Andrew Klavan’s Pelosi Blinks dissects Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment maneuver as politically motivated, mocking media framing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi while contrasting C.S. Lewis’ view of humanity with Freud’s cynicism to expose leftist policies—abortion, gun control, and "woke" ethnic studies—as tools to reshape human nature. Guest John Murawski reveals how K-12 ethnic studies programs indoctrinate students into anti-Western identity politics, teaching oppression narratives and activism while elites shield their own children from radicalization. Klavan ties this to feminism’s devaluation of motherhood and elite control, warning that without spiritual resistance, materialism will hollow out democracy itself. [Automatically generated summary]
Media pundits seem to be discovering the hidden charms of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Ever since President Donald Trump arranged for the erasure of the ISIS leader, anti-Trummers, Trumpers, seem to have been asking themselves, if Trump ordered him killed, can he really have been so bad?
The Washington Post, where democracy dies strangling on hatred after taking a heavy dose of mindless venom, called the terrorist leader an austere religious scholar and blamed the United States invasion of Iraq for distracting this, quote, academic from his intention to live a, quote, quiet life as a professor of Islamic law, unquote.
Never Trumper Max Boot, also in the Washington Post, objected to President Trump calling the austere scholar a coward, saying, after all, the terrorist had been so very brave that he blew himself and three children to smithereens.
I've prayed God would allow me to wake up in a world where I'm making all that up, but so far no dice.
I haven't even gotten to the satire part yet.
But we can now look forward to articles from, say, the New York Times, a former newspaper, praising al-Baghdadi for his wistful appreciation of female beauty that caused him to hold a female hostage as a sex slave before murdering her.
And maybe Chuck Todd will chime in on al-Baghdadi's limpid, soulful gaze as he watched the videos of innocent people being beheaded, which he made in order to recruit more austere scholars to his cause of slaughtering everybody in sight.
There was, of course, also al-Baghdadi's fabulous fashion sense, which led MSNBC to offer him a hosting spot on their new show, Muslim Eye for the Christian Guy, which has now unfortunately been canceled due to Trump's brutal indifference to fostering really good TV.
Meanwhile, McCarthyite Congressman Adam Schiff is whining because Trump didn't inform him of the operation ahead of time.
Trump said he worried Schiff would leak the mission, but Schiff said that was absurd, according to anonymous sources on the Intelligence Committee who spoke with the Times.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
Ship-shaped topsy, the world is ipped-easing.
It's a wonderful day.
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You know, there's a psychiatry professor at Harvard named Armand Nikolai who teaches a class comparing C.S. Lewis with Sigmund Freud.
I haven't taken the class, but I have read Nikolai's book on the subject, The Question of God, and I also watched a PBS documentary based on the book and also read a play based on the book.
And it's a brilliant idea for a comparison.
C.S. Lewis, of course, was the great Christian apologist who sought to remind the West of the truth and meaning of its founding religion.
And Freud was not just the founder of psychiatry, he was also part of a great movement to eliminate God, to eliminate all spirituality from the understanding of human life.
He wanted to make the study of human behavior and psychology a field of physical science, just like any other.
The other big mover and shaker in this field was Karl Marx, who sought to do the same thing with the study of history.
He wanted to remove the spirit out of the philosopher Hegel's theories of history as a spiritual development.
He said he was going to stand Hegel's theories on their head.
Now, I could talk about the subject for the rest of the year, but I just want to focus on one comparison between Lewis and Freud.
These two quotes from them describing what they thought of human beings.
C.S. Lewis said this about people.
There are no ordinary people.
You have never talked to a mere mortal.
Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.
But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.
Immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.
Compared this to what Freud said about people.
I have found little that is good about human beings on the whole.
In my experience, most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all.
That is something that you cannot say aloud or perhaps even think.
Logically, and based on the facts of history, both these viewpoints are defensible.
You can make a case for either.
One is what you see in people when you regard them as immortal spirits expressed in matter.
The other, what you see in them when you regard them as purely physical beings.
God has decreed that you can logically choose for yourself how to look at them.
I would simply add from my personal experience, having tried both approaches, that C.S. Lewis' approach will lead you to greater depths of understanding, wisdom, joy, and compassion, but Freud's approach will get you a job in a university's liberal arts department, so it's your call.
