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SPEAKER 01 :
Thanksgiving is, in my opinion, the greatest American family holiday by far. Christmas is besotted with commercialism. In fact, if you study the history of Christmas at all, you’ll realize that if it weren’t for the commercial interest, it’s not at all clear whether this nation would have ever developed much of a Christmas tradition at all. Because in the early days, the pioneers up on the East Coast, they were very religious people. They knew about all the pagan origins of Christmas, and they basically not only didn’t observe it, they forbade the observance of it, deplored it, and would have nothing to do with it. And it’s, I guess, a tribute to the power of the dollar that Christmas has become the biggest single holiday of the year in terms of money spent on people. I don’t know. Do you know what the second one is? The second largest commercial success for holidays in the beginning of the year? Halloween. Halloween. Halloween. Halloween, of all people. Thanksgiving wouldn’t make it second place because the only thing that we really spend money on this time of year is travel and food. That’s it. And turkey is not very expensive, is it? You can generally get them pretty cheap at your supermarket. And then there’s Easter. Easter is colored eggs and bunny rabbits and maybe a nod in the direction of Jesus’ resurrection on the part of some people. But Thanksgiving, that’s the day when we want to be with family. And, you know, if you picture up in your mind the image of the Thanksgiving celebration, It’ll be very close in most of our minds because it’s a family affair with a table covered with food, all the traditional good food that we all enjoy like turkey and dressing and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie and, in our case, a sweet potato casserole to die for, all kinds of good stuff that we have on Thanksgiving Day. And we do these, we spend this time with the people we owe our lives to, you know, our mothers and fathers, our grandmother and grandfather and It’s good to be with family on these days, and we go to a lot of trouble. We travel long distances to be with family. We’re drawn by ties sometimes that we understand and sometimes that we don’t, but we just got to be there. And even our old American tradition of watching football on Thanksgiving, that’s something we do together on that day. And most important of all, we give thanks to God. for this great land that we have, for the food, for the people we love, for the freedom, for every good and perfect gift from God. And the very fact that it’s a Thanksgiving Day implies a debt that we owe to God. It implies a gift that we have received that wasn’t something we had coming or something we deserve, but something that he gave us. And I really believe among the things we should be thankful for on this day, on Thanksgiving Day as it comes this week, is that we still have a Thanksgiving Day. Because honestly, I’m not entirely sure why we still do. When you consider the systematic drive that’s going on in this country and has been for a generation or more to eradicate God from public life, it’s really remarkable that Thanksgiving Day remains largely untouched. Christmas has been attacked. You can go down and put a Santa Claus on the courthouse square down here. But you cannot go down there and put a nativity scene on the courthouse square. You can put it there if you’ve got certain other types of Christmas, non-religious Christmas, as a part of a collage. But all by itself, to put a Thanksgiving creche out on public property? Can’t do that any longer. And the government can formally acknowledge the birth of Martin Luther King, but it cannot acknowledge formally as a government on government property the birth of a man who set more people free than Martin Luther King ever imagined. In fact, Martin Luther King knew that. He was a minister of the Christian faith, so he knew who it was who really set men free. You know, I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I think the reason why Thanksgiving has remained untouched is really because no one dares. It is too uniquely American. It is not attacked It’s not a question of not having been done away with because there aren’t those who would like to get rid of it, because they are there. It’s just that Thanksgiving can’t be touched, not at this particular stage of our development. So this week, when you have Thanksgiving, give thanks, but don’t become complacent. This, too, can be lost. There’s an enemy of everything godly and everything godlike, an enemy of life in all its forms, Implacable. That enemy is not the ACLU. It’s not the Supreme Court. It’s not the Democrats. It’s not the Republicans. It’s not even Madeline Murray O’Hare. Paul tells us who the enemy is. In Ephesians, the sixth chapter, a very familiar scripture, but I don’t know if we’ve thought as carefully about this as we ought to have thought. Ephesians chapter 6 and verse 10. Finally, my brethren, Be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to take a stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. So take unto you the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day and having done all, to stand. Now there’s something about this I had not focused in on and had not quite grasped until I began to think about this this time. To stand against, looking at it in the Greek, looking at the structure of the sentence, looking at what Paul is talking about, I believe means to actively oppose. Because it means literally in the Greek to stand toward. It’s not a passive thing of standing pat, of building up your defenses and protecting yourself. It’s stand toward or to stand against or to actively oppose. It’s not passive defense. It’s active opposition. Active opposition against the wiles of the devil. He said we wrestle against. Notice it’s a struggle, and it’s a struggle that we personally, individually, collectively are engaged in. And again, he says, we wrestle against, and the word for against is the same as the one before. It’s we wrestle toward. It’s not a passive thing. We have a goal, an objective, and we’re struggling for this objective. The Greek is a preposition of direction and implies movement toward something when it says we wrestle against, not also flesh and blood. Therefore, the enemy is not human. Now, you have to understand this. Get this very straight in all of our minds. The enemy is not a court. The enemy is not people. It’s not a political party. It’s not a human institution. It is spiritual. It is wicked. It’s the rulers of the darkness of this world. The darkness, in fact, the rulers of darkness also in this passage are equated with the devil because you are to stand against the wiles of the devil. You don’t wrestle with flesh and blood. You wrestle against