David Walsh argues Western civilization’s unmatched exploration—from ocean mapping to Everest, the poles, and space—was driven by curiosity and Christian mission, not greed, yet history is distorted. He criticizes modern narratives that overemphasize non-white contributors like Sacagawea while downplaying white male pioneers such as Daniel Boone or Edmund Hillary, calling it an "anti-white obsession." His Real History series aims to correct this, framing it as a necessary counter to leftist suppression of Western achievements. [Automatically generated summary]
So, you know, a lot of what we do on the show is debunk myths, dismantle false narratives, and talk about the important facts, especially about American history, that people don't want you to know about.
And earlier this week on X, I commented on and on the show, or commented on the remarkable fact that the desire among Western people, Europeans, Americans, white people, in other words, historically, the desire for adventure and exploration is one of the things that makes them historically unique.
And so when we talk about Western culture, AOC pretends that there's no such thing as white people.
There's no such thing as Western culture.
Well, that's part of what it is.
It's one of the things, one of the defining characteristics of it that sets it apart from other cultures.
I wrote earlier this week, Europeans and eventually Americans explored the entire world, mapped and charted every ocean and populated land mass.
And then when they got bored in the 19th and 20th centuries, decided they might as well go to the North Pole and down to Antarctica, then up to the highest peak on Earth and down to the deepest depths of the ocean.
When all that was done, they went to space.
The greatest indictment of our education system is that most kids will graduate grade school and then college without even the slightest appreciation of this absolutely remarkable story.
So nothing but pure facts there.
Just all that is obviously true.
I'll read you some of the responses that I got to that and we'll go through some of them.
Placenta Pod, don't know if that's his Christian name or not, writes, so you want the learning target to be appreciate how much better my culture is than everyone else's?
Yeah, sort of.
Yeah, kind of, kind of.
You could say that.
A fundamental goal of the education system in the West should be to give children an appreciation of the things that make Western civilization exceptional.
Yes, a fundamental goal of the education system in your civilization should be to instill in children, instill in the next generation, an appreciation of and a gratitude for your civilization.
That should not be scandalous.
That should just be obvious.
It's one of those things that's so obvious it doesn't need to be said.
And yet it does, because you have idiots like this who say, what, you want people to appreciate that our culture is better?
Of course I do.
Of course I do because number one, it is better.
And number two, this is our culture.
It's our country here in America.
Yes, of course you want people to have that view of it.
Especially when it happens to be objectively true.
Elizabeth Bond responded with this.
The highest peak Everest was first conquered by a New Zealander, Edmund Hillary, and Nepalese Indian Tenzing Norge.
And in fact, most who went to conquer Everest today, who want to conquer it, will not make it without the aid of a Sherpa guide, no matter how European they are.
By the way, you know that someone, when somebody starts, when someone writes something and they start what they have written with the words er or um, you know that whatever follows is going to be the dumbest thing you've ever read.
You know, it's going to be the dumbest, most pompous thing you've ever read.
When someone actually writes, um, um, are you sure about that?
Er, I don't know about that.
Yes, Edmund Hillary was from New Zealand.
Why do you think, what, you think he got me on that?
I said that exploration is, you know, that it's the Westerners who made it to the highest peaks and the lowest depths.
And you think he got, you think he got it, gotcha?
Because it was, actually, he was from New Zealand.
Gotcha there.
What do you think New Zealand is?
New Zealand is Western civilization.
New Zealand was settled by Europeans in the 19th century.
Okay, that is Western culture.
Even if they're on the other side of the world geographically, how did they get there?
How do you think they got there, Elizabeth?
These are Europeans who got there on ships.
Another amazing accomplishment of European civilization.
So if Edmund Hillary was an Aborigine, then you'd have me.
If he was Aborigine, then that would be, yeah, then you'd have me.
That would be a gotcha.
You'd have me on that one.
But he wasn't.
Yeah, there are no Aborigine explorers.
I'm afraid to tell you.
There are no Aborigines going around the world accomplishing anything, frankly.
As for his Sherpa guide, sure, he had a guide, just like a lot of polar explorers had enlisted Eskimos, sorry, Inuits, to help them.
You know, European settlers and conquerors in North America and South America and Central America, they had native guides and translators that they used.
Yeah.
But that doesn't take away, you know, European explorers and settlers in the Pacific Islands, again, had translators, guides.
That doesn't take away from the fact that the Europeans are the ones who did all this.
European Exploration Dominance00:07:01
In fact, it just kind of underscores really my point.
When you consider that there were natives who lived near Mount Everest, but never thought to climb it.
And you had natives who lived in the Arctic, never tried to make it to the North Pole.
And you had natives who lived in what is now the continental United States, but never explored beyond their own territory.
And then Europeans come from half a world away from an entirely different world.
And they have more curiosity about these people's neighborhoods than they did.
And I think that that not only does that not undermine my point, but instead it underscores it.
Instead, it highlights my point.
I mean, that is my point.
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Hemendra Bisht wrote, the drive to explore is a species trait.
Europe industrialized.