More importantly, though, when you understand the difference between Lewis's Christian approach to humanity and Freud's materialist approach, you understand the true argument we're in today, not the argument between left and right, between Democrat and Republican, between for Trump and against Trump, but the argument between two different visions of humanity.
Take a spiritual approach, and you see a world of broken angels, each with special dignity and God-given rights that are more important than any momentary issue or problem, and that therefore have to be preserved even in moments of crisis, even in moments of war.
We are spiritual beings in physical form, and it is essential that we be free to choose our own path to the good as much as physically possible.
Take the materialist approach, and freedom isn't even an issue.
Let the elite rule you.
The smarter, the better, the ever-so-patriotic shadowmen of the deep state can tell you what to do.
They can fix everything by physical means, by manipulating the material world, which after all is all there is.
They can fix inequality by redistributing money.
They can make sex more fair by cutting unwanted babies out of wombs.
They can distribute drugs to erase depression or to turn boys into girls.
It's all meat and chemistry at the end of the Freudian road.
Until we, who believe in spiritual man and the freedom he deserves, until we understand that this is the argument we're in, we may win the day here and there, but we will lose the fight over time and will lose our freedom step by step as well.
Until we understand that our arguments have to be made not just at the practical level, but at the moral and spiritual levels as well, we will allow the ultimately empty philosophy of materialism to take on the appearance of a morality it does not have.
Yes, capitalism works better than socialism, and freedom works better than top-down government, and individual rights lead to greater successes than 10-year government plans.
But the reason they work better is because C.S. Lewis was right and Freud was wrong.
The reason they work is because they deal with the reality that God lives and the Spirit is real.
And if we don't convince our children of that reality, they will not know why they should go on fighting for their rights.
I'm going to show you what I mean about this and how it applies to the news in just a second.
Pelosi's Impeachment Delay00:09:36
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So to me, it's so fascinating when you're watching these little things that go on.
It's all politics and it's all this little give and take and you never really know who's winning or who's losing until the election comes.
But it really is interesting to me.
There's a narrative being sold to us right now.
And the narrative is, I heard Andy McCarthy, a brilliant observer of politics and of law, saying this on Fox News this morning.
You know, Steve Bannon, you remember Steve Bannon from the old days of Trump-Trimp Mania?
He was saying the same thing.
He says Nancy Pelosi's impeachment plan is working.
The plan is, remember, they took this, usually it's the House Judiciary Committee that would handle impeachment, but Jerry Nadler was not being tough enough because he believed that you really have to convince people before you can impeach a president.
You can't just go around doing it.
So she gave it to the intelligence committee run by Adam Schiff.
It's kind of weird that he should be running the intelligence committee, but he is a genuine snake.
He's a McCarthyite snake.
He will lie about you.
He will do any kind of double dealing.
He wants to bring this president down by hook or by crook.
And so the plan has been sit away, have this testimony in a locked room in the cellar of the Capitol, leak, tell the Republicans that they're not allowed to send out any information, but you can leak to the press.
Unnamed officials named Schiff are leaking to the press, and the press is Democrat too, so they're going to spin this any way you can.
It's going to be the mounting evidence.
The case is the vice is closing.
All the while, all the while forgetting about the fact that you tried this with Russian collusion, you tried it with obstruction of justice.
You tried it with Stormy Daniels.
You've been trying it since the election to get this guy impeached.
And it's not a question of, oh my goodness, we found something terrible the president did.
Let's impeach him.
It's let's impeach him.
So let's find something terrible the president did.
And all they can come up with is this garbage story about Ukraine.
And so you'd think, you would think they'd be winning.
And the polls, I know the polls keep saying, oh, more people are in favor of impeachment.
I'm not saying I don't believe the polls.
I'm just saying I don't believe the polls.
The reason I don't believe the polls is because they favor Democrats.
And of course, Democrats are like 100% for impeachment.
And Republicans are like 83% against.
But then others are for the inquiry, right?
They'll say, yeah, go ahead, have the inquiry.
And some of them may be saying that in the most cynical, sarcastic way imaginable.
They may be saying, yeah, go ahead, have your inquiry, and then fall off a cliff, you bum.
So you don't really know what they're saying.
They are not going.
They may impeach.
They definitely may impeach.
I mean, now Pelosi and the gang are so far out there on a limb, if they don't impeach, they're going to look pretty stupid.
So they may well impeach, but they are no way going to get this, push this past the American public.
