Today I’m launching a podcast, the Present Crisis, which will serve as an added feature to my Substack. It will mainly contain audio editions of what I’ve recently written, but may include occasional conversations or interviews as the need arises. It will only be available here, via email, and not on any of the distribution services (iTunes, Spotify, etc.).
The title of the podcast comes from one of my favorite speeches — President Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address on January 20, 1981:
“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.”
That has certainly stood the test of time, hasn’t it?
And that’s why I took the line for my title, with a bit of irony, because the “present crisis” remains just that — ever in the present. We will never vanquish the flaws of human nature, so we will always struggle with the forces that those flaws unleash, in both the personal and the political.
For example, our Founders struggled with issues surrounding free expression and the natural tendency to censor and suppress ideas, which is why they protected free speech in the First Amendment.
Yet we’re still struggling with that tendency today.
In this episode, I address free speech and read from my recent post about how Samford University in Birmingham disinvited a historian from speaking on campus because some in their community objected to some of his views.
I hope you enjoy it!
Pepper
Podcast Episode: Samford University’s free speech fail