Ep. 71—Thick Skin, Weak Stomach—Timothy & David Gordon

By Catholic Culture Podcast ( bio - articles - email ) | Apr 02, 2020 | In The Catholic Culture Podcast

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Timothy and David Gordon join the show to discuss their new book Rules for Retrogrades: Forty Tactics to Defeat the Radical Left. It’s a reverse-Alinskyan playbook for conservatives and Christians who are sick of being outmaneuvered at every turn by the forces seeking the destruction of the Christian faith and the natural foundations of the social order.

The Gordon brothers want us to stop falling for the left’s tactics, which take advantage of the timidity, and false humility of today’s conservative Christians, and start turning the radicals’ own tactics against them as much as possible within the bounds of Christian morality.

https://www.tanbooks.com/rules-for-retrogrades-forty-tactics-to-defeat-the-radical-left.html

Contents

[1:21] Remarks on the beginning of a dialogue with the Gordons

[6:11] Egalitarianism as the beating heart of radical leftism

[9:17] What is a retrograde?

[12:45] “No truth is ‘off-limits’”: Don’t censor your thoughts for fear of consequences or optics

[21:05] Admission of sin’s wickedness a prerequisite for mercy

[23:01] “Always be on offense”: why a defensive position leads to failure; it should fall to those who advocate wickedness to be on the defensive

[28:21] “Risus est bellum”: The best response to an absurd or evil claim could be laughter or rebuke rather than dignifying it with an argument

[30:38] Virtue-signaling Christians who try to curry favor with the left by throwing retrogrades under the bus; mod-cons vs. militant mods

[33:32] Ways that leftist conditioning affects even staunch conservatives

[37:50] “Be coarse but never crass”—have “thick skin and a weak stomach”; how the hierarchy of virtues gives us moral perspective in politics (civility is relatively low on the virtue totem pole)

[45:23] The degree to which Alinsky’s tactics may be used against the left; the rules of swordsmanship vs. the ends for which you fight

[50:57] Why prayer was not discussed in Rules for Retrogrades

[55:38] “For radicals, the issue is never the real issue”: ex., pushing maternity leave is a pretext to normalize being a working mother

[59:46] The importance of the order in which the rules were arranged

[1:01:34] “The root of cultural decay is feminism: end feminism to end radicalism”

[1:07:00] Follow-up comments by Thomas on the importance of prayer

Theme music: “Franciscan Eyes”, written and performed by Thomas Mirus. Download the Catholic Culture Podcast soundtrack.