In this week's episode, we're talking about racism in public schools, and what it means to be white in America, and why it's a problem. We're joined by the author of Woke Kindergarten and his wife, who tells us about their own experience with racism in the public school system, and how it drove them to pull their kids.
00:22:08.160Like, I just figured you weren't being as explicit about non-heterosexual sex.
00:22:13.800It's very – I mean, maybe not explicit explicit, but as explicit as – what's that Western guy from ancient Britain – not ancient Britain, but, like, Victorian Britain?
00:24:17.820If you treated any other cultural group this way, people would be like, you, sir, are a bigot.
00:24:23.800Where such verbal grievances proved insufficient, the few pre-modern female or minority artists who could be excavated from the historical record were messily grafted onto our syllabi.
00:24:34.160We studied Sofana Sibba instead of Da Vinci, fragments of Sappho rather than Sophocles.
00:25:12.340Such substitutions were celebrated as a reparative maneuver and therefore as a necessary improvement over the thinkers and artists who had been replaced.
00:25:22.780Now open up your textbook and begin memorizing the copyright information.
00:25:46.220Because I want to, I've been watching recently some conversations that Samo, Samo Berger, who runs Bismarck Analytics, really smart guy.
00:25:54.000He's been having Rubyard, who runs What Have All Hissed.
00:25:56.240And so people thought that I was throwing shade at What Have All Hissed in a previous video, that he was the YouTuber with more subscribers that I was comparing us against.
00:26:19.320I actually, when a young person is too buttoned up, I actually respect them less than when they make mistakes.
00:26:27.840A great example of this is, like, Brett Cooper versus Pearl Davis.
00:26:32.060I think of Pearl Davis was a lot more respect than I think of Brett Cooper.
00:26:37.460Even though Brett Cooper has a lot more followers and everything like that, she seems to be operating off of some script.
00:26:43.300No one, and Brett Cooper was, like, 18 when she became famous.
00:26:46.280No 18-year-old girl becomes famous without, you know, questioning a few things they're not supposed to question, having a few ideas they're not supposed to have.
00:26:56.080She's been so, like, a bowling lane where you put the two, like, things in the aisles so that, like, no ball can ever go in the gutter with every idea she's pitching.
00:27:06.100I'm like, oh, she's got a team betting everything she does and says.
00:27:10.240And, yeah, Rubyard says some silly things, but it's just because he doesn't have any guardrails on what he says or thinks.
00:27:19.780I'm often, like, yeah, that was probably a foolish thing to say, but it shows to me that you're a young person willing to think outside the box.
00:27:29.500And that, to me, is a higher order thing than always not looking foolish.
00:27:35.840But I'm sure that we look the same way to people, you know, maybe it's old people who might push the boundary too much.
00:27:41.080But anyway, so he was talking with Sam Obergia, which is this really famous analytic company, and they're just, like, talking about history.
00:27:49.280They're talking about different cultures, and there's no benefit to them of doing this.
00:27:54.280Like, these interviews only get a couple south-infused, like, less than a regular episode of ours.
00:27:58.420But it's clear, and I'll post a little bit of one of these episodes here, that they, like these Jewish students who pair off like this, and we'll talk more about how their education system works, that they're just interested in the information.
00:28:12.600They're, like, what does this tell us about the future?
00:28:14.840What does this tell us about what we should do?
00:29:11.260And I'm one of the people who will agree with that thesis the most.
00:29:14.100The second thing is that, as to your classical literacy, Jesus Christ was literate, and he was a carpenter.
00:29:22.400And so what that signifies is that the middle classes in the Roman Empire at least were literate.
00:29:26.920And for the third point, I think one of the biggest things people should know about history is whatever thesis you have about a particular era of history is true.
00:29:38.420And an example of this that I like to use because it just shatters people's conceptions of history is that people would have sex in public in the Middle Ages.
00:29:46.600And we see medieval Europe as this very puritanical religious society.
00:29:50.880And it was significantly more religious than us.
00:29:54.600But what religion meant in that society is a very different thing, where the things that we associate with Protestantism today, like sexual purity or cleanliness or reading the Bible, medieval Christianity was totally different.
00:30:10.340And that is a critical part of an education system.
00:30:13.520And I want to talk about how we can work that in.
00:30:15.280Do you have anything to say before I keep going?
