Richard M. Weaver

Uh, when he came on the scene, uh, he was a student of Donald Davidson, who was probably the most important member of the Nashville 12, the Vanderbilt Agrarians.

Um, he was a, a strong fan of Richard Weaver from Weaverville, North Carolina.

Many more people know who Weaver is.

Um, but, uh, I think Bradford was the most important scholar of Southern history and Southern literature, uh, during the second half of the 20th century.

And of course, you're, you're, you find all of the anxieties of your great-grandparents to be increasingly irrelevant to the actual problems that you face.

I mean, one way I think about it, you know, Richard Weaver, I think he, he says in Ideas Have Consequences that we, our minds operate at three levels.

We have our specific beliefs and about things.

We have our principles and convictions.

I don't know.

What do you think?

Well, that's why I find Richard Weaver's notion of metaphysical dreams so helpful, because it helps us understand that, again, that the-- people st- begin to think in a certain way about borders between nations.

And they won't-- they can't help but they...

You're going to find lots of other books that these guys write, and every one of them is worth reading.

But The Road to Serfdom, The Conservative Mind, and then The Philosophical Side of Conservatism, Richard Weaver's book, Ideas Have Consequences.

Everybody uses that phrase now.

That's the book that the phrase comes from, Ideas Have Consequences.

ideas have consequences.

That's a line from Richard Weaver, I believe originally, with a book called Ideas Have Consequences.

And I used to always add to that, and bad ideas have victims.

And you can't think of a more appropriate subject that would illustrate that than the slaughter of 1.5 billion preborn children worldwide since 1980.

What is that question in particular?

Well, I think at least one of the questions, the kind of question the critical theorists are saying is, what's wrong with the world, right? So I don't know if you've ever stumbled upon the work by Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences.

And Richard Weaver is writing in the late 40s, Right when the critical theorists, you know, it's one of the eras they're writing in.

So Horkheimer and Adorno, two of these gentlemen, write a book called Dialectic of Enlightenment.

We can define those terms and all, but they're writing right at the end of World War II, and that's when Weaver's writing.