July 26, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:35
3362 Why Leftists Destroyed College | Duke Pesta and Stefan Molyneux
Duke Pesta joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the liberal takeover of academia, leftists college students demanding censorship, the opposition to different viewpoints and the rise of social justice warrior culture. Dr. Duke Pesta is a tenured university professor, author and the Academic Director of FreedomProject Academy, a Live Online School offering individual classes and complete curricula for students in Kindergarten through High School. For more from Dr. Duke and the FreedomProject Academy, please go to: https://www.fpeusa.orgBrilliant Anti-Common Core Speech by Dr. Duke Pesta https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si-kx5-MKSEFreedomProject Mediahttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyUPngKLxiB3xkUfHVDxGegFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio back with our good friend, Dr.
Duke Pesta.
He is a tenured university professor, author, and the academic director of Freedom Project Academy, a live online school offering individual classes and complete curricula for students in kindergarten through high school.
You can find out more about his information and his organization, fpeusa.org.
Dr.
Pesta, great to chat with you again.
So great to be with you again.
I always love talking to you guys.
So...
Political correctness, social justice warrior, safe spaces, microaggressions, the whole what seems to me noxious, claustrophobic gas suddenly seeping through the vents of American academia, and of course not just in America but other places as well – It's a topic that I think really needs to be discussed more.
As Aristotle said once, one of the great marks of an educated mind is the ability to entertain an opposing opinion, even to argue it without being swayed by it.
And of course, when you're confident in your abilities to reason, to use evidence in an appropriate and logical manner, You have nothing to fear from opposing opinions or opposing arguments because you can dismantle them.
You know, if you're Bruce Lee, you don't have a lot to fear from somebody who spent most of their life sitting on a couch eating Cheetos and playing Virtual Fighter 4.
And so the better you are at arguing, the less you have to fear from opposing opinions.
And so it seems to me that the sort of house of cards that's being built has a lot of causes in modern American academia.
But I think a lot of it has to do with an inability to accurately process arguments to separate good arguments from bad, which creates a kind of fascistic and paralyzing approach to censorship and panic and all that kind of stuff.
But of course, you're much more deeply embedded in the academic world and have more experience of it than I do.
So what are your thoughts on the catalyst and causes of these issues?
Well, I could tell you stories for weeks about my 25 years in academia.
It started when I was a graduate student.
I remember a little anecdote to begin.
I remember being in a class of PhD candidates, and our professor was a professor of American literature.
And we were going on talking about the World War II period, pre-World War II literature.
And a female graduate student, she's just been kind of bitching all class long about who did we Americans think we were and why in the world did we throw our noses into World War II?
We should have just stayed out of it.
And this professor, who was herself a classical liberal Democrat, she was a Scottish woman.
She was so blown away by this that she turned around and on the board in huge letters she wrote Hitler all the way across the board.
And the whole class started laughing.
But this was 25 years ago in grad school.
And I think where we are now – and you had mentioned this argumentation problem, that if you can think logically and you can argue, you can defend your position.
And you're also not afraid of competing opinions.
Well, that's gone now from universities.
The echo chamber of academia.
For 30 years now, professors have been liberal to hard left.
And they do a really good job of screening out non-liberals.
We keep hearing these really bizarre commentary from people who try to defend the lack of intellectual diversity in universities.
They say things like, well, you know, Republicans, conservatives, they're much more money-oriented.
They're not public service-oriented, so they never go into academia.
Well, the reality is that the faculty has done a pretty darn good job of chasing people away.
I have a pretty good, really good, actually, academic record.
I've been at seven different universities.
Over the course of my career, because once they find out who you are, they find a way to get rid of you.
They do a good job of screening you out to begin with, and then once you get there, there are all sorts of mechanisms by which they can get rid of you.
I've actually, in my career, had to sue a university who fired me, quote-unquote, simply because they didn't like my opinion.
It took a while, but I won that battle.
But this is a hard thing.
So without being too...
I'm not talking too much.
I think what you said is exactly right.
Not only can liberal progressive academics not argue anymore, they don't have to.
The echo chamber of universities is so complete that they really never encounter in universities serious arguments that combat them.
So what they think they know, they don't have to defend.
They bully, they lecture.
And so now, even to be slightly, slightly right of center, you could be very moderate.
If you're not a radical progressive, they see you as very retrograde.
Genuine conservative ideas, like we see with Hollywood liberal types, they're just mocked and impugned.
They're never really debated.
Well, yes, in the increasingly bichromatic un-rainbow of Western thinking, if you're not a Marxist, well, clearly you must be a Nazi.
There's something I read that said the degree to which leftism has been embedded, particularly in the social science.
It's not as bad, obviously, in engineering and physics and so on.
But this guy who was lecturing some participants of the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology And he said, you know, hands up, show of hands, how many are liberals?
It was a sea of hands, there's a thousand people in the audience, a sea of hands, 80% of the room.
And then he said, okay, centrists or moderates, there are about 20 hands, libertarians, 12 hands, and last, conservatives out of the thousand people in attendance, three hands.
Three hands.
Now, Of course, depending on which slice of Americana you're taking, that's 0.3% is low by any stretch of the imagination.
And these, of course, are people who claim to love diversity.
That's what they say on the left.
We love diversity, diversity of opinion, challenging your viewpoints, multiplicity of perspectives, blah, blah, blah, right?
And it's like, well, if that's the case, then shouldn't you have a giant outreach program to get more conservatives or Republicans into the social sciences?
But no, they say, well, they're just not smart enough, they're not interested, and so on.
It's like, really?
And what other demographic groups would you also apply those same terms to?
Yeah.
I can't.
Nope.
Short circuit.
Microaggression.
Macroaggression.
Sorry, go ahead.
