Transcription
You said that you had been reading American history. Okay. And that you were concerned with, interested in, and convinced by, I suppose, all of those issues of what made America great. Okay.
So now, while—so this is interesting and worth taking apart—because for decades, certainly since the 60s, the typical pathway for someone young who was assessing the history of his or her country would have been to read it through a highly critical lens. So, for example, I remember when I was 13 or 14, so that would have been the mid-70s, um, I was reading *Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas* and some of the uh, so-called new journalists. And uh, they’re not—they weren’t of the left exactly the way you would conceptualize the left now. They were more like radical literary figures, I would say. But the mid-70s ethos certainly was to read history and sociology critically. And I don’t mean you were being uncritical. I mean to take—take an anti-establishment stance. Like in the 60s, that was all well anti-establishment, free love; the sexual revolution is coming; everyone’s going to be free. By the time the 70s came along, which was the milieu I was embedded in, all of the optimism of the 60s had pretty much vanished, but all of the cynicism 100% remained.
Now you, though, interestingly enough, in Chicago, and this would be mid-2000s, so 2008, 2009, right? Right. Near the end of the two-thousands or the first decade of the 2000s, you were reading American history and, and as you said, in the height of the Obama fervor. Sure. Um, but your take was positive and patriotic. Correct. So why—why do you think that was? Like, what do you think it—what made you different? Like when I met you, you—you were very, I would say, relatively sheltered still and very, very straightlaced. And from the Canadian perspective, you know, you were—you were of the—it appeared to me that you were of that American evangelical stripe, which we have some of in Alberta, not a lot. It’s not really a Canadian thing. And so when I met you, I thought, okay, so that’s Charlie’s—that’s—that’s the cauldron, the matrix out of which he emerged. Maybe cauldron is not the right metaphor, but I’m curious like why do you think that your political rebellion took a conservative form when that isn’t—it’s not common for young people and it certainly wasn’t the pattern of the time from say 1965 till well, probably till about—you—till about when you were adolescent. So that—that’s a phenomenal analysis and question.
Let me just add to it. The literature, the non-political, non-historical literature that we were being assigned in sixth, seventh, eighth grade was what I call pre-woke. It was almost there. And so it was—it was like books that come to mind is a book called *Things Fall Apart*. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this book. Chinua Achebe, I think. Yeah, exactly. I think it was the main character was Okonkwo. I could be wrong. I’m just drawing from like 13, 14 years. Basically, the entire premise of the book, based on my memory, is that there are these—this, you know, wonderful tribe and they all get along in Africa and these evil colonialists come in and things fall apart and there’s internal strife and the end of the book is basically the summary of all of these relationships of these evil colonialists that say, and you know, here’s the history of just the under—you know, sub-Saharan Africa, basically dismissing all of the complexities and the beauties of, you know, this specific tribe. So it’s kind of a testament to Rousseau. But it was written by an African in that book. Correct. And I—I again, I’m drawing from almost a decade-old memory, but I remember the discussions we’d have in class were—were very much anti-colonialist, anti-western, that we are the contaminants on the world, that we are polluting other tribes. And again, mind you, we’re in eighth or ninth grade discussing this. So I don’t know what post-structuralism is or postmodernism is, but it was pre-woke. We weren’t quite there, though.
And so from the historical standpoint, it was not 1619 Project, but it was: we’re going to spend a whole month on slavery and we’re going to spend three days on the founding. Right. And did you spend any of the time when you were studying slavery assessing the fact that the UK was the only country that’s ever existed in the history of the world that spent—what, two centuries and a tremendous proportion of its treasury eradicating slavery around the world at the behest of Protestant Christians? Because that’s the story and we—let me—I never remember knowing the name Wilberforce. Wilberforce. Yeah. See, this is a very interesting thing. You know, I actually didn’t come across—this is so strange, but life is very strange—I didn’t come across the name Wilberforce till I was probably in my 40s. Isn’t that amazing? It’s beyond comprehension. I didn’t get to know him until the last five years. Last five years. Is that right? Even—is that even the political—I might have heard it, but not until someone looked at me seriously and said, “You have to study this guy. This is a preacher. This is a man of faith that led to the abolition of slavery, probably the entire—under impossible conditions. He devoted his whole life to it. And that the link between that and the religious ideation is rock solid. Rock. It’s—it’s one-to-one. Absolutely. And it’s also the case that his ideas wouldn’t have fallen on fertile ground, cuz they did relatively—like when you can make a radical cultural shift in one lifetime, which is no time at all historically, you know that you’re at the forefront of ideas whose time has come, and that was clearly the case for Wilberforce, and he certainly is one of those people who stood up against the greedy, self-centered and malevolent ethos of his time. But the UK swung around behind him impossibly rapidly and then with their full might. And it is—it’s—it, you know, I’ve learned a lot of things in the last 10 years that have shocked me so bad I don’t know how to recover exactly. And one of them was that the public school system was set up by fascists on the Prussian military model. I just—I’ve never been able to figure out exactly what to do with that. They were literally trying to make thoughtless worker drones, desk workers. That’s what bureaucrat means. Yeah. Well, or—or factory workers. That’s right. And it—what—what that in itself wasn’t so bad because the country was industrializing. But right underneath that was the idea that while you were doing that, it was necessary to pretty much stamp out or fail to develop anything that would produce any kind of creative entrepreneurship. It’s like, okay, that’s—hard to swallow. And then when I read about how the food pyramid was developed, that’s just beyond comprehension. I—I don’t know if that’s the worst crime ever committed in the United States, but it’s up there.
