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May 1, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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CAMP TERROR Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep823
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Coming up, what's going on with these university protest encampments?
Are these potential terrorists in the making?
Are they perverse role players?
I'll give you my own take, and I'm also going to talk to author James Lindsay about whether a newly revived communist totalitarianism motivates the activist left in today's culture.
I also want to talk about an Arizona rancher who allegedly killed a migrant and how he got shafted by the system even though he died.
If you're watching on Rumble, listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
What is going on with these encampments around the country?
I have an excellent guest today.
James Lindsay, who has thought about this, has written a good deal about critical race theory, post-colonial, revolutionary theory, studied China and Maoism.
So he's going to come on shortly and give us his analysis of all this.
but I'd like to set it up by giving you a little bit of mine.
Here is a statement by Professor Norman Finkelstein.
Now, this Norman Finkelstein guy is a very odd character.
He is a Jewish leftist who is in support of the encampments in Gaza.
In fact, by way of background, this Norman Finkelstein guy wrote a book called The Holocaust Industry, and the theme of the book is to bash people who invoke the Holocaust on the grounds that they are all making money off of the Holocaust, and they can't afford to pay it back.
Welcome to my show!
Today marks an historic occasion.
By seizing control of Hamilton Hall, students at Columbia have anchored in historical memory the nexus between the horrors inflicted in Vietnam that was the hallmark of my generation With the horrors inflicted in Gaza that is the hallmark of the new generation.
So, here is an old guy, an old 60s radical, basically saying, oh, I was in heaven when we had the anti-war protests in the 1960s and 70s, and it's deja vu.
In fact, the students now get to live through a similar experience, this time, of course, not involving Vietnam, but now involving Gaza.
And here you get the sort of revolutionary heroism that these encampments are invoking.
It is a testament to the majesty of these young people that they have risked their futures.
They have risked their futures.
I put that into question, Mark.
I'm not sure what future they're risking when you've got the media, you've got the university itself, you've got the Biden administration.
So you've got Powerful allies and I think their futures are actually not being risked.
But anyway, for the sake of a poor, powerless people halfway around the world in order to uphold the sacred principle that every life is worthy and the murder of none shall pass in silence.
Now, this is a very sinuous and deceptive type of rhetoric because these protesters in the camp show no sympathy for the Israelis who were killed on October 7th.
In fact, they think it was a good thing, or at least some of them think it was a good thing.
And the rhetoric of global intifada, we need more October 7th, suggests that the students are taking sides here.
So the idea that these are humanitarians and the kind of Gandhian mode, they don't like to see human life extinguished, this, I think, is not a rhetoric that we can take all that seriously.
Now, the Biden administration is considering...
Bringing Gaza refugees here.
Now, this is not directly related to the campus, but I think it's related in the sense that the Biden administration, which initially was very much on the side of Israel right after October 7th, can now almost squarely be considered to be on the other side.
And the motivation appears to be to secure the Muslim vote and to ally itself with the progressive left, which is definitely on the side of Hamas and on the side of the Palestinians resisting Israel.
I think this notion of bringing people from Gaza here is very dangerous to our security for the simple reason that many of those people support Hamas.
Now, Debbie makes the point that a lot of the campus activists support Hamas, but the support for Hamas in Gaza is, I think, of a whole different kind because those are people who witnessed the terrorism of Hamas And are okay with it.
In fact, Hamas recruits from the ranks of the Palestinians.
Hamas has established systems of indoctrination all through Gaza.
The last time we had an election in Gaza, admittedly many years ago, Hamas won decisively.
The reason they don't have elections in the West Bank, which is ruled by the Palestinian Authority, is the Palestinian Authority is terrified that if they do have elections, Hamas would win.
So these are Hamas sympathizers for the most part that Biden now wants to bring to America.
Talk about importing terrorism.
And I think this is a huge issue for Republicans and this is something that can have a real impact on the 2024 election.
Now, trying to figure out the motivations of these students is not all that easy.