That's exactly right.
And by their own definition, they're hypocrites.
If I set up a similar circumstance, you have this business, this corporation that was 98% white.
And they argued that, well, African Americans, Hispanics, minorities in general, they just either don't have the intellect to do what we do or they're so selfish and greedy that they don't want a part of our money trade.
They would laugh us out of the room.
These progressives spend their whole life Deconstructing the arguments they make every day in defense of their own worldview.
This is what I mean by the echo chamber.
I mean, they don't even realize anymore these progressives.
Some of them do.
I mean, you do have the Bill Ayers types.
You do have some academic progressives who know exactly what they're doing, who have no problem despising their enemies so much that they don't want to hear from them.
Those are there.
Much more dangerous is that Squishy middle 50% of academic leftist academics who honestly don't see the contradiction in what they're doing.
They are intellectually incapable of recognizing that the bigotry they fight is the bigotry they promote.
Well, and I think this is only reinforced in particular in the peer review process.
Once you get a significant majority of leftists in the academic circles, then they tend to put up the Hadrian's Wall, right?
I mean, see, there's so much against walls on the southern border, but walls against conservatives coming into their profession.
A study, and I'll put all the links to this below, but...
A study trying to examine where people in the humanities felt, how they felt about conservatives.
Almost 19% said, yeah, I'm going to have a bias against a conservative-leaning paper.
24% said they'd have a bias against a conservative-leaning grant application.
14% said that they really wouldn't want to invite a conservative to a particular symposium.
And 37.5% said they would not like to choose a conservative as a future symposium.
Colleague.
Now, of course, they persist in saying no discrimination exists, but when they're actually...
And these are just people willing to admit it.
I think we can assume that the numbers are probably a little higher.
Selectivity bias, right?
If you got 37% willing to admit that, there's another 30% that would quietly, gleefully engage in the behavior as well.
Yeah, and there's also reviewers rejected papers with controversial findings.
Because of poor methodology about accepting papers with identical methods if they supported more conventional beliefs in the field.
So what people did was they obviously created these fake papers, used exactly the same methodology, but one of them went against leftist grain and the other one did, and the bias was extremely clear.
And so my question is, why is anyone talking about the students and their fragility?
I think what we need to understand, and this, of course, has occurred in lower education, so to speak, as well, right, sort of in all the way from kindergarten through high school, that, you know, a lot of women, a lot of lefties and all that kind of stuff.
So my question is, let's not focus on the fragility and need for safe spaces and hug puppies for the kids.
Let's talk about the lack of diversity and the inability to promote and challenge their own opinions among the academics, among the teachers and the professors themselves, because it seems that the kids' sensitivity is just a shadow cast by that monument to bigotry.
I think that's well said.
And look, you have an example in universities of what happens to sheltered, pampered intellectuals who have safe spaces constructed for them.
Look at your faculty, right?
The faculty, the American university is a walled off, monolithic, completely isolated animal.
There is no diverse, genuine intellectual diversity.
There are no really serious arguments don't take place on college campuses anymore.
From the progressive professoriate's point of view, it's all been answered and asked.
Republicanism is evil.
Christianity has to go.
Western culture is a cancer.
Multiculturalism is the only way to proceed.
Marxist social thought is the way to go.
There's no debate about this.
So that kind of pampered inbred, spare the precious flowers, the snowflakes, from any argument that challenges what they already think they know, you have what's going to happen to all these kids by just looking at the university.
And that, I think, is what is so damning.
And you mentioned wall building.
It's not just wall building anymore.
Building walls to keep conservatives, Christians, seriously religious people, to keep non-progressives out.
It's not just that.
Universities are actually building walls internally.
They're walling off literature now.
They're walling off real history.
They're walling off genuine interaction between the humanities by promoting all this identity politics.
I mean, I've got kids at my university, and this is true of universities all across the country, There is no requirement anymore for basic American history.
You don't have to take any American history other than ethnic diversity or diversity courses in America.
There's no traditional American history courses.
I'm an English professor.
We no longer require almost...
Shakespeare's not required of English majors anymore.
The argument, the great writer of Western culture, the pinnacle, so to speak, of Western literary achievement...
Not required.
Yet there are numerous kinds of diversity.
So you're not learning traditional history.
You're learning the history of Marxism, the history of homosexuality, the history of labor unions.
You're learning all of that leftist history, but you have no traditional playing field to play off of that.
When I was in graduate school in the 1980s and early 1990s, back then, Good books were still being read and traditional history was still available.
All the other stuff was being balanced out with it.
What we decided as university professors in the late 90s, by the time you got to the late 90s, professors realized that if you show kids the traditional view of American history and show them our leftist stuff, they're going to default 8 out of 10 times to the traditional stuff.
So by the turn of the century, they had simply set about removing all history, literature, philosophy that did not promote the Marxist, liberal, secular, humanist worldview.
And so now, this is the danger.
Kids don't have traditional values to fall back on.
They don't have a traditional historical understanding of their country.
They don't know what liberty means, and they don't know what it costs historically.
America's responsible for all the evils of the world.
They don't know our history.
If we just get rid of American values, what did that federal judge say yesterday, right?
That he sees Judge Prosser, or Posner, I think his name is.
He says, I see no reason for any modern law student to study the American Constitution for one second, he says.
It's utterly unnecessary.
The world has changed.
That's all over with.
And this is exactly the same thing we're teaching our kids in the schools.
Well, and of course, the traditional American values of small government, of free markets, and so on, with all of the stains, of course, that are in every culture's history of slavery and so on, but the values, traditional American values, are important to keep away from students because, of course, That's not where America has been going for the past couple of generations.
It's what you could say since the progressive area at the turn of the last century.
