The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, welcome, welcome. Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Great to be together as always. I’ve told you over and over again. What do we have up today? We have during our 1 hour program or podcast, if you’re listening that way, we have four segments. One is the WYNK, what you need to know, here at the beginning, what you need to know. I’ll tell you what the key stories are and what sort of you’re not seeing what you should be looking at. I’ll talk about that in a moment.
And also two interviews. So two interviews today. We will talk later on with Jeffrey Tucker. Jeffrey Tucker is the founder of the Brownstone Institute. It looks to read his background, he’s a kind of libertarian conservative, kind of a free marketeer. But he’s written about what’s happening in Canada with the truckers, what he sees and has been very interesting writing. H he’s referred to… His writings were referred to by Ted Malloch in recent piece.
We’ll also talk with John Schlafly about his column. He and Andy Schlafly’s column is out this week, the Schlafly Report. This time the title is Exploiting the Vacuum and US Leadership… about world politics and others. So we’ll get to all that. Please visit Proamericareport.com, Proamericareport.com and you can follow all these interviews and segments. Play them again. All right.
What you need to know today, I want to do this carefully, but I think this is very important. And I am not making moral equivalency to these two topics as I talk about them. But I am making a point about what is happening gradually in our society, but intentionally.
So, about six months ago, there was a professor from a University – I won’t even say his name, you don’t need to know his name. But he did an interview where he said basically pedophilia… “Well, probably it’s just something that happens to you when you’re in utero. It’s your genetics, and we shouldn’t judge people. They’re made that way. They don’t choose that action.” And he was roundly excoriated. I think he might have lost his job.
But that argument that you don’t choose what you do is gotten pretty common. And so you see that a lot. But it also is true that you probably have heard the term the Overton Window, the idea that when you say something or do something or have an action so far outside of the norm, it sort of broadens what can be expected. I’m way, way oversimplifying that idea. But you can see that, right? You can see that in your own life. You can see that.
And you can see over the course of the last 50 years in American culture, what was completely unacceptable has become acceptable. And sometimes that’s good, right? Sometimes it’s good. What was unacceptable 150 years ago, say the treatment of certain members of the community is now better. It’s better now. Well, that’s good. That’s progress. But certain other things, for example, promiscuity, drug use, pornography… people will say, oh, well, that’s just your free choices, and it’s no big deal. It’s changed.
Flash forward to a story that I saw that I really was disturbed by. And it cuts to the heart of so many things that are happening. And that was Van Jones announced that he has a new child, I think a daughter, which is always wonderful. Here’s somebody excited about having a child. And then he announced that he and his friend, a woman, had decided to have the child not because they wanted to be together, but because they thought it would be nice to have a child and therefore they got together.
I don’t even know if it was if they got together themselves or if they had used science or technology. But basically they said we didn’t love each other as a married couple or even as a couple together to have children. We just thought we’d like to have a child. And we were around each other. We’re friends.
Now, I have to tell you, I know Van Jones. I don’t know him too well. But when I did my stint at CNN, I would go up to New York and they’d put me in a hotel for a couple of days. And I’d be on Anderson Cooper’s show each of the nights. And because I was up there staying in a hotel, some of the other folks that came up and stayed in hotels you’d sort of cross paths with. So Van Jones was one of them. He’d be on a panel, I’d be on a panel. And I didn’t even break bread with him, I can’t say I did get that far, but I sat and talked with him in the green room, and he’s very persuasive.
He comes not from the academic background or the elite background of the Yale and Harvard. I think he’s from Tennessee originally, maybe even went to University of Tennessee, one of the satellite schools, not even the main campus. But he’s very persuasive and he’s very smart, very savvy. And so what he’s always doing is carving out a space for his opinion. I’m not saying he doesn’t believe it, but he was in the Trump White House standing behind Trump when they signed the reform bill on the prison reform. He was someone who said, you recall, that the Russia story looked like a nothing burger.
