July 24, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:12:55
3755 The Real History of The Crusades | Duke Pesta and Stefan Molyneux
Were the Crusades an unprovoked act of aggression on behalf of bloodthirsty Christians? Did the First Crusade mark the beginning of close to a millennium of hostility between Christianity and Islam, or did the conflict begin centuries earlier? Stefan Molyneux is joined by Dr. Duke Pesta to discuss the truth about the Crusades!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.orgYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio, back with a good friend Dr.
Duke Pester, a tenured university professor, which is the only reason he can appear on this show.
Author and the academic director of Freedom Project Academy, a live online school offering individual classes and a complete curricula for students in kindergarten through high school.
And you can check out Dr.
Duke's work at the Freedom Project Academy at fpeusa.org.
Dr. Pester, how are you doing today?
We're going to go and examine some Saracens this afternoon.
Excellent. This is a topic dear to my heart because as a professor at a university, this particular issue is used by students across the board, the miseducated students, to completely write off 2,000 years of history, literature, culture, and art.
Whenever any serious discussion is endeavored about Christian history, Western history, the Crusades.
It's almost like a mantra that shuts down discourse.
It's almost like the word racist.
Once it's said, everybody's got to stop and no longer think.
Soon they'll be using that word slavery as well in the same context.
So let's start with the mythology or start with the generally accepted wisdom regarding the Crusades.
What is it that your students are coming into your class believing about it?
Well, in the first place, they know nothing about the Crusades.
I gave a series of quizzes over about five years to my kids to find out general knowledge.
And one of the questions I would ask them is, date the Crusades.
When did the Crusades occur?
And And literally, in five years worth of quizzes, about 600 quizzes that I had, about 87% of kids could not identify within 500 years.
When the Crusades took place.
So they know nothing about them.
They don't even know who the enemy was when the Crusades were being waged.
Very few of them could list the Ottoman Empire or Islam.
The Caliphates, very few knew that.
They just knew in their little programmed minds that the Crusades were a synonym for Christian violence.
They were a synonym for Western imperialism.
They were a synonym for everything evil in multicultural discourse, right?
The multicultural argument that all cultures are equal.
Ignore your senses. Ignore history.
Ignore the way cultures treat their own people.
They're all the same. And if that's so, that means Western culture in America, in particular, has to be wicked.
The only reason we have greater technology, greater superiority militarily, greater wealth, is because we must have raped and stolen.
So the Crusades, the word crusade, is one really powerful word that sums up everything from what happened to the Native Americans to everything that happened with the Romans, everything in between, and particularly what happened in Christian culture.
So they know nothing about it, except the political spin that they're given by their teachers.
Well, and the same thing happens with slavery as well.
The Christian West was involved in the slave trade and in the practice of slavery post-Roman Empire for the shortest amount of time relative to Jewish cultures or Islamic cultures.
And of course, it was the Christian European West, white males, the satans of history, who actually ended the practice of slavery, not just in the West, not just in Europe, but worldwide through the agency of the British Empire and the power of the British Navy.
So, you know, white males involved in slavery for the least amount of time, found it morally abhorrent, ended slavery worldwide.
And now who's the only group ever blamed for slavery?
It is one of these horrible things in history that no good deed goes unpunished.
And lo, one must be aware when one sets out upon the journey to sail around the world, you will be shot at for all of the good things that you do.
And if you do bad things, well, you're considered dangerous, so people will cover up and protect everything that you've done.
It is, you know, one of the trials and tribulations that occurs in the lives of good people and decent cultures.
So, yeah, this idea that it was just some random imperialistic slaughterfest in the Middle East, you know, Christians just woke up one morning and said, hey, let's go and, you know, behead some people far overseas.
This is—it's criminal, literally is criminal intellectual dishonesty, because let's start with the basics.
Of course, Christianity originally— Yeah, and to preface what I'm about to say...
You want to see a progressive's head explode?
Point out to them that the first great slave-holding nation in the history of the world was an African society, right?
Egypt. Let them know that.
All this black Athena stuff that we got in the 70s, the idea that Greek culture and Egyptian culture was primarily a black culture stolen by white people— As a way of sort of legitimizing cultures prior to Western culture as being legitimate cultures that were run by Black people.
Fine. I'm willing to give you Egypt, even though, of course, we know Northern Africa is much different than Southern Africa.
Let's give these progressives Egypt because welcome to the club.
You were the first great slaveholding people in the history of the world, Africans then.
And if you want to argue that Africans were black people, I don't think it's true.
But if you want to make that argument, then you, African-Americans, if you would want to call it that, in this country have to recognize that slavery first started with them.
There's open-air slave markets now in Libya.
They've emerged in Libya.
Some of the migrants are being snatched up.
The women are being raped and sold.
And where are all the people who are anti-slavery?
No, no, no. The important thing is what happened among four or five percent of whites and a lot of blacks, slave owners, in America 150 years ago.
That's the only important thing about slavery.
The fact that it's currently going on.
In Libya, apparently doesn't matter because you can't guilt Libyans into giving you money.
So, okay, we'll come back to slavery because, you know, historical Islam and slavery is something that is a little bit under-examined.
So before the Islamic conquest began, and we're talking, of course, Islam developed in the Middle East in the early 7th century.
We're going back. Back, baby!
You know, 1,300, 1,400 years.
So 622, Islam begins to develop and conquers most of the Middle East and North Africa within 80 years.
Now, this is a big thing. Before Islam, the Middle East, you know, there's Christians, there's Jews, Zoroastrians, Arab polytheists, and Greco-Roman civilization, and so on.
So, it was a multicultural mosaic.
You know, multiculturalism can be a good thing.
Multicultural mosaic.
And then Islam came along and was initially somewhat peaceful, tried to convert by the word rather than the sword, and then seemed to...
Well, not stay the course, so to speak, and became fairly aggressively expansionist.
Right. In the middle of the 7th century, like you said, 600 plus years after Christ, you have Muhammad, who looks around the world surrounding him.
And he sees primarily Jewish and Christian peoples.
And so what Muhammad does is he takes a lot from the Old Testament, takes a lot from the New Testament, takes a little bit from the old Persian mythologies, and creates a religion that centers him as the prophet.
And within his lifetime, before he was even dead, the warmongering, the colonial ambitions of Islam had really come to dominate.
People who want to talk about the Crusades, and we're talking about the 10th and 11th and 12th centuries, We're talking here as early as the 8th century, as early as 732 A.D., within a hundred years of the founding of Islam, you have the famous Battle of Tours, where Islamic armies, the Umayyad Caliphate, people don't know this, the Umayyad Caliphate was the fifth largest empire in the history of the world.
Within a hundred years of Muhammad's birth, you had the fifth largest empire ever to walk the earth had conquered Spain, All of the northern African coasts had conquered much of what we call Syrian Palestine today.
Sicily for almost 300 years.
Sicily, the Muslims ran a caliphate in Sicily for almost 300 years.
Absolutely. And so within 100 years, by 732 AD, Spain had been conquered and Islam was trying to take France.
And so that's when you have the famous battle of Tours led by Charles Martel, right?
Our English history, our European history reminds us, Charles Martel in Latin, the word means Charles the Hammer.
And what he did is he systematically pushed the Islamic invaders out of France.
So in other words, for about 400 years, before there was a single European crusade to the Holy Land, you had all of the major battles between Islam and Christianity fought on Christian territory by encroaching Islamic armies, That we're not the least interested in peace or coexistence.
It took four centuries for Europeans to take the battle to Jerusalem.
Let that sink in for a second.
It was a 400-year war before a single battle was fought on Islamic territory.
And that tells us something, right?
That it's not that the Europeans were being reactionary or they were sending crusader armies simply for loot and plunder.
This was an existential struggle for the survival of Europe.
It wasn't Europeans trying to conquer Islamic territory.
It was exactly the opposite.
Well, it's like getting someone out of your home who's a home invader and suddenly you're the aggressor.
So, yeah, let's just remember this.
The first Muslim empire, right?
The Rashidun Caliphate.
Nine million square miles at its height.
That's about the same size as modern day America.
The second, as you pointed out, the Umayyad Caliphate.
One and a half times larger.
That's 15 million square kilometers, which is close to the size of modern-day Russia.
And if you want to compare that, you know, the Roman Empire, remember how bad and colonialistic and imperialistic the Roman Empire was?
The model for the Star Destroyer these days, it seems.
So the Roman Empire, after 800 years in its prime, 5 million square kilometers, one-third the size of the largest, the second Muslim empire.
And it took 800 years, second Muslim empire, what, about 100 years or so.
So very expansionistic, very aggressive, and it very thoroughly subjugated Christians or non-Muslims within its borders, right?
You had heavy taxes, 20%, which was enormous back in the day, imposed upon Christians.
A lot of people had to convert or face true financial ruin, and there was a lot of this convert or die stuff that went on back in the day, and it did not spread necessarily by the force of its arguments or the persuasiveness of its theology.
And so when this sudden, very brutal and expansionistic ideology has emerged and is spreading across the known world at the time, then when the Christians decide to fight back and retake their lands, suddenly they are the aggressors.
I mean, it's almost like the non-Christians have been in charge of historical teachings.
Yeah, I agree 100%.
And let's be very clear.
I don't like to look back at history, especially history a thousand years old, and try to pick moral winners and losers in the sense that we must recognize that the Europeans weren't doing nothing when Islam came along.
They were warring amongst themselves, right?
You had emerging Christian nation states warring with other Christian nation states and with pagan nation states.
The idea that somehow we go back now to history, whether it's 100 years ago or 200 years ago to the founding fathers or 1,000 years ago to the crusades, and what we're doing is we're projecting our liberal values back on history.
What we don't like today, what we in our enlightened benevolences have come to reject, that has to be the filter, the only filter through which we see history.
So to be good historians, I think what we need to do is recognize that everybody, there was not a culture in the whole wide world that was not militaristic.
There were no peaceable cultures.
You could cite various sects, for instance, of Christianity or Buddhism that eschewed violence, but they were part of a larger movement that was protected by military might.
Certainly with Christianity, that was true.
Judaism, it was true. All the major religions.
So war was the norm.
Conquering territory was the norm.
We recognize that now as a bad thing, but for them, they didn't.
So judging them first and foremost, whether it's just judging the Islamic crusaders or judging the European crusaders, simply by the politically correct lens of war is bad, John and Yoko, let's all sit around and sing Kumbaya, judging history by that lens, this is what the Soviets did, the Marxist dialectic in history.
Rewrite history so it's favorable to your political cause.
Revision is history. Having said that, you go back to the actual combat The actual wars from the creation of Islam in the 7th century all the way through about, really it wasn't until about 1500, 1571, if you want to talk about the Battle of Lepanto, which really finally once and for all pushed Islam back, the Ottoman Empire back to Asia more or less.
We're talking about 700 years of almost continual war, most of which time Europe was spent on the victim side.
Europe was being invaded. European ships were being harassed by sea and by land.
And people don't recognize when I ask my kids about Dracula, right?
It's all goofy horror stuff.
But they have no idea of the Battle of Turgaviste, right?
How Vlad II of Wallachia, how he became Count Dracula, right?
And Vlad the Impaler.
But impaling.
Simply taking your enemies and spitting them on long, tall spears so that they would bloodily ooze down the spear and die a horrible death.
It's interesting, right? Vlad has been given the—he was the Wallachian prince who fought back the Ottoman invaders to Transylvania, to Eastern Europe.
He's called that the impaler simply because he did what the Muslims were doing.
Impaling was a Muslim form of punishment.
When Muslim armies conquered Christians, They impaled them, man, woman, and child.
They pierced them with spears.
They let them writhe on those spears till they died.
And so all Vlad did was, when he finally defeated the encroaching Muslims, is he gave them a taste of their own medicine.
And so forever on in history, again, he's the impaler, and there's no mention of the barbarity and cruelty of the Turkish attackers.
Well, this is the important thing to remember, that for the past 50 years, maybe a little bit longer, it has been a relentless hostility coming out of academia and the media and Hollywood and just about everything that is culturally available as a weapon against traditional Western values, Christian values, it has been a relentless hostility coming out of academia and the media and Hollywood and
Because, of course, the story of colonialism is that only white Europeans practiced it and they brutalized third world countries who were entirely justified and right in throwing off the shackles of Western colonialism and imperialism.
However, when Europe gets colonized by Islam in the past, well, it's really, really bad, you see.
For Europeans and Christians to fight back and throw off the shackles of Islamic imperialism.
Although I think it could be safely said that if you wanted to live under an imperialistic power, you probably wanted to choose 19th century England rather than, say, 9th century Islam.
So this is just something to remember.
there's this prejudice, there's this bigotry, to some degree racism, anti-Western, anti-Christian, anti-freedom, cancer really running through the narratives of history that have evolved over the past half century.
Yeah, we hear about the evils of British colonialism all the time.
This is the bias you're talking about.
And yet, as bad as the British were, think about the entire Hindu custom of the untouchable, right, for about a thousand years, an entire cloud, like the overwhelming majority of the population of India was considered untouchable.
You couldn't touch them. They were diseased.
They were left in squalor and poverty and misery.
Whatever you say about the British, they ended a lot of that stuff.
And this is the other thing. It drives them nuts when you point out that if we recognize, and you have to recognize this, because this is how the left wins these arguments.
By cutting us off from the totality of history.
Let's just focus on the evils of the West, the evils of the white male, the evils of the British or the Christian or the American soldier versus the Indian.
That's how they do it. If you understand, if we understand and accept the premise that colonialism, genocide, oppression, tyranny, these were aspects of almost every single human culture that's ever been around.
We accept that historically unalterably true premise.
Then it makes their heads explode when you point out So they're really mad, progressives, that the West just did what everybody else was doing better, right?
Not only did they invent better, not only did they create better, they conquered better, right?
Let's just admit that. And if you admit that, I love what Dinesh D'Souza, right, who was obviously born in India, Indian parentage, he has a wonderful article he wrote a few years back.
It's called Two Cheers for Colonialism.
I can't quite go three, D'Souza says, because of course there were oppression, of course there was tyranny.
But how much better off am I is the Indian continent, for instance, because the British, for all of their methodical ways and their occasional brutality, were much, much better conquerors, much, much better rulers.
You couldn't have had Gandhi in the old Indian system, right?
But you could have had him in those British law schools that he went to as a colonialist who visited England, right?
So that has to be acknowledged as well.
There is a direct statistical correlation between a history of British colonial rule and present-day economic and political freedoms as well as higher standards of living.
