Conservative self-censorship on themes of politics and religion aids the left’s push to eliminate Judeo-Christian ethics from America, said Rick Manning, president of Americans for Limited Government and author of Necessary Noise: How Donald Trump Inflames the Culture War and Why This Is Good News for America, in a Wednesday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily.
Manning described a Judeo-Christian ethos as central to American values and as the foundation of an objective moral framework for the nation.
“Our DNA is a Judeo-Christian DNA. It’s built into the Constitution [and] the Declaration of Independence; all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,” Manning remarked. “It’s part of the DNA of America, and when President Obama said we were a post-Christian country, he stated that almost as a triumph, and for the left it is, because here’s what it means: the underpinning of a certitude that there is, in fact, right, absolute truth, and everything else falls aside, that exists [within] a Judeo-Chistian ethos.”
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Manning warned of growing moral relativism in the wake of continual erosion of Judeo-Christian values across America
“It doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Manning said of the Judeo-Christian ethos. “So the concept of absolute truth underlies the rule of law, [and] it underlies the entirety of our civilization, and when you destroy the Judeo-Christian ethic, you destroy the rule of law and everything else becomes situational ethics, and what you see is, it’s okay to lie to accuse a Supreme Court nominee [of sexual impropriety] because the objective is to make sure that person isn’t confirmed. The ends justify the means. When we lose the Judeo-Christian ethos of our country, we lose the capacity to have objective [and] rational conversations between right and wrong.”
Marlow asked if the undermining of Judeo-Christian ethics is circumstantial or wrought by design.
“There is a concerted effort to destroy America,” noted Manning. “We’ve closed our eyes to it and allowed those who would destroy America to take over the institutions of America, and as a result, we wake up and we wonder, ‘Well, how the heck did this happen? How do we find ourselves with an Obama administration suing a school district in Illinois saying you have to let boys shower with girls or go in the girls’ locker room? When did we vote on that?’”
Manning added, “The left has been doing this over time and has developed a consensus in academia, and they just haven’t let the rest of us in on it. There is a concerted effort [to destroy America], but because there’s a concerted effort it is something we can attack and defeat.”
Conservative self-censorship on the subjects of politics and religion in order to avoid possible contentiousness in discussion amounts to withdrawal from the ideological battlespace, explained Manning.
“Because we’ve turned a blind eye, because we’ve said, ‘Oh, the things we can’t discuss are religion and politics,’ well, when you say you can’t discuss religion and politics, effectively, you say you can’t discuss anything that matters in the world,” stated Manning. “So consequently, we say you can’t discuss religion and politics in polite company, yet the other side does.”
Marlow reflected on those deliberately avoiding political or religious discussions around the Thanksgiving dinner table.
“I was thinking about this over Thanksgiving because I was at a house where we were discouraged from talking politics — which is fine for me because I talk politics all day every day, so I’m more than happy to have a day where we talk about other things — but overall, as this becomes a greater trend, I think this is very bad,” determined Marlow. “I think we’re all getting very soft to being able to handle criticism and [being able] to disagree civilly, which I think is a lost skill that used to be necessary and assumed, and now, basically, if anyone disagrees with you that is a microaggression, if not a macroaggression.”
Marlow continued, “I find all these [phenomena] to be certainly not good, and perhaps devastating for the future of the country if we’re going to control speech and forget how to disagree politely. I don’t like this stuff, and it’s becoming more and more commonplace.”
Manning described conservative self-censorship on matters of politics and religion as a surrender of critical analysis of such subjects to news media outlets.
“I think it’s important to remember that the speech they want to control and say you can’t engage in is the speech that they don’t control,” Manning said. “When I say ‘they’ I mean the major media and the elites who are sitting there and basically putting us through an inundation through all the entertainment that we consume of almost complete leftist agenda with little pushback.”
Manning went on, “They’re inundating us everyday with stuff throughout MSN headlines on MSN.com — they’re tilted left. Everything we see is tilted left, and as a result we can’t discuss it because that would be pushing back. We have to accept that norm. So yes, it’s a manipulation and it’s dangerous.”
Conservative self-censorship in political and religious discussions allows left-wing and partisan Democrat news media and academia to control Americans’ understandings of such subjects, concluded Manning.
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