Ep. 690 ties Notre Dame’s 2019 fire—a $850M blaze initially blamed on construction—to France’s surge in church vandalism, with two desecrations daily in 2018 and a foiled jihadi bombing plot ignored by media. The host frames it as Christianity’s decline amid materialism and socialism, contrasting it with their late-life conversion while critiquing Bernie Sanders’ Soviet ties and Trump’s transparency. Historian Paul Ray links this to universities like Tulsa axing humanities majors—replacing Shakespeare with "social justice"—and warns of Weimar-style academic censorship, where dissenters face exclusion. Both argue Notre Dame’s flames mirror Western civilization’s erosion when its roots are abandoned. [Automatically generated summary]
Joan of Arc became a hero to the French in the 15th century during the Hundred Years' War.
A peasant girl who received heavenly voices and visions, she believed she had a mission to overthrow the English and put Charles VII on the throne.
It's said she convinced Charles to place her at the head of his armies by revealing things to him in private only the angels could have told her.
Her victories at Orléans and elsewhere gave Charles the crown he wanted.
Captured by pro-English nobles and abandoned by the king, she was handed over to England and tried for witchcraft, heresy, and cross-dressing.
She was convicted and burned at the stake, a death that understandably terrified her.
It's said that as she was dying, she cried out to nearby clergymen to lift up a crucifix.
Hold the cross high, she said, so I can see it through the flames.
I was reminded of those words yesterday as I watched Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris burning.
When St. Joan died in 1431, she was only 19, but the cathedral had already been standing for nearly 170 years.
It has stood as a symbol of the nation, of its civilization, and of its God from the 13th century on.
It has withstood every war and disaster that has fallen on the great city.
But while its iconic towers remain and precious artwork and relics have been saved, the fire destroyed much of the interior.
The cause of the blaze is not yet known, and investigators say they have found no sign of arson and are treating it as an accident, possibly connected to construction work being done at the site.
But the strange silence that has fallen over the press, the sudden unwillingness to speculate or even question authorities about their investigation, and especially the self-imposed censorship of any mention of the plague of church arsons and desecrations that has fallen on France during Lent this year, that silence, that censorship, speaks more than words about what everyone is thinking and what everyone fears.
I couldn't watch the beautiful structure burn from within without sensing I was looking at a symbol of what has happened not just to France, but to Europe and maybe to Western civilization as a whole.
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So I got to tell you about Notre Dame.
I loved that cathedral.
I must have been to that cathedral at least half a dozen times.
Notre Dame's Fall00:16:04
Every time I go, I would climb up the towers, the inside towers, these weird 13th century steps, just a very claustrophobic, beautiful climb.
You get to the top.
It is one of the great views of Paris you will ever see.
And Paris, of course, one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
If I had to list one of my 10 favorite scenes in movies, this is absolutely true.
If I had to list one of my 10 favorite scenes, maybe one of my five favorite scenes, the 1939 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
If you've never seen it, the Victor Hugo classic turned to a movie.
And of course, much changed for the screen.
But it had Charles Lawton giving one of his greatest performances as the bell-ringer Quasimoto in Notre Dame Cathedral.
It has a wonderful scene where he's in love with the gypsy girl, Esmeralda, played by Maureen O'Hara.
She must have been just a kid.
She's so beautiful in it.
And they decide they're going to hang her outside the cathedral for witchcraft.
And poor Quasimoto, this ugly little bent over man, is watching from his perch in the tower of Notre Dame.
And he swings down on a rope and he sweeps her off the scaffold where they're going to hang her.
And he carries her back up into the cathedral, where by law they were not allowed to arrest her.
And he holds up her body.
She's fainted and he holds up her body and shouts, sanctuary, sanctuary.
And it's just one of the great scenes in all movies.
Anyway, I was just watching this.
I think all of us felt the same way.
We were all appalled to see this incredible monument of Western civilization in flames.
And, you know, I was obviously, I'm watching the coverage, and I was just kind of appalled.
I mean, if there was any other kind of disaster, a plane crash, take a plane crash, what do they do?
They follow the investigators around, they ask them, what have you learned?
What have you seen?
They speculate, they get on the air and they say, you know, like, well, it's funny, it drifted out this way and the weather was this and people said they saw this.
You see this all the time, all the time.
Instead, we got stuff like this.
These are two examples from Fox.
Shepherd Smith, have I got that?
Yeah.