The swing states won't go for it.
The Republican voters won't go for it.
They would have a literal revolution on their hands.
And if the Republicans ever sign on to it, which is part of the other narrative they're selling, that the Republicans are panicking and they're going to betray.
They're going to turn against Trump.
All of that, I don't believe.
And the reason I don't believe it is because the way they're behaving.
They keep putting off the vote.
And now Nancy Pelosi, here's Nancy Pelosi one week ago, right?
It was one week ago saying, yeah, we're not holding a vote about it.
There's no requirement that we have a vote.
And so at this time, we will not be having a vote.
And I'm very pleased with the thoughtfulness of our caucus in terms of being supportive of the path that we are on in terms of fairness, in terms of seeking the truth, in terms of upholding the Constitution of the United States.
Okay, so that was one week ago.
And now she sends a letter, here's from the reading from the Wall Street Journal.
The House plans to vote on a resolution.
So she's cracked a little bit.
She's blinked.
The House plans to vote on a resolution laying out Democrats' next steps in the impeachment inquiry into President Trump and move to a public phase of the investigation, the first significant vote since the probe began.
This isn't a vote to authorize starting an impeachment inquiry, but it would affirm the one started last month into whether Mr. Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate a political rival.
So the actual resolution is supposed to come out later today.
We do not know how fair it's going to be, but we do know that Nancy Pelosi had to bend a little bit because of this incredible weight of information, of a sense, just a sense that it was unfair.
Here's Jim Jordan making that case.
We think this whole thing is a charade to begin with.
I mean, like we said several times, the facts are the facts and they haven't changed.
You saw the call transcript.
There was no conditionality there.
There was no quid pro quo there.
You've seen both people talk about the call, President Zelensky, President Trump.
President Zelensky said there was no pressure.
You know that Ukraine never knew that the money was held up at the time of the call and there was no action taken by President Zelensky or Ukraine to condition release of the dollar.
So there's never been nothing there.
But Adam Schiff down here in the bunker continues to have these secret depositions and then go out and leak stuff like this whole story in the Washington Post talking about the type of questions that we're at.
I think the irony here is they're doing it all in secret and yet they go out and leak everything to the Washington Post, all this inaccurate and false stuff that's in the story.
But yeah, the facts haven't changed.
We think this whole thing's a charade.
So this is a real test, I think, of the American people and where their minds are at because it's so obviously unfair and it's also irrational.
It's irrational that all these other attempts to impeach the president have failed and turned out to be nothing.
They've all been dirty dealing behind the scene.
They've all dealt with leaks.
We've seen Adam Schiff lie at least twice when he said he hadn't met the whistleblower before when he had, when he said that he had seen proof that Trump colluded with the Russians and he hadn't.
We know that he's dishonest.
So the idea that we should suddenly be taking them seriously is so irrational.
And even to hear people, I mean, on all the stations, including Fox, where they debate whether this latest guy is telling the truth or not, we don't know because we can't see him.
So we don't know whether he's telling the truth.
Plus, we've seen what was in the phone call.
So they keep saying, here's a guy who was actually in on the phone call.
We've seen what was in the phone call.
And if that's an impeachable offense, then really, you know, having your shoelace come untied is an impeachable offense.
This is a nonsense process from the beginning to the end.
And I think Pelosi is, I think no matter what they say, they can tell you it's working.
They can say it's good.
Obviously, Pelosi has political considerations.
Maybe she wants to bring this vote so that some of the Congress Democrat congressmen in Trump districts can vote against it and say, look how independent it was.
I stood up to Nancy Pelosi.
Maybe that's part of her calculation.
Maybe she feels that the polls are so much in her favor that now they can bring this out in the public.
Maybe this resolution is going to be so unfair in and of itself that we won't really get to see what's going on.
We'll just get to see a sort of another kabuki show brought out into the public instead of held up in secret.
But the very fact that she has to answer with all this media power, with all this secrecy, with all the Democrats in her corner, that she has to answer the question of fairness is really interesting and tells you something about the way our political system actually works.
And I'll talk about that in just a second.
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So let's talk about C.S. Lewis for just a second, Mir Christianity.
It starts with this incredibly famous but also very moving segment, the first part of his famous, most famous book, Mir Christianity.
He says, everyone has heard people quarreling.
Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant.
But however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say.