And I'm going to ask James Lindsay about it, but it seems to me there are kind of almost two different ways to look at them.
One is the students are potential terrorists.
They are revolutionaries.
They are motivated by hatred of Israel.
These are people who are in a serious sense taking sides in a distant war.
That's one view of it.
Here's another view of it.
And that is that the students are lost souls and the students are yearning to be part of some great struggle.
And there is no great struggle that they're part of.
And there's not one kind of on the horizon either.
And so they adopt a great struggle in fantasy.
And they replicate the fantasy on their own campus.
So, let's look at it this way.
Students go and take over a building, which they think is kind of like Hamas storming Israel on October 7th.
This is their October 7th, except in their case, they're taking over like Hamilton Hall.
Then they, quote, occupy the building, right?
And this is supposed to be an anti-colonial move.
So, think of it this way. From the student's point of view, Israel...
Israel is the university.
The Israelis are the university administration.
And the students think of themselves like, we are the people of Gaza.
Did you see the, I don't know if you saw the clip on social media where a student is talking about the fact that the administration won't supply food and water.
And a journalist is like, well, didn't you guys occupy the building?
Didn't you take it by force?
Why do you think the university has an obligation to give you food and water?
Well, that's because we need humanitarian assistance.
Are you saying that the student should be allowed to starve?
Now, the very concept that these Wealthy students paying, what, $80,000 or $90,000 a year are somehow, quote, starving is almost an effort on the part of the students to act like they are victimized people from Gaza.
They're starving like the people in Gaza.
They need food and water.
Just as the UN is supplying bottles of water and food in Gaza, they need the university to supply, I guess, DoorDash or all sandwiches and coffee to these students.
So this is a twisted role-playing on the part of the students who fancy themselves to be part of this grand global system of oppression.
It's happening over there.
Israel is the bad guy.
The Palestinians in Gaza are the victims.
And it's happening right here where the universities are the bad guy.
And we, the students, have to take over.
We have to launch a revolution against these buildings.
And that becomes similar to the Hamas uprising against Israel.
So, this would suggest, if there's any truth to this, it would suggest that what we're seeing is not genuine revolutionary activity at all, but a kind of...
Distorted, adolescent, sophomoric, and ultimately perverse attempt on the part of a group of completely spoiled brats, badly raised kids, who now somehow want to live in a kind of grand landscape of oppression, even though they are not, in fact, the oppressed.
In fact, they are, in our society at least, part of the privileged.
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Guys, I'm very happy to welcome to the podcast James Lindsay.
He's an author, he's a mathematician, he calls himself a professional troublemaker, he's written six books on a variety of topics, religion, the philosophy of science, post-modern theory, critical race theory.
The latest book, Cynical Theories, how activist scholarship made everything about race, gender, and identity, and why this harms everybody.
The website, newdiscourses.com, you can follow him on xatconceptualjames.
James, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
Really appreciate it.
I look at you as a kind of guru of Marxist and communist revolution.
And here we have these camps, these encampments on campus.
Ostensibly, it's all about Gaza.
Ostensibly, it's all about protesting genocide.
This is something that seems to have started on the East Coast and the West Coast, but it is metastasizing.
It is spreading. What, in your view, is really going on here?
I see so many things happening, Dinesh.
And it's great to finally get to sit down and talk to you.
So, yeah, thanks for the opportunity.
There's so many things happening that come to mind.
It's like, you know, where do I even start sometimes?
A lot of my research for the past year, year and a half, has been particularly into Mao Zedong and Maoism and what happened in China leading up to the Cultural Revolution and then during the Cultural Revolution.
A lot of people don't know the history of China.
It's not the time to get into all of it.
But Basically, Mao took power in 1949 with a military coup, and he ruled over China with an iron fist.
And then he had his big stumble.
In the late 1950s, he started a campaign called the Great Leap Forward.
I think we call it the Great Reset today.
And it failed. And what a big surprise.