It has been going for bigger government, fiat currency, vote buying, imperialism, foreign wars that go on forever, a military industrial complex, and massive government control of the economy, all of which is socialist leading to communist in nature.
So of course, if there's huge amounts of criticisms of where America is in the current year, Then it can't be that it's because traditional American values have been applied consistently.
In fact, quite the opposite has occurred.
So to criticize the present is to unravel the Marxist narrative because the Marxists have won so indisputably in public and private policy.
I mean, what is it?
Eight out of the ten platforms of the Communist Manifesto have already been implemented in America.
So if America's in a bad place, you can't blame traditional American values, which is why you need to keep them away from students.
That's right.
You have to keep them ignorant.
I'll give you one example.
You mentioned slavery.
One of the things I started doing about seven years ago, because I got so frustrated, kids were coming to me at college.
I think I mentioned on our last segment together that the average college junior, senior that I have in English, English major, has about a seventh, eighth grade reading level.
They really are that poor.
They're not even high school level.
So you keep them ignorant.
You don't let them read complicated books.
You don't teach them how to read in a complicated way.
Because if they're complicated thinkers – a complicated thinker, of course, a complicated reader is somebody who, like you began the segment, right?
Somebody who is capable of assessing other arguments, using what's good from them, rejecting what they don't like.
Oh, that's gone.
You mentioned slavery.
I started giving quizzes to my juniors and seniors before I even passed out the attendance sheet the first day of the syllabus.
I gave them a 10-question American history quiz.
And we started, even though I'm an English professor, not an American historian, just to see where they are.
And this has been true for seven consecutive years.
The vast majority of my students, I'm talking like 9 out of 10 in every single class, 28, 29 out of 30 kids, they have no idea that slavery existed anywhere in the world before the United States.
And I've got Christian kids, I've got Jewish kids, Moses, Pharaoh, none of that.
They have none of it.
They are 100% convinced that slavery is a uniquely American invention and that with the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery ended worldwide.
They are convinced of this.
How do you give an adequate view of history and culture to kids when that's what they think of their own country, that America invented slavery?
And the whole Black Lives Matter movement, which is taught as absolute history in English classes and philosophy classes and sociology classes and anthropology classes and race identity classes, that's the new narrative, right?
That even though slavery ended in America, it's still with us in the way we oppress minorities.
And so that's all they know.
They know nothing else.
Well, of course, that is one of the great lessons of the abolitionistic movement.
Slavery, of course, was practiced throughout the world for as long as human history has ever been visible.
Human beings have owned slaves, and the Ottoman or Muslim slave trade is reported to have killed about 100 million blacks from Africa and so on.
Yeah, white Western Christian Europeans ended the slave trade worldwide.
And now who are the only group that gets blamed for the slave trade?
The group that participated in it for the shortest amount of time with the least amount of slaves.
And it was only a couple of percentage points of the population who actually owned slaves.
And some of those were blacks who owned slaves who did not even go into Africa to catch slaves because they couldn't survive with all the bugs in Africa.
So I had to wait for the blacks to bring the slaves to the shores.
It's a more complicated history.
I've got a whole truth about slavery presentation, so I won't get into all the details.
But I think one of the things that's tragic about what's going on in the American colleges, and of course, I think there's some data for this, but let's sort of rely on your experience for this, is that it seems that the net has been cast very wide as the huge amounts of money from the government have been is that it seems that the net has been cast very wide as the huge amounts of money from the government have been pumped into higher education, which means Lots of people building their bureaucratic entities.
But of course, what's happened is you've had to cast your net a lot wider.
And there's this weird correlation-causation confusion where people say, well, people who go to college do really, really well in the economy.
So if we get more people to go to college, they're going to end up earning the 60% more or whatever it is that people with college degrees earn.
Obviously, college has its value and will teach you to use your mind better, but it generally doesn't make you a lot smarter.
IQ tends to be, you know, somewhat hereditary, a little bit environmental, but certainly as you get older, it tends to become more and more fixed.
So smart people go to college, not college makes people smart.
And so I think what's happened is as the net has been expanded, the standards have had to fall.
Otherwise, people would be failing out and fewer people would want to go to college, which of course is not to the interest of the college administrators.
So I think you cast your net wider, you end up with a lot smaller fish.
And I think that's caused a whole challenge and made it less valuable for smart people because they have to contend with the less intelligent who are all around the place dragging down the standards.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
I would argue, routinely, about 40% of my kids every year don't belong.
Four out of ten of my students, they either cannot do the work, they're intellectually incapable, they can't read at the level they're supposed to, their math abilities, their critical thinking skills.
Their historical knowledge is shockingly low.
They don't belong.
Or some of that 40% is kids who won't do the work, kids who theoretically could do it, but attitudinally they're just too immature.
They're blowing off classes.
So about four out of ten of them don't belong.
Now, we can't fail 40% of our kids.
We can't.
Especially because, you know, we mentioned this when we talked about Common Core, you and I, and Common Core, as we said, is just a bleed-down into high school, middle, and elementary school of this exact same attitude that higher ed has labored under for 40 years, right?
So this is the bleed-down now.
The creature has outgrown its cage and is now bleeding down to education at all levels.
But this is the problem, that these kids don't belong, they can't belong, but one of the first things, people forget, one of the very first things President Obama did When he became president before Obamacare and his other debacles, one of the first things he did, very quietly, was to federalize the student loan program.
In the past, the banks controlled the student loans, which made a lot more sense because a bank's not going to lend you money if they don't think you're going to pay it back.
So you bring your daughter to a bank and you say, I want $250,000 over the next four years for my child to go to Yale and be a women's studies major or a creative writer.
Bank's going to say, no way.
No way.
