Charlie, Jack, Tyler, and Blake spend the whole episode centered on a single crucial topic: With the Islamic holy month of Ramadan upon us, is Islam compatible with conservatism and with Western civilization? Support the show
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| From the age of Big Brother. | |
| If they want to get you, they'll get you. | |
| The NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone. | |
| They're collecting your communications. | |
| *Montage music* | |
| Okay, everybody, it is Thought Crime Thursday. | |
| Welcome in. | |
| We have the gang. | |
| We have Blake. | |
| We have Tyler. | |
| We have Jack. | |
| And as I should say is, Anshallah! | |
| Happy Ramadan! | |
| Wait, we don't honor that around here. | |
| And we never will. | |
| Blake, what is Ramadan? | |
| Ramadan is the holy month in the Islamic calendar. | |
| You can't say a specific time it is because they use a full lunar calendar in Islam, which is a bit shorter. | |
| Ramadan was in July or June a decade ago. | |
| It's worked its way all the way back to March. | |
| I think it moves by a couple weeks a year or so. | |
| It'll soon be in winter. | |
| Those will be very chill Ramadans. | |
| During Ramadan, if you're a devout Muslim, you cannot eat and you cannot drink anything, even water, while the sun is up. | |
| It's a harder Ramadan in March than it would be in November. | |
| Yeah, in the Northern Hemisphere, of course. | |
| Yes, but there's been cases, remember when Enes Kanter and some other Muslim basketball players, they literally didn't eat all day, and then they had to try to eat and drink stuff right before the basketball game. | |
| Yep, exactly. | |
| It can get really crazy. | |
| Obviously, it can get really extreme if you're one of the, as we'll be discussing soon, one of the many Muslims who've moved to, for example, Sweden, high up there. | |
| In the near the Arctic Circle, you can get to where your day, you know, when it was in summer, for example, you'll be having a Ramadan fast that's, you know, 18, 19, 20 hours long. | |
| If it goes full 24 hours, the Islamic law is you follow Mecca times. | |
| So does that mean that as it keeps moving towards winter that we're going to see more Muslims move northern? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Now, yeah. | |
| Now you'll have a Ramadan fast that's like, you know, freaking three hours. | |
| So Alaska is going to get like conquered by the Muslims because they can eat all day. | |
| Chill out. | |
| This came up for me when we were at Guantanamo. | |
| So the detainees, we had to obviously observe Ramadan when they were being held. | |
| And so, yeah, that's closer to the equator rather than further away. | |
| But it was also like, yeah, off of Mecca time, as you say, Blake. | |
| And then also it was that you couldn't... | |
| Basically, you couldn't, you know, you had to sort of like leave them alone completely. | |
| I can't get into it too much, but you had to sort of leave them alone until after night or after sunset. | |
| So basically, my entire schedule flipped from, you know, diurnal to nocturnal. | |
| So basically, it meant I was working night shift all during Ramadan because everything was completely off limits in the detainee camps during Ramadan. | |
| And so who was the prisoner at that then, Jack? | |
| And who was the... | |
| Who is the prisoner during that month, right? | |
| You have to wonder, like, who's actually... | |
| The question is, who actually ends up being the prisoner and who ends up being the warden? | |
| Yeah, and you know, a funny thing about Ramadan is, so it's fasting during the day, but if you've, you know, been around some of the restaurants, you may know, they tend to feast at night. | |
| And so there have been studies indicating that even though it's a month of fasting, the average Muslim gains weight during Ramadan because they're pigging out every single night and they put on some pounds. | |
| I'm no fan of Islam, which is what we're going to talk about, but I do kind of admire religious structures that forgo the flesh. | |
| Fasting practices I do actually have a soft spot for. | |
| I'm not saying I have a soft spot for Islam. | |
| I just do think that more people involving in the limitations of indulgence is generally good. | |
| You know, Charlie, there's actually a Christian tradition that is remarkably similar to what you're describing. | |
| What, you mean Lent? | |
| Well, Lent is... | |
| Very important and should be embraced, but it's not as extreme as not drinking water. | |
| You know, the ortho bros in Great Lent, it's pretty extreme. | |
| They go like full vegan in Orthodox. | |
| And they do 47 days, so they don't take Sundays off. | |
| And it's basically, I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it's all animal products completely. | |
| Wow. And Blake, what were you going to say? | |
| Similar thing. | |
| Orthodox Great Lent is no oils, no meat, no dairy. | |
| It's almost like a diet of bread and vegetables is kind of what you're encouraged to. | |
| And I think if you're sufficiently, if you're going hard at it, I think you're supposed to abstain from sex as well, even if you're married. | |
| Interesting. So there's a lot of stuff that piles into that. | |
| So Blake, are you doing Great Lent then? | |
| Yeah, and then similarly, Catholic Lent was more intense. | |
| The traditional Catholic Lent was no meat, all of Lent. | |
| And they totally have gone softball on that, where it's only on Fridays. | |
| And that used to just be the norm any Friday, all year long. | |
| And in theory, it was like, well, you're supposed to... | |
| That's where you kind of got people saying they give up stuff for Lent. | |
| It was sort of, you can replace the no meat thing that's universal with a choose-your-own-adventure approach. | |
| To Lent. | |
| But I feel like that's a cop-out. | |
| You actually want things that are expected of everyone because that's what encourages people to actually do them. | |
| And it used to be significant enough. | |
| That's where the Filet-O-Fish came from at McDonald's. | |
| I don't know if I ever told this on air. | |
| I can't remember, but my grandma was super Catholic. | |
| Every Friday, no matter what it was, even beyond Lent, was at no meat on Friday. | |
| Let's go! | |
| I was raised in that kind of a culture. | |
| I was. | |
