59 to dealing with a jellyfish. Farrell: Precisely and it’s like standing on quicksand. There isn’t anything to stand on. Fitts: If words have no meaning, you can’t finalize a transaction. Farrell: This is the point. Words have meanings that have grown in customary usage over a prolonged period of time. I don’t care what language it is – Swahili or Russian or Pig Latin – they all have con- ventions that have grown over customary usage, and that customary usage is reflec- tive of the culture of tradition. In other words, these people are always, always targeting tradition of some sort. You can see it everywhere that they have gone. They have gutted the academic tradition, they have gutted the churches and their ecclesiastical traditions, and they have gutted almost every sort of human institution that you can think of. It’s very dangerous. I’m quite alarmed to the extent that they have been so successful they are now parading this openly and clashing in the streets over it. It has proceeded much further than I ever though it would, and it has done so at a much faster pace. Fitts: When I started driving around the country, one thing that I noticed was that in every county in America, particularly if you go into the small counties, there are three institutions: One is the bank, one is the courthouse, and one is the church. Farrell: Sometimes it’s a lodge. Fitts: Well, the lodge is always hidden be- hind the courthouse, so the lodge is really running the courthouse and often it’s also running the bank. One thing that you will see is that of the three institutions, the banks are working off the Federal credit, the courthouses are working off the Federal credit, so they are centrally controlled. The church separates into two churches. There is one church that is run by a national endowment, and it’s run and controlled top-down. The endowment picks the next pastor, not the people. Then you have another one that is a grassroots church that is financed by its congregation, and it may or may not have national affiliations. Frankly, it makes money by helping people be successful – teaching them good habits, teaching them good values. It’s economics depend on the people being successful. Farrell: I think that by saying ‘church’ we’re not excluding the synagogue because you find similar phenomenon happening there. Fitts: Yes. You find the same phenome- non in the temples, and with the Bud- dhists. What I found driving around America is that it is the spiritual institu- tions that were the most committed to helping people succeed, whereas the other two – the courthouse and the bank – in- creasingly were only harvesting them. Not to say that some of the churches weren’t, but generally you found more commit- ment to the success of the individual and the success of family. Farrell: This is why in our private discus- sion, I made the observation that if you look at the way that the institutions have been hollowed out, and they have gone or proceeded in a certain order. The first was the academy – academia. This began, and of course, that took over the seminaries. Then the churches were hollowed. It is very, very difficult, and I hope people hear me now. If you are a traditionalist Roman Catholic and survived Vatican II, you will know what I’m talking about. For that matter, if you’re a traditional Lu- theran or Anglican, you will know exactly what I’m talking about. I saw this happen when I was nine years old in my church. One weekend we went to church, and it was the old Methodist service, which is essentially the old Epis- copalian prayer book. The next weekend, after a big merger, that ritual was gone. We were not praying ‘thee’ and ‘thou’. Everything became the yoo-hoo ritual and contemporary and it happened just like that. They’ve marched through the academia, and targeted the churches and the temples, and now they have their sights set on the final humanistic component or pillar of our civilization, much of which – in terms of this discussion – I think is centered around things like Constitution and juris- prudence. Medicine is another big area that they have particularly targeted – as you know very well. So they’ve made this transition, or they are attempting to affect a transition, in the culture. The biggest symbol of their agenda is always, always, always – and I hope people latch onto this – to use the language and the way that they propose everybody use it. Simply refusing to do so always brands you in their eyes. This is why they are so targeting people and insisting on gender-neutral pronouns and so on. That, for them, is the symbol of surrender to their agenda. This is not a minor thing. People may think that it’s minor, but it isn’t. For them, this is the old gnostic tactic of get- ting people to agree to use terms as they define them and as they’ve set them. It’s imperative to understand that new defini- tion is a definition made in opposition to some traditional meaning. So this is cru- cially important for people to understand. This is why there is such a big hullaballoo in academia about it. They want to signal their complete victory in academia in capturing that institution precisely by this linguistic agenda. So it’s very, very crucial that people understand this. Fitts: What they’re doing in parallel is also trying to assert financial control. We saw in the late 1990’s in the Clinton Adminis- tration, Federal grants being plopped out to churches. I remember being absolutely shocked and amazed because the separa- tion of church and state is supposed to be very strong. Suddenly, you had the Federal govern- ment throwing billions of dollars at the churches because they were trying to get them on the payroll. It’s a terrible conflict of interest for the church to take a dime from the Federal government. Farrell: The surrender of the churches and synagogues is very important for people to understand if you’re a tradition- al, relatively conservative person. For the Orthodox-practicing Jew, it’s the same thing and this is very important for people