And it killed maybe 100 million people, destroyed the economy of China so badly that they forced him to step down as the chairman of the CCP. Well, Mao didn't like being taken out of power.
He was replaced by a man named Liu Xiaoxi, and that was in 1962.
In 1966, Mao wanted his power back, and he unleashed his students that he had brainwashed in his schools and his universities, and in particular, his elite universities.
And that's what we called, or they called the Red Guard.
The Red Guard was made up of primarily elite college students and kind of elite, private's not the right word, but it's the closest thing in our kind of system, high school students.
And it eventually included middle school students and children.
They attacked their professors, they attacked their schools, they attacked their temples, they attacked their parents.
Luckily, we've all seen what that looks like now, because the three-body problem just came out on Netflix and we see that scene from the Cultural Revolution where a physics professor is humiliated on stage, even his wife humiliates him, and then he's beaten to death on stage by his students.
And that's, it's hard not to see that.
You say, but they're screaming for global intifada.
They're screaming about something to do with Palestine.
Well, one of the organizations that really is Western Maoism in the United States is called Students for Democratic Society, SDS.
That's what the Weather Underground sprung out of in the 1960s.
And they are partly behind what's happening on campus.
But I bring them up not because of that, but specifically because they had a member defect who became a conservative named David Horowitz.
And David Horowitz had a very famous remark about what he learned while working with SDS is that one of their mottos is the issue is never the issue.
The issue is always a revolution.
And so today it's this Four years ago, it was BLM. In between, it was drag queens.
Someday, it's going to be climate change again.
The issue just changes.
The idea, though, is to just get out and do radical activism that tears down institutions, that demoralizes the population, and the inches our society closer and closer and closer to the revolution they think they want.
Now, in the case of China, you had a primitive agrarian society for the most part, mass poverty.
You can imagine some of these students who come from desperate circumstances, but nevertheless, here they are with books.
They're susceptible to revolutionary ideology.
In the United States, on the other hand, you've got affluent students.
By the way, in this case, a good many of them Jewish.
They are overrepresented in elite universities.
They have very nice...
I mean, I remember when I first went to Dartmouth as a 17-year-old, I was just shocked at the abundance of the place.
Huge rooms, heated all night, coffee and donuts, tennis courts as far as the eye can see.
So these students are in a completely different social and economic situation.
What is their...
What attracts them to a revolutionary ideology that wants to overthrow things?
What do these students actually want to overthrow and why?
What they want to overthrow is the American system overall, the Western system.
But we could say capitalism.
At the end of the day, they're going to go after capitalism, which of course has made them very comfortable and affluent.
Well, it made their parents that way.
And these are very affluent people, young people.
But let's remember that it's their parents who earn this money in the overwhelming majority of the cases.
They are children of affluent people.
In fact, I tell journalists, I get journalists sending me messages, DMs, or texts, or whatever.
Sometimes they say, I'm going in one of the encampments.
What should I ask?
And I say, ask, are your parents rich?
Just ask them, are your parents rich?
And I think you're going to find that it very frequently is the case.
Because what I think what they're looking for that's leading them to adopt a revolutionary ideology and just to, I mean, it's.
It's kind of a stunning thing to say.
I think they're looking for meaning and purpose in their lives.
I think that they don't know what their lives amount to.
They don't know what the direction is.
Oh, so they're going to go to their elite university and they're going to get their stupid job at a consulting firm, maybe McKinsey, maybe Booz Allen, but who knows?
It's just another grind through of a process that doesn't at the end of the day mean anything.
They want to stand up for something that really means something.
And changing a system that they've been convinced harms all these people, whether through racism or sexism or homophobia or transphobia or the old colonial conquests or all of these horrible things that they've been taught in a very slanted and radicalizing way through much of their education, if they can overthrow that evil, then they've really done something with their lives and they've done something with their day.
And I think that when I, so you asked me what I see, we can kind of just keep coming back to that because I see a lot of things at once.
