As the left attempts to finish the Umayyad Caliphate s job at the Battle of Tours, by dismantling the Western civilization we hold so dear, we ask classicist, scholar, and immortal heir to the multiverse Spencer Clavin a simple question: What is the West? Then, lone conservative Cassie Dillon and Fleckis Talks join to discuss President Trump s congressional smackdown, Florida s finally killing white guys who kill black guys, and the Girl Scouts' outrage that the Boy Scouts are becoming The Girl Scouts? Plus, the mailbag.
00:00:00.000As the left attempts to finish the Umayyad Caliphate's job at the Battle of Tours by dismantling the Western civilization we hold so dear, while the alt-right tries to make it a matter of melanin, we ask classicist, scholar, and immortal heir to the multiverse Spencer Clavin a simple question, what is the West?
00:00:18.220Then, lone conservative Cassie Dillon and Fleckis Talks join to discuss President Trump's congressional smackdown, Florida's finally killing white guys who kill black guys, and the Girl Scouts' outrage that the Boy Scouts are becoming the Girl Scouts. How transphobic are they? Plus, the mailbag. I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
00:00:35.840Western civilization is all the rage these days, a hot topic of debate. Here is Tucker Carlson and President Trump describing Western civilization. Tucker on his show and President Trump in his Warsaw dress.
00:00:56.340President Trump's speech in Poland last week may have been the single best thing he has said out loud since entering politics, and for one reason. It was a rousing defense of Western civilization.
00:01:07.620We write symphonies. We pursue innovation. We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand new frontiers.
00:01:21.620The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost?
00:01:33.620That's a very good question. The left hopes the answer to that question is no. They have at least since the time of Jesse Jackson marching on college campuses said, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go. Here's why.
00:01:46.620That triggered the alarm bells for me. Am I wrong in making this parallel between Steve King, President Trump, and white nationalism?
00:01:58.720Trump seemed to embody and enshrine that belief that the West should steal itself for a clash of civilizations with other cultures, other beliefs, which pretty much spelled out, you know, the Muslim world.
00:02:13.820So this is not a speech he could have given really any place else. And this is a white America, America first kind of speech.
00:02:20.820Well, as he talks on the left about white nationalists, let's ask a white nationalist himself. Richard Spencer and the late Sam Francis also get in on the battle to define Western civilization.
00:02:32.820A quotation from Samuel Francis is from the mid nineties. And he actually said this at a speech at an American Renaissance conference.
00:02:40.820He said the civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people, whether you're on the left or the right.
00:03:02.820Or the right. Many people seem to imagine that we could just find a, you know, a black African and dress him up in a Harris tweed vest or give him a pipe or some snuff and maybe a bowler cap and he'll become an Englishman or something like that.
00:03:17.820Or, you know, in another way, like the neocons, we describe Western civilization in this totally abstract term where it's, you know, some vague ideas about individualism and political institutions like democracy and so on.
00:03:34.820Now, they all seem to get this wrong, all of those people. And that is why last week we talked to a Charlottesville Unite the Right attendee about the alt right and how they define Western civilization.
00:03:46.820And today we're joined by an in-studio guest, Spencer Clavin, a classicist and obviously heir to the to the multiverse.
00:03:55.820Now, I can't help but notice Spencer Clavin is here. I can't help but notice the coincidence of the name. Are you related to Richard Spencer?
00:04:02.820You know, not genetically. And as I understand it, that's basically the only kind of relationship that he acknowledged. So I would have to say no, unfortunately, I'm not.
00:04:10.820Not genetically, certainly not spiritually, if that doesn't exist.
00:04:14.820Spencer, a very simple question. What is the West?
00:04:17.820Boy, oh, boy. You know, it's funny. I one of my great regrets as a as a doctoral student is that I don't get to spend a lot of time firing up the old tour browser.
00:04:28.820And, you know, only when you're buying contract killings and drugs, I assume.
00:04:33.820I thought we were going to talk about that.
00:04:34.820Oh, that's right. Marshall will cut it out, right?
00:04:36.820You'll cut out how Spencer Clavin engages in contract.
00:04:38.820No, I'm going to turn up the audio on that part.
00:04:40.820Okay, good. Thanks. We wouldn't want that to get out.
00:04:43.820Is it too late for me to cover my thing?
00:04:45.820Look, I mean, I'm not up on the whole Keck and Pepe the Frog of it all.
00:04:51.820But it seems to me whenever I listen to the all right on this stuff, I'm amazed at how exactly like the radical progressive left they sound.
00:05:00.820I mean, basically Richard Spencer is basically at the point of accusing people of cultural appropriation, which I'm pretty sure was the province solely of the, you know, the far left.
00:05:10.820But on this particular point, I think that the radical progressive left and the alt right are almost in exact complete agreement.
00:05:19.820I mean, you have the alt right chanting things like blood and soil.
00:05:24.820Right. Which amounts to the assertion that basically what it is to be Western is to be born into a certain gene pool within a certain set of geographic barriers.
00:05:34.820And that's basically what a lot of people on the left want to claim is true of Western civilization, that all of our lofty ideals and principles are essentially just window dressing for a kind of white supremacy.
00:05:47.820Right. I mean, this is back in, I think it was in 1978.
00:05:49.820Edward Said basically makes this argument in Orientalism that it's all kind of a Western identity is just a way of justifying to oneself the superiority of whites.
00:05:59.820White people angle European countries.
00:06:11.820That's right. If you just take a slight turn to everything that is not that, then you'll get what I think.
00:06:15.820I mean, look, one of the crowning achievements of actual Western civilization is to develop slowly over time and space,
00:06:26.820this idea of a nationhood whose citizenship doesn't depend on ethnic or geographic determiners.
00:06:33.820I mean, you really I think this really kind of you can see it beginning with the Stoics who, you know, the ancient Greek set of ancient Greek philosophers.
00:06:41.820And the Stoics had this idea which exists before them, but which they developed in a really robust way of the Logos.
00:06:47.820Right. The Logos being this universal sort of rational principle or rationality that pervades the whole universe.
00:06:55.820And things like ideas about, you know, right and wrong and logic, those all come under the head of this Logos which exists everywhere.
00:07:02.820And that's kind of where you start to get this idea or to justify this idea that there might be a universal civilization because you could have a society of people who no matter where they are or what race they were, they live by the Logos.
00:07:17.820There's an eternal law, an eternal reason that isn't confined to your government.
00:07:23.820Right. And you see this again, it plays out elsewhere, like Cicero near the end of the Roman Republic, he writes that on the Republic.
00:07:30.820And he talks about a law that will not be different at a different time or a different place and different in Athens and in Rome, but it'll be the same for everyone.
00:07:39.820And that law is justice, this idea of, you know, of right and wrong and good and bad that kind of pervades the whole universe.
00:07:46.820And so, again, that you start to develop that idea of a society that transcends location and space until, you know, a minor event occurs in the Middle East around, oh, I don't know, the year zero.
00:08:01.820That's a coincidence around when time started.
00:08:07.820And one of the claims that Jesus Christ, I think, makes about himself and is certainly made about him is that he is the Logos as a human being, right?
00:08:15.820That the word, the Logos, was made flesh.
00:08:17.820And so now you have a person claiming to actually pronounce the universal moral law.
00:08:23.820And as Christ himself says, you know, allegiance to him is what defines membership in the universal society, right?
00:08:32.820Whoever does the will of God, that is my brother or my mother or my sister.
00:08:36.820My kingdom is not of this world, meaning it's not in a specific time or place.
00:08:40.820And so out of that tradition, then, you get people like Augustine who start to kind of theologize and to Christianize the Ciceronian idea of a universal civilization.
00:08:51.820He says, if you don't hate your mother and your brother and your sister, then you can't follow him.
00:08:56.820If you don't renounce your parochial and superficial bonds, then you can never bond yourself with the Logos, with the eternal law.
00:09:08.820Yeah, I mean, I really think there he's almost building on the call of Abraham way back in Genesis, right?
00:09:13.820God says to Abraham, leave your home and your brothers and your father and everything that you've known and be defined by my call to you.
00:09:21.820Be defined by what God pronounces as truth.
00:09:24.820And, you know, actually, Paul, too, confronted the Stoics and the Epicureans in Acts.
00:09:32.820And you usually kind of read this as an adversarial confrontation between Christianity and Greek philosophy.
00:09:37.820But basically, I mean, Paul quotes Eratos at them who had strong Stoic roots.
00:09:41.820So basically what he's saying is, look, you Greeks, you Greek philosophers, you already believe this.
00:09:46.820You already believe in this universal society.
00:09:48.820I'm telling you that the king of that society was here on Earth in a particular person.
00:09:53.820And so then that gets fed into the Christian tradition with Augustine and with Aquinas.
00:09:58.820So effectively, this massive major strain of Western thought is the opposite of blood and soil.
00:10:06.820It's the only idea that really effectively contravenes what everyone else believes, you know, which is that you are in a particular place and time and genetic material.
00:10:16.820And that's what makes you who you are.
00:10:17.820I think you just made all the alt-right guys' heads explode.
00:10:20.820I think because for most of those guys, I think they read a summary one time, an excerpt of Thus Spake Zarathustra and the bell curve.
00:10:29.820I think that's basically the canon of those great thinkers.
