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Charlton Heston
"Winning The Cultural War"
Harvard Law School Forum
February 16, 1999

Solely to be fairly used for the educational purposes of open discussion.

I remember my son when he was five, explaining to his kindergarten class what his father did for a living. "My Daddy," he said, "pretends to be people."

There have been quite a few of them. Prophets from the Old and New Testaments, a couple of Christian saints, generals of various nationalities and different centuries, several kings, three American presidents, a French cardinal and two geniuses, including Michelangelo. If you want the ceiling re-painted I'll do my best. There always seem to be a lot of different fellows up here. I'm never sure which one of them gets to talk. Right now, I guess I'm the guy.

As I pondered our visit tonight it struck me: If my Creator gave me the gift to connect you with the hearts and minds of those great men, then I want to use that same gift now to re-connect you with your own sense of liberty ... your own freedom of thought ... your own compass for what is right.

Dedicating the memorial at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln said of America, "We are now engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure." Those words are true again. I believe that we are again engaged in a great civil war, a cultural war that's about to hijack your birthright to think and say what lives in your heart. I fear you no longer trust the pulsing lifeblood of liberty inside you ... the stuff that made this country rise from wilderness into the miracle that it is.

Let me back up a little. About a year ago I became president of the National Rifle Association, which protects the right to keep and bear arms of American citizens. I ran for office, I was elected, and now I serve ... I serve as a moving target for the media who've called me everything from "ridiculous" and "duped" to a "brain-injured, senile, crazy old man." I know ... I'm pretty old ... but I sure Lord ain't senile.

As I have stood in the crosshairs of those who target Second Amendment freedoms, I've realized that firearms are not the only issue. No…no… it's much, much bigger than that.

I've come to understand that a cultural war is raging across our land, in which, with Orwellian fervor, certain affected thoughts and speech are mandated.

For example, I marched for civil rights with Dr. King in 1963 – long before Hollywood found it fashionable I might say. But when I told an audience last year that white pride is just as valid as black pride or red pride or anyone else's pride, they called me a racist.

I've worked with brilliantly talented homosexuals all my life throughout my whole career. But when I told an audience that gay rights should extend no further than your rights or my rights, I was called a homophobe.

I served in World War II against the Axis powers. But during a speech, when I drew an analogy between singling out innocent Jews and singling out innocent gun owners, I was called an anti-Semite.

Everyone I know knows I would never raise a closed fist against my country. But when I asked an audience to oppose this cultural persecution I am talking about, I was compared to Timothy McVeigh.

From Time magazine to friends and colleagues, they're essentially saying, "Chuck, how dare you speak your mind. You are using language not authorized for public consumption!"

But I am not afraid. If Americans believed in political correctness, we'd still be King George's boys-subjects bound to the British crown.

In his book, "The End of Sanity," Martin Gross writes that "blatantly irrational behavior is rapidly being established as the norm in almost every area of human endeavor. There seem to be new customs, new rules, new anti-intellectual theories regularly foisted on us from every direction. Underneath, the nation is roiling. Americans know something without a name is undermining the nation, turning the mind mushy when it comes to separating truth from falsehood and right from wrong. And they don't like it."

Let me read you a few examples.

At Antioch college in Ohio, young men seeking intimacy with a coed must get verbal permission at each step of the process from kissing to petting to final - at last - copulation ... all clearly spelled out in a printed college directive.

In New Jersey, despite the death of several patients nationwide who had been infected by dentists who had concealed their AIDs --- the state commissioner announced that health providers who are HIV-positive need not... need not ... tell their patients that they are infected.

At William and Mary, students tried to change the name of the school team "The Tribe" because it was supposedly insulting the local Indians, only to learn that authentic Virginia chiefs really liked the name "The Tribe".

In San Francisco, city fathers passed an ordinance protecting the rights of transvestites to cross-dress on the job, and for transsexuals to have separate toilet facilities while undergoing sex change surgery.

In New York City, kids who don't speak a word of Spanish have been placed in bilingual classes to learn their three R's in Spanish solely because their own names sound Hispanic.

At the University of Pennsylvania, in a state where thousands died at Gettysburg opposing slavery, the president of that college officially set up segregated dormitory space for black students. Yeah, I know ... that's out of bounds now. Dr. King said "Negroes." Jimmy Baldwin and most of us on the March said "black." But it's a no-no now.

For me, hyphenated identities are awkward ... particularly "Native-American." I'm a Native American, for God's sake. I also happen to be a blood-initiated brother of the Miniconjou Sioux. On my wife's side, my grandson is a twelfth generation native American ... with a capital letter on "American."

Finally, just last month ... David Howard, head of the Washington D.C. Office of Public Advocate, used the word "niggardly" while talking to colleagues about budgetary matters. Of course, "niggardly" means stingy or scanty. But within days Howard was forced to publicly apologize and then resign.

