Rob Schneider is a funny guy. A lot of his humor is irreverent and better suited to the Beavis and Butt-head demographic but his physical comedy and sense of timing are hilarious. His Saturday Night Live skits as the Richmeister / makin’ copies office nerd still crack me up 30 years later.
But there’s more depth to Schneider than his off-color gags and pratfalls suggest. During a recent interview on Fox News in which he explained why he is moving his family to Arizona from California, Schneider touched on the biggest threat facing America today.
During his interview, Schneider observed, “You know something’s wrong when people say, ‘If you put God, and family, and country first, that’s somehow controversial,” then asking rhetorically, “How is that controversial?”
Putting God, family and country first is not controversial at all. It does, however, represent an existential threat to authoritarians across the globe. Whether it’s today’s American totalitarians or the Chinese Communist Party, God, family and country stand in the way of subjugating free people.
These three principles have been under attack for centuries, and the reason is simple. If people believe in God, family and country, they are less apt to embrace tyrannical politicians and their political systems. For this reason, these three institutions must be destroyed.
Let’s start with God. There has always been atheism but the idea of basing a political system on it began to take form during the 18th century. It was Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau who theorized that man is fundamentally good and corrupted by society, and that citizenship doesn’t require compassion for other people.
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Rousseau’s repudiation of the the Bible’s views on the nature of man - that we’re infinitely sinful, hopelessly corrupt and depraved by virtue of original sin - ushered in the false notion that man and society are perfectible. All we need to do is replace the word of God and biblical law with Man’s law.
Many of Rousseau’s theories were incorporated into the French Revolution of 1789. The promise of liberté, égalité, fraternité was quickly betrayed and devolved into the Reign of Terror, resulting in tens of thousands of decapitations and other murders.
Along the way, the cathedral of Notre Dame was rebranded as a Temple of Reason, other churches were sacked or destroyed entirely, clergymen were killed and exiled, and the Georgian calendar was rejected. The storming of the Bastille did not occur in ‘The Year of Our Lord 1789’ but the Year 1 of what was called the Era of Liberty. In truth, it was an era of vicious paganism.
The French Revolution did not bring liberty, equality or fraternity to France. Instead, it established the template for instituting Marxist-Leninism in Russia in 1917. Clearly, God has no place in a society ruled by tyrants.
There’s no place for family either. Karl Marx declared marriage a farce and argued for the abolition of the nuclear family. In his 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx opined, “The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.”
Frederick Engles, Marx’s parter in political theory, backed-up Marx in his 1884 opus Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, writing, “The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife, and modern society is a mass composed of these individual families as its molecules.”
Then there’s country. Not content with blowing up the institutions of marriage and family, Marx did his best wreck the idea of sovereign nations. “The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality,” wrote Marx. That’s clear as crystal.
Rob Schneider wasn’t wrong to ask why putting God, family and country first is controversial, even though it isn’t. But to put those things first is to repudiate the three pillars of Communism and similarly tyrannical forms of government. That means putting a big fat target on yourself.
Authoritarians know very well that if one person puts God, family and country first, they won’t put the government first. They also know that if one person says it, others are likely agree. That is repugnant to those who believe in the writings of Marx, Engles, Rousseau and others like them.
In response, belief in God must be reduced to something between ignorant bumpkinism and dangerous radicalism. The family and marriage are diminished to systems of oppression and whoredom. National identity is decried as the, “handmaiden of the bourgeoisie.”
The American Left is obsessed with demonizing ordinary beliefs, questions and observations. The good news is, they can only succeed if we let them.
Scott Hogenson is a political and social commentator who lives in Texas.
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