If you, on the other hand, say, like, my kids got in the pre-med program, I need a couple hundred thousand dollars to study medicine at Johns Hopkins, that's a whole different ball of wax.
Well, your status federal government under Obama decided that that's not fair.
We shouldn't provide money for doctors that we're not providing for women's studies majors.
So now all these kids are going to school.
It's all completely underwritten by the federal government.
And what that means for the universities is not taking students, not taking unqualified students means that we're not getting all that money.
That money is guaranteed.
If the kid never pays that money back, the feds have to deal with this, not the universities.
So we have thrown open our doors.
We're taking anybody with a pulse.
I mean, obviously the Harvards and the Yales are a little harder to get into, but we're taking anybody who has a pulse.
Why?
Because we're getting all the money for it.
And like you said, if we're bringing in all sorts of unqualified customers pretending to be students, we can't fail them.
We just have to lower the overall standards.
So the high achievers are being sacrificed to maintain a lower level of overall achievement.
And again, is that not the walking, talking definition now of what Common Core does at the lower grades?
It's exactly the same premise.
Right.
And I would certainly, I don't think it's too controversial of a statement to say, Dr.
Pesta, that repeating propaganda, just slightly less challenging than actually learning how to think for yourself, how to reason, how to write, how to stand up and speak your mind, how to take counter arguments that are strong.
You know, you only get as strong as the people you're fighting.
And so I think that the expansion, sorry, go ahead.
You see this with the whole snowflake safe spaces.
I've always learned the most from getting slapped down.
When I was 20 years old, I thought I was the king of the world like we all did.
I thought I knew everything.
And a professor much more smarter and educated than me, like a puppy, whacked me on the nose with logic, truth, and history.
I learned something.
See, now we've created a situation where you can't whack the puppies anymore, where every puppy has to be stroked and petted and given a milk bone.
This, I think, the two things that I would say, if you'd have asked me for two quick things, one would be the echo chamber of universities that professors themselves no longer encounter, and they didn't in grad school.
They no longer encounter ideas they don't agree with.
They no longer are taught to respect different points of view.
The second thing I would have said is this, right?
It's the sociology of education now.
We've created an educational paradigm that's based utterly on self-esteem, feeling good.
There is no truth.
One of the things that you said, the death of Western culture, we got rid of truth.
There is no truth, we're told.
There is no truth.
There's no beauty.
There's nothing that endures.
There is no genius now.
Everything's a social construct.
Ironically, and as you know, Stefan, right?
Everything's a social construct except my Marxist position to deconstruct your...
Yeah, there's no such thing as truth except for the truth that Republicans are either.
That's absolutely...
There's no moral relativism when it comes to the enemy.
There's only moral relativism when you're trying to argue against them, then there's no truth.
When they put their arguments forward, there's this Mussolini-style boot-on-the-forehead kind of truth that you'll get punished if you don't comply with...
And the expansion of these softer disciplines, I don't even know what to goo, is probably the best way of putting it.
Because if you are running a physics program, if you have to lower your standards, it's immediately evident.
If you are running, you know, rigorous courses on philosophy, and I think for the philosophy students, like a right under a physics system in terms of highest IQ, if you have to lower those standards, it's immediately evident.
But if you have these soft kind of goopy echo chamber nonsense pseudo disciplines, then you can lower those standards and nobody really notices it.
And so I view the expansion of the humanities and the leftism within the humanities as the giant catch basin for the incoming wave of people who probably shouldn't be there but can't be failed.
They just sort of get diverted into this catch basin and that's where they stay until they graduate with a degree and then can't ever get their lives started.
And this is the thing that really bothers me about it because it sounds like we're negative on the students who shouldn't be there.
It's actually out of great affection and love for these people that they shouldn't be there because they're going to get these degrees.
They're going to graduate, you know, 25, 35, 45 or more thousand dollars in debt.
They're not going to be able to get the jobs they want.
Their lives are going to be postponed.
You know, the number of people who are getting married and having kids in their 20s now is enormously declining partly because of the student loans.
Their credit might be ruined.
Home ownership is down.
People who could have been really great as electricians or plumbers or janitors or whatever it is that's more in line with their abilities have been sucked into this giant machine for the profit of leftist intellectuals.
And in many ways, you could really say that the people who owed them the truth lied to them.
And it could really be honestly said that millions of lives are being destroyed because of the greed of people who damn well know better.
You know, you're exactly right.
And to start with the end of your comment there and work backward, that's right.
So you're 17 years old, you just graduated from high school.
About 40 to 50% of my kids would be so much better off spending a year joining the service for a couple years, joining the Coast Guard, learning how to be a plumber, a carpenter, something.
But if you're 17 years old, you leave high school, and you muck around for a couple years finding where you should be, that's fine.
You have no debt, right?
You haven't spent any money.
You're still 19, 20 years old.
These kids are graduating from college now.
They go right into college because it's paid for by the federal government.
They go right into college, and it's taking the average university kid now needs five and six years.
Years to get a four-year degree.
Literally at my university, they're telling kids, don't take a full order of courses.
It's too hard.
So instead of taking four years for a four-year degree, take five or six.
And you know the interesting thing?
If you think about Obamacare, under which children are designated as children until they're 27, that's about the time now that our kids are graduating with undergraduate degrees.
So now mandatory pre-K they want, right?
They want mandatory pre-K. They want to Have kids in school from two and three years old all the way until they're adults at age 27.
And that's the perfect time to take them.
And one more comment about what you said that really fascinated me.
The social justice warrior mentality.
You're right about the humanities.
The humanities are the problem now.
And as a humanities professor, it breaks my heart because I hate to tell you, and I know you know this, the humanities are the answer.
That the only way we're going to fix these kids is if we teach them to think critically, philosophically, if we give them an accurate view of history, if we have them read the world's classics rather than this political junk we're feeding them.