As columnist Tony Snow wrote: "David Howard got fired because some people in public employ were morons who

  1. didn't know the meaning of niggardly,
  2. didn't know how to use a dictionary to discover the meaning, and
  3. actually demanded that he apologize for their ignorance."

What does all of this mean? It means that telling us what to think has evolved into telling us what to say , so telling us what to do can't be far behind.

Before you claim to be a champion of free thought, tell me: Why did political correctness originate on America's campuses? And why do you continue to tolerate it? Why do you, who're supposed to debate ideas, surrender to their suppression?

Let's be honest. Who here thinks your professors can say what they really believe? Uh-huh…there’s a few…

Now that scares me to death, and should scare you too, that the superstition of political correctness rules the halls of reason.

You are the best and the brightest. You! here in the fertile cradle of American academia, here in the castle of learning on the Charles River, you are the cream. But I submit that you, and your counterparts across the land, are the most socially conformed and politically silenced generation since Concord Bridge. And as long as you validate that ... and abide it ... you are - by your grandfathers' standards - cowards.

Here's another example. Right now at more than one major university, Second Amendment scholars and researchers are being told to shut up about their findings or they'll lose their jobs. Why? Because their research findings would undermine big-city mayor's pending lawsuits that seek to extort hundreds of millions of dollars from firearm manufacturers.

Now I don't care what you think about guns. But if you are not shocked at that, I am shocked at you. Who will guard the raw material of unfettered ideas, if not you? Democracy is dialog! Who will defend the core value of academia, if you supposed soldiers of free thought and expression lay down your arms and plead, "Don't shoot me."

If you talk about race, it does not make you a racist. If you see distinctions between the genders, it does not make you sexist. If you think critically about a denomination, it does not make you anti-religion. If you accept but don't celebrate homosexuality, it does not make you a homophobe.

Don't let America's universities continue to serve as incubators for this rampant epidemic of new McCarthyism. That’s what it is: New McCarthyism.

But, what can you do? How can anyone prevail against such pervasive social subjugation? The answer's been here all along. I learned it 36 years ago, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., standing with Dr. Martin Luther King and two hundred thousand people.

You simply ... disobey. Peaceably, yes. Respectfully, of course. Nonviolently, absolutely. But when told how to think or what to say or how to behave, we don't. We disobey social protocol that stifles and stigmatizes personal freedom.

I learned the awesome power of disobedience from Dr.King ... who learned it from Gandhi, and Thoreau, and Jesus, and every other great man who led those in the right against those with the might.

Disobedience is in our DNA. We feel innate kinship with that disobedient spirit that tossed tea into Boston Harbor, that sent Thoreau to jail, that refused to sit in the back of the bus, that protested a war in Viet Nam.

In that same spirit, I am asking you to disavow cultural correctness with massive disobedience of rogue authority, social directives and onerous law that weaken personal freedom. But be careful ... it hurts. Disobedience demands that you put yourself at risk. Dr. King stood on lots of balconies.

You must be willing to be humiliated ... to endure the modern-day equivalent of the police dogs at Montgomery and the water cannons at Selma. You must be willing to experience discomfort. Now I'm not complaining, but my own decades of social activism have left their mark on me.

Let me tell you a story.

A few years ago, I heard about a rapper named Ice-T who was selling a CD called "Cop Killer" celebrating ambushing and murdering police officers. It was being marketed by none other than Time/Warner, the biggest entertainment conglomerate in the counrty - in the world.

Police across the country were outraged. rightfully so - at least one had been murdered. But Time/Warner was stonewalling because the CD was a cash cow for them, and the media were tiptoeing around it because the rapper was black.

I heard Time/Warner had a stockholders meeting scheduled in Beverly Hills. I owned some shares of Time/Warner at the time, so I decided to attend. What I did there was against the advice of my family and colleagues I asked for the floor. To a hushed room of a thousand average American stockholders, I simply read the full lyrics of "Cop Killer" - every vicious, vulgar, instructional word.

    "I GOT MY 12 GAUGE SAWED OFF
    I GOT MY HEADLIGHTS TURNED OFF
    I'M ABOUT TO BUST SOME SHOTS OFF
    I'M ABOUT TO DUST SOME COPS OFF..."BR>

It got worse, a lot worse. I won't read the rest of it to you. But trust me, the room was a sea of shocked, frozen, blanched faces.

The Time/Warner executives squirmed in their chairs and stared at their shoes. They hated me for that.

Then I delivered another volley of sick lyric brimming with racist filth, where Ice-T fantasizes about sodomizing two 12-year old nieces of Al and Tipper Gore.

