Oct. 5, 2019 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the Political Cesspool.
Well, here we are, and welcome to another live broadcast of TPC.
I'm your host, James Edwards, this Saturday evening, and I'm so glad to be able to say it.
October the 5th.
That's right.
The calendar has flipped to October, and I never feel more alive than I do in this fall season.
I love this time of year more than any other time of year, and especially at where I am in life right now.
I guess I'm middle-aged now in my late 30s, but I still have young kids in the nest, and there's just so much to see and do.
Fun, festive activities you can do with a family this time of year to get into the autumn season.
And boy, we were doing it today, let me tell you.
You know what we did today, folks?
If I could just tell you this very quickly before I set the table for tonight's show, we got a very unique show tonight.
A little bit different.
Just a little bit different for one show only, what we're doing.
I'll tell you why in just a second.
But what we did today, my wife and I, we got dressed, we took the kids out, and we went out and we picked pumpkins.
All right.
We picked pumpkins.
We picked some pumpkins for our front porch display and then, of course, some jack-o'-lanterns for us to carve as we get a little closer to Halloween.
After that, we went and we picked some apples.
We did some apple picking.
We did two bushels of apples.
And you're never going to believe what we picked after that.
We stopped by the side of the road and we picked cotton.
Now, we probably shouldn't have done that because it wasn't our field, but there's still some fields that haven't been picked yet.
And I just, you know, I was just going to go with it.
We were in a picking mood and get out there and do it like my ancestors did it.
And yes, they did it.
My ancestors were sharecroppers going back not too many generations.
And it was just a beautiful fall day in Dixie.
And I'm proud of my cotton picking grandparents.
But anyway, that's what we did today.
Had a great day doing it.
And then, by the way, we went out to a nature trail.
We did a little nature trail.
We were out all day today.
Got back just in time to get a quick shower and then into the studio for what promises to be a great show tonight.
Now, here's what we're going to be doing this evening.
Special installment of TPC tonight.
We're giving Keith Alexander and Jack Ryan the night off.
And the reason for that is we want to have an extended, it'll be nearly two-hour interview with Dr. Kevin McDonald.
Now, Kevin is a mainstay on this show.
We typically bring him on to talk about current events and things going on in politics.
But tonight, we want to do a two-hour extended interview with Kevin about his epic new book, which is entitled Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future.
So I sat down with Kevin earlier this week for a very special installment of TOQ Live.
We did that on Monday, I believe it was, Monday or Tuesday.
And we discussed this brand new book, and we went for an hour, and then we took questions from the YouTube chat room.
Now, I do this monthly series with Kevin, but this time we were focusing exclusively on him and his book.
Anyway, and I thought to myself as we were doing it, this was just, it was so good.
As soon as we got off, I said, Kevin, let's do that exact same interview.
Let's make it made for radio.
I mean, we're not playing the tape from the interview we did.
We're doing another live interview tonight with the commercial breaks and all.
But he said, yeah.
So, you know, to do an hour on YouTube for the radio is going to take about an hour and a half.
So that's what we're going to do tonight.
It's going to be a little more esoteric, a little more scholarly, maybe, than the standard TPC show when we're just talking about current events and things of that nature.
But this is going to be one that I felt so strongly about that it was an interview so nice I'm going to do it twice.
So we're going to bring Kevin on live in the very next segment.
Then later in the broadcast, we're going to bring back our good friend and correspondent and the former television news reporter Sean Bergen.
Sean Bergen is a pros pro.
He's going to be back on to talk to us about those contemporary issues.
He's basically taking Keith's spot for one night only.
Keith will be back with us next week, but except we're pushing that to the third hour.
Sean will be on to talk about the current state of presidential politics and his take.
Now remember, this is a former media man who worked in the New York, New Jersey area for one of the biggest stations up there.
He's going to be offering his take on the media's coverage of the impeachment inquiry.
So Kevin McDonald talking about his new book in depth.
And by the time this interview is over, I'll guarantee you, folks, you'll know why I felt it worthy enough for two hours of tonight's live broadcast.
And then Sean Bergen.
So that's what's coming up.