Was interviewing a right-wing media commentator in France, Philippe Carcenti.
And here's the exchange between them.
It's a big shock.
I mean, this church was there for more than 850 years.
Even the Nazis didn't dare to destroy it.
And you need to know that for the past years, we had churches desecrated each and every week in France, all over France.
So, of course, you will hear the story about the politically correct, political correctness, which will tell you that it's probably an accident.
Sir, sir, sir.
We're not going to speculate here of the cause of something which we don't know.
If you have observations or you know something, we would love to hear it.
So I'm just telling you something.
But we need to be ready to go.
No, sir.
We're not doing that here.
Not now.
Not on my watch.
The not on my watch is the giveaway to the self-righteousness, the fact that this is a virtuous thing that he's doing by cutting this guy off.
Who really, and this is not about speculating about the cause of the fire.
Right now, as I said, they're saying it's probably an accident.
They're seeing no signs of arson.
But what is Shep Smith cutting out?
He's cutting out the context the guy is trying to put it into.
And Neil Cavuto, usually one of the most sensible and straightforward of Fox hosts.
Maybe this was something that came down from the top.
But the absolute self-righteousness in Shep's voice is what really caught me.
Not on my watch.
Are you going to talk about the spate of desecrations?
It's been going on for a long time, but it has really picked up over Lent this year.
And of course, yesterday is the beginning of Holy Week.
That's the week that begins with Jesus, where the memory of Jesus entering Jerusalem on Sunday.
That's Palm Sunday.
And then it ends, of course, with the crucifixion on Good Friday and the resurrection on Easter Sunday.
So right at the top of Holy Week, they're not even going to talk about this.
I mean, just again, think about a plane crash.
Think about any other kind of disaster where they would be talking about this.
Maybe not speculating about who did anything or anything like that, but just talking about the context.
Neil Cavuto did it too.
He was interviewing Bill Donahue, also a conservative from the Catholic League.
If it is an accident, it's a monumental tragedy.
But forgive me for being suspicious.
Just last month, a 17th century church was set on fire in Paris.
We've seen tabernacles knocked down.
Crosses have been torn down.
Statues have been.
We don't know that.
We don't know.
So if we can avoid what your suspicions might be, I do want to look at what happens now.
There was a very pricey rebuilding and renovation effort going on that involved a good deal of Catholic fundraising campaigns.
I know in this country and abroad, this renovation was paid for upfront.
So in other words, all the monies were there.
And now I'm wondering how much more the Catholic Church commits to this, or do you think now they first want to get to the bottom of it?
Well, first they have to get to the bottom of it, and they will rebuild it.
There's no question about that.
Certainly the Catholic Church will come up with the money for it.
That's not even a question.
But I'm sorry.
I mean, when I find out that the Eucharist is being destroyed and excrement is being smeared on crosses.
Wait a minute.
This is going on now.
I love you, Deal, but we cannot make conjectures about this.
Why?
I mean, again, he's putting it in context.
And again, you do not want to make conjectures.
Of course, you don't want to blame anybody for anything.
You don't even want to say it's arson when you don't know.
Nobody knows.
And again, they're investigating right now.
But since when, since when does this kind of silence, this kind of pall of silence, is willingly, since when is such a pall of silence imposed willingly on journalists?
When do journalists not speculate?
When do they not go after investigators?
So let's talk about the context that these two guys were trying to put this in when they were cut off.
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So what are they talking about?
You have not heard anything about this probably in American media.
This is the other thing that gets me.
It's not as if, oh yes, this has been all over the news and what Shep and Neil Cavuto are saying is, yeah, we don't want to put that in this context.
Nobody knows that this is going on.
All right.
So here, hunted down by yours truly on the internet, the Religion News Service, the Religion News Service runs this.
Sometimes it's a cross of human excrement smeared on a church wall with a stolen communion host stuck at the four corners.
Other times, a statue of the Virgin Mary lies shattered on the floor.
Now and then a fire breaks out in a house of prayer.
Roman Catholic churches have increasingly come under attack in France, a country so long identified with Christianity that it used to be called the eldest daughter of the church.
A recent fire, that's one of the people we're talking about, at Saint-Saul Pisce, the second largest church in Paris, has shed light on a trend that has become commonplace in many smaller towns.
These incidents get a brief mention in the press, complete with quotes from Catholics shocked at the sight of beheaded statues, scattered hosts, and sometimes a short video clip on national television.
That's over there, but over here, you get nothing.