00:10:32.820Well, we were talking before the show about, you know, analyzing the portion of Aristotle where he quotes the bell curve.
00:11:05.820Incidentally, I think, you know, the it seems like a seminal feature of alt-right discourse is like purposefully misspelling important words and ideas, which goes really well with the willful misunderstanding of crucial concepts.
00:11:18.820But anyway, I read on Vox Poppily this this assertion that, you know, if only the founders had kept the title of the rights of Englishmen instead of using the concept of natural law for propagandistic purposes.
00:11:32.820So it's like, oh, it's a living document.
00:12:24.820I mean, before sort of the Stoic philosophy that I was talking about, you have people like Aristotle who expressly tie the whole ethical universe to the polis, to this particular city in which you're living.
00:12:37.820And there is another important strand of Western thought that you have to kind of incorporate when you're talking about this, which is the sort of development of the idea of the nation state as kind of the Goldilocks of political entities, right?
00:12:53.820The right size to defend individual liberty in the real world.
00:12:56.820But the thing about that is, you know, that acknowledges a fact about the world, which is that we live in countries and are related to people and have ties to this particular life.
00:13:08.820But the whole project of the West, I would argue even a definitive project of the West, is the struggle over, you know, centuries to reconcile that fact with this beautiful notion of the universal society.
00:13:24.820And basically, I think what people come up with is this concept that your particular nation might somehow embody or be a model of the universal society.
00:13:35.820This comes up a lot in Aquinas, but you know where it really comes up is in the idea for America.
00:13:40.820John Winthrop, the model of Christian charity.
00:13:42.820And I know, talk about making the alt-right's head explode.
00:13:44.820The concept of a creedal nation is like, you know, anathema to them.
00:13:48.820But that, I mean, the founders read their Cicero, they read their Bible.
00:13:52.820This is a concept that was not alien to them.
00:13:55.820And essentially, the whole idea is to unify the idea of a nation state with the idea of the universal society and get a country to whom you can belong,
00:14:08.820in which you can be a citizen solely by, in the ideal world, solely by ascribing or professing fealty to a certain series of ideas, life, liberty, equality under the law, etc.
00:14:22.820Pursuit of property, private property, sure.
00:14:24.820That's right, shooting people at will.
00:14:32.820Right now, nationalism has come to the fore as a response to Davos, basically, as a response to these globalized elites who want to get rid of many features of the nation state.
00:14:45.820And so we have a robust defense of nationalism.
00:14:48.820We have a robust defense of Western civilization.
00:14:50.820And it seems that those defenses are often totally missing the point of the nation and of the Western civilization.
00:14:59.820How do we pick up, like our forefathers in Philadelphia did, how do we pick up Cicero and bring our civilization into its next phase, into the future, and to preserve our country?
00:15:10.820Well, you know, a good start would be to actually read Cicero.
00:15:29.820Scrap the idea of actually reading the canon.
00:15:31.820Look, you know, this is a thing, as I'm sure we'll shortly discover on the panel, you know, my job is basically to sit in dusty attics lined with books and read about people from 2,000 years ago.
00:15:42.820So I basically digest information at like a 2,000 year delay.
00:15:47.820So when you get down to sort of, I'm hoping that people like you can answer the question of how do we put these ideas into practice in the modern world.
00:15:57.820This idea that, you know, we're going to basically resurrect the Ciceronian or the Aristotelian or any number of ancient ideals by living the life that Cicero or Aristotle lived by throwing our iPhones away and, you know, living according to the, this is going to, living according to the sexual morality of 300 years ago.
00:16:21.820That's just, that just doesn't happen.
00:16:22.820That's not how the, how the world works.
00:16:24.820What I think we have to do is, you know, another kind of Aristotelian idea is one of form and matter, right?
00:16:29.820That you have the particular form, the particular matter in which things are embodied, but then you have the, the concepts and the ideas which, as we've been talking about, are universalizable.
00:16:37.820And I think what we really have to do is figure out how to embody the ideals that we've been talking around in the 21st century, given all of the new facts that are available to us.
00:16:47.820And you bring up an interesting point on academics, on the elites.
00:16:52.820You, it's, I think the guys who are Western chauvinists and who are basically white identitarians, they try to pride themselves on being intellectually superior.
00:17:02.820You know, they read the bell curve or part of it and they think they have a high IQ and that they've read, but they don't really know anything about their civilization.
00:17:10.820You have read all the books. You have a high IQ. What is the role of elites in conservatism and in America? They've gotten a bad rap over the last year and a half.
00:17:21.820There's been a revolt in many ways against the elites. How do we, how do we use them? What is the role of an elite?
00:17:34.820Doing a doctorate in classics is like, it doesn't get more kind of like airy fairy than that.