So, you know, the bottom line is that the humanities are the sinkhole, but fixing the humanities is the only way to fix this problem.
You can't just send kids from high school into fast tracks for the departments of physics or biology.
And here's the thing.
The University of Wisconsin Has an endowed chair, Stephan, has an endowed chair in feminist biology.
This is beginning to affect the sciences.
The sciences now are being – well, think about global warming.
Think about how much bogus science is involved.
But you had mentioned before, if you're going to get a grant from the federal government… In a lab on a university campus, if you're a scientist on a university doing climate research, you're being evaluated on how much grant money you bring to the school.
Are you going to be able in this climate as a university scientist to apply for and win a grant to get money to show how global warming isn't true?
It's never going to happen, right?
And so the only way you get money as a functioning university science is to politicize your science according to what the government wants at the time.
And that's all leftist science, right?
So at University of Wisconsin-Madison, there is an endowed chair in feminist biology, as if biology itself, simple life, the study of life, now is a gender issue even more than it is a science.
And it's hard for people to understand just how much these costs have increased.
So, you know, back in the 70s, it would take an average family 13 weeks to pay for a year at Harvard.
Now it's more than a year.
Average cost of tuition and fees at a private nonprofit four-year university was over $31,000.
In 1971 to 72, it was $1,800 in current dollars.
It's gone up, like, staggeringly.
Even at public four-year schools, of course, heavily subsidized.
Tuition and fees, a little over 9K. Recently, in 1971, less than $500.
So what's happened is...
This is so typical in these kinds of economic scenarios.
The government has started funding things, and people always think, ah, you see, well, when the government starts funding things, of course the price of things are going to go down.
No, no, no, quite the opposite.
When the government starts funding things, the price of them go up, because demand goes up.
And the colleges, again, the cost of providing the education hasn't gone up much at all, even if you don't count things like the internet and all that kind of stuff.
Because, you know, theoretically, you should just be able to do courses on your own and go take an exam.
I mean, that would be the sensible thing to do.
But, of course, when universities first came in, I guess you could say 2,500 years ago, but even over the last 100 or 200 years, the technology wasn't possible.
You should just be able to go write an exam and have that be your proof of knowledge.
But the amount of spending that's going on in universities is enormous.
And there is a tendency that all organizations that are not specifically conservative will always end up being left-wing, particularly if they're shielded from the market, heavily subsidized.
Of course, they're going to end up praising the government.
Of course, they're going to end up loving government spending and ignoring the costs of taxation because that's who funds them.
And as the old saying goes, whoever pays the piper calls the tune.
Yeah, and that's it.
We had talked before about how the Common Core was the feds now seizing control of elementary, middle, and high school education for just these reasons.
After all, what is it that made all 46 states buy into Common Core was the threat from the federal government that if you don't, we're not going to give you money, right?
And so because we want the money more than we want liberty, right, the liberty as states to educate our kids, Universities are the same way.
Rather than be independent places of genuine learning, where the best and brightest go to be challenged in the best and brightest ways, rather than that model that really worked for us as a civilization for hundreds of years.
I mean, you go back to the, you know, in Western European countries, the university system was born a thousand years ago, right?
Christianity gave rise to these schools.
The Christian religion, if you want to call it that, liberalized.
And so the idea became prevalent in Christian universities that as people who believe in God, we are also free to study the world that God made.
And so the study of science began to emerge out of that.
The philosophical naturalism began to emerge out of that.
That system worked really well, but it was a system based on merit and privilege, right?
That you either had to be tremendously gifted if you were a poor kid, and then there were all sorts of scholarships available for those kinds of kids.
Some of the greatest minds we've produced, people like Christopher Marlowe, John Milton, these were relatively poor kids who demonstrated great aptitude and received scholarships.
And the idea being that only the best and brightest – it was one of the ways to break down the class distinction.
Some of the best and brightest minds – Newton was another one – who came up from relatively unimpressive circumstances, but their intellectual gifts gave them access.
We've completely rewritten this now.
Now it's the lowest common denominator.
And my favorite quote is one from C.S. Lewis back in 1938 when he was writing the Screwtape Letters.
Lewis, of course, it's one devil talking to another about the best way to destroy human beings.
There's a great section in the Screwtape Letters about education.
And Lewis says, turning now to America, he says, our biggest threat, Lewis said in the 1930s, as devils are the biggest threat to the demonic kingdom, Lewis thought, was American, the American system.
And in 1938, Lewis said, his devil said, we can destroy the American education system and thus destroy American liberty.
If the philosophy of I'm as good as you ever has its way.
The philosophy, the faux democratic philosophy that says every kid is the same kid, is equal kid.
All kids should be in college.
All kids are entitled to the same education, whether they can do it or not, whether they want to do it or not, whether they have the attitude for it or not.
When I'm as good as you has its way in America, Lewis said, 80 years ago, then American education will cease to be in the country's entire Republican mindset will go away.
I think he was very prescient about it.
It's a great book, by the way.
I really, really recommend it.
There's a wonderful bit in it, totally tangential, but it's a wonderful bit in it where the one devil is saying to the other, the best way to tempt a man with decaying his soul is not to provide him great temptations to do evil, but rather distract him with inconsequentialities and tiny petty worries and have him stare at the cold embers of a fire, worrying about nothing he can change in the past and nothing that matters in the future, and that way you get him to lose his soul.
Make sure you do not tempt him with any great evils because that will muster his defenses And he will then find virtue thereby.
I'm paraphrasing, obviously, but it's something like that.
The idea that it is pettiness that is the great evil of virtue, the great enemy of virtue, not evil, has always struck me as very, very powerful.
Well, what did they say about Eichmann, right?
The banality of evil, right?