the rulers of the darkness of this world which consequently is equated to the devil. There’s also a very familiar scripture, one verse you needn’t turn to it, it’s James 4, 7. Submit yourselves therefore to God, resist the devil, and he will flee from you. In the words, the same as we’ve been having here before, it has to do with active resistance, aggressive resistance, not passive resistance against the devil. Oppose him. Now, why would I say that this is not passive. I mean, I’m playing around with Greek words here, but that’s not all I have for you in terms of the reason why I say that the resistance that’s called for here is not passive. Consider the armor. Stand, therefore, having your loins girt about with truth and having on the breastplate of righteousness, your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace, taking the shield of faith whereby you can quench all the fiery darts of the wicked, and take the helmet of salvation… and take the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. The sword is not a defensive weapon. If this is purely passive, why do we need a sword? If we are simply to sit still, armored and defended by God and the word of God and the breastplate of righteousness and all this stuff, what do we need a sword for? Now, I think we need to understand there is a spirit world out there. There are two great powers, one of light and one of darkness. And on the night of his betrayal, Jesus came up against this world. In Luke 22, verse 52, Jesus said to the chief priests and the captains and the elders that had come to him. We’re in the Garden of Gethsemane. He’s prayed, sweat blood, cried out to God that this cup would not pass from him, and finally come to conclude that it must not, that he had to drink it. And he said to the chief priests and the captains that had come down there, important men that had come all the way down there to arrest him, he said, if you come out here as against a thief with swords and staves, when I was daily with you in the temple, you didn’t take any hands against me, but this is your hour and the power of darkness. Now, I want you to think about this for a minute. These men who had come down to arrest Jesus on this night were not demon-possessed. Judas appears to have been, as far as that’s concerned. But these men were ordinary men. But they were more than that. They were ordinary men who had purpose in their heart and mind to commit a great evil. They had purpose in their heart and mind to murder Jesus Christ, to kill him. And they knew that what they were doing was contrary to law. But they had concluded that the objective they were after was high enough, important enough, and strong enough that it justified any wrong that they might do in the course of doing it. These men who came down there to arrest Jesus on this night knew what they were doing. They were intent on murder, and they were fully responsible for what they were doing, and they were instruments of the power of darkness in the process. So understand, there are examples of demon possession in the Bible, but the examples of demon possession in the Bible are, generally speaking, only destructive to the person who has the demon possession and to those people who are close to him, the people who love him and care about him. The greater damage is done by the power of darkness that is influential in men’s lives without possessing them. And how does that work? Well, back to Ephesians again. Back to Ephesians, this time to chapter 2 and verse 1. He says, in the lust of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath even as others. Who was like this? Paul says we were like this. We all had our conduct there. In time past, we walked according to the prince of the power of the air. It is the spirit that is at work in the children of disobedience. And what he’s telling us is that walking according to the spirit as we have in the past would actually lead us in certain circumstances and given the right circumstances to commit evils that you and I would never imagine ourselves doing now in our present circumstances. Now, I don’t know how this spirit works in the children of disobedience. I only know that it does. One of the ways it works is by deception. This much we are aware of. There’s a short passage back in Revelation chapter 12. Again, these are fairly familiar scriptures, but I want us to think about them in a little different light. There was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon fought in his angels and prevailed not. Neither was their place found anymore in heaven. And the great dragon, that old serpent called the devil and Satan, which deceives the whole world, was cast out to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. In other words, his objective, his work is a deceptive work continually, and he deceives the whole world. He said, I heard a loud voice in heaven saying, Now has come salvation and strength in the kingdom of our God and power of his Christ. For, and this is an important passage. If you haven’t underlined it in your Bible, you probably should. The accuser of our brethren is cast down who accused them before our God day and night. And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony because they loved not their lives unto death. In other words, Satan was not able to make these people afraid. They fought him. They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony. One, the grace of God, the blood of Jesus Christ, the forgiveness of all of our sins, so that we cannot be blackmailed any longer. Because you have to understand this. Satan is a blackmailer. He’s an accuser. And he actively works at blackmailing us to this day in our hearts. Because not only does he accuse us before God, he accuses us to ourselves. His attempt is to make us afraid. I’ll tell God what you have done, and boy, are you going to be in a lot of trouble. Well, he says the saints overcame him by the word of their testimony and by the blood of the Lamb, and he was not able to prevail against them. But the point is there is a war. It’s a battle to be fought. We have to wrestle. There are things we have to do. There is preparation that we have to make, and it’s a dangerous world. Now, the reason I have told you all this, there’s been a curious convergence in my reading recently. It’s been a little frightening in its implications, and it’s caused me to look at the scriptures that I’ve read to you so far in a way that is different from what I have read them. I was looking for a good read not long ago, and I get catalogs about books all the time coming into my office, and one of them plopped on my desk one day, and fortuitously I decided to read through it and look for something that I would enjoy reading that had some substance to it. And as I made my way through it, and this book, this