Thomas Fleming Explains Self-Hating Europeans

Hey everyone, we're live now on the conversations that matter podcast. I'm your host John Harris.

I apologize to everyone who is waiting I should have made more clear that this was

Eastern Time and doing all these podcasts across time zones does get confusing But we're live now for some of you.

This means your lunch break for some of you. You're just getting up But good morning, America. We have a special guest with us today who has not been on before Dr.

Thomas Fleming, thank you for coming on the podcast. Dr. Fleming really appreciate it. Well, it's a pleasure

John and I know we met what now a year and a half at least something like that ago and You you have quite the pedigree and I can't read all of it.

But dr. Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation He served as the editor of Chronicles magazine from 1984 to 2015

He is the president of the Rockford Institute or was the president from 97 to 2014 and has written many works and We're gonna talk about a topic that I know you you're very well versed in today

You told me before we started recording you've been thinking about this for about 20 years and that is why

I answer the question Why is it that? Europeans white people

Westerners seem to have an affection for Foreigners and hate themselves at least our elites seem to have that and the simplistic explanations out there

I've heard don't seem to make sense of it. And I know you've thought very deeply about this So I appreciate you coming on to share your thoughts and help us explain the world.

We're living in Well, you know it it it is an odd phenomenon because if you went around the world say

Two or three hundred years ago and even today if you go to rural areas If you

I spent a lot of time in Italy and if you go to an Italian village Not only do they know

Italy is a better country than every other country and their region of Italy whether it's

Lombardia In the north and I covered their separatist movement for years or down or in Sicily They know that their really region is the best and not only that they know that their village is the best and that they're part

Of their village is the best. I used to know a Marxist political theorist that he lived in the

Abruzzo and he said in my town We not only knew a foreigner or an alien like somebody from northern

Italy But we knew a guy who walked into our neighborhood from the other side of town because even though he was wearing the same clothes

He wore his hat a little differently and we hated it now Okay hatred isn't nice But the fact is if you really love who you are and who you belong to and you love your your family you know the

Maybe the greatest Christian poet of all time Dante. He refers to relatives and friends as a me my folks my people mine

Now this is this is normal This is how we're constructed by our creator to love our own

And so when you have a whole civilization which for about 500 years has been teaching

It's it's best and brightest to despise themselves and to look elsewhere whether to primitive societies in Africa and South America or else to Asia as superior this is this is

Extraordinary and it begins like so many things begin In our world it begins in the

Renaissance when people wanted to escape the power of Christianity because you know priests and Lutheran ministers and Calvinists they agreed they disagreed on a lot

But they agreed that we have a moral nature and moral obligations. For example one man one wife

Well, if you're a rich playboy, this isn't very attractive So for a variety of reasons they began looking at alternative cultures which they celebrated and and held up for example the great

French essayist Montaigne wrote an essay on the cannibals in which basically he says people who eat their

Grandmothers are morally and culturally superior to French Christians Now this is you would think preposterous see the fact that even calls it the essay on the cannibals, but it's one of the most influential essays ever written in the past 500 years

So it begins in the rebellion against against Christian morality Now one of the things

I've seen what one of the explanations that seems a little more sophisticated It says that this all started with post -colonialism and Edward site sides if I'm pronouncing his name correctly his essay orientalism

But you're saying no this goes back way farther You see Saeed with his side comes up with this theory, which is a very derivative theory

He was not an original thinker at all that that Western man has an inferiority complex

So we have to go around beating up other people Yellow people black people brown people it's in his case, you know, he claimed to be

Palestinian though He had never actually lived in Palestine very funny, but his arguments and then before that it was largely a question of anti white cologne colonization of Africa and bringing slaves to the new world and This this was the dominant idea before Sayyid before that if you go back to the 1920s even

There a group of surrealist intellectuals. They were mostly communists in in France They denounced

Paul Clodell great Christian poet and playwright who was ambassador to China Clodell had made a statement saying that it was object was to defend

Christian civilization and everything in the West The surrealist about in the 19 late 1920s came up with a manifesto saying there is nothing good in the

West I've never heard this Wow Christianity is a poison and it needs to be

Eradicated and Western civilization is nothing but Exploitation of people who are better than we are now

The thing is these surrealists were coming in a very long tradition

But unfortunately the idea that poor Edward Sayyid, you know is responsible

He has he was just one the the most recent in a very long chain that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years

Does that chain start with Rousseau because some people will say it's Rousseau's noble savage that really got this going

Rousseau's noble savage is important, but he is not the first Frenchman to celebrate savages,

I mentioned Montaigne a several hundred years earlier and between Montaigne and Rousseau the more and more of these

French intellectuals heard stories usually phony stories about how Wonderful it was to be an

Indian in North America or South America They dropped the cannibalism bit that they found that that was a little upsetting to people and so but writer after writer and and so it would either be

American savages or there's all these plays in say 17th and 18th century

French plays poems books in which a Persian or Chinese comes to Paris and they write witty ironic things about how crazy the lives of Western Christians is and this was a very, you know popular form of literature

Voltaire did it Montesquieu did it I mean it was just a way you could show you were very clever