The idea that – you're right.
And what Lewis said with regards to education I think is exactly perfect, that we are a republic.
We're not a democracy.
The ancients all hated democracy, and they were right to hate it.
This idea that mob rules, majority rules.
Your founding fathers detested the idea.
The ancients all – have you ever – reading Roman history is absolutely stunning.
Reading, you know, Suetonius and Plutarch on the fall of the Roman Empire, how the republic – by virtue of what?
By the destruction of morality and the destruction of education.
Those two things transformed a vibrant republic into a democracy which quickly became an oligarchy, which quickly became a tyranny.
And you can sort of see, without being hyperdramatic about it, you could certainly see us, you could plot us on that line.
Go back to where we were in 1900 as a culture.
We were a fully functioning republic.
Somewhere after World War II, we shifted into teaching our kids that we really were a democracy.
Fifty years later now, we're reaping the rewards of that, and you're beginning to see greater, greater fascist behavior by people who think we are a democracy.
The Democrats in our universities are not Republicans in the sense that they believe in a republic, a place where the people are empowered.
They're Democrats in the sense that they believe they have numbers on their side now.
So they're transforming culture within the universities.
It's all run by liberals, and so you will be liberal too.
Now you're seeing that spill out into the broader culture.
I mean, you really could map it on a timeline.
If you lay down the 200 years before the fall of Rome, before Christ, to the 200 years after when Rome was a full-fledged empire, you could sort of lay that on our timeline over the last 150 years, and there's remarkable parallels to that.
Actually, we'll have to come back and talk about that.
I'm just working on a Fall of Rome presentation to help people to understand.
There's an old saying, I think Acton, the guy who said power corrupts, also said that historical principle is far more important than historical detail.
And that if you, it doesn't matter when the Roman Empire, like it doesn't matter which king or which emperor succeeded which emperor, what matters is the principles that you can apply to the present.
Now, it's also struck me that There are two things that the giant massive subsidization and isolation from the marketplace that is occurring in higher education and as vastly as you say coming out of the federal level.
Federal tax expenditures for higher education, $29 billion larger than it was in 1990 in real dollars.
Between 1990 and 2013, federal loans grew 376% compared with an enrollment growth of just 60%.
Federal government, way, way the largest student lender, issued $103 billion in loans in 2013.
States are just less than 1% of that at $840 million.
So I think that there's a couple of things that the federal government does, has an incentive to do with regards to this kind of funding.
First, of course, government loves to fund indoctrination for bigger government.
So the fact that, you know, it's funding a lot of people to go into the humanities where they're going to be indoctrinated about bigger government and government is a solution to all problems, the free market is evil, and without the government barrier, you're going to be eaten alive by cannibal banksters and so on.
I mean, all of that is...
I think it also gets to mask unemployment.
Because, of course, people who are in school are not considered to be, of course, unemployed because they're not actively looking for work.
So it helps keep the unemployment numbers low.
And I think it also helps to cover up cultural deficiencies in various groups, right?
So, as you know, in a lot of states, Asians, East Asians...
Tend to have their scores reduced on the SAT and whites, I think, are fairly neutral.
Hispanics and blacks have their scores increased.
And the degree to which there are cultural differences that could be changed to more of a focus on education, more of a focus on reading and so on in black and Hispanic communities could really help, I believe.
And of course, I've long talked about excessive corporal punishment in black and Hispanic communities and so on.
So there's cultural things that are cultural, cultural things, what a terrible phrase.
Things based on culture.
There's sort of cultural habits that are sort of covered up by all of this stuff.
So you keep the unemployment numbers low, indoctrinate the kids and cover up certain cultural deficiencies when it comes to approaches to education.
And I think all of those things combine to create this kind of whirlwind or giant sucking sound or whirlpool of lowering standards.
And man, when you lower the standards...
In culture, it no longer remains culture.
You are no longer cultured.
It's not just that you're lowering the standards, because we are doing that.
And so we're starting to see a fallback.
This was by design.
Rather than try to elevate the cultures, the individuals, and all of us who are at the lower end of the spectrum, rather than try to elevate us now, the mantra is that those of us who are behind, whether for cultural or personal reasons, those of us who are behind are behind because somebody else is doing it to us.
We have completely exonerated.
This is where all the social justice comes in.
This is where all the identity politics, all the Black Lives Matter stuff, all the Marxist stuff.
The argument now is that if you are underperforming, it's not because you're not working hard enough.
It's the I'm as good as you that Lewis was talking about.
That I'm as good as you.
If I'm not doing as well as you, it must be because you're tyrannizing me.
It must be because your culture is holding me down.
And so not only are we lowering standards, but we're also telling the people at the bottom of the standard that they're there because of the greed, the racism, the bigotry of other people.
So now we have low-achieving kids who are not achieving and we're not helping them.
We have no way to help them.
But what we're doing is we're keeping them ignorant, but we're feeding them all this social justice theory.
So these kids who are underperforming now have no impetus to work harder.
Even to suggest a child who's failing work harder is a microaggression, right, if that kid happens to be non-white and non-male.
So you can't even suggest, you can't even point out to these struggling students there's a problem.
And you take away that and you fill their heads with, whatever you have that I don't is a result of your having taken it from my people.
And so that's what we're seeing on campus now.
Greater and greater ignorance and more and more political arrogance.
That's a dangerous combination for any culture.
And I think about this, because this bothers me at my very, very core, because I think like every decent person in society, I'd love to see more egalitarianism of outcome among disparate ethnic and racial groups.
I think that would be just what a great...
I think that by, of course, talking to minority kids and saying you have little chance because of institutional racism, which is a wonderful thing.
It's like this voodoo spell that conjures racism even when there's no evidence of racism because you can just replace the word person, personal racism, with individual racism.