I see young lost people going to church.
in these encampments. That's what I see. I see a tent revival of a religion that's giving them meaning and purpose in life.
It's getting them through the day. It's allowing them to go home and put their head on the pillow and think, I made a difference today.
I mean, I think, James, that is extremely insightful.
It sort of strikes me how far afield all of this is for Marx.
Marx expected the revolution to come from the working class.
These students are the very opposite of a working class.
They're like the non-working class.
And second of all, Marx expected the revolution to be motivated by economic factors.
That it was the kind of economic oppression of the working class by the sort of rich landowners and by the bourgeoisie.
But you're saying that the cause is cultural, it's spiritual, in a sense...
Would you say that the decline of Christianity and of religious belief in general something that by the way was fostered by some of the new atheists people like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins now that seems to have created a vacuum I think what you're saying is secular revolutionary ideology is filling that vacuum.
And it seems to me that some of the new atheists would probably recoil against that, don't you think?
I mean, Hitchens isn't alive anymore, but I don't think he would be in favor of any of this.
Well, I mean, not to speak for him, obviously, but it looks like Richard Dawkins is rather concerned with what he sees going on right now.
He's come out and made some statements.
He's even said that he considers himself broadly culturally Christian recently, and that was, you know, something of controversy.
So there is, I think, an element of that.
I think that there has been a growing kind of spiritual vacuum that was encouraged by the new atheist movement, but I think it was also growing in this kind of post-1960s cultural shift that was the neo-Marxist project.
And the neo-Marxist or Western Marxist project really answers the question of why this is so far afield from Marx.
There's a document that I recently came.
It's not classified or anything, but it's from the CIA where they're talking about the student movements in the 1960s.
And there was a 3M chant that a lot of the students at the time used, which was Marx, Mao, Marcuse.
Marx, Mao, Marcuse.
These are the three names. And the way the CIA characterizes it is Marx the god, Marcuse his prophet, and Mao his sword.
And so that's a very visceral way to think about what Mao Zedong did with Marxist ideology in his own way.
He called it with Chinese characteristics.
What Marcuse as his prophet did is he retooled the idea completely.
the critical theorists who are the neo-Marxists, through the middle of the 20th century, recognized that in an advanced capitalist system, that's what they called the United States in Western Europe, in an advanced capitalist system, they said, well, capitalism doesn't immiserate the workers.
That's an exact quote from Max Horkheimer, who created the critical theory.
It allows them instead to build a better life.
And then Herbert Marcuse said specifically, in fact, it's a very good life.
And what this does is it stabilizes the working class and it turns them into conservatives and counter-revolutionaries, meaning that they can no longer be the base of the revolution.
He said, so we have to look elsewhere.
And where can we find radicalizable people?
He said there are two places.
He said in the students.
The very idealistic young people.
And then secondly, he said, in his words, in the ghetto populations.
And by ghetto populations, he didn't just mean inner-city blacks, but he did specifically mean them.
He meant racial minorities, sexual minorities, feminists, criminals, mentally ill, the outsiders of society.
And his goal was to figure out how to cobble together a fusion movement of these radicalized, highly intellectual college students who would take up and champion causes like black liberationism and gay liberationism and push them very vigorously.
And so this whole new form of Western Marxism was really cobbled together in the 1960s.
And it's not hard to trace the intellectual history.
I say that now that I spent a couple of years having to do it, to start with Marcuse and end at what we call intersectionality.
And that's really what these kids have taken up.
But as to the question, would Christianity stabilize more of these people so that they don't have quite the energy?
The answer is quite possibly yes.
I think that there are a variety of factors.
I think we give the New Atheists far too much credit to say that they created a spiritual vacuum.
I think they just kind of inflamed one.
So, I do think that what we are seeing is a return to this kind of Christian spirituality, but we're seeing it in two ways.
We're seeing people who are realizing how miserable they are when they participate in this and how empty they feel and how going to leftist church doesn't satisfy their spiritual needs.