00:30:17.720No, I want to see where you take this.
00:30:20.840My friends showed up at classes each day to preserve their GPA, not to uncover truths about the world, and it showed.
00:30:27.680After being shown the fault of each of the great thinkers of the West, my friends showed little respect for their ideas.
00:30:34.880If a particular claim in the text did not resonate, it was dismissed rather than grappled with.
00:30:39.600Isn't it silly, a student might remark, that Augustine made such a big deal out of a few stolen pairs.
00:30:48.300This was the fruit of pedagogical shame.
00:30:51.660At its finest, a cohort of students uninterested in and repulsed by the values and creations of the culture they were supposedly being educated to join.
00:31:25.120Yeah, colleges teach kids to hate their ancestors, and nothing hurts fertility more or the intergenerational survivability of a culture more than having pride in your identity.
00:31:38.100And these individuals were taught, one, they're not even really taught their identity, and this is one of the things I find about American culture.
00:31:49.980It's one of the reasons why we talk about the Backwoods Peoples.
00:31:51.980One of the reasons we talk about the American nations and the different immigrant groups to America is people don't realize, even within our country, that we're – America's a continent, bro.
00:32:02.480We are as different as the Europeans in terms of our perspective and our cultural history.
00:32:08.780And every one of us has something to have pride in when you study, when you learn about it.
00:32:14.440And I think that one and the most important thing is how do you impose an understanding of sacredness in your ancestors?
00:32:26.900I think first, there's two things here, is to focus on your ancestors' sacrifices.
00:32:34.820This is something that Judaism has done very well.
00:32:38.020Almost all of their holidays are focused on some sort of sacrifice that one of their ancestors made to preserve their traditions, you know, Passover, for example, or Monica.
00:32:48.920No, but they're all about some trial that they went through, right?
00:32:56.340And when you actually study your real ancestors, and better if you have books about your ancestors and what they did, you can learn from them that the trials that you experience today are childish and trivial in comparison.
00:33:14.260There's that joke about, oh, I walked five miles uphill through the snow.
00:33:19.460And in our parents' generation, that was a joke, but people did used to walk five miles to school through the snow.
00:33:38.460Our ancestors suffered in ways that we cannot begin to conceive.
00:33:43.840Women lost one tooth for every pregnancy, on average.
00:33:47.420We live in a—and before penicillin, the level of pain that people went through every day, you know, as we talked about, like, the King of France had, like, an additional anus that was just rotted through.
00:34:27.420Every culture has these stories of the Jews.
00:34:29.620I don't even feel like the Jews do a particularly good job of showing—because their stories are told in a way that was meant to seem challenging to people 500 years ago.
00:34:38.420They're like, oh, they were huddling, afraid of, like, an invader who could kill them.
00:34:42.800But today, just talk about, like, basic medical stuff to understand the challenges of our ancestors.
00:34:49.840And then the second thing, and this is where the progressives, their entire ideological trick—and you can say, why do they do this?
00:34:58.940They do it because if you can lower somebody's connection to their ancestral culture, it's easy to convert them into something new.
00:35:06.920And because they're peddling this mimetic virus, this totally new cultural tradition, the urban monoculture, the best way to do that, to get people to ignore all of their ancestral tradition, is to paint their ancestral tradition as evil.
00:35:21.680Or to lie to them about what their ancestral tradition was.
00:35:25.900As we pointed out in our Black culture video, that, you know, if you go back to the 60s, Black people had a higher marriage rate and a lower out-of-marriage birth rate than white people by a significant margin.
00:35:38.780And yet today you have movements like the BLM movement saying, this is a traditional part of Black culture.
00:35:44.480And it's like, no, but the way that you fight the progressives on this, okay, is you admit what they are unable to admit.
00:35:57.600My ancestors didn't create the culture I venerate.
00:36:04.580I name my children things like Octavian.
00:36:07.380When my ancestors in England were taken as slaves, they were colonized by the imperialist Roman Empire.
00:36:19.820But the Roman Empire brought civilization.
00:36:26.080That civilization, you know, when I look, just so people understand, like, how backwards my people were.
00:36:32.900Because I wasn't just a British, it was, you know, especially it was you, a lot of Norwegian, Viking ancestry.
00:36:46.640It has, like, metaphors to their state and society.
