Catholic Teacher Fired for Criticizing Black Lives Matter Movement: Conservatives ‘Need to Be on Offense’

Demonstrators raise their fists as a fire burns in the street after clashes with law enfor
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Robert Kraychik

Conservatives must always be on offense to secure political victories, said Timothy Gordon, a Catholic high school theology teacher who was fired for criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement, offering his remarks on Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with host Rebecca Mansour and special guest host John Hayward.

Gordon described Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organization on Twitter. He recalled, “I said Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization. BLM was declared a BIE — a black identity extremist movement — which is a form of home-spun terror, according the FBI.”

“[Black Lives Matter] is essentially a non-falsifiable religious cult that sets itself specifically against Christianity, just like the French Revolution did,” said Gordon. “They want destroyed the Western nuclear family. They want to destroy private education. They want to destroy the basis for the Western nuclear family, which is heterosexual marriage.”

National Review’s John Hirschauer reported about Gordon’s firing:

Until recently, Tim was a theology teacher at a Catholic high school. Between his two books, his podcast, and his full-time job as a teacher, Gordon was able to support his family and the expansive medical needs of his daughter.

His daughter, who had been suffering from relentless bouts of seizures, recently underwent a hemispherectomy, a rare form of neurosurgery in which a large portion of one of the brain’s hemispheres is removed. It is an expensive procedure, and Tim was fortunate to have insurance from the Catholic high school that employed him to defray some of those expenses.

Members of that high-school community emailed Tim, wishing his daughter well during the surgery. They prayed for her on the morning announcements. But after Tim said something unfashionable about Black Lives Matter in public, his employment at the school was swiftly terminated. No longer covered by the school’s insurance, his daughter’s expensive recovery would have to be financed out-of-pocket.

Gordon issued a statement on social media about the firing:

Gordon, the sole breadwinner for his family, said he is grateful for the financial support he is receiving from fellow Catholic conservatives who are donating via his website.

He told Breitbart News Tonight that the ordeal of being fired enabled him to draw on the lessons he outlined in his latest book, Rules for Retrogrades: Forty Tactics to Defeat the Radical Left.

“[A] retrograde is a deplorable 2.0,” Gordon explained, “And it’s an intellectual who understands Western Civilization, [and its] key figures like Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas and Suarez and Bellarmine. They like to fight, and they’re willing to take their principles to the mat. They hate the tepid conservatism that came to really characterize conservatism in the early 21st century.”

Gordon continued, “The first [rule] is just always be on offense. Chess masters know it. Military generals know it. Defensive coordinators in football know it. You always need to to be on offense. Defense doesn’t win championships.”

“Cowardly conservatives” operate on defense, Gordon stated. “You can’t really throw a strong punch from your back foot. You need to counterpunch, and you need to counterpunch with all your weight behind it. The only way to to win a football game is to get the ball, maintain possession some of the time, and actually score points. It doesn’t matter how good your defense is. You need to be on offense.”

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“Never negotiate with the radical left, because they’re always on offense,” added Gordon, “They’re excellent at these rules. Circle the wagons around other conservatives the way leftists circle the wagons [around other leftists]. Never ever give up a conservative or a retrograde. Never forfeit or apologize on their behalf. Defend their jobs. Defend their livelihoods. Defend their ways of life.”

Humor is indispensable as a tool of political persuasion, explained Gordon.

“Effective, punchy, time-efficient jokes out of the mouth of a great rhetorician on the right-wing are incredibly effective,” Gordon said. “They’re effective tenfold — or maybe a hundred-fold — compared against a Socrates walking around using logic to prove what we already know are right-wing truisms [and] propositional axioms about Western Civilization.”

Gordon went on, “If you can sit there and make jokes against these jokers on the left, then you can be very, very effective. That’s why Trump was so effective in 2016, and yes, that’s why they’re extra-aggressive, counter-aggressive against jokes, especially funny jokes and punchy punchlines on Twitter.”

“If all of us return to making jokes and being sacrilegious against the sacrileges of the left, they can’t get us all at once,” Gordon added.

Hayward said, “The right was scared away from using passion and morality in its arguments. They were told they have to be dispassionate and never talk about moral issues, and the left basically just ran the field on both of those things. [The left is] nothing but passionate appeals and nothing but moralizing, now.”

The right must include passion alongside its reason, Gordon replied.

Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern or 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific.

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.

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