| No meat on Fridays. | |
| Yeah. And there's a very rich Christian fasting tradition that, like, Wednesdays were, I think, again, some Orthodox still do this, but I think historically, Wednesdays were sort of a semi-fast day. | |
| You would have so many more fasts. | |
| Advent is also like a fasting period, as intended to be. | |
| There's a very rich Christian tradition. | |
| Of fasts and abstentions throughout the year that were very strong. | |
| LDS, you guys do fasting once a month. | |
| Mormons are weak. | |
| We only do once a month. | |
| But is it a 24-hour fast? | |
| No, it's big. | |
| It's supposed to be 24 hours. | |
| So it's 12 fasts a year. | |
| Is it just food or is it water too? | |
| It's supposed to be everything. | |
| No drinking, no water. | |
| See, the no water is tough for me. | |
| That is the toughest. | |
| For 24 hours that you can make it. | |
| No Jell-O? | |
| But people would always hawk the... | |
| Like the water fountain at church? | |
| Because it's always on Sunday. | |
| They're like, oh, bad Mormon, drinking the water fountain. | |
| I feel like they could just turn it off or something. | |
| Deactivate the water fountain. | |
| The no water thing, that's tough. | |
| I drink an extraordinary amount of liquid, as you can tell. | |
| I have like three gallons of fluid a day. | |
| I've been drinking a lot lately. | |
| It's good for you. | |
| It gets all the toxins out. | |
| I'm so much happier. | |
| Blake is some sort of camel. | |
| Charlie, are you still doing the last time you drank? | |
| Yeah, it's amazing. | |
| No caffeine. | |
| Since I started drinking more water, and obviously with this, but since the election, I lost a lot of weight. | |
| It's incredible how it works. | |
| So, all respect aside, though, we've been having this discussion offline a lot lately because we've been seeing, you know, obviously there's more Muslims in the West than there ever were when we were growing up, certainly more than a century ago, and the trends indicate... | |
| That will continue. | |
| And we now kind of, so we have the open debate is, is Islam compatible with conservatism and is Islam compatible with Western civilization as we understand it? | |
| And we especially are talking about this because a politician in Australia recently described Australia's approach to freedom this way. | |
| Let's play clip 296. | |
| There's been some that have been agitating in the parliament to nullify the laws, to remove them off the statute books. | |
| Think about what kind of toxic message that would send to the New South Wales community and I think the advocates for those changes need to explain what do they want people to have the right to say? | |
| What kind of racist abuse do they want to see or be able to lawfully see on the streets of Sydney? | |
| I recognize and I've fully said from the beginning that we don't have the same freedom of speech laws that they have in the United States. | |
| And the reason for that is that we want to hold together a multicultural community and have people live in peace, free from the kind of vilification and hatred that we do see around the world. | |
| Further chisel free speech laws so that Muslims aren't offended. | |
| Multicultural, but they've been having those arrive in Australia far more than they were in the past. | |
| Much larger numbers because they have immigration from India, immigration from Africa. | |
| And it's very funny how he's like, we do this because we're multicultural, unlike the United States of America. | |
| As if we're not multicultural. | |
| They also have the huge Indonesian influence, which are all Muslims. | |
| Overwhelmingly so. | |
| Largest Muslim. | |
| We of course have that in Britain. | |
| We have European countries considering blasphemy laws. | |
| And part of this is Islam. | |
| They do have a tradition of taking their blasphemy more seriously, which you could say is admirable, but it's also okay, guys. | |
| We have a history of freedom of speech. | |
| We have a history of freedom of religion. | |
| And unfortunately for all of you, freedom of religion includes the right to say that... | |
| The Prophet Muhammad was not an admirable guy. | |
| It's the freedom to say Islam is bad. | |
| And we have societies that are passing laws against this, and I think we're going to be having more discussion of this, because what you especially see now is there's a take in certain factions of conservatism in the U.S. that, | |
| like, I'm sure Jack could describe this too, that Islam is based, basically. | |
| I remember a few years ago there was that meme"Islam is right about women" which was done to short-circuit liberal brains because they can't criticize Islam but you're also basically saying that Islam being anti-women is a good thing so it was it was trolling the left but you'll just also hear people on the right say you know unironically oh you know Islam is more socially conservative they have more marriages Better in these ways. | |
| And I think we're going to see people say, we should align with them more overtly, or you might even see, some people are just going to join Islam. | |
| They'll say, I want to join a religion that's not cucked. | |
| Especially in the black community. | |
| Yeah, I want a religion that's not cucked, a religion that's not gay. | |
| I'm not going to see, I don't think a lot of white people are going to join Islam. | |
| I don't know, that ad... | |
| I said a lot, not some. | |
| That ad that Charlie tweeted out was pretty gay. | |
| It was a pretty gay ad. | |
| Let's play that out. | |
| Alright, let's play 293. | |
| *laughs* *laughs* Hey, hello boy. | |
| Assalamu alaikum, sister. | |
| What are you doing here? | |
| What does it look like I'm doing? | |
| I'm studying the Art of Patience. | |
| You can't eat for another 4 hours. | |
| Oh, Ramadan. | |
| The month of patience. | |
| Okay, well, first of all, there's bacon on that burger. | |
| Yeah, it looks like a bacon burger. | |
| No, first of all, I'm concerned. | |
| It definitely looks like bacon. | |
| Maybe it's like beef bacon? | |
| I don't know. | |
| No, this just came up and was served to me. | |
| He's obviously an actor, by the way. | |
| No, I'm upset because for some reason I'm getting served these ads on Instagram. | |
| What's in your algorithm? | |
| I don't know. | |
| My algorithm on my For You page on Instagram? | |