Some of the books like the Persian letters are actually pretty funny because it's it's a two -edged sword but usually the sword only cuts one way our world is absurd and stupid and Everyone else is smarter than smarter better more moral more creative than we are and the defense of Indians that that is that that is mounted

Look, I have I have no I have no animus against against the native peoples of North America I when

I was growing up in northern, Wisconsin We we had friends who were tribal

Ojibwe was a fishing guide who took us everywhere wonderful man but the fact is that they were almost all cannibals in the old days and it was quite a

Quite a primitive miserable world. They had not advanced very far in agriculture they had very few skills and to celebrate this as superior to an advanced civilization it

It is simply It's the beginning of this host self -destructive impulse that that we now see everywhere

I mean, it's the it's the it's the ideology of the Democratic Party. So then

Would you say this is a French project then to? This self -hating

European like that it spread from France to other places What explains it? What are the origins of it?

It it doesn't start in France actually But since France was the dominant cultural force in in European civilization from say the 16th century to the early 20th century

Anything that was getting popular in France would be spread to England and then to North America And so the

French were it if you do if you couldn't speak French in 1850 You might as well hang it up because you're not gonna you're not gonna go anywhere do anything

The French have never got over this idea that they are not only like the home not young the great nation but also that they are the culture bearers of Western Europe and They deserve it

I mean they but they became the great sort of spearhead first of the

Renaissance and then of the Enlightenment and Basically the the the

Enlightenment project as it's sometimes called says that you can't take anything for granted

Everything is open. It's up to you as the individual thinker to first of all eliminate all tradition all faith all moral givens and then you then

Systematically build up the world according to what you see it as and this is this is

Descartes. This is this is the entire project of Western philosophy down to the present philosophy has become a very

Destructive discipline because it teaches children to doubt with their parents and grandparents tell them

Before you can go through a period of doubt You have to have a period of certainty before you can study other cultures

You have to be at home in your own so that you have a place to stand But there were really

I that where it really begins. I think it's in in Florence in the 15th century where Florentine intellectuals began to study the occult and when they studied the occult like Writers these were writings that were supposed to be by ancient

Egyptians ancient Persians and Babylonians They're really in late in the

Roman Empire. They're fraudulent documents Hermes Trismegistus the

Chaldean Chronicles. There's it's a whole lot of junk and They began to this has the wisdom of the universe and and they joined it with sort of neo

Platonic Speculation but it gave them a wisdom whatever is true in the

Bible they would say It's true because it's imitating Moses was in Egypt and he talked to the

Egyptian priests and they taught him everything The same thing is true they would say of Plato so everything come goes back to the

Egyptians and the builders of Solomon's temple and to the ancient Babylonians and therefore our traditions are sort of bogus and derivative and it's a very

It's a very dangerous and evil Project because basically what it taught you is if you learn magic mumbo -jumbo

You can escape the demons that you have to pass that you have to get past if you want if you don't want to burn

In hell forever So it's a it's a get out of hell free card if you if you learn this this system and how it could take over the most brilliant intelligent people of the period it's a it's it's sort of amazing, but it does and Florence propagates it and then when the when the daughter of Of the of the of Lorenzo the

Magnificent the great ruler of Florence he marries his daughter to the king of France Then I mean to the the heir to the

French throne that these that these these Florentine ideas Flood into France in the in the late 15th early 16th century

So if you're looking for an origin and by the way the same tradition this occult tradition

It it it it infects the whole world because you it I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist

But but basically that's the heart of Freemasonry in other words that the builders of the pyramids have a secret wisdom and that could that has been passed down to the

Masons and and and eventually If you went up all the degrees of Freemasonry in the 18th century

You realize that all all rulers were evil all priests were evil All all all

Christian religion was evil and you repudiated it and so essentially you became a kind of pseudo

Egyptian hmm That that's fascinating. I just have so many questions

I don't even sure where quite to start and just reminder for those who are streaming if you have questions get them in on X on YouTube on Facebook, and I will try to ask

Dr. Fleming what you have? So I'm gonna ask my questions first though since it's my show There does seem you know, there's a natural

Proclivity people have in fact someone Keanu Keanu Shaw But I say that my high school is the best my class was the best same with my college and major, right?

This is a natural human instinct. That's right say on Father's Day my dad's the best dad unless you had a really terrible childhood,

I suppose and That seems to be have been some Disconnected from our elites in Western countries

So that what I'm wondering I guess is if you're saying this stems from a religious impulse that The religions of these other places are superior

Two questions wrapped up in this why not go back to if you're gonna do that your own pagan

Roots right because Europeans pre -christian they have their own paganism that they could appeal to and there were people obviously who did that and And why why does that also have to affect?

your view of your own people So, you know disconnected from a religion.

Why can't you say? Well, we got religion wrong Hypothetically, but you know

I still love my people and I want what's best for them because the situation right now just like where We're gonna like give all this money to Haitians, but we can't protect the people in Appalachia.