But in the meantime, we are going to wrap up the show, by the way, in the very final segment with a very heartfelt thank you to everyone who contributed to this show during the month of September.
Folks, you came in, you came in strong the last two weeks.
You got us well funded into the Christmas season.
We will go.
And I want to thank people like John in South Carolina who sent in this letter.
Dear James, please find the enclosed check.
Thank you for the opportunity to support your radio program.
God bless John.
Well, John, I say it and I mean it.
God bless you and thank you for giving us the opportunity to serve you.
John and South Carolina.
James and Keith, thanks for all you do.
Enjoyed the show.
That's from a listener in Plant City, Florida, who sent in a contribution.
You know, we've got people, we've got active military, former military, lawyers, doctors, farmers, homeschool mothers, accountants.
I mean, good people of all walks of life tuning into this show, like Joseph in Nevada.
Dear TPCQ, TPC crew encloses my donation for September and October.
Thank you for all you do.
I received my copy of the Occidental Quarterly as my incentive, and it is intellectually stimulating.
We're going to hear from the editor, Joseph, of that magazine tonight talking about his new book, Kevin McDonald.
Thanks again, sincerely, Joseph.
And then, how about this from a listener in Virginia?
Listen to this, folks.
This is the kind of stuff we get.
And I tell you what, you just, it's beyond words.
Dear James and Keith, when I find myself sorting through my wife's stock of Christian thank you cards to find one suitable for my favorite radio hosts, I know it's time to make a quarterly donation to TPC.
I hope you all enjoy the card and its somewhat cliche but true sentiments.
Some highlights for me from listening to every show this past quarter include Jonas Niels, the Swedish filmmaker, insightfully attributing the current moral failings of his many countrymen to 300 years of no suffering to quicken their mainly spirit.
Your grown-up conversation about El Paso.
I waited all week to hear the truth from you and Keith about that topic.
Pastor Brett McEntee stating the obvious that loving your extended family, as Paul in Romans 9:13 did, is inseparable from biblical Christianity and Dr. Michael Hill's hopeful banter for the future.
And he closed his card with a very nice and uplifting verse from the good book.
And I want to thank Mike in Virginia for doing that.
But, folks, when we come back, Kevin McDonald is our guest, former professor of psychology at California State University, Long Beach, the author of more than 100 scholarly papers and reviews, and several books, including the culture of critique and cultural insurrections, and of course, his new book, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition.
Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future.
Kevin McDonald is up next.
We're just getting started.
Don't go anywhere.
Buckle up, hold on tight.
I'll be back with you in three minutes.
I'd advise Mr. Trump to stop whining and go try to make his case to get votes.
The press has created a rigged system.
They even want to try and rig the election.
Well, I tell you what, it helps in Ohio that we got Democrats in charge of the machines and poisoned the mind of so many of our voters at the polling booth where so many cities are corrupt and voter fraud is all too common.
And then they say, oh, there's no voter fraud in our country.
I come from Chicago.
So, I want to be honest.
It's not as if it's just Republicans who have monkeyed around with elections in the past.
Sometimes Democrats have to.
You know, whenever people are in power, they have this tendency to try to tilt things in their direction.
There's no voter fraud.
You start whining before the game's even over.
Whenever things are going badly for you and you lose, you start blaming somebody else, then you don't have what it takes to be in this job.
Hi, I'm Patty, wife of former Congressman Steve Stockman.
In Congress, Steve sought impeachment of Eric Holder for his corruption of the Justice Department and his fast and furious gun running that caused border agent Brian Talley's death.
Steve called for arrest of Lois Lerner for her contempt of Congress as it investigated her targeting of conservative nonprofit groups.
After four years, four grand juries and millions of tax dollars, Steve Stockman is in prison.
His case involved four checks to nonprofits.
DOJ has one standard for Hillary Clinton, but another for folks like President Trump and my husband.
We've spent all our savings, all Steve's retirement, and much of mine.
Steve Stockman has fought for you and America.
Won't you join me now to fight for Steve?
To help text fight to 444-999, text F-I-G-H-T to 444-999 or go to defendapatriot.com, defendapatriot.com.
you I'm seven years old.
I'm sitting here in the corner having a timeout until mom comes to talk to me.
