Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Acton Line podcast: Antifa explained; America’s Founders in the crosshairs
Acton Line podcast: Antifa explained; America’s Founders in the crosshairs
Dec 21, 2025 12:59 PM

On June 29, violent riots between alt-right groups and Antifa broke out in Portland, Oregon, leaving several people with severe injuries. Portland is ing a hotbed for violent, left-wing groups. Who is Antifa and what are they protesting? Rev. Ben Johnson, senior editor at Acton, joins the podcast to explain the events of the protest and Antifa’s objective. After that, Craig Bruce Smith, professor of history at William Woods University, joins the show to bring attention to an increasing dismissal of America’s Founders and how some are trying to erase the founders’ legacies from history. The Founders were slaveholders and not without faults. How should we approach this history of slavery in the context of America’s founding?

Check out additional resources for this podcast:

Two more Oregon men left bloody after violent antifa attack at Portland protest

Portland mayor, e under fire after right-wing writer attacked at protest

Ted Cruz seeks federal action against Portland mayor after antifa attacks journalist

The spiritual core of political hate

You Can’t Celebrate America’s Independence While Vilifying The Founders

How to Understand Slavery and the American Founding

Letter to the Editor: George Washington should be honored, not vilified

San Francisco School Will Cover Controversial George Washington Murals

Purchase “American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era,” by Craig Bruce Smith

New to the Acton Line podcast? Subscribe here! We also mend starting with these episodes:

Mourning the Notre-Dame cathedral inferno; Rev. Robert Sirico on education

F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom; The media vs. ‘Unplanned’

Rev. Robert A. Sirico on the reality of socialism; Interview with a Venezuelan dissident

Do you have feedback for the Acton Line podcast team? We want to hear from you! Email us at [email protected]. If you like Acton Line, don’t forget to leave a rating and review on iTunes!

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Report: Dire situation for Syrian Christians
A roundup at Notes on Arab Orthodoxy paints a grim picture for Christians — and clashing Islamic sects — in Syria. It’s a gut-wrenching account of kidnappings, torture and beheadings. One report begins with this line: “Over 40 young men (including a couple of doctors) from the Wadi area, were killed by the bearded men who are eager to give us democracy.” The article also links to a report in Agenzia Fides, which interviewed a Greek-Catholic bishop: The picture for...
DCI John Luther: Secular Authority
John Luther is pierced for Jenny's transgressions.An essay of mine on the wonderful and difficult BBC series “Luther” is up over at the Comment magazine website, “Get Your Hands Dirty: The Vocational Theology of Luther.” In this piece I reflect on DCI John Luther’s “overriding need to protect other people from injustice and harm, and even sometimes the consequences of their own sin and guilt,” and how that fits in with the Christian (and particularly Lutheran) doctrine of vocation. Indeed,...
Samuel Gregg: Why Austerity Isn’t Enough
Writing on The American Spectator website, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg looks at the strange notion of European fiscal “austerity” even as more old continent economies veer toward the abyss. Is America far behind? Needless to say, Greece is Europe’s poster child for reform-failure. Throughout 2011, the Greek parliament passed reforms that diminished regulations that applied to many professions in the economy’s service sector. But as two Wall Street Journal journalists demonstrated one year later, “despite the change in the...
Samuel Gregg: A Necessary Symbiosis
Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg reviews America’s Spiritual Capital by Nicholas Capaldi and T. R. Malloch (St Augustine’s Press, 2012) for The University Bookman. … Capaldi and Malloch are—refreshingly—unabashed American exceptionalists. One of this book’s strengths is the way that it brings to light a critical element of that exceptionalism through the medium of spiritual capital. Part of the American experiment is mitment to modernity—but a modernity several times removed from that pioneered by the likes of the French revolutionaries,...
Samuel Gregg: Unions and the Path to Irrelevancy
On National Review Online, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg demolishes the left’s knee-jerk explanation for labor union decline, which blames “the machinations of conservative intellectuals, free-market-inclined governments, and businesses who, over time, have successfully worked to diminish organized labor, thereby crushing the proverbial ‘little guy.'” Gregg writes: “The truth, however, is rather plex. One factor at work is economic globalization. Businesses fed up with unions who think that their industry should be immune petition are now in a position to...
Review: Can One Kill ‘For Greater Glory’?
Immediately after watching For Greater Glory, I found myself struggling to appreciate the myriad good intentions, talents and the $40 million that went into making it. Unlike the Cristeros who fought against the Mexican government, however, my efforts ultimately were unsuccessful. The film opened on a relatively limited 757 screens this past weekend, grossing $1.8 million and earning the No. 10 position of all films currently in theatrical release. Additionally, the film reportedly has been doing boffo at the Mexican...
Wong and Rae on How and When to Fire Someone
Donald Trump's tagline: "You're fired."Last week I raised the question of whether being a Christian businessperson means you do some things differently, and particularly whether some of these things that are done differently have to do with terminating an employee. Here’s a snip of what Kenman Wong and Scott Rae say in their recent book, Business for the Common Good: Although panies may take on certain employees as an act of benevolence, it is not the norm. Employees are bound...
Mindmaps and Kuyper’s Wisdom and Wonder
This week we feature a post by Steve Bishop who is involved in full-time Christian ministry as a husband, father and in teaching mathematics and forensic science to post-16s. He blogs at and maintains the neo-Calvinist/Kuyperian website www.allofliferedeemed.co.uk Follow him on twitter @stevebishopuk Mind maps have in recent years been associated with Tony Buzan. However, they go back as far as the third century and were – or so it is alleged – first used by Porphyry of Tyros. Mind...
How Junk Bonds Killed the Three Martini Lunch
A recent editorial in the New York Times claims that during the 1980s leveraged buyouts “contributed significantly to the growth of the e gap, moving wealth from the middle class to the top end.” First Things editor R.R. Reno explains why the real story is plicated, more interesting, and explains much more than e inequality: The upper middle class world responded to the leveraged buyout revolution by upping mitments to education and economically oriented self-discipline. The old white-collar social contract...
30 Years Ago Today: Reagan’s Westminster Address
The Washington Post’s editorial page reminds us that today is the 30th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s address at Westminster Hall, London. The speech, famous for its “ash heap of history line,” was Reagan’s challenge to the Soviet Union’s very legitimacy and pointed to its hollow core. Reagan’s great strength was not just America’s military posture against the Soviets, but that he truly made the Cold War a battle of moral ideas. It was a decisive pivot away from America’s policy...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved