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Real Clear
Wilfred Reilly: New Book Review
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Is Western culture really as malevolent as some narratives suggest? Join us as we welcome Professor Wilfred Reilly, author of "Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me," to challenge these pervasive academic narratives. Reilly takes on popular works like Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" and the "1619 Project," arguing that the practices of slavery and conquest were not unique to the West but universal behaviors across all civilizations. With examples ranging from ancient Sumer to the Aztec empire, Reilly emphasizes the necessity of historical context, countering the notion that Western culture is uniquely sinful.
Professor Reilly doesn't shy away from contentious topics that have shaped our society and its politics. We explore the true effectiveness of McCarthyism, debunk the myth of peaceful Native Americans, and scrutinize the implications of the sexual revolution. We also analyze the three-fifths compromise and the Southern Strategy, arguing that demographic and migration patterns played a more significant role in the South's political shift. Reilly insights invite us to reconsider the complex interplay of racial dynamics and political affiliations, urging us to look beyond systemic changes to address deeper issues rooted in human nature.
In the final segment, we shift gears to contemporary issues such as modern dating dynamics and traditional gender norms. Reilly shares practical advice for young men navigating relationships and personal development, stressing the importance of maintaining physical fitness, securing decent employment, and honing essential life skills. We also touch on the growing influence of social media and modern psychological approaches on relationships, exploring how these factors contribute to a widening divide in dating experiences. Reilly's perspective offers a unique take on these modern challenges, making this episode a must-listen for anyone seeking a nuanced understanding of history, politics, and society.
Okay, welcome back to Real Clear. I am so pleased to be joined yet again by Professor Wilfred Riley, political science professor and author at Kentucky State University. His recent book is called Lies, my Liberal Teacher Told Me, and he's been gracious enough to join us here. Welcome, professor Riley. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Always good to come back on the show, great to have you. We were talking just previously to recording.
Speaker 1:I'd like to go over your book in a more general way. I want to give people a sort of ethos as to a general outlay of your book, and I really want them to go and purchase it because it's an important book. This is a book that does not hold back. It makes really important and grand, rather grand assertions, if I could put it that way. Grand might not be the right word, but it makes very far-reaching, hard-hitting assertions about I should say corrective assertions about various beliefs that have permeated through academia, through academia, and so I'd like to go through maybe a couple of them, but first discuss the general outlay of your book. What can you tell us about why you wrote this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good question. And for the classic opener I get a basic. The reason I wrote this is that there's a whole genre of books that sort of argue that the West, white dissent, american and European culture is the worst culture in the world and nobody knows this. And this is the basic. This is where the basic idea of being woke quote-unquote comes from. I usually list them off like there's Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, which claims to tell the classic history book stories from a different perspective.
Speaker 2:The classic history book stories from a different perspective, the perspective of Irish near slaves or Choctaw Indians being forced to march to the West. This kind of thing. There's obviously Lowen's. The book is called Lies your Teacher Told you, which is the source of a lot of the things that I'm frankly rebutting in my opinion, and just many more of them. There's the 1619 Projects book 1619, often phrased as a black history of the United States which came out just a couple years back Bury my Heart and Wounded Knee, a native history of the United States. This is an old classic, if you want to use that label, and that again is just one of a genre. There's also Vine Deloria's Custard Died for your Sins. I think that has the same subtitle.
Speaker 2:And what kind of every one of these books does is essentially claim that in the American history classroom in high school or college you're taught that this is this wonderful sin free country and that people are telling you constantly what a fine place we are, how Columbus arrived here as a brilliant navigator and he found this empty continent populated by a few stone tool using savages. And from that point forward, our brilliant hero fathers spread out to bring civilization to the wilderness, this kind of thing. And then the narrative begins. Of course that's not true. The whites were savage genociders and the country was founded on slavery and the brutal murder of those totally unprovoked of native peoples and so on. And the second part of this whole narrative usually, at least in my read is that most people don't know this. So if you've ever read a college textbook or a textbook in a high school adults class, there are these little sidebars that say things like most people don't know about feminism, and there'll be an arrow pointing up and they'll give you a message that your parents probably aren't aware of about how brave black people or women or something were in the past.
Speaker 2:And I think that there are two things that I say in my book in response to this. First, it's not accurate to say that basically, the narrative that we are being told is wrong. Almost no one is being told that America was the most wonderful or the Western world was the most wonderful society in history. That's not true. It hasn't been true since well before I was in school, if anything. We're told the reverse, almost everyone is told the story that I'm critiquing and I don't know if what I'm saying is making sense. I feel like I'm saying this badly, but the story that I'm critiquing is itself wrong. So Western culture didn't do anything that other cultures did not do historically. The things that are described as Western sense, like conquest and warfare, were in fact universal human sense.
Speaker 2:So the first chapter of my book Lives, my Liberal Teacher Told Me, deals with slavery, and slavery was a human practice that extended essentially throughout history. Slave was one of the first 20 or so human words. It appears in Sumerian and so on cuneiform languages. It appears egyptian hieroglyphs and the origin of the word basically means defeated warrior. In uh, sumerian glyphs it's the term for man from the mountains, with a couple of additions that I think resemble shackles. It literally just means someone from the highland cities that came down to fight the akkadians or whatever on the plains and lost and had their status in life unfortunately and brutally changed so that they're going to be assisting with the agricultural enhancement of Samar for the rest of their life, and from there you go on into the similar practice in Greece and in Rome. Discuss the Arabic slave trade that reached into black Africa and also in Slavic yeah, the white hinterlands of Europe that actually give the world the term slave Slav that still endures today. There's also was a Muslim slave trade.