All I did was cut my sister's hair.
I was just trying to help.
I guess mom didn't like how I did it.
In a minute, she'll be back and ask me if I know what I did.
It was wrong.
Maybe I shouldn't have cut her hair.
And she'll say we all make mistakes because we're just learning about stuff.
Then she'll give me a hug and we'll end up talking about more stuff.
No matter what you talk to your kids about, love is what they'll hear.
I really like mom's timeouts.
I think she likes them too.
Yeah, I think they help her remember how much she loves me.
A thought from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Visit us at mormon.org.
It's time to jump back into the political cesspool to be part of the show and have your voice heard around the world.
Call us at 1-866-986-6397.
All right, folks, let's begin this extended interview with Dr. Kevin McDonald, who is here tonight to continue his promotional tour of his newest book, Racing Its Way Up the Amazon bestsellers chart as we speak, getting saturation coverage this week on TOQ Live, as I just mentioned.
He also sat down with Hendrik and Lana at Red Ice a couple of days ago and now tonight on TPC, among other stops, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition.
His newest book argues that ethnic influences are important for understanding the West.
The prehistoric invasion of the Indo-Europeans had a transformative influence on Western Europe, inaugurating a prolonged period of what is labeled aristocratic individualism, resulting from variants of Indo-European genetic and cultural influence.
However, beginning in the 17th century and gradually becoming dominant was a new culture labeled egalitarianism, or rather egalitarian individualism, which was influenced by pre-existing egalitarian tendencies of Northwest Europeans.
Egalitarian individualism ushered in the modern world, but may very well carry the seeds of its own destruction.
And that provocative teaser will serve as the foundation or the launchpad into tonight's discussion.
Kevin, congratulations on the success of the new book.
Hey, man, I appreciate it.
Yeah, it's doing pretty well.
I think people seem to be interested.
Well, let's make them more interested tonight.
I was interested enough to do this interview twice this week and for very good reason.
And I think by the time we're done tonight, people will agree.
Let's start with the basics, though, or at the very beginning, I should say.
When did you start writing the book and what was the original motivation?
Well, I really started writing it about 40 years ago, you know, and I had the very first published paper.
Yeah, I'm old, man.
About 1980, my very first academic papers were on monogamy in Western Europe.
I was intrigued by the fact that European culture did not have polygyny.
Where you see, you know, you look at China, you look at India, the Muslim society, you look at Africa.
They're all polygynous, meaning wealthy, successful, powerful males command a lot of females as mates, as concubines or wives.
But that didn't really happen in Europe.
I mean, there was a little bit of that, but it was always kind of not really legitimate, and there were a lot of controls on it.
It was disrespectable.
It was something that was condemned by the church.
And they did have a role.
And so I got into the history of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages because they were telling the kings how many wives they could have.
They could have exactly one wife and they couldn't divorce her.
Didn't have children and that sort of thing.
And that's just not done in other cultures.
I mean, Western culture is unique in a lot of ways, but that's certainly one of them.
Having this church that was telling kings and aristocrats what to do and to regulate their sex lives.
I mean, it was amazing.
It really was.
But so I started there.
That was in 1980, the first publication of 1983.
And I kept going at it, published more on that in the 1990s.
And since I was in child development, I also said very interested in family history.
So I was doing a lot of reading on European families and finding there also quite a bit of uniqueness.
The Europeans' family structure is much more individualistic than the rest of the world.
Starting out with this famous Hajanel line, basically separating Western Europe and especially Northwestern Europe from the rest of Eurasia, including Eastern Europe and some of Southern Europe.
They, you know, there's been much more based on the basic family, you know, husband, wife, kids, rather than the whole, you know, extended family with your brothers living under the same household, the father living there and the mother living there.
It's much more collectivist and kinship-oriented.
Western Europe, really unique among all the advanced civilizations of the world, is much more prone to individualism.
And every way, go ahead.
One thing I like about the book, Kevin, is that it also doubles as a history book.
I mean, there's so many different, I don't know if I want to say schools of thought necessarily, but there's a lot of different aspects of this book that make it appealing.
A lot of it is the history.
