Last week, I mentioned that I had found a column about the “Liberty Amendment” in a newspaper owned by the Freedom Newspapers group, and noted that Freedom Newspapers and its owner R.C. Hoiles were worth a column of their own.

Well, here it is.

I first became aware of Hoiles last year when researching information about the influence of progressivism on our public education system. Hoiles was one of the strongest voices against educator John Dewey and progressivism, and I quoted an editorial in one of Hoiles’ newspapers that called Deweyism “The Great Delusion.” As noted by the editorial writer, possibly Hoiles himself, “Progressive education is producing students who can’t think and who can’t read, write, spell, or figure with facility.”

Even more significant was the conclusion of the editorial writer that, “Under the present system children are taught that competition is not good, only to find out when they become adults that they are in a competitive world. No sooner do they discover this vital point than they become easy marks for those who feel that the competitive, free enterprise system is bad and that competition should be eliminated by the force of the government. It is only natural that the children brought up in this sort of environment will look upon the competitive system with a jaundiced eye and turn to the government for the solution of their problems.”

In 1953, when this was written, maybe the jury was out. But now that we have lived through the conversion of our mid-20th-century manufacturing-based economy to the 21st-century welfare-based economy, there is a guilty verdict hanging over the head of progressivism for anyone to see.

Unfortunately, the “jaundiced eye” predicted by Hoiles or his surrogate has grown so diseased that at least half the population of the United States no longer has eyes to see. Socialism — free stuff — is now considered the birthright of Americans even more than liberty. Unfortunately, this uniquely American form of socialism masquerades as “social justice” and thus wears the cloak of respectability. Instead of government acquiring the means of production, the overseers merely acquire the means of producing wealth in the form of taxation policies that soak the rich and pay off the poor. The honest socialists call it “redistribution of wealth”; the deceptive ones call it a progressive tax policy.

In the meantime, people like R.C. Hoiles are few and far between these days, especially in the media. His conviction that the country needed newspapers that “believe in moral principles and have enough courage to express these principles” might well confound the entire faculty at any school of journalism in the country, especially his oft-expressed belief that “every fact of existence — if it is a fact — is immutable, irrevocable and eternal” and that “moral facts are no less concrete and timeless than physical facts.”

This is the same conception of natural law that motivated and empowered our Founding Fathers as they set about to bring forth “a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Without a belief in “immutable” moral facts or laws, you cannot hold any truths to be “self-evident,” nor can rights be “unalienable” as proposed by the Declaration of Independence. It is therefore a certainty that R.C. Hoiles was a direct descendant philosophically of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and the other Founders.

If his ideas now seem “quaint” or “silly,” that is only because we as a nation have lost our connection to what William Faulkner called “the eternal verities of the heart” or what Hoiles called the “fundamental moral laws... [that] govern human behavior.”

More and more, as I study the decline of the American republic in the 20th century, I see that life preservers were thrown out repeatedly to the populace by patriots such as Hoiles, but they were most often thrown back with disdain. If it feels sometimes like we are now losing the battle to preserve our way of life, including our liberty and prosperity, perhaps the truth is even more dismaying.

Perhaps, the war is already lost. We may just not have been able to bring ourselves to acknowledge that distasteful fact. After all, the clarion call of Hoiles and people like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan who were manning the bulwarks 50 years or more ago should have been as urgent an alarm as that sounded by Paul Revere in 1776. Instead, American slumbered.

More and more, it looks as though the barbarians have long since advanced past the gates, and that we are now an “occupied” nation. Call it the Land of the Freebie. Or the Home of the Braying. Or just call it “The Great Delusion” and give Hoiles the final word. He has earned it.