June 11, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:20:37
4116 The Spiritual Death of The West | Michael Walsh and Stefan Molyneux
"Without an understanding and appreciation of the culture we seek to preserve and protect, the defense of Western civilization is fundamentally futile; a culture that believes in nothing cannot defend itself, because it has nothing to defend. The past not only still has something to tell us, but it also has something that it must tell us. In this profound and wide-ranging historical survey, Michael Walsh illuminates the ways that the narrative and visual arts both reflect and affect the course of political history, outlining the way forward by arguing for the restoration of the Heroic Narrative that forms the basis of all Western cultural and religious traditions. Let us listen, then, to the angels of our nature, for better and worse. They have much to tell us, if only we will listen."Michael Walsh is a journalist, screenwriter and author of many books including “The Devil's Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West” and “The Fiery Angel: Art, Culture, Sex, Politics, and the Struggle for the Soul of the West.”Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dkahanerulesPJ Media: http://www.pjmedia.com/columnist/michael-walshThe Fiery Angel: http://www.fdrurl.com/the-fiery-angelThe Devil's Pleasure Palace: http://www.fdrurl.com/devils-pleasure-palaceYour 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
Hope you're doing well. Very pleased today to talk to Michael Walsh.
He is a journalist, screenwriter, and the author of many books, including The Devil's Pleasure Palace, The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West, and The Fiery Angel, Art, Culture, Sex, Politics, and the Struggle for the Soul of the West.
You can find his columns at pjmedia.com slash columnist slash Michael-Walsh.
We'll also put his Twitter feed in the show notes.
Michael, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thank you for having me on.
I appreciate it. So, the cultural battle, culture wars, politics being downstream from culture, culture perhaps being downstream from demographics and history.
Where do you see the major potentially peaceful battle occurring in the West at the moment?
How is it characterized? Because a lot of people think it's politics, but you certainly have taken a different approach.
I am, and in both these books, Stefan, I decided to go at the root of the problem and the issues, not the symptom.
Politics is the symptom of a cultural issue.
This has been true since the Greeks, and it remains true especially in the West today.
And I believe that we have been cut off from our own culture deliberately, deliberately by the philosophers of the Frankfurt School and the educational establishment that followed in their wake, which is what I outlined in Devil's Pleasure Palace.
And in Fire Angel, I'm trying to reconnect us with the roots and the wellsprings of our own culture, which gives us the tools to fight back against Two groups in particular that I see as mortally threatening us.
The first and less dangerous is the cultural Marxists who have just tried to inculcate a kind of spirit of nihilism in the West and a sense of guilt so that they can help us to destroy ourselves By cutting us off from our own strengths.
And then, of course, recrudescent Islam, which has always been antithetical to the West.
It defines itself in antithesis to the West.
It is not assimilable.
And for us to pretend that it is and to welcome it in is just crazy.
And 3000, well, 3000 years of Western history and certainly What, 1,300, 1,400 years of dealing with Islam has taught us these lessons, but we seem to forget them and we seem to have to learn them over and over.
So that was the purpose of these two books, to show you the problem and then connect you back to the solution.
Statism seems to be grimly cyclical amnesia and self-destruction.
So let's go to the deep roots of this.
I mean, we could certainly start talking about the 1930s, but in your book, of course, you go a lot.
Further back and further deep, let's start from medievalism onwards and feel free to take your time and explore the nooks and crannies so people can get a sense of how we got here.
Because if we don't understand the momentum, then we won't understand how much struggle is needed to turn something.
You know, the bigger the rolling boulder, the more strength is needed to change its course.
That's correct. Well, especially in this latter book, in The Fiery Angel, I spent a great deal of time taking us from the Greeks to the modern times via the Middle Ages.
And this is a crucial step.
I'm now, for reasons late in life, very obsessed by the Historians of the Roman Empire.
So I've read Livy, and I've read Tacitus, and of course I read Virgil and the Aeneid, which is a quasi-historical epic poem, in order to ground myself in our own political origins and to see if there are lessons that we can learn from that.
And in fact, we can.
And one of the things I think people forget about the Romans, because we really only know the cartoon versions of the Romans, Is that while the Roman Empire in the West fell in the middle of the 5th century, it lasted in the East for another 1,000 years.
1,000 years.
It's an unimaginable amount of time to us in America, which is only a couple of hundred years old.
But the Roman Empire, which continued in Constantinople as an apotheosis of Greek Hellenistic learning, the The Byzantine emperors were Greeks.
That was the repository of learning what was left of ancient Greece for many, many years.
When it fell to the Turks in 1453, a lot of that learning was destroyed, but some of it was preserved.
And while it died out in the West during the so-called Dark Ages, the 8th, 9th, 10th centuries, it was preserved in the literature of the East.
It was translated into Arabic, which had become the lingua franca of the Muslim world.
And the Turks had been converted to Islam at that point, obviously.
And so some of it survived, and it came back through the Al-Andalus, the Spain, the Muslim conquered Spain, and then back into the West via Thomas Aquinas.
So it was just kind of a stroke of luck in a way.
First, bad luck that Constantinople fell, but secondly, good luck That Abhisheh and these Muslim scholars of the very brief golden age of Muslim scholarship preserved the Greeks, although rejecting the teachings of the Greeks, they did preserve it enough that we were able to reconnect with our own base.
And so that is the basis of everything that we know now happened To stretch through this brief interregnum of the Muslim conquest.
But we should learn from it that they are not there to preserve.
That was accidental. They're prepared and they are there to destroy.
And we have to preserve our own culture in the face of Islamic prescription that there can be no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet, etc., etc., which means that all previous civilizations and existences must be negated.
And that's one of the things we're up against.
But if we reconnect with the Greeks and Romans, no matter how we do it, we'll find the strength to resist both them and the cultural Marxists.
So what is in the Greeks and the Romans that you think has been scrubbed or is most necessary in the sort of cultural battles that we found ourselves in?
Yes, that's a good question, and it's precisely what the books are about.
I have posited something that I call, whether originally or unoriginally, the heroic narrative.
It's partly based on Campbell's philosophy, The Hero of a Thousand Faces, and the basis for all Western storytelling.
But more important, it's not just storytelling.
It's the basis for all Western self-identification, which is to say, We are not cogs in a machine.
We are not ants in an ant farm.
We are not Chinese under the Han Dynasty.
We are individuals. This is partly a Christian thing and certainly a Judeo-Christian thing.
We are individuals with our own destinies, an individual destiny.
We're not a collective. We may form ourselves into groups, but we ourselves are not nothing.
And that therefore, all of our stories, starting with even before the Greeks, you can go back to Celtic history, you can go back to Finn McCool, you can go back to Cattle Raid and Cooley, in our own Irish culture, these things are about individuals with a destiny to fulfill.
And even the humblest among us, especially those of us who are Christians, understand that there is a destiny that we uniquely and alone must and can fulfill if we set our minds to it.
So I think the notion of individualism, which then comes and is reflected in the religions that grow out of the heroic narrative, is what separates the West from the East.
And that's why the cultural Marxist and economic Marxist collectives are so Debilitating and damaging because they treat people as a group rather than as individuals.
And we must fight for the individual.
The left, by the way, which has masqueraded as the party of the individual and concern for individual rights, It's now a wholly collectivist enterprise, and it attacks us constantly on the grounds of collectivism, and through the means of collectivism, and yet it's individuals like you and me and a handful of other people in cyberspace, on Twitter and writing and on blogs, and I still work for Some of the mainstream media outlets as well.
We have to defend individualism.
I never thought I'd get to the point where the left would actually abjure the Constitution of the United States, but they have.
They don't like the First Amendment.
They don't like the Second Amendment.
They probably don't like the Third Amendment.
They'd like to have police quartered at all of our houses, I'm sure, if they were given their druthers.
They don't like the Fourth Amendment.
They don't really like the Fifth Amendment, unless they're using it.
They certainly don't like the Ninth and Tenth Amendment.
So we're up against a mortal enemy here, and we have to treat them as Big fans of the 19th though.