little catalog gave you a long statement about each book, what it was about, why they were recommending it as a good read, and so forth. This was a book titled Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum. The review of the book was glowing, and it talked about how the book was extremely well written, that it was a good read, that it was an intelligent, intelligently written book, and very insightful. And I said, well, I’m interested in that. I’m interested in the history of Europe. I’m interested in what happened. Like a lot of people, I would like to be able to explain Hitler. And so I thought that I would give that book a try. The book turned out not to be exactly what I thought it was. It was not so much about Hitler as it was about all of the people who have, down through generations, tried to explain this man. Because he remains one of the most inexplicable figures on the stage in all of history. one of the hardest to understand, one of the most difficult to grapple with. And we know more about him than we did about Genghis Khan, for example. We know more about him than we did about Joseph Stalin because of the blackout on that side of the Iron Curtain. We have a lot of information about Hitler that we never had about any of those people. And so the author is approaching all the people who have tried to explain them. In the early part of the book, it was interesting reading along because he kept pointing out how People would try this explanation and try that explanation. And he began to realize as he did this study that they were trying more to find closure on this event. They were unwilling to leave this open question. It was troubling. It nagged at them. And that they were looking for as much an explanation to find some peace in themselves as any other reason, even though they were historians and being driven by the historians, the normal historians’ work. I have only gotten about a quarter of the way through the book so far. But I’m already deeply disturbed by what I’m reading. Coinciding, and as I said, there’s a convergence in this that has been very striking to me. Coinciding with this is the current election in Florida and two editorials that popped up recently in a major newspaper that between, you know, it’s funny how things come together, and I sometimes wonder if God does this to people, to bring things together so that ideas… that have been festering for a long time in your mind suddenly become much clearer than they were before. But before I talk about that, let me tell you what I learned about the Hitler explainers. The world has moved on and has mostly forgotten Hitler. We will see some sort of a special on television or something on the History Channel, and sometimes we watch, but more often nowadays I think we move on because it’s old and it’s ugly and it’s not something we want to look at. It took me a long time, frankly, to get up the nerve to go watch Schindler’s List and see it in the movie theater. In fact, it really needed a little help from somebody else to get me down to see it. We were out of town, and it was a chance, and so we went to see Schindler’s List. I really ought to watch it again. I don’t want to. And I think those of you who’ve seen Schindler’s List will understand why. I really don’t much want to watch it again. Most of the world has moved on and forgotten Hitler and don’t want to think about Hitler, and so many of them. Great numbers of people in the world were born after it was all over, and it doesn’t mean as much to them. But historians are still struggling with them. They have tried to find a cause for the man and the great evil that he wrought in the last century. Some of the explanations for what he was and why he became what he was are actually kind of laughable when you get right down to them. Some of them I doubt that you’ve ever heard. Any of you ever hear of the thing called the billy goat bite? No, not anybody in this room has heard of it. Well, it’s funny in its way, but it’s also ridiculous, and it’s ugly, so I’m not going to explain it to you. But anyway, it’s one of those things about Hitler where people try to see Hitler himself as a victim. This thing happened to Hitler. This series of events occurred to him, to his twisted him, and therefore it is the events that somehow are responsible for what Hitler did rather than Hitler himself being responsible for what he did. Some of them think some disease brought this to pass. Maybe it was he picked up syphilis from a Jewish whore, you know, and that that syphilitic mind of his, he went crazy in his latter years, and that’s the reason why Hitler did what he did. Some mental pathology. None of these explanations have ever resolved the question, and it certainly had not resolved it for Ron Rosenbaum. As I kept thinking, also, as I read along in the book, I began to realize that it’s not enough to try to explain Hitler, because the truth is, No one man could bring about evil of the likes that Hitler brought about in this world. I mean, you could introduce a Hitler in the United States, for example, in the 1930s and 1940s, and he would have been a comic figure. He would have been laughable. He could not have garnered the support that he got. I don’t think that could have happened. But the fact is that the Constitution, the laws of the land, so many things in this country would have prevented some of the things that Hitler tried to do. But more than that, no person can do what Hitler did without a large set of dedicated accomplices who are willing to do your will and your bidding and who are afraid to say you know. So what we’re dealing with with Hitler is not merely one man. We’re dealing with a system, with a group, a system of people within a system that created it. It is plain to me. that we are dealing with human evil on a grand scale in the case of this man. But more than that, nothing has ever so clearly epitomized the powers of darkness as the Nazi Party, the brown shirts, the SS, and the cadre of evil men that formed the Third Reich. I think you can find wide agreement on that. Now here’s the question. Did all this come to pass without warnings? Did no one see it coming? Hardly. One man in England, Winston Churchill, saw it coming clearly as day a long, long time before it came to pass. He warned anyone who would listen and nearly destroyed his political career in the process. You know, if you haven’t read his biography in one of the foreign form or another, you really should. You owe it to yourself, living in a modern world, to read this man’s story. I recommend The Last Lion by William Manchester. It’s a two-volume said of the biography of Churchill up until he became Prime Minister of England, and it’s really enlightening. The man nearly destroyed his political career by his continued opposition to Hitler because no one in