Here's another piece from Breitbart, the Catholic hierarchy.
This was linked to on CNN's religion site.
The Catholic hierarchy has kept silent about the episodes, limiting themselves to highlighting the anti-Christian threat and expressing hope that politicians and police will get to the bottom of the crime.
Reports indicate that 80% of the desecration of places of worship in France concerns Christian churches.
And in the year 2018, this meant the profanation of an average of two Christian churches per day in France, even though these actions rarely make the headlines.
And when you say rarely, they never make the headlines over here.
The Vienna-based Observatory of Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe, which was founded in cooperation with the Council of European Bishops Conference, but is now independent, said there had been a 25% increase in attacks on Catholic churches in the first two months of this year, compared with the same time last year.
The executive director, Ellen Fantini, told Newsweek, this is a Newsweek piece, that while in many cases the motive for the attacks was not known, France faced growing problems with anti-Christian violence, especially by anarchist and feminist groups.
And then there's this, and this is from an Israeli paper.
Just three days ago, a jihadi terrorist woman was sentenced to eight years in prison by a French court for involvement in a foiled plot in 2016 to blow up the Notre Dame Cathedral with a car packed with gas canisters.
That was three days before Notre Dame went up in flames.
But it's like, you know, faulty towers.
We're not going to mention this.
We're not going to mention any of this because we don't want anything.
Look, it's obvious.
It is obvious.
Everyone is afraid that there might be Muslims involved.
Believe me, I am not saying there are.
I am not in any way implying or hinting or trying to wink at you and say that there are.
But that's what everybody's afraid of.
That's why this kind of self-righteous, let's not talk about the war, let's not talk about the causes.
That's what's going on.
I'm not saying in any way that they are responsible or that it's arson.
I'm simply saying it's weird.
It is weird when reporters don't speculate, when they don't ask about the causes.
A lot of the stories like in Reuters and the New York Times, they didn't even talk about the investigation.
You know, they said, oh, well, they ruled out arson.
I don't think they can have ruled it out that fast.
All I'm saying is they were afraid that someone would connect this to Muslims or Islamists, I should say, and that there would be reprisals.
And the thing is, it misses the point.
Because what happens when you don't say something?
Does it go away?
Does nobody think it?
No, it rattles around in your head all the louder.
It rattles around in your head all the louder, and especially because even at the worst, France is not suffering from Islamism.
It's not suffering from Islamic terror.
That terror has moved into a gap, the gap where Christianity used to be.
Okay, that is the problem in France and in Europe in general, is that Christianity has moved out and something, something is going to move in.
And that's what Douglas Murray was talking about in The Strange Deaf in Europe.
When people convert to Islam, it's because it's the only thing on offer because Christianity has lost its mojo, its confidence, and its belief.
You know, I have an article coming out in City Journal soon called Can We Believe? about this phenomenon of people calling for Christian belief, saying the society cannot sustain itself without the Christian belief that made it what it is.
There's a lot of people on the right, too, who get very angry at me when I talk about this, as if somehow Western civilization, which began by being called Christendom, was somehow disconnected.
We can disconnect it from this.
We shouldn't let's talk about the connection between the Constitution, the Declaration, and the Christian thought that formed the civilization that brought those things into being.
It doesn't matter whether Jefferson believed or not.
That's not the point.
The point is everything in his brain, everything in his attitude was shaped by the Christian society that raised him and brought him into being and all of us, even today, that brings us into being.
You remove that bottom stone in the Jenga Tower, and maybe, maybe everything falls down.
And the thing is, what's difficult about it is you cannot just believe because you think it'll save Western civilization.
You can't believe because you think it'll make you happier.
You can only believe if you believe.
And there is a great movement and has been for a long time militating against that.
And I get these letters from people who think they sound like they think they are at the pinnacle of human evolution by denying the existence of God, by denying the truth of Christianity.
And I just don't think they've thought it through.
I really do not.
I mean, I spent, I was 49 when I was baptized.
I spent a lot of time thinking about the various possibilities.
I think I've thought a lot of these dead ends through.
I've gone down a lot of dead ends.
And I've talked, I think I've talked about before the Enlightenment narrative, this narrative that started immediately with the Renaissance.
At the very start of the Renaissance, they started talking about the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages.
Remember, the people who lived in the Middle Ages didn't think they were in the middle of anything.
They thought they were right at the edge of time because they were, right?
It became the Middle Ages during the Renaissance.