00:36:50.220And I was like, yeah, some of the earliest literature has themes.
00:36:55.960Beowulf, at the level of education that it was written at, the level of civilization it was written at, I would say is similar to the theming of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
00:37:06.180Except the Epic of Gilgamesh was written 26,000 to 28,000 years before Beowulf.
00:37:17.200Nah, Gilgamesh is better because it has a good bromance.
00:37:20.120All good literature has a good bromance, my good sir.
00:37:24.380When I read something like Beowulf, I am reminded that while some people can't own this, that my uncivilized ancestors, before civilization reached them, were half beast and half child.
00:37:40.100Wow, you're really just digging in with the commenters.
00:38:04.660So you're not, what you're saying here is that you are not for ancestor worship.
00:38:08.980You are for celebrating tactics that win.
00:38:11.440And in the end, that's what should be celebrated in universities.
00:38:15.720And I would say that this probably gets at the heart of what Columbia was trying to do with their classic series, which was to say, here are texts that over time have proven themselves to be foundational to Western civilization.
00:38:51.160You're referring to the urban monoculture.
00:38:52.820I'm referring to pre-urban monoculture, the era in which this classics program was established.
00:39:00.540For example, one of the things, you know, I was talking about Ruby Yard recently talking about something really interesting.
00:39:06.140And one thing I didn't know about is they were saying when the Persians reached the decaying remnants of the Babylonian Empire, they just opened the gates.
00:39:16.520And they were going over multiple times in history where this happened, where an empire had become so decadent that it had lost the vitality to survive.
00:39:24.460And is that not what the West is doing right now with the giant waves of immigration?
00:39:31.680We are just saying, I give up, replace us.
00:39:35.080That is the state that we are in at this point.
00:39:37.940That we lack the ability to intergenerationally motivate our survival because we have no pride.
00:39:47.340Well, that's the point is this is, again, a very happy cause.
00:39:52.020Prenatalism is the collective group of people who have chosen to inherit the future, who have chosen to be there and to show up and to have kids.
00:40:02.940And so I think the bigger question is, I think most people who are prenatalists are probably going to opt out of the university system or at least approach it with great skepticism.
00:40:13.320The question is, what kind of internal culture does one want to create?
00:40:17.580And how will one make that internal culture one that doesn't just celebrate the ancestral values of the culture, but winning values that impart fitness, however you want to define it, to your kids, right?
00:40:30.640Well, no, I think that you need to find an intellectual architecture that, one, resists the urban monoculture's attacks, which is really important that you're able to do.
00:40:44.980And I think the biggest point to resisting the urban monoculture's attacks is, for example, if I am an American black family, right?
00:40:53.740And they're like, oh, well, this civilizational technology of Christianity, you know, as the Smithsonian spreadsheet said, that's not black.
00:41:04.140Monogamy, they'd say, that's not black.
00:41:06.200Being on time, they say, that's not black.
00:43:20.940Civilization uplifted us, and we don't need to shame our ancestors for embracing that.
00:43:45.760When I look to the ancestors within my own culture that I admire, they are the ancestors after we adapted to them.
00:43:54.300Yeah, they're the ones who rose above, who learned better, who did better, and who learned and iterated and, yeah, overcame their previous generation's shortcomings.
00:44:07.580And that's what good culture is all about.
00:44:26.580The only part I remember of it, though, was them warning people, like, about white people, and they're like, they smell like a wet chicken.
00:44:37.920And there's something about that that, like, sticks with me forever.
00:44:42.540Like, every time I see our chickens in the rain, I just think of this line, they smell like a wet chicken.
00:44:49.140And they smell like shit, so I'll tell you that.
00:44:52.940So I'm going to go over one snippet from another article, and then I want to think through with you how we can educate our kids better with this information.
00:44:59.840My optimism about higher education's recovery, of course, is based on my pessimism about the future of sheep raising in the governs of academia.
00:45:18.760That would have been more appropriate, probably.
00:45:20.280The establishment shepherds extraordinaire act as though things will go much as they have for the last 50 years.
00:45:27.340By things, I mean the mass production of haphazardly educated but heavily indoctrinated graduates who have absorbed the core ideas that America is very bad and that multiculturalism is very good.