Now this is the frustrating thing about history as well, Michael, which is we've We have the recipe for salvation, or at least we have the recipe for damnation, which gives us the recipe for salvation, which is, if you look at the late Roman Empire and the writers and so on, I mean, they're all facing exactly the same issues that we're facing now.
An overweening, tyrannical government that continually expands by bribing off the less intelligent, less fortunate, less ambitious sectors of the society.
Mass immigration.
Because the indolence and laziness of a welfare-dependent population has reduced the productivity of the empire.
Debasement of the currency, massive national debts, attacks upon the family, free and easy divorce.
I mean, all of this has been done before.
History is just the same damn story, but with different costumes.
And the fact that we're not willing to circle back, and in particular read...
The Romans, I think, have the most to say about the decay and dying nature of a hyper-redistributionist, welfare state, imperialistic, quasi-empire.
They have everything that needs to be said, has been said before, and it's even been translated.
It's not like you've got to learn Latin to figure this stuff out, and yet we simply won't go back and say, huh, I wonder if anyone in the past has dealt with this similar kind of issue and maybe solved it for us.
Well, that's exactly my point, Stefan.
Exactly my point, which is they cut us off from our own culture.
They stopped teaching it in school.
I took Latin when I was a freshman in high school.
In Honolulu, Hawaii, it was mandatory to take Latin.
I'm so glad I did because it gave me the basis for all the romance languages that I've encountered in my life.
It also connects us with the wellsprings of our history.
If you go back to, say, Livy, who is writing about pre-imperial, pre-Republican Rome, he's talking about Rome under the kings, and then how the Romans threw off the kings and established the republic.
He's constantly writing about the problems between the elites, between the aristocracy, and the people.
So the aristocracy, the elites have their consuls.
The people have their tribunes.
And that's this yin and yang of Roman republican democracy, obsessed Livy.
By the time you get to Tacitus, who's writing past Tiberius and past Nero, actually, he has the chance to overlook the first five emperors, starting with Augustus.
He has nothing good to say about any of them.
And he reflects on how Roman society corrupted itself through fear of the absolute dictate.
Being touted as coming back never came back.
So these are the two extremes that we have to go back and forth between.
But your point is correct, and that's the point I make on the fiery angel.
We've already been there.
We've already done it, and we know exactly what the problem is.
Now let's learn from it.
But if you've cut off your youth from the past, they're going to start thinking that this has never happened.
We know how youth is.
Everything's brand new. Everything happened yesterday, the day they were born.
And so they're going to look for silly solutions elsewhere, and they're going to be very susceptible to the siren song Of nihilism and Islamism, which promises them a completely unified field theory of everything with no thought required.
So democracy, Republican democracy, is dangerous.
It's difficult. It's hard.
It requires an informed electorate.
And our founding fathers were quite clear about that.
And yet, what have we done?
We don't make them read about it anymore.
So no wonder we have the problems we have.
It's a funny thing too, Michael.
I remember when I first started taking philosophy in university.
These figures were handed to me as, you know, elevated, refined intellectuals who wrestled with the problems of humanity and morality and politics and so on.
And you quote this, Paul Johnson's great book, Intellectuals, in your book, in The Devil's Pleasure Palace.
And it was a real eye-opener to me.
Paul Johnson's basic thesis was, you know, we had these people who said, well, we're the new moralists.
We can replace the priests.
And I said, okay, well, how good were they as people since they claimed to want to replace the priests as the moralists of mankind?
And, I mean, almost end to end, they were just appalling messes of selfishness and neurosis and hypochondria and egotism and viciousness and...
Vanity and all that and particularly maybe we can start with Rousseau in this area because of course you first hear about Rousseau it's the noble savage it's the gentle education of children and and all of this and then you sort of pierce through the language which people use to describe themselves which is you know like the selfie on tinder it's got no relation may not represent the actual person involved and when you learn about Rousseau and the hideousness of his personality,
his character, his choices, his abandonment of children to almost certain death in orphanages, not even bothering to name them, his use of his longtime affair mistress, who he said he just used for her body, nothing for her person, and so on. The hideous nature of these people should be kind of a clue.
You know, like it's the same thing with Marx.
You know, it's the same thing Simone de Beauvoir.
And I think it was Sartre who signed a proclamation saying that pedophilia should be legalized.
It's like they're not even being very subtle.
I mean, you've got Alinsky. He's dedicating his book.
To Satan! I mean, it's not like this.
Ooh, there's no slate of hand here.
It's like, hey, which hand is the card in?
It's like, well, the hands are right open.
There's nothing up the sleeve. They're right up front.
And even though people are screaming in her face, we're terrible human beings.
We have no values.
We hate life. People are like, ah, I really think they have a lot to teach us.
And it just drives me crazy. It's like the woman who dates the guy who's got a big swastika tattooed on his forehead.
He's got no neck.
You know, he's carrying 12 heads in a body bag.
And she's like, well, I don't know.
There was no sign that anything was amiss.
And it's like, ah!
Drives me crazy. No, they come to us strangely naked, and yet we won't see who they are.
Rousseau is a good example.
And I was thinking about Rousseau this week, in fact, because it's now 50 years ago.
Is that right? Yes, 50 years ago this week that the revolution of 1968 happened.
And the French students were in the streets.
I was a freshman in college that year in the spring of 68.
And I remember my French teacher, a wonderful guy who just couldn't quite get French into my head at that age, but I tried.
He turned to us at one point during all the student uprisings that took down De Gaulle and there was, of course, 1968 was a very busy year here in the United States, too, as you may recall.
I would say it's the worst year in American history.
Our French teacher looked at us and he said, you know, boys, or I guess it was in college, so it was college class, You're all the bastard children of Rousseau.
And I had no idea what he meant by that.
But first of all, bastard children should have been a clue, but I didn't know about Rousseau's interesting personal habits.
But also the fact that we had inherited this notion that Rousseau and Rousseauianism was good when in fact it was evil.
Should have told us something, but you're right, Paul Johnson in Intellectuals tears these guys apart.
In fact, the subhead on the chapter on Marx is, quote, howling gigantic curses.
And that's exactly how you see Marx, don't you?
Just a monster of a man who was also sexually rather frisky, who had a long-running affair with the housemaid.
His house while his wife was there simultaneously.
He's the guy that never had a job.
Oh, and dumped her pregnant into the street.
After he impregnated her, just threw her into the street because it's really bad when capitalists exploit their workers.
But it's fine if you bang your maid, get her pregnant, and dump her into the street to a certain life of destitution, if not prostitution.
Definitely. And you mentioned Rousseau's mistress, Therese, what's her name?
He had four or five children by her, and they were born.
He didn't name them. He put them in a bag, and he took them to the steps of the nearest church or foundling hospital, and he left them.
So this ought to tell leftists exactly what your leaders have in mind for you.
They treat you the way Satan treats us.
I said in The Devil's Pleasure Palace, God wants souls.
Satan needs corpses.
Satan piles up the corpses, whereas God wants the souls.
They're not working collaboratively, I hasten to add, but their interest in humanity is of two different parts of the human being.
And if you don't see the body count with Satan, then you're not paying attention.
But as you pointed out, they're never paying attention.
They think Rousseau's great.
They think Marx is great. They think Bernie Sanders is great.
They think Hillary Clinton is great.
These people are as monstrous as they come, and yet no one will call them out on it because they're so well protected by the people invested in not seeing the emperor's new clothes.
Well, and this is something I was thinking about while I was reading through your books, which I thought about when I was a kid and then received my Christian education.
I remember I was in boarding school and I was in the choir and we would get our religious education, I think twice a week, maybe even three times a week.
And I remember we did have a young priest who came in, and he was entertaining and a good communicator, but there seemed to be a trivialization of the devil.
And I remember very clearly, I think I was about six years old, and he stood up in front of the congregation, I guess the kids for the most part, And he was saying, you know, and God threw the devil into a big lake and then put up a sign saying, no fishing!
And I remember we all kind of tittered at that, like it was kind of a funny way to describe it.
But then when I came across, years of course later, a portrait of the artist as a young man, wherein there is the terrifying description of hell that is provided by...
A priest who could be characterized as verbally sadistic to one degree or another.
