 So, as I said at Mass, I'm Father Parkson, I'm a priest of the diocese of Phoenix, Arizona. It's great to be with all of you today. The word woke is a word that I heard for the first time, probably in the last 10 years. And I remember when I heard it, I didn't really know exactly what it was about. Obviously after the death of George Floyd and the rise of Black Lives Matter, I started to hear it a lot more. I also started to see Catholics read books like White Fragility. And I saw Catholics go on the internet, Catholics that I knew well, that were sincere, loved God, devout, definitely Sunday-going Catholics. And I started to see them make videos about things that I found kind of unsettled, declaring their privilege and things like that. And I was confused by it, but I didn't really know how to make sense of it. Also, my own life, I have Catholic friends who really got into it. And I could see it was kind of fraying our relationship. And that was very painful to me. So I feel like I've been touched personally by this ideology. And I really wanted to understand where did this come from and what is the meaning of these words? And the more that I've learned about the woke ideology, where it comes from and its roots, I think I've had much greater clear about discerning what's like, aha, I see what's actually going on here. And actually the desire for this talk is to give you some clarity about where the woke ideology came from, which increases our confidence and how to combat it. Amen? Now I would be utterly remiss if I did not tell you that a lot of my talk, I stole from this book, which is called The Wake Not Woke by Noel Mering. Noel's a very lovely person. I've met her and I told her, hey, I'm giving a talk at Studentville. I'm basically gonna steal your book. She's like, oh, I'd love to see it. And I was like, no you won't, because you'll be thinking copyright infringement the whole time. But so I want to give her a full credit. And basically the heart of my talk when I begin to, the scheme I use, I follow basically the heart of her book. So if the only thing you do after this talk is go buy this book and you read it, that would be a worthy outcome of the talk. It's called Awake Not Woke. Awake Not Woke by Noel Mering. It's great, it's great title, isn't it? Yeah. So what does it mean to be woke? Well, classically it means to be awake to oppressive realities. Specifically to be awake to systemic oppressive realities as they relate to gender, class and sex. Now, on the face of it, it would seem like a Catholic would be about that. I was reading a book recently called The Crucifixion by Fleming Rutledge. And in it she's talking about this Greek word, Dikaiosune, which is sometimes translated as right or righteous or just or justification or righteousness. She's like, what's the best word? And she does this whole long word study of it in Hebrew and Greek. And the word she prefers is the Latin word rectificare, which means to make right, which would be the English word we don't use very often, rectification. In other words, we worship a God who makes right wrongs. He makes right injustices. He's the God who hears the cry of the poor. He's the God who hears sins cry out to heaven. He's the God who reconciles us to God, the Father through his death and resurrection. So since we worship a God who does justice, wouldn't on the face of it, it would seem like the woke ideology would be utterly Catholic. Like if it's about recognizing overthrowing oppression, well, wouldn't a Catholic be about that? But I think once you look at the roots of where it comes from, it makes it clear why a Catholic could not stand for the ideology. So what are the roots of it? Oh, before that, I should say, are Catholics about justice? Yeah, of course. Are they against racism? Yes, are they against sexism? Yes, are they against every unjust discrimination? Yes, and with your spirit. Okay, this is a good crowd. Okay, amen. So what are the roots of it? What are the origins? Well, of course, everything starts back in Genesis chapter three, with the evil one tempting Eve that she can be like God by her own power and her and Adam falling for it. But if we were to move forward a little from that, it would be with Karl Marx, but really to see the effect that Hegel had on Marx. So Hegel was a German philosopher. He was an idealist. And part of his philosophy was something called the dialectic. And it works like this. You have the thesis, which is the status quo, the way things are, but it contains within itself contradictions. That gives rise to an antithesis, which is opposes it. These two things go against each other. And then out of that conflict resolves into a synthesis, which then becomes the new status quo, the new thesis, and it starts back all over again. And he thought this movement was tending towards historical utopia. And Hegel was an idealist, which means he believes in the absolute spirit. But Marx took that idea, but Marx was a materialist. He thought the only things that were real is the material world. And he took that idea and he put it into economics and class warfare. So what does that look like? Well, if you read something like the Communist Manifesto, in it, Marx says, capitalism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. And hopefully you can hear in that some Hegel, right? That the thesis, the status quo, the way things are contains the contradictions with itself. It's gonna give rise to an antithesis because what we have is the bourgeois, like the ruling class. They're ruling over the proletariat or the working class. And one day the proletariat, the workhouse is gonna rise up and they're gonna overthrow the bourgeoisie. We're gonna move into socialism. And then finally the utopia of communism. So this idea, these are utopian ideas, we're gonna bring heaven to earth and we just wanna keep the revolution going and one day it will be here. So a progressive idea is when somebody says something like, hey, you don't wanna be on the wrong side of history. You ever heard that? The implication of that is, is that we're tending towards this utopia and everything's gonna be judged the past by this current future state where things are perfect. As the philosopher Dr. Crape went said, progressivism is a philosophy. It's really chronological snobbery. If it's newer, it's better. Instead of people believe that. I remember hearing the story about a public school superintendent. She was talking about a new textbook and she was telling this person, oh, this book is much better than the older book. She said, oh, really how? She said, well, it's newer. That doesn't make any sense. Just because something is newer doesn't necessarily mean it's better. But I hope you can see in the example of with Hegel and Tomarx how Marx took this Hegelian dialectic and that we're in this process of revolution moving towards utopia. Now what happened unfortunately is that it didn't happen. There was no automatic inevitable revolution. In America, we had the stock market crash in 1929. Then we have the Great Depression. And even then capitalism doesn't fall. And so there's a group of German Marxists and they're thinking about why didn't it happen? Because Marx said it was inevitable. Capitalism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. So they said, I think we need to help the revolution along. And so what they did is they came to America in 1933. And they, I'm sorry, in 1933, they started something in Frankfurt, Germany called the Institute for Social Research. And then they came over to America in 1935 and they matriculated basically in Columbia University. And these group of German Marxists says, we're gonna switch our tactics from economic or class to now culture and sex and education. We wanna get into those things and through that we're gonna stir up this revolution. Now something that Noelle Merring says in her book, and Awake Not Woke, she says, they immediately recognized two problems. Marx saw this, Engel saw this, who wrote the Commodus Manifesto Marx and the Frankfurt School, these new German Marxists. And the two obstacles were the faith and the family. And they knew that immediately. Why? Well, the faith gives people a context for their suffering. If somebody is suffering, are they're oppressed in some way? Well, you don't wanna give them a context for that. You don't want them to suffer well. You wanna rub raw the wounds of oppression. Why? You want them to feel enraged. You want them to feel helpless. Why? Because then they'll be about revolution. They'll be about finding who is the oppressor and then I can do terrible things to them because I want to overthrow them. So of course, as Catholics, we fight injustice, but we fight injustice with justice. We don't fight injustice with more injustice. That doesn't make any sense. As Reverend King once said, you can't fight darkness with more darkness. You fight darkness with light. And so they saw immediately though that if you give people a context for their suffering and they suffer their circumstances well, that's a huge