One way you know in which a sort of colonial occupation is somewhat benevolent is just look at the birth rates.
Look at the total population of the country.
If the population of the country is going up, It's not that bad.
If you look at, you know, the history prior to Islamic conquest, just look at North Africa.
North Africa used to be Christian.
I mean, it was the home of St.
Augustine and St.
Felicity, Perpetua, the martyrs and so on.
It was central, North Africa, central to the development of Christian tradition and thought.
And Within one generation after the prophet's death, it had fallen to Islam.
And it used to be an entire Christian civilization, North Africa.
How many are left?
Where did they go? What happened?
Their population certainly didn't increase under their new colonial rulers.
Well, Rome, a lot of people don't recognize, Northern Africa provided a number of Rome's emperors.
A surprisingly significant number of Roman emperors actually were born in Northern Africa.
And so, perfectly in the heart of Western culture.
And yeah, I think that's exactly right.
The progressive way of looking at history now And you can see it in American history school books.
I call it the Howard Zinnification of American history.
Howard Zinn was a radical Marxist historian in the 1970s and 80s who created a people's history of the United States, which was focused exclusively on lower class Marxist arguments, right?
Forget the achievers, forget civilization, forget military history.
Let's talk about who loses in Western culture, who loses because of capitalism and free markets.
Our kids for about 40 years in American schools have been learning the Marxist Zin version of history.
And in that view of history, things like socialism, Islam, non-Western empires, non-Western slavery, that's all whitewashed, right, to magnify America's Zin.
My students are absolutely staggered when I point out to them that Native American tribes like the Cheyenne and the Comanche Actually had black slaves and in some instances had African slaves beyond the Civil War after the Emancipation Proclamation.
It's a staggering thing for them to have to comprehend and no one's ever pointed it out to them before.
Well, I mean, the native, the indigenous population in America, they found torture pits with 500 skeletons brutally tortured to death.
Yeah, they owned and collected slaves, which brutal war against each other.
You know, it's back to this.
We should do another show on the Rousseauian noble savage myth, but we'll do that another time.
But no, they were, you know, Stone Age and as brutal as one can imagine.
So this is important, right?
There were five major Christian capitals in the Middle East.
And by the end of the 7th century, three of those five had been taken over by Muslims.
Constantinople, besieged twice by Muslims.
Rome was attacked and its holy shrines were pillaged.
And so this...
This encroachment, this attack, this tide of brutality coming out of the Muslim world at the end of the 7th century was alarming and was a constant focus of Christian thought.
How are we going to defend ourselves against this violent and expansionistic belief system?
Yeah, and, you know, the consequences of this way of arguing, of...
I found myself in university context being labeled a racist simply for trying to point out these broader truths of history.
This is not about Muslims.
Muslims today are under siege by Western culture.
If warmongering presidents didn't treat Islam so bad, we would have never had 9-11.
It's this absolute unwillingness to go back and look at the historical origins of all these conflicts.
You mentioned at the beginning of our talk, there are almost no Christians in the Middle East whatsoever, right?
What you do have is the one Jewish state of Israel, surrounded by about two billion Muslims, a state of about six million people, surrounded by two billion Muslims.
It's the only democracy in the entire area.
And the entire world narrative is that it's an illegitimate state that must be eradicated Because somehow that one little entity is oppressing Muslims worldwide.
It's that same argument applied back to the Crusades.
We're going to magnify the sins of one group so reprehensibly and completely ignore how the rest of the so-called oppressed power is being treated.
Right. And so the news of Christian suffering under the Muslim rulers, of course, we've got to remember it was far, far from the age of TCPIP. And so news traveled slowly.
And in particular, around the late 10th and early 11th century, there was a Muslim emperor ordered the persecution and forced conversion of many Christians in his empire.
And they destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the most revered church in the Christian world.
And so once this church had been destroyed, and of course, you know, think of Islam sensitive to how the Koran is treated.
Well, this is the most holy church in Christendom, destroyed, and the forced conversions of Christians and so on.
And of course, pilgrims wanted to go to the Holy Land, similar to the Mecca journey.
And so it did actually reach the Christian West, like Europe, where, of course, Christianity had spread into Europe faster in some ways because it was being driven out of the Middle East.
The refugees that we see now that are coming across the Mediterranean into Europe, of which only 2% are Syrian war refugees, but that's a topic for another time.
fleeing the war, the Christians moved into Europe partly because they were being driven out of the Middle East by Muslim conquests.
And so there was this idea of where does this stop?
Where do we stop and draw the line and begin to fight back?
Now, it did, of course, happen when the Muslims had come very, very far into Europe, as you point out.
I mean, central Italy and Sicily and Spain, and they're starting into France.
Bulgaria, it took over 1,100 years to free Bulgaria from Muslim rules.
So that is a long time, frankly.
Even in historical standards, that's a long time.
And so there was this sense, if we don't stop it now, we can't live in the ocean and that's where we're going to end up.
That's a great point. You mentioned how fleeing Christians, Christians fleeing from Islamic tyranny, radically enhanced Christian life in the West.
That great movement we call the Renaissance only got started after Byzantine Eastern Christians, Eastern Orthodox Christians, who saw the fall of Constantinople.
People who saw their culture swallowed up by advancing Ottoman armies.
When they came to the West, when they came to Venice, when they came to Italy, bringing with them the great contents of the library at Alexandria, that ancient Greek library at Alexandria, all these Greek ancient books now were in the hands of European Renaissance scholars.
And it completely transformed culture.
So, right, the idea that what was advancing was barbaric and backwards.
Educationally, look at it in terms of art.
I mean, right, the Quranic prohibitions against representational art, particularly of religious subjects, versus medieval and Christian ability to paint sacred truths.
And how one artistic culture flourished under a different understanding of God than the, and I have a mini theory about it.
If you think about Christianity, Christianity, its fundamental central idea of Christianity is the Trinity in many respects.
You've got one God who is three, three radical individuals who are one.
There is already a kind of tolerance for diversity and an interactive nature about the Christian trinity.
You think about the radical oneness of Allah, right?
There can be no God but Allah.
It's interesting, you wonder, sort of sociologically and theologically, as the conceptual ideas of Islam and Christianity evolved, one seems much more prevalent to one-world thinking, to one way only.
To absolute intolerance.
I mean, today no one seems to complain that you can't set foot in Saudi Arabia, certainly at the holy sites if you're Jewish.
You can't build a church anywhere in Saudi Arabia.
Yet we're happy in the West to welcome peaceful Muslims here and let them build mosques, worship the way they want.
I think there's something in the historical and anthropological origins of the founding ideas of the two religions that one suggests relative openness, relative willingness to embrace We're good to go.
Well, of course, the history of Christianity has to some degree been the history of attempting to work with existing belief systems, prior belief systems, contemporary belief systems.
If you look at, of course, the massive respect given to the non-Christian philosopher Aristotle throughout the late Middle Ages period, he was called the philosopher, and he was not considered a heretic or a blasphemer and so on.
And that's just one example, the fact that the Christianity was willing to work with Roman ideas, Roman philosophy, and in particular, Roman law, right?
When the cities began to re-emerge in the late Middle Ages as the result of, you know, there being better farming methods, excess food is required for cities, otherwise everyone's starving to death in their own 40 acres.
