Prof. Jason Hill at the Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend Shillman Fellow outlines the legacy we must leave to future generations. VIDEO AND TRANSCRIPT
https://www.frontpagemag.com/prof-jason-hill-at-the-freedom-centers-restoration-weekend/
Jason Hill:
I often start my talks with an epigraph and it goes something like this. The barbarians are not at the gates and the jungles are not approaching the cities. The barbarians are inside the cities and the jungles are our cities. The barbarians move openly among us like sinister ghouls, dressed in suits and ties, dresses, and stilettos that can hurt and do hurt the pavements. They are wicked men and nefarious she-devils. But America, the most exceptional and unprecedented phenomenon in history, is in an age of moral crisis, an age of nihilism in which values and the good are destroyed for the sake of destruction and because America is good. Our culture today is unfortunately bankrupt, destitute, intellectually bankrupt, morally bankrupt and spiritually bankrupt.
Now whether we believe in the great reset, the council of stakeholders, the financial cartel, the stakeholders of global capitalists, the machinations of the World Economic Forum, ESG logic, the climate catastrophists, the open board of globalists who, with full forethought of malice, aid and abet the genocide of our young people through the importation of drugs, including fentanyl, and the infiltration of gang cartels and the crime and the civic destabilization that come with them, in order to place a republic on the verge of a nervous breakdown is irrelevant.
Those phenomena are true, or whether we believe in the elevation of the secular religions in our K-12 educational systems such as Black Lives Matter, ideology, critical race theory, social justice warriorship, wokeism, environmentalism, transgender ideology, and the manner in which children have been confiscated from their families, so teachers can non-gender them behind their parents’ backs, and encourage psychologically confused 15-year-olds who think they are boys, to consider sex hormone treatments and double mastectomies, and those who are younger into taking puberty blockers. These phenomena are true, or the way that our universities, as a professor of 25 years in the university, have become indoctrination centers for left-wing Marxist propaganda. Now, without engaging in journalistic minutia, which would make me become a statistician of [gutter trivia], a few things stand out. The left is evil.
Audience Member: That’s right.
Jason Hill: It is evil because it propagates and promulgates what I call America phobia. [Applause]. And it wants to change the political DNA of this country, and it is using as pawns the American youth as vehicles through which to accomplish this goal. When I ask my students — and I travel around the country giving talks at various institutions. But when I ask my students and the students at these institutions, what is it that you want to do with America, increasingly, I get one and one answer. We want Professor Hill, Dr. Hill, they say, to change the political DNA of this country. We want to go into corporations and we want to rebrand them into something different.
And I said, “What is it that you want to rebrand these corporations into?” And they say, we want to destroy what we find in America, which is race capitalism or capitalism, which is racist and make it into a socialist country. This is the answer that I get. And we must remember that the socialism-communism axiom is not primarily about the appropriation of private property because we have to ask ourselves, ladies and gentlemen, what is a source of wealth? Wealth is nothing but the concrete and tangible application of human intelligence of man’s mind to the problem of human survival, right?
Therefore, socialism is a wholesale nationalization of the mind, of the individual’s mind, which means it is a violation of one’s inalienable and sovereign right to one’s body and one’s mind, which makes socialism a hate crime and incitement to violence — [Applause] — which makes socialism incompatible with the foundations of or republic.
Now, there are a multiplicity of reasons for how and why we arrive at this state. I’ll focus on one reason and I’ll give you one solution because I like to be very concise and I know that I don’t want to hold you up too long. So we could talk about the 1960s and the creation of revolutionary studies like Black studies and queer studies and women’s studies, and Chicano studies, and the revolt against reason and the destruction of logic and all the means of adjudicating among truth claims. We could talk about all those phenomena.
But I want to focus on one particular phenomenon that is responsible for all the maladies and the complete malarkey that is going on in our culture. And it is that American children have been expropriated from their families as they are in China, in Cuba, in North Korea, and as they were in the Soviet Union. And this is because too many American parents, in pursuing the American dream, which is an honorable vocational calling, the American dream is a [conservative] part of the American identity. But in the pursuit of the American dream, a lot of children have got left behind.
Adding to that is a general breakdown of the American family and the [desacralization] of the family, the deep (indiscernible) of the American family. The American family today enjoys low prestige; it has a low-prestige value fixed to it where children take their dinner plates or their dinner trays to their separate rooms and eat, dwell on their devices while their parents eat while attending to work brought home from the office. And that’s the least malignant scenario that I can describe.
So we have a case where American parents have outsourced — they have outsourced their children morally, spiritually, existentially. They’ve outsourced their children to these educational institutions, to K-12 institutions. Where parents ought to be the primary moral instructors of their children’s lives, the schools have assumed that responsibility. But we must remember, ladies and gentlemen, that classrooms are places of impermanence, of transition, while families are here to stay for better or for worse.
Now, given the epidemic of loneliness among the Z generation, given the increasing rates of suicide and suicidal ideation, given the depression and anxiety of our young, the highest-ever in the history of a republic, this is an age of despair for young people today. When I go across the country, again talking to young people, when my last class at my university ends at 4:00, and I’m in my office at 11:00, ministering to students not about Aristotle or about Plato or about John Stewart Mill, but about their personal problems because one student is pregnant or another student is suicidal.
And I say, “Why aren’t you talking — I’m not a licensed psychologist. Why aren’t you talking to your parents about these problems?” And they say to me, “Talking to my parent or talking to my parents” — if they have two parents at home — “is like talking to a brick wall. I can’t talk to my parents about this.” After 25 years in the classroom, you learn a lot about the structure of the home life, not just by the behavior of students in the classroom and their method of cognition, but what you learn about them when they sit in the safety of your office.
So the emotional support and the authentic affirmation in their personhood, not their ability to get into an Ivy League institution, that students should be getting from their parents, is being outsourced to educators. Now most parents, of course, are not monsters, and most parents are not ill-intentioned. They’re just morally exhausted and they are physically tired.
So to take back the youth, our children, our country, I think we must become more warriors for goodness. And the greatest way to fight the idea of pathogens suffusing our culture and infecting our children is for each of us, in our person, in our agency, is to become a walking, practicing moral vaccine, to become an inoculant, for each of us to become inoculants against these pathogens, which means that we must cultivate our moral goodness, which we hold up 24/7 365 days a year as emulative models to our youth for that which they can pin their aspirational identities on. We become the moral inoculants.
And my students ask me, “Why should I be good when bad things happen to bad people?” (sic). And I say, “Bad things will always happen to good people because suffering is built into the nature of reality. But your goodness is the only source from which you will heal from the bad things that will inevitably happen to you.” No one has ever healed from the bad things from a source of evil or character rocked.
And in closing — [Applause] — in closing, I will say in the spirit of the late Queen Elizabeth’s grandmother, Queen Mary, and her own sense of monarchy, that we should strive to make an America where each can proudly say that America is God’s sacred mission to grace and dignify the earth, to give ordinary people an example of nobility and duty to raise them up and inspire them in their pained and striving lives. And that to live as a true American is to live out an ethical identity that is a vocational calling from God.
In the name of a return to Americanism, let us bequeath our children and to future generations this enduring and heroic legacy. Thank you. [Applause].
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