block to revolution and the mindset we wanna build. And the second thing was the family. Now, before I get to that actually, I wanna say another move that the Frankfurt School made. And they combined a Marxist theory with psychology and the writings of Sigmund Freud. So cultural Marxism constantly has been dubbed Freudal Marxism, which is the idea of Freud and the idea of Marx put together. And some things about Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud thought a man wants to be happy and the key to man's happiness was sexual fulfillment. He literally wrote that. And man wants sex, he wants sexual, he has sexual desire, he wants sexual fulfillment. And he says this is the core of the human person. Sigmund Freud also goes on to say that man is sexual from birth. Not like, oh, I go through puberty and then I have sexual desires, get testosterone, no, no, no, no. He says from our birth, we are sexual. He talked about all these phases we go through. We go through an oral phase and an anal phase and a phallic phase and a latent phase and a general phase. And so do you think in our culture we sometimes sexualize children? That, my friends, is the legacy of Sigmund Freud. And although these have largely been discredited methodologically and among other people in his groups of academics, that it's kind of captured the American imagination. It's captured modern man, this idea that my fulfillment comes about through fulfilling my sexual desire. And Freud went so far as to say that repressed sexual desires, what leads to neurosis. So when you combine these two horrible ideas with Karl Marx, which is you're looking outward to see who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed. And then Freud takes that even further and he says even interiorly, I can be oppressing myself because I can be repressing my sexual desire. In the Frankfurt School, these Germans, they said the first place that people learn how to repress their sexual desire is in the traditional patriarchal family. That makes you, they thought, easy fodder for fascism. You learn how to just say yes to authority because you have parents that teach you about chastity. They teach you about self-restraint. They teach you about self-discipline. And so they knew that to have this cultural Marxist revolution, they had to uproot institutions like the family and traditional norms. Are you following at this part? Are we following? I know it's a bit philosophical. So, and then with that, as I said, they also saw the family as the enemy. Frederick Engels who wrote the Communist Manifesto with Marx said this. He said, the family's founded on the slavery of the wife. The husband is the bourgeois, he's the ruling class, and the wife is the proletariat. Whoa. You know, and this idea was really pointed out to me by a Catholic author whose name escapes me right now to come back to me. And he wrote a book called Out of the Ashes. And in it he said this. He said, if a woman in our culture is really good at cooking and she starts a restaurant and she gets out of a business loan and this restaurant gets going and her cooking's amazing, she makes all this money, we would say good for you, you're amazing. If a woman's really good at making clothes and she goes out of the house and she starts a business and makes all these clothes and she makes all this money through her marketing and design, we would say good for you, go get it girl, you do you. If a woman's really good at listening to people and paying attention to them, being really empathetic, and she does that, she starts a counseling business and gets out there and makes lots of money, we're like get it girl, come on. The author's name is Anthony Eslin. But he said if a woman freely chooses to do all of those things, to make delicious food, to design something beautiful, to listen empathetically, if she does all those things for the people closest to her that she loves the most, like her husband and children, we say, now you threw your life away. Your life has no value. What do you do when you're betraying the movement? Isn't that interesting? And isn't that true? I love being Catholic. Anyway, it's the best, it's the best. And then of course, they also looked at education. They wanted to get into the educational system and they wanted to use education to further the revolution. So I wanna now talk about dogmas. So these would be like the presuppositions of the woke movement. And I took these straight out Noel Merring's book. The first is group over person, group over person. At the end of the day, we have to judge people either by a group they're in or by individually as a person. And there's a book called Primal Screams and it's written by Mary Eberstadt. And the book's called Primal Screams, How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. It's an amazing book. And her thesis is basically this. For millennia of human history, when somebody asked you, who are you, you would answer that question by referencing your family and your faith. You'd say, oh, who's here I am, these are my parents, these are my grandparents. I come from this place, this home. And you'd say, oh, I'm Catholic and I've been Catholic for generations and this is the tradition my family is passing on to the next generation, our living faith. But she said with the breakdown of those two things, the family and the faith, people are now clinging to secondary identities like sex or gender or race and they're making it a primary identity. So if somebody's a member of the LGBTQ community and in any way you question them of being a member of that, like, well, do you want to let your sexual desires define you? Nobody should be defined by their sexual desires. We all have desires, but that doesn't define me as a person. A man might be married to his wife. It might be drawn to a woman that's not his life. That doesn't, in principle, suddenly make him an adulterer. We don't want to define ourselves by our desires. We have beloved children of God. That's who we are. We're created male and female. And so there's a reduction, a reductionist quality to that. But Mary ever says, when we lose that, we cling to secondary identities as primary identities. And when the secondary identities are threatened, we come after you. She says, the response is so vitriolic. They want to scorch you. They want to rip your heart out. And she said, why? She said, it's a primal scream. Because the human heart has a deep desire to know, who am I? Who am I? And in this book, she tells wild stories of people who are children from artificial insemination. And they don't studies on these people. They walk around and they don't know who their brothers and sisters are because they don't know who one of their parents is. They have a fear that's a kind of a sexual relationship with somebody that they're related to. They sometimes see people that look like them and they wonder, is that my brother or my cousin that I don't know? And you're like reading these accounts and it's heartbreaking. But that's what happens when we unmoor people from family and faith. And what this does is it moves us more towards tribalism, but not a tribalism like an extended group of families. A family is based on love, but a tribe according to the woke is based on grievance. Who am I? Well, I'm always either an oppressed or an oppressor group, and I'm looking for the other groups that are in competition with me. So I wanna give you a bunch of examples. Number one, 2017, there was a women's march and there was a pro-life feminist group that wanted to march. And so they were going to, but the people that were putting the march together found out and they told them, ooh, okay. You can come, but you can have no official signage. You can't sponsor it anyway and just go ahead and march. So this pro-life feminist group said, well, we don't understand. Is this a pro-abortion march or a pro-women's march? And these women shockingly thought they knew what a woman was, even though they weren't biologists. I know, what a time to be alive. And so what happened was they were missing something fundamental that the woke movement does, which is that they've now shifted what it means to be a person. As Catholics, we define ourselves the universals. In other words, we'd say things like Aristotle would say, we're rational animals. We have an intellect, we have a will. We're made in God's image and likeness. That's who we are. We're embodied as male or female, but now wokeism as an ideology, if you think about Marx and Freud redefines us as now we're a tribe against others, oppressor or oppressed. It's so central to being a woman is having the felt experience of being oppressed and wanting power by overthrowing the one who's oppressing you. Does that make sense? So like for instance, I don't know if you ever heard of like an oppressive patriarchy in the West that want to be oppressed by this and central to being a woman is to see that and to want to overthrow this power structure. So it doesn't define relationships by love, it defines them by power. And that's a