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Aug. 15, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
16:41
Sunset in the Golden State - Ep 4: How the West Was Lost
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Music by Kevin MacLeod
Music by Kevin MacLeod I guess Trump was right.
We have a big, beautiful wall and a big, beautiful door.
Let's go through it. What is the plural of hippopotamus?
Hippopotami. What is the plural of cactus?
Cacti. What is the plural of waterfoolam?
What a fool am I.
And here endeth the dad joke.
So we've come up here in the hills above Los Angeles to have a look at the Hollywood Reservoir, which was built in the 1920s and holds literally billions of gallons of water.
This was when Europeans came to California after 19,000 years of virtually no change.
We did what white Europeans generally do, which was we mastered the landscape.
We turned it into something that could keep human beings alive far in excess of what the desert water would provide.
And this to me is a very powerful analogy or metaphor for California.
Whites as a whole, specifically the European Christians of course, from Northern and Western Europe, We're, you could say, almost addicted to rationality.
This goes all the way back to the pre-Socratics, Socrates himself, of course, with the Socratic method, the slicing and dicing of particularly ambiguous questions until you get a clear answer.
We're very, very addicted to rationality.
The question of how California began to unravel is a subset of the larger question, how the West began to unravel.
Whites are addicted to rationality, take away our rationality, and we cave in on ourselves.
We don't have the resistance that we need to stay upright.
Think of a man walking into wind, the wind stops, he falls over because he doesn't have the resistance.
We love to wrestle with logic, we love to wrestle and subdue, as in the case of this reservoir, subdue the landscape.
Impose reason and science and evidence.
On the world. There's a reason why 97% of all scientific advancement from 800 BC until 1950 happened in Europe and North America, primarily white males.
Whites built the modern world.
This did not exist when the Amerindians had the land for 19,000 years.
This is the result of the imposition of will, of science, of engineering, of reason, of rationality on the landscape.
But all of that seems to be changing.
In California, the debt is over $3,000 per capita.
That includes children, the elderly, those who don't work.
The financial burden is extraordinary.
The unfunded liabilities from pensions to bonds is staggering.
And the question is, how did it come to pass that whites who were the vast majority in this state not a few decades ago Are now going below 50%.
Why is it that there are in many schools twice the number of Hispanics than whites?
Why is it that California, which used to be a Republican stronghold, now can send no Republican votes in presidential elections?
What has changed? I'm going to tell you what has changed, but it's a long and deep story.
And it starts in the Second World War.
In the Second World War, the British, the French, the Americans allied themselves with Soviet Russia in order to take down the Nazis.
In other words, the West made allies out of international socialists in order to take down the national socialists in Germany.
And it was, in fact, the Russian efforts in the Second World War that largely defeated Hitler.
In order to make that alliance, The horrible, predatory, violent, coercive, totalitarian, destructive nature of communism had to be obscured.
Churchill said, if Hitler invaded hell, I would find a few good things to say about the devil himself.
Now this alliance with totalitarian communism in order to defeat Nazism created a cultural portal through which leftists, socialists and communists could pour into the West.
And continued their destructive work of undoing the rational empiricism of the Western mind, which they had achieved in Europe and now wish to also achieve in America.
So, the collectivists, the communists, the socialists poured into the West, poured into America, and where did they settle?
Well, right here in California.
It's a lovely place. It was a lovely place.
They settled into the universals.
The Marxists, the post-modernists, the Frankfurt School, settled into Californian universities.
And then a terrible thing happened, with the best of intentions, as so often happens with government programs.
The government said to the GIs returning from the Second World War, here is some free tuition, here is the GI Bill, you can go and get educated.
Veterans Administration offices have been set up in every state.
And it's here the ex-soldier goes if he wants to continue his education under the GI Bill of Rights.
You mean he can get any kind of education he wants?
Now you're getting the idea.
Any kind of education, and in any part of the country.
But! At the time, rabid Marxists and leftists were infesting universities in America, particularly in California.
So what happened? There was a huge transfer of anti-rational collectivism, socialism and communism, into the mind, heart and soul of America.
Through the GI Bill, the returning soldiers, in particular in California universities.
This produced the 1960s, the counterculture, which was essentially a return to primitivism, a return to collectivism, anti-individualism, anti-rationality, anti-Americanism.
The students in the 1960s made outlandish demands of the administration, and the administration generally folded, gave up the ghost, became spineless, turned into puddles of fearful compliance.
Why? I believe that the answer to that goes back to just before the First World War.
The West lost its certainty.
The West lost its spine.
It lost its self-confidence between the First World War and the end of the Second World War.
You just look at those couple of decades.
The First World War, an absolute catastrophe.
One of the fascinating things about the First World War is it wiped out, almost to the last dollar, all of the wealth that had been generated through the Industrial Revolution.
It undid a hundred years of often brutal progress.
After the First World War, the returning soldiers spread the Spanish Flu, which killed tens of millions of people, more even than the combat in the First World War.
Then, largely as a result of massive overprinting and overcreation of money by the Fed, Federal Reserve, there was a huge bubble that spread itself throughout the 1920s, culminating in one of the greatest financial disasters to hit the world ever, the stock market crash of 1929.