"SHE PUSHED HER BUTT AGAINST MY ...."No…no, I won't do to you here what I did to them. Let's just say I left the room in stunned silence. When I read the lyrics to the waiting press corps, one of them said "We can't print that." "I know," I replied, "but Time/Warner is still selling it."

Two months later, Time/Warner terminated Ice-T's contract. I'll never be offered another film by Warners, or get a good review from Time magazine. But disobedience means you have to be willing to act, not just talk.

When a mugger sues his elderly victim for defending herself ... jam the switchboard of the district attorney's office.

When your university is pressured to lower standards until 80% of the students graduate with honors ... choke the halls of the board of regents.

When an 8-year-old boy pecks a girl's cheek on the playground and gets hauled into court for sexual harassment ... march on that school and block its doorways.

When someone you elected is seduced by political power and betrays you ... petition them, oust them, banish them.

When Time magazine's cover portrays millennium nuts as deranged, crazy Christians holding a cross as it did last month ... boycott their magazine and the products it advertises.

So that this nation may long endure, I urge you to follow in the hallowed footsteps of the great disobediences of history that freed exiles, founded religions, defeated tyrants, and yes, in the hands of an aroused rabble in arms and a few great men, by God's grace, built this country.

If Dr. King were here, I think he would agree. I Thank you.


THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER
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ORIGINAL VERSION
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The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.
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MODERN AMERICAN VERSION
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The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving. CBS, NBC, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.

America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can it be that, in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Then a representative of the NAGB (The national association of green bugs) shows up on Nightline and charges the ant with green bias, and makes the case that the grasshopper is the victim of 30 million years of greenism.

Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when he sings "It's not easy being green." Bill and Hillary Clinton make a special guest appearance on the CBS Evening News to tell a concerned Dan Rather that they will do everything they can for the grasshopper who has been denied the prosperity he deserves by those who benefited unfairly during the Reagan summers. Richard Gephardt exclaims in an interview with Peter Jennings that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his "fair share."

Finally, the EEOC drafts the "Economic Equity and Anti-Greenism Act," retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government. Hillary gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of federal hearing officers that Bill appointed from a list of single-parent welfare moms who can only hear cases on Thursday's between 1:30 and 3 PM. The ant loses the case.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the government house he's in, which just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around him since he doesn't know how to maintain it.

The ant has disappeared in the snow. And on the TV, which the grasshopper bought by selling most of the ant's food, they are showing Bill Clinton standing before a wildly applauding group of Democrats announcing that a new era of "fairness" has dawned in America.


Thomas Sowell
Wash Times Weekly Edition
September 14, 1998

Solely to be fairly used for the educational purposes of open discussion.

People who go around saying "Let's move on" may be expressing nothing more than their exasperation at the media's non-stop obsession with Monica Lewinsky, but what that really amounts to is "Let's move away from the rule of law," because we refuse to think beyond the moment or look below the surface.

The whole American system of justice and the freedom of ourselves and our children depend on the rule of law, which is more important than any of the so-called "real issues" that people want to move on to.

This may be the golden age of lazy phrases for lazy people. Consider some of the nonsense notions that are floating around.

For example, "I take full responsibility" is just a collection of meaningless words unless you take the consequences. But this phrase is used repeatedly by politicians who want to end the discussion of their misdeeds, precisely so they do not have to take any consequences. And we fall for it.

What about "improper" or "inappropriate" relations? When I wear socks that don't match, that is inappropriate. If I wear my checkered sports jacket to a black tie dinner, that is improper. But things like this are miles away from the scandals and law-breaking that are at issue.

Then there is the fall-back positions of the Clinton defenders - that he is admittedly a "flawed" man. Let's talk sense. None of us is flawless. But there is a huge difference between flawed and being corrupt, especially when it is those in power who are corrupt.

The Clintons have been corrupt throughout their careers and they have corrupted governments in Arkansas and in Washington. The Whitewater partnership with the McDougals that Bill Clinton called a "private" business transaction was financially benefitted by a criminal fraud that cost tens of millions of federal dollars and led to more than 20 felony convictions.

The refusal of one of the convicted felons to say "yes" or "no" as to whether Bill Clinton was in on the fraud is quietly passed over by a lazy public and a lazy media. What upsets them is that she went to jail for stonewalling the court.

We don't have to ask whether Hillary Clinton was involved in the fraud because she was a lawyer for the crooks and helped keep the fraudulent operation in business when state officials wanted to shut down the savings and loan association that was being looted. That is why her billing records got subpoenaed - and why they got "lost" in the White House for two years.

Hillary Clinton's claim that $100,000 she received was from a commodity trade has been treated as just another funny little fib. But when the wife of a governor receives a hundred grand in laundered money, that is not a laughing matter, unless corruption and abuse of power are big jokes. If they are, the Clintons have been a lot of laughs for a lot of years.