And these two poles of how the devil was portrayed to me as kind of like a Wile E. Coyote cartoon character that you could just, you know, beat by painting a hole in a wall and having him run into it, versus a truly diabolical destroyer of souls and lives and cultures and civilizations and so on.
It seems that to me, because we have become so largely secular, We no longer have a conceptual or moral container wherein we can put the diabolical aspects of humanity.
And the fact that individual human evil can create such destruction, I mean, if you look at Stalin with the Ukrainians or Hitler with the Jews and others, I mean...
We don't have a way of containing how much destruction can be wrought by corrupted and satanic human beings.
And I think, for me, I kind of regret that I was just told he was, you know, the devil was kind of like a cartoon character you could throw into a lake, put up a sign and say no fishing and, you know, done and dusted.
It's like we've lost our immune system for evil because we don't have an artistic or conceptual container wherein it draws our attention to human corruption.
That's correct, and of course the famous line, you know, the greatest trick the devil ever played is as convincing as he doesn't exist, which was in the movie The Usual Suspects, but actually it comes from Baudelaire.
That's the truth, and the fact is we don't want to admit the devil, but, and here's the but, and this is the whole point of the Fire Angel, our artists deal with the devil in humanity all the time.
That is the great subject of Western art.
The temptations, the crimes that are committed.
How do we deal with them? Let's start at the beginning.
Let's start, as I do in The Fire Angel, let's start with the Oresteia by Sophocles.
What happens? Agamemnon goes off to war in Troy and fights for 10 years, and they're all waiting for him to come home.
And as the first play opens, Agamemnon The watchman sees the fires being lit, and the fires are the thing that are going to tell him that Agamemnon and the Greeks are victorious and they're on their way back.
And what he says is, Is this a sign from the heavens or is it just another lie from the gods?
He's not sure until Agamemnon shows up.
Now, Agamemnon shows up and what does he find?
Well, he finds that his wife has taken up with another man.
Agamemnon himself brings home Cassandra as his mistress, the great prophetess Cassandra.
Who people hated not because she was so down, but because she was never wrong.
She's always right.
That's why they hated Cassandra.
And as soon as he gets in the bathtub, he is slaughtered by his wife because she's still mad that he sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, to get favorable wins for the Greek fleet 10 years earlier to go.
So there's a primal crime and then a primal revenge.
And all three plays of the Oresteia deal with The moral correctness of how do we sort that out.
So, Orestes comes back and he kills his mother and her lover.
He's put on trial.
And in the end, with a jury of 12, the jury is hung until Apollo and the goddess Athena Come in and intervene, and they rule that while he did murder his mother, it was because she had killed his father.
And now they turn the Furies, the Eredes, into the Eumenides, the peaceful ones.
And everyone learns to accept the verdict and move on with their lives.
So these three plays, you can read them all in an hour.
They are so wonderful.
They're great on stage, they're great to read, but they go to the heart of the Western moral dilemma, about the human moral dilemma.
Yes, a great evil was done, and it was answered with a great evil, and evil begets evil, but how do we sort it out?
We're talking about 500 BC here, so none of this is new to us, and we can learn from this if we would just go back and reread these things and connect with our own history.
Well, and the ethics that are the foundation of the Western system.
As you point out in the book, thou shalt not steal is, in a sense, the lancement set up against the charging horses of the welfare state.
Because if you refer to property rights and thou shalt not steal, then when people come along and say, oh, you know, all of this freedom we have seems to be producing quite a lot of inequality.
And that makes me uncomfortable.
And so what we're going to do is we're going to take from those who have, and we're going to give to those who haven't, right?
The old Marxist doctrine, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
So we're going to take from those who have too much.
We're going to give just a little, you know, a little skim off the top, you know, just a little redistribution.
And for a while, of course, it seems to work fairly well as...
Evil does, right? Evil is very tempting because you have to kind of look over the hill of evil to see the valley of the consequences.
You know, the devil will bribe you with all these wonderful things.
And if you only look at the wonderful things, it's like, done deal, man, I'm in.
But if you look over that to the valley on the other side, and now when we're in the valley, we really seem to have lost our way.
I mean, so much. We no longer live in the West anymore.
That was the West. We now live in a post-Western nihilistic hellscape of Nietzschean will to power, falsification, lies, rage, manipulation, grabbing of resources with only the thin pretense of morality.
So, in a sense, to me, when I say, well, we've got to save the West, It is not anything to do with trying to find a way to maintain what we have right now, which is pretty ghastly.
But we can't move forward without understanding what gave us something to save in the first place, which is all of these intellectual and, in particular, the artistic traditions that you talk about.
Yes. Well, I think the last chapter of the Fire Angel subhead is the way forward might just be backward.
Look, there's a passage in the Bible that speaks to just what you were saying.
When I quote the Bible, as I do a lot in The Devil's Pleasure Palace, I'm quoting it as a literary work.
I don't want to get into religious test arguments about whether Christ was The son of God, etc.
I just want to talk about the story that we have.
And in the story, the hero, who, by the way, doesn't know he's the hero until later in his life, who has to learn to accept it, and even at the moment of his death cries out, why are you doing this to me?
Why are you not listening to me?
Help! And only achieves his apotheosis at the very last frame of the movie, practically.
Well, there's a passage in the Bible where the hero, Jesus, goes up on top of a mountain with the devil, who says to him, have a look at this, and this is your valley metaphor.
I will give you this entire thing.
And the whole world, the world is not enough, right?
The world is yours. That's the running tagline in the movie Scarface.
Both versions of the movie Scarface, we see an ad that says, you know, the world is yours.
And Jesus says no, because the price of it is Jesus to worship Satan, and he won't do that.
But the point that you've made, I make in this book and others make, is the devil comes to us not as Satan with claws and hooves and It's the classic story of the traitor.
The traitor is the guy, your best friend, who comes up behind you and stabs you in the back.
Youth is very susceptible to this, and the devil always comes using your own goodness against you in order to seduce, corrupt, and eventually kill you.
And that's why the mountains of corpses are down in that valley.
Everyone steps off that cliff and down they go.
Well, and I think this is, however we want to characterize these two poles, I shouldn't speak for you, but however I would characterize them as Darwin versus Jesus, or Darwin versus Socrates, or...
Because the question is, the devil comes along to you and says, I can give you the entire world.
If you live in a Darwinian, mammalian universe, yeah, I mean, that is more resources for your offspring, that's more resources for your progeny, that is getting to the top of the food chain.
So, why not?
Why not take the world if the world is all there is?
Now, Jesus would say heaven.
Socrates would say virtue.
Aristotle would say eudaimonia or the good life.
There has to be something that pushes back against the mere material will to power.
Because in a Darwinian universe alone, you look at someone like Che Guevara, or you look at someone like Lenin, or you look at someone like Stalin, who started out his career as a bank robber and probably would have ended up in jail, but instead ended up ruling over 200 million people just in the Soviet Union alone.
How do you look at those people and say, well, you did wrong.
You see, you took power and that's bad.
Or I look at people like George Bush or Barack Obama.
In a free society, I don't know, they'd be kind of like two-bit hustlers, maybe used car salesmen, maybe run a bit of a Ponzi scheme or something.
They wouldn't have gathered the massive amount of resources.
Or the Clintons, of course, you know, the first satanic couple in a way who gather hundreds of millions of dollars of resources through, you know, selling off scraps of freedom and resources and so on.
How do you say no to people who've gathered that many resources?
Now, of course, Christianity has the answer.
What is the point of gaining the whole world if you lose your soul?
And so there's a way to push back against the Darwinian aggregation of resources that characterize evolution.
You get the most resources, you get the most offspring, You win!
And how do we push back against that in the absence of a philosophy that people find meaningful or a religious instruction that they find compelling?
That, to me, has been one of the big what the 20th century was kind of all about.
Yes, well, we can't push back absent though.
So that's the answer to that question.
Does this mean we need a reinstitution of Christianity?
Partly. Certainly of the moral code of Christianity and Judeo-Christianity.
Yes, we do. Because we have to be able to answer Gordon Gekko, the evil villain of Wall Street.
