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C. Hurt: Address to Summit 2022, Session IV
Written by Charles Hurt, opinion editor, The Washington Times
Friday, August 12, 2022
Address to Summit 2022 and Leadership Conference,
Seoul, Korea, August 11-15, 2022
It's so great to be here. Unfortunately, I think I was reliving my college years, and I missed this week's fact-finding mission. I was fishing in Alaska. Dr. Jenkins joined us for a bit. Turns out he's a master fisherman.
But I think I've been to four or five of these wonderful fact-finding missions here over the past few years, and I always come away with a tremendous understanding of the unique challenges here.
One other note about fishing in Kodiak. I had my son with me because he had graduated from high school, and I wanted to take him on a trip he wouldn't forget. We took him up to Reverend Moon's fishing cabin in Kodiak, and it was truly spectacular. You got a real sense of the man and the vision for the peninsula. And the fact that he was such an avid fisherman, I think, says so much about him.
It's interesting: I've worked for a lot of newspapers over the years. I've worked for conservative ones, I've worked for liberal newspapers, and no paper have I ever been more proud to work for than The Washington Times.
And the idea that we stand so unflinchingly to fight for faith, freedom and family is – it sounds sort of simple, but you cannot imagine how important it is from the standpoint of a newspaper. In the United States we often talk about the fact that faith is important. The reason faith is so important, whether you're putting out a newspaper or governing a country, is because that's the hook by which we declare that our rights come from God. They don't come from a king, they don't come from a government. In the United States, obviously, we were founded after fighting a war on the premise that our rights come directly from God and not from a king.
What we often fail to think about is the fact that it's the same all over the world. Everybody's rights come directly from God, and they don't come from the Chinese government or the Russian government. They come directly from God. And if we can start from that standpoint and view the entire world through that lens, it stiffens the spine in the fight for peace, I think. And it's an important thing to remember.
Every time I come to South Korea—obviously there are a lot of unique challenges here, and the threat from the North is something that's pretty profound. I must say that I love my country, I love the United States, I love America. But I'm always marveling at the things that are done correctly here in South Korea. And I can't help but think how much I would love to be able to export to the United States so much of what South Korea does so well. People here are filled with a sense of duty and diligence and industry.
One of the problems with being a superpower for a long time, and possibly the last remaining superpower – if you discount China, which I think is probably unwise – [is that] a country that comfortable can lose its sense of duty and diligence and industry, both as a country and as individuals. And we need to remember, as a country, that we have to go back to that, because the leadership position of the United States, if there's a void there, it will be filled with incredibly evil dictatorships.
Speaking of the problems in America, probably the single greatest – I don't know if it was a mistake or a lack of foresight on the part of the founders – is they understood that if you had a group of people and their rights came directly from God and they were charged with governing themselves, you would have to have a diverse and vibrant media that inform those people. Because you can't have self-governance unless the electorate is fully informed.
I can tell you, having spent my entire adult life and much of my younger years working for newspapers – when I was eleven, my brother and sister and I started our own one-page newspaper in my town. Actually, it was probably, in a lot of ways, more interesting than some of the things that we write about in our paper today. It was about things like squirrels that would get run over on the road, but anyway it kept us entertained. But it's alarming, having worked for newspapers, as I said, that were conservative, that were liberal, in big cities and small towns, the lack of diversity in the media in America is, I think, the greatest governance problem facing the country.
The media, even though we enjoy all of this free speech, are remarkably monolithic and singing from the same choir sheet, both in partisan politics and in their outlook on the world. As Chris [Washington Times President Christopher Dolan] said, and I've heard him say it many times, “We will never mock you. We are a guest in your home. The Washington Times will never mock your faith, your family, your freedom.” And that's not the case with the vast majority of newspapers in America.
The fact that it took somebody like Reverend Moon—and is maintained, of course, by Dr. [Hak Ja Han] Moon—to step in and give that diversity, especially in Washington, is among the greatest gifts you could possibly give to the United States of America. It's a reminder that because of those extraordinary gifts, we have a responsibility to fill our leadership role with the rest of the world.
Thank you all very much. It's such an honor to be here.
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