Other civilizations pioneered it in different eras.
Modern space exploration is multinational.
The remarkable story isn't Western civilization alone.
It's human civilization, uneven, competitive, often brutal, but relentlessly expansionist.
Well, space exploration is multinational, but only in a way that, again, proves my point.
First of all, space exploration was pioneered by the United States and the Soviets.
And now the major players are the United States, the European Space Agency, maybe like Germany.
Then you do have other countries like Japan and China.
No African country has launched a person into space at all.
No Central or South American country has independently launched a person into space.
There have been a few South, I think it's a Central South American country, I meant to say.
No African country has launched a person into space independently.
No Central South American country has launched a person into space independently.
There have been a few, I think, South Americans who have gone to space hitching a ride on someone else's space program and their launch, but none of these countries have independently done it.
Here we are 60 years after the first man went into space, Yuri Gagarin, Soviet, and they still haven't done it.
So this, again, kind of proves my point.
Japan and China obviously are not white Western countries.
East Asian countries, China, Japan, South Korea, are advanced.
Although even they never had an age of exploration the way that Europeans did.
You know, with a few exceptions, even them.
With a few exceptions, they mostly explored their own regions, explored and conquered their own regions.
The whole idea of like, I'm going to get in this ship and just go across this huge ocean to a place where I don't even know where I'm going.
We're just going to go across this huge ocean, probably going to die on the way.
If we don't, we're going to end up in some other place.
They have no clue what it is, never been there, and we're probably going to die there.
Like that, that is something that, again, with a few exceptions from other parts of the world, very few, is something that was almost entirely unique to Western civilization.
No one else was doing this.
Jokes says every one of those journeys was motivated by greed.
Okay.
It's not even worth responding to.
It was greed, greed motive.
First of all, even if that were true, so when you say greed, what you're talking about is the drive for resources, which is not greed, by the way, in and of itself.
An inordinate desire for material possessions, that is greed.
Whether someone has an inordinate desire for it is, that's, I can't say.
I can't look inside their souls.
I especially can't do it 500 years after the fact.
Neither can you.
But just getting in a ship and going to another part of the world in search of resources, that's not greed.
That is need.
Like you need resources in order to exist, in order for your civilization to exist at all.
And so, yeah, like people had to do that back in the day.
I know these days, you sit around at your house and you have Amazon Prime show up and everything is provided to you like magic.
You flip a switch, lights turn on, you pick up your phone, it works, right?
You take it all for granted that, hey, why would anyone ever need to get into a ship and go to some other country, go to some other part of the world looking for resources?
Why?
Oh, those greedy bastards.
Why didn't they just go to their fridge and open it?
Why couldn't they just go to their go to their cupboard and open it and all the spices are right there?
What are they doing?
Go to all these other places looking for spices.
Yeah, that's the way that it used to work.
These things that you take totally for granted back hundreds of years ago, this was like people, people died for it.
And that's not greed.
That was just necessary in order to survive.
But that's also not the primary thing that drove these explorers and pioneers.
That's not what drove it.
The primary thing that drove it was, in many cases, curiosity, like wanting to see what's there, going to a place just to see what's there.
I mean, Europeans had a deep hunger to just understand the world that they lived in.
Curiosity Drives Exploration00:02:55
What does this world look like?
What else is here?
How big are these oceans?
What other land is there?
They just wanted to know.
A desire to know for its own sake is what drove a lot of this, and also a desire to spread the gospel.
They were driven by Christian, by their Christian virtue and their Christian principles and by the call that we all have as Christians to go forth and spread the gospel.
And that's also what drove a lot of it.
Finally, Colleen writes, yeah, well, the obscure Eskimo who assisted in the effort gets the Google homepage recognition, especially if it's a she, the guy who achieved the extraordinary thing is ignored entirely.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, that's why the average kid in school probably knows more about Sacagawea than they do about somebody like Kit Carson or Daniel Boone.
They probably never even heard of Kit Carson.
Maybe not Daniel Boone either.
And the average kid in school, because the education system is a failure, they also probably don't know much about Sacagawea, but they probably at least know a thing or two.
They know that she existed.
And that's one of the most tragic things about the anti-white, anti-male obsession of our media and our education system, especially, is that there are so many fascinating stories out there that are never told.
There are so many incredible people, so many incredible men worthy of admiration who achieved these unimaginable feats.
And we don't even know about it, or the average American doesn't know about them because the stories are not diverse.
I mean, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, right?
That is the reason why most of the greatest and most important stories in the history of the United States and of Western civilization more broadly are never told.
The reason simply is that the heroes of those stories are for the most part white.
And even worse, for the left, for the most part, white men.
And so that's hundreds of years of history that we just can't.
If you're going to talk about it, you got to find a different hero for the story.
Find someone else.
Find the random Eskimo.
Even if you have to invent her, it doesn't matter.
Just like, find someone.
Can't be this white guy.
That's the tragedy of it.
But not to make this all one big commercial, but that's one of the reasons why we created my series, Real History, where we tell the real story of American history and world history.