Radio host and author Michael Savage joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow to discuss his new book God, Faith, and Reason on a special Thanksgiving Day edition of Breitbart News Daily.
“I just want to emphasize this: you hear ‘God’ in a title, right away you walk by and say, ‘ah, who wants to hear that preachy, sanctimonious stuff?’ That’s the immediate reaction in a nation as devoid of any faith as you could ever imagine. That’s where we’re at today. I mean, Rome was probably more faithful than this country is right now, at least from the media point of view,” said Savage.
“And yet, there’s a hard core of people who have never forgotten that this whole thing didn’t begin on its own out of nowhere, that there must be more to it all,” he noted.
Savage noted that Albert Einstein was used as an icon of supreme atheist reason by the Sixties counterculture, but Einstein himself said that “as he got older, the more that he probed the perimeters of the universe, the more he was sure there was a Creator, a grand Creator – it could not happen by accident.”
“That seems to be left out of every discussion of one of the greatest minds of all time,” he observed. “Now, having said that, I’m just one of the many billions who has arrived on this planet and have asked the universal questions. My odyssey God, Faith, and Reason goes back to me as a little boy in the streets of the Bronx, all the way up to now.”
Savage said his book is filled with stories, anecdotes, and observations of varying length, such as the tale of a hard-edged Jewish gangster who survived eight gunshot wounds, went to prison a broken man and picked himself up by realizing that God had saved his life. He drew inspiration from this story to declare that everyone comes to a moment in their lives when they “realize they need something more than themselves.”
When Marlow observed that terrible events like the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandal blazing through Hollywood make this the perfect time to release a book about restoring America’s faith, Savage exclaimed, “Weinstein and Charlie Rose, where is this going to end?”
“All of the sanctimonious people like Charlie Rose. How much more sanctimonious can you get than Charlie Rose?” he asked. “I mean, you could expect it from Weinstein, a dirtbag producer from Hollywood, but would you ever have expected Mr. Peepers, the deacon of the liberal intellectual church, would have run around naked out of the shower?”
Savage worried that President Trump has been “misadvised” on policy matters and “steered to the left.”
“He’s still doing some good things for those of us who believe some hard things need to be done. The issue is, who’s steering him? Who’s advising him? We can pretty much guess where this is coming from,” he said.
“Just last week, I spent two days, six hours, imploring the president to reverse the importation of elephant and lion trophies from Africa,” he recalled. “I went berserk. I’m an animal rights activist. I have been for years. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. They’re going to let them bring in trophies from Africa in this day and age? What are we, suddenly 1880? We don’t know any better?”
“I said on the air – and I’ll tell you the truth, I knew that I would burn any bridges here, I didn’t care – I said, ‘Mr. Trump, I hope you’re listening. I hope you get the message. If you do not reverse this order, you’ll not only be a one-term president. When they come to impeach you, and they will on some other garbage, you’ll lose all of the women voters who came over to your side and half the independents,’” Savage recounted.
“This is a very important issue. I was shocked Friday night at dinner to get a text from someone high up in the media who said he’s reversing the ban. But here’s the trick to it all, Alex: Do you know who the president thanked for helping him see this? He thanked Greta van Susteren, who doesn’t even have a show, and Piers Morgan! And he ignored my audience,” he complained.
“I don’t know who is steering the president away from his core base, which consists in part of my huge audience of activist listeners. I don’t know what’s going on there, Alex,” he told Marlow. “But somebody is telling him, ‘Forget Savage, forget his audience.’ It’s a mistake that they’re making because they needed us to get where they are. Or, as Jimmy Durante said: ‘Be awfully nice to everyone you meet on the way up, because you’re going to meet them all on the way down.’”
Savage recalled being approached by his publisher to quickly produce a book about the 2016 election entitled Trump’s War. He agreed on the condition that the book which became God, Faith, and Reason would also be published, even though his book company doubted it would be a huge financial success.
“I said it’s my thanks to God for giving me what I have. I’ve got to return the favor,” he recalled.
Trump’s War became a New York Times bestseller, which Savage considers “a miracle unto itself” because he was given little or no exposure by big media outlets, including Fox News.
“I’m banned from Fox News,” he remarked. “They’ll have Charles Manson on, they’ll have an ISIS killer on, a rapist, a murderer, deviant, pervert – they don’t mention my name. This is what was done to people in the Soviet Union.”
After laboring long and hard on God, Faith, and Reason, Savage decided to hold it for publication during the holiday season – a season he discusses in the book by trenchantly noting that Halloween seems to have become a bigger holiday than Christmas.
“You know, you drive around in San Francisco or most cities in America, there used to be St. Christopher medals on the dashboards of cars in Queens where I grew up in New York. You’d see a little St. Christopher. It gave me a sense of, I don’t know, continuity and calmness to know that there were religious people around. You know what I’m saying? You drive around now, St. Christopher is dead. You have dreamcatchers, voodoo dolls hanging off the mirror. You can’t even see out of the windshield. If that doesn’t symbolize the debasement of our society, I don’t know what else could say it better than that,” said Savage.
As for the “reason” component of God, Faith, and Reason, Savage noted that he holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley along with two master’s’ degrees, so he considers himself “an extremely logical, reasonable person.”
“It’s not as though I haven’t any education in the sciences. I do. I have a strictly logical mind. However, with reason you come to understand that you must have faith. With faith you come to understand that there must be God,” he declared.