But at the same time, we're seeing not exactly what we would call a revival, but we're seeing a turn within the church.
I know Turning Point USA has their Turning Point faith that they do, for example, where there's a real dedicated interest in getting much more biblically grounded within the church.
It's much more serious, not so much of this mega-church, pop Christianity that kind of flourished a couple of decades ago that maybe helped contribute on the other side to this kind of vacancy of spiritual fulfillment that's being filled with radicalism.
It would seem that if...
You've described and kind of traced the bad guys and where they get their ideas, what alienates them from society, what they're trying to accomplish.
Now it would seem logical that everyone excluded from that radical cohort Would be the good guys, and those would be people in a position to block this revolutionary project.
But here I see a bit of a problem, because when I look at, let's just look at what's going on in Gaza.
I mean, I'm sorry, the encampments over Gaza.
You have these tents all over the country.
You probably notice that they all look the same.
The same colors.
In other words, there is a network of organization and funding behind them.
Then you've got pretty large numbers of students.
I mean, if you look at the demonstrations at Columbia and elsewhere, they're pretty huge.
And they seem to draw...
I mean, they draw blacks, they draw whites, they draw BLM types, but they also seem to draw...
Fairly broadly from the campus, the question I'm getting at is the left consistently shows a level of funding, organization, and energy.
Because I say to myself, can the right pull anything like this off on any issue, ever?
And my answer to that is no.
I mean, it's just almost hard for me to even conceive it.
So my question is, how do you mobilize a counterforce against the revolutionaries that could be successful?
Well, your analysis is right.
I don't think that the right could do this, and I do think that, you know, you point to the identical tense.
In fact, I think the story broke.
I can't cite the source or name the names personally.
I haven't kept up with it, but I believe I saw last night that some of the funding behind this has been identified, and it does trace back to...
with the Open Society Foundation, which was founded by George Soros.
It's really run by his son Alex now.
So it's a little more complicated time.
We can't say, oh, George Soros is funding it.
It's a little more complicated.
He's extremely old and his son really runs the show.
But at any point, or at any rate, I don't think that the right can pull this off.
And more to this point, actually, what we're hearing, like for example, at Washington University, and we heard from the NYPD last night, is that the people that they're arresting, which is not necessarily the preponderance of the people there, but the people that they're arresting are not majority students or faculty.
They are majority outsiders who have nothing to do with the university, which again, people Have to read what this means.
It means that there is a funded network of activists who are coming in or being brought in, maybe from the local area, but probably from much further away, flown in, put up in hostels or hotels or whatever else, who are coming as agitators to whip up the student bodies, to get the faculty to feel like they have to now come out and stand in solidarity with the students who are now under attack from police.
It's a very coordinated effort.
In fact, it's probably best to be thinking of it as a militia operation against these campuses that's happening through some kind of a funding network with coordinated and trained professionals who are coming in and agitating to create these circumstances that are then being left to be run by the students who are the ones who end up getting arrested when the police come.
And so this is very important to realize that they have a very coordinated, very strategized, very deliberate approach I think it's bait and a trap to try to get It's going to get probably infiltrated and weaponized against us.
So the right answer actually is what we can do is exactly what we're doing in this case, which is pointing out what you've pointed out and what we've already just discussed.
Hey, where are all these tents coming from?
Where are these people coming from?
George Soros' theory of change in society, if you read Alchemy of Finance, the whole book is about this.
I just read it again recently.
The whole book is about this, and it's this concept called reflexivity.
Reflexivity is a feedback loop.
So what you want to do is you get a little something started, you get people believing something big is happening, so more people come, and it becomes this whole mythology that some huge change is happening and something emergency has to happen right now to deal with it.
George Soros famously used that to short, in his words, to malevolently or maliciously short institutional favorites in the stock market.
I think he's using it to short the United States of America by contributing to education programs that make kids hate America I think the same thing's happening here, here, but when we point out that this is a fake astroturfed demonstration, that this
is protest theater, not real organic protest of angry people, we can see, first of all, many of the college students who are showing up, not that they shouldn't be held responsible, they should, but they are the primary victims of these manipulations, of these psychological operations by some hostile entity.
We can start to nail down who the hostile entity actually is.
And more importantly, we don't take the bait of the reflexive potential.
We don't say, oh no, there's some huge thing.
There's a gigantic organic demand to support Hamas.
We don't believe it.
And when we don't believe it, we don't go along with it.
Imagine if in 2020, very few people believed the line coming out about whether it's BLM or George Floyd.
Maybe very few people believed the line about COVID-19.
We'd live in a very different world.
And what we can do without having to organize in a massive way, without having to figure out how to create networks of revolutionaries who drop at a hat to show up and do things, is we can expose that it's fake, that it's a manipulation.
It's what, in fact, the psychological literature on totalitarianism calls planned spontaneity, which is a form of manipulation of a population.
We can steal that reflexive potential so it doesn't run away.
BLM ran away with us in 2020.
This is not going to run away with us in 2024.
Yeah, I mean, I think what you're saying is, number one, discredit the narrative, and number two, cut off the radicals from the general population.
Kind of what Reagan did with the Berkeley radicals in the 1960s very effectively.
Hey, this is all great stuff, James, and guys, I'd like to direct you to James Lindsay's book, Cynical Theories, How Activist Scholarship Has Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity, and Why This Harms Everybody.
Follow him on X at ConceptualJames.com.
James Lindsay, thank you very much for joining me.
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Have you heard about the Arizona rancher?
This is an old guy, George Allen Kelly, who supposedly shot an illegal that turned up on his ranch.
And as a consequence of that, was hauled before a court on charges of murder.
Now, there was a bunch of articles about this when it first came out, and a lot of sympathy for the rancher, because here's a guy, and think of it, this is a guy, the illegal was on his property.
Now, the reason he was charged...
At least so the report said, is that the guy was just walking on his property and this guy fired a shotgun and killed him.
Now, the case went to trial, and the verdict has just come in.
Hung jury. Now, hung jury normally means that everybody wanted to convict, but one guy was holding out.
In this case, it's the opposite.
What the hung jury represented is everybody wanted to acquit.
Except one guy who wanted to convict and that guy would not move and so it's a hung jury.
This gives the prosecution the right to retry George Allen Kelly, but the prosecution has announced already that it's not going to do that.
So the case is closed.
In a sense, it becomes the Equivalent of an acquittal.
But they really went after this guy.
And even after the jury verdict, there were protesters outside the courtroom with signs like, Gabriel was a human being.
Gabriel is, of course, the illegal person.
That was on the ranch.
And somebody else goes, someone walking 100 yards away is not a threat.
So the idea was that the illegal wasn't in his house, wasn't attacking him, was some distance away on the ranch when he was shot.
And... And evidently, the prosecution tried to get Kelly to agree to a plea deal.
This is kind of how they like to do these things.
They're like, whether or not you're guilty, we'll offer you a plea deal.
He would have pled to one count of negligent homicide.
They were kind of offering him a relatively light sentence.
But to his credit, this guy goes, no, I'm not taking the deal.
I'm going to go to trial.
And now he is a free man.
Now... What makes all of this really interesting is what really comes out of the trial.
Because what comes out of the trial is something completely different than what we heard about in the news reports.
First of all, it's not even clear that George Allen Kelly shot this guy.
The main evidence that he shot him was, get this, and I'm not joking, that George Allen Kelly in 2013 published a novel, Far Beyond the Border Fence, in which a border rancher named George patrols his ranch, gets into gunfights with traffickers, then goes down to Mexico to rescue abducted family members.
And so the main evidence against him was, this guy must have done it because several years ago he wrote a novel with his own name, George, and he fantasized about doing something like this, and therefore he must have done it.
I say that this was the main evidence against him because here's what actually happened.