We have to be able to answer Darwin.
As Barack Obama said, at some point you've made enough money.
I mean, in a way, we have to be able to answer that with With goodness and with the innate sense of justice and right and wrong.
And again, these are concepts the left corrupts constantly by saying, how can you let this one person suffer?
Well, Ireland's just gone through this, as you know, and in a country we both share roots in.
They just voted to remove the Eighth Amendment from the Constitution, which guaranteed the protection of the life of the unborn.
So now it will be up to the Irish Parliament, which is almost wholly a left-wing organization, to define how many weeks it will be permissible for a woman to abort her child.
And they're talking about 12, but as I've said to my Irish friends, and I'm on my way to Dublin to say this again, so Roe versus Wade started out the same way.
If you go back and look at the decision, it was a very limited right to abortion.
It's now become a complete total right to kill your child at any point in its gestation for any reason.
And that's the way it will go.
Satan cannot be satisfied with partial measures.
He has to take the whole The whole body, because he can't have the soul.
But we have to have a moral argument against that.
And the moral argument is, yes, it's wrong.
It's just wrong. That there is, if you believe in an afterlife, then it's not worth gaining the whole world if you lose your soul.
Certainly not for whales, as they say in A Man for All Seasons.
But we've taught our kids that only fools think this way.
And that therefore the world is a corrupt dog-eat-dog place where if you don't shiv your buddy, then you've somehow let the team down.
And the Clintons were the worst example of this.
And there's a reason why, and I wrote this many times, most famously at the request of John F. Kennedy Jr.
when he was alive and he was editing George magazine.
And he knew that I was writing a book about the great Irish gangster Owen Vincent Madden, Oney Madden of New York City.
And he said, well, Madden died in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and I spent a lot of time in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and he asked me to write a book about Clinton's connection to Oney Madden in Hot Springs.
Oney Madden retired from gangland in 1935, the day after Dutch Schultz was murdered at the Palace Chop House in Newark, New Jersey, and he went to Hot Springs, which he took over for the next 30 years and ran as a gangland fiefdom.
And one of his protégés was William Jefferson Blythe III, Clinton.
So Clinton sat in that club, the Southern Club and Grill, and I have Clinton's friends from Hot Springs telling me all about it.
I talked with the lawyer, I talked with everybody in Hot Springs, and absorbed Not crime, but the lessons that the tough guys win, the guys that are willing to cut corners win, the guys who can intimidate and who have muscle win.
And that's how a boy from nowhere became president of the United States.
He applied gangland's lessons to American politics.
And since then, the Democrats have never stopped doing that.
And so, as writing as David Kahane in National Review, as I did for many years, I coined the expression, the Democrats are a criminal organization masquerading as a political party, which has now become a kind of meme.
And I stand by that statement.
I believe that's exactly what they are, and there's no way to prove to me that they're not.
But we can't become them.
We can't become them.
Well, that, of course, is the big challenge because they do gather resources and there are too many compromises among non-leftists.
And I know we have to kind of use this nomenclature, although collectivists, individualists, rationalists, and mystics, there could be a lot of different ways of putting it.
And one of the ways in which it has become so tragic, at least for me, is we have this incredible communications technology.
You and I are able to have this video conversation across thousands of miles or hundreds of miles.
And at the same time, and probably not coincidentally, as we have the rise of this amazing communications technology, the range of allowable subjects is collapsing.
And again, it's probably not a coincidence.
Political correctness has risen, I think, in particular with the internet, because the internet opens up a human conversation that pushes back against propaganda, particularly the propaganda of guilt and collectivism, in the same way that the monotheism to some degree of Christendom under Catholicism was fragmented or fractured by, I guess, the internet of the day, the Gutenberg Press.
And this political correctness, this very narrow Overton window of allowable opinions, you've written, and I thought it was a very powerful phrase, political correctness, It's the most brazen assault on Western culture that one can imagine, a ravenous, lupine force that can never be satisfied.
And a lot of people think it's just kind of fussy, it's just kind of OCD maybe a little bit, it's an over-concern for the feelings of the over-sensitive, but you're particularly ferocious on political correctness, and why?
Why? Because I think it's fascism of the mind.
That's what it is. It's to get people like you and me and millions and millions and millions of others like us to think that we're aberrational and alone.
So your point, I think, about the Internet is very good.
What it allowed people to do is to connect with other people and realize they're not alone, which is why the ferocious pushback now is so great because the Cultural Marxists who started political correctness, it all comes out of critical theory and the Frankfurt School, they realize their grip is failing, so they have to do things like net neutrality.
They had to go right back and attack the internet.
They institute state censorship of the internet.
They don't want people talking to each other because it You know, I hate to bring up Star Trek, but I do kind of like Star Trek.
And there's a wonderful Star Trek, the only true Star Trek, the original.
The Ur-Trek, we could call it.
The Ur-Trek, yes, exactly.
There's an episode with The good angel.
And he seduces all the children on board a ship to kill all their parents and take over the ship.
And when the Enterprise finds them, the children are in the grips of this angel, who's played by Melvin Belli, which is funny for those of us who are of a certain age.
Melvin Belli, the famous San Francisco lawyer, was quite a prominent public personality in his day.
He plays the angel.
And Kirk finally gets the children to look at the angel Without the rose-colored glasses they are effectively wearing.
And as they watch him, his face begins to melt and he turns into a horrid monster.
And Kirk says, now look at him.
And the kids all start crying and they want to turn away.
He says, no, look at him until you see what a hard, putrid thing this is.
And that's what we simply must do with our opponents who Are dedicated to our destruction.
Expose them for what they are.
And political correctness is their way of making that difficult for us to do, because it rules things out of bounds in the conversation.
And as soon as you say something that offends somebody, you're immediately ostracized, banned, and lose your job, etc.
I mean, just look at the mob mentality now on Twitter where someone can make a tweet and the next minute they're gone.
Just gone. Gone, gone, gone.
This is something worthy of the old Soviet Union, and frankly, it doesn't surprise me, because if the Soviets had had this, they would have used it.
I should just say, to polish my bona fides on this subject, I spent a great deal of time in the Soviet Union.
I spent the years between 1985 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 working and living behind the Iron Curtain, in and out constantly, starting in East Berlin in 85, in East Germany, and then going to Moscow in 86.
With Vladimir Horowitz, the great Russian pianist who did a once-in-a-lifetime return to Russia at that point.
And then continuing to go back until right up to the coup against Gorbachev.
I was also there when Chernobyl blew up.
So I had a very The front row seat of a lot of the great events, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, which I was at, as well.
I saw this happening.
I know what the Soviet Union was like.
I got the smell of it in my nose to this day.
If you've spent any time in a socialist country, children out there, I'm talking to you, Bernie bros, it stinks to high heaven.
The people stink. The air stinks.
It's filthy. The water is polluted.
It's disgusting.
The entire place has no maintenance.
Everything's falling apart.
The buildings crumble as you look at them.
And this is the satanic hell.
This is the devil's pleasure palace that these people want for us in the West.
And you simply have to say it.
So they've swept that all under the rug, and now we've got a new generation of suckers We think, well, what's wrong with each according to his ability?
Well, what's wrong with it is it always ends with you up against a wall being shot.
That's what happens.
And if you don't understand that, I can't help you unless you experience it firsthand.
Well, and of course, there are a lot of people, I just did a conversation about Che Guevara, who like shooting people.
You know, it's something a little bit beyond the can of most sane people.
But yeah, there are a lot of people who are like, wait, there's a political code out there that can have me finally unleash my inner serial killer.
You know, people, they like that stuff.
I mean, to forget that human beings can be monstrously sadistic and use...
Ideals as a way of uncorking their inner devils is something that we kind of need to keep relearning, which is kind of annoying because there have been so many examples.
You know, as I say, in the 20th century, a quarter of a billion people were murdered by their own governments, not war, not combatants in war, murdered by their own governments from Cambodia to, of course, the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, in particular, Russia.
Sorry, China was monstrous with this.
That's a quarter of a billion bodies.
Anybody to me who then says, well, we should try it again, it's like, so you want more bodies.