They say things like this, how would you like it if anyone did the same to you?
Or that's my seat.
I was there first.
Or leave him alone.
He isn't doing you any harm.
Or why should you shove in first?
Or give me a bit of your orange.
I gave you a bit of mine.
Come on, you promised.
People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated and children as well as grown-ups.
And he says, Now, what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behavior does not happen to please him.
He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about.
And the other man very seldom replies to hell with your standard.
Nearly always, he tries to make out that what he's been doing does not really go against the standard or that if it does, there is some special excuse.
He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise.
In other words, what Lewis is talking about is universal morality, what he sometimes referred to as the Tao, T-A-O, the Tao from the Tao Te Ching, the way that we live.
And the argument of the left for the past, I'll go with 50, 40, 50 years, has been that that standard doesn't exist, that it's a product of evolution, that it's not something that we are observing.
The evolutionary argument is that we developed this sense of morality out of the way we interact with each other.
But that argument in evolution doesn't work with any other thing.
We don't say, oh, we developed an eye so we could invent light.
We don't say, oh, we developed a nose so we could invent smells.
But we say we developed a moral sense so that we could invent morality.
But no, of course that's not true.
We invented an eye so we could see the light in some form that is actually there.
So we could smell that we developed the sense of smell.
So we could smell scents that are there in some form.
We developed the sense of morality so we could see this standard that C.S. Lewis is talking about.
And the problem that Republicans have is that they so often don't appeal to that standard.
Not Republicans, conservatives, I should say.
We tell you, oh, you know, capitalism makes everybody rich.
It lifts people out of poverty.
But we don't talk about the morality of freedom, of being free, and why each individual has a right to spend the money that he has.
We allow them to make the argument that somehow we're greedy for wanting to keep the money that we have.
When we don't want to keep it, we want to decide what kind of charity we are going to put into place.
And it's really interesting.
You know, let's visit for a minute.
Do we have Knucklehead Row?
want to go over to Knucklehead Row for a minute.
So at Knucklehead Row, a writer named Jennifer Wiener, who I've read before, and I don't think she, I don't admire her very much, but she said something.
I don't want to make fun of this because I think it really is important.
The other day, Trump was at the World Series, and he got booed.
And that, you know, they made it sound like that was incredibly wild, but it wasn't.
First of all, he was in Washington, D.C., so there's no Republicans there.
And secondly, I remember Obama got booed.
I think it was at an all-star game where he was pitching, this is America.
We're a garrulous, loudmouthed bunch of mutts, and we boo our politicians, and why shouldn't we boo our politicians?
He's not the king.
He's just the president.
And yeah, we can boo him if we don't like him.
So they made a big deal of this.
But Jennifer Weiner on Knucklehead Row made an even bigger deal out of it.
She said she watched, it's kind of amazing.
She said, I watched the video of him being booed over and over, scrutinizing every second of the footage, waiting for the exact moment when Mr. Trump's smirky grin gives way to stony petulance.
The precise instant when he realizes that this sea of red-hatted Americans are not his red hatted Americans as the applause for veterans gives way to lusty booze and the chants of lock him up ripple through the stadium.
She says it felt, it's like she's watching porn, really, it felt like medicine, like bomb for a weary soul.
It wasn't until I'd watched the footage sped up, slowed down from six angles and heard myself crooning, let me taste your tears, that I started feeling a little sick, as if I'd gorged on Halloween candy.
So why does she, she starts to realize who she is.
And this is one of the things that always stuns me about the New York Times.
The New York Times, where people, you know, respectable, educated people are making the argument that we should be ruled by the deep state, are making the argument that the Soviet Union, a slave state, a truly oppressive slave state, was a good thing in some way, that it was better for women in some way, where they're making the argument that this free country, this country that has lifted so many people out of slavery, lifted so many people out of oppressive regimes,
this country that has lifted so many people out of poverty and created a world of wealth that didn't exist ever before, that this country is somehow rooted only in slavery.
This is the New York Times.
And I sit there and watch, don't you see how hateful you've become?
Don't you see how you've let your philosophy turn you into these horrible, small, slave-dealing, ugly people?
And it always strikes me.
Well here, Jennifer Weiner has a moment when suddenly she sees herself as she is.
But the reason it upsets her that she is in fact turned into this hateful person, which as far as I can see, virtually everyone at the New York Times has turned into, she says, this is why.