England wanted to believe what he was saying. But I got an answer from Rosenbaum to a question I had been asking for years. I even one day went out to the University of Texas in Tyler to the library trying to make my way back through Time magazines. I wanted to see… In 1930, 31, 32, 33, what were the American news magazines saying about this man? And I couldn’t find anything. It’s probably back there somewhere. I believe he was on the cover of Time more than once. But the library just didn’t have what I was looking for. But I really wanted to know, what did the news media do? Did no one see? Did no one report on what was going on? The answer was, yes, they did see, and they did report. They were the men of the newspaper Hitler called the Poison Kitchen. In one newspaper that Hitler hated above all the rest, it was a liberal paper. People have called it communist, but it was not. They were anti-communist and anti-Nazi. They were liberal and socialist. It was the Munich Post. It’s a remarkable newspaper, and it’s been all but forgotten in the modern world. I mean, you don’t ever hear about it. You don’t ever hear the names of the men who were the editor and the journalist at that time who laid their lives on the line for the sake of getting this story to the public. The Munich Post journalists were the first to focus sustained critical attention on Hitler from the first moment he came out of the beer halls into the streets. You never hear about them because it’s more comforting to think that no one really knew who Hitler was and what he was about until it was too late after 1933 and he had too much power to be able to resist him anymore. Now think about that. Rosenbaum says this in his book Plainly. He says, It’s more comforting. The reason why people haven’t looked at it, it’s more comforting to think that no one really knew who Hitler was and what he was about until it was too late. That is not the case. People did know. The Munich Post writers and editors knew, and they engaged Hitler in mortal combat for 12 years. Twelve years these people opposed this man from the time he first came out of the beer halls into the streets. began to form his Nazi party and gather these people around him. The Munich paper had been so much on Hitler’s case that he dispatched, and Hitler came into power, by the way, in 1933. They had been so much on his case that he dispatched a gang of his bodyguards, they were so-called, to vandalize the office of the Munich Post in 1923, ten years before he came to power. He had already attempted to silence and shut this newspaper up and to intimidate them without success. The story of the 12-year battle between Hitler and the Munich press is an incredible litany of scandal, violence, murder, blackmail. And sadly, the story is almost lost. I had no idea until I got Rosenbaum’s book. Rosenbaum’s a responsible historian. He went to Munich. He went to the libraries. He found the old crumbling papers that are left of the Munich Post. He went down and ruined his eyes on microfiche, trying to study and to read all the editions, day after day after day, of the Munich Post during this 12-year period when they were on their fighting with Hitler. The men of the Munich Post saw Hitler as what they call a political criminal. And it took me a little while to get through my mind what they meant. He was not a a criminal politician. That’s almost a redundant phrase. He was a political criminal. Hitler’s evil, quote, this is quoting Rosenbaum, Hitler’s evil was not generated from some ideology that descended into criminality and murder to achieve its aims. Rather, this evil arose from his criminality and only garbed itself in ideological belief. Now, I’m afraid it’s too easy to miss the significance of what he said here. What he is saying here is it’s not that Hitler had an ideology that was so important to him that he was prepared to break the law in order to pursue his ideology. This was, he was, his evil arose from his criminality, and he clothed himself in ideological belief. Now, when you think about that for a little while, there’s certain things ought to begin changing. to crop up in your mind. When you realize and you watch politicians at work, and I will give you my traditional disclaimer at this point. It’s important that you understand this. I’m not a Democrat. I’m not a Republican. I’m not Reform Party. I’m not Green. I am independent. And I think that people in my position have to remain independent and above that kind of thing in order to say the things that I’m going to say to you today, some of which are kind of shocking when you consider the implications of. But you need to understand this, that whenever politicians get up in front of you and change their beliefs, whenever they have, let’s say a few years back, strongly believed this, now with an election program, they believe something totally different. To find them shifting their ground, moving around to adopt to the polls, you know, the polls show people won’t vote for this, okay, then I don’t believe that anymore. The polls show the people want this to happen, okay, I am now going to be for this. It doesn’t have to do with a deeply rooted personal morality. It has to do with a deeply rooted personal desire for power. Do you understand what I’m saying? The objective is power. Now, maybe he’s got some ideology in there, but generally speaking, they are cloaking themselves in ideology in order to achieve power to do what? In Hitler’s case, it was to carry on one of the most vast criminal enterprises in history. That was his objective, and that was what he was doing it for. And remember, it was not merely Hitler. It was what the Munich Post saw, a homicidal criminal enterprise that grew up around Hitler as the center, as the spokesman, as the one, the driving force within that. Rosenbaum saw in the yellowing pages of the Munich Post the signature crimes of Hitler and the Hitler Party. You know what they were? I wonder if you know what the signature crimes of Hitler and the Hitler Party, according to the men who knew Hitler best, what they were. It wasn’t murder. No, no. It wasn’t killing. It wasn’t homicide. It wasn’t ransacking the offices of the press. It was blackmail. That’s signature crime. Actually, they said blackmail and counterfeiting, but they didn’t mean counterfeiting money. What they meant by this counterfeiting was a counterfeiting history, rewriting and forging documents and this kind of thing. Always the counterfeit, never the real, always the criminal approach. Now, this is really one of the really striking things about me. The stories of blackmail that you see, political blackmail that were going on at that time, are an absolute snake pit. They blackmailed their enemies. They blackmailed their friends. They blackmailed people outside the party. They blackmailed