George and his wife Wanda were eating lunch at their ranch.
They heard a shot. They look up and they see a group of armed migrants on their land.
Armed migrants. George tells Wanda, go hide.
He calls Border Patrol for help and he fires warning shots into the air.
But Border Patrol comes to the property, searches the area, finds nothing.
Later that night, George goes out to check on his old horse and he finds a body.
He immediately calls law enforcement.
The body is this guy, Gabriel Cuen Butima, who had had multiple arrests for illegal crossings.
No bullet, no weapon is ever found on the body or near the body.
And yet, George is charged with first-degree murder.
The bail was $1 million.
In other words, it's not obvious he even killed this guy.
That the guy ended up dead is beyond a doubt.
But they're unable to trace a bullet in his body to George's gun.
There's no ballistic evidence establishing a direct connection.
All you know is that this rancher, to warn those guys off, fired into the air.
I guess the assumption is that maybe, maybe one of those bullets hit this guy.
This guy and killed him.
But what I'm saying is that that was not proven at trial at all.
So in other words, there's overwhelming evidence here.
I mean, there's clear case of reasonable doubt.
This guy should have been acquitted straight out.
But in any event, I'm glad the right outcome was eventually reached.
And I'm glad that George Allen Kelly is a free man.
The book I'm discussing by the historian David Hackett Fisher has the subtitle Four British Folkways in America.
And we need to take a moment here to think about what we mean by folkways, kind of an odd term.
It was a term invented about a century ago by an American economist and sociologist named William Graham Sumner.
And he used it to describe the collective, I'm now quoting, usages, manners, customs, mores, and morals that he set up practiced, in some cases consciously, but in other cases unconsciously, in every culture.
This is the way of life, the patterns of behavior, the distinctive signature customs of a particular peoples.
So you can speak about the folkways of the Apache Indians.
You can speak about the folkways of the ancient Greeks.
And the folkways encompasses all the different stuff that they're thinking and feeling and doing as a culture.
Now, this notion of folkways is exhibited, and historian David Hackett Fisher spells out the different elements that make up folkways, and here's what they are.
Speechways. That's the way you talk.
People in America don't all talk the same.
People, for example, in Texas.
I mean, I am now a relative newcomer to Texas.
I'm still learning sort of Texasisms.
Those are part of the Texas folkways.
If you go to Dallas, people dress differently in Dallas than Houston.
So one can speak even in that sense.
There are folkways of Texas that are things that Texans have in common.
But then even within Texas, there are some regional folkways.
So speech ways refers to expressions, dialect, slang, things like that.
Vocabulary, syntax, grammar.
Building ways. This is architecture.
Have you noticed that if you go to different parts of America, the buildings don't look the same?
And that's because they're built according to different folkways.
And according to our source and our historian, David Hackett Fisher, there are four primary ways of building buildings in America.
And they come from the four British cultures that settled America.
Then there are family and marriage ways.
Marriage customs are not the same.
They differ. And in fact, in the past, they've become a little more homogenized now.
But in the past, marriage customs were very different, say, in New England versus Virginia versus, let's just say, Pennsylvania and the Midwest versus Appalachia and the backcountry.
Sex ways, conventional sexual attitudes.
Naming ways. If you look at different groups coming to America from Britain, the Puritans, for example, who settled New England, the so-called Cavaliers or Royalists who came and settled Virginia, the Rednecks who settled the Appalachians,
and the And then the Quakers and the religious dissidents who settled the Midwest, interestingly, they didn't give their kids the same names.
A lot of them used biblical names, but interestingly not the same biblical names.
So naming ways, religious ways, and this has to do with patterns of worship.
Let's remember that all these different British groups did not belong to the same denomination.
The Puritans who came, for example, were, well, they were radical Protestants.
They were Huguenots. They were rebels from the Anglican regime in England and in Great Britain.
Now, the Anglicans, the regime itself, those are the people who settled Virginia.