Which then invited in massive amounts of government intervention and control into the economy, resulting in a 13-year Great Depression where unemployment ravaged the West as a whole and discontent bubbled over into increasing interest in socialism and communism.
The 13-year Great Depression culminated in the virtually civilization-ending disaster of the Second World War.
50 million killed, 60 million killed, it's hard to even count.
So, after such a few decades of rampant disasters, what right, what ability did the leaders of the West feel that they had in instructing the young?
Could they say to the young, well, you must listen to us because we are wise, we are knowledgeable, we are virtuous, we are good, we are right?
Or... That the young had to do was cast their eyes back over the past few decades and say, you people do not know what the hell you're talking about.
Don't pretend to us that you have any wisdom.
Don't pretend to us that you know anything about the right thing to do.
We can see the evidence.
And of course, all of the festering sores and boils and discontents and racial animosities and negative aspects of Western history were being poked at, inflamed and poisoned by all of the leftists infesting.
American universities. Even now, there are tens of thousands of outright Marxists indoctrinating the young in America, in American universities, and yet we are supposed to spend our entire lives, minds, and social capital scouring the American landscape for the few Nazis who remain, who have virtually no influence.
But this is the power of indoctrination.
So then, the left had a problem.
And that problem began in the 1960s.
Just as it was achieving its great power in the university system, it began to dread the new facts coming out of the Soviet Union.
Nikita Khrushchev, after he surveyed the unholy damage done To Russia by Stalin.
The purges, the gulags, the counter-revolutionary terror.
He began to talk about the destruction of Stalin, the cult of personality, the murders, the mass imprisonments, the mass executions.
And facts began to pour out of the communist countries.
The terrible revolution that occurred In China, wherein Soviet spies, communist spies in the State Department handed over China to Chairman Mao, where he embarked upon a slaughterhouse-fest campaign that killed tens of millions of Chinese, was also pouring information out into the West.
So they had, to put it mildly, a bit of a PR problem.
They could no longer claim, as they had, that communism was going to be more economically efficient than capitalism.
They could no longer claim That the workers in a capitalist society were going to get poorer and poorer and poorer.
The 1950s denied that very foundational argument of the Marxist system because you had a giant and expanding middle class went completely against the theory.
They could no longer win the intellectual argument.
They could no longer win the economic argument.
And they sure as hell could not win the moral argument as the piles of bodies began heading to the very sky in the communist dictatorships.
Did they change their minds?
Did they review their theories?
No. What they did was they came up with an extraordinarily cunning plan that had been put in place as a principle by the communist international movement as early as the 1920s, which was to foment racial divides and racial hatreds within the West to take down capitalism, to take down freedom, to take down their great competitor in the social battle of ideas, the free market.
In 1965, the great, late, great Senator Edward Kennedy helped sponsor the 1965 Immigration Act, which put an end to a fair degree of isolationism in American immigration policy that had gone on since the 1920s and shifted America's immigration from Europe from whites to the Third World.
Yet the fact is that for over four decades, the immigration policy of the United States has been twisted and has been distorted.
By the harsh injustice of the national origins quota system.
Under that system, the ability of new immigrants to come to America depended upon the country of their birth.
Only three countries were allowed to supply 70% of all the immigrants.
Now, of course, the argument was, at the time, from the Democrats, it's a very small amount.
Of people from the third world, it will not change American demographics.
Well, all you have to do is look at California to realize what a lie that was.
What a false bill of goods the American population was sold.
Now, why did they want to switch immigration to the third world?
Because people from the third world generally vote for socialism.
They vote for the left. You then import people.
you make them dependent on the state, and they make less money in the free market, and then what you do is you begin a whole propaganda campaign which says the following.
Blacks, Hispanics in particular, make less than, say, East Asians and Jews.
But you ignore the East Asians and Jews, and you just focus on the whites.
You say blacks and Hispanics make less money than whites.
The answer is As to why, it's not anything to do with cultural differences, it's not anything to do with work ethic, and it certainly has nothing to do with IQ differences between ethnicities.
That information you must ruthlessly attack and suppress, and anyone who brings it up, you must try to destroy their lives as a racist, as a bigot, as a white supremacist, as a Nazi, because that conversation competes with your statement, your argument.
That the only reason blacks and Hispanics do less well than whites is because of endless white bigotry and racism, the legacy of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, you name it.
You must always try to destroy the competing narrative that brings understanding and peace and reduces tensions and hostility between ethnicities.
When you bring people from the Third World into the West, you create a near-permanent underclass for large proportions of those groups.
And then you say to those frustrated groups, the whites all hate you and that's why you do badly.
The whites are racist and that's why you do badly.
The whites are privileged and that's why you do badly.
The whites are rich because they stole everything from your ancestors and that's why you do badly.
And you weaponize Immigration against the whites in America.
So, it has gone and is going in California.
And as it goes for California, so it goes for America, so it goes for all of us. so it goes for all of us.
So we're in San Francisco, we're driving downhill somewhat like California as a whole.
So here's a wild number.
25% of the entire homeless population in America sleep in California streets and shelters every night.
Violent crime in California is 20% higher than the national median.
San Francisco, where we are right now.
Ranks number one in the country for property crime rates of America's largest citizens.
The result of all of this means that just over the last 15 years or so, about 6 million Californians over the age of 25 have left the state.
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