Also a propaganda were the Renaissance, meaning rebirth, when the narrative they were telling is that first there were the classical societies, then there was the darkness, the middleness of Catholic life in medieval England, and then there was the rebirth, the Enlightenment, the light Shed on everybody.
And that, of course, was when science came along, Newton transformed everything.
And so we move away from the Catholic Church.
We move away from Christianity into a world of science where finally we learn that everything, everything, everything is made of material and it's just one big machine that's going on.
And my problem with this is that I believe the narrative was propaganda, some of the most successful propaganda in history.
I believe it's obsolete and I don't believe it made sense even then.
Every single person who started the scientific revolution was a member of the church, whether Galileo, Newton, all the people going back, Francis, I can't remember his name, Bacon, going back to Francis Bacon, they were all members of the church, which hints to me, suggests to me that it was Christian thought, the Christian mind that discovered science, the Christian way of thinking, the trust that God made sense, that God made a world that made sense, that he made a mind that connected to the world that made sense.
And the idea that science would reveal a clockwork universe is itself obsolete.
The quantum mechanics of the current day really gives a role to consciousness in creating reality, which leads me to think that, hey, maybe consciousness, a consciousness, created reality in the first place.
Plus, the absolute unbelievable unlikeliness that this world could exist and that we would be able to understand it if it just happened accidentally.
They say that the odds of that happening are like a wind blowing through a junkyard and assembling a 747.
Those are the same odds.
And so they pose this thing.
They make up this thing, the multiverse.
You know, I'm called king of the multiverse for good reason because I am.
But they call it the multiverse.
And the idea is we just happen to live in that one universe that makes sense that we can understand.
And all the other universes, it doesn't, which is like saying, yeah, you know, I drew a straight flush in this poker game five times in a row because this just happens to be the poker game of all poker games in which I do that.
If I said that, somebody would shoot me.
The next thing you would hear would be a gunshot.
But still, they do this to support the idea that there is no God because they cannot accept God as an explanation for anything.
All I'm saying is, you know, I believe in God because I believe it to be true.
Bernie On Taxes And The Multiverse00:08:52
I believe in Christianity because I believe it to be true.
When you see that church gutted, we all know what we were seeing.
We all know we were seeing a symbol for a civilization that has lost that faith, and no civilization survives the death of its gods.
No civilization has ever survived the death of its gods, and this one won't either.
You know, talking about the way in which people think once they lose God, you talk about materialism.
And one of the biggest symptoms of materialism is socialism.
Atheism, basically, socialism says all your problems can be solved by money.
All I got to do is redistribute the money.
Take your money, give it to the other guy, then everything will be fine.
Why does it always come a cropper?
It always comes a cropper because money is just a symbol of your work and your ambition and your desire and your charity.
And when you take it away from people, you're taking away from them something of value.
And when you give it to someone else, you're giving him essentially nothing.
Bernie Sanders was on Fox yesterday, and I admire Sanders for doing this.
Bernie Sanders has now taken the lead in a lot of Democrat polls, and the Democrats are incredibly flustered by this.
I mean, they're talking about how can we get it, Bernie?
It's really hard because they got at Bernie last time, and it only burnishes his image as an outsider for them to attack him, and yet they want to stop him.
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So, like I said, Sanders went on and did one of these town halls, and I didn't like the town hall that much.
I admired Sanders for going on Fox.
It was a good move, a smart move.
They packed the audience with Bernie supporters.
So it was kind of like these, instead of having, you know, Brett Baer and Martha McCallum just question him, it was like they were questioning him in an onslaught of booze and applause, which I just hate.
It doesn't mean anything.
When somebody applauds for you, that really doesn't mean that you've said anything true, but it sounds like you're getting all this support.
And I was really struck by this one woman who stood up and asked a question.
Let's see if I her name was Kathy, what is it?
Kathy Harrington.
Listen to her question.
Our question comes from Kathy Harrington.
Kathy, what's your question?
Hi, President.
Hi, Senator Sanders.
Welcome to the Lehigh Valley.
So my question is: the definition of socialism is just a society agreeing to work together and combining their resources to make sure everyone is protected and taken care of.
How can you challenge the idea that socialism is bad in the minds of the public?
Now, I don't want to pick on this lady.
She's just the lady, you know, asking a question, and she's obviously a Bernie supporter.
But that's not what socialism is.
It leaves out the question of force, which is just idealism taking to the point of naivete.