| Well, think about it. | |
| It's probably like hyper-masculine content. | |
| Tyler, what have you been looking up? | |
| Hyper-masculine content with fast food. | |
| I don't look at fast food. | |
| Ramadan. Or Ramadan. | |
| Tyler Abu Bakr. | |
| Tyler, you have to go on a Mormon Lent for this. | |
| Mormon Lent for Tyler. | |
| I want a Lent for Instagram. | |
| I want to know the algo recipe that got Tyler caught in a Canadian Ramadan program. | |
| Wait, so we've got Canadian Ramadan versus Mormon Lent here. | |
| I was so offended because it was just Canadian. | |
| I didn't care about the rest of it. | |
| I'm like, I don't want to serve Canadian ads. | |
| No, it's much deeper than that. | |
| It's much deeper. | |
| Was it like a Tim Hortons ad or something? | |
| We have too many Canadians in Arizona right now. | |
| Since you did bring up, you don't think we'll see people in the West convert to it? | |
| A lot. | |
| A lot of whites. | |
| For sure, but let's play. | |
| This is out of the UK. | |
| Charlie, did you say a lot? | |
| Let's play clip 291. | |
| I'm PC Paul. | |
| I've been a police officer here for 16 years, and in January I reverted to Islam. | |
| I started studying the Quran, and I started to... | |
| Look into Islam and it's just such a wonderful, wonderful, peaceful religion. | |
| In a period of five months, I've read the Koran twice. | |
| I've not missed a prayer. | |
| Young people, they'll come to me and they'll say,"Paul, because I can say to them, are you praying?" Because I know I'm praying all the prayers and it's nice because they'll come and say,"Actually, now we're praying." So, it works together. | |
| I can rub off on them and they will inspire me and they'll rub off on me. | |
| I can't even understand. | |
| People have asked me, why did you choose Islam? | |
| And my answer is, I didn't choose Islam. | |
| Allah chose me. | |
| Allah chose me. | |
| Okay, so is that like a BBC propaganda film or something? | |
| I think it was an Islamic community center. | |
| It's a few years old. | |
| I just remembered it when we were going to do this topic. | |
| No, this is propaganda. | |
| I've actually seen something really frightening recently. | |
| There are a bunch of... | |
| Again, Instagram. | |
| It's on your algo. | |
| There's influencers who are saying positive things about the Quran. | |
| Oh no, that's been happening for a while. | |
| I know, but I've seen the uptick recently. | |
| White influencers. | |
| Islam can spread through importation or conversion. | |
| Those are the two big ways. | |
| And the West has primarily been taken over by importation. | |
| Agree, right, Blake? | |
| Yeah, it's very heavily driven by immigration. | |
| Whites are far more likely to fall victim to secularism than Islam. | |
| On balance, yes. | |
| Yeah, for sure. | |
| Vast majority balance. | |
| I don't care about this weird lunatic. | |
| I can't understand. | |
| But if that starts to change, I will happily adjust that statement. | |
| What Blake said, though, is very important. | |
| And Jack, I want you to respond to this. | |
| For young... | |
| Islam speaks to young men that are very displeased with a hyper-feminized culture. | |
| And they're very upset with how feminine the American church has become and how female-centric it has become, which is so emotion and compassion and no more about reason and people's sensitivities. | |
| How, Jack, do you respond? | |
| Well, I mean, | |
| there's a few examples that I can point to, but, you know, obviously, it's just this, is that... | |
| Christianity has been central to the history and to the story and the development of Western civilization, really since the days of the Roman Empire, since when Jesus literally came, almost immediately you began having an impact in his area. | |
| Then, of course, it spread throughout. | |
| Blake and I did a whole series on this around Christmas time. | |
| So the idea that we can just take a foreign... | |
| You know, a foreign religion and import it into the West. | |
| It would completely change who we are, completely change our system of law, completely change our institutions. | |
| It would completely change everything that makes us us. | |
| And it would do so in the name of, oh, well, they're a little bit more masculine than us. | |
| And I would actually put that at the fault of the current heads of the church. | |
| In the United States, certainly the church in the West. | |
| Charlie, you and I have talked about this for years at this point. | |
| But, you know, when you look at it, there's a reason that, actually, my friend Joshua Lysak, we did the books together, my co-author, he has a phrase for it. | |
| He says, there's this brand of Christianity out there that's like, Jesus is my boyfriend. | |
| And it's very feminine coded, like, oh, I'm in love with Jesus. | |
| He's my boyfriend. | |
| And you hear this in, like, a lot of music. | |
| You hear it in a lot of sermons and homilies as well, where it's just very female coded, very emotional. | |
| It's all touchy feely and you never hear anything about condemnation of sin. | |
| That's exactly right. | |
| You know why? | |
| So here's my theory. | |
| My theory is because the Father of the Godhead is the least emphasized part of the Godhead of modern Christianity. | |
| We have churches that focus on the Holy Spirit all the time. | |
| We have churches that focus on Jesus all the time. | |
| You rarely hear about God the Father. | |
| And that's because a lot of people have father wounds and it's looked as being too patriarchal. | |
| And I think the way that we combat Islam in the West is we speak about God the Father, who is rules and order and discipline and regimen. | |
| All three obviously are God. | |
| The Trinity is an incredibly complex topic that we don't have to get into today, which we all agree in the Trinitarian God. | |
| But God, think about how... | |
| Rarely you hear about God the Father. | |
| If you were to open a random, even in Catholicism, which I have great respect for, I would say that Jesus is definitely talked about even more than God the Father. | |
| But the liturgy, fair enough, talks about all three. | |
| But let's just say you open up a random Christian sermon, and it's even a good Bible-based church, chances are they're not going to be talking about God the Father. | |