It's got nothing to do with ideals.
It's got nothing to do with egalitarianism.
You're just a hugely rage-filled, hateful, postulant, souled...
The monstrosity of a human being, and you want to set up a system wherein you can produce more bodies.
I mean, that to me is with the examples.
Like, if you meet a Nazi now, it's not like you can say, well, that wasn't real Nazism, you see.
We've just got to try it again in a different country or under a different context.
It's like, you know what that is.
You know what National Socialism is.
You know what that is, so you have no excuses.
You can still run across communists in every walk of life, and in particular in academia, where there are like over 30,000 vowed communists in America alone.
And they're like, well, you know, next time, you know, we're going to tweak it a little bit, we're going to get it right.
And it's like, no, you just want more bodies because it's the same story every single time.
Yes, they're frustrated, bitter, nasty little people, especially the academics, of course, who, if you remove the social restrictions on murder, they'll be the first to sign up to start shooting.
I say in The Devil's Pleasure Palace, rage is the characteristic attribute of Satan.
Satan is infuriated.
And if you go back to speaking of the lake of fire from your Irish boyhood, if you go back to the beginning of Paradise Lost by Milton, which I use as a tool of analysis in The Devil's Pleasure Palace, along with Faust, which is the other kind of Ur-Western myth, how does Paradise Lost open?
It opens with Satan waking up on the floor of the lake of fire, chained, saying, what the heck just happened?
And he is so angry, he calls a top-level meeting of all the bad devils to decide, how can we get back at God?
We can't beat him in a fight.
St. Michael just put his sword right through Satan's heart, which is why it's the cover of my new book, The Fiery Angel.
So we can't beat him in a fair fight.
How do we do it? And there's a whole bunch of theories that are floated.
And finally, somebody says, hey, God has this new toy.
It's called people. And he just loves these guys more than anything.
And he's created them to serve him and just be the bee's knees, the cat's meow.
So Satan says, aha, that's the way we're going to get him.
We're going to go through his favorite thing, more favorite even than the angels, the humanity, if you follow Milton's theology.
And then we will corrupt them.
And that's how I can hurt him.
So Paradise Lost is a giant revenge fantasy by And that's something that we simply have to keep in mind because I think that's dramatically correct and it's also theologically correct.
These people are not good, which is why I refer to them throughout Devil's Pleasure Palace as the satanic left.
They don't like that, but it's true.
How is it not true, for example?
In what way are they saintly?
I want to know. Yeah, and the term political correctness, as you point out, seems to have originated with Trotsky.
Oh, shaggy-haired, rat-faced little monster.
And he was trying to describe these early Bolsheviks who, you know, the correct mode of communist expression under the Soviet political thought regime was constantly changing, and you had to navigate with the wind.
You know, the people think that a tyranny is iron unjust laws.
No, tyranny fundamentally is a system with obscene punishments and no laws.
It's a whim-based system.
It's simple, precisely.
It's whimsical, yes. And so this idea of political correctness was, what slogans do I need to mouth to not end up with an ice pick through my forehead today?
That is how it started.
And again, when you look at the etymology of these phrases, like political correctness started with Trotsky to describe how not to get killed in a psychopathic pseudo-revolution that was a mass murder fantasy disguised as a political ideology.
That should give you a bit of a clue as, again, they're not hiding.
That's the amazing thing.
I'm evil. I want, you know, like they just say all of this stuff and people are like, let's rebrand it just a little bit, obscure it just a little bit and everything will be fine.
Well, there's a wonderful portrait of Nero in a book that no one reads anymore, but I happened to see the movie The Nuns Brought a Projector into the Classroom sometime in the late 50s, early 60s, and showed this movie called Quo Vadis, which turns out to be a very long novel by a Polish writer.
It's about Christians in the time of Nero.
The portrait of Nero in that book is one of the most effective literary portraits of a monster you've ever seen.
It's not that Nero is sadistic and violent.
He's actually rather cowardly and pathetic.
But he's completely whimsical so that his entire court never knows when it's going to be their turn to open their wrists and die or be executed, or as he does to the Christians after the fire in Rome, turned into giant human flaming torches for the It's the frivolity of it that's truly evil.
It's not so much the physical abuse, torture, and murder.
It's the utter never knowing when what you said yesterday is now out of favor today.
And ladies and gentlemen, I give you the contemporary left because it changes with them every goddamn day.
Every day, There's something new you can't say.
Every day they've moved the goalposts.
And you can just think of it in terms of gay marriage.
Neither Obama nor Hillary would have said they were in favor of gay marriage, even as recently as, what, four or five years ago?
And suddenly that has all gone down the memory hole.
They were always for it.
And tomorrow they'll be for whatever else you have to be for in order to not to lose their place in this obscene pecking order.
Whereas we as conservatives are conserving.
I know exactly what I like.
I like Sophocles. I like Beethoven.
I like Aquinas. I like Mozart.
I like the paintings of the Renaissance.
And that's not going to change, no matter what the political climate is going to be tomorrow.
I don't know how you can be a leftist, Stefan.
You have to literally get your playbook every single morning to know what's acceptable discourse and what's not.
No, you see, Michael, I hate to school you on this, but it's from your own book.
You just have to invoke the magic word evolution.
My thoughts are evolving.
Everything's just evolving.
You know, I'm growing, you know, so I can kind of contradict what I said yesterday, and it's not called hypocrisy.
It's called evolution.
It's a beautiful word that gets...
Because this is the amazing thing about the left, is that...
This, to me, is what is really genuinely mentally ill about this hyper-subjectivist position.
Because what do they say? They say, nothing is true.
There's no such thing as reality.
There's no such thing as goodness.
There's no such thing as objectivity.
There's no such thing as virtue.
Reason is meaningless. Everything is whim-based.
And if it feels good, do it.
Okay. Well, that is basically the ethics of a hungry centipede who just wants to make another centipede.
So, if you take truth, objectivity, virtue, reason, and ethics out of the human environment, the last thing, logically, you should ever become is a finger-wagging, hysterical moralist.
Of course, right? Because you've just said, hey, no such thing as morality.
Oh, you're evil for saying X, or we're going to destroy you for saying Y. Now, as you begin to quote your book again, which is quoting someone else...
That hypocrisy is the tribute that evil pays to virtue.
But to me, when I first heard this theory, I don't know if it's British empiricism or just basic old common sense stuff, but when I first heard this theory, there's no such thing as reality, there's no such thing as virtue, there's no such thing as goodness, there's no such thing as truth, and reason is meaningless.
I'd be like, wow, that's a pretty wild statement.
I guess they must have shut down the universities after they said that, you know?
Like, I mean, if you don't believe in ghosts, you don't pay a ghost time to come check out your house, right?
Because there should be consequences for such foundational epistemological statements.
Ah, that's the amazing thing, is that they say there's no such thing as truth, there's no such thing as goodness, and then they turn into the most vicious, belittling, aggressive, hostile moralists that could be conceived of, that sound like something that Arthur Miller would have left out of the crucible as being far too exaggerated, and that to me is a wild contradiction.
Yes. Well, look at what they're actually asking for.
Let's take them at their word. There's no such thing as truth.
There's no such thing as beauty.
There's no such thing as right. They want a world of ugliness and dirt and awful and filth and dysfunction and physical and moral degradation.
That is what they advocate They just say something different, even as they're advocating it.
We have to teach our children to listen to what they're really, really saying.
I have a chapter in The Fiery Angel called Beauty and the Beast, La Bella La Bat, and it's all about Beauty and the Beast, not just the fairy tale, but the Philip Glass opera and the Andrew Lang version of The Blue Fairy Book, but the larger significance of the relationship between men and women.
Without quoting the four-letter word, which has suddenly become quite bogus the last 48 hours, I say that the left, to them, you strip away Belle, beauty, you strip away her feminine attributes, her beautiful clothes, and all they see beneath that is the Blank of a trollop.
That's what they see.
And they say, beneath all the beauty and the hair and the makeup and the skin, we're just guts and awful and blood.
And that's who we really are.
And everyone can be reduced to the level of their genitalia.