Now you can say that he’s a straightforward, honest guy. I don’t know to dispute. I do know he’s very, very sophisticated and savvy in his messaging. And so the idea that he, and he got some sort of massive grant recently, I don’t know, millions and millions of dollars. But the idea that Van Jones is out and promoting this notion that it’s okay and normal to have children outside of some structured family is truly diabolical. It’s so bad I can barely get words to describe it, because what is true is this: the ideal is for a dad and mom together to raise a kid. And of course, we all fall short of the ideal. That’s true.
And so we have lots of friends and family and others who get divorced. They have to raise their single family. We have lots of families that have a spouse, a father or mother die. They have to raise their family. They have blended families. Just because there is an ideal – father and mother raising kids – doesn’t mean that you can’t do well and fine and succeed with some other situation. And we are called, I think, as a community to find ways to support the people that don’t have the ideal in ways.
And so you sometimes get a situation where if you’re a coach, I coach basketball for my sons, both my sons and my well, I used to coach my daughter. I don’t coach hers this year. And you end up in a role that’s something akin to a mentor. Sometimes you have a particular work relationship where I once early in my career had a colleague who was 25 years older than me, 20 years older than me, and he really was kind of a mentor father figure, professionally. We’re all called, I think we should recover and rediscover those roles.
But the notion that Van Jones is out doing a round of press promoting his idea that he wanted another child, and therefore he and his friend over dinner, literally they’re describing over dinner, they decide to have a child. That’s terrible. That’s terrible because it sets up exactly the opposite of the ideal. And guys like Van Jones, I think, would say we have an epidemic of fatherlessness in African American communities. And if you’re going to be a real man, you got to stand up and take responsibility. I think he would say those things, and yet he’s just subscribed to a model that makes it significantly less likely that you do any of those things.
Because someone you have dinner with, and is a friend, there’s nothing that holds you together. The point of these relationships, husband and wife and family, is they hold you together in ways that most normal friendships don’t.
One of the great shifts in the country was in the late 1960s, early 1970s, where no fault divorce happened, where you didn’t have to go in and say, I’m filing for a divorce because of X, Y or Z reason. You could just go in and say, I don’t want to be with that person anymore. And again, I’m not claiming, I’m not proclaiming that everyone should stay with everyone that they marry just because. But once you make it easier to step away from a marriage, that’s going to be likely that people step away. Once Van Jones and others make it acceptable to think that the family is not the ideal, it’s terrible for our future.
Again, don’t get me wrong, it’s not that it can’t be overcome. It’s not that there’s not lots of people that survive and even thrive in chaotic situations or different situations, but it’s a terrible idea. And the notion that it’s celebrated and not mocked. The notion that it’s celebrated and not condemned – that’s terrible for us as a society. No one should encourage Van Jones to be proud of what he’s done.
He may be proud to be a dad, he’s got to love that daughter I’m all for that, but no one should say oh, that’s really thoughtful. That’s really serious. What an interesting modern man. No – what a fool. And what a fool, not only a fool… Well, I should say it differently. I’m careful. What he’s done is foolish. How he’s done it is foolish, meaning what he’s done in terms of proclaiming this and going about this… Again I hope he loves his daughter and
I hope the woman that had the baby with him can be a good mom and all that, but this is foolish behavior and it’s undermining our society. Somebody’s got to be willing to say so. I condemn it. I condemn the behavior. I think it’s a terrible model and there’s something truly evil about promoting that.
That’s what I think. And what you need to know is, there are so many aspects of our culture right now. It’s not just the professor saying pedophilia is something that you’re born with. It’s not just the presence of pornography masquerading as free speech or free expression. It’s in these fundamentals like the family like what you’re seeing with Van Jones
That’s what you need to know. We’ve got to take a break, everybody. We’ll be back, we’ve got some great show. Ed Martin here in the Pro America Report, back in a moment.
