God, Faith, and Reason

by Michael Savage

  It should be noted that both Andrew McCabe and the former director of national intelligence James Clapper, who never shuts his claptrap mouth, have already refuted the Democrats’ conspiracy theory. There is absolutely no collusion whatsoever with Russia.

  Having said that, my big, high, powerful Democrat lawyer friend said to me, “Trump should give a national press conference. He should have done it already and stopped tweeting.” I agree. Trump should stop with the juvenile, adolescent tweeting. It’s not presidential. He should give a national press conference in the Oval Office with the Great Seal of the United States in front of him and say, “Yes, I defended General Flynn, because he is a good man. And I would do it again. And number two, yes, I did tell the ambassador about the dangers of radical Islam and its agents’ attempts to use laptops to blow up airplanes, because that is my job as president: to protect people. And I would do it again with any other world leader who is our ally.” That would be the end of it.

  By attacking Donald Trump, the Democrats, neocons, and RINOs are attacking every one of us who voted for him. They’re using tactics the Soviet Communists developed in the 1920s and ’30s. And what they are doing to Trump they are doing to every one of us, every decent American like you, like me, who went to the polls.

  We didn’t beat anybody up. We didn’t burn anything down. We didn’t attack any police. We didn’t use the vile tactics of Black Lives Matter or Antifa, a revolutionary communist terrorist group. We don’t use the cowardly tactics of those with masks over their faces. We bit our tongues, went to the polls, and voted. By attacking Trump, they are attacking our votes. That means they’re attacking democracy.

  We all know there’s nothing there. We know this whole thing was a creation of the Hillary Clinton campaign, which has snowballed into a fake-news avalanche they are starting to believe themselves. We must stay strong in this avalanche and not yield to our liberal neighbors. Don’t let them run you down. Illegitimi non carborundum.

  Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness,

  And his chambers by injustice;

  That useth his neighbour’s service without wages,

  And giveth him not his hire;

  —Jeremiah 22:13

  PART V.

  GOD AND MAN

  How does God guide your life?

  How does searching for God help direct your life?

  How much does God do versus how much does the individual do?

  Lonesome Boy on Cold Sand

  Picture a boy about eleven years old, thin, small, walking alone aimlessly on a cold beach in the middle of the winter in Rockaway, New York. No one is around. The boardwalk is empty. The hotels are silent. What is the boy doing wandering, almost like a bumblebee who’d been sprayed with Raid in the sand?

  I was that boy. You see, inside one of the hotels on that wintry day, there was a father-and-son Boy Scout dinner. It was on a Sunday, I believe, and I had attended it. But my father worked seven days a week in his little store, trying to put bread on the table, pay the rent, pay the car bills. So he wasn’t with me. I was always alone. I had no father in that regard. He had to work, and I understood that. But it seemed to me that all the other boys had fathers with them and they were happy.

  In sitting still and rest shall ye be saved,

  In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength;

  —Isaiah 30:15

  It suddenly dawned on me in the middle of that dinner that I had no father, at least not when I needed him. I still remember almost running out of that room on my own and disappearing onto the sand, the cold sand, and walking by myself. I didn’t know where I was going. I don’t think I was going to walk into the ocean to kill myself, but I really don’t know for sure. I don’t know what was in the mind of that eleven-year-old boy.

  But I do know that out of nowhere there came the scout leader and a few other men looking for me. I turned around, and there were these kind men. There was Mr. Aaronson. He didn’t yell at me. He didn’t scream and demand, “What are you doing?” as my father would’ve done. He was kind, and he reached out to me and took me in his arm. Then, he took me back into the dinner, and I felt that I had just been protected. In many ways, the story is a great metaphor for those of us who are wandering like lost insects, seeking our father or, more important, our Father in Heaven.

  The Lord GOD hath given me

  The tongue of them that are taught,

  That I should know how to sustain with words him that is weary;

  He wakeneth morning by morning,

  He wakeneth mine ear

  To hear as they that are taught.