She says, we, Democrats, liberals, progressives, the resistance, whatever you call us, are supposed to be better than that.
We're supposed to be the party of the downtrodden and the less fortunate.
While Republicans support the fat cat billionaires, we stand up for the workers.
While they put kids in cages, we work to reunite them with their families.
When they build walls, we say all are welcome here.
For them, the cruelty is the point.
That's why we're here.
For us, kindness matters.
When they go low, we go high.
She is living under what I think is the illusion that her good intentions make her a moral person.
She doesn't recall that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
She doesn't look at San Francisco where all that generosity toward the downtrodden has people living in the streets, people taking drugs, people who are mentally ill without treatment.
And, you know, Heather McDonald has virtually a book-length piece about San Francisco in this quarter's city journal.
It is a brilliant piece.
It's a brilliant piece of journalism, as we've come to expect from Heather, but it's a brilliant piece of journalism showing how this compassion, this incredible bleeding heart liberalism toward the poor and the homeless has destroyed the city.
And who suffers, of course?
The poor who are not homeless suffer because their neighborhoods are destroyed.
She has old people who are afraid to go outside because these drug-addicted, crazy people are out on the street making them afraid.
And so, but they are still, they are still doing what C.S. Lewis said.
They are making their arguments in moral terms.
And we have to make the arguments on the other side.
And one of the things about making these arguments is they depend on what you think of human beings, what you think a human being is.
If you think a human being is a meat puppet with a chemistry set inside, then maybe by rejiggering his chemistry, maybe by rejiggering his meat, maybe by taking money from this one, because why should he have it?
He's just a piece of meat.
Why not give it to the other piece of meat?
And now both pieces of meat will have the same money and everything's going to go well.
The fact that that doesn't work, it's not the fact that that doesn't work, the fact that it doesn't work is not the reason we oppose it.
We oppose it because that's not what human beings are, and that's why it doesn't work.
Human beings are souls, they're spirits, they make choices, they have free will, and you cannot solve the inequalities between them by simply redistributing the wealth that one of them made and giving it to another who didn't do that, especially if you take away the free choice that's involved in charity.
You know, all of this stuff is they're trying to convince us is this stuff is passing away.
Christianity, spirituality.
They are working overtime, trying to convince us that it's passing away.
But also in the New York Times, the one guy over there that I really respect, who's Ross Duthot, he has a column where he says, you know, not so fast, not so fast.
He sounds a little bit like me here saying, you know, I know that fewer people are going to church, but maybe it doesn't mean what we think it means.
And one of the things he says in this argument, it's actually a really good argument.
He talks about the fact that maybe the Christianity that's fading away, that the polls show fading away is the lukewarm Christianity, but an intense belief is still remaining strong.
But he also talks about the fact that young people are actually, because young people stop going to church, when they go to college, they stop going to church, and then later when they start to have children, when they start to deal with reality, when they start to deal with mortality, they go back to church.
But young people are actually going to church a little bit more than young people in the past, which bodes fair for the fact that as they grow older and more serious and more knowledgeable and more experienced, they may go back to church in greater numbers.
He also points out that really the crisis in Christianity is a crisis in Catholicism.
And there's no question why they're having that crisis.
It's not just the scandal, but it's also the liberalization of Catholicism.
So let me end with this.
Let me end with Kanye West.
Obviously, you've all heard that he's dropped this new album, Jesus is King.
I'm in no position to judge Kanye West's music.
It's not my kind of music.
It's not what I like.
And again, you know, I made this joke.
I was talking to Knowles the other day, and I said, you know, in some ways, in some ways, Kanye West may not be the spokesman we want to lean on, but he may be a good representation of American culture because he's a crazy narcissist and American culture is a crazy narcissistic culture.
And suddenly, with his conversion to Christianity, and again, I'm not judging his lyrics or anything, he's saying a lot of things that make him sound very much like a religious conservative, like this.
The culture has you focus so much on somebody, bitch, and pulling up in a foreign and rapping about things that could get you locked up and then saying you about prison reform.
Like, it's, bro, we brainwashed out here, bro.
Come on, man.
This is a free man talking.
Democrats had us voting Democrats and food staffs for years, bro.
What is he talking about?
Guns in the 80s, taking the fathers out the home, plan B, lowering our votes, making us aboard our children?
Gosh, in that kill.