00:17:39.820Was it you got rejected from gender studies? Is that why you had to choose classics?
00:17:42.820You know, I did. I gave them my best, but I wasn't quite queer enough.
00:17:47.820I think it was like one degree further. No, I do think that the, some of the criticisms that have been leveled at the elites are partially justified in the sense that in this country we have become,
00:18:04.820we being the Chardonnay sipping, brie cheese eating, intellectual elites, we have become disconnected from the basic everyday concerns that animate 90% of the population.
00:18:17.820And I think that the election of Donald Trump is evidence of that. The fact of how shocked I was by the number of people who sympathize with a man that I find abhorrent,
00:18:27.820tells me that there's something going on that I'm not keyed into, or at least there was, and I'm trying now to.
00:18:34.820I have a metaphor about this, which will take me a second, but bear with me.
00:18:39.820So my mom has a plumber that she likes to call whenever our toilet breaks down, which is approximately every five minutes.
00:18:45.820And the plumber is always boring her with these long descriptions of the technical process that he's going to undergo to fix her toilet.
00:18:55.820You know, widgets and gaskets or, I'm now just saying words.
00:18:58.820Yeah, I have no idea about any of the words other than plunger.
00:23:12.820And I saw the I saw that piece you're talking about, you know, defending Antifa and these Antifa people think they're out there fighting the Nazis.
00:23:18.820They think there really are not there's a huge Nazi problem in the US and we need them to step up, take it to the streets, get violent, justified violence and defeat the Nazis on, you know, for America as if there are heroes.
00:23:30.820That's there's a lot of projection going on, I think, on their part.
00:23:34.820Cassie, we've been talking about the centrality of logos of Greek thought and Jerusalem of Christianity that built the West.
00:23:42.820These days in the West, people don't think and they don't practice any religion of any of any classical variety.
00:23:49.820Do you think I know young people very often are not raised in formal religious households anymore, though there is a little pushback to that.
00:23:59.820Do you think that there is a future for the right or for Western civilization if it remains atheistic or secular?
00:24:07.820Is there a way to translate those classical religious values into secularism or do we all need to get back to church and synagogue and get some old time religion?
00:24:16.820I find that to be a very difficult question because if you look at Europe, it's becoming progressively less religious.
00:24:22.820But if you look at certain parts of America, it's actually becoming more religious.
00:24:25.820And I think that has to do with a lot of values changing in American society where people are confused and kind of scared of what's going on.
00:24:32.820So they're going back to the church, which gives them a foundation for beliefs that they have held true throughout the last couple hundred years.
00:24:38.820So even in the West, I would say that secularism is becoming or in the East, secularism is becoming more prominent, too, in certain areas.
00:24:46.820But you are seeing the rise of more fundamentalists around the world.
00:24:50.820So I think that you need to have the clear balance.
00:24:52.820If you aren't getting your values from religion, you have to figure out where are you getting them from.
00:25:49.820It is unsettling that the Boy Scouts of America would seek to upend a paradigm that has served both boys and girls so well through the years.
00:25:56.820Cassie, as our resident female, why are the Boy Scouts recruiting girls?
00:26:02.820By the way, this isn't just transgender issues.
00:26:05.820They're recruiting girls, just actual girls.
00:27:15.820And how will the left be able to resolve this tension between a feminism that says women should have their own organization and should be able to do whatever men want to do.
00:27:24.820And a transgender gender bender movement in the popular culture that says men and women are essentially the same.
00:27:31.820And those categories are mutable and we can will our way from one to the other.
00:27:36.820I think this is, this is one of those issues on which, you know, we need to find our way forward incorporating new information that has actually come to us since, since we sort of set up the paradigms that are reflected in say the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts.
00:27:51.820It is true and I think you actually see this in leftist discourse.
00:27:55.820It is true that there is a, there's a tension between the idea that there is no difference between the genders.
00:31:08.820All right, in today's tweet news, there's always some President Trump tweet news.
00:31:22.820President Trump is once again tweeting his displeasure with Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.
00:31:27.820He tweeted out just today, quote, I requested that Mitch M and Paul R tie the debt ceiling legislation into the popular VA bill, which just passed for easy approval.
00:31:36.820They didn't do it, so now we have a big deal with Dems holding them up as usual on debt ceiling approval.
00:32:31.820So I think, yeah, it's not politics as usual.
00:32:34.820But the change is the change that people voted for.
00:32:36.820Because a lot of people, especially in the media, are whining that President Trump isn't handling this in private conversations and whispering to them.
00:32:44.820And I guarantee you none of those people have ever picked up a football.
00:32:47.820You're saying there's a benefit to being called out in public, holding people accountable, making them sweat a little bit, and hopefully straightening out their job.