  —Isaiah 50:4

  Five Out of Seven

  God is not an equivocator. God doesn’t sit on the fence. I’ve led my life that way. Have I always been up to the standards? I have not. I’m a man. I’m an imperfect creature who doesn’t hold himself up above the average person. I am the average person. I try my best, but I often fall back to earth. It’s all I can do. I try.

  It’s like saying I’m going to do push-ups every night. I’d say that five out of seven nights, I do the push-ups, but two nights out of the seven, I don’t. I say, “I don’t have the strength. I don’t want to do it. I just want to go to sleep.” It’s the same with everything else. Five out of seven times, I do the right thing; two out of seven, I don’t.

  Jewish Gangster Finds God

  I suppose everyone’s challenges are relative. I had some hardship in my life, with a father who couldn’t be there for me as much as I wanted and with the loss of my brother, Jerome. But there was much joy and love in my childhood as well. My father worked all those hours to provide the kind of opportunities for me that he hadn’t had. And I made more good decisions than bad.

  One of the more interesting interviews I’ve done on The Savage Nation was with a man who’d grown up under much different circumstances and, for a long time, made much worse decisions than I did. His name is Michael Hardy, and he was the last of the old-time Jewish gangsters. Bugsy Siegel was his godfather. He was, by his own admission, a murderer.

  This was a man who grew up in the even tougher Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York. Growing up in a place like that makes you a hard person. It’s inescapable. But there’s a difference between being very hard-minded, very tough, very uncompromising, and then crossing that line and being able to cut someone’s throat with a soda bottle. I asked him what had driven him to become the criminal he used to be.

  He said, “Well, I watched people—I watched these cops come to my mother’s house and give envelopes—envelopes all the time. And city councilmen in New York City and Brooklyn, the president came one time. These are all thieves. You understand? That’s how I grew up. I watched that, and I understand. Let me tell you the difference between tough and hard. You can get tough sleeping in the street for three weeks. That’ll toughen you up. But hard, brother? I’ve got twenty-seven years in the worst prisons in this country. I’m hard.”

  I recognized the second part of that answer as somewhat circular. He was saying that prison had made him a hardened criminal but he had been in prison because he was already a criminal. But take note of the first part of his answer: what had started him down the road to a life of crime was his observation of depraved, corrupt local government.

  What have I said so many times about the effect our national government has had upon the population? With the Marxist we had in the White House unapologetically lying to the people about Obamacare, running guns to Mexico, targeting political opponents through the IRS, getting caught spying on innocent Americans after his director of national intelligence said he wasn’t, and, worst of all, openly condoning rioting in the streets and racial hatred, calling it “protest,” the people naturally lost respect for basic decency and law and order. It’s very analogous to how Michael Hardy reacted on a local level.

  It has biblical precedents as well. Throughout Kings and Chronicles, the fate of the Jewish people is determined by whether they
and their leaders were faithful to God. Some kings of Israel and Judah were faithful; others were not. The kings who “built up the high places,” meaning temples to gods other than Yahweh, led their people astray. Ultimately, the Jewish people lost the Promised Land because they followed bad leaders in turning their backs upon God.

  I’m not excusing an individual’s decision to become a criminal or blaming it on “society,” as some do. But leadership does influence the culture, which translates right down to the individual. With strong moral leadership and a culture devoted to God and mutual respect among men, you will have a lot less people making the choices Hardy did.

  There is still the nature-versus-nurture question. A lot of people who grew up in Brownsville did not become gangsters. Is the tendency toward crime born in people, rather than something they learn? Because one’s brother could have wound up a surgeon, for example, instead of a gangster, even though both grew up in the same rough neighborhood.

  Everyone knows stories like this. How many stories my mother used to tell me, because we’d argue over this. She’d ask me, “How do you explain, then, in the same apartment,” in the same Lower East Side that she was in, “one brother would be a cop and the other would be a criminal? How did that happen? The same parents, the same background.” We’d argue over nature versus nurture. I asked Hardy if he thought he had been born a hard man.