We'll talk more about that in a second.
Give us a Cliff's Notes version on this chapter you have on the population genetics of Europe, the main points of that chapter.
Well, the main points are that there were three different population invasions, movements into Europe, into Europe proper.
The first were the hunter-gatherers.
They were there sort of forever, this sort of primordial group called Western hunter-gatherers, so Scandinavian hunter-gatherers, you know, in the north more, but really closely related.
And then about, they were there, you know, forever, so 45,000 years ago.
And they had to retreat during the Ice Ages, but they came back.
And then around 8,500 years ago, you had the farmers from the Middle East.
And these people are much more clan-oriented.
And they spread, they started from what is today Turkey, spreading into Europe and heading north and really displacing the hunter-gatherers, dominating them.
But being repulsed by the time they got to Scandinavia, because Scandinavia had a much more sophisticated hunter-gatherer culture than these other areas.
We're able to hold them off for like 3,000 years.
And really, the farmers never did succeed in invading Scandinavia to any great extent.
But the third invasion was the Indo-Europeans.
Beginning about 2,500 BC, this totally militarized, very successful culture spread from what is called the Pontic steppes, present-day Ukraine, the southeastern Russia, those steppes, spread northwest into Europe.
But they also spread south into Asia.
They conquered their land.
They went down into India, conquered that, went all the way over to Western China.
Incredibly successful group, completely militarized culture, where all of a man's status, entire status, really rested on your ability as a military person.
It didn't depend on your, you know, on agricultural or anything else, really, except military status.
That was the whole ballgame.
And they would invade these areas, and they would basically dominate the people that they invaded.
They wouldn't formate them, but they would demand services from them.
Sort of like a feudal system, where if you were a serf, you had labor obligations to the Lord, but they wouldn't kill you.
You were useful to them, obviously.
And this system dominated Europe really for a very long period of time.
But again, it's more common in the north.
So one of the more important points of the chapter is that there's this sort of cline, as they say, from southern Europe towards northern Europe, with the farmer genes being much still, in the present day age, being much more common in the southern part of Europe.
In fact, in Sardinia, it's like 95% farmer-related genes.
And this is going from 8,500 years ago.
So this is an amazing phenomenon that, you know, that this would still persist over that length of time.
But as you go north, more of the Indo-European genes and more of the hunter-gatherer genes.
And it's really, it's really the more northern parts of Europe, especially northwestern Europe, they're really responsible, I think, for the culture of the West.
You know, for a long time, the Indo-European model of society dominated through the Middle Ages and I think into the modern era almost, you know, with the Protestant Reformation was really the big break in Western history that sort of that ended up gradually ending this domination of this European model, or this Indo-European model.
But before that, that was really the model.
You think about the kings and the feudal system.
You think about Roman society, very much an Indo-European culture.
The Germanic tribes vary in a bunch of Indo-European culture, the Vikings, the Norsemen, all of that.
If any of that piques your interest, folks, believe me, there is more of that to come.
We're going to talk about the Romans, the Vikings.
We're going to talk about the church and its impact on the West.
We are talking with Kevin McDonald about his new book.
You can get it on Amazon.com, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition.
Stay tuned.
Be right back.
Corruption.
Informing citizens.
Pursuing liberty.
You're listening to Liberty News Radio.
USA Radio News with Wendy King.
President Trump has opened a new front on the impeachment battle that threatens his administration, blasting Republican Senator Mitt Romney for criticizing his push to get foreign nations to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
He tweeted, Romney is a fool and a pompous ass who's been fighting me from the beginning.
Biden's wife Jill says it's clear the president is getting desperate.
I know my son Hunter.
I know his values.
I know his heart.
I know that Donald Trump is scared to death of Joe Biden and he's going to do and say anything he can to take down, to try to take down the Biden family.
President Trump says he's called for China to investigate Biden and his son, and his reason is to prove corruption, not politics.
The New York Times says a second whistleblower is contemplating filing a complaint similar to the first one.
This is USA Radio News.
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Four homeless men were murdered and another seriously injured in New York City.
New York PD Assistant Chief Stephen Yu said it began with the discovery of one homeless man who was dead on a sidewalk.