| And when you have a generation and a country that is seeking order, that is seeking rules, Then talking about that portion of the Godhead, I think, is incredibly important. | |
| Blake? Yeah, I was thinking, as you said, about, you know, yeah, God the Father, the God of rules, also, like, the God of judgment, a thing you're not going to see, that you'd see in medieval Christianity all the time, is, you know, images of the last judgment, or images of just judgment in general. | |
| Even that, that can even come, I think, through Christ. | |
| So have you ever seen the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in D.C.? | |
| It's incredible. | |
| And it's got that right behind the altar. | |
| I now try to go every time I go in D.C. Yeah, and see if you guys can bring up the interior of that. | |
| It's the closest thing, I think, to a European style. | |
| My brother just got in a little bit of trouble there because he was leading a protest against the newly installed Archbishop on Bannon. | |
| I haven't followed that story, but I'm thinking of when you look behind the altar, if you guys can even zoom into that a little bit, I think that's Jesus, even though it kind of looks God the Father-y, but he looks very stern. | |
| And menacing. | |
| And that's an element of God that there is, that God is merciful and God is forgiving, but God is also the ultimate judge. | |
| I once had a friend of mine in college who said, when I see that, I want to like fall on my face and confess my sins because I face judgment. | |
| And that's definitely an aspect. | |
| We have a very touchy-feely, like emotionally resonant Christianity, you know, like Jesus as your life coach. | |
| And that appeals to a lot of people, but I don't know that it gives the level of strict order. | |
| I completely agree. | |
| And by the way, it's feminine is what it is. | |
| It's because it's a young woman that doesn't want to be offended. | |
| She's like, oh, you can't tell me anything wrong, you know, so Jesus is my buddy. | |
| Like, actually, God is there to judge you, and God is there to tell you that you did wrong. | |
| And they're like, oh, that drives people away from the church. | |
| Well, actually, it didn't for 2,000 years. | |
| What you're doing is driving people away from the church. | |
| This whole modern, sloppy, watered-down, it's driving people to Islam is what it's doing. | |
| The truth is, I think the great hack of Christianity is it is able to have all of those elements. | |
| So it does have... | |
| That's the beauty of the trinity. | |
| But you must moderate it. | |
| As we sometimes say, it's not that things that are effeminate or feminine are bad, or that things that are masculine are always good. | |
| It is that you need things in the balance, and Christianity has historically had that balance, and it's out of alignment now. | |
| And I think we'll see. | |
| As long as that void is there, if the perception is that... | |
| Islam is the macho religion that is demanding of you. | |
| Who's to say we couldn't see all those guys who are in Trende, Aragua or whatever who currently they join weird bastardized versions. | |
| They are primed for Islam. | |
| Yeah, they're like the cult of the Saint Death and all of that. | |
| My prediction is that Islam will find its way through Latino and black men in our hemisphere. | |
| Young white Christian men, I don't think, are primed for it. | |
| But young Latino men that go into gangs, they are primed for Islam. | |
| Everyone's against you. | |
| You just want to be strong. | |
| Join Islam. | |
| Talk, Blake, about how Islam has found itself in this very patriarchal way in the past. | |
| Yeah. Obviously, a lot of guys end up joining in prison, for example. | |
| You could even say it might be an improvement. | |
| It's better to follow. | |
| The rules of praying five times a day, fasting, that over total moral anarchy. | |
| But obviously we prefer Christianity overall. | |
| And there's a lot about Islam that, as we saw in that clip, it's like a very peaceful religion. | |
| Well, no. | |
| Because in Islam, in contrast to Christianity, Islam... | |
| It rigidly defines a lot more of what you're supposed to do and how you're supposed to live your life. | |
| Rules for life. | |
| There's a lot more explicit rules. | |
| Christianity, it's almost like both a strength and a weakness. | |
| The Bible doesn't really get into the details of, for example, what does a majority Christian country look like? | |
| Correct. We have vibes, we have instructions from Paul to individual communities of believers, because our scriptures stopped at the point where we were still an underground church of a few thousand people. | |
| And we've reached the point where there are countries that have been Christian for over almost 2,000 years. | |
| And now our problem is like, you know, we have the decaying of that. | |
| We don't have a lot to go off of there. | |
| But Islam is different. | |
| Islam was a war leader, Muhammad. | |
| He unites these tribes in Arabia. | |
| And you, from the beginning, have an Islamic society, an Islamic group that, from top to bottom, is Muslim. | |
| And very shortly after his death, We start getting... | |
| Pretty strict rules on what Muslims are supposed to do. | |
| I think we've talked about before. | |
| Are you familiar with hadiths? | |
| The hadith are like writings of teachings. | |
| I think it means sayings. | |
| They're extremely long. | |
| They're about as long as the Talmud, I think, of things that the Prophet Muhammad said or did or how he reacted non-verbally to other people doing things. | |
| You'll have a hadith that is like, so-and-so did this, and Muhammad smiled and laughed when he did this, thus showing it was not bad. | |
| And within this, you have certainly a ton of generic stuff. | |
| You know, this is how you pray properly. | |
| This is how you cleanse yourself properly. | |
| Some of them are kind of funny, just because this is humorous. | |
| The hadiths, you have to be ritually cleansed to pray. | |
| And someone says, if I fart, does that make me unclean? | |
| And the Prophet Muhammad said, if you don't smell it and you don't hear it, it's okay. | |
| If you smell it or hear it, then you've got to purify yourself. | |
| If it's silent and non-deadly, you're okay. | |
| 100% real. | |
| But there's also serious ones. | |
| There is no way that's real. | |