So you can see the Puritans up in New England, the Anglicans in Virginia, Very different methods of worship.
Very different ways of constructing a church.
Very different services. Food ways.
Patterns of food and diet.
Have you noticed that southern food, for example, is kind of different from New England food?
The cuisine is different.
Even if you go to good restaurants in these places, the ingredients are different.
The food is different. The way of making it is different.
The taste is completely different.
Dress ways. We're good to go.
As they are in the Northeast.
So different attitudes toward time.
Wealth ways. Different attitudes toward wealth and savings and charity and philanthropy.
Rank ways. And rank ways has to do with hierarchy.
Attitudes toward whether society is set up as an egalitarian, hey, we're all equals in here, we're all, you know, or is it a system in which there is a built-in structure of authority, uh, Older people are wiser.
The organization of society is more hierarchical, and so on.
So this is what we mean by folkways.
And now we come just to the central thesis of the book, which I'm going to lay out.
And then in the next few episodes, I'm going to spell out by zooming into each of these four groups and telling you a little bit about them.
And you will be able to see a very recognizable pattern, a very recognizable lineage of From the original British settlement in a particular part of America and the way that that part of America is now, architecturally, in terms of its attitudes, but also in terms of its politics.
So now I'm going to read... We're good to go.
The present area of the United States was settled by at least four large waves of English-speaking immigrants.
So immigrants are coming, they're all coming sort of from the same part of the world, which is Great Britain.
England, Scotland, and Wales.
But they're coming in four different waves, and they are four different types of people.
They have a few things in common.
Like I mentioned yesterday, they have a common religion, they have a common, generically, Christianity, they have a common language, generically English.
But even the religion and the language are kind of carried out in very different ways.
So, what are the four ways?
Number one, the first was an exodus of Puritans from the east of England to Massachusetts during a period of 11 years, 1629 to 1640.
So the Puritans all came within about a decade, and they all came to one place or one area, and that is the area we now call New England.
The second was the migration of a small royalist elite and large numbers of indentured servants from the south of England to Virginia.
Different part of England, different part of America.
And so these are royalists.
These are people allied with the king.
These are people who are against the Puritans.
Many of these people are high up in society, and they bring indentured servants with them, and they settle Virginia and create the culture that we now call the culture of the American South.
The third was a movement from the North Midlands of England and Wales, To the Delaware Valley.
And the fourth was a flow of English-speaking people from the borders of North Britain and Northern Ireland to the Appalachian backcountry, mostly during the half-century from 1718 to 1775.
So the first wave, Puritans, they settle New England.
The second wave, Royalists, or anti-Puritans, from the south of England, the opposite end of England, so to speak, and they come and settle Virginia.
The third wave settles the Midwest, and these are religious dissidents, Quakers, essentially people who want to be left to themselves, and they created what we now call the Midwestern personality.
The personality we see in people like Paul Ryan and Mike Pence, these are their ancestors.
And the fourth group, the fourth group very interestingly comes out of the borderlands of England and Scotland and Wales.
Now think about what the borderlands means.
The borderlands is the site of constant warfare.
Whenever England invades Scotland or England sends an army against Wales, they overrun the borderlands.
Every time the Scots fight for independence and they send an army to fight against the English king, it overruns the borderlands.
So these These beaten down people who live in the middle, these people who are the product of scarcity and famine and war, these are the people that we now colloquially call the rednecks.
These are the people who settled into the Appalachian country and maintained many of the distinctive attitudes of suspicion of authority, anti-government, I'll do things the way I want.
Don't tell me what to do.
I'll soup up my car however I feel like doing it.
I'll go on the highway the way I feel like going.
And so this mentality, recognizable even today, traces its roots.
This is what I find kind of interesting.
The signature elements of American culture, the diversity of American culture, and I'm talking about the culture of white people, and the original culture, the people who originally settled America, that can be traced right back to the mother country and to four separate parts of England that settled the United States, all in the period leading up, prior to, this is the period that actually created the American founding.
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