An expanded search of the area revealed three additional victims.
All of them were severely beaten with a blunt object.
The three males on East Broadway had severe head trauma and were pronounced deceased at the scene.
The one male at 2 Bowery was pronounced deceased at the scene.
They then searched the area and picked up another homeless man.
The 24-year-old was arrested and a pipe was recovered.
Chief of Manhattan South Detective Mike Baldasano.
So the mode of a PFCB right now just random attacks.
Hong Kong's embattled leader describes the latest round of rioting as a very dark day for the semi-autonomous territory.
Demonstrators have again started to march in Hong Kong, many of them wearing face masks in defiance of a new ban.
You're listening to USA Radio News.
Welcome back.
Get on the show.
Call us on James's Dine at 1-866-986-6397.
All right, folks, we're back as we continue this in-depth, deep dive interview with Kevin McDonald about his new book, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future.
It's a long title.
It's a long book, 541 pages that this man has been working on, as he mentioned in the last segment, for the last 40 years.
It is a magnum opus of sorts, and it's one that we're very excited about.
If you go to Amazon.com, all you have to type in is Kevin McDonald book, and there you'll find it.
It's the top return you'll get with that search query.
And we mentioned, we say a lot.
We fight for the past, the present, and the future.
Well, again, I mentioned that in part this is a history book, but it also talks about our evolutionary origins, where we came from, how we developed and how we evolved over the course of history, and then prospects for the future.
So in this book, Kevin documents the ancient history of our people, modern times, and prospects for the future.
It is currently, with regards to history, he mentioned Scandinavia and Great Britain in the last segment.
It is number one, the number one book under the subcategory of Scandinavian history right now and number 23 in Great Britain history.
So there you go, and you can get it, and we can make those numbers go up even more at Amazon.com.
So, Kevin, the last segment, you were talking a little bit about the Indo-Europeans.
You talked about their importance, their culture.
You touched on why they were successful, but you also say that they exemplify aristocratic individualism.
What do you mean by that?
Well, where were they conquered?
They set up this very hierarchical society with them at the top.
But it wasn't despotic because among the various aristocrats, there wasn't any despot king.
There was always consultation.
And any aristocrat could just defect from that from the group.
If he didn't like this military leader, he could just join something else.
It was very much of a free market system.
In that regard, it was very individualistic.
And these military bands were always uh um they they, they were at a sort of high level in the society that was above the kinship groups.
In other words, kinship was of lesser importance, it was much more individualistic and the whole, the whole culture was directed at gaining glory.
You know uh, the fame of a dead man's deeds.
You know that you would go down uh, people would talk about you after your death as a hero.
As you know, you think of Beowulf or something like that.
Those kind of stories um, those are very Indo-european uh where, where you have a this warrior who's battling evil of some kind in a very heroic way uh, St. George against the dragon, those are Indo-european.
Uh, you know stories and uh they, so they.
You know there's a very big emphasis on sort of being a hero, you know, and for your people and for yourself really, for you know, for for your own glory.
Going down in history, the fame of a dead man's deeds is comes from a Scandinavian, one of those Norse sagas, and that's very typical of them and very much emphasized in Ricardo Duchesne's book on Western culture.
That this is, this is fundamentally why the Western culture has been so assertive, so aggressive, so interested in, you know, going down in history, changing history, you know it's very dynamic.
Look at other cultures and they're just not very dynamic.
You like, you look at Chinese culture and you have changes of faces.
You know, different dynasties.
Just changing the faces didn't change the system at all.
It was fundamentally a kinship based society and just you would change what kinship group was at the top.
Basically and that's true really all throughout Asian after different kinship groups who would come and go, but the same structure would prevail in European society.
You have this individualistic culture, very dynamic, very aggressive, you know, wanting to discover things, and of course it carries over to science and inventions and intellectual output as well as military.
So this was a dynamic, intense culture that really did conquer the world.
You know, if you look back 100 years from now, Europe and European dominated societies, you know it really ran the entire world and it's been a downhill march.
But yeah, I mean yeah, until the early 1900s even yeah, very relatively recent history, did this, did that exist, did that world exist?