| That is 100% real. | |
| I have it bookmarked on my computer. | |
| I'll look it up if you want me to. | |
| Of course, I keep bookmarks of funny hadiths in my computer. | |
| Of Islamic flatulence laws. | |
| You have a full page of this. | |
| Literally, look at me. | |
| I'm going to show it to you just to prove that I'm not making it up. | |
| Funny history. | |
| I have funny hadiths. | |
| And I've got... | |
| Maybe you need more subscriptions and less of this. | |
| Do you see it there? | |
| Do you see it? | |
| Yeah. Read it, Blake. | |
| All right. | |
| Okay. You're calling my bluff. | |
| All right. | |
| So this is from the Ablutions Voodoo section of the Sunnah al-Bukhari. | |
| My uncle narrated Abad bin Tamim. | |
| My uncle asked Allah's messenger, peace be upon him, about a person who imagined to have passed wind during the prayer. | |
| Allah's apostle replied, he should not leave his prayers unless he hears sound or smells something. | |
| So this is all that hummus that they were starting to eat. | |
| That hummus really starts to get the GI tract on. | |
| I can't believe you don't have Netflix and you have this. | |
| This is a weird personless subscription. | |
| But more seriously, the... | |
| The hadiths also have guidelines, for example, on how you wage war as a Muslim. | |
| So we have hadiths that say the most honorable thing you can do as a Muslim is to engage in jihad for Allah. | |
| And even though I remember after 9-11, they would say, well, jihad, you can have a jihad in your heart against the sins within you. | |
| But if you read them, and there's hundreds of these, it is very clear. | |
| They mean actually going to war for Islam. | |
| There's examples where a woman says, I would love to be a warrior to go on jihad. | |
| And he says, because your faith was so great, you will get to do this. | |
| And it actually describes she sails to a foreign land and she just drops dead when she gets there. | |
| And that's a great thing because if you die while on jihad, that's like an auto-paradise thing. | |
| In the Hadiths. | |
| So it's not that she had to fight. | |
| It's not that she had to die fighting, but that she just died while on the jihad journey. | |
| And they even get into, they have guidelines for how you distribute war captives, which includes like slaves, sex slaves. | |
| Like this is all described in the Hadiths in a very literal way. | |
| And so I like to point out to people is you'll sometimes hear Islam needs a reformation to make it more compatible with the West. | |
| But as you would know, The Protestant Reformation, the belief is they're taking Christianity back to its roots before stuff was layered over it from paganism and so on. | |
| And if you do that with Islam, you're going back to what the Hadiths say. | |
| You're going back to what is written down in our early scriptures. | |
| And they have all of this in it. | |
| And so to reform Islam in any other way, you actually have to say, we need it to just do the sort of... | |
| You know, gay liberal thing that Christianity has done where they just decide to ignore all of their scriptures. | |
| So, I agree. | |
| I think that there is some truth in that. | |
| So, Jack, what then do we... | |
| So let me ask you a question, Jack. | |
| If... Let me be as provocative as I can here. | |
| Would you, if you found out that there was a Republican running as a Muslim... | |
| How would you process that? | |
| Well, if it was a Republican running as a Muslim... | |
| A Muslim running as a Republican. | |
| Yeah. Sorry, other way around. | |
| Yeah. They're not running. | |
| A Muslim running as a Republican. | |
| Yeah, as a practicing Muslim. | |
| So the way that... | |
| Similar to, I guess, the way you'd say JFK ran as a Catholic. | |
| He ran for president as a Catholic. | |
| Not in terms of the religion, in terms of the grammar. | |
| That the way that you would look at it is to say, look, okay, these are the things we believe. | |
| These are the things that we want. | |
| These are the things that we're pushing for. | |
| And you've got to leave it up to that. | |
| You certainly have to leave it up to that district. | |
| Here's the way I look at it. | |
| Because this really centers around the idea of integration and assimilation when it comes to When it comes to migrants, because Islam is not a Western religion. | |
| Islam did not originate here naturally. | |
| There's no history in Western civilization of it other than the invasions, the Turks, the Ottomans coming through the Balkan history with this, Spain, etc., etc. | |
| That's the history. | |
| Barbary pirates. | |
| You can talk about the Houthis right now in relation to the Barbary pirates. | |
| That's been the history of the connection. | |
| My question would be is, can this be done, can it be done compatibly with what that clip the Australian premier was talking about earlier there? | |
| This is our system. | |
| This is our culture. | |
| You are coming here. | |
| You're bringing your own values and your own culture with you. | |
| So are you doing so in a way that actually complies with the standards and mores? | |
| Of our majority culture? | |
| Or are you going to turn around like you see what happen on campus all the time? | |
| Are you going to turn around and say that our majority culture has to bend and has to accommodate and is mandated to have to twist ourselves in pretzels and turn ourselves inside out to accommodate your minority imported culture? | |
| So, I mean, I asked for a reason, because I endorsed a friend of mine who's actually my family physician, Dr. Zudi Jasser, who's Muslim. | |
| However, he actually speaks out more against Islam than almost any Christian will. | |
| I mean, he will use the hadith against Islam, and he's like, we have to, his argument, and we're going to have him on the show soon, is we need to actively ignore, like, some of the more insane Mohammedan teachings, and we need a reformation. | |
| And so, however, he's an extraordinary minority. | |
| Like, he had a self-admission minority. | |
| So I think you're right, Jack. | |
| I think it depends. | |
| And I got some hate. | |
| Oh, Charlie, how dare you, as Tyler knows, endorse Zutty. | |
| I was like, well, you know, I'm not going to apologize. | |
| It wasn't that bad. | |
| It wasn't that bad. | |
| But I guess let's just talk more broadly. | |