people inside their own party. They blackmailed heads of state. They blackmailed Hindenburg, which was one of the reasons why Hindenburg actually made Hitler chancellor. They blackmailed Poland. They blackmailed Czechoslovakia. They blackmailed Britain. They blackmailed everybody under the sun. And in fact, because Hitler needed to blackmail other countries, and some of his generals really didn’t want to adopt the position, didn’t want to go to war, for the objectives that Hitler did. He blackmailed two of his top generals and forced their resignation so he could put generals in there who would do the job. Blackmail was the signature crime. And you know what struck me when I realized that? That the signature crime of the devil is blackmail. Remember what it said? The accuser of our brethren that accused them before God is cast down. That is spiritual blackmail. And Satan the devil’s signature crime is blackmail. Now, the investigative work of the Munich Post reporters is staggering. They had copies of documents, blackmail letters, threats, extortion letters. They published it all. There’d be secret documents up in the Reichstag somewhere, and it would show up on the front page of the Munich Post the next day. How they got them, nobody knows, but there were enough people in Germany who were worried about what was happening that they would feed those documents out. If they got hold of them, they would give them to the Post because they knew that was the one place in the country, Munich, the Post, of all places, that they knew the truth could be gotten out about what was actually going on. It’s staggering to consider. Over 12 years, they cataloged nearly every crime of the Hitler Party for the German public. So you can’t sit back and say, well, the German people didn’t know until Hitler was actually in power, and it was too late. It was on the front pages of the Munich Post. Day after day, they chronicled. They had a weekly rundown of all Hitler’s murders that week. There were that many of them that they could chronicle them daily. A daily log, and cumulatively what one saw in the pages of the Munich Post, was the extermination of the bravest and best in all of Germany. In some cases, the reason why people were killed was not because they opposed Hitler, but because they were able. And if they were able and brave, and brave enough to stand up and be seen, they were eliminated. Hitler succeeded by killing off his most capable opponents and blackmailing the rest of them. I mentioned his two generals already. But the saddest pages of this story is the fact that Hitler went from being a politician on the wane who had suffered an electoral setback and who looked like he was going to lose it all. He went from that to the chancellorship of Germany in just a few short weeks. He was almost gone. And for the men of the Munich Post, this must have been a terrible blow for them because they felt they had finally defeated him and got him on the run, got him on his way out, and the next thing they knew, he was the chancellor of Germany. How did he get it? Well, many historians believe he blackmailed his way into the chancellorship. After one week of Hitler being in power, the Post published their regular murder count, 18 dead and 34 wounded, as a result of Hitler’s minions and what they were doing the first week after he was in office. In a matter of days, the Munich Post was stormed by the SA, trashed, the editors and reporters arrested. Most of them wound up in concentration camps and died there. I think a couple of them actually escaped the country across the border into either Switzerland or France, and survived to tell their story another time. Nearly every crime of the Hitler Party was chronicled in the pages of the Munich Post in the 12 years leading up to his final power grab. But the public in Germany were never impressed by this, and this may be the most astonishing thing of all. And it’s something that somebody, I haven’t gotten to Rosenbaum’s explanation of it yet, but it’s a question somebody needs to ask. How, you can’t say the people did not know. How was it possible that people kept on voting for this man in view of the fact that his crimes were being published day after day in the press? I can only conclude they did not want to see. Other papers published something here or something there. Most of the papers, most of the mainline papers in Germany did not follow these stories. The Munich Post followed them. There can be little doubt that the Hitler propaganda machine denied everything. They lied in their teeth, and the people chose to believe it. Well, they were able to say, well, you know, in fact, the accusations were, and it’s a lie, was that the Munich Post is a communist paper. You can’t listen to the communists. But they weren’t. And Rosenbaum made a point of addressing that particular point as he researched the paper. They were anti-communists. They were publishing articles all the time that were anti-communists. They were very liberal. And they were socialist. But they were not communists. And they were right about Hitler. Now, I said… that there was a remarkable convergence in my reading this week, and I want to point to two editorial pieces that I read, but first I have to make that disclaimer again. This is not purely a political issue. It is not a Democratic-Republican issue. You don’t have to take political sides in this question. The two columns that I encountered are both by Republicans, and in the nature of this situation, they have to be. You’re probably not going to get this from anywhere else. It’s just like the situation in Germany, and please don’t think that I’m comparing anybody in the United States today to the Nazis or the Nazi Party or the Hitler Party. That’s not what I’m trying to say. What I’m trying to do is to get some material and some ideas in your mind so that you can think about them. They are, as I said, the nature of the situation, these particular columns would have to be written by Republicans, maybe by independents. They have a point of view. But just because you have a point of view doesn’t mean you are wrong. The Munich Post was discounted by the Nazis as being communist. So you don’t have to pay any attention to them. They were not. History is clear. They were telling the truth. Hitler was lying. Now we know. Now we’re in a position to look back and we can say it doesn’t matter what kind of finger you’re pointing. It doesn’t matter what you’re saying about the Munich press. It doesn’t matter what you say about the bias of their reporting. They were right. They were telling the truth. Hitler was lying and all of his minions were lying and Germany was ignoring what they were doing. We can’t afford to discount what someone is saying merely because he’s a Democrat or a Republican because nearly everybody