Happy afternoon, parish orphans and retrogrades.

Today I will be talking about the directional challenge to Catholic conservatives.

It besets us, what to do now, Western man, what to do now Western Catholic conservative.

And with me, I've got Mr. Eric Salmons, who recently wrote a

stupendous article on his own crisis, the pages of Crisis Magazine. He is editor there. He has a new

book out called Deadly Indifference. And he's with me right now. What's up, Eric? Not too much.

Thanks for having me on. This is a good topic to talk about.

Yeah, this is, in some ways, it's the topic to talk about because we're at a time that I've identified as a kind of deadly time for the conservative, particularly the Catholic conservative. It's the

post-Trump era marked by a kind of populism, which I think is a very healthy energy,

a kind of angry, angryish populism, almost like the Sons of Liberty. But this time rejects

the spirit of the Sons of Liberty, you know,

the Samuel Adams type that that went against the crown in the early 1770s, because this type

of populism rejects all notion of kind of patriotism, particularly American patriotism.

It rejects all notions of limited government.

It's a deadly hour for conservatism conceived as a political ideology qua small state. So what do

you say about that? In your article, which is absolutely dynamite, you write, it's called the political

path for conservative Catholics, you lay out something you call natural law libertarianism,

very close to my own political ideology. What is natural law libertarianism? Right. So essentially

what it means is that the state has a very limited role.

That's where the libertarian part comes.

And I know the name libertarian automatically gets some Catholics,

their hackles up and like, oh, wait, I'm not libertarian.

...