See, maybe not the most articulate argument, but those things go together.
He is talking about a different version of human beings and the version that the left has been selling.
And when he says this is a free man talking, he's right.
You're not a free man talking until you understand the reasons why you should be free, which have to do with what a human being is.
And those are the arguments we have to start making because, again, we're going to win political victories over time.
We're going to lose political victories.
But over time, we're going to lose the argument if we're not making the argument that we should be making, the real argument about what a human being is.
All right, I got a great guest coming up, but come on over to dailywire.com.
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John Murawski, recently, he wrote a piece for Real Clear Investigations about how leftist history is making it into the classroom.
And the piece was titled Woke History is Making Big Inroads in America's High Schools.
This is a really interesting topic because it's interestingly bothering some people on the left as well.
John, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Hey, thank you very much.
You know, this is a powerful piece.
Can you give us kind of the overview of what you feel is happening in the public schools?
So basically, most people are familiar with identity politics or political correctness or grievance studies as the critics refer to these kinds of classes in the college level, right?
They've infiltrated the universities and they're popular.
People major in them.
And every university has a department.
But these classes are now moving down to the level of high schools and middle schools to some degree as well.
And what makes them unusual is they focus a very strong focus on identity politics, on oppression, on looking at people as two categories, the oppressor and the oppressed.
And the oppressor will be, of course, the white male or the European or the American.
And it's a kind of very kind of a neat categorization of humanity.
And it creates a very neat picture of good and evil.
And kids are encouraged to, They hold mock trials to hold Western civilization on trial for crimes against humanity against the Native Americans.
They also are taught how to draw manifestos to bring manifestos of demands to their school administrators.
So they're kind of, I guess, recruited into social activism and community organizing.
So it's a completely different model of education where instead of having the students sit passively listen, take in information, learn a subject, they're encouraged to be very emotionally engaged and to become engaged in terms of activism, activity, and social change, which is a component of their grade and what they're learning.
So it's called ethnic studies, and it's widely established in California, and other states are adopting policies, and it's kind of spreading as a trend.
Elites' Radical Education Agenda00:12:51
And kids apparently really respond to it.
They apparently seem to like these classes or the ones who take them.
Not everybody's taking them.
They're the ones who do.
I mean, people voluntarily major in these subjects in college.
So there is a kind of a strong, it really appeals, I think, to young people to their sense of moral outrage, their sense of, you know, of having a sense of purpose and of questioning the culture that their parents created, the world that their parents created.
And underneath those classes, there's a certain bit of extremism and I would say maybe a bit of indoctrination.
But underneath, there is real issues about historical and some would say present issues of social inequalities and justice that they're to resolve.
The question is already resolving them.
Do they already give an options and alternatives in these classes, or is it more where they're spoon-fed information, which is what the critics say, is that they're basically spoon-fed kind of formulaic political slogans and recruited into radical social action.
And I'm not making out the term radical.
They actually themselves use the term radical often in what they're doing.
It's a radical critique of capitalism, a radical critique of whiteness, a radical critique of empire.
And those are the terms that they use.
So basically, that's kind of the overview of what the story is about.
I'm really struck by the fact that this is almost the mirror image of what used to happen, which is that immigrants would come into the country.
You would assume that they had come to the country because they wanted to be in the country, that something had appealed to them about it.
And they were then taught how to be members of the country, how to participate in the country.
They were taught civics.
This is kind of the opposite, is that on the one hand, we're supposed to be delighted that people of other colors and people of other cultures are coming into the West.
But then at the same time, we're supposed to teach them that it's awful here and it really is a bad place that they want to be in exists.
This is kind of underlying the logic to it, isn't it?
Well, you bring up an interesting point.
One of the issues of ethnic studies is that it tends to be very one-sided.
So the West is presented as almost as a criminal enterprise.
And native cultures tend to be, there's almost kind of a boosterism for these cultures.
However, you have to remember that 100 years ago, a century ago, there were all sorts of anarchist movements, socialist movements, communist movements, and they were largely driven by ethnic groups.
So there's a lot of parallels.
And it's kind of almost like a repetitive cycle of ethnic groups coming in and then struggling to fit in, feeling a sense of rejection, reacting with verbal rhetorical violence, and sometimes even kind of an Antifa-like protest culture.
I don't think this is the first time we're seeing this.
