Welcome to Family Policy Matters, a weekly podcast and radio show produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, I'm John Rustin, President of NC Family. And each week on Family Policy Matters, we welcome experts and policy leaders to discuss topics that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our prayer is that this program will help encourage and equip you to be a voice of persuasion for family policy matters. Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters.
If there are times when you say to yourself, how on earth did we get here culturally? Well, if you want to understand what brought us to this point? Well, first of all, thank you for joining us this week on Family Policy Matters. If you want to learn more about arresting pro-life sidewalk counselors and labeling parents who speak at school board meetings as, quote, domestic terrorists, our guest today says you have to go back to 1916. Well, that is very close to a quote from our guest today, Seth Gruber, whose pro-life work in churches across the country led him to create what he hopes will be an antidote to what he calls our culture of death. We're grateful to have Seth with us today to discuss his new documentary and book, entitled The 1916 Project. Seth Gruber, welcome to Family Policy Matters. Thank you, Tracy.
It's good to be with you. All right. So your title, The 1916 Project, intentionally mimics another project, right, with a very different goal, The 1619 Project. So for those of us who might need the refresher, what is The 1619 Project?
And why did you feel like it needed a rebuttal? The New York Times in 2019, at the end of 2019, launched The 1619 Project. Where basically they said, America is systemically racist, root and branch. And it all goes back, they said, to 1619, when the first black slaves came to American shores. This is now a special on Hulu. And they said that this is a new founding.
That was the subtitle. We're offering a new founding for America, meaning it shouldn't be 1776. No, no, no, no, no, it should be 1619. That should be America's real birthday, when the first black slaves came to American shores, because that's who we really are.
We're a real American. We're racist. So we got to defund the police, post the black square, you bigot, silence is violence.
And if you think anything other than racism explained the George Floyd incident, that's proof of your racism. So we got to cancel anything with vestiges of racism, or that was traced to a racist legacy. So Aunt Jemima, the syrup ladies got to go, if you remember, they canceled Aunt Jemima. Well, this led into the summer of 2020. But it was very influential because it came K through 12 curriculum in many schools in America, and really gave a lot of credence to a lot of the lies of BLM, Incorporated and Antifa and the Democrat Party. And so that summer of 2020, thanks to the disciples of the 1619 project, people began to refer to that violent, arson, riot protest summer as the 1619 riots, actually, Tracy, so they're linking the two together. And then they canceled Planned Parenthood.
Well, almost they canceled their founder. And because the revolution always eats its own, the pro abortion, Marxist 1619 project, radical left, not pro lifers, not conservatives. They went after Planned Parenthood in the summer of 2020. And they said, Hey, Planned Parenthood, your founder, Margaret Sanger, she was a racist and a eugenicist. And I'm sitting here like just cracking up, crazy.
I'm like, Yeah, exactly. We've been trying to tell you this for 100 years, and you wouldn't listen to a single Christian conservative or pro lifer. And then July 2020, Planned Parenthood takes their founders name off of their flagship Manhattan mega clinic.
It was called the Sanger Health Center, they stopped giving out the Margaret Sanger award, even though Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton had received the Margaret Sanger award, they got rid of the Smithsonian bust of her face. And we're supposed to go about like nothing just happened. You just canceled your patron saint of feminism, the woman who was lauded as a hero by the radical left for over a century, and all of a sudden she's worthy of being canceled.
Hmm, what is going on here? So we opened my 1916 project film and book with the question if they've lied to you about their patron saint, what else are they lying to you about? And what's the hidden history behind Planned Parenthood, the sexual revolution and our broader culture of death today. So if you want to understand the insanity of the 2020s, you don't go back to 1619.
You actually go back to 1916. When Margaret Sanger opened her first clinic in New York City, that was the beginning of Planned Parenthood, the billion dollar organization as we know it today. I hope our listeners know that that most of the abortion clinics began in the inner city and in neighborhoods that were predominantly African American. But where do we get the rest of these things? Where's the transgenderism happening?