Speaker 1:The Barbary still is a Muslim slave trade, isn't there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a Muslim slave trade today, and blacks and to some extent in whites. One of my charitable causes actually is combating modern day slavery, but so essentially it, as, as you just pointed out, slavery is a vice of mankind. That's not done yet. This chapter focuses mostly on the past. I talk about aztec slavery and cannibalism so on, but essentially the point our society didn't do anything notably different from anyone else, with one exception actually. The abolitionist movement is pretty uniquely Western. We did play a unique role in ending slavery. That's, I think, the first point. I think the point's made pretty well. I go on for about 30 pages there, but secondarily, this is what I tried to start with here. Pages there, but secondarily, this is what I tried to start with here.
Speaker 2:The idea that we are bad here, that we had slaves here, is not something that people aren't told. In fact, it's pretty much all people are told about slavery. Globally, education about slavery focuses almost entirely on the white-led or white-run Atlantic slave trade. But one time I've looked at this data something like 41% of American schoolchildren believe that only the United States of America ever had slaves.
Speaker 2:The way we tend to conceive of slavery in the West is somewhat akin to people thinking of war only in terms of World War II or the Russo-Japanese War. It's in the context of one brutal but somewhat isolated incident of the practice in one area of the world during one period of history. So I guess the things that inspired me to write the book are the existence of this narrative that we are telling people that we are a wonderful place while we are not, and no one knows this in reality. We are telling people to some extent that we are a horrible place while we are not, and everyone has in fact heard the narrative that we are a horrible place. Right, that breaks it down.
Speaker 1:No, I think if I could put your statements there robustly, it would be that you are taking on the general and generic assumption that the United States and the West is some sort of terrible force that deserves a catabolic action rather than anabolic. Right, so we should tear ourselves down, degrade our muscular structure and tear asunder what has been. So you're taking on almost. The way that I interpreted your book from a bird's eye view was that you are seeking out the most essential operating codes that are constituent to that are molecular, to that prop up. The main problematic code in society right now, which is the West, is bad, and you're coming up with specific examples, assumptions, rather implicit assumptions, sometimes explicit, that people carry within them and you're taking them on. So some of them have been like that McCarthyism really didn't catch many communists. I'll only give a few here, rather we'll talk about a few, but I'll list maybe all of them. We'll see. And again, I really want RealClear members to buy the book and guys, this is a very important book. So if you want to comment on the post and let us know that you've purchased the book, I'll make sure that Professor Riley sees that and I'm sure he'll be delighted and you'll be in the ranks of people like Elon Musk who, as I understand, recently liked the book on X and so forth. So it's really gaining traction and has ascended as it should.
Speaker 1:So number two, the Red Scare, was a moral panic that almost caught no communists. You take that on as you mentioned. Native Americans were peaceful, etc. The hippies were the good guys and the sexual revolution was great. I'm not reading the titles verbatim, but just as I recall them and glance at them, that the founders counted slaves as three-fifths of a person. And you go on to say that things like white flight was unprovoked and caused by pure racism. Southern strategy racism turned the solid South into was it red state? Is that your assumption there or your statement? And then you go on. Please go ahead.
Speaker 2:Some are a bit more specific. So a common claim is that it was the Republican, racist, quote, unquote Southern strategy that moved the South into the Republican column politically. And what I argue is that in fact you can track population migration and a much bigger factor was just the migration of a large number of young executives and so on from the North to the South. If you look at population growth in the USA over the past really 40, 50 years, that's almost all been in the South and the West. So the fastest growing areas in the country have been Vegas, miami, the Research Triangle in North Carolina, nashville, so on down the line, and that explains most of it. The South didn't actually, in terms of congressional districts, swing Republican until the Bill Clinton years. The Dixiecrats were all Democrats and most of them stayed in Congress and the Senate until the mid-90s.
Speaker 1:Now people are always talking about the political realignment. Is there any truth to that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and actually I want to. I'd like to make one quick point and then I'll respond to that and then make make the point the political realignment that people are talking about. It's the argument that it's a very simplistic argument. It's that when Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, republicans responded by just becoming racist and then racists in the South started voting Republican and Republicans became the racist party and started getting more Southern white votes. You see some effect. You see some bigots in the South starting to vote Republican after that.
Speaker 2:But that's not really what realigned the political parties. Until you saw shifts in population migration, you didn't see Republicans start winning the South. You also have to remember that a lot of states in the South, like Mississippi, are almost 50% Black. So you have to look at what Black voters did, which is something people just too slowly ignore. The Black vote started shifting back in the 1930s when Franklin Roosevelt began to pursue non-racist policies at the national level and did things like provide government jobs and some social frankly welfare benefits to African-American communities. So by 1936, you had a lot of black guys voting for the Democrats, which would start moving southern states. So there's actually this really complex picture that didn't have all that much to do with this sort of Huck Finnish Lee Atwater strategy that people try to pin partisan mobility on the reason. The Democrats like the idea that the Republicans are just racist and that's why the South started moving right.
Speaker 2:Is that it to my opinion and this is just my opinion as a right-leaning consultant? To some extent, but it provides an easy stalking horse to disguise some of the political history of the Democratic Party itself. I don't want to get into which party has been worse over the years. Political parties aren't exactly avatars of morality, are they? But the Republican Party was specifically founded to oppose slavery. Abraham Lincoln was a republican. If you look at actual history in the southern region of the united states, the democratic or the kooks clan was the military arm of the democratic party. There are entire well-written books, like negroes with guns, about the near race war in their region between white and black republicans and armed knight riding clansmen okay, and from here you can listen to the full episode.
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