  He replied, “Let me answer that question. Kings and killers are born, they’re not made. Great kings are made, okay, great, because they step off their throne and they look in people’s eyes. They don’t look at the top of their heads. But killers are made. Now, I—you want to know the point, the validity of this question, uh, of what I’m saying? I’ll tell you what. Six million Jews went into the gas chamber. Six million. Apparently, they, some of them, were hoodwinked, but none of them took the opportunity to kill the last Nazi before they walked into that gas chamber. Just grab a pistol and kill them, knowing you were going to die anyway.

  “You understand? I got in a gunfight in, uh, in, um, Hollywood, this famous gunfight—gunfight at a producer’s studio, 1978. Well, I got shot. I got shot six times by this guy, a movie producer. We shot it out right in front. People thought we were making a movie. I was looking out of the corner of my eye while I’m getting nine millimeters pumped into me. Okay? And the last bullet that I—that came out of my gun, I ran and I started beating this guy over the head. I had—I was—I was hit in my jugular vein. I was dying. Okay? That’s the difference. If I’m gonna die, I’m gonna take somebody with me.”

  So are killers born or made? Michael Hardy says both. I must accept the answer he gave me, as far as his opinion is concerned. But it doesn’t really matter whether it was nature or nurture; even a killer like Michael Hardy could change. He could have decided not to be a killer any longer. It took a personal decision on his part to become a different person for him to be saved. In other words, by turning to God, he saved himself.

  Here is how he put it to me. “Now, what changed my life? I was in Corcoran. Okay, I had sepsis of the spine. Okay, I helped a guy escape out of Donovan Prison, uh, a guy named (Dave Finney). I got the warden fired. I did it for that reason, to get the warden fired. Anyway, what happened is I was dying, okay, and I made a prayer. I said, ‘Lord’—this cop came in and he started making me sit up. I had sepsis. I had such pain in my—in my back. I had a few days to go. I said, ‘If you ever did this to me on the yard, I’d kill ya. But now I’m dying, so you’re coming in here to feed off me.’ He said, ‘Well.’ I said, ‘But I’m getting out in a few days.’ He said, ‘No, you’re not, you’re doin’ life.’ I said, ‘No, I get out November twenty-seventh.’

  He must’ve looked at the computer—I never seen him again. I was dying. Okay? I made a prayer that night, ‘God, please don’t let me die. I promise on my soul I will change my life.’ This is after twenty-seven years of prison—now I finally broke, just a couple of days after I’d finished seventeen years for murder. Okay? I broke. But I only broke—I—but I said, ‘I won’t take any vengeance on nobody, and I won’t do anything except—’”

  I had to interrupt him at that point and ask, “Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. You said you broke? What do you mean, you broke? You changed?”

  How canst thou say: ‘I am not defiled,

  I have not gone after the Baalim’?

  See thy way in the Valley,

  Know what thou hast done;

  —Jeremiah 2:23

  “I broke, yes, I did,” he replied. “God broke me. God. Adonai. El. He’s the one that broke me. He broke me.”

  It’s an interesting use of the word “broke.” Hardy said God broke him. I asked him what he meant.

  He said, “Because God comes to you. If you—He sends people to you. If you don’t listen to Him, okay, He’s gonna find a way to break you. He’s gonna bring you to Him. And be thankful He does, ’cause if He doesn’t, then you’re lost. You go into Gehenna, and I know that. This—this is the culture that I come from. This is the Jewish culture. Okay.

  Woe to them that devise iniquity

  And work evil upon their beds!

  When the morning is light, they execute it,

  Because it is in the power of their hand.