Where's the sex ed? How does that stem from 1916? 1916 wasn't necessarily Margaret Sanger following in the steps of radicals who came before her.
She was blazing a path where none existed. She was called one of the first free love open evangelists for the joys of the flesh. And this is in like 1914, when a lot of this was not popular. People valued marriage, they valued monogamy, they valued waiting until marriage. And so she really helped architect the sexual revolution. Before Woodstock, Tracy, before the 60s, Sanger was blazing a path where none existed. She said in her first magazine, Woman Rebel, our ultimate objective is unlimited sexual gratification without the burden of unwanted children.
In other words, I want to do what I want to do. That's basically what she said. That was not normal or okay to say openly in 1914. Okay, like 110 years ago. So just to give you a little window into who Margaret Sanger was, but Planned Parenthood has never been merely an abortion organization. People really get mistaken and confused by that.
Okay. Yes, they are the largest abortion provider in the world. And they kill one third of America's unborn children every 12 months in the land of the free in the home of the brave. But that's not all they are.
And that's never what they were. They're a culture of death organization. Planned Parenthood wasn't just part of the eugenics movement. In the early 20th century, it was the eugenics movement. Like Margaret Sanger called herself a eugenicist. Her founding board member Lothrop Stoddard was the exalted cyclops of the Massachusetts KKK.
And his book, The Menace of the Underman was so influential in the lives of people named Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Fritz Sauchel, Robert Lay, and Adolf Hitler, that he was invited to the Third Reich in 1939 to meet with all of these men. This is the founding board member of Planned Parenthood I'm talking about. So Planned Parenthood wasn't just like, oh, they were connected to some of the eugenics organizations. No, they were the eugenics movement.
Okay. All of her funders, founders, board members, everything, all part of the American Eugenics Society, all funding the eugenics operation in America. So what you have to understand is that they've taken that same legacy with them today.
This is a biblical concept, by the way, Tracy, that bad seed yields a bitter harvest. And so Planned Parenthood today is not only the largest abortion provider in the world, guess what? They say on their own website, in a citation I have in my book, that they're the largest provider of the comprehensive sexuality education in American public schools.
It's called CSE. That is not the birds and the bees. Comprehensive sex ed as a tool of the sexual revolutionaries is one of the liturgical arms of the religion of humanism. It's how they disciple the next generation into their quote unquote pagan religion. It talks about gender theory, transgenderism. It opposes parental rights. It has cultural Marxism.
It has critical race theory. It teaches children how to circumvent the law and get a judicial bypass to get an abortion without parental consent. All of this junk is wrapped up in comprehensive sex ed. Planned Parenthood says on their own website they're the largest provider of that in America's public schools. And lastly, Planned Parenthood announced last fall that they're now the second largest provider of puberty blockers and cross sex hormones for America's gender confused youth. That's all one organization. In response to this, and that's pretty big, right?
That's pretty overwhelming. You have launched or relaunched, I guess, the White Rose Resistance. So tell us the history of that name and why that tactic?
Yeah, we're calling ourselves the White Rose Resistance 2.0. It's based off of the story of a Christian resistance group led by kids in their 20s in Nazi Germany in 1942 and the first couple months of 1943. Hans and Sophie, brother and sister, were leading it. Sophie was 21.
Hans was 24. They said things like, if you know, why do you not act? They said, we're the White Rose Resistance. We are your bad conscience and we will not leave you alone. Hans and Sophie's father actually spent some time in prison for publicly criticizing Hitler.
So they came from good stock. It's an important lesson about raising up dragon slayers and your children in the admonition and fear of the Lord to be warriors for Jesus. Sophie wanted to become a school teacher, but she was horrified at what was happening. And so she became the youngest member and the only female of the White Rose Resistance. These students largely would print out these illegal leaflets criticizing Hitler and the crimes that were happening, and they would spread them all across Germany and try to wake people up.
It was a social media campaign pre-digital age to prick the conscience of the culture and awaken the church in particular to action. Sophie said things like, the real damage is caused by all of those millions out there who just want to survive. It's the honest men and women who just want to be left in peace. Those who don't want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won't take measure of their own strength for fear of antagonizing their own weaknesses. Those who don't like to make waves or enemies.