is something. Everybody’s a Democrat or Republican. Everybody’s left or right. Everybody’s conservative or liberal. It’s pretty hard to find a moderate person in the world, it seems, anymore. So everybody is something. What I ask you to do in these two editorials is to simply consider what is said and evaluate it in the light of what we know to be true. I’m talking partly about what we know to be true from current events in our country, but also what we know historically. Historically, we know that power corrupts. Any large concentration of power or money attracts a lot of able people and a lot of unscrupulous people, a lot of criminals. There will be criminals either on the fringes or in the middle of any power or money center. Do we all understand that? That’s something everybody should know. Anytime you have a lot of money and a lot of power, there will be criminal elements who will be working constantly to get their hands on that power or that money. If there are criminals in the Republican Party, that does not mean the Republican Party is criminal. If there are criminals in the Democratic Party, that does not mean that the Democratic Party is criminal. Now, I want to tell you all that because the accusations, that is, not exactly accusations, they’re statements that are made, And these editorials are pretty serious business. The first is by Peggy Noonan. It appeared in the Wall Street Journal Friday, November 17th, ten days after the election. For many years, she says, there’s been a famous phrase that derives from the 12-step recovery movement. It refers to a thing that is very big and obvious and of crucial importance that people around it refuse, for whatever reason, to acknowledge. It’s called the elephant in the living room. There’s an elephant in the living room in the Florida story. Actually, she says, it’s a donkey. And actually, there are a number of them. When the story of the Florida recounts and hand counts and court decisions is reported on network and local television and the great broadsheet newspapers, the journalists uniformly fail to speak of the donkey in the living room. That thing that is there, everybody knows it’s there, and nobody talks about it. You know what the old story about the elephant in the living room is? They give great and responsible attention to the Florida story, but with a unity that is perhaps willful, perhaps unconscious, perhaps a peculiar expression and an attempt of fairness, they avoid talking about the donkey. You know what it is. The donkey is the explicit fear, grounded in fact, in anecdotal evidence, in the affidavits of the on-the-ground participants, and the history of some of the participants, that the Gore-Clinton Democratic Party is trying to steal the election. Simple terms. Now, I would disagree with her at a certain level here, and I’ll try to explain to you what I mean. I would not say the Gore-Clinton Democratic Party. I would say the Gore-Clinton machine is trying to steal it because, you know, Democrats are good people. We’ve got neighbors that are Democrats, and they love their kids, and they love their wives, and they’re good people all the way up and down. So trying to tar one party or the other with a brush like this is, I think, unfair. And I don’t think that’s the way she intends it because she identifies it as not the Democratic Party. but the Gore-Clinton Democratic Party, I would say the Gore-Clinton machine. They’re not to resolve it. They’re not to resolve it, but to steal it. That is, they are not using hand counting to determine who won. They’re using hand counting to win. Now, that’s a serious accusation, you know, and it’s not one that anybody should ever just swallow and take it as it is, but it is a serious accusation made in a responsible newspaper, and people should take it seriously and look to see whether it’s true or not. They are attempting to do this through chicanery and by interpreting various ballots any way they choose. As in, this ballot seems to have a mild indentation next to the word Bush. Well, that’s not a vote. The person might have changed his mind. This ballot seems to have a mild indentation for Gore. The person who cast this ballot was probably old and too weak to puncture the paper card. But you can see right here there’s a mark kind of thing. I think that’s a vote, don’t you, Charlie? Oh, yeah, that’s a vote all right. That’s how the chads probably got on the floor in the counting rooms. It’s one of the increasing numbers of stories, none of which are ever the lead of the papers, and this is true. They’re never the lead. They wind up on page 11 indicating the possibility of significant vote fraud throughout the election. It’s the donkey in the middle of the living room that no one wants to talk about that’s there. Columnists are writing about it. George Will wrote about it, suggesting that what is happening in Florida amounts to an attempted coup. Michael Kelly wrote, suggesting Mr. Gore is not a helper of democracy but a harmer of it. The conservative magazines have weighed in, like the Wall Street Journal editorial page. You can hear vote fraud discussed in all the argument political shows on television and radios. You hear it all the time, and I’m sure you have, haven’t you? But it’s not reported as news. The news pages leave it alone. Now, again, I’m not comparing anyone to Nazis, but what I am saying is the situation is analogous to what was going on in Germany. where one reporter, one newspaper, was reporting it, and the rest of them, by and large, were ignoring it, not reporting on it. She says it’s not reported as news, and it only counts when it’s news. And this is the most extraordinary, because Republicans fear a fraud. The legitimate fear of it is the reason why the Bush people don’t want more hand counts. They do not trust the counters. And I think what I’ve been able to see on television, that’s true. They just really don’t trust the counters, so why do more hand countings? The question, the extent of vote fraud in this election, and the fact that the Republicans think it is governing what’s happening in Florida, is not the unspoken subtext of the drama. It’s the unspoken text. Republicans are convinced, and for good reason, that Bill Daley, who learned at his father’s knee, and Al Gore, who learned at Bill Clinton’s knee, are fraudulently attempting to carry out an anti-democratic strategy that is a classic of vote stealing. Keep counting until you win, and the minute you win, announce that the American people are tired of waiting for an answer and deserve to know who won. Of course, you can discount this because Peggy Newman’s a Republican and she wants George Bush to win and so forth. You can discount it, but don’t ignore it. I mean, you have to think about things like this and ask yourself, is she right? Does she know