It doesn't make any sense to people Yeah no, it doesn't and it doesn't make any sense that the a lot of this is related to the the notion of Primitive man being superior to the man of advanced civilization

Now the thing is none of these people knows the slightest thing about how primitive people live

Or about how ancient Greeks and Romans lived or how the Egyptians live they they they invent peoples that don't exist the for example

The ancient Greeks were very religious, you know say Paul goes to Athens and he says

I can see you're the most religious people of all because you have a you have a Statue to all the other gods and here's one to an unknown

God Now Paul actually got it, right? These were very

Religious to the point of fanatically Faithful people into their own religion

Families were attacked Parents were respected all of this and it's and this is also true primitive societies

But see these people reconstructed and so originally don't know fathers don't have any control over their children after the age of 12

You can do anything you want to do so they invent us as other

Societies that is a model for them and the model is everybody's equal to everybody else

Everybody's the same as everybody else. There's no difference between father and son. There's no difference between man and wife there's no difference between male and female and You can make you can be anything you want to become it's like there's an old

Clint Eastwood movie called Bronco Billy and and they you could and in Bronco Billy's West Wild West show you could be what you want to be

Well, if we live in a society where we think people could change their identity tomorrow and and so in such a view

And you again you attribute it to everybody else in the world But us we have these hang -ups about mom and pop and grandparents and tradition and loyalties

No, no, we're the ones who are breaking all the rules primitive Peoples are much in this sense are much smarter than we are.

They honor their parents. I It was

Red Fox and it's and his son play is becoming Entranced with after everything

African and so he insults his father in front of an African friends And he's oh to be

African. You must respect the elderly. Well, that's largely true We we what our schools are designed to teach you to despise your parents to despise

Authority to despise hierarchy that that note and yet on the other hand

We create this artificial group. We call experts. So if you pick up a daily newspaper today, hi

I'm an expert on nutrition or I'm an expert on relationships. It is so total goofball

Who's all he's an influencer and and he invents a resume and and he starts saying preposterous things

You know If you ate 50 eggs every day you would you would live to be 300 years old and people accept this at face value

So what you're saying it sounds like is The grass is greener first of all there there's this when you don't understand something and you have a romanticized view of it

You tend to think it's better and superior and it sounds like almost the dynamic that the

North had after The Civil War or the war for southern independence. I know I think you use that term or But you know

You had that novels like Gone with the Wind that Northerners were buying up because they felt they had lost something in their own civilization and we're looking for it

So that's kind of what you're saying is there's this lost this lostness that we have in the

West That may be as a result of modernity and we're looking in these primitive societies for what we've lost

We have but it's not so much that we lost it. We destroyed it Classes did everything they could for example, if you just look at family legislation from say the

American Revolution down to World War two in every generation They weakened marriage they weak and they weakened the authority of parents over children

They you know things like school attendance laws imply that parents don't want to do what's best for their children the same thing with the

Employment laws for children but divorce laws by the 1880s foreign observers were saying of the

United States. They have divorce on demand Now we think divorce on demand was invented in the 1960s.

No, no You realize all the northern states had basically you could say my husband drinks.

I don't approve of that I wanted to get a divorce So the we destroy all our fundamental institutions we destroy the family

We destroy the influence of the church. Oh churches are fine. As long as you don't meddle in politics That's that's utterly preposterous

We've destroyed forms of art and music that used to give joy and they're replaced by things that nobody in his right mind

Would you know you go to it you go to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and it's it's a nightmare of Horrors that that they want you to look at and say oh, that's beautiful So you we destroy everything and then naturally you you you yearn for something now

This means there is an opening there is an opening for people who are Christian or conservative or have a tradition especially in the south

Which is the last place where we have these traditions in the United States and you know gone with the wind may be in some

Respects a silly book, but it's a very accurate book. That is the the I once I gave gave some lectures on this

Her depiction of the way Southerners live their attachment to kith and kin the way they thought of things

It's all dead on and so it's actually a nice book to give to people

So they can read such a book or read some of Faulkner's novels or read, you know

The literature of the world gives you an image of how human life can and should be lived and Guess what?

That's why they don't teach it in schools and universities If people grew up reading the

Bible the Iliad and the Odyssey Greek tragedies Shakespeare Dickens if they had a good dose of that They'd have they realized that just about everything they're taught about human life in school is wrong

That's the literature can play but we can't so it's very interesting for about the past 25 years

All the Ivy League schools in America complain and and and and all the all the best universities

They can't get students to read finishable Not not a single book

When I was an undergraduate This was some time after they say during the

Punic Wars when I was an undergraduate. I I took a lot of French classes and In my 19th century

French novels class. We had to read a four or five hundred page novel in French a week

Do you know you couldn't get somebody to read a 400 page novel a month at Yale?

so It's a lost art. It's it's a lost skill I'm going back and I'm sure it's worse now, but you know 15 more than that now 16 or 17 years ago in undergrad and I took an 18th 19th century literature course and it was a community college

That's where I started and and we didn't read hardly any classics It was all they tried to pick the trashiest novels from that time

You know, we were reading like Moll Flanders. We were We were deconstructing

Pride and prejudice and making Frankenstein a gay novel and I mean it was just terrible But uh, that's why

I tell people don't don't take English courses, yeah English literature is great.

I my father was a great