Well, and you know, so that leads us into or I guess in, in some ways I correlate that with you know, the Roman culture of dominance and conquering and and Rome.
I think we're all fascinated by Rome for for many different reasons, but it's a particularly interesting Indo-European culture itself.
You make a big point in your book about how open Roman culture was though, to incorporating new peoples and gradually giving rights to the plebeians, The commoner, the lower classes.
How did this contribute to their success while also ultimately failing?
Yeah, I mean, Rome was a prototypical Indo-European society where military ability counted for everything.
And so it started out with these clan-type families that were sort of band together into the city.
But again, kinship was de-emphasized in favor of individual accomplishment.
But they were always quite open.
And this is what allowed them to really expand because they would conquer people, first of all, right around Rome, you know, the various Latin cultures right in the vicinity of Rome, and then expanding through Italy.
But every time they did it, they didn't exterminate those people.
And in the long run, within, say, a couple of generations, those people would be able to join Roman society.
They often expected them, even in the immediate aftermath of conquered, they would expect them to become soldiers in their army.
And if they were good, they would be promoted.
And, you know, within a generation or two, you would have these people in the Senate and very, very prominent positions in Roman society.
So they were not exclusionary.
The Greeks were much more exclusionary.
They could never really develop this vast empire the way the Romans did.
But that was the key of their success.
But, you know, as they expanded, especially when they got beyond Italy, they started conquering all these areas of North Africa, Middle East, really all the way to what is now Iran.
And so that meant incorporating all these new peoples.
And they had just massive numbers of slaves.
They were not European, but they would bring them into Rome.
And gradually, over time, they would free these people.
And so Rome really became a polyglot of people.
And there was no emphasis on military virtue.
Well, I was just going to ask you this.
It's an add-on to this question.
I was with Pat Buchanan in Long Beach, California when he accepted the Reform Party nomination.
And he made a comment in his speech about the Vandals and Visigoths of multiculturalism.
Of course, the Vandals and Visigoths were known as barbarian tribes that invaded Rome.
Is America making the same mistake Rome made?
Or are there any parallels there that you can draw?
Well, I think we are being invaded now.
And there is this openness, and we're letting these people in.
I mean, I don't think that this is something that most white people want, by the way.
I think that this is a top-down process promoted by the elites with all their power in the media, with corporate input, because they want cheap labor.
So we're seeing the same thing.
And what happened in Rome is that the people that originated in Rome, that gave it its vitality, its strength, its military courage, and organizational skills and everything, those people disappeared.
And especially in the ancient world, they really did disappear.
I mean, there was high mortality.
Rome went on, the culture really degenerated.
I've got a little note in my book on the recent cultural degeneration since 1960.
But you could see it in Rome.
And there was less emphasis on military virtues, less emphasis on marriage.
They really regulated marriage.
You couldn't have divorce.
It was very uncommon.
Very hard to do, and just not a good thing to do for people, especially if you were higher up.
If you were a priest or something like that, you couldn't get divorced.
You had to get married a certain way.
So it was very puritanical about sex and marriage and they didn't have polygyny, concubinage, or anything.
But as time went on, you know, you brought on all these slaves.
But even then, if a man would have a child with a slave woman or something like that, the slave, the child could not become a citizen, really.
But then even that eroded as time went on, it became easier and Asia.
And really, the original population just really disappeared.
But by the end, there was not the same people anymore.
And when you don't have the same people, you don't have the same culture.
You don't really have the same dynamism.
And that is really the prognosis for the West if we continue this disastrous path.
I mean, how can anybody really seriously think that you could import Africa and keep your culture and civilization?
That is a great place to pause it right there, Kevin, and a great point as a bookend to that part of the conversation.
We do have to take a break.
Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition.
That's the name of the book.
Kevin McDonald's, the author, our guest.
Go to Amazon right now and buy it.
We'll be right back.
Abby Johnson was once director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Bryan, Texas.
After a moral crisis, she quit, and now she campaigns against what she once endorsed.
They implement abortion quotas in all of their clinics.
What do you mean, quotas?
have to perform a certain number of abortions every month.
One of the reasons that I left.
Are they explicit about that?