And so when the cities began to regrow, the church turned to Roman law.
As a way of saying, let's not reinvent the wheel here.
We had a great system of law that came, of course, from originally non-Christian sources and was developed before Christianity, but further developed in early Christianity.
So there's this willingness to absorb and work with other belief systems.
And, of course, Christianity is not a political system.
And people look at the theological aspects of Islam, which is fair, of course, the theological aspects to Islam, but it is a political system.
As I've said before, it's sort of like looking at communism and saying, well, it's just an economic theory.
It's like, nope, it's a political system.
And that, of course, is the challenge.
So let's talk a little bit about the tipping point for the first question of the Crusades, right?
So there are Christian Byzantines who were in Constantinople, now Istanbul.
Oh, that always gets that song in my head.
So, the Byzantines were being attacked by the Muslims.
There was a second Muslim attack that was just barely repelled.
And this battle between the Christian Byzantines and the Muslims went on for hundreds and hundreds of years, you know, successes and failures on both sides.
And the Byzantines were never able to recapture their territory.
And they tried, of course, they were devout Christians, they tried to recapture Jerusalem, but were unable to do so.
And because Jerusalem is so important to the Christians, the Byzantines were working hard to recover it from Muslim rule for more than a century, and then the Crusades happened.
So here we go. 1071, the Byzantines had suffered a crushing defeat under the Muslims.
They lost a huge amount of their territory, and their emperor was captured.
And so from 1073 to 1095, the Byzantines were begging members of the Western nobility and Christian leaders for military aid.
And then what happened 1095?
Ambassadors sent by the Byzantine Emperor appeared before Pope Urban II and said, we need your help to deal with the Muslims.
And it was later that year, this is almost 1100, almost the year 1100, the Pope said...
Maybe, maybe we should start looking at military solutions to these expansionist tendencies of Islam, and we should try and take back the key areas of Christian theology.
Yes, and the one thing we haven't yet mentioned, that it's so obvious that the fact that nobody mentions it is why our kids have forgotten it.
Jerusalem, Palestine, it was not empty.
I mean, this idea that somehow my kids actually believed that Islam always and forever had owned Jerusalem, right?
That it was always an Islamic city.
The idea that my kids seem to have is that one day, at some mysterious vantage point, Islamic armies wandered into Jerusalem and found a completely abandoned city, and then they just inherited it, right?
The story of the Crusades always begins with 1095, right?
A Christian pope decides To send an army to Jerusalem to try to take it back.
But the back is the key.
For four or five hundred years, Islam had been advancing and conquering.
They brutalized the inhabitants of Jerusalem when they took the city.
That doesn't count as crusade.
It doesn't count as colonialism. It's only that pivotal moment in 1095 when, and it reminds me of today's circumstance, any attempt on the modern Western world to fight back or to even try to stem the tide Of immigration from certain highly politicized, radicalized nations, that's considered racist, right?
So it feeds, and you see how much worse it gets.
If we treat our history this way, right, if we refuse to see the complex interactions of different kinds of people from our history, how in the world can we deal with today's problems?
We can't.
In the same way that we're apologetic now for crusading Islamic armies and angry that Western armies finally tried to answer them, you see what's happening in places like Germany and Sweden now, right, where it's much better to allow your daughters to be raped.
It's much better to keep your mouth shut and allow aid, state aid to be paid to terrorist people, terrorist families.
Much better to do that than to risk opening your mouth in defense of Western values, which we have taught people have no defense anymore.
Right.
So the tipping point for the Crusades, let's just, as you point out, let's just give people the brief sort of takeaway.
You've had over 400 years of Muslim aggression, an invasion taking over of Christianity, Christian territories.
Three out of the five Christian centers have fallen to Muslim hands.
Rome has been attacked.
Two of its holy sites have been desecrated.
Constantinople, which is one of the last remaining capitals of Christianity, is facing down a Muslim threat, again, existential to its existence.
So this idea that Christians just woke up one day and just decided, hey, let's just go charging off to the Middle East and start hacking people up.
Come on. I mean, this can't be considered to be true at all.
I mean, the Christians stood for...
Or stood without a huge counterattack or a significant counterattack.
They accepted.
They allowed for or they submitted to this expansionism for longer than slavery existed in America before really coalescing and fighting back.
And Jerusalem, of course, the first crusade, the aim was to recapture Jerusalem, which was a Christian city.
And they were simply trying to take back what culturally and theologically and historically had been Christian to begin with.
And that is very, very tough for people to process.
They also don't understand when the Muslims had Muslim piracy, the Barbary pirates and so on, was a huge deal.
One of the first things Thomas Jefferson had to do when he was president would deal with problems with Muslim piracy.
North Africa, the Mediterranean and so on.
This is one of the reasons why, I mean, people, it's astonishing.
Over a million Europeans were taken as slaves by Muslims and other North Africans.
The entire coastline around Europe was depopulated.
People couldn't even fish.
The reason why there are castles was because of these constant raids from Muslim slave traders.
And again, it doesn't exist in history, which is why history is now a strangulation fable designed to crush the larynx of Western cultural pride or self-respect or any appreciation for the positive effects of Western culture.
It is a brain virus, and it's impossible for me to understand how what's taught in the West, what's taught as history, how could it possibly be different from the greatest enemies of the West teaching that history?
I mean, they always say, oh, the winners write the history.
It's like, okay, so who's won and who's writing this history now?
Because it sure as hell isn't the victors of the West.
Yeah, it's a great point.
And, you know, as somebody at the university level who sees the kind of history that's getting taught, it is acrimoniously incorrect about Western culture in general.
You mentioned the fall of Constantinople.
Think about that for a second. All this demand today for reparations, how we have to make amends, just the West does, right, for what we've done.
But to this day, the greatest church, the largest church in human history, the Hagia Sophia, right, that great church in Constantinople, It's now the greatest mosque in the world, right?
That they took this great building, this edifice of Byzantine Christianity, Islam conquered it, turned it into a mosque, and yet where are the calls for reparations?
If we called for Islam to give back and repair, provide reparations for what it's taken, the toll on them would be so outrageously high as to dwarf What American or Western responsibilities are.
And yet, this is something that we almost can't even talk about because of how dominant multiculturalism has become.
One of the things I love about talking to you is your understanding that the argument wins, right?
That reasoned logical analysis.
I have no problem Calling out, in fact, what makes Western culture special, is that we have always, for a long time, even in those benighted years with the Catholic Church, there was still a lot of criticism of the Church from within.
Dante, in the 13th century, is putting popes in hell for goodness sake, right?
500 years, 400 years, 500 years before the Enlightenment, Dante, who, by the way, called Aristotle the master of the men who know, right?
To go back to your earlier point about this appreciation for even pre-Christian pagans.
But the argument that somehow, someway, Western culture has to bear the brunt of this.
If you lay Western culture alongside all the other cultural ways of thinking and doing and seeing and being, we come out looking really pretty good.
And this argument somehow that we alone are the problem, it's the only argument that the progressives can make, the anarchists can make.
The only way you can convince people, kids in particular, that Western culture has to be replaced is to not show them the truth about non-Western cultures.
Well, and I do want to make this point, which I don't think can ever be made emphatically enough, that what is called multiculturalism is anti-Europeanism, it's anti-white, it's anti-Western.