You'll notice how the left is obsessed with genitalia.
That's all they can talk about.
And frankly, one of the things that we have to keep pointing out When they talk about freedom, they only mean sexual freedom, sexual license.
Sexual license obsesses them, and any kind of expansion of it is a good thing.
So, they cast off your tired old morality, blah, blah, blah.
They want to keep, exactly as Satan would, they want to keep pushing the boundaries of human sexuality to the point where it becomes lethal, as in AIDS, where it becomes societally destabilizing.
As with abortion.
And the next thing you know, your country is collapsing and you don't know why.
Because after all, don't we feel good?
Oh, I'm so proud of the Irish now.
Now that they can kill their children, They're going to import people because they don't have enough people to support Ireland.
The new Taoiseach in Ireland, who by the way is gay and half Indian, who is so not Irish, it's almost beyond belief.
He makes Eamon de Valera look like absolute 100% patty.
He is now advocating a new thing for Ireland, Ireland 2014, in which the government is going to bring in 2 million non-Irish into Ireland.
Now, Wait, would those two million be composed, say, of whites fleeing South Africa, or is it, in general, the third world pipeline?
I suspect they'll come from India, which is where Leo's father came from, or from Afghanistan, or from the Muslim world.
Because, you know why, Stefan?
Because Ireland's not having enough babies.
At the same time, they're advocating...
Abortion on demand, essentially.
So if this is not a satanic bargain, I don't know what is.
Sorry to interrupt, but this is something I've mentioned on the show before, which is one of the vastly ugliest bait and switches in the history of humanity was when I was growing up and when you were growing up too, there was zero population growth, don't have too many children because it's bad for the environment.
And then it's like, psych, you didn't have enough kids.
Let's bring the third world in here and have them sit on your welfare dollar for the most part.
And it's like, oh man, that's really quite a mind frack and going to be a little bit tough to recover from.
But of course, you know, there is this requirement to pay for the retirement benefits of people who voted in a bunch of free-spending Big, promising, empty-suited politicians saying, oh yeah, we'll tax you, and we'll borrow money, and we'll print money, and now there's not going to be enough money for your retirement.
Importing people from the third world ain't going to pay for the retirement.
It's actually just going to crash the system even further.
But, of course, it's going to destabilize the system to the point where it's tough to ask people to make sacrifices in peacetime, but it seems to be inordinately easy to ask people to make sacrifices in wartime.
Before your day, before my day, but of course, you can read about it very easily, like all of the coupons and the rationing that occurred in England and other places in the Second World War.
We had a little coupon for like one stick of butter a month kind of thing.
And people were like, we're all pulling together to fight this battle.
So, you know, absolutely, we will see if we have any old scrap iron in the basement and we'll have our children drag it down to the local smelting yard to be turned into spitfires and hurricanes.
People will take extraordinary sacrifices in a time of massive conflict, which they won't even dream of and in fact will burn down the public square if you ask them to take a tiny sacrifice in a time of peace.
But during a time of war, you can cut people's pensions, you can cut people's health care, and then you can shame anyone who disagrees as being anti-patriotic and against the group.
So if you import a lot of conflict, it's a way of evading that you can't pay your bills.
Yes, well, the idea is to, this is the Madame Merkel, Frau Merkel in Germany, her theory is the Germans, the Germans have a word, one of my favorite German words, Kinderfeindlichkeit, it means hatred of children.
It means they don't like children particularly, they don't want to see them in public, they do not want to see them in restaurants.
I used to take my little girls, you know, we'd go out to eat and the Germans would lecture us, well, we don't bring the children into the restaurant, you know, that kind of thing.
So Germany is a country that's putting itself out of business, and as a result, Merkel needed to bring in one million non-Germans.
Now, to the leftists, and of course Merkel was raised in, where was she raised?
Let me think. Oh yes, East Germany, communist East Germany.
She is in fact a product of Communist East Germany, a country that I spent many, many, many, many, many happy months and years in.
Her theory is, well, they'll be German, we'll Germanify them, and then there's no difference among us and the Afghan refugees that we're bringing in.
And they're going to work happily to support these superannuated childless Germans, starting with Madame Merkel, who has no children of her own, P.S., And neither, by the way, does anybody else running any of the European countries.
Have you noticed? It's almost an entirely childless aristocracy.
Yeah, Theresa May as well.
She's childless, if I remember rightly.
Macron has no children.
I don't think any of them has any children.
They're trying to sell the notion that Italy might be entirely filled with sub-Saharan Africans in a hundred years, but it'll still be Italy.
And if you say, as I do, it won't be Italy because there won't be any Italians in it anymore, they say racist.
That's what we're up against.
And we have to be very strong in standing up for the European nation state, which evolved for a reason.
And that's one of the things I'm defending in The Fiery Angel as well.
One of the great genius moves of the left was to tie immigration to particular races and therefore invent this verbal whip that they can hit anyone with who protests against immigration because they now have said, That immigration should come ideally from, you know, India or Africa or other places where there are non-whites.
And then, of course, if you say immigration, well, let's have a discussion about this.
I'm not sure it's everything it's claimed to be.
Because they've tied it so directly to race, you can't ever talk about immigration because they can just scream racist at you and shut down the conversation.
It is an amazing move.
And it is something that is having a terrifying amount of success wherein you can't talk about it.
I mean, we all understand. You take every Japanese person out of Japan and you replace them with Mexicans, guess what?
Not a lot of people are going to be eating at low tables sitting down.
There won't be really any Shinto shines except maybe it's like little tourist attractions.
If you take all the Japanese people out of Japan, you replace them with Mexicans, you have Mexico on an island.
I mean, we all understand this.
This is not that complicated, but of course, You have this wonderful word, racist, which can be used now to lash anyone who questions the value of third world immigration.
It is not an argument, but it is astonishingly successful.
Yes, and what they've done is, another diabolical aspect of this, is they've used the American exceptional example.
We in America are a country of Diversity, literally speaking.
We have learned over almost 300 years, even more since the colonies, how to assimilate new peoples, new groups, new experiences.
We were not an ethnic nation state, and we aren't, and it's one of our strengths.
Europe has no chance against this.
None. Zero. If Ireland 2040 takes place and Varadkar and his crew import two million non-Irishmen into a country the size of, what is it, New Jersey, and with a population the size of Brooklyn and Queens combined, it's not going to be Ireland anymore.
And first they'll deny that, but if you scratch them, they'll say, well, that's exactly what we want, because we don't like Ireland.
We didn't like Catholic Ireland.
We didn't like the fact that it's truculent.
We didn't like the fact that it exported people all over the world who became very successful in countries as different and different as Britain and the United States and Canada and New Zealand and Australia and everywhere else the wild geese fled.
They want to wreck the countries that have been successful.
They do. They just want to wreck them.
And I would say this is Cloward Piven on steroids.
That was a tactic the left decided to use in the late 60s, early 70s.
The theory was if you overwhelm the welfare system, all the social safety nets, you can break the country because you'll make it, as Alinsky says, In one of his rules, make the enemy live up to his own book of rules because you can kill them with this because they can't do it.
How many sub-Saharan Africans are there?
There's something like 400 million or however the number.
But Ireland can't take them all.
You can't take them all.
There's no room for them, and then it won't be Ireland anymore.
It has nothing to do with racism.
It has to do with history, culture, and geography.
And yet it becomes a racist argument to say Ireland can't take all one billion Chinese, for example.
Let's take Africans out of the equation.
What if all the Chinese decide to move to Ireland?
Where are you going to put them? And will it be Ireland anymore?
These are questions that are worth arguing about.
I keep insisting, you cannot, and the press does this constantly, two Swedes arrested in terror.
Right, yes, yes. Two Swedes arrested, Mohamed Al-Aziz and Hafid Al-Saleh.
And you go, they're not Swedes.
They're Arabs living in Sweden.
Yes, but they have Swedish passports.
I don't care. They're Arabs living in Sweden.
That's what they are. They're not Swedes.
And if they are, then that term no longer has any meaning.
I think of Dolph Lundgren, and that's who I think of as a Swede.