Yes, it's in your budget, right there on the line item.
One of the reasons I left Planned Parenthood was because in a budget meeting, I was told to double that abortion quota.
And for me, as someone who had spoken to the media and had said, you know, we're about reducing the number of abortions.
We're about, you know, prevention, all these other services, I was shocked.
So since you actually worked at a Planned Parenthood, give us some sense of the relative number of abortions.
Okay, Abortions Planned Parenthood provides over 330,000 abortions a year.
They are the largest single abortion provider in our country.
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Welcome back.
To get on the show, call us on James's Dime at 1-866-986-6397.
I'm your host, James Edwards.
Kevin McDonald is our guest, and we're talking about his book, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition.
It is an important book, important enough to warrant two hours of tonight's live broadcast, and even then we'll only be skimming the surface of it.
But, you know, we talked earlier tonight.
Kevin said he started writing this book 40 years ago.
I started this radio program 15 years ago, and I can tell you this, when I started this show, it was with guests like Kevin McDonald in mind.
I mean, this man, yes, he's a friend, but I would say this if I didn't know him at all.
He's a national treasure, and these are the people that I am so honored to bring to the airwaves each and every week.
These are the best and brightest minds in their fields, men of duty and honor, and men whose message would otherwise be hushed up or distorted by the establishment press.
So thank you, Mr. and Mrs. TPC listener, for your listener support.
This is 100% listener-supported entity for giving us the opportunity and the ability to bring guests like Kevin and present him on these airwaves.
And so with that, we will continue with Dr. McDonald.
You argue that there have been, and we talked a little bit about one aspect of this earlier.
Let's talk about the other.
Two main influences on European culture.
The Indo-Europeans, of course, with their aristocratic individualism, and the northern hunter-gatherers with their egalitarian individualism.
Let's focus on the latter now.
What was Northern hunter-gatherer culture like and why is it important still?
Yeah, the hunter-gatherer culture in general, throughout the world, tends to be much more egalitarian.
There are a lot of examples.
People, anthropologists who've written about hunger-gatherer groups note that if somebody tries to become a despot within a hunter-gatherer group, they get struck down.
People gang up against them.
So they're very egalitarian.
But the thing about these hunter-gatherer groups in the Northwest of Europe was that they developed a very complex culture, which is uncommon.
There are some other cultures around there, but as far as I know, the only culture that developed this kind of complexity where you had large numbers of people and sort of complex social relationships was in Northwest Europe that was not kinship-oriented.
These cultures, and I think the reason for that is that they had to disband part of the year.
They would stay close to the seashore part of the year, and there they would gather, you know, shellfish and other marine resources.
But then they couldn't stay there all year.
I'm not sure exactly why, but they would have to leave and go elsewhere.
And then they'd break up into much smaller family-type bands.
Those are the sort of typical hunter-gatherer bands that you think of.
And they would disperse.
And so they could never really have one kinship group dominating this area.
And so you retained this individualistic kind of structure, even though it was quite advanced socially.
In fact, it was so advanced it was able to hold off these farmers I was talking about for 3,000 years.
I mean, that's a very, very long time.
And when the Indo-Europeans came, my belief is that they really gave them a good fight, but the Indo-Europeans, of course, won.
They were much more militarized, probably organized for battle.
They were much more patriarchal, by the way, whereas the previously existing hunter-gatherer culture were much more sort of female-oriented.
So again, the Indo-Europeans are very patriarchal and male-dominated.
They won the battle, but I think in general, there was a sort of syncretism or synthesis between the two cultures.
And it's amazing if you think about it.
Scandinavia was the only European society that didn't have feudalism, really.
The peasants were free.
They were not reduced to serfdom.
So they had much more political clout.
They didn't have the kind of despotism and domination, exploitation that you saw even in the Germanic areas of Europe, you know, with the feudal system and serfs and so on.
Really, it was, let's face it, an exploitative system, verging on it.
It wasn't slavery exactly, but because they could inherit land and so on, but they really owed their lord a lot of labor obligations.
You didn't see that in Scandinavia.
And the king was much more on the side of the peasants and often sort of battling the aristocrats for power, but on the side of the peasants more.