Because if all cultures are supposed to be valuable, go to these classes and challenge people to say what is wonderful and valuable about European, white, Western, Christian culture.
It is not multiculturalism.
It is anti-white.
It is anti-Christian. It is anti-European.
That's all it is. Everything else is elevated in order to lower and attack this culture that certainly you and I have as our history.
It's not multiculturalism because...
The white culture is not elevated the way that other cultures are, but other cultures are used as giant clubs with which to smash the face in of thousands of years of Western history and Western culture.
I don't think that can ever be expressed strongly enough.
It's not diversity. It's anti-white.
It's not multiculturalism.
It's anti-European traditions.
It's anti-Christianity.
Take it one step further. I'm always alarmed at the incredible racism of the term white male, right?
So Aristotle and Dostoevsky.
And sexism! Exactly!
Aristotle and Dostoevsky.
Kafka and Frederick Barbarossa.
These are all the same people, right?
It doesn't matter if it's 2,000 years ago or two days ago.
Any European, any American, any North American combination of ethnicities, it's just so bizarre.
The radical diversity that we already see within Western culture is a thing to behold.
There's not much diversity in the great Chinese emperors, right?
There was not a whole lot of diversity in North America prior to the arrival of the Europeans, but within European culture itself, we've inherited Judaism, the whole Jewish tradition.
We've inherited the whole classical tradition.
I mean, the different people from different parts, from Russia to North America, you've got all this incredible plenipotential diversity, you've got all of these different groups contributing, and that's all seen as a monolith, whereas the real monolithic nations of the world, some of the most fascist ones, they're given a complete pass on all of this.
It goes back to what you said before, and I remember in a previous conversation down the road we did, is there ever been a culture, has there ever been a culture in the history of the world, we ask this question rhetorically, That has been so self-loathing as this one.
And how did we get here?
How did we get to the point where to be proud?
They're trying on college campuses, they're trying to ban...
The flag on 4th of July.
Thanksgiving has to be done away with because it's an insult to Native Americans.
I mean, where did we get to the point where this kind of cultural rot?
I think Lincoln was right.
If America goes down, it's not going to be from enemies without.
It will be because of our own moral turpitude, our own unwillingness to defend our way of life.
And that's exactly where we find ourselves now.
the lack of diversity in Saudi Arabia or other countries.
I mean, it's crazy.
I mean, Europe is crazy diverse compared to the Middle East.
So as far as where it went, my sort of very, very brief theory, which is still a work in progress and may, of course, not be the final answer, is that when you have freedom, and I just did a video on the Pareto distribution, right, which is that a small, in a large group involved in the free market, a very small in a large group involved in the free market, a very small number, produce significant amounts So if you have a company of 10,000 people, only 100 people within those 10,000 produce half the output.
So when you have freedom in a creative environment, you end up with disparity.
You end up with inequality, so to speak, of outcome because the bell curve and IQ distribution and other things as well.
And so when you have freedom, you get a small number of very rich people, you get a big chunk of the middle class, and then you get poor people.
And when you have that kind of inequality, it opens up a big hole in the side of your culture for people to worm in and say, oh, those rich people, they're only rich because they stole from you.
And to arouse and rouse up the resentments of the poor people, of the less intelligent people on the bell curve.
And from that, you can start to set the rot in.
And until and unless we understand this Pareto distribution, the bell curve in terms of IQ, it's forever going to be an open wound that can fester because freedom does produce Thank you.
Thank you. Well, and the flip side of that coin is that what allows authoritarian states, and I would argue that Islam generally is a religion elevated to a government and turned into a kind of dictatorship, at least the way it's practiced in most parts of the world.
Well, the word does mean submission.
It does, doesn't it? There's a bit of a clue there.
And so the flip side of that coin is that not only are the burgeoning lower classes much more free to rise up, but you've lost the will to authority in Western culture.
Why stand by and watch on college campuses as our most sacred right, freedom of speech, is being absolutely bullied into submission by college kids and police officers standing there afraid to intervene?
So authoritarian countries, non-Western authoritarian countries, they control the problem of lower classes grumbling with an iron fist.
It's a mark of our relative civility.
And this goes back a thousand years.
Prior to Magna Carta, this goes back, right?
It's a mark of our relative tolerance in the West that our first recourse isn't always the authoritarian one.
Again, you couldn't have had things like Magna Carta.
You couldn't have had the rise of a middle class if we were so authoritarianly structured, as some of these non-Western cultures are, that there's no or the untouchables in India where there's never even the slightest pretense that anybody could rise higher than their station.
Right. Now, I do want to drop something in here as well and get your thoughts on it before we move on to the history of slavery in the Middle East.
And it is this.
I have noticed that as the ruling classes in the West have become relentlessly secular, I think they pay a lip service to vague Christian ideals, but they have become enormously secular.
I mean, if you think of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who was screaming his scaldron of anti-American invective at his supposedly Christian audience, I mean, that's a political speech, and it's become heavily politicized, even the lip service that is paid to Christianity.
But in the past, you know, as far as Western colonialism goes, there was considered to be, and it used to be called this, the white man's burden, which was, look, we have civilization, we have relative free markets, we have great culture, we have Christianity and so on.
And when we go to sub-Saharan Africa, people don't really remember this because, again, there's this revisionism going on, I think, far beyond what the data supports.
Which is you get to sub-Saharan Africa when the first Europeans got there.
And yeah, there was brutality, there was slave trading, cannibalism in certain places.
In sub-Saharan Africa, there was no two-story buildings.
This is in the sort of 15th, 16th, 17th century.
No written language.
They hadn't invented the wheel yet.
And there was this idea of, you know, there but for the grace of God are us.
So there was this idea of the white man's burden that we're going to try and bring civilization to a stable government.
We're going to ban cannibalism and we're going to ban—I mean, the Suti in India, you pointed out one of the things— The bride had to throw herself on the funeral pyre of her husband and burn to death.
And then this idea that, you know, we kind of, by the grace of God or philosophy or luck or whatever, we developed some pretty cool stuff.
We want to bring it to the rest of the world and try and bring everyone up to our level.
Well, that was, you know, and there was corruption in it, and I understand all of that, but there was a benevolence foundationally for a lot of this stuff, which also drove the end of the slave trade in the West and around the world.
But as... Leaders in the West have become progressively more secular.
It's not like the imperialism has ended.
I mean, as I've pointed out on the show, under Barack Obama's presidency, he dropped 100,000 bombs, largely on Muslim countries.
That's not how colonialism used to work.
Colonialism, whatever misguided and however corrupt sometimes his outcome was, it wasn't just...
The British Navy's ships sitting in the harbor and firing randomly into cities.
It wasn't just throwing cannonballs down the main streets of a city somewhere in the third world.
There was an attempt to go in and fix things that were really broken in those societies.
So, as the sort of Christian impulse to civilize and to bring not just Jesus, but to bring...
Separation of church and state, and the free market, and representative democracies, and a republic if you can milk one out of the local conditions.
Now, it's like the CIA doing coups.
It's the undermining of foreign democracy.
It's propaganda machines.
It's really gruesome manipulations.
It's massive amounts of bombing machines.
But all of these people hate Christianity as well, and it's like the colonialism that occurred under Christianity had a benevolence that's hard to imagine.
I mean, again, just think, you can't just look at the Amritsar massacre and other things that happened and say, well, these bad things happen.