You don't have to prove anything.
But not only is it not trying to work hard to instill better work ethics and better focus and so on, and this should start way back in the day, of course.
You can't just do it immediately to people who've come to college.
But also, isn't it fair to say, Dr.
Pesta, that it's teaching people to hate the dominant culture?
And if I go to Japan and I want to succeed in Japan and I hate everything about Japan and I say it's really prejudice against white people and Japanese people are racist.
There's this institutionalized racism.
They're always rejecting me.
They're always blackballing me.
They're always ostracizing me.
I can't get ahead and it's because they're so nasty and they're so evil.
What possible chance do I have to succeed in a Japanese society?
Isn't it crippling people of their chance to succeed by not only refusing to confront them on potentially poor work or study habits but also filling them full of hatred of the entire culture or system that they're going to need to work in to succeed?
Yeah, and what you're talking about without mentioning it is white privilege, right?
We've gone from all of this race-class consciousness over 40, 50 years to now a point where everything is white privilege, right?
That it doesn't matter who you are.
If you're a white – and it always troubles me because what exactly is a white person?
You're telling me that someone like Aristotle and someone like Dante and someone like Lenin – And someone like me, we're all the same person.
I mean, there is such a tremendous amount of arrogant racist assumption about lumping people that way.
The same progressives who get mad if you fail to properly distinguish a Mexican person from a Dominican, right?
They see you as a raping racist.
There's no problem lumping every person who is slightly melanin-challenged from now to 2,000 years ago in the same camp.
So you're right.
What we're doing is we are re-inscribing racism.
I make this point all the time.
The real sexist and biggest on any university campus are the professoriate.
I mean, this idea that you're going to condemn somebody as a bigot, no matter what they say, no matter what they do, no matter how they comport themselves, simply by being white makes you a bigot.
How is that different than the way we used to treat African Americans in this country, right?
It's not a lick difference.
And so, same thing with gender.
To me, the single most sexist word that kids hear on a college campus every day is patriarchy.
My students, every one of my kids can tell me the word, what misogyny means.
Every one of my students know that misogyny is the irrational hatred of the female.
Not one in 25 years could tell me what the irrational hatred of men is.
Can you give me that one, Stefan?
Misandry.
Yeah, they don't know it.
I don't have a single kid in 25 years who can use the word misandry, right?
So they know what it is to irrationally hate women, but the idea—you couldn't hate men.
In other words, you can't hate men enough if you're a feminist on a university campus.
You cannot hate white people and white culture enough if you're a teacher of race.
And so, you know, just because it's coming from the left doesn't make any less bigoted.
Well, this is the great tragedy.
And I know, I always hated to plumb people's motives because that's voodoo as well.
But let's just say that they wish to improve ethnic relations and so on.
Constantly screaming racism at people is not the way possible.
I mean, we kind of deep down know, and I've said this on the show many times, that calling someone a racist without clear evidence of racism is racist.
And it doesn't matter whether it's from which ethnic group it comes from.
That is a disturbingly and deeply racist action.
And it is almost going to virtually guarantee that different groups are going to have a much tougher time living together.
Because this fear that people have, generally white people, to a small degree, maybe East Asians as well.
But the fear of, oh, I'm going to be called a racist for pointing out empirical facts or disparities between different groups and so on.
And not blaming it all on white people.
That is, I don't think it's solving the problem.
I think it's actually making it worse in the same way that, you know, anti-poverty programs make things worse and anti-drug programs generally make things worse, at least at the government level.
But until we can, you know, stop the race baiting and start to, with empirical data, with empathy, with humanity, with curiosity, begin to explore the differences in outcomes between groups, whether it's cultural or other factors that are involved, We are not going to be able to get along and I feel a certain amount of despair about that because it would be great,
you know, the diversity theory where we can get along and enrich each other's differences, I fail to see how screaming racism Mostly white people is going to allow us to productively enjoy the differences in our cultures.
Well, we've created a situation now where, as you pointed out at the outset, Western culture, whether it's white Christian culture evolving into the Enlightenment and beyond that into the age of science and reason, that whole arc of history now we have branded racist, irredeemably racist.
So we're not teaching kids those books because they're racist books.
In the few instances when we do teach those books, we teach them from an oppositional perspective.
This is why, forget that Jefferson was 200 years ahead of his time as a political theorist.
He owned slaves, so his whole life is invalidated, right?
So the very culture that gave us Magna Carta, that gave us the Constitution, that gave us civil liberties, the very culture.
And abolitionism.
The very culture that provided for the first time in human history guaranteed women's rights, rights of minorities and homosexuals.
That culture now has been branded irredeemably racist.
And all the other cultures of the world that still to some degree, and some in many cases very much, participate in all of those social evils, still doing them.
Those cultures are pointed out to us as our model, right?
That you can't criticize what goes on in the Congo.
You can't criticize what Islam does.
I mean, the farce over the Orlando shooting, right?
I mean, the Orlando shooter screaming Allah Allah Akbar all the way, right?
He's blowing people up.
He's got ties to terrorism.
And yet it's Christianity and its guns, right, are the problem.
And Republicans, if I remember rightly.
Yes, exactly.
That's a microcosm of our universities.
All the world's problems are blamed on the one cultural subset over a thousand years who made strides to fix it.
And the fact that we have all this freedom and relative liberty, that's a mark to our professors, not of our success, but of our horrible failure.
And so what do we have to look forward to?
What do we look to?
You despair, I despair, because we can't trumpet or be proud of Western culture.
culture.
We have to despise it.
That means we have to look to non-Western cultures.
And they are as bigoted or worse than we have ever been.
They are as patriarchal or worse as we have ever been.
They are as homophobic and anti-transgender as we have ever been, or more so.