It's not that we all agree to work together.
It's that you agree to work together and then you come and take my stuff.
It's that you force me to do what you want me to do.
You say that my work, the fruits of my labor, belong to you to redistribute.
We're not all working together.
That's called charity.
Charity is when you get together with people by agreement and you all agree, oh, we're going to give some money to this other person.
And that's ennobling.
That ennobles you.
It creates a sense of responsibility in the person who receives the money.
But this materialist mindset, there's no question of your will.
You know, there's no idea of your will.
We're just agreeing to work together.
Oh, and if you don't, you're under arrest.
That, you know, they've lost the sense of the human will, of the free will that makes people do what they do, choose the things that they do.
And it's an idea that can only be supported by those people who believe in God.
I mean, that is really true because you have to understand that the person you are is just represented by your body.
It is not your body.
So the other thing about Bernie, he did a good job.
I'm sure he won some votes.
I'm sure he'll do well.
It was a smart thing to do.
But everything about him, as far as I'm concerned, is just dishonest.
I mean, every word that comes out of his mouth is he's avoiding things.
He's hypocritical.
At one point, Brett Baer asked him about taxes.
Why don't you, if you want to pay higher taxes, why don't you?
There's cut five.
Your taxes do show that you're a millionaire.
You did make a million in 2016, 2017.
You're right, the 561 in 2018.
But your marginal tax rate was 26% because of President Trump's tax cuts.
So why not say, you know, I'm leading this revolution.
I'm not going to take those.
Come on.
My dearie, I am.
I pay the taxes that I go.
And by the way, why don't you got Donald Trump up here and ask him how much he pays in taxes?
Well, we'd love to have you.
And if the president, I guess the president watches your network a little bit, right?
Hey, President Trump, my wife and I just released 10 years.
Please do the same.
Let the American people know how to do it.
It's not an answer.
That's not an answer.
He was asked the question, why did you take Donald Trump's tax cut when you've been vilifying it and saying nobody shouldn't be there in the first place?
You can pay as much taxes as you want.
He didn't answer the question.
There was something just dishonest about him that really gets at me because he's a true believer.
I believe he believes what he's saying, but he's never apologized for honeymooning in the Soviet Union.
It was a slave state.
My friend Roger Simon writes a piece in PJ Media.
He was there at almost the exact same time, like a year earlier, and he said people were begging him to help him get out.
And Roger was also a socialist, and he said, oh, I made a mistake.
He changed his mind.
Why didn't Bernie instead?
He took his shirt off and was dancing around singing, this land is your land, this land is mine.
There's just something dishonest about this guy.
Now, I don't know how he's going to do on a debate stage with Donald Trump.
They're both so out there that I'm not sure which one of them will come out on top.
But I, you know, they talk about how dishonest Trump is, but Trump is like a carney barker.
He basically tells the truth, except he exaggerates everything.
Bernie, everything he says is hypocrisy.
Everything he says, it just does not hold together.
And I think, you know, let me just play one more cut.
They asked him about charitable giving on his tax returns.
This is cut number six.
Last question on this.
A lot of millionaires and billionaires give a ton to charity.
You gave 3.4%.
My wife and I do give money to charity.
All right?
And we're proud to do what we did.
You're quite right.
They're up people.
Gates Foundation do a phenomenal job.
We do what we do.
I mean, again, it's like it's taking away the power of charity, the power of free will.
It's this materialism.
It is what I saw, what I saw represented by Notre Dame burning.
It's what I saw being silenced by the press, nobody wanting to ask why is this happening?
Is this part of the continued desecration of churches?
Why haven't you reported on the desecration of churches?
Even if it's not part of that desecration, why haven't you reported it?
Why are you silencing people now?
I mean, it really is, it's really an interesting moment in our society when, you know, when reporters who are supposed to expose things instead cover them up, like they cover up the malfeasance of our security forces during this FBI investigation, the Russian investigation into Donald Trump, it is an amazing thing when elites have turned against the people so much that they want to support this incredible power structure instead of do what they're there for, which is examine that power structure to its bones all the time.
It is just amazing to me to watch the press basically abscond, you know, disappear on its duties.
Silencing Shakespeare00:14:29
All right.
We have a guest coming up, Paul Ray, a fine, fine scholar from Hillsdale University, historian.
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All right, Professor Paul Ray is a professor of history at Hillsdale College, one of the most respected scholars at Hillsdale, as well as the Charles O'Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in Western Heritage.