00:45:39.160In 2016, when Donald Trump was campaigning for president, he caricatured higher education's business model as we'll take $200,000 of your money, and in exchange, we'll train your children to hate our country.
00:45:50.680We'll make them unemployable by teaching them courses in zombie studies and underwater basket weaving and, my favorite, tree climbing.
00:45:58.340Though the higher education establishment detests Trump, with every holy fiber of its being, the professional bureaucrats and administrative careerists increasingly recognize that Trump's deflated view of colleges and universities resonate with many Americans.
00:46:14.460So how can we build something like this Jewish system?
00:46:18.260And to describe how this Jewish system works is you have an education system with no grades that isn't necessary for a person's job outside of what they learn, which can help them with in Jewish intellectual circles.
00:46:31.380So, like, what they learn is the point, not how it grades what they learn.
00:46:36.720And they're expected to have these one-on-one conversations or debates about the information with other scholars in their class, which in part influence their class status.
00:46:49.220I think that maybe we can create some sort of daily part of our education system where our kids can talk with other kids in our network, right?
00:47:00.720Like, okay, take somebody like Scott Alexander's kids, right?
00:47:03.640Like, I would love it if every day we had one lesson plan where our kids would debate their kids.
00:47:11.080Yeah, to make it about, yeah, fun interchange and status hierarchy.
00:47:15.220And then when you're reading something, you're reading it with the motivation of getting to discuss it and hash it out with other people in an enthusiastic format.
00:47:24.480I think a lot of people, for example, who watch anime or consume other fan universes don't necessarily enjoy every single series they watch, but they watch the series because they love discussing it with their friends.
00:47:38.420And I've seen this with other genres as well.
00:47:40.840Like, a lot of people, when I went to college, loved watching The Office together.
00:47:44.640Not all of them loved The Office, but they loved the ability to talk about it in a really animated way with others.
00:47:50.900Well, and I think that this is sort of like our track series.
00:47:53.940So, like, a lot of our track series' biggest fans are actually Haradi Jews, which I think would surprise some people.
00:48:05.820See, Jews and ultra-Orthodox Jews specifically, when they are discussing their religious traditions, they are allowed to have crazy takes.
00:48:17.100They are allowed—I mean, if they can back it up with logic, that is actually something that has some level of credibility to it, right?
00:48:27.940Too many Christians today—and I think this is part of why Christianity is failing, and I think it's part of why Catholicism is failing more than Protestantism, and Orthodoxism is failing more than, you know, I think even Catholicism at this point.
00:48:44.140It's the Orthodox Christian churches, the Greek Orthodox Christian churches, and it's because if you sort of rate churches by how much are you supposed to, like, read the text and interpret it yourself, the ones that lean more to that are doing better.
00:49:33.540What it should mean, I mean, if this text is imbued with some sort of supernatural, and we would argue that all of the ancestral texts that have been elevated by God through their impact on our civilization have a divine inspiration in a way.
00:49:48.420Well, if it has a divine inspiration, then you're supposed to be able to take something from it, relevant to your time.
00:49:53.380And I think that that's a problem with a lot of these classics courses, is they're like, learn the classics, but learn them was in their context.
00:50:02.900Yeah, only within their context, yeah.
00:50:16.700I, by the way, I just want to say to those who do not, you know, who think that Trump was making up the fact that they were tree climbing courses, to Trump's credit, yes, there are absolutely tree climbing courses.
00:51:18.660So Trump was right, but I'm all for tree climbing courses because that's a trade and I want people to actually create value.
00:51:24.280And my big argument about universities is we also need to parse out what the different things you're buying are.
00:51:31.140And what you're discussing here with this classics course for a while and like for why Columbia was offering it in the first place is to impart high social class.
00:51:40.560Understanding the classics, being able to discuss them intelligently, being able to reference them.
00:51:45.260A purely social class thing based on memorization, not on argumentational ability.
00:51:50.780Well, an argumentational ability is the core of the social class.
00:51:53.320So what they have is a program that was originally meant to help students signal social class, which is why many people send their kids to university.
00:52:02.340Then they stripped it of that because they got the kids disinterested in the actual texts, not capable of actually discussing them because they weren't freaking reading them.
00:52:11.180And then put them in all this additional context that makes them utterly useless from a class signaling standpoint.
00:52:17.140So you are totally wasting people's time.