Sure, that's like looking at the night sky and saying it's daylight because there are stars.
I mean, it's the gap between, not the things themselves, that matter.
Would you rather live in sub-Saharan Africa before the British came along or after?
Just look at life expectancy, look at birth rates, look at infant mortality.
These things all got vastly better under colonial rule.
And so it seems to me that since human beings do have some impulse for colonialism, we all want to spread and grow and so on.
It sure was better when Christianity, rather than this secular leftism, which seems to me corrupt, if not satanic, almost beyond words, now the bombings that are going on in the Middle East have no civilizing impact.
Civilizing impacts are sold, like, oh, we're going to be welcomed as liberators in Iraq, and we're going to make a Jeffersonian democracy out of this society.
But it has become much more brutal with no redeeming outcomes, as was the case with Christian-driven imperialism, And that, to me, is something that needs to be remembered as well.
There is a lot of violence going on from the secular rulers in the West towards the Muslims in the Middle East and other places.
This bomb everyone and invite everyone is a terribly catastrophic scenario.
But it seems to be getting a lot worse since the rulers became more secular.
Sorry for that long speech. I hope that makes some kind of sense.
No, it does. And a couple of thoughts on my side of this is, number one, I think that you asked the question, as they become more secular, as Christianity becomes secular, Went to becoming nothing more than a cultural product, not a theological one or a philosophical one, now to being nothing.
Religion in general, but particularly Christianity in the West, it gave a transcendent reason to have a worldview.
It provided an identity.
It anchored truth in something beyond materialism, something beyond mere existence.
And so I think the people who argue that all bad things are done in the name of war, they never, in the name of religion, all bad things are done in the name of religion, all wars and all this stuff, But they never point out the opposite side of that.
The positive impact of religion or the idea of religion in human affairs, human politics, government, the white man's burden, as you say, this tendency.
Despite the bad things that were part of the Western colonial legacy, look at the results.
I mean, India is a better place than it was before.
Look at South Korea. I mean, just look at the difference between South Korea and North Korea and the impact of Western values, Western importation, Western defense of South Korea versus what happened in North Korea.
One peninsula, night and day differences.
And some of this I think does.
A culture that no longer believes it has any transcendent meaning.
A culture that no longer believes that intervention in the affairs of people can be a positive, not just a negative.
A culture like that I think can't survive.
It becomes totally self-loathing.
And the opposite side of the coin...
To all of this cultural attempt to better, it wasn't bringing orphanage.
The idea of Mother Teresa working away in India, trying to take care of those people that the Indians really didn't care about, these untouchables again.
Now, in progressive circles, Mother Teresa is viewed as an interloper.
Kind of a quasi-colonialist who's imposing her religion on innocent non-Westerners.
That's the progressive rewrite of Mother Teresa.
And so if you look at the flip side of the coin of that particular rationale, you get cultural appropriation.
This idea now that whenever white people do yoga, they're disrespecting Hinduism.
How about that a couple weeks ago on a college campus where a group of young minority girls were demanding that white girls stop wearing hoop earrings?
Literally, they were calling for the—that's a heritage of our slave days.
These hoop earrings, they said, go back to the slave times in America.
And, of course, immediately the history, real history, debunked it.
Hoop earrings go all the way back to the Egyptians.
They're not the sole ownership of African-American slaves in the 19th century.
But this idea that it only goes one way, right?
That whenever Europeans, Christians, conservatives, Westerners— Show their appreciation for other cultures by trying to borrow from them.
Now that's racist. And all my family's Italian.
Can you imagine me walking into a pizza place and slapping the pizza out of a couple of Hispanic kids' hands and say, quit appropriating my culture?
The cultural appropriation is the exact opposite corollary of what you just laid out about the benefits that Western culture could in the past when we believed in ourselves.
Despite the bad things we did, we could offer the world useful, meaningful, holistic things.
Now we don't believe it anymore, so much so that for us to even engage in or share with non-Western cultures makes us cultural appropriators.
Got to stop doing that, but you can't turn around then.
And say to the rest of the world, this is the unfairness of it, if we said to the rest of the world, the West, all right, we'll stop appropriating any aspect of non-Western culture.
We will no longer serve Indian food.
We will no longer, nothing non-Western in our society to make you happy.
On the provision that all the non-Western world must immediately jettison The culture they appropriated from us.
No electronics, no computers, no satellites, no modern medicine, right?
You're willing to do because you're doing the same thing you accuse us of doing, right?
But nobody ever lays it out in those terms.
Oh, yeah. Can you imagine going to an Indian restaurant and saying, what's all this electricity you're using?
That's cultural appropriation.
You'd be racist for that, too.
So, yeah, I mean, the racism thing has become nonsense.
So let's talk about this slave trade because that was an important thing as well.
Regarding the Crusades, as I mentioned before, over a million Europeans, particularly those in coastal cities, snagged up by the Muslim slave trade.
It was brutal, a brutal system, and again, was depopulating the sort of outer rings of Europe.
I mean, Europe has traditionally had a very strong relationship with the sea, but not during this particular time period.
But the Muslim dominance of the slave trade, I mean, there was Jewish elements and there were Muslim elements that dominated the slave trade, in particular Islam, between the 7th and the 15th century.
Now, the Christians did enter the slave trade later, 1519 to 1815, the period of Christian slave trading, much shorter and much more humane than what happened in the Islamic slave trade.
14 centuries of Muslim slave trade.
The death toll in Africa alone is estimated at over 112 million people.
112 million blacks from Africa killed by the Muslim slave trade.
And this is a staggering sum because of course you normalize it for world population now.
It would be one of the biggest death tolls of anything throughout history, far bigger even, normalized for human population than the 100 million or so killed by communism in the 20th century.
It is one of the greatest mass murders, mass enslavements in history, if not the It was the perpetual raiding of Muslim pirates and slave traders that brought about the abandonment Throughout Southern Europe of the scattered settlements of classical times and the retreat to defended hilltop fortifications,
the first medieval castles, the same raiding led to the abandonment of the old agricultural systems with their irrigation dikes and ditches.
So some of the mass starvations that happened as a result of poor farming methods had to do because you couldn't be scattered, you couldn't take, because you'd be out exposed and without a fortification, so you'd just be snagged and sold into slavery.
The Muslim slave trade typically dealt with castrated male slaves, eunuchs.
And you would completely amputate the scrotum and penis of 8 to 12-year-old African boys.
And of course, significant numbers of them died in agony during this particular process.
And so this is really, really important to understand that it was an incredibly brutal slave trade, far dwarfed anything that happened in Christianity.
It is unexamined, unapologized for.
Certainly no restitution has ever been offered from a very rich Middle East to a relatively poor Africa in the centuries since.
And it's not spoken about because the only people responsible for any slavery are the people who ended the practice.
And if you take slavery and define it the way modern progressives do, you would have to make the argument that not only was Islam the greatest slave trading institution in the history of the world, you would have to make the argument that almost the entirety of womanhood in Islamic countries are slaves as well.
You mentioned the creating of the eunuchs to guard the harems, right?
Well, what is this genital mutilation stuff that's going on?
In American hospitals now, let that sink in.
You've got American hospitals now that are performing genital mutilations on Islamic girls because culturally their fathers want them to.
That's slavery too.
Let's turn this back on the liberals.
The progressive definition of slavery means exactly that.