“It’s a three-way system here,” he explained. “At the end of the day, when you sit in that church and you contemplate your little dance in the sun called life, the short dance in the sun that we all have, and then you say, ‘Is there an eternity? What does it all mean? Am I really judged? Does it really matter what I do, or should I throw caution to the wind and do what the heck I want?’ you come to understand that there has to be a grand designer. There has to be a judgment day. There has to be another world. And so as I say, reason leads you to faith, which leads you to God.”
Savage said he believes the United States is on the verge of a spiritual revival and warned that unless such a revival occurs, “this country will be overtaken by Islam.”
“It’s only a matter of time,” he elaborated. “They’ve had their spiritual revival, and that’s called jihad, or war against the West, namely Christians and Jews. There’s no question about it. Only the idiotic would disagree with that statement. They’re not coming here to assimilate, especially those coming from throwback nations living in the Ninth Century, bringing their women in wearing costumes from the Middle Ages. That’s crazy! How can this end good for Western civilization? By the way, this is not the first time that this has occurred. It’s many times it has occurred.”
“Now, only a revival of faith can save the West,” he asserted. “The question is, can the West overcome the deeply ingrained, anti-God faithlessness of the government media establishment? That’s the only question there is. I don’t know that Trump is the man to do it. I don’t know that he’s Constantine. But something, somebody has to come along to save this nation, because we’re not going to save it in a secular manner.”
“We’ll just be overrun and disappear completely,” Savage feared. “When I say ‘disappear,’ I don’t mean the land mass will disappear, I don’t mean the people will disappear – our entire way of life will disappear, which is what the left has wanted for over 70 years. How about the chants from the early feminist movement: ‘Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civilization has got to go?’ Well, they’re getting their wish, aren’t they?”
“And what happens when Western civilization goes, to all those radical feminists? Do you think that the Muslim invasion and the Muslim invaders are going to treat them well? Are they that crazy?” he wondered.
“I’ll stop right there because this really is not about Muslims. It’s about America. And moreover it’s not even about America, it’s about mankind in general, because every human on this planet, no matter what their religion may be, ultimately thinks about the eternal questions,” he said.
Savage worried that in the current cultural, political, and media environment, people are “afraid to even express faith in God.”
“They think they’ll be seen as an idiotic, primitive rube. That’s because of the ‘smart men’ in the world, like Harvey Weinstein. It’s men like him who have chased God away. It’s men like him who have killed God. It’s men like him who have driven a stake in God’s heart,” he charged.
“But as I have said, God is not dead. Man is dead to God. That’s one of my main lines in God, Faith, and Reason. Think about that one. God is not dead, as Nietzsche said. Savage says man is dead to God. What that means is that if man is dead to God, God can come back in our lives if we become alive to God,” he said.
“It’s not a paradox. It’s not a riddle,” he insisted. “God is not dead, man is dead to God, but man can be reborn to God no matter what his religious beliefs are. Even an atheist can be reborn to God.”
“Let’s talk about atheism and religion,” he proposed. “How does that match? Look at Alcoholics Anonymous. I was on a major guy’s show Saturday on WABC, I didn’t know that Larry Kudlow, a great guy, loved my book, I thought he was a financial guy. Because he had crashed and burned on the drugs and alcohol many years ago, he said it was only through God that he came back and has his life back again. I didn’t know that.”
“The point is that you send people into AA or drug treatment, aren’t they all taught that they have to give their lives over to a higher power? What in the world is that but acknowledging that an ego-driven life is a dead end?” Savage asked.
“I think that we do see God, but we don’t use the word ‘God.’ We use words like ‘higher power.’ That’s fine to me. I’m not a preacher, I’m not a rabbi, I’m not a proselytizer. What I’m trying to say is, all of us will come to a point in our lives – pay attention, listeners, I mean you! – you will find out one day when you’re all alone, you’ll scream, and you’ll scream not for Joe and not for Mary, but you’ll scream for God to help you. That’s what happens to everybody,” he said.
Savage concluded by telling the story of how God changed the course of his own life.
“Late 1970s, two children, wife, hilltop north of San Francisco,” he began. “Killed myself to earn my Ph.D. from a great university, was told it was the union card. Went for the jobs. They said, ‘Drop dead, white man. We’re not hiring.’ Two hundred universities told me to die and put my future on hold.”
“Two young children, nowhere to turn. I had killed myself for that Ph.D. I went out on the deck of my house in the valley and I started to scream to God. I asked him to just give me a living. I didn’t ask for a fortune. I said, ‘God, please, just give me a living. I don’t know what to do,’” he recalled.
“It didn’t happen overnight. It wasn’t a Cecil B. DeMille production. It was through that moment – and I swear as God is my witness, that’s when things started to come my way, slowly but slowly but slowly but surely. Things opened up. It was like the Red Sea started to part,” Savage said.
“And then in 1993 or 4, I sent out a demo tape to like 350 radio program directors, and about five of them around the country said that’s good stuff, blah blah blah, would you like to fill in? That opened up the door to radio. It’s almost a quarter of a century later that I’ve been on this ride of talk radio and authoring. But I’m still wandering in the wilderness,” he testified.
“There’s no recognition for my struggle, nor should there be. God does not want me to be acclaimed. God does not want me sitting up on some high tower, beloved by the world. I think he wants me to be behind a microphone and behind a book, anonymously doing what I’ve always been doing, which is writing and talking,” he said.
“That’s all there is to it. I’m not an evangelist. I’m not looking to build a mega-church or create some kind of organization. That’s not who I am. I think each person has to struggle in their own way, find their own way, and come to understand they’re not alone,” said Savage.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.
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