| Either anyone can take this. | |
| Let's say if there is someone that's not like Zutty. | |
| Let's say it's someone who is very religious. | |
| Someone who's in a mom. | |
| I can't think of it. | |
| Someone comes in and they say, hey, we're doing this mass movement and we want to continue forward against all this stuff, and we might agree with them on issues. | |
| At what point do we draw the line of collaboration with Islamic fundamentalists? | |
| It's kind of happening a little bit in Michigan right now, right? | |
| It is. | |
| Because you had so many... | |
| That felt so detached because the left went so far into all these issues that they felt completely sidelined in Michigan. | |
| And that's why many voted a majority is what we're reading in exit polling supporting President Trump. | |
| So it's a great question to ask. | |
| I don't know the answer. | |
| Because in Minnesota and Michigan, this is a real community-based issue of saying, hey, how do you engage? | |
| You know, the Orthodox Muslim community in some kind of way here. | |
| So, Blake, I want your thoughts. | |
| I mean, I'm torn. | |
| I mean, during the election, I remember there were hundreds of young Muslim men that would come up asking for selfies, loving everything. | |
| They hated my Israel stance, but they loved the whole vibe of what we were doing. | |
| It's hard to kind of see them individually being, you know, the problem. | |
| I look at things more broadly. | |
| I think that when you... | |
| Import a macro ideology, you get a macro erosion of the culture, and that is irrefutable. | |
| Yeah, I think maybe a helpful way to think of it is when we think of how we're often in agreement with conservatives in other pretty different countries, like, I mean, I'm almost thinking like conservatives in like Japan, | |
| conservatives in India, conservatives in... | |
| People who share our values in entirely different places, that we can be aligned with them, but that wouldn't necessarily be like, oh, we should merge our countries together or something. | |
| And so with devout Muslims in the U.S., I think what we can say is if we agree on particular issues, we should collaborate. | |
| But big picture, we don't want America to become a... | |
| It's certainly a stated goal to spread Islam, and they have a richer tradition of both outright conquest in the name of religion, and also you can get documents like the Muslim Brotherhood has put out texts that basically say You know, | |
| our demographic tidal wave is a way for us to expand our influence in the West. | |
| And, you know, a notable thing that's worth knowing is there are prophecies in Islam that are expressly related to them one day conquering the West. | |
| So this isn't just a general, you know, let's spread our religion because we love it. | |
| It's that the Prophet Muhammad had, like, sort of prophecies that are recorded that, you know, one day Islam will conquer Rome. | |
| It will conquer the Roman Empire. | |
| And so for them, if you're a devout Muslim, there's a real sense of one day we will have the crescent over the city of Rome because we'll defeat the Christians. | |
| And again, it's a difficult thing for us to engage with because we don't favor that outcome. | |
| There are a lot of these guys. | |
| Let's put up that chart with the numbers of what percentage of different European countries are going to be Muslim by 2050 if migration rates go. | |
| If we look at that, I think it's Sweden's at 30% there. | |
| They're at 30% now? | |
| No, this is 2050 in a high migration scenario. | |
| When Ramadan is during the winter. | |
| There you go. | |
| Exactly. And then you can see it's like 15% in Italy. | |
| If Italy is 15% Muslim, that will mean the city of Rome itself will probably be 40% Muslim or something like that because they're going to cluster in the big cities. | |
| We were just talking about Toronto the other day. | |
| Toronto is like a quarter Chinese and is like 15% to 20% Muslim. | |
| Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised if there are 10 times as many practicing Muslims as there are practicing Christians in the city of London. | |
| Oh, without a doubt. | |
| Well, and so the obvious way of looking at this is that a Christian nation becomes a secular nation, then that must import new people to sustain their materialism, so then they import Islam, and then it becomes an Islamic nation. | |
| It goes in sequences. | |
| Yeah, and it's interesting because we haven't... | |
| We haven't yet seen a country that goes over that tipping point of it was a Christian country and becomes a Muslim. | |
| The UK is awfully close. | |
| The UK is getting there. | |
| And France is close too. | |
| France is scarily close, but it still isn't fully there. | |
| The closest would be... | |
| Probably Lebanon, where it seems to have been... | |
| Lebanon, when it was created, Lebanon was majority Christian. | |
| My wife is like one-fourth Lebanese. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | |
| And they ended up here. | |
| So that's not so much immigration. | |
| That's a lot of the Christians left, because they tended to be wealthier, so they emigrated. | |
| And also Beirut used to be the Paris of the Middle East. | |
| It was a gorgeous city. | |
| And now it's the Paris of the Middle East, because it's a giant slum. | |
| It's awful. | |
| So that begs a broader question. | |
| I wanted the whole episode on this. | |
| The other stuff is there's nothing else going on. | |
| Why is it that Islamic countries are so crummy? | |
| Now they might say, but Dubai! | |
| But Qatar! | |
| So you've got to reconcile that. | |
| Is there one that's nice that didn't happen to be built on a giant pile of money that they had to pay other people to dig up for them? | |
| Again, I'm not a defender of Islam, but I want us to go through this, because this is an important thought exercise. | |
| So, Turkey is not great, but it's not third world. | |
| It's probably second world, right? | |
| Lebanon used to be, but they were Christian. | |
| But the majority of Islamic countries are rather poor, very, very tribal, right? | |
| Libya, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq. | |
| And I want to flag something, which is... | |
| I think it would have a better explanation if they were basically always that way. | |