Having state troopers bring a female employee to your hotel room, where you drop your pants, may be funny to some or "private" to others, but I frankly found the story too gross to believe until it turned out that Monica Lewinsky did what he wanted Paula Jones to do. It was an abuse of power, if ever there was one, and committing perjury about it in a court of law is not just telling a little fib among friends about a night out on the town with someone you picked up at a bar.

Using the Justice Department for malicious prosecution of innocent people in the White House travel office is not "private", even when you want to give their jobs to your personal friends. Illegal collection of FBI files on hundreds of Republicans and having the Internal Revenue Service target conservative think tanks for audits are not private.

These are abuses of power - and the victims are not just the particular individuals or institutions that are targeted. When the vast powers of government can be used to ruin anyone who opposes or exposes you and reward those who cover up your crimes, then those who hold that power are for all practical purposes above the law, no matter what the Constitution says.

If all it takes are some clever phrases to make us shrug it off, then the problem is not just with the spin-masters, but with us. And the consequences are not just for now, but for future Americans and future holders of power over them. Will this even be America then?


Listen to Lee on Rush 6-24-98. Need RealAudio?

I Believe
By Michael Kelly,
The Washington Post, February 4, 1998

Not for commercial use. Solely to be fairly used for the educational purposes of open discussion.

I believe the president. I have always believed him. I believed him when he said he had never been drafted in the Vietnam War and I believed him when he said he had forgotten to mention that he had been drafted in the Vietnam War. I believed him when he said he hadn't had sex with Gennifer Flowers and I believe him now, when he reportedly says he did.

I believe the president did not rent out the Lincoln Bedroom, did not sell access to himself and the vice president to hundreds of well-heeled special pleaders and did not supervise the largest, most systematic money-laundering operation in campaign finance history, collecting more than $3 million in illegal and improper donations. I believe that Charlie Trie and James Riady were motivated by nothing but patriotism for their adopted country.

I believed Vice President Gore when he said that he had made dunning calls to political contributors "on a few occasions" from his White House office, and I believed him when he said that, actually, "a few" meant 46. I believe in no controlling legal authority.

I believe Bruce Babbitt when he says that the $286,000 contributed to the DNC by Indian tribes opposed to granting a casino license to rival tribes had nothing to do with his denial of the license. I believed the secretary when he said that he had not been instructed in this matter by then-White House deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes. I believed him when he said later that he had told lobbyist and friend Paul Eckstein that Ickes had told him to move on the casino decision, but that he had been lying to Eckstein. I agree with the secretary that it is an outrage that anyone would question his integrity.

I believe in the Clinton Standard of adherence to the nation's campaign finance and bribery laws, enunciated by the president on March 7, 1997: "I don't believe you can find any evidence of the fact that I had changed government policy solely because of a contribution." I note with approval the use of the word "evidence" and also the use of the word "solely." I believe that it is proper to change government policy to address the concerns of people who have given the president money, as long as nobody can find evidence of this being the sole reason.

I believe the president has lived up to his promise to preside over the most ethical administration in American history. I believe that indicted former agriculture secretary Mike Espy did not accept $35,000 in illegal favors from Tyson Foods and other regulated businesses. I believe that indicted former housing secretary Henry Cisneros did not lie to the FBI and tell others to lie to cover up $250,000 in blackmail payments to his former mistress. I believe that convicted former associate attorney general Webster Hubbell was not involved in the obstruction of justice when the president's minions arranged for Hubbell to receive $400,000 in sweetheart consulting deals at a time when he was reneging on his promise to cooperate with Kenneth Starr's Whitewater investigation.

I believe Paula Jones is a cheap tramp who was asking for it. I believe Kathleen Willey is a cheap tramp who was asking for it. I believe Monica Lewinsky is a cheap tramp who was asking for it.

I believe Lewinsky was fantasizing in her 20 hours of taped conversation in which she reportedly detailed her sexual relationship with the president and begged Linda Tripp to join her in lying about the relationship. I believe that any gifts, correspondence, telephone calls and the 37 post-employment White House visits that may have passed between Lewinsky and the president are evidence only of a platonic relationship; such innocent intimate friendships are quite common between middle-aged married men and young single women, and also between presidents of the United States and White House interns.

I see nothing suspicious in the report that the president's intimate, Vernon Jordan, arranged a $40,000-per-year job for Lewinsky shortly after she signed but before she filed an affidavit saying she had not had sex with the president. Nor do I read anything into the fact that the ambassador to the United Nations, Bill Richardson, visited Lewinsky at the Watergate to offer her a job. I believe the instructions Lewinsky gave Tripp informing her on how to properly perjure herself in the Willey matter simply wrote themselves.

I believe that The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, U.S. News & World Report, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, PBS and NPR are all part of a vast right-wing conspiracy. Especially NPR.