Those for whom freedom, honor, truth, and principles. It's just literature. It's just words. Those who live small die small. It's the reductionistic approach to life. If you keep it small, you'll keep it under control. If you don't make any noise, the boogeyman won't find you. But it's all an illusion, because they die too. Those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe from what? Life is always on the edge of death.
Narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues. And a little candle burns itself out, just like the flaming torch does. So I choose my own way to burn. That's a 21 year old young woman saying that in 1942. That is some of the most inspiring, courageous, brave rhetoric I've ever heard from any Christian facing a culture of death.
Much less a 21 year old young girl who knew that her Christian duty had a cultural and political aspect to it. She said, we are Christian and we are German. Therefore, we are responsible for Germany. They got killed because they distributed their leaflets at the University of Munich, which was a very dangerous thing to do.
And so they missed a meeting they were supposed to have right after they got killed with a guy named Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And so we named the Ministry of the White Rose Resistance because we're facing the same demonic eugenic ideology and spirit today in America. And it will have the same disastrous consequences, whether that's in 10, 20, 30, or 40 years. At some point, if the church does not wake up and recognize how spiritual this fight is, and that we're called to fight on our knees and then get up and fight on our feet for the sake of the next generation. So we say save the unborn, save the family, save America. And if you can't stop the butcher of little babies in the womb, you won't conserve anything else in this republic either.
But what do you want then? If you could get all the Christians in America to do whatever you think they need to do, what would that be? Well, firstly, Christians need to vote. This is the beginning of a Christian civic duty, not the end of their Christian civic duty.
This is a no brainer, guys. There are states working to codify abortion through point of birth right now into the state constitutions. And this is going to make the next decades of protecting the unborn and abolishing abortion that much longer and bloodier. And many times it's because Christians simply don't show up to vote, Tracy. About half of American Christians aren't registered to vote and the other half that are registered, half of those guys don't vote. We're the largest voting bloc in the country and we have the most pathetic turnout at the polls. So we're simultaneously the largest and the weakest voting bloc in the country at the same time.
So we brought this on ourselves in a very real sense. So that's the beginning of your civic duty. How easy to show up and bubble in a circle that best represents your Christian worldview to protect the unborn, first and foremost, for goodness sakes. So get educated. Subscribe to my podcast, The Seth Gruber Show.
Connect with the family council. Learn more. Get equipped to share the truth. And then screen this film at your church. Any church in America can host a screening of the film right now, Tracy, by going to The1916Project.com. And you can pick up the book, which is called The 1916 Project, The Lying, The Witch, and The War We Are In.
That's available anywhere you get books. But if you get it from us, you support our ministry and you can find a pastor with the courage to host a screening of this film. We're having hundreds of churches screening it around the country, and it comes out in October streaming on X, formerly known as Twitter, for a few weeks leading right up to the election for free for anyone in the world to watch during that time period. And it'll really shake you. It'll wake you up. And it can wake up the church and those that Margaret Singer wanted to really target and eliminate, particularly black America who disproportionately votes for the Democrat Party, who has made it their goal to fulfill Margaret Singer's vision for black people. This is all very racist and demonic.
And so get educated, screen the film. And then if you want to launch a White Rose Resistance chapter in your city, let us know. But get engaged with your local pro-life ministries. Do something.
Take action because we need the church to stand in these evil days. Right. So you're, I think it's safe to say, a very fiery individual.
Do we expect the documentary to be of the same tote? I think it's great. I mean, I think it's bold. It's powerful. It's beautiful. It's artistic. It's incredibly well done. And I think any Christian in America should watch this and will be moved by it. All right.
Seth Gruber with the 1916 Project. Thank you so much for joining us today on Family Policy Matters. Thank you for listening to Family Policy Matters.
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and leave us a review. To learn more about NC Family and the work we do to promote and preserve faith and family in North Carolina, visit our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org. And check us out on social media at NC Family Policy. Thanks and may God bless you and your family.