So it was a much more egalitarian society, I would say, in the Middle Ages.
And the view that's developed in the book is that as you go from the south of Europe to the north, you go from really a very collectivist kind of culture based on extended families, brothers living under the same roof and so on, to the more Germanic areas, which I call modern individualism, which really are individualistic.
But when you get to Scandinavia, it is extremely individualistic.
And the family ties are relatively loose.
People are sort of free to make their own alliances.
And Scandinavian society in general has been very individualistic, more even than the Germanic areas.
But in general, all these individualistic families, that means that the husband and wife have consent to marry each other.
In other words, they're not told by their parents, here's who you have to marry.
As you see in Middle Eastern cultures, when you import Muslims into the UK, you find parents marrying their kids off.
And if your daughter does not marry this person, you have these honor killings, right?
That's the kind of thing that happens in the Middle East.
It never happened in Europe, especially not in Northwest Europe.
So a much more individualistic culture.
Husband and wife would have to wait until they get married until they were economically viable.
They couldn't sort of be part of a family cooperative.
They would have to work as servants for the Lord or other similar families.
And so the typical family household in Northwest Europe had non-relatives, which you never see in the Middle East, or even in Southern Europe.
But it's very individualistic.
People were hired as servants that were not related.
And this is like unique, really, in the world.
So this is something that doesn't happen elsewhere.
And, you know, it is really an important part of Europe.
So chapter four is on the family.
As I said, because I was a child developmental psychologist, I really got into family history because children are definitely not socialized the same around the world.
This is a good example.
Young European children, age, you know, 10, even before that, would go off as servants for other people, even if they brought the family brought servants in.
It was just like a revolving door.
And so you had a lot more non-relatives in the home.
Again, European society is not based so much on kinship.
It's much more fluid, individualistic.
Well, let me add a follow-up question to that since we're now on the topic.
And I'm looking at the clock.
We have about three minutes remaining this hour.
And we have Kevin McDonald for two hours tonight.
This is a deep dive into his book, A Book of Importance to Our People, a book that we hope and believe you should purchase.
But we're going to talk about matters of faith and how they have impacted our history in the next hour.
I don't want to get into that yet, but with just a couple of minutes remaining this hour, Kevin, let's talk about the family structure because you just mentioned you have a chapter in the book on that.
It is the building block of our civilization, but yet it still varies even amongst Europeans.
So how does variation in family structure within Western Europe correspond to genetic differences between Northwestern and Southern Europe?
And that's the interesting thing is that, you know, we talked before in chapter one, I talk about this climate, which, as it's called, is a sort of gradual change in the genetic structure as you go from the south of Europe to the north of Europe.
In the south of Europe, you have the more farmer-oriented culture, which derived from the Middle East.
The Middle East has always been much more collectivist.
You go there now.
This is the most collectivist part of the world.
And this is where, you know, the Muslim societies are all based on extended kinship.
Look at Jewish society, much more kinship-oriented.
And they retained that when they came into Europe.
And you can see it's an amazing thing, you can still see it.
There's a dividing line in France.
I talk about this a lot in chapter four.
In France, between the southern part of France and the northern part of France.
And the southern part of France is much more farmer, they are genetically much more farmer-related.
In the north of Europe, much more Germanic.
And, you know, guess which part of Europe was the big dynamic part?
It was a Germanic part of Europe that industrialized.
That was the font of French industrialization and really a scientific endeavor.
Everything, modernization was all in the north of France.
And that dividing line, amazingly, is still there.
You go, I mean, I have a study recently that look at family structure in southern France, and kids stay with the family they were born in much longer.
They stay close to home.
They don't venture out so much.
Whereas in the north of Europe, they do that.
Of course, there's a lot more sort of individual pathology.
People don't take care of each other as much in the individualist culture.
So you have people who are homeless more often.
Whereas in the south of Europe, your family will take care of you.
In the north, people sort of get separated from all that.
They have to make it on their own.
And their families don't have as much responsibility.
Kevin, hold on right there.
Commercial radio, you take breaks.
It's not like the TOQ live.
By the way, if you want to see an uninterrupted version of this conversation, go to TOQLive.com.