| But a lot of places that are not great in our Muslim countries now were once the apex of civilization. | |
| The Persian Empire ran the Middle East, was an innovative country. | |
| They were hugely culturally influential. | |
| If you were to say, what are the three great civilizations in maybe 0 AD, you'd probably say... | |
| The Romans, the Persians, and the Chinese in terms of their ability to influence the world. | |
| There's Persian stuff everywhere. | |
| Persia gave us chess. | |
| Persia gave us a lot of mathematics. | |
| A decent number of inventions came out of Iran. | |
| You've been to Iran? | |
| I've been to the border. | |
| Which one? | |
| The Armenian. | |
| Oh, you've been to Armenia? | |
| I don't know you went to Armenia. | |
| Been to Yerevan. | |
| It's beautiful. | |
| I went to the Ararat region. | |
| Oldest Christian country. | |
| I had to see Mount Ararat. | |
| The oldest Christian church in the world is at the base of Mount Ararat. | |
| And that was like 200 A.D., right? | |
| Yeah. Is the Ark in Armenia? | |
| No, it's in Turkey, but the Ararat region is right on the border of Turkey, and I took a taxi out. | |
| It was like the most dangerous thing I've ever done. | |
| It was like the dumbest thing. | |
| I got into Yurvan and took a taxi out to Mount Ararat. | |
| And that's a similar thing worth flagging. | |
| Turkey is the Turks, but if you take a DNA test, they're basically Greeks. | |
| They're descended from the people who've been there. | |
| I say Greek, and they were really probably the people who were just always in that area. | |
| The Greek Muslims. | |
| Yeah, so when it was a Greek empire, when it was the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire as they call it, that was a place that produced a ton of scholarship, produced a ton of innovation. | |
| It was probably actually the most technically, the most literate and advanced part of Europe. | |
| And Turkey is not. | |
| And this is actually a thing that they've asked themselves. | |
| And, like, we invented the printing press in, I want to say, like, 1500. | |
| It took, I think, almost 200 years for the printing press to really take off in the Islamic world. | |
| And it's a question that certainly has driven them berserk, like Salafism. | |
| So I have a question on a question. | |
| Jack might have some thoughts on this, too. | |
| If it wasn't for the Cold War, would the Muslim... | |
| Diaspora be as great as it is, especially across Western Europe. | |
| Right, so you're talking about this idea that there was a lot of... | |
| Carving up of, you know, by the way, not just the Middle East, but also Africa during the Cold War, this huge fight for, you know, which side is going to come in. | |
| So you had the Communists running amok all over the globe, trying to use the, you know, loot the treasury of the Soviet Union, well, loot the treasury of the Russian Empire to go and expand the revolution. | |
| And so prop up all these Communist groups. | |
| How does the West respond? | |
| The West responds by Trying to prop up their own groups. | |
| And what does this do? | |
| This creates this diaspora. | |
| So, of course, you see, you know, elements of this, like the revolution in Tehran. | |
| In 1979, you see so many Persians, you know, flee because of that. | |
| The overthrow of the Shah, you know, what, 20-some years prior, etc., etc. | |
| You could go down the list of all the things. | |
| That have happened between Israel and Egypt and the various wars from 1948 on that all involved the Arab world and all involved this massive, massive instability. | |
| You know, I look at it this way. | |
| I think that a lot of the influx of migrants in general has more to do with the legacy of World War II than anything else because it just created this So I went to Sweden and Malmo, which is one of these areas with no-go zones, | |
| I guess in 2017, and went right into the no-go zones. | |
| There were shootings going on. | |
| There were actually gang wars going on between the migrant gangs that were coming in in the current era, so in 2015 on, versus the migrants that had been there since the 70s. | |
| And so you had Somali gangs fighting Arab gangs, basically. | |
| And the local, actual native Swedes were just pretty much caught in the crossfire. | |
| This also led to massive expanse in rape numbers, which is something that, of course, we've seen across Sweden, Germany, Ireland now. | |
| Conor McGregor talking about it. | |
| I guess he's running for president. | |
| He even says, talking about this issue and what they're turning Ireland into. | |
| So I think that it's an aspect of decolonization as much as anything else. | |
| I think it's an aspect of the legacy of World War II. | |
| You know, you could say if the Cold War hadn't happened, I think that a lot of things would have changed if communism wouldn't have happened. | |
| Put it that way. | |
| It's very, very hard to say that, you know, what could have been otherwise, though. | |
| So what Blake is getting at, though, is what about Islam makes these once great peoples? | |
| They obviously genetically have the brainpower to succeed, and Persians are not dumb, right, genetically. | |
| What is it about Islam in practice that turns once great places into hell holes? | |
| So, and this is a thing that you can debate, because there was like an Islamic conversation. | |
| But what's funny is when they were in their golden age, it was some Arab Muslim rulers on top of societies that were not really Muslim yet. | |
| Egypt was, I think, over 50% Christian. | |
| They're not sure until when, but maybe until the 1200s or so. | |
| Same with large groups. | |
| I mean, the Middle East in general was maybe 25-30% Christian until World War I. And one factor that seems actually really interesting is in the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, Christianity, we don't know exactly why this was, but they got really gung-ho that there's one sin God hates more than any other. | |
| And it's consanguineous marriage. | |
| You can't marry your cousins anymore. | |
| And we have evidence of this. | |
| A pagan king would convert to Christianity and he'd write a letter to the bishop or the pope and say, okay, I'm a Christian now. | |
| What am I supposed to do? | |
| And we have some of the responses that they wrote back. | |
| And it was always kind of three things. | |