what she’s talking about? Is it true? Do the things that I’m seeing in the news tell me that this is what’s happening? She says, can a political party in this great and sophisticated democracy in this wired democracy where sooner or later every shadow sees sunlight, steal a prize as big and rich and obvious as the presidency? Sure, yes, of course. If the history of the past half century has taught us anything, it’s that a determined people can do anything. Think about this. Determined people can do anything. What might stop it? Well, if the media would start leading the news with investigations into the prevalence of vote fraud, and the possibility, just the possibility, that the elections being stolen might help. There have been a number of shameful moments in the drama so far. Mr. Daley announcing that the will of the people is that Mr. Gore won, that Mr. Gore win, I should say. Mr. Gore’s own aggressive remarks in the days after the election. Hillary Clinton announcing in the middle of what may become a crisis involving the Electoral College that her first act will be to do away with the college. There’s the Internet column from Paul Begala, who prepped Mr. Gore for his debates with Mr. Bush. This is an interesting paragraph, by the way. I’m going to read it to you, take the time to read it to you, because I think it’s important that you hear this. He prepared Gore for his debates with Mr. Bush. He acknowledged that when you look at an electoral map of the United States, you see a sea of red for Mr. Bush and clots of blue for Mr. Gore. Quoting now, Paul Begala, if you look closely at that map, you see a more complex picture. You see the state where James Byrd was lynched, dragged behind a pickup truck until his body came apart. It’s red, which means it went for Bush. You see the state where Matthew Shepard was crucified on a split rail fence for the crime of being gay. It’s red. It went for Bush. You know, this is incredible. This is incredible in the 20th century that a man of Paul McGowan’s education would make this kind of statement. Because what he is saying is he just tars the whole state of Texas. He blames the whole state of Texas essentially for Michael Byrd’s murder. You see the state where right-wing extremists blew up a federal building and murdered scores of federal employees. It’s red. So all those places where the right-wingers are, the extremists are, who blow up buildings and drag men to their death and crucify gays, these are red. These are the people that vote for Bush. Think about what this man is saying. The state where an Army private who was thought to be gay was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat and the state where neo-Nazi skinheads murdered two African Americans because of their skin color And the state where Bob Jones University spews out its anti-Catholic bigotry, they’re all red, too. That, frankly, is one of the worst examples of political bigotry I have ever read in my life. It’s inflammatory, deliberately inflammatory. It is, and I’m going to say this word, it is Hitlerian in its approach, pure and simple. Whether he would be Hitlerian if he was a Republican, it doesn’t matter. And it’s not because he’s a Democrat. It’s because he’s part of a political machine that uses the language, that uses the news media to accomplish their ends. Now I’m returning to Peggy Newman. It was a remarkably hateful column, but also a public service in that it reveals what animates Clinton-Gore thinking regarding their opponents. Hatred. Pure and simple. A hatred that used to be hidden and now walks forward and stands in the living room, too. as does the unstated but implicit message of the hatred. And this is the thing that so many times people miss, that extraordinary means are understandable when you’re trying to save America from the terrible people who would put George W. Bush in the presidency so they can kill more homosexuals and black men and blow up federal buildings and kill toddlers. Really, if Republicans are so bad, it’s probably good to steal elections from them, don’t you think? And this is the mindset of a cadre of individuals who are involved in the political process. And it’s not because they’re Democrats. It’s because they are criminals, to put it in simple terms. It’s the way they think. I never thought I would wind up nostalgic for the days when I merely disagreed with Democratic presidents. This is Peggy Noonan. But whoever doubted the patriotism, the love of country of John Kennedy or Jimmy Carter, The crew we have now, Messrs. Gore and Clinton and their operatives, seem to my astonishment as an American to be men who would never put their country’s needs before their own if they were even the mildest conflict between the two. America is the platform of their ambitions, not the driving purpose of them. I’m not prepared to say that. I’m not prepared to go quite that far. But I am profoundly disturbed by the pattern that I see developing because I do believe that While I do not believe this of Gore and Lieberman, I believe that when you go down a few layers beneath you, men exactly like what she describes here are there. And I’m not sure how far down you have to go. Another donkey in the living room is the sense that Republicans are no match for the Democrats in terms of audacity, shrewdness, and killer instinct. Republicans seem incapable of going down to the level of Gore-Clinton operatives. They think that you cannot really defend something you love with hatred because hatred is by its nature destructive, it scalds, and eats away. Yeah, it’s true. And of course, you have to realize that in Germany, the men of the Munich Post ended up being no match for Hitler. Truth did not win out over error. Truth did not win over lies. Lies and violence won over truth in Nazi Germany. Republicans seem to be losing the public relations war. The Democrats have David Boies and Bill Bailey each, forgive me, She does need to be forgiven for this one. She says, in Evelyn Wall’s phrase, as smooth as an enema, the Republicans have James Baker, who seems irritated and perplexed, perhaps because he’s taken aback by how the game has changed, how the Democrats he faces now operate by rules quite different, much rougher than the ones they played 20 years ago. Now the game for the Gore camp in Florida is to win any way you can in Florida, and if you can’t win, delay, and in the delay, maybe you’ll win when the Electoral College comes together, or maybe at the very least, If someone stops you, you’ll have ruined the legitimacy of the man who does win, which will make it easier for you as you wait in the wings for the rematch of 2004. Maybe Peggy Newton is wrong. We don’t know right now, do we? As I give you this message, we roll this tape. We don’t know how this is going to come out. And God willing, we may find that