scary place to be friends. If you ever meet somebody and you say, what's life ultimately about? And they say, power. You should slowly back away from that person. If they're your Uber driver, wait for the next one, just. But the point is that you can't just be a woman. You have to be a woman with the right ideology. And if you're not, then you're not really a part of this group. Another example, Nicole Hannah Jones, she was part of the New York Times 1619 project. So this was a desire to recast the American story as not being founded in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence, but rather in 1619, when the first slave ship, English colonists brought slaves over. She's saying that America is fundamentally a racist place. It's in its very DNA and every core institution of America is racist at its heart. And so she once famously said, there's a difference between being politically, being racially black and being politically black. And it's not enough just to be racially black, you must also be politically black. So you can be a part of the group as long as you think like we want you to think. As I've been pointing out the irony of, a lot of times the word diversity is thrown around, but it's never a diversity of thought. They want total uniformity and thought. It's great to have these different diverse groups as long you're all in agreement in what we're saying. To use a little more controversial one, when Kanye West once wore a MAGA hat, make America great again, and he talked about his support for Trump. Another black writer in a ton of Haasie Coates in the Atlantic said Kanye black, a Kanye West is no longer black. Really? That's it, huh? But I hope you've seen all these example. The group ideology is more important than the person. And the person could be sacrificed for the sake of the ideology. What it means to be black or a woman, what's really important though is you have to believe what the group believes. The problem with that friends is if the person is defined by power, who has it and who doesn't, and that we think the oppressors are evil, and those who are oppressed are really the virtuous ones, then what you're gonna create in your culture is a glamorization of victimhood. Have you seen that around? Me too. You're gonna glamorize victimhood, and this is also really important, you're gonna wanna publicize it. You're gonna wanna publicize your victimhood. And so there's an author named Jonathan Hyte. He wrote a book called The Coddling of the American Mind, and in an interview I once heard him in, he spoke about how now on college campuses and bathrooms and colleges, it says if there is a teacher or staff member that makes you feel uncomfortable in any way, then please call this number and let us know. But friends, you know, biblically, when you have a problem with another person, you go to that person directly, and we don't wanna raise an entire generation who sees everything as power, groups oppressing other groups, and we're not teaching young people how to engage in conflict. So Jonathan Hyte says we're creating these people that are fragile, but he said we're creating them. He said but the problem is conflict, a person is not like a vase, when they break they're gone, when a vase breaks that's it. He said a person is more like an immune system, and sometimes they have conflict and they get better at dealing with it, by dealing with it, do you see what I mean? But we live now in a culture where we want to glamorize our victimhood and we wanna publicize it, and that sign in the bathroom is really doing that. It's not making a college student do the hard work of actually going up to the professor and say hi, I didn't understand that, or what did you mean by that, or that offended me, but rather I just call this number and I tell some third party, I post on the internet, I called CNN, but I just, I publicize I'm a victim, because when we know what this ideology does, that's, it gives props to it, says it's a great thing to be a victim. We can talk about this in the Q&A if you're interested, but things like identity politics or intersectionality, and what those are doing is constantly analyzing how oppression is working in different groups. Who's the dominant group, who's the weaker group, who's the oppressor, who's the oppressed, and I hope in all of this, you're just hearing Karl Marx. Are you hearing that? That's what it is, great. Also wanna just point out that the irony of valuing the group over the person is that it eventually leads you to do racist things. Isn't that ironic? And so one of them is in 2020, there was a Smithsonian exhibit and it was talking about whiteness and things that white people make black people do that's unfair, and a couple of things they point out, as being distinctly white things, was being on time and working hard. And that way people were trying to oppress other races or people of color. And so they posted this, the Smithsonian had this, and then people took pictures of this and put this on the internet and the internet exploded because what you're saying then is that people of color are by nature lazy and tardy. And do you really wanna say that? And the Smithsonian said, oh, then they took it down. So the problem with putting group over person is in the end it makes you say racist things, which is the very thing presumably we're trying to fix. Amen? This is something that Robin D'Angelo writes in white fragility. She says, this simplistic idea that racism is limited to individual intentional acts committed by unkind people is at the root of virtually all white defensiveness on this topic. So basically she goes on to say that there are systemic oppression. Whiteness oppresses people of color. And even if you can't point to any specific act or something you did or policy, you're still oppressive by being white. I know, okay. So here's what the Catechism of the Catholic Church says. But where's how we think that through Catholics? The Catechism talks about that there is sin. And when somebody does sin, it causes scandal. And it can make other people sin more easily. We have something called capital sins, like pride, lust, avarice, covetedness, envy, sloth, wrath, gluttony. There's another called capital sins. It's because when you commit them, they often lead you committing other sins. We know that, like you eat a chipotle burrito, you're like, that was a mistake. You're like, I'm taking the rest of the day off. Little gluttony, let's throw in some laziness, right? When we overeat, we just want to give into other sins, right? That's what a capital sin is. The Catechism recognizes all of that, but there are sins that cry to heaven. It even says that this can create structures of sin, that it makes it easier to sin. As my favorite author, G.K. Chesterton says, what makes a good society good is that it makes it easy to be good. And what makes a bad society bad is makes it easy to be bad. And so when you have a community or society, there's a lot of people committing sin, makes it easier for other people to sin. But this is so important. The Catechism says structures of sin is always rooted in personal sin. So even though there are structures of sin at the end of the day, it's always individuals making decisions that are causing these structures of sin to exist. It's always tied to a human heart or to a person doing or saying something. It doesn't just exist somewhere out in the ether. And a critique of this idea that the group is more important than the person, that your whiteness is oppressive by simply you being white, is somebody like Ben Shapiro who has said, the problem with that is then I can't fight it with you. Because if you can point me to something that's racist, like a policy, then we can change that. If you point to an action that somebody's doing that we can approach them about that are something that somebody's saying. But if it just exists somewhere in the ether and we're always just sort of looking for it, then it's almost impossible to fight. It's like shadowboxing. And then if everything is racist, we see everything as racist, it makes it harder to fight actual racism. Because it's like the boy who cried wolf. And then when somebody actually says that is racist and it is racist, the culture's just saying, yeah, they call everything racist. So it's probably not. Do you see what I mean? What a time to be alive friends. What a time to be alive. The second one is will over reason. This is the second dogma. And it's been defined as expressive individualism. That's a comment, a phrase coined by a term Robert Bella. And it basically means that modern man is primarily defined by his inner life and his feelings. There's a long history to this, like beyond the scope of this talk to get into it. But basically means to be human is to express all of my desires, especially my sexual desires that I've bought into Sigmund Freud's worldview. And that that is what it means to be authentic. I have desires, I have deep desires, I have deep feelings and I should be able to express all of them. And that's the