I don't think of Mohammed Al-Faziz.
Now, I know that there's a great focus on immigration, and I think there should be.
I think they're very, very important questions to be asked.
Whenever the left claims that they want diversity, I ask them then, why is there so little ideological diversity in newsrooms and college campuses?
Faculties and so on, which are overwhelmingly leftist.
I mean, they're not interested in diversity in any way, shape, or form.
They're interested in importing people that they can weaponize against their enemies domestically.
It's possible that this kind of immigration might work if there wasn't this constant leftist drumbeat of white privilege and you're being treated badly because you're black or you're brown and the whites hate you.
It's one thing to say, okay, we're going to bring in a bunch of other races and cultures.
It's another thing to say, and there's going to be this constant propagandistic drumbeat to turn them against the whites in the countries they're coming to.
That makes it functionally impossible.
And of course, I think that's basically the design.
This goes back to one of the 1920s resolutions of the Communist Party, which was to weaponize non-whites against whites by claiming that all disparities of outcome, whether it was relative racism and white privilege and so on, this has been going on for It's about a hundred years, and that's why it's reached so far and so deep.
But when it comes to the West as a whole, say, oh, well, you know, but in the 19th century, yeah, but there's no welfare state in the 19th century.
And that makes a foundational and fundamental difference.
The welfare state has done demographics exactly what it did to the family, which is to wreck it in general.
And the big challenge for Europe in particular, I would argue, is You can't fix immigration without giving up the welfare state.
The welfare state is the big prize that everyone is coming to live off.
If you are living in the Middle East and you can make it to Germany, you are going to make 10 times more for not working than you would make working in the Middle East.
10 times more.
And you'll get a free computer and you'll get free housing and free internet and free cell phone.
I mean, if you have that level of goodies, Then people are just going to try and find a way there.
And the way that you stop that is you could build high walls and people will, you know, they have value for sure.
I mean, Israel has shown that. But fundamentally, you're going to have to take away the honey that's bringing the flies, so to speak.
And if the Europeans can't examine the welfare state and say, well, the immigration issues, the demographic pressures that we're facing could not exist without the welfare state, can they examine that and say, Europe or the West as a whole ended in the 1960s in particular when the welfare state came in, and we can either cut out that cancer called the welfare state and find a way to survive, or we can't.
But I think a lot of people are focusing on immigration.
I view immigration as a symptom of the massive redistributionist welfare state that allows Other cultures to come and flourish and succeed and make 10 times the amount of money without knowing the language, the history, the customs, without having had experience in the free market, without being well educated.
Come on. I mean, if you could go some...
Let's say you make $50,000 a year.
If you could go someplace, sit on your butt all day and make $500,000 a year, well, that'd be pretty tempting for you now, wouldn't it?
And you can't deal with immigration without dealing with the welfare state.
But... To deal with the welfare state, you have to ask women to make sacrifices, and historically it's been the men who make sacrifices, and I'm not sure the women will be up even for the discussion, let alone the sacrifice.
Yes, and I'd add one thing to that welfare state syllogism, which is the Europeans now are asking themselves, the Brits use this, homegrown British bombers named Mohammed and Ahmed.
The generation that's born into it accepts the economic prize, which the parents went there to get, and doesn't care anymore.
Now it's just hostile.
So the notion that because you now can make more money doing nothing, you'll be happy.
You won't be happy. You'll be miserable.
You'll be just another slave waiting for a handout, essentially.
And as a result, they don't assimilate, they don't learn the language.
Even if they do learn the language, they weaponize it against the host because their tribalism outweighs their economic self-interest.
It just does. And I think if history has taught us anything, that is true.
I made a point yesterday, I was talking with Dennis Prager on the air, and I said, if you notice, in the 19th century, nationalism was a cause of the left, not the right.
Wagner was involved in the revolutions of 1848.
They were all about...
Look, Germany and Italy didn't even exist as countries in the middle of the 19th century.
There were still loose associations of culturally similar and linguistically similar little mini-principalities and states.
So the drive to nationalism was on the left in the 19th century.
Now it's a dirty word on the right.
Look, you can have open borders or a welfare state.
You can't have both.
You cannot have both.
And as a result, and I make this point about abortion, the argument against abortion While a moral one is strong, isn't the best argument to make against the left.
Make it against the welfare state, because if you don't have children, you can't support the social safety net.
So their answer to abortion has been more immigration.
My friend Mark Krikorian, who runs the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, It jocularly appends to almost all of his tweets about immigration problems.
Solution, more immigration.
Immigration is not the solution.
It's actually just the final result of the cloward pivoting of the West.
And that's what we're dealing with. And we have to be aware of it.
Being aware of it is the first step to fighting it.
And unfortunately, most people aren't aware of it.
I am constantly astonished at how little awareness people seem to have, Michael, of what you call it, the cold civil war.
And I'm constantly amazed at, you know, to sort of reference Samantha Bee and her use of the See You Next Tuesday word to describe Ivanka and the sort of hatred and the rage and the lack of attendance to facts.
You know, Michael Brown was a hero.
Well, you know, he charged a cop.
He tried to take his gun. He got shot because he charged the cop again.
And it's like, doesn't matter.
No justice, no peace.
And it's like... How do you even know if you have a just cause or not before examining the evidence and allowing a process to take place?
It always amazes me that people think, well, it's gonna just somehow work out.
You know, when you have people openly Advocating for the destruction of everything you hold dear and you and perhaps your family and who worship people who are cold-blooded killers and who wish to attack the family and wish to hypersexualize children and so on.
It's like they're not going to stop.
They're not going to stop. Now we are, fortunately, since I'm better at words than swordplay, we are still at a place where it is a language-based conflict, a cultural-based conflict.
But I don't think, you know, there's that meme, you know, if you only knew how bad things were.
There is a sort of cold-blooded, calculated attempt to destroy the West that is succeeding, I think, beyond the wildest dreams.
I mean, how on earth do you take down a country that has a nuclear Arsenal, well, culturally, artistically, internally, through shame, through guilt, through fantasies of original sin like white privilege and so on, racially specific sins.
And I just, I don't think that people really get how bad things are and how bad they're going to get.
Because by the time the left erupts into its open violence phase, you know, it's probably too late.
Well, the left always goes to open violence.
Let's face it. They always go to open violence.
But the diabolical nature of these people cannot be overstated.
And it offends them.
And they go, how dare you say this?
And how dare you posit that we would just want destruction?
People ask me about this, especially after Devil's Pleasure Palace came out.
They said, okay, so critical theory wants to question and tear down and destroy everything.
What do they want to replace it with?
And I say, nothing.
Nothing is what they want to replace it with.
They don't care. It's the act of destruction that motivates them and makes them happy.
What happens after that can be sorted out, but the destruction is the most important thing.
And we underestimate the animosity Of our opponents, our ideological opponents.
We are not both arguing for a better world, but different means of getting it.
We are arguing for the preservation of a world, and they're arguing for the destruction of it.
We have the easier defense, but we just don't make it, because they have disallowed us to use our own culture in its own defense.
It is, by definition, racist, a giant plot.
I love this about the Left Seven.
They think that everything is a giant plot.
I call this the big meeting theory of history.
At some point, all the cavemen in the world got together and said, we're going to oppress women from now until kingdom come.
And guys, I want you to all swear a blood oath, and that's what we're going to do from now on, and that's just the way it is.
And all the white people in Europe got together and said, we're going to oppose the other races of the world, even though we don't know that there are any, but in case there are, we will oppose them to our dying breath.
And in fact, the world is, to use our term evolution, it's an evolutionary place.
We have come into contact with each other.
We have done exploration, development, social adjustments.
The thing I hate about the left the most, having been born in 1949, so I watched this whole thing happen over the past 68 years, is the wedge they have driven between white Americans and black Americans is just appalling.
They deserve to go to hell for that thing only, because of course they've recast our history, They have completely forgotten about the entire first half of the 20th century involving race relations and how they gradually improved, and my own personal hero, Scott Joplin, who changed the course of American music in the first decade of the 19th century.
All they can think about is Jim Crow, which was a Democrat thing, Racism, slavery, which was a Democrat thing, lynching.
