Enough is enough
My Mike Shaw Sep 14, 2025 @ Mike's Point of View
Way back in 1931, Archbishop Fulton Sheen published a book entitled Old Errors and New Labels. On page 95, we find the following quote:
America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance. It is not. It is suffering from tolerance: tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so much overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded…
In the face of this false broad‐mindedness, what the world needs is intolerance. The mass of people have kept up hard and fast distinctions between dollars and cents, battleships and cruisers, ʺYou owe meʺ and ʺI owe you,ʺ but they seem to have lost entirely the faculty of distinguishing between the good and the bad, the right and the wrong. The best indication of this is the frequent misuse of the terms ʺtoleranceʺ and ʺintolerance.ʺ There are some minds that believe that intolerance is always wrong, because they make ʺintoleranceʺ mean hate, narrow-mindedness, and bigotry. These same minds believe that tolerance is always right because, for them, it means charity, broad‐mindedness, American good nature…
What is tolerance? Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience towards evil, and a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. But what is more important than the definition is the field of its application. The important point here is this: Tolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons. Tolerance applies to the erring; intolerance to the error….
Tolerance does not apply to truth or principles. About these things we must be intolerant, and for this kind of intolerance, so much needed to rouse us from sentimental gush, I make a plea. Intolerance of this kind is the foundation of all stability.
Even as a young child of perhaps eight or nine, I noticed two alarming things:
There seemed to be substantially more strange, nasty, and anti-social characters extant than was publicly acknowledged; and perhaps 20 percent of teachers (at all levels of education) seemed to be very disturbed individuals who appeared to dislike—if not hate—young people. Moreover, at least one-third of teachers would use their status as instructors to a captive audience to pontificate on matters completely unrelated to the subject they were supposed to be teaching.
At the same time, many schools had in place a brief morning prayer, that was assiduously—for the most part—nondenominational. This practice would end, of course, with the infamous school prayer court decisions of the early 1960s. Privately, President Kennedy was troubled by the landmark decision (Engel v. Vitale), given that it was extremely unpopular, and that it could—and did—lead to Southern states abandoning the Democratic party.
To this day, JFK’s lukewarm public reaction to the decision, in which he says that we should support the Supreme Court, pray more at home, and attend Church with more fidelity, is labeled as his “endorsement” of the decision by virtually all so-called “historians.” At that, without a single public law being passed, the US became a secular, if not atheistic country. It is difficult to overestimate the damage done by the school prayer decisions. Among other things, an amoral Leftist movement, more closely identified with Stalin than a socialistic flower child, would be spawned.
Now, fast-forward 50 years from Engel v. Vitale to the founding of Turning Point USA in 2012. Schools, especially colleges, are hotbeds of leftist indoctrination and vicious cancel culture. It is straight into the Belly of this Beast that Charlie and his team venture, debating students and taking on all comers. Heck, they were creating converts to the conservative side.
But, Charlie’s greatest sin was promoting the sadly true conclusion that “College is a scam.” Talk about hiding in plain sight. Anyone who has gone to college, even if you did obtain particular job-granting skills, is only too well aware of the gargantuan bureaucracy; textbook cartel; inflated tuition (owing to the proliferation of student loans); questionable required courses; and the ridiculous overemphasis on athletics—to garner financial support from a pathetic cadre of “jock-sniffing” donors.
The latter point is especially egregious in that it attempts to co-opt the legitimate notion of “school spirit,” as it applies to high school, into a setting whereby 20 or more times as many students are involved, with precious little in common, beyond being students at a university.
In the wake of Kirk’s assassination, truly sick celebratory postings sprouted up all over. Only this time, there were immediate consequences, with many job terminations. I guess that organizations did not want to be identified so overtly with the many nutcases they employ.
94 years after his breakthrough work, Fulton Sheen is more right than ever.
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