Not only did Islam was the most successful at enslaving people across the world that weren't Muslims, They are the best enslavers of their own people as well.
By the definition of progressives, they are.
So playing the progressive game, you got to apply the standard rationally, right?
If all these things count as slavery, then what they do to many of their own people count as well.
And so how do you apologize for this?
You remember the fella, the guy who played Gimli, John Rhys Davies, I think his name was, something like that, who played Gimli the dwarf, a famous actor in The Lord of the Rings.
He was a little boy. His father was an African diplomat.
He tells the story in like 1947 when he was a little kid.
His father took him to a dock in Africa and pointed out to three ships that were leaving the coast of Africa heading east.
He said, those ships are slave ships, he said, son.
Those ships are Islamic slave trade ships that are taking African people back to the Middle East to become slaves.
He said to him, someday, someday your generation is going to have to fight those.
That's the next big problem we're going to have to confront.
He tells the story very poignantly, right, as a young boy.
And so, yeah, so if we're going to use the radically expanded definition of slavery as promulgated to beat up Western culture, right, they're telling us now what?
If you make under a certain income, you're a slave.
You got multi-millionaire players in the NFL arguing that they're slaves to these owners who have all this billion dollars.
We're going to radically expand these definitions that it's awfully hard not to just condemn Islam externally, but condemn it internally as well as the entire social structure is predicated on that kind of slavery.
Let's also remember Eastern Europe.
Of course, Eastern Europe receiving criticism from leftist quarters because of a lack of willingness to take in migrants.
I guess they still have a little bit more objective history in Eastern Europe and some of that sort of region.
So Crimean Tatars enslaved and sold 1.75 million Ukrainians, Poles, and Russians between 1468 and 1694.
And I've got a whole truth about slavery, which people can check out if they want.
So 1.75, again, normalize that by population.
It's got to be 10 to 20 times that amount relative to current population.
And I tell you...
Oh, man. So, Dr.
Pesta, one of the things that bothers me is that I don't consider anybody who lifts a feather and claims himself to be a strong man to have any particular credibility.
Whites are pathologically self-critical these days.
They're like abuse victims, you know, in brutal relationships, which, you know, I think whites are in a pretty brutal relationship to the dominant culture at the moment.
It's a very leftist, Marxist culture.
And to yell at white people and say, feel bad for something, or you did this stuff wrong in history and feel bad for it, well, white people are already flagellating themselves like psychotic medieval monks in many ways.
And so... Getting morally outraged at people who are already self-victimizing is not a very challenging moral feat.
The challenging moral feat is to bring your moral outrage to people who aren't even willing to admit that anything wrong happened.
That is where the real challenge exists.
There are very few of our feminist professors willing to go to Iran and educate the girls there.
A little of that, right? Right.
And so this has become a – I view most of the, quote, moralists in the West these days and maybe elsewhere as well.
I don't view them as moralists.
I view them as bullies.
I view them as picking the most self-critical, most spiritually weakened people and yelling at them and calling them bad.
And that, of course, is what happens in abusive relationships.
The man breaks down the wife and then castigates her and criticizes her and slams her cooking and slams her sexual prowess and breaks her down even more.
That is not courageous criticism of a fellow human being.
That's just finding somebody who's already self-attacking, pouring fuel on the fire, and then considering yourself some sort of moral hero.
Really, really despise the people who are spending their time and effort criticizing a lack of diversity in the West or criticizing racism or sexism in the West.
It's like, come on, there's a whole world out there where you could show your moral heroism and your moral strength and your moral principles and so on by going out.
Go talk to the caliphates out there in the Middle East about the history of the slave trade and go start demanding reparations and go start demanding apologies and go start demanding all of that.
I want to see how that's going to go.
I wonder if you can go and say, hey, Saudi Arabia, you really should allow some Christian churches to be open because you're really not recognizing and respecting diversity and so on.
They don't want to go and do that.
And that to me means that they have no interest in the good.
They only have interested in a kind of sadistic abuse of the self-haters.
Well, picking on, like you said, picking on, for lack of a better word, white American culture, you're also bravely picking on the one demographic that you know is not going to fight back, right?
It is the least threatening to call out white power in this country, to make fun of Christian institutions, Western culture, To introduce the canon of literature.
No one's going to fight you back.
I mean, it's a straw man argument.
You're fighting the most unresponsive people in the world.
That's part of the problem. The Chinese.
I mean, the Chinese kill more of their people every year than all the rest of the countries of the world combined.
This goes beyond Islam, right?
The one country on this earth, the Lao guy, that actually has a dedicated gulag is China.
And yet we've completely mainstreamed them in terms of A business prowess in terms of a seat on the Security Council.
Yeah, so where are these brave Westerners who can picket Ann Coulter, for God's sake, at Berkeley to the point of causing millions of dollars of property damage and engaging in all sorts of acts of violent disobedience?
Where are they when it comes to what happens in China?
Where is the progressive left?
Let's talk about Muslim atrocities.
The progressive left that is very concerned about genocide Could care less about the Armenian genocide.
You've got high-weight Democrat politicians who are denying the genocide of the Armenians by the Turks simply because it's fashionably unmulticultural to do so.
And we talked already about how every offense by the Jews in Israel is magnified and what they're surrounded by every day is largely minimalized, right?
We've seen the human hostages.
We've seen the fake video.
We've seen Palestinians as young as three and four Right?
In military gear, throwing stones at police officers.
And there's no—this moral equivalence, right, between the two sides is exactly what the problem is.
And it's until we—until the West decides—and I go back to what you said a little while ago.
I'm not sure you can reverse this now.
Because we're turning out more and more generations of kids who are more and more being taught this every year.
So as bad as you and I had it, and as bad as our kids are getting it, imagine what our grandkids are beginning to get, right, in the elementary, middle, and high school.
So the only way you win this, and the founding fathers were right, the Republic will stand as long as you have two things, an educated and a moral population.
We can talk about the morality aspect perhaps another time, but certainly as far as education goes, I think our entire chat today suggests there are horrific dangers of the kind of miseducation, the kind of anti-education that we're giving our kids about our own country and our own way of life.
It won't stand. If we cannot convince our kids that freedom is better than slavery, that free speech is better than censorship, if we don't have the guts to show our kids America, Western culture's demerits alongside the demerits of the rest of the world, then you could make a solid argument that we don't deserve our own civilization.
Well, I certainly think and hope that our conversations can help to generate that kind of courage in people.
You know, we're like a sandcastle and time is like the waves.
You know, we have to defend, we have to rebuild, we have to protect because everything falls apart, everything falls away that is not rigorously protected and defended.
Your freedoms will wash away.
Your independence will wash away.
Your liberties, your egalitarianism fantasies will all wash away if you don't actually protect and defend what you have.
And everybody in the world wants what everyone else has.
And there has been, I think, particularly in higher education, and you would speak to this much better than I could, Dr. Pesta, but I think there has been in higher education a pretty relentless dumbing down.
It goes back to what Harold Bloom was talking about decades ago.
But as the gates of academia have opened up to allow more and more people in the fantasy You say, oh, well, you know, people who have a college degree are really, really smart and they make a lot of money.
So let's have everyone get a college degree so they can become really, really smart and make a lot of money.
It's like, that's not, no, no.
No, no, that's not how it works.
Smart people go to college.
College doesn't make people necessarily smart.