it is not that way at all. In the end, we will have to wait and see what we will see. And I think I have slipped, yes, I’ve got one other thing here. The other editorial in question that I wanted to read for you I didn’t want to miss. No, that’s not it. You’ll just have to excuse me while I find my way to where I’m supposed to be. This one’s by Thomas Sowell, who is also a conservative columnist, who also wrote the same day, I guess independently, of Peggy Noonan. And this is the one that really disturbed me when I read it. And again… What I’m asking you to do is not decide that these people who write these editorials are right. I want you to take these thoughts in your mind, compare them to what we know of history, compare them to what we know of events on the ground in the country, in the news as it finally is reported as news, so that you will understand what’s going on around you and not be caught like the Germans were in 1933 when Hitler had grabbed power and it was too late to oppose him and they had passed up all their opportunities in years gone by to do anything about it. This is Thomas Sowell. He said it was only a few words among the millions that have been spewed out through the media about the presidential election, but they are among the weightiest and the most chilling of these words. A front-page story in the Wall Street Journal mentioned in passing. Quote, this, by the way, is news, not opinion, this particular quotation. Quote, a quiet intelligence-gathering operation begun by the Gore camp checked into the backgrounds of Republican electors with an eye toward persuading them to vote for Mr. Gore. You know what they’re talking about? They’re talking about the Electoral College. You do realize that if those 25 voters go for Bush in Florida, in the Electoral College, that on December 18th when they actually meet and cast their votes, they don’t have to cast those votes for Bush. They can switch them to Gore, or presumably Nader if that’s what they wanted to do at that time. The electoral college, 25 states in the country bind their electors to the person that they were elected to vote for. 25 states do not. Florida is one of those states that do not. So what’s happening here? The people are beginning to check into the backgrounds of Republican electors with an eye toward persuading them to vote for Gore. Question. What does a person need to know about your background to persuade you? Do they need to know that you went to college? Do they know that you graduated from Yale or graduated from the University of Mississippi or graduated from the University of Alabama? Do they need to know if you’re a Georgia Bulldog in order to know how to persuade you to vote for Al Gore? No. But on the other hand, if they knew that you had an affair 10 years ago that your wife doesn’t know anything about, would that be of any use in persuading you to vote one way or another? Actually, he asked the question here in his article. Those who vote in the Electoral College are not legally bound for those whom the voters in their states voted for. But if the Gore operatives are merely trying to persuade Bush electors to defect, why this hush-hush digging into the past of these electors? All this is going on while Gore spokesmen are saying on TV at every opportunity, every vote should count, but a Bush voter’s vote will not count if his elector actually votes in the Electoral College, decides to vote for Gore rather than have some scandal of his past life made public. You know, I don’t know. Maybe he is viewing something with alarm that does not need to be, you know, looked at that way at all. But when I saw this combination of things that swirled into my life this past week, I found it deeply and profoundly disturbing. I do not mean, and I repeat this, I am not even suggesting that we have a Nazi party or anything even remotely like the Nazi party in this country. But I’ll tell you this much. The mere fact that at the level of, let’s say, George Bush and his running mate and the men who work below them and the other part of the men that work below them, below these people are a network of people who have a stake in this thing, and some of those people will do anything because power. Can you imagine sitting on the threshold of the power of the presidency of the United States, and what that means to third and fourth level people in these administrations, as opposed to not having a shot at it at all. There are people who would kill for that. Half the country will dismiss these people as the rantings of Republican hacks. Half the country will view them with alarm and be concerned about it. What should our position be as Christians in all of this? Well, I don’t think that we should take sides politically. I really don’t. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t take sides on matters of light and darkness in this world. It does not mean we can’t wrestle against the powers of darkness whenever we encounter them. It does not mean that we cannot stand up for life against death. It does not mean that we can’t actually oppose, actively oppose evil where we see it. But we must never allow ourselves to think that people are the enemy. Remember what Paul said. Never forget it. He says, put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil because we don’t wrestle against flesh and blood. We wrestle against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high place. Take the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand, to aggressively withstand, to oppose actively the devil and the evil that is in this world. Having done all, take the whole armor of God. Stand with your loins girt about with truth, having on the breastplate of righteousness, your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. Above all things, taking the shield of faith, wherewith you can quench the fiery darts of the wicked. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Our only offensive weapon is the word of God. Among all the things that we should be thankful for this Thanksgiving, is that the powers of darkness have not overtaken us yet. It’s very discouraged to see a public willingness, though, to descend into darkness. The promise of wealth, good times, medical care for everybody, jobs for everybody, retirement income to take care of us in our old age, all the things that make us weaker and more dependent as people are conspiring to draw us down. I want you, hopefully today and throughout this week, be thankful for your freedoms, but know this. You will not always have them. There is an enemy that is determined to take them from you, and he must be opposed, but not by your own strength. The only way we can oppose him, the only way we can stand against him, the only way that we can actively oppose him is through the power and through the word of God.