I think we saw the very, very similar things about 100 years ago in this country in the 20s and the teens.
And I think when it stopped is when Alexander Soljani went to the Gulag Archipelago in the Cancer War, and it just became obvious that the Soviet Union was the real criminal enterprise.
And so it kind of dampened the enthusiasm among progressives for that kind of social reform.
Is it a change of pace, though, to have the public schools run by governments, essentially, basically teaching anti-Western propaganda?
Isn't that a little different than the 20s and 30s?
I don't know.
I don't know what schools taught 100 years ago.
I don't know.
I assume there were radical activist teachers.
There were unionizers.
There was a lot of, you know, America has a long history of radical activity.
It's not something really new.
We shouldn't think of it as new.
We should think of it as just something that's part of the system.
We're always dealing with it and negotiating.
Just like there's always been a very strong conservative and far-right wing.
It's just part of living in a very large, complex, multifaceted culture.
Is this a problem?
Recently, there was a kind of controversial article in The Atlantic, and I'm sorry the name of the author has slipped my mind, but basically he said that he, a liberal, you know, a left-winger, was giving up on public schools because his kids weren't being taught the rudiments of civics, basically.
They weren't being taught how the government worked.
They weren't being taught the things that are useful.
If you want to get ahead and be an elite person in the country, you really have to know how the country works.
So isn't there a danger here that what will happen is in the same way, in the same way the elites kind of sold us sexual liberation, but they live in steady marriages and have kids in wedlock, in the same way that they're sort of teaching the poor this radicalization, but they're going to want their kids to know how the society works and how to be a thriving member of it.
Or are they not?
So I think the author you're talking about in the Atlantic was George Packer.
That's right.
That's correct.
Yeah, he was sending sort of the political correctness he was experiencing there.
So my sense is that these movements appeal to the elites.
It's the elites who are.
Where is it happening at universities?
It's just elite universities.
It's not happening at community colleges or vocational schools.
The more elite the university, the more the quotient for social justice.
Why that is, I don't know.
But people who tend to read radical revolutions from Pol Pot to others tend to come from the upper layers of society.
They tend to claim that they represent the interests of the oppressed.
Now, whether that's true, I don't know.
Most of the people who are oppressed have never read them and are vaguely familiar with their academic tracts and tractates.
So I think it tends to be a very upper class, elite intellectual phenomenon.
It's a kind of a paradox, but that's just the way it seems to be.
Do you think this is a dangerous phenomenon that this is now going down, this kind of radicalization is now going down to the level of high school students?
Do you think it's dangerous to the polity, dangerous to the future of democratic governance?
And if so, how do you think we should respond?
I don't know how to answer that question.
I think, you know, a complicated society like ours is not going to have a uniform perspective.
There's going to be a lot of conflicting and clashing perspectives on reality.
So that in itself is democracy in action and pluralism.
I think where it gets, you know, potentially dangerous is when you have situations like Evergreen College, where they call the cops in to escort the professors off campus.
Yeah.
And where you have basically kids like at Oberlin who basically roll up in fetal position because they feel that they're micro-aggressed to death.
And, you know, then they're actually having a hard time interacting with other people and solving real problems.
So yeah, it could become dangerous.
And it could become dangerous if the country becomes so divided that we really, it leads to like Andrew Sullivan has, the writer Andrew Sullivan has compared some of the rhetoric on the left to the rhetoric that preceded the genocide in Rwanda, the complete dehumanization of the other side.
And I think he's talking about both sides, not just the left, I guess.
So yeah, it could people are very nervous about the level and intensity of the rhetoric and the one-sidedness of it.
And these kinds of classes tend to kind of animate people's moral outrage and the sense that they're being wronged and they've been ripped off and they need to get stuff back.
Somebody took their job and somebody took their opportunity.
And so, you know, it seems to be taking an extreme form.
Yeah, it could lead to unhealthy results.
But again, I don't think it's inherently dangerous in all forms as long as, you know, you can have reasonable professors who introduce you to this material that challenge you and then introduce you to alternative viewpoints.
Of course.
But, you know, so, I mean, if you were teaching this stuff, I don't think necessarily it would be the same as some completely radicalized professor.
But I think, you know, some of these universities, they've taken the activist route and they are, you know, it seems to be out of whack and out of balance.
I don't think it has to be that way.
I just think it has played out that way in some places.