You know, tall people get on the basketball team.
Putting a short person on the basketball team doesn't make them tall.
And what's happened is, and I just read this the other day, that over the past, A couple of decades, the average mean IQ of college students has gone down by almost a full standard deviation.
So you've opened up the gates.
You've opened up. And then what happens is you have a lot of people in there who don't have the native intellectual acuity to understand principles beyond the immediate.
And if you don't understand principles, i.e.
freedom breeds inequality of incomes and outcomes, then you are so prone to what Nietzsche called resentment, right?
He used the French word ressentiment all the time.
But this idea of resentment, that you can always find...
And show them others who are doing better than they are.
This happened with the kulaks in post-revolutionary Soviet Russia after 1917.
They went to all of the peasants, and some of the peasants were doing really well.
Again, it's that Pareto distribution.
Out of 10,000 peasants, it's 100 who produce half the food.
And you go to all of the lazy, drunken, idiot, or just not particularly smart peasants, and you say, ah, those peasants, they got all their food, they got all their land, they got all their wealth, they got their pretty women and pretty wives, and they've stolen it from you, and we're going to steal it back from you.
Because they're just bad people, and they're pillaging, and they're...
You know, predator distribution is like the antithesis to this egalitarian fantasies.
And so you've got all of these people coming into college who aren't doing as well as smart people, who cannot replicate the successes of prior generations of intellectuals.
And what's everyone saying?
Well, they're saying, well...
See, all those people, they just stole everything, they're just bad, and you're exactly equal to them, but the reason you can't do as well is because of privilege and racism and sexism and glass ceilings and you name it.
All of these magical inventions to explain underperformance that can very easily be explained statistically with the bell curve and so on.
And I think this...
Is a great challenge to our society, which is why I think some of the most interesting intellectual work these days is being done outside of academia, because the flood of less able students into academia, I don't think it's designed to share the wealth.
I think it's actually designed to destroy academia.
Yeah, and if our kids today are one standard deviation intelligence-wise less than their predecessors, Our kids are three or four or five standard deviations less in their cultural knowledge, right?
One way, I think, to raise the intellectual achievement is to go back to teaching real cultural knowledge to kids, right?
By exposing kids to comparative societies, we don't do it anymore.
We don't have real critical thinking in the schools anymore because the narrative is all political.
It's not educational.
The politics dictate we must magnify the sins of the West and ignore the non-Western sins to combat racism.
But that's counterintellectual.
It's It's quasi-fascist in a way.
It's lying to our kids.
If we went back to comparative critical analysis, here's what Western culture did wrong in the Crusades.
Here are some of the atrocities.
Here are some of the motivations.
Here are some of the petty behaviors because there were plenty.
Whenever you get people together, you get plenty.
Here are plenty. But on the other side of the coin, consider the opponent in the Crusades.
Five centuries, four centuries before the First Crusade, this was happening, this was happening, this was happening.
And get kids to engage that way?
That, I think, is going to raise the overall profile, but our universities won't do it.
They are adamantly committed to going down that other path, to transforming the United States of America, to transforming the West.
Not on the basis of truth or knowledge, understanding, learning, or critical thinking, but simply by, for lack of a better word, incorporating this kind of cheap quasi-socialist dialectic to get us to be so embarrassed about ourselves that our fundamental institutions are transformed.
The very things, the very pillars on which we built Western freedom, free speech, free association, free expression, free markets, free expression of religion, all that has to be done away with.
And I There's a small percentage of our intellectual elite who understand exactly what that means in terms of the destruction of a way of life, by and large, the end of liberty in the world.
Where else are you going to go when the West falls?
There's a small percentage that understand that.
But far, far too many of our, even our professors, haven't thought through carefully enough what their own little challenged platforms to speak truth, how as soon as they get rid of the other stuff, that's going to go too.
That the little island on which they think they are immune in their progressivism, that's going to be swallowed up just as quickly as everything else is.
That's the tragedy in this, that the people screaming about this, these college kids screaming about democracy in anti-democratic protests, demanding their free speech rights while shutting down the speech of others, insisting upon no fascism and no violence while brutalizing people who disagree with them, don't have enough intellectual awareness or simple common sense to understand that the shoe is on the other foot as well and that you're inviting those things back at you.
This is the great, I think, coming horror that I think men and women of good conscience are trying desperately to avert is that young people, I think, are not being taught how to think anymore.
They're being taught how to hate.
And you get a certain rush, a certain sadistic rush, when you uncork your hatreds and your frustrations, and you've been told by the powers that be that those particular people are your enemy.
And generally, whoever's saying, those people are your enemy, who doesn't have a good rational basis, just follow the arm back up to the head that's saying it.
That's probably your actual enemy.
But they're not being taught how to think.
They're being taught how to hate.
And that gives you a certain amount of power until the objects of your hatred begin to hate back.
And I think that's starting to happen now when you look at the pushback with the free speech riots and so on.
Well, people are showing up now and they're willing to fight back.
And that, I think, is where the civility of society really hangs in the balance.
And that takes us all the way back as a nice segue as we wind down to the Crusades.
In reality, the Crusades were not some spur-of-the-moment attempt by Western peoples to dominate and punish non-Western peoples.
It was a response to a civilization that was under attack.
Their civilization, their worldview, their beliefs, their religion was being assaulted by an aggressive, powerful enemy.
And after centuries of that kind of oppression, they fought back.
And we're all better because they did.
Western culture is better because they did.
And world culture is better because they did.
We are in a similar situation.
If we are not willing to fight back, primarily intellectually, philosophically, right?
But sooner or later, as we're beginning to see, as that side becomes more violent, right?
If we're not willing to stand up to them and not be cowed by their violence, then we're going to lose this again, right?
And what I'm worried about, vis-a-vis our talk on the Crusades, we have turned crusading into Like the word discrimination.
We have turned it into only a negative word.
I tell my students all the time, kids, you discriminate all the time, and you have to.
Do you want me to pick your husband for you?
Would you be okay with that? No, you're too discriminating for that, right?
You don't just stick anything in your mouth.
You eat carefully. You discriminate.
What about your friends? Do you pick your friends simply by who's first come, first serve?
No. We've turned discrimination into one of those words, which is a very useful word, but we've only given it its negative connotation.
A crusade, the way the Middle Ages perceived the word crusade, it was a just battle for something worth saving.
For survival. We've completely lost that definition.
And as long as we continue to do this with words...
As long as we continue to teach kids that the worst interpretation of a word is the only interpretation when it comes to our values, we're going to be behind the eight ball here.
And so fighting back a lot of different ways.
I'd prefer to fight back philosophically.
I'd prefer to fight back theologically, intellectually.
But at some point, they leave you in a wiggle room.
Are we a culture? And vis-a-vis the immigrants, too, that are streaming into our countries.
Are we a culture that's willing to fight for our core values, whatever that means?
Or are we going to roll over and let them go away?
It is my hope that we can continue with language, with reason, and with evidence, because if it Comes to a time when we can't, and I have to step aside.
Whoever takes my place will be a very, very different kind of person.
So thanks very much for the conversation.
Just wanted to remind people to go to fpeusa.org to check out the Freedom Project Academy.
My great thanks to you as always, Dr.
Pesta, not just for what you do on this show, which gets out to millions of people, but also for what you do in your classroom.
I have recommended that people stay away from Thank you.