| And they would say, observe the Sabbath. | |
| You'd like that. | |
| I love that. | |
| Observe the Lenten fast. | |
| Observe the fast. | |
| Love that. | |
| And... Don't marry your cousin. | |
| You can't break any of the marriage rules. | |
| And so the marriage rules were obviously definitely no, like marrying your nieces, your brother, sister. | |
| Don't marry your godchildren. | |
| That's equal level of incest. | |
| And then the big one is don't marry your first cousins. | |
| And sometimes they'd get stricter, your second cousin, your third cousin. | |
| And they're just, they're insanely gung-ho about this. | |
| They never stop talking about it. | |
| They enforce it really hard. | |
| And a big theory is that this actually caused sort of the... | |
| It broke the sort of clannish systems of kinship that exist in most pre-modern societies. | |
| You have a clan, you marry other people in your clan. | |
| And this, one, it just lowers your IQ because you have a buildup of genetic dead weight. | |
| And it also makes it so you look to other people within your clan. | |
| You don't sort of have a group-based, more general altruism, for lack of a better term. | |
| And some people hypothesize that this basically helped launch Western civilization on its big upward trajectory. | |
| And if you look at the worst parts of the Muslim world, which are some of the ones that we, for whatever reason, are the most gung-ho to bring in, like Pakistanis who moved to Britain. | |
| Other Pakistanis will tell you they're coming from the worst part of Pakistan. | |
| And Pakistan's not a great country. | |
| Pakistan's not a great country, and they're coming from, I can't remember the name of it, but it's like one of the worst parts where they have an over 90% rate of them, for example, marrying first cousins. | |
| And if you're from a society where 90% of people marry their first cousins... | |
| But it actually lowers the genetic pool. | |
| It lowers your genetic pool, it lowers your IQ, and it makes you backwards. | |
| It's weird to say, but not marrying your cousins is like a technological breakthrough on par with the printing press or the steam engine. | |
| It's the technological breakthrough of marry random people you're not related to. | |
| And isn't that also one of the reasons why... | |
| Our settlers to America were so strict about keeping family records. | |
| That's a big driver. | |
| There was this whole, like, the family records must be really kept so that when you meet a mate, we can both look and make sure. | |
| Yeah, because you can't break the marriage rules, man. | |
| What's funny is this gets obscured because who we remember best are nobles, and nobles would get exemptions from this because noble marriages were so important. | |
| So you look at the king of England, and yeah, he marries his cousin for some complicated reason. | |
| But you needed the Pope to sign off on that, and the Pope was not signing off on that for a random dirt farmer in the middle of France. | |
| And there are what? | |
| 40 Muslim majority countries? | |
| 45? 45, 50 or so. | |
| So the richest are obviously Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and UAE. | |
| Then Bahrain. | |
| Bahrain, Brunei. | |
| And then Iran. | |
| But Iran is actually a story of a once wealthy great power that's been made super compromised because of Islam. | |
| Yeah, and it was a much nicer country under the Shah, who was nominally Muslim, but very westernizing. | |
| And you have a common trend of this, where you'll have some of the most successful leaders in Muslim countries. | |
| They'll say they're Muslim, they'll observe some external forms, but they're clearly, they desire to modernize in a Western direction, and that's what the Shah would do. | |
| And it's not super easy to say how badly, like, what's Iran's natural potential? | |
| Because to some extent, we obviously sanction them a lot. | |
| But yeah, they clearly were at the absolute apex, and they fall into being, at best, like a middle-income country under, you know, many centuries of This faith they adopted. | |
| So I guess the last question is an important one. | |
| Is Islam capable of a reformation? | |
| What I would say is I think they already had it. | |
| So for them, for example, like the age of colonialism, you know, they were dominant for a long time. | |
| The Ottoman Empire was a Muslim empire and they conquer half of Europe. | |
| They look like they may conquer Rome. | |
| And suddenly it's 1850 and they're getting their butts kicked. | |
| The Europeans have all this technology they don't understand. | |
| And they're whooping on them, and they're getting colonized. | |
| And so what you get is Salafism. | |
| So Salafism, that is the ideology of Wahhabism. | |
| That's the ideology of Al-Qaeda. | |
| It's the ideology of ISIS. | |
| It's very much make Islam great again, where they say, we built up all of this medieval stuff on top of Islam. | |
| We got away from the words of the prophet. | |
| We need to go back to the basics and practice true Islam. | |
| I would say that spiritually is what a Reformation would be. | |
| Jack, final thoughts. | |
| Islam, the West, is it compatible? | |
| Honestly, I don't think it's compatible. | |
| I think the West has Christianity at its core. | |
| The West has always been majority Christian since we've had the rise of Christianity and since the advent of Western civilization as we know it today. | |
| They're indelibly linked. | |
| And America has always been a Christian majority nation and continues. | |
| To be a Christian majority nation. | |
| And America is at its best when our moral core is Christian. | |
| Tyler? I'm still thinking about that white kid in Canada who's eating bacon. | |
| And while you're getting that ad served to you. | |
| And while I'm getting that ad served to you. | |
| Is that the Islamic Reformation that they'll start eating bacon? | |
| It did really incidentally start this whole thing. | |
| And if you're getting these ads too, you should immediately delete Instagram. | |
| I think that's what you should do. | |
| Knock it off. | |
| Take a full Ramadan to think about it. | |
| We want to hear from you. | |
| What do you guys think? | |
| Freedom at charliekirk.com. | |
| Till next week, keep on committing thought crimes. | |
| The West and Islam, are they compatible? | |
| Thanks, guys. |