And then this—the next mystery is Wilberforce is another mystery of that magnitude. And—and even—you might say particularly on the left. It’s like, okay, you guys, you’re—you’re for the oppressed, which I don’t buy for a second, but especially because I’ve watched in the last 10 years the lefties sell out the poor worldwide to the climate apocalypse mongers. And that’s just been a catastrophe for places like Africa, like Bjorn Lomborg has been so forthright in observing. But the fact that slavery and reparations, all of that, the unfair founding of the United States has been a central dogma of the radical leftists. They blame slavery on the West. And the fact that the radical types have control over the education system means that no one even educated in a conservative milieu knows who the hell Wilberforce was. And I—I don’t—I just don’t—or—or Thaddeus Stevens or the heroism of John Quincy Adams. Those would be, you know, some main protagonist characters for the abolition of slavery here in America.
And so when I was in ninth, tenth, and eleventh grade, something in me, and I don’t quite know—my parents very patriotic, but not political. Patriotic, but not political. They’re conservative, but we were not a political family, but very patriotic. Something in me desired to try to find the other side of the story, to try to push back a little bit from the—the incessant narrative that was being built. And I do want to make sure this is clear. We were not yet at the place where the—the—the teachers were saying America was racist. In fact, it was actually much more insidious than that. And so that even in 2008, that—that still wasn’t occurring. I could make—at least in my environment—I could make an argument though that what they were doing when I was in high school is actually long-term much more effective to create revolutionaries for the left than what they’re doing now because it really didn’t warrant that much of a backlash. It wasn’t—it wasn’t overly provocative. They weren’t saying to the white kids in class, “Hey, go sit on this side of the class and black kids on this side of the class.” Yeah. Well, those things always happen one tiny step at a time, of course. But when I was being schooled, there were no parents showing up at school board meetings about critical race theory. Now, these elements were laced throughout all the curriculum, right? And it took a very discerning eye. And for whatever reason, you know, how I was raised or just something in me around tenth or eleventh grade, I asked the question. I said, “Look, we have spent an entire month on slavery. Totally get it. Terrible thing.” But we spent so little time on the brilliance of the founders and what they’ve created and the greatest political document in human history and what went into that. And it was an underemphasis on the heroism and the courage and the brilliance and an overemphasis on the evil and the tragedy and the horror without even the redemption arc behind it.
Yeah. Well, the thing that’s so awful about that, as far as I’m concerned from the leftist perspective, let’s say, is if you are concerned with the poor and the oppressed, you know, and then you have to be discerning there because there are people who are poor and oppressed as a consequence of their own idiocy and that’s not so uncommon as you know in your own life by watching your pathway to failure. So, but given that there are people who are unfortunate, you’d think that the appropriate tack would be to determine who in history served the most effectively. And I just can’t see anyone you could possibly point to more effectively—who did that more effectively than Wilberforce ever. And so, you would think that instead of erecting monuments to Lenin, the leftists would erect monuments to Wilberforce. But not only do they not do that, no one knows who the hell he was. It’s one—it is one of the greatest memory holings of a hero in Western history. Yeah, I completely agree. Why is it—my hypothesis is he’s Christian—is that you cannot highlight a man of faith who did something with such valor and such significance. It is—it is at odds with almost every other fundamental narrative that they must try to present. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s right. That I think that’s right—that it is fundamentally—but that begs another question and that would be: why, given that Wilberforce was clearly a force for the good that Obama, for example, would have been pushing—by which I mean movement towards a uh, polity where there were no racial—there was no racial or ethnic prejudice—if Wilberforce is the poster boy for that sort of effort, which if you understand his life and you read about it, I can’t see how you can conclude that, then why would the lefties forego that merely to oppose the fact that his motivation was fundamentally Christian? Because that points to something deeper, right? It points to the fact that the true war, so to speak, isn’t political. It’s not left versus right. It’s something deeper. And then if it is anti-Christian, then why? Like, what does that mean? Like there’s an Enlightenment element there, right? The Enlightenment types, especially after the French Revolution, generated this narrative that science and religion were radically opposed and that if you were on the side of religion, you were against clear, rational, logical thinking. And—and so you could imagine a stream of anti-Christian sentiment emerging on the rationalist side, right? But—but it isn’t obvious to me at all that the leftist types who don’t talk about Wilberforce are anti-Christian because they’re scientific rationalists. Like, no, all you have to do is talk to them for like 15 seconds and you find out that that’s not the case. They might use those arguments from time to time, but they certainly don’t apply the rigors of scientific thinking to their own—to their own radical hypothesis. So, it’s deeper than that. And so, what is it exactly that? What is it exactly that they’re objecting to? Is it the fact that the more radical leftist story, Marxist, let’s say, is in its essence anti-Christian, which I think is a fair statement. And that—but why would that be more important? This is the strange thing. Why would that be more important than serving the poor and fighting for the abolition of slavery and all of its associated prejudices? Because it still doesn’t get you out of the conundrum, which is: why then—why not Wilberforce? Instead of tearing down statues, why not erect statues to him?
Yeah. So, well, what do you—I know that’s a—that’s a hard thing to sort out, but you got any—obviously you were feeling something like this in high school, right? Correct. You guys are throwing out the baby with the bathwater here. Correct. Yeah. Which baby exactly? So my initial thought is that the leftist types, the ones that really understand it, they—they—they do not seek to achieve what a Wilberforce type figure would want, which is actual liberation and actual eradication of evil. Yeah, I hate to say it. I think they just want to be in charge.