I don't know what is happening in the classrooms.
I read the course descriptions in California, dozens and dozens of courses, over 800 pages of course descriptions.
And if they're doing what their course descriptions say, they are sort of training these kids to lead the next revolution.
I mean, the rhetoric is somewhat inflammatory.
But, you know, these kids are taking other classes.
They probably are taking an economics class and a math class.
And that's not all they take.
You know, it's not there.
There must be some balance to what they're learning.
Yeah.
And maybe they'll also notice that their electricity keeps going off and their house is on fire.
It doesn't speak well for the government.
They're blaming capitalism for that.
They're blaming the.
I've heard.
I've heard.
Yeah.
John Moroski, thank you very much for coming on.
The article in Real Clear Investigations is called Woke History is Making Big Inroads in America's High Schools.
It's really fascinating.
It's a good investigation.
Thank you for talking.
I hope you come back and talk again.
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
Thanks a lot.
You know, I want to end with a final reflection.
I started talking about feminism yesterday, and obviously I'm an anti-feminist, meaning that I'm against feminism, obviously in favor of everybody having equal rights, but against the philosophy of feminism and the way it affects people's lives.
And I didn't get around to saying what I really wanted to say.
The other day, there was a reporter on TV, and I guess it was Bring Your Kids to Work Day, and she was talking on MSNBC, and her son came up and started to ask for her attention.
And this was played on MSNBC as being so cute, a working mom who brought her kids to work, but you never know what's going to happen.
The kid may come on television.
And I was thinking, you know, I don't actually find this all that cute because one of the things is you're always hearing because the women in TV are all working women, you only hear from women who don't stay home with their kids.
The only people who have a voice in television are going to be women who do not stay home with their kids.
And what I was thinking as this little boy pitifully tried to get his mother's attention was that anybody, anybody with a certain amount of training can be a television reporter.
Anybody can be a television reporter.
Anybody certainly can be an anchor woman.
I don't think this woman was an anchor woman, but anybody can sit and read a copy off a teleprompter.
Anybody can do almost any job, really.
I mean, maybe an artist is unique.
Maybe some CEOs, maybe some incredibly talented sportsmen are unique.
But most people can do most jobs.
Only one person can do the job of a mother.
Only one person can be the mother of that person.
And when you deprive, especially when the kid is really little, like this kid really seemed to be, when you deprive that kid of your presence, you are depriving him of something unique that only, only you have to offer.
And one of my real problems with feminism, even though I actually think that there are problems it's trying to solve, is the denigration of the values of motherhood and of homemaking and of essentially the spiritual values that women used to represent.
And the thing is, I believe, I really do believe that feminism, the uptick of feminism, which really gained steam in the 18th century and the Industrial Revolution came along at the same time for a reason, because the Industrial Revolution stripped homemaking women of a lot of their economic power.
Homemaking women did not just raise children.
They also had home industries.
They also made clothes.
Women were called the distaff, which was a thing that you used to make clothes.
It was like a spindle that you used to make clothes.
And so women had all this economic power.
When you read Proverbs 31, Christians always say, I'm looking for a Proverbs 31 woman.
But when you read that description, it's a woman with great economic power.
She goes out and negotiates for land.
She does all kinds of business things so that her husband has a great life, but also so her family has a great life.
And that was destroyed.
A lot of that was destroyed by the Industrial Revolution.
I believe that a lot of that is coming back.
The home industries are being brought back by computers.
And what I would like to see happen, too, is when that comes back and when women, at-home women, regain some of that economic power and some of that flexibility to do more than just take care of babies, which can be a grind, that maybe, again, they will represent those spiritual values that I think are being taken out of the world on purpose.
I think they're being taken out of the world on purpose because I think if you can reduce men to meat puppets and chemistry, they don't have to be free and you can have all the power.
Because the one thing you got to notice is when people say that most people are trash, like Freud said, they don't mean them.
They mean you.
They don't mean the elites.
They mean the ordinary folk.
That's who they mean.
And it was really only through the development of Christendom that somebody said, you know, those ordinary folks deserve to have just as much power as the elite, that nobody is born to rule over anybody else.
And it is a complete picture of a human being that has the absolute right to rule himself versus a picture of these meat puppets who just need to be guided and drugged and given guaranteed incomes by these elites who have full humanity.
Daily Wire Insights00:01:19
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