Professor Ray's entire scholarly career has been focused on studying the origins and evolution of self-government within the West, and that is part of what we want to talk about to him today.
Paul, are you there?
Hey, it's good to talk to you.
Thanks very much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
And you were very hospitable when I was at Hillsdale, and I appreciate that as well.
We talked when we had dinner together.
You're called to lecture around the country.
You're a very highly respected scholar.
What do you see happening to the liberal arts, to the study of the liberal arts at universities in the U.S.?
It's dying.
It's dying for two reasons.
One is internal to it.
That is to say, the onset of postmodernism and the sort of post-Marxist, various post-Marxist outlooks.
The effect of it is that people no longer, as often anyway, teach Shakespeare with an eye to what we can learn from Shakespeare.
They teach Shakespeare with an eye to how we can trash him.
And the practical effect of that is if English literature is not worth studying, you're going to have a drop in majors.
And that's gone on nationwide and all throughout the humanities.
So that's one aspect of it.
The fashions within the profession, the politicization of everything, so that everything becomes an occasion for a ranting professor not really talking about his subject, but talking about his opinions about contemporary matters.
That's one dimension to it.
Another dimension to it is, you know, to some degree, in this country, which is basically oriented towards business and engineering and STEM, there's always been a question in the back of people's minds, what is the value of this?
And so there are sort of two attacks coming at the same time.
One is the suicide of people within the humanities, killing the subject that they study.
The other is people who aren't really friendly to it anyway.
And I'll give you a concrete example of this.
This last week, the University of Tulsa, where I taught for 24 years, has decided to gut the humanities, turn itself into a school that is oriented almost entirely to STEM.
And so there won't be a major in philosophy, for example.
There won't be a major in religion.
And the people in the humanities will go into a division of the humanities and social justice.
It's suicidal for this particular university to do this because what will happen is they will lose large numbers of students.
They have a $20 million structural deficit every year.
$10 million comes from sports, from the perspective of the trustees, the University of Tulsa's football team with a university attached.
The other is the law school.
There's been a tremendous drop in the number of people going to law school, so the law school loses money.
And what they're now doing is gutting the College of Arts and Sciences.
Now, I mentioned this particular example because it's come up recently.
But this sort of thing is going to go on nationwide because people in the liberal arts have lost their way.
And the consequence is they're killing the subjects they teach, and there are fewer or fewer students taking them.
And of course, there's always pressure from parents on students who go to college to do something so that they can get a job.
Well, how do you explain a philosophy major, a history major, a literature major?
We've always been on the defensive.
Now we're finished in most places.
And I thank God I teach at a college where this doesn't go on.
Well, I was just about to ask you that.
I mean, because you obviously take a different tack, does that mean that you don't get invited to places or that are you ever silenced or disinvited?
Or are you still basically at such a high level that you can get in?
I'm too academic to get disinvited.
In other words, the topics that I get invited to speak on are, you know, focus topics on, say, Thucydides or on Herodotus or on Montesquieu or on Tocqueville.
I don't get invited to give a kind of general address to, you know, a thousand people on the state of America today.
So I don't get disinvited.
At least it hasn't happened yet.
And nobody's ever shouted me down.
But that's because the people who invite me are interested in the kinds of things I write about in the books I write.
What doesn't happen to me is I don't get invited to apply for big jobs at famous universities because I'm known to be a conservative.
And essentially it has been true for maybe 30 years that conservatives need not apply.
Wow.
When you look at the country at this moment and you look at the state of education, you look at the things that you were talking about, about the gutting of the humanities, essentially, you know, you have a very vast knowledge of history.
Are there other times that this reminds you of?
Are there things that you think about, you think, well, gee, this is just like when this happened in Rome or when it happened in Greece or whatever.
Is there something that America today reminds you of?
It reminds me of the last days of the Weimar Republic.
German history was my minor field.
I started out to be a German historian in graduate school.
And what goes on at the universities, the kind of attacks that are made, the way administrations conduct themselves, it reminds me of that period where people do get shouted down, where professors get driven out for the things that they say in class that are perfectly respectable things to say, where there's certain topics that you can't teach.
If you remember a few years ago at my alma mater, Yale, there was a kerfuffle about Halloween costumes.
Yes.
And it involved a couple who were masters of a college there.
And the woman who taught education resigned.