And they are much more religiously and socially intolerant than we have ever been.
And so consequently, we can't promote ourselves, and the cultures that we have left all reify the worst aspects of what we've tried to get beyond.
What is the hope?
Where do you turn to?
And that's why everything becomes politics.
They've given up on philosophy.
They've given up on truth.
They've given up on literature and history.
Everything now is simple politics because that's the easiest access to power for them.
Well, and money.
You know, it's a follow the money.
It's one of the oldest, I think, scams or shakedowns in human history, which is to find the most self-critical person and try and pathologize that person's self-criticism into self-hatred and then have them pay you to forgive them on a regular basis.
And I think that's what's happening to the West and this sort of pathological altruism that has grown out of Western European culture or European-derived cultures.
Will be, I think, our undoing unless we find some way to push back.
Can you think in your long knowledge of history, I can't, of any other culture that had so vehemently hated itself, that had so vehemently taught its kids to despise the origins, the history, the evolution of that culture.
I mean, our kids are so culturally ignorant about what we as a nation have been, and yet they have so much disgust for what we are.
That can't be good in the long run for anybody, but I can't think of another culture.
I mean, even the Germans after World War II weren't nearly as universally critical of their heritage as we have become in the 21st century.
And it's a lie.
We're teaching kids a terrible lie, a destructive lie in the sense that The best hope for liberty and freedom has emanated from Western culture, good and bad.
And to simply impugn that across the board and leave no other place to look for it, I just don't see, like you say, the rise of, we're re-enshrining racism, we're re-enshrining all sorts of horrible things now that Western liberty, after hundreds of years of trying and failing, have begun to do away with.
We're all putting them back in place now, and we're using them to beat up people we disagree with.
Well, the only other cultures that I can think of tend to be things like Jim Jones cult and something like that's the only, like generally directly suicidal, like people who are going to cut their own balls off and go join some comet in the sky, that sort of stuff.
And there is, of course, in, I love W.E.B. Du Bois, a black intellectual from the turn of the last century.
And he said, he said, I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.
Across the color line, I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas.
I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.
And that idea that we can take the best from all cultures and find ways to inform it without this hyper-politically correct jigsaw puzzle of humanity that we've cut everyone up into these tiny opposing pieces and think we can build a civilization I think is a huge tragedy.
Now, I do want to give you a chance just at the end here to talk a little bit about Freedom Academy.
I'm very aware, of course, that people are going to be listening to us chat for the first time.
And so I wonder if you can just tell people a little bit because, you know, we talked about Common Core last time.
And even without Common Core, the fact that so many students are arriving at college levels, as you say, grade eight reading level if they're lucky, although I'm sure they're very good at Call of Duty.
What is it that you guys provide that people can use in order to try and rescue the remnants of Western civilization, blow on the embers in their children's hearts and minds and try and keep this great experiment of liberty going?
Well, as I mentioned, I got involved with education lower than college because after 20 years, it just broke my heart that I was getting kids in college who I couldn't teach anything.
I had to stop teaching them Shakespeare.
I had to stop teaching them the great works of Western culture, and I had to teach them instead how to do basic reading.
I had to give them basic literacy.
So I got involved with education at an earlier grade.
We put together a school.
It's a complete online school.
It's called Freedom Project Academy.
We can be found at fpeusa.org, Freedom Project Academy, fpeusa.org.
And we are a unique school.
We're a classical school, which means that we deliver – rather than recordings, we have live teachers in real time teaching through the computer to your kids.
So our teachers do the assignments.
They grade.
And they make sure your kids get a classical education in the spirit of the founding fathers.
We teach critical thinking, how to think, not what to think.
Because we do believe that.
We don't have to teach kids conservative ideology.
We just teach them to think.
And they'll see, when you lay the two side by side with what's going on in the progressive world, they'll see why the one matters more than the other.
So we can do individual classes for moms and dads, or we can do the entire curriculum from kindergarten.
We're fully accredited.
We can provide high school diplomas.
I really do believe, whether you look at Freedom Project Academy or you look elsewhere, the only safe place for your kids is outside of the public school systems.
They're government schools now.
We see how the government is impinging upon the universities, how through things like Common Core, the government is taking over the middle school, high schools, elementary schools.
Right now, we still have freedom in this country to educate our kids ourselves.
So we need to do that.
I'll close my little spiel by quoting to you my favorite quote from an African-American novelist, this time Ralph Ellison, the great novelist of The Invisible Man, you think about how even books like Huckleberry Finn now are being removed from kids' education because they contain the N-word, right?
That now invalidates them, even though the same teachers who are pulling Huck Finn off the shelf because it has the N-word are letting their middle schoolers listen to heavy metal rap songs that use that word left and right.
But even in the 1940s and 1950s, Ellison was bothered by the attack on Huckleberry Finn.
And what Ellison, the great novelist, said was, Huckleberry Finn is the most moral book on race ever written.
Called it the most moral book on race ever written.
That's Western culture for all of his faults and weaknesses.
The great works of Plato or Aristotle or Aquinas, the writings of Shakespeare or Homer or Virgil.
These are books that talk to us like Du Bois did in your quote.
The great minds all talk about freedom and liberty and opportunity and success and achievement and country.
These are the things that the great books have in mind.
You'll get them at Freedom Project Academy.
Unfortunately, you don't get them in the high schools anymore, and you're certainly not getting them in the colleges anymore.
And let's at least be happy that there are alternatives, because that's not the case throughout the world.
Even throughout the Western world, there are certain places in Europe where this is not allowed.
So thanks so much for your time.
Always a great pleasure to chat.
We'll put all the links below to check out Dr.
Duke's work.
And thanks again for your time.
I'm sure we'll chat again soon, and have a great day.