The ethnic group that got lynched in the largest single lynching incident in the United States was Italians.
Yes, it's true.
Tell me more. I may have skipped that one.
No, it's actually an interesting story because it's an Irish versus Italian thing.
The Mafia began in America in New Orleans, the Manonero, the Black Hand, and there was an Irish police chief named Hennessy who was assassinated by anarchists in the early first decade of the 20th century.
And a bunch of Italian prisoners were rounded up and put in jail.
And the Irish from Irish Channel, which is, you know, where they settled in New Orleans, rioted, broke into the jail and hanged them all.
So there were 10, 11 poor, largely probably innocent, you know, shoemakers and fruit sellers who got danced at the end of a rope in the largest single mass lynching in American history.
But, you know, they use history as a weapon against us as well.
When you think about You know, my gangster Oni Madden, I mentioned Oni Madden, Bill Clinton's mentor in Hot Springs.
Oni Madden founded the Cotton Club.
He bought it from Jack Johnson, the heavyweight champion that was down and out on his luck.
He hired Duke Ellington.
He hired Lena Horne.
He hired Harold Arlen, a Jewish songwriter from Buffalo, New York, to come and be the house songwriter.
He changed the course of American musical culture in a gangster nightclub.
But it was the place where blacks and whites could mingle and work together.
And was it perfect? No.
But the perfect cannot always be the enemy of the good.
And on the left, they always use the perfect as the enemy of the good.
They just do. They're just diabolical that way.
So let's close on this thought.
We can learn something.
Oh yeah, I'm relentless and absolutists in their relativism.
So let's close on this thought. I'll keep it brief.
I want you to unpack your thoughts regarding this.
The one thing that frustrates me enormously, Michael, regarding the West and Western culture, white culture, whatever you want to call it, it's a very self-critical culture.
And that is one of the reasons why the humility to self-criticize is one of the foundational reasons why it has advanced, progressed so much.
Now, if you are around a self-critical person, and I remember knowing people when I was growing up, they were trying to be artists, or they were trying to be musicians, or they were trying to, and they would get mad at themselves.
Oh, I can do better. You know, you're really frustrated.
You look at that frustration, you say, oh, and that's a tough thing.
But boy, do they get good through that humility to say, I know I can do better.
This isn't good enough. It's like success is just whoever just keeps going ends up winning.
And in the West, we do have a history of self-criticism that goes all the way back to Socrates and maybe even before, but this idea, let's start with a blank slate.
Let's pretend we know nothing.
Not assume that we have reached the very pinnacle and penultimate end of human moral development, but let's see if we can go further.
And this self-criticism is foundational to what I love about the West.
But, but, but, if you get a group of people who aren't self-critical but are rather verbally abusive around a self-critical person, I think you get a very hellish witch's brew of destruction.
Like, if you have somebody who's self-critical about their piano playing and that person then teams up, their tutor or their teacher becomes somebody who's verbally abusive and destroys them, hooking into that very self-criticism to undo any pleasure they take in what they're doing, it is a very destructive relationship.
And my concern is that when you look at other cultures, other religions, other groups coming into the West, I think they kind of Like a fox on the trail, they scent that self-critical nature of the West.
And I think that they basically want to work their money spigots in and drain it dry because they're like, well, you know, they feel guilty about refugees.
Oh, okay. They feel bad about refugees.
They care about refugees. Okay, well, we'll use that.
Or, you know, they really want women to be more free and more empowered.
Let's really use that. And they Really care about, you know, the black community and they want the black community to do better.
Well, let's really use that.
And, you know, they're concerned about injustice and inequality.
So let's... And not because they care about egalitarianism or women or blacks or anything, but just because they sent the self-critical nature, the capacity to improve.
But rather than say, well, if that person's really good and they're self-critical, what I should do is become more self-critical too.
They're like, ah, that person's really self-critical.
And that's how we get in.
And that's how we tear them apart.
Well, I think that's certainly true.
And of the two groups that I've mentioned as the primary threats right now, both Marxism and radical Islam are non-self-critical.
They have the answer to everything.
There is only one way to do it.
They constantly accuse Christianity of being dogmatic, which is just ridiculous.
I mean, if you think through the history of Christian teaching, And the arguments that Christians have had, and the councils of this and that, and trying to sort out these doctrinal differences, Christianity is constantly questioning itself.
We have a pope right now who's openly questioning certain elements of Christianity.
It's evolving a little too much, in my opinion.
A little maybe too much.
I get a kick out of it when people say, oh, well, he's the Argentine Pope.
No, he's an Italian who was born in Argentina.
That's who Cardinal Bergoglio is.
He's an Italian who was born in Argentina.
Okay. Look, Islam is a self-referential religion.
It can only study itself, and it's perfect going in.
So the questions are always, how much more perfect can it possibly be?
Those are its theological arguments.
Marxism fails and fails and fails, as you've noticed time and again, but it just never was tried quite right, because doctrinally it's perfect.
Marx was a genius and the Frankfurt School was a collection of brilliant philosophers, etc.
So you're right. If you get someone who's self-critical and you're surrounded by a pack of wolves, then it's very difficult.
On the other hand, I can think of two things in particular, two works of art, an officer and a gentleman, being one of them, in which Lewis Gossett Jr.
plays the drill sergeant. Richard Gere plays the naval officer's training school and Gossett wants to wash him out because he hates this kid and he won't and he tries to break him and of course at the end they have a famous fight in the boxing ring,
a martial arts fight and Richard Gere manages to pass and become a commissioned officer in the United States Navy and then sergeant, I forget what the character's name is, the sergeant then has to salute him And he did, that is a great teacher.
He tried to break a kid, but I always said this when I was teaching myself, I was much harder on my best students than I was on the kids who just could, for whom it was beyond them.
There's no point in trying to hold them to some kind of high standard if they're not temperamentally or talent or capable of it or have the talent for it.
So why feminists don't focus much on the theocracy in Saudi Arabia, say?
Well, of course not. Yeah.
So what you do do is you go after the ones that have talent and you break them.
You try to break them. You want to bust them down to buck private.
And that's one thing the West does very, very efficiently.
We have an entire Marine Corps structure that used to be based on it.
But, you know, now it's rude and it's this and it's that and there's disparate outcomes.
The West has always embraced evil.
And I think this is a good point to close on, Stefan.
And I do this in both the books.
I talk about what does Faust want?
What does Faust want? People say, well, Faust wants to know everything.
No, no, no, no. Faust already knows everything at the beginning.
He talks. He has a big speech at the very beginning of the first part one.
He says, I've studied everything.
I've mastered everything. And here I stand, a fool, no wiser than I was before.
So when Mephisto So it comes to Faust.
He doesn't offer him knowledge.
Faust says to him, if you could show me one moment, one moment of perfect happiness, You have my soul.
I don't believe that perfect happiness is attainable.
And that's the wager behind Faust.
So we're always self-questioned.
We always realize nothing is perfect.
We know perfection is not attainable here on earth.
But the left offers it as a siren song, as Mephisto does to Faust.
Yes, okay, I'll show you that one moment.
Now, what does that moment involve?
It involves the seduction and corruption and death of Marguerite, of Gretchen.
So there's a body attached to Faust's achievement of a moment of perfect happiness.
This is what the left offers us.
They offer us corpses and tell us it's for our own good.
I think it's horrible and I hope that people will join me in my crusade here, both in Devil and Angel.
And take these tools and learn our history and fight back against these people who are willfully corrupting it because we have to stop them.
We just have to stop them.
All right. Great point to end on.
Just wanted to remind people of the names of Michael's most recent books, The Devil's Pleasure Palace, The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West.
And the showbook, The Fiery Angel, Art, Culture, Sex, Politics, and the Struggle for the Soul of the West.
You can check out his columns at pjmedia.com slash columnist slash Michael-Walsh.
And we'll put the Twitter link, which I won't spell out again here.
We'll put the Twitter link below. I really, really appreciate the books.
And I really, really appreciate your time and attention today.
It was a great pleasure to chat. Thank you so much, Stefan.