And one of the things she said a year later in the Washington Post was she did not think she could teach the family anymore and the needs of children because she couldn't She would be harassed if she indicated that fathers are necessary.
And the reason for that is very simple.
There's a chunk of our population where fathers are absentee.
And if you want to understand why there's so much crime in the neighborhoods dominated by that population, that's partly tied up with the collapse of the family.
But you can't talk about that.
So we're entering a world where serious questions in which people really do get hurt by certain social practices can't be discussed.
Wow.
Now, obviously, when you say the collapse of the Y, it reminds me of the collapse of the Weimar Republic.
A chill goes up my spine, obviously followed by the Third Reich.
Do you see a way of turning the tide here?
Is there something that people like you or anybody can be doing to convince the universities that they have gone astray, or is that just a lost cause?
It ought not to be a lost cause, but it might be.
Let me say, though, politics is generational.
I'm from the baby boom generation.
I was in college in the 1960s.
I have seen everything that's going on now before.
I saw it at Cornell in 1969 when we had an armed building seizure.
I saw it in Yale in the spring of 1970 with the reaction to the Black Panther trial.
None of this is new.
It's the second round.
And what's interesting about the first round is it receded.
This may recede, but I can tell you the reason why I hesitate to say it will recede is that in 1969, the faculty was against, by and large, against what was going on.
Today, a good chunk of the faculty is in favor of shutting down dissenting views.
And the administration's nearly everywhere are in favor of shutting down dissenting views.
What happened at Yale was orchestrated from within the administration.
This business at the University of Tulsa of turning the humanities into the division of humanities and social justice, meaning of the humanities taught in a partisan fashion, that's being done by the administration.
So what worries me is the degree to which the hard left is actually in control of administrations and seemingly supported by trustees.
Yeah, no, I've seen this too.
It's appalling.
Paul, thank you so much for coming on.
I hope you'll come back and talk about this some more.
Really interesting conversation.
Thanks a lot.
Anytime.
Anytime.
Thank you.
Thanks, Paul.
A little depressing, I'm afraid, but still honest and straightforward.
And that's something I have seen as I've traveled around the thing that appalls me, every university that I go to and college that I go to is not the kids who show up and squirt Michael Knowles.
It's not the kids who protest.
It's not the hecklers or anything like that.
It's always the administration working against free speech, feeling that they have reached a stage where their conversation can end.
The conversation can end because they have got it.
And that's my final reflection, which goes back to what's happening in France and what's happening in Europe and what's happening at the universities here.
Listen, I can't tell you to believe in God.
I can't tell you to reconstitute the things that make you free, that make you as prosperous and free and power and this country as powerful as it is.
But you ought to know.
It's abuse that you've been kept in ignorance.
It's abuse when young people are kept in ignorance when they do not know.
When you have people like Ilan Omar saying this country is founded on genocide or whatever and injustice.
This is a kind of nonsense to talk about what it is this country is that people like scrabbled out of the mud for thousands of years with powerful people's boots on their neck to build a country where they could be free.
Certain ideas went into it.
You don't have to go back and embrace those ideas.
But if you don't even know what they are, what will you say?
What will you say when the revolution shows up at your door and says, why do you believe what you believe?
This is the thing that really bothers me because I went down so many wrong roads, because I explored so many mistakes, so many errors, because I adopted so many ways of thought without really thinking them through and then thought them through to the point where they collapse.
I know what I think.
I know why I think what I think.
I know what my axioms are, those things that can't be proved, but without which the entire system collapses.
Do you?
Do you know those things?
I mean, they're there for you to find.
You know, Paul mentioned Shakespeare.
Shakespeare basically invented the idea of a human being that is in your mind now.
If you don't know a little Shakespeare, if you haven't seen Shakespeare, if you haven't thought about Shakespeare, you don't know why you think the things you think.
You don't know in what context you think those things and when the revolution comes because the revolution comes to places where art, where people have forgotten how to defend the things that they love.
And the thing is, you know, you can defend those things with bullets and rifles and armies and all those things are necessary, but if you can't defend the ideas, the society gets eaten out from within.
And that's what Paul Ray was talking about.
Defending What We Love00:01:12
And that's what you saw at Notre Dame as the cathedral, the civilization, the country, and its religion got eaten out from within.
And that's what nobody wants to talk about.
All right, I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I will be back again tomorrow with the mailbag in some other city in Texas.
But today, I'm speaking with Knowles at 7 p.m. at Texas A ⁇ M. Talk to you then.
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