key to being human and that's the key to being happy. That's why a person can say today, I'm a boy trapped in a girl's body. If you believe in expressive individualism, that's my inner life. That's what I believe, that's what I think. And therefore I should be able to express that to be authentic. And any way that somebody tries to inhibit me is inhibiting my happiness or my freedom to be happy. Now, is authenticity good? Of course. Are our feelings important? Yes. Does every person have an inner life? Yes. Should we acknowledge it? Of course. David talks in the Psalms, he's using very emotional language. At one point in the Psalms, he says my only friend is darkness. That dude's having a bad day. If you can say my only friend is darkness, you're having a bad day. Is Santa Guston talking about his inner life and the confessions? Of course. So that's part of being human. We say things like when somebody's telling you something that meant a lot to them you can't empathize with them. We call that gaslighting. You don't recognize somebody's emotions. So these are all important things. But we also have reason and will. We also have embodied realities, objective realities, like chromosomes. And those also have something to say. But in the worldview of expressive individualism, which raises will over reason, if I have the desire, the will, I should be able to project that or impose that even on other things. Even if those things are irrational. Do you see this in our culture? My friends, me too. It's unbelievable. And what's so key about the Frankfurt school, because they were Marxist Freudians, is that they even rejected the moral law. That even in any internal voice that says, hey, I shouldn't act on that desire. I shouldn't act on that sexual desire. They would say, oh, you've just internalized your oppression. That's what you've done. And so to be human is to transgress. So I'm losing water, so okay. To be human is to transgress the moral law even. That's how far they go. And so one of the reasons why Catholic would have to reject this, is because when you say will over reason, the reason is God. Reason is the logos. In John chapter one, verse one, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. And the logos, the mind of God, as we know in John chapter one, verse 14, took flesh and dwelt among us. And this movement at its core is anti-reason, the intelligibility that God has placed into the world. And so the woke ideology and the name of authenticity can reject even the moral law. Like all of that is just oppression. Noel Mary makes a great point. She says, for a Catholic, for a Christian, authenticity is always bound up with the authority of God. This is the true notion of freedom. There are huge debates over freedom. This is going on right now, right? The Roe v. Wade just got overturned, and it's freedom as license, or freedom for excellence. Freedom for license means this. I want to do this thing, and it's good. How do you know? Because I want to do it. That's why it's good. I want it. What is it? Irrelevant. The key is I want it, right? Freedom for excellence is that I have a purpose or a meaning embedded inside of me, and I'm most free when I become more like the thing I was created to be. A Catholic notion of freedom is this. When is the train most free? When it's on its tracks. When is the sunflower most free? When it's following the sun. And let's say a sunflower just got autonomy and said, for too long I've been under the oppression of the sun, and I don't want to look at it anymore. So I'm going to turn away from it, right? Well, that's not a sunflower. That's a dumbflower, and it's going to die because it just cut itself off from its only life source. That's what it is. But this ideology taken to its core is will over reason. It even rejects the moral law that a human person has in nature, people become plastic. Pope Benedict says, we now think of our bodies as like uncultivated farmland. I could just change my body parts. And we do that in our culture. We do that to kids. But this is the ideology that started a long time ago. I know sometimes it feels like it was here yesterday. Like where did this come from? We all knew this was not true until yesterday. But these ideas have seeds hundreds of years ago and they're really just coming to fruition. I now want to move to what Noel calls the indoctrination. So those are the dogmas. How do we win the indoctrination? One is the sexual revolution. Now, I want to read to you a quote. It's from this book called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. And it's by a woman named Shulamith Firestone. Raise your hand. If you've ever heard of a feminist writer named Shulamith Firestone. No one. Okay. You'd have. Oh, amazing. Okay. You win. You get a water that I dropped. Sorry. Sorry. I'd never heard of her until I read this book. And she says this. And just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself. So the end goal of feminist revolution must be unlike that of the first feminist movement not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself. Genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. There's a paragraph at the end of the paragraph she says the tyranny of the biological family would be broken. Guess what year she wrote this in? 1970. That quote is 52 years old. Seems absurd when she writes it. But if you think about it, what has she done? What did Marx say? We're in this revolutions because he took Hegel's idea. And remember, he thought that the proletariat would overcome the bourgeois, the oppressed class, would take over the oppressors. And then we move into a classless utopia. You apply that to the family. The wife is like the proletariat she's worked. She's oppressed by her husband. One day she's gonna overthrow him. That was first way of feminism. But what we wanna get to is just like they wanna get to a classless society in economics. We wanna get to a genderless family which of course would eliminate family. Family no longer exists. I go so far as to say people who really have bought into like a queer ideology, they want everyone to identify that way so that we would eliminate sexual difference. They will literally say things we wanna smash, heteronormativity. You ever heard that? Heteronormativity, this idea that we're male and female. Now again, friends, I feel like this came yesterday. She wrote this in 1970. And she's just taking these tactics and moving away from economics to class onto gender and sex. Isn't that wild? There's hope coming. Sorry, it's coming. I know. So for instance, when Black Lives Matter first came out, on their website, this was eventually scrubbed. It said we want to empower queer networks. We wanna abolish the nuclear family. And I think people thought, what does that have to do with racial justice? What does that have to do with the death of George Floyd? What is going on here? And Patrice Calors, who's one of the founders, she said in an interview, I can't believe she said it, she said, me and one other girl, we're one of the three founders of Black Lives Matter, we're both trained Marxist. She said that in an interview, so we know what we're doing. And so all of these things come together. It's just looking for oppression in all of these different ways to keep the revolution going because we're going to the utopia. I want you to know the roots of it at all makes sense. Like how do we get to where our vice president declares her pronouns before she gives a speech? Yeah, okay, let's just move on from that. Okay, the next indoctrination is thought and speech control. I was on vacation last week in San Diego and I was reading a little book I've never read for called 1984 by George Orwell. Yeah, not like a little dystopian literature on vacation. Okay, and one of the things in the book, they have something called the Ministry of Truth. And their job is they release a new dictionary every year but their job is not to increase the dictionary, it's to eliminate words, to get more and more language and to take words and to redefine them to have more and more narrow meanings. So we said we would get to the point where equality only ever meant the equal measure of something, like the equal amount of water. But in their minds in the future, they would no longer know what it meant to have political equality or economic equality. Those are human equality, those words would not make sense to them. That we could somehow control the mind by controlling words in the way that words are used. So here's a couple of examples. We have to be very careful how we use words. That's why it's hard to find this ideology. One of them is equity. Equity sounds like a good word, sounds like justice. Yeah, I want equity, I'm Catholic. I think everyone should have equal opportunity to do something, we should remove barriers to doing it. I'm for equity. But for the woke, equity means not a quality of opportunity, it means an equality of outcome. So I'm not an oppressed group. I'm, according to this ideology, the least oppressed group. I'm a white Catholic