Category: radio

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON POLITICAL UPHEAVAL

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON POLITICAL UPHEAVAL

Just for fun, and to provide a little perspective on our present political perturbations, see if any of this sounds familiar. The answer or speaker in each paragraph corresponds to the same number at the bottom of the page.

1. “A burden of doubt had been cast over” the press. When the wrong man won, reporters and editors said they had been deluded, “not just by the polls, but by the politicians in both parties. Everybody should have known better.”

2. The FBI illegally assisted a presidential campaign. In the expectation that he would be named attorney general when his candidate won, the director of the FBI, who was friends with the candidate, put the Bureau’s resources at the candidate’s disposal months before the election.

3. The candidate believed campaign victory was destiny.

4. The two candidates have vastly different campaign strategies. The incumbent, whom many despise and most expect to lose, is on the road to large and small cities. Huge crowds stand in line for hours to hear him speak and shower love on him when he does. His opponent, happy to run on widespread hatred of his opponent and assured of victory by the polls and pundits, ventures out very little and makes few commitments about what he will do once elected.

5. “You can understand what the president has to stand. Every day in the week, he’s under a constant barrage from people who have no respect for the truth, and whose objective is to belittle and discredit him.”

6. On hatred and calls for the impeachment of the president over a controversial decision: “People signed petitions and fired off furious messages to Washington.” In Worchester, Massachusetts, and San Gabriel, California, the president was burned in effigy.  In Houston, a protestant minister became so angry while composing his message to the White House that he died of a heart attack.[1]

1. Henry Luce, the founding editor of Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated magazines, referring to Harry Truman’s victory in 1948.

2. Assistant to J. Edgar Hoover, William Sullivan. “We tried to create the impression that the president was too ignorant to deal with the emerging communist threat. We even prepared studies for Dewey, which were released under his name, making it appear as if his staff had done the work. No one in the Bureau gave Truman any chance of winning.”[2]

3. “It was written in the stars,” said Thomas E. Dewey. He was the first Republican to use statistical polling in a national election. The polls showed him winning.

4. President Harry S. Truman, Democrat v. Thomas E. Dewey, Republican, in the 1948 election. Truman toured the country in his private rail car, The Ferdinand Magellan, speaking to hundreds of thousands along the way. Dewey stayed mostly in New York.

5. Harry Truman, in a letter to Owen Latimore’s sister. Latimore was a China scholar, accused by Joseph McCarthy of being  “the top Russian espionage agent in the United States.”[2]

6.  The reaction after President Truman sacked General Douglas MacArthur for insubordination.  

Reading presidential biographies (Audible is great for this) provides an excellent perspective in times like these. Here’s a summary of what I’ve learned from George Washington to George H.W. Bush with a little Churchill and Tony Blair on the side.

Trust God. 7 It is God who judges:

He brings one down, he exalts another. [3]

Don’t panic. Our country has seen worse times and corrected greater wrongs. Does anyone remember 1861? Did you know that Franklin Roosevelt was the first to attempt to pack the Supreme Court? His Democrat majority stopped him.

Be sober about the biases in the media. They’ve been misrepresenting the facts and pushing an agenda for a long time. Develop discernment by reading good biographies and history, not the halo-biographies written by cheerleaders. Get your reporting from people committed to finding all the facts, not just the ones that support their side. That’s why I keep recommending World News Group’s podcast, The World and Everything In It. They are committed to reporting “sensational facts with understated prose” from a biblical worldview perspective. More importantly, they are transparent about their point of view.

Participate intelligently. Consider carefully the people advising a candidate. They have far more influence on a president Trump or Biden than most of us imagine.  

Hope in Christ alone. The Kingdom of God does not arrive on Air Force One.

[1] McCullough, ch. 16, Commander in Chief. Audible book.

[2] TRUMAN, David McCullough, ch. 14 Fighting Chance. Audible Books

[3] The New International Version. (2011). (Ps 75:7). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

WORLD RADIO: NPR FOR CONSERVATIVES

OK, I admit it, I enjoy National Public Radio (NPR) and I’ve listened to it for decades. I’ve listened to it for so long that I know who Bob Simon is and what happened to him. I’ll just stand here for a minute so my conservative friends can lob their rotten tomatoes …

Feel better? Good, now let me tell you why NPR scratches my information-junkie-itch and what I’ve found to replace it.

NPR does a lot of things very well. From Morning Edition to All Things Considered, Car Talk to The People’s Pharmacy and This American Life, among others, NPR succeeds with its breadth of topics, in depth reporting, and its literate reporting staff. But more than anything else I appreciate its tone. Unlike its commercial, conservative competitors, it isn’t bombastic, crude, repetitive, personality-driven or sensationalism, but rational, reasonable, and somewhat understated. The problem, and it is a deep one, is that you can’t listen to NPR without noticing its Darwinian, post-modern, secular-humanist point of view. (Did I leave any out?). I am increasingly sickened by its total commitment to the politically correct party line and pretty much anything contrary to the biblical world view. It’s reporting on the Planned Parenthood videos sounds like public relations work by the priestesses of this modern Molech. As Juan Williams said in 2010, when he was unceremoniously fired from NPR for mentioning his reasonable fear of Muslims on airplanes, “To say the least this is a chilling assault on free speech. The critical importance of honest journalism and a free flowing, respectful national conversation needs to be had in our country. But it is being buried as collateral damage in a war whose battles include political correctness and ideological orthodoxy.”

Enter WORLD RADIO and its daily program, The World and Everything In It, a thirty-minute daily broadcast available to download on your smartphone or listen online. The World and Everything In It takes the best of NPR, its tone, its breadth, and its intelligence, and presents its news and commentary from a biblical world view. It is refreshingly honest about this, unlike NPR, which pretends objectivity as it promotes the PC party line. Its contributors and regular guests include Cal Thomas and John Stonestreet, along with weekly interviews with thinkers and policy makers from all walks of life. WORLD RADIO is also committed to journalistic integrity. They do the hard work of chasing down the facts, verifying them, and reporting them without gloss. Like the magazine from which it grew, WORLD RADIO doesn’t shy away from difficult stories. It will report corruption and failure within Christianity as well as without, yet without the rancor and insensitivity found in some other publications.

WORLD RADIO is part of World News Group, which also produces the monthly World Magazine and GOD’S BIG WORLD for kids. They also sponsor the Hope Awards for effective charity. Like NPR, it is a non-profit, which works in its favor. It doesn’t let its advertisers shape its content. Yet unlike NPR, which slurps at the tax-payer-money-trough to fund its budget, WORLD doesn’t whine. They do offer an opportunity for forward thinking Christians to contribute to the further development of world class journalism from a biblical point of view. I urge you to check them out, and become a regular reader and supporter.