  And they covet fields, and seize them;

  And houses, and take them away;

  —Micah 2:1–2

  “Let me tell you, Michael, I was born into a war zone in Brownsville. Okay? It started out with the, uh, Profaci-Gallo war. Well, I started out with gang wars when I was a kid, um, in Brooklyn on Dead Man’s Hill on Crown Heights. Okay, that’s where I started out. I went to a school where the principal jumped off the roof. We went to see Blackboard Jungle, and we—I thought it was a musical comedy. So more happened in a half a day in my school than happened in that whole movie. So God has always been with me, okay, but it wasn’t—but listen, He wants you—He wants you to pay attention to Him, and if you don’t, He’s gonna cause you to do it one way or the other if He loves you. If He doesn’t love ya, s—He didn’t like Cain, okay, Cain didn’t make out good.”

  It’s was amazing to me that he referred to the story in Genesis that had had such an effect upon me. He is referring more to Cain’s murder itself than his punishment in living in the Land of Nod, but we had both been drawn to the same story. And it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to say that Cain was “broken” by God when he was exiled to Nod, east of Eden.

  I was still interested in hearing more about how God had broken him in order to save him. He continued, “I’m gonna tell you something. That happened to me in Rikers Island years ago, when I took my little girl. She was being, uh, abused in a foster home. But that actually happened to me, but that—that’s a very heavy experience. But in the hospital, in Corcoran, yes, I had a—I had a sec—in other words, God—in a sense, God spoke to me and He let me know, ‘Listen, you’re headed for a hard, hard time. Okay? Now, you got a choice now. You can either die in this prison, okay, or you keep having faith in Me and I’ll bring you through it.’

  “And I said, ‘hard time.’ A couple days after I had the encounter with the, uh, CO, okay, who never—who never came back to my room again, uh, what happened is, uh, I was released. I had died that night, and I, uh, the nurse told me she brought me back. A few days later I was released to an ambulance. They brought me to UCSD. And with—with the great care I got in UCSD, in one year—I was there for a year—semicoma. Okay? I was there for a year. Uh, I had a doctor tell me that, uh, he’d give me the operation, but I was gonna die anyway.

  “And I told him, ‘Listen, I’ve been in hell that’d burn the shoes off your feet in the first five minutes. I spent years there. There’s nobody gonna kill me before God. God knows when I’ll die, not you, brother.’

  “He wouldn’t operate on me. I’m not gonna give you his name. Let him go on in his career. But anyway, yes, I—and God—God—came to me and spoke to me. Okay? And believe me, He gave me an awakening. And He just told me, ‘Listen, you got to ch
ange your ways. This is a part of history. We don’t have much time left. Okay? Things are gonna happen. There’s a storm coming. If you don’t prepare—if you don’t—if you don’t maintain the greatest sanctuary, okay, against tyranny in the world, and keep tyrants from controlling it, then we’re gonna lose it.’”

  At the end of his story, he was referring to America. But he and I agree philosophically. When you say you’re broken, you say to God, “Save me, and I’ll do better. I’ll walk the path you’ve laid out for me in the Bible. I’ll turn my back on my previous, sinful life.” An individual can save himself that way. So can a nation. And once it does, it can bring itself out of the hell it has created on Earth and into a more just, equitable, and godly life.

  That certainly happened for Michael Hardy. His decision to change his life and his willingness to follow through were what saved him. As he went on to tell me, “I’ve changed my line of thinking. Okay? I, you know, I—I’m handicapped. I would travel around the streets in San Diego in my wheelchair. People treated me good—real, real good—real good. And, uh, and I—you know, I look at these people, these are the people, these are American people. These are good people. Okay? Who would want to hurt these people?

  “You know, I’m not in the battle zone anymore. When you get out of the army, you stop fighting. Okay? I’m not in that army no more. I’ve been shot eleven times in the streets in this country. Okay? I’ve had sixteen gunfights, I’ve been in two major mafia gang wars, and that’s only on this side of the border. Okay? But I’m gonna tell you something. When you don’t need to do that, when you’re not a combatant, then you look at the—you—you smell the flowers. And I—I thank God that I’m not here—you know, listen, I faced the gas chamber on my last case, and I beat three strikes three times by the grace of God only. And I—and you know what, you don’t have to be a fool to sit around and compliment yourself and say, hey…”