male who's a priest. I'm like, I'll pressing this whole group, right, but if I saw, I'm sorry, okay. Wow, rise up, okay, yes, please do not kill me, okay. And I'm five foot 11, I'm mostly Irish. I grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona and I didn't make it to the NBA, I know. And it's not because the NBA is oppressing me. The NBA is a meritocracy. The best players play. As Jordan Peterson has tried to point out, the reason why NBA basketball players, like Kobe Bryant or the Bodger, the reason why they shoot 500 shots after each game and they practice endlessly is because they're trying to create inequality. Do you see what I mean? They're trying to be better than other players. That's how you get on the court, is you're trying to create inequality. It's a meritocracy. Jordan Peterson has pointed this out. People, by nature, form hierarchies and they're built on competence. And that's just how life works. You start in a trade and some people are better than others. But for the woke, if the outcomes of something are not perfectly aligned to their ends, they would say there must be some sort of oppression that occurred. It doesn't have to do with meritocracy. It doesn't have to do with people's own personal choice or what they decided, no, there is oppression. We just haven't found it yet. It's either sexism or racism or some other social oppression. And so equity is one of those words that's been redefined to mean this. And people can use that word and not really know what they're saying. And also with that, this is why they shut down speakers at universities. Because to them, the person who's coming, if they hold the wrong ideology, they're the oppressor. And if they have any claim to truth, like reason or dialogue or free speech, that's just a mask that's hiding their power. That's really what that is. Any claim to truth, truth doesn't exist. That's just your truth and you're holding onto it to keep power. So there are some people, these are people who are really bought into the ideology, who believe that free speech itself is just a mask to keep the oppressors in power. And if you believe that, then you don't even let the speaker talk. Because if you disagree with somebody's ideas, why not go to their talk, get to the Q&A and then attack their ideas? Why not get in a dialogue with them and try to show them in front of all these other people they don't know what they're talking about or it doesn't make sense. But they say, no, no, no, no, no. The point of critical theory is to upset the narrative. And so you're the oppressor and I'm gonna upset it by not even let you talk. And so that's why we hear things like speech is violence. But then after, I think this was what to say, Berkeley, after the speaker was not allowed to come, a group of people trashed the university and they didn't persecute them because they said, well, their violence was speech and they were the oppressed group, so they can do that. Now friends, that might not make any sense to you or me, but according to this ideology, it actually makes perfect sense because the oppressed is the one trying to overcome the oppressor. And lastly, through education activism that they've gotten into the universities. And they wanna use the school to undermine the uniqueness and importance of the family. So there was that bill that was recently in Florida, you all heard about this? It was dubbed the don't say gay bill, but it doesn't say that anywhere in the bill. And the bill said that we can't talk about things like gender identity or sexual preference until at least the fourth grade. And people got real upset about this. Now I personally believe, if you have a deep desire to talk to a seven-year-old about your sexual life, you shouldn't be teaching seven-year-olds. That's I think just generally true. Yeah, yeah. Because there's already a group of people in every child's life that is specially equipped to tell that child those things at the proper time and those people are called parents. Amen, hallelujah. And so we see this undermining of families through schools. And John Dewey, who's kind of the father of a lot of progressive education, was deeply influenced by these thoughts, too. And he thought that the school was to be an engine for social transformation. He didn't think the school was primarily an academic institution, like reading, writing, and arithmetic, but rather for social transformation. Like when we have an obesity problem in America, we expect our schools to fix it, which I've ever wondered this question, why? It's a school. Like, yeah, you go to PE for 30 minutes a day, but like just reading, writing, arithmetic, or like teaching my kid about sex. Yeah, if you want to teach him the biology of sex when it's appropriate, like seventh or eighth grade, fine. But why are you teaching them a whole worldview? But according to this ideology, that makes perfect sense. I got a master's degree from a secular university about five or six years ago, a master's degree in educational leadership. And I remember looking at old laws written about the role of teachers in schools. And it says that the school acts, and in Latin it said, in loco parentis. And do you know what that's Latin for? In the place of parents. That the school was meant to be giving what the parent would want. But now, as you know, this has happened many, many times, that they now write up things about transgender ideology. And if a student comes out, it says they're really struggling with this or thinking about this. And the teacher finds out that the parents are not on board, which means to me they're not totally affirming it. That could be then dubbed a toxic environment, and then they can begin to cut the parent out of it. That you don't have to tell your parents, just tell me. Now to me, that seems crazy, not only not Catholic, it seems un-American. But according to this ideology, that makes perfect sense. We're using the school to undermine the authority of parents. And friends, I don't know how many parents are really aware of this, who send their kids to public education, how often this stuff is happening, and their authority is being undermined by the school itself. Okay, why don't we move to what can we do about it? Because I think we can use a little hope at this point. What can we do about it? Well, I just wanna say that you can't build a civilization on lies. You can't build a civilization on silliness. At one point, these things have to collapse. And they can keep trying and trying and trying, controlling media and narratives, but we're made for truth. Our intellects are made for truth and reason, and our wills are made for love. They're not simply made for grievance or oppression, or to be in a power play. So the first thing I would tell you to do is to get educated. And I think the easiest or simplest book to read would be this one, which is Awake Not Woke. It's the one I talked about throughout this book. It's the best response I've seen to the woke ideology. It's a little philosophical. It's by Noelle Marying. Her last name is spelled M-E-R-I-N-G. And she's also done a number of interviews with, she was with Dr. Scott Hahn recently. She did a stupid bill of presents. So you can also find her on YouTube, but she's an excellent critiquer of the woke movement. Number two, if somebody says that they're woke or using phrases, let's not presume that we know everything about how bought in they are. It could be a phase they're going through. They could be just parroting a script. They could have gone off to college and encountered some of these ideas. And now they have kind of a sincere ignorance. And they're a sincere person. They want racial justice. They see Black Lives Matter. That makes perfect sense to them, because it's true. And so I want to be a part of this movement. But then it's kind of a package deal. Now they're starting to take on other things they didn't realize. So my point of that is we're not fighting people. We're fighting an ideology, amen? And so the more educated you are, the better you'll be at asking questions and seeing where this person kind of falls. Whether it's just kind of a phase or they're sincere, but they're using these words or they're full blown bought into the ideology. Also to be clear about language. So again, words like equity, diversity, inclusion, tolerance, what do we mean by those terms? And are they being used in a fair way? So a lot of times we use those terms, but tolerance never works both ways, right? So the person who's struggling with gender dysphoria, which is a real thing and doesn't feel comfortable in their body and doesn't feel comfortable using the bathroom that's aligned to their sex. And they want to use the other bathroom. We say, well, they say we'll be tolerant of that person. And we can say, well, what about being tolerant of the people whose bathroom they're now using? What about their rights? That's like, well, that's transphobic. It's like, well, that's convenient. I mean, so the tolerance isn't being used both ways. So again, these terms, how they're being used. Also, Jordan Peterson was here at Steubenville and he was interviewed by Father Dave Pavanka. And at the end of it, Father Dave said to him, do you have any advice for us Catholics? And the first thing he says, you know, you Catholic types. He said, don't be so apologetic about your virtue and that we need you to be noble and courageous. And then he also said, don't let people weaponize your guilt against you. Because if you're a person who's conscientious and somebody accuses you of being racist or sexist or transphobic and you want to be a good person, you might really take that to heart. Like, gosh, am I? I'm gonna really analyze. But so somebody once said guilt is the currency of wokeness. Sometimes they use guilt to just silence you to further the ideology that they're actually giving. I'd also say though, as I said before, be courageous. We live in a time friends where we need to have the courage to speak the truth. Amen. And it's not easy. And this stuff, again, these roots from a long time ago, but to be honestly the best analogy I can think of is I feel like we're Alice and we're in Wonderland. And at one point she's talking to I think the Queen of Hearts. And the Queen of Hearts says, well, do you ever think of impossible things? And Alice says, well, you can't think of impossible things. And she said, oh, you just haven't tried hard enough. When I was your age, I used to think of six impossible things by breakfast every morning. And that's what it feels like to me. Like these are like impossible things, just so irrational things that we knew weren't true 15 minutes ago, but they move so quickly. And to speak out against them is to be label things that sometimes Catholics, we can just begin to silence ourselves and not speak the truth in love. And also a very practical thing is to join local school boards. This is so important. A lot of decisions are made on school boards about curriculum, what happens in schools. And these ideologies are being put forward, like, oh, we're gonna put critical race theory and history and all this. We're just gonna retell the American story. Is racism, is slavery a part of our history? Yes. Should we whitewash that or forget it? No, should we tell the story? Absolutely. But was our country exclusively founded on that? That's crazy. That's just not historical. It's just not real. If you read what the founding fathers said, they struggled with it. They knew. I think it was Jefferson who said, I tremble to think that God is just. Like, we know this is a terrible evil. We know we're not living up to our own values in the Declaration of Independence. So just tell history as it is and not merely as the story of a deeply oppressive racist country. But those decisions are made often on school boards. And one person who's well-equipped can stand up and be decisive and not allowing those things to go through. In conclusion, I'll say, we must reject the woke ideology because it elevates the will over the reason. And God is the logo, sees the sum total of rational laws and he took flesh and dwelt among us. So ultimately it's anti-God. It also sees all relationships as power. And as Catholics, we choose love over power. I remember seeing a shirt a few months ago, it said the future is female. That's what it said. The future is female. And I was like, what's going on there? And I was like, I don't think I love that, but I don't know why. So I thought about it for awhile and I said, oh, I don't like that. And here's why. It presumes that there's a battle going on between men and women and one of them must win and one of them must lose. So I'd say, I don't like your sweater. I think it just say the future is family. Or the future is marriage. That men and women, nobody, one person doesn't have to win or lose. We can choose love over power. I can lay down my life for my beloved and they can lay down their life for me. And that's what we're made for. We're made by love, we're made to love, we're made for love. And that's why this ideology will never satisfy our hearts. And because it's anti-God, I think the best biblical analogy or image would be the Tower of Babel. They try to build a utopia. They try to build something to God by their own power. And we can't build utopia by our own power. Just it's gonna lead to greater division, not to love. Last couple of thoughts. Dr. Peter Crape wrote a book called How to Win the Culture War. And in the end, he says, what wins the culture war is saints. Because Christ wins. And what saints are, are little Christs. And that's what we need. Holiness is the most powerful thing in the world. And as Saint Josemarie Escriva said, the crisis of culture is always a crisis of saints. And God is raising up people in our time to fight this ideology. And friends, however crazy it feels, I wanna remind you that from all of eternity, God chose you to live at this time and in this place for the good of the community and for his glory. And when Saint Joan of Arc would go into these paddles and things were way beyond her, people would ask, are you afraid? She would say, I'm not afraid. God is with me. I was born for this. And we should have this confidence in fighting this ideology. Amen. Thank you. We have about 20 minutes. If someone would like to ask a question, we have a microphone that's coming out. I simultaneously love and hate Q and A. I love Q and A because it's so lively and exciting and I wanna be helpful. But then sometimes people are like, I have a friend, his name's Mark. He's woke. What do I do? And I'm like, I don't know. Give me this book. I have a similar question to what you just said. Okay. Thanks. Here we go. Thank you, Father Parks, for your amazing conversation here. I am going to a wedding next weekend. This wedding is not Catholic and the maid of honor is a male. He prefers to be called by Hishi pronouns and his new female name. I don't know what to do and I wanna be Catholic and loving but also not like I don't wanna go against my faith in addressing him in what he truly is as God has made him as a he. So what should I do in addressing him and how can I relay my Catholic love to kindly guide him in this situation? We have begun, friends. What? Yikes. Okay. Okay. Can somebody ask where the bathroom is next so we can have an easy one? Okay. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. No, it's okay. Well, there's a couple of things there. The first is if I could somehow, if somebody had pronounced that I didn't wanna use, I would just keep using their name and not use them. I would try as hard as I could to just not use them because usually when you're talking to somebody, you don't use their pronouns, right? Right. Unless you're like a rapper. What is he doing? He is, we don't usually talk in the third person. So I would as best I can just try to avoid it. Here's the tension and I hope you don't feel like I'm, we wanna preach the truth in love and I hope you don't feel like I'm contradicting myself but I just think about Jesus walked to Emmaus which is the wrong direction. He's walking the wrong direction with the disciples because he's trying to win them over to have them turn around and come back to Jerusalem. It's so sometimes when we, if somebody asked me to use like a general neutral name, I would probably use it for the sake of just trying to gain their trust so that I can actually have a conversation with them to actually change their heart because I don't wanna win an argument, I'm trying to win a heart or soul. Does that make sense? So that's why it's for me, it really is a prudential judgment, right? Because if immediately I lose the right word like, oh, you're a transphobic, hate or bigot, then there's no conversation to be had, right? So if there's a way, I would pray like crazy to the Holy Spirit. I'll try to say if there's a way, I would just not use their name. If I could just say, how are you? It's great to see you. You know, there are things like that and I would just, I'm gonna try to engage them in conversation to gain their trust, to try to ask the Holy Spirit for an insight to in some small way be a voice of truth. Obviously it's very difficult. Relations are based on trust. When you just met somebody, you don't know them that well. It's really hard all at once to be like, hey, read this book. You know, that gets a little locked heart. So anyway, I hope that's helpful. Thank you so much. Father, you already addressed it in some degree. My question is, or I'd like more if you could speak more on a prudential judgment and it's kind of, I guess, balanced with courage. Can you hear me, Father? Yeah, okay. Of course, prudence directs as an intellectual virtue and it directs all virtues. But it seems that some people think that maybe, and especially in their youth, that if we don't speak the truth, like as if we're firing off a machine gun or something, that we're not being courageous, that we're being cowardice. And then, of course, charity all the time. But could you speak more to like, obviously it's something we have to continue to grow with in our lives, but I don't know, like that process of growing in that and like discerning that. Yeah, Jesus of Nazareth, he's so sneaky. Like he just never does what you think he's gonna do. Like when he catches a woman in an adultery and he treats her with like utter kindness, he protects and defends her. Until all of her silents have walked away. Has anyone condemned you? Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more. Then in like John chapter eight, he's talking about the Pharisees. He's like, your father is Satan, who's been a murderer and a liar from the beginning. He's like, tell us how you really feel, Jesus. They're like, whoa. So the simple answer, friend, is it's, I'm gonna tell you some principles that then wisdom is knowledge of the universal and prudence is knowledge of the practical, right? It's applying universal things to practical situations. It's right reason and action, right? So God is love and God is truth and there's only one of him. And the truth is not a something, it's a someone. As you said, it's not a hammer, it's not a weapon. It's a person also, it's Jesus himself. And so the best thing is like, what would Jesus do, you know? So let me give you an example of my own life. I was in San Diego as I told you and I was sitting at the beach reading 1984 and this couple came up, this woman dressed as a woman, this young man dressed as a man and he sat down and in the course of being there for about 15 minutes, he put on a woman's top of a bathing suit and it took off his tank top and then he put a towel around his waist and then he put on like bottoms to a woman's bathing suit and it took his clothes off and then took it off and then he was dressed like a woman. And I just remember having that experience and really praying like, God, how do I love that person? And part of me was kind of was like, like what is going on, you know? And part of me thought, I don't really ever want to lose that to be honest. Like there's something that went against nature that I don't want to be that let people legend in me because there is rationality and that's what my mind wants to know the truth. But at the same time, like I'm called to love that person and what does that look like? So I think that's the tension we're in, right? Like trying to meet them we're at and then to walk them out. So yeah, I would say at the end of the day, you and I are going to die and we're going to meet the Lord and we're going to be judged by him. And so you're right. I think I watched a lot of people on the internet who I think are, I agree with them, but they're method a lot of times. I'm just like, come on, like you're speaking truth, but you are just destroying this person. You're going to win this argument, but I think you're going to lose this soul, you know? And so I know that's the nature of the internet. So-and-so destroy, so-and-so, so-and-so obliterates. But when we're actually looking at somebody in their eyes and they're really struggling with this, where are we willing to meet them? So these are gender dysphoria is a real thing. It's very painful. I think we're creating it in young children that's been written about a lot. It's called rapid onset gender dysphoria, which is attacking 10 to 14 young girls, which is like skyrocketed in the last 20 years. So we're actually creating this problem, but that doesn't mean that people aren't still experiencing it and we need to meet the worth or at and walk them out. So I'm sorry, I know that's not very practical, but God is truth and God is love and he's both of them and we want to be able to do both. Just real quick. Have you noticed, like for instance, I've loved the progression of say Trent Orne, when I first watched him with Catholic Answers back in 2012, now it's like in a sense like the way he walks with people in charity. I just think that's a great example of the transformation with Catholic. Amen. I actually think that's Trent's most impressive quality in debates is not his startling intellect, but his kindness towards. And real quick story about Trent. Trent used to do something which is a group called justice for all. They used to assemble like 75 foot pyramids. They would have images of abortion and then he would go to college campuses and debate people. That's called making friends. So he was, and I remember one, Trent was talking to this girl and he's like, are you perpetuating a why? She said, you're Satan. And he said, well, I go by Trent, but what's your question? And I was like, Trent, you're so good. Anyway, yes, please. So as we spoke about is that one of the biggest issues is the fact that there's this huge gender dysphoria going on with kids. If you ever meet a kid who's struggling with gender dysphoria, how would you say that to approach them? Especially because in our society, not if they're your kid, if it's someone else, how do you approach that? Because it's just like everything that's going on in society would be encouraging them to like embrace this dysmorphia, but how do you approach that to help them realize the truth? Yeah, great question. Again, for me, somebody in my own life that I walked with for a while, I met her and she had top surgery scheduled. She was gonna get double mastectomy. She was gonna have both of her breasts removed because she didn't want them. Yeah, so anyway, I had a conversation with her and I asked her all about that and I asked questions about why don't you like being a woman or what don't you like about your breasts or what about them are? So I asked a lot of questions about that and it just revealed a lot of history and stories and she wanted to be loved, you know? So I ended up walking with her for some months and she put off the surgery twice, which I was very grateful for, but at the end of this conversation, and early in the conversation I said, just to be clear, is there any pathology? Is there anything wrong with your breasts or any sickness, cancer? She said no. And after one conversation, it was about 45 minutes, you know, I'm listening, asking questions, I said strictly speaking, the reason why the church would be against that is because the Catholic church would consider that mutilation. Like if I took my hand and I smashed it into the wall till no longer could do hand things, like pick up a water or throw a baseball, I've taken a healthy organ and I've willingly destroyed it. That's called mutilation. I said, does that make sense? And I didn't know, I was a little, I said that a little trepidation. And she said, yeah. And I was like, okay. So even after just one conversation, really listening a walk with her, she could at least accept like, reason why I could see why you would think that, to cut off healthy breasts, is I'm actually mutilating my body. And so I, there's a woman named Dr. Michelle Critella. She calls it institutional child abuse, where I don't really, if you're a parent and your child has a smartphone and they have TikTok, just please get rid of it. It's just so, it's crazy. Like it's, anyway. So you're right, TikTok, Instagram, this stuff is just like on a loop, you know? But so I think socially, if you're a parent, you have to be very careful what your children obviously see on the internet, which a lot of these narratives, schools are also doing this. But the person themselves, my fear is that people that have genders for it, we created this problem, is that we're going immediately to hormone blockers. And I found with walking with people who have it, there are other significant issues, family issues. This particular girl that I walked with, she felt rejected by her youth group in high school, but felt really accepted by the LGBTQ community. So it's really about belonging. And I felt rejected by the church because of this experience. And I really felt welcomed by these people. And I remember hearing her talk years ago by Father Philip Bochansky, who's the head of courage, which is the ministry to those of same-sex attraction. And he said, the LGBTQ community is very good at saying, we love you, you belong here, this is your home. And he said, unless they're hearing that it's clearly from the Catholic church, we're just not gonna compete. We can have truth, but they need to hear both. They also need to hear like, this is your real home, you're a beloved by God, you're a child, you're a son or daughter. That's who you are, your body's not a mistake. This is not only true news, it's good news. This is Genesis 1 and biology 101. This is who God has made us. So I would say again, it's a person-to-person meeting the more they're at, and then having the courage to those moments to stand up for the truth, but we have to earn the right to be heard. I would also just try to gently find where they're getting the ideology and try to get them to try to move away from that. One last thing, it's a resource, it's a detransition story, Michael Knowles interviews a young woman who's detransitioned. It's about 30 minutes long, it's amazing. And two things that I took away from that was number one, she said, I started in this community online and I remember I was really lonely, I didn't like my body, I was like 17. Do you know why 17 girls don't like their body? Because they're 17. Everything's having their girl anyway. Have you ever met a seven? Okay, anyway. I didn't like, I was insecure about my body. It's like, yeah, we all want to do puberty, it's terrible. I know, that's part of the deal. I feel like your body's betraying you, yeah. So she talked about, she joined this online group and they would really encourage her to change your pronouns and she changed your pronoun and they gave her all this affirmation. She said it created a feedback loop. And she said this is like years, like three years away before I started taking any sort of hormones. And I had no desire to go there, but I just slowly went. The second thing she said is I was spending hours a day on the internet. I was spending like three, four, so I was living in a virtual reality. Like all these friendships were disembodied. And so that was also really stuck with me, that we spent so much time on the internet, even bodily realities move away. Like, you know who doesn't struggle to change gender ideology? Farmers. Do you know what I mean? They see, they see how they work. And they're like, yeah, okay. Anyway, I hope that's helpful. Sorry, I'm sorry. You know. Hello, father. Thank you for your clarity. I was wondering, I always wondered this about this whole movement about the folks that started this movement. Like you said, communism, socialism. Do they generally have a concern that they generally want what's best for people? Or is this about control and manipulation? That's an excellent question. I mean, obviously it'd be impossible to say because I can't judge the hearts of people. But I will just say this though. When you're making a utopia omelet, you can break a lot of eggs because we're going for utopia. We're going for heaven. And so when you're going for heaven, you can justify a lot of things. And one of the problems with it is if you've fully bought into this ideology and you want to write every single wrong in human history, every inequality you want to write, Jordan Peterson points out, well, why do we stop at race and gender and sex? There is such a thing as attractiveness privilege. That's absolutely a privilege. Money privilege. If your parents are married, my parents are divorced, that is huge privilege over me. And so you should, you know, give me money or something. Do you see what I mean? He's saying, why do we stop there endlessly? But his omelet point he's making is if we really wanted to write all these wrongs, we would have to give some mechanism, incredible power to have to do that. They have to control the human behavior of millions of people. And so I think what you fully bought into the ideology, I could speak to whether the goodwill or not, but I do think it's very easy to rationalize very terrible things because you're going for utopia. Does that make sense? Just one example that comes to mind is Pol Pot. He was part of the Chima Rogue in Cambodia. He killed like hundreds of thousands of his own people, depopulated the cities, tried to go to like an agrarian thing and very short amount of time. He would kill anybody who had Western ideas. That meant as simple as like war glasses. Anyway, and after killing hundreds of thousands of you, they asked him about it. He said, yes, in those days, we were like children learning how to walk. That's what he said. We were like children learning how to walk. It's like, that's what you call killing hundreds of thousands of your own. So to your question, I couldn't say, I can't read human hearts, but I think what you've bought into an ideology, especially when you're going for heaven and you're building it yourself, I think you can justify a lot of terrible things. Thank you, you're welcome. Thanks so much, Father. A couple of things that came to mind during the course of your talk. One is a wonderful book by Joseph Pieper, Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power. I highly recommend that book. In 2009, I was at a multilateral conference of 54 countries. The Holy See was represented. There was a young man senior who was representing them. And we went into this talk sponsored by the government of Sweden. And the gentleman who was leading it said, heteronormativity is a form of child abuse. I was trying to process what in the heck is heteronormativity, but Tony, the young man senior jumped up and he said, you're trying to tell me that because I was raised in a household with a mother and father that I was abused and the man without hesitation said, well, first of all, if we could dispense with such arcane language as mother and father, but that in and of itself is proof that you were abused because you were not allowed complete freedom for your sexual identity. He then went on to say that we've made significant inroads in the provision of explicit sexual education to the kindergarten and older children. And really what we need to do is to redouble our efforts for the pre-kindergarten age children in the provision of explicit sexual education. Certainly one thing that comes to mind as well in our times, you talked about the beauty of living in this age. Certainly our lady said to sister Teresa, sister, excuse me, Lucia Dos Santos, the final battle between Satan and Christ, marriage and fabric. So we're certainly right there. And then another resource is a wonderful documentary that EWT, TN did a wolf in sheep's clothing, which gets into the whole sort of background that you're talking about, the Frankfurt school, Marx and so forth. Thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for that. So a wolf in sheep's clothing is an excellent documentary on this. And then abusive language, abusive power by Joseph Pieper is also an excellent, it's quite philosophical, but very good about how language works. We're probably gonna have time for about two more questions. Hi. I'm gonna ask this question because it affects families and it affects students, but what do you think the Catholic response should be to gun violence? Well, pedophilia is obviously deeply immoral and illegal for good reason. So those people should be persecuted to the highest extent of the law and removed from society. Yeah. Gun violence, sorry. Oh, I'm so sorry. I thought you said pedophilia. I was like, oh, a response to gun, sorry. Total listeners to that, gun violence. What should we do about gun violence? Well, I don't know. I don't know if I'm gonna have a good answer for you that's really gonna be a fruitful thing. It's a serious problem. I will say this, though, in my opinion, the root problem of gun violence, and by that I mean people going into schools and shooting up children, is that we are creating people that don't know why they exist. And it is a deep, tragic pain. It is a deep tragedy when you exist and you don't know why. It's like a pain. And so here's how the mindset of it is. My life has no meaning or purpose. My life is absurd. There's no purpose to life. And then projection is a thing in psychology. I then projected on all of you. And so you know what? Your life is absurd. It has no purpose or meaning. And so I think that is, because you think to yourself, if somebody hated their life, even if they hated it, why wouldn't they just shoot themselves? That's terrible, obviously. But I don't know if I'll just take myself out. But what they're doing when you shoot up a bunch of people and then shoot yourself is it's a revolt to say, my life is absurd without any meaning. And I wanna prove that to you that your life is absurd and has no meaning. So I'm gonna shoot children. It's a revolt, Jordan Peterson says, Jordan Peterson says against being itself. Like none of this has purpose or meaning. So I think that's the ultimate root of why it's cause. As far as the instrumental cause of it, which of course is violence and guns. Yeah, I don't think I would add anything helpful. So I don't know. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. You gotta know you're laying and I don't know much about that. Sorry. One thing I wanna say about the question before, what is it to be to be a conservative? Well, as the class question is, what are we trying to conserve? And I'm not a super political person, probably because I have a hard time watching politicians, partly because I don't feel like they're ever talking about anything. I'm like, you're not saying anything. And I find that infuriating. Anyway, side note, this is my own thing. Okay. But there's part of the conservative mood in America whether politically or socially that feels like we've given up the family. And that is a devastatingly bad idea. So the young man who just came up and the man who talked about how Sister Lucia, one of the Fatima, said the final bout of a marriage and family. As John Paul II says, so goes the family, so goes the nation. If you give up the family, friend, you've lost. The family is worth fighting for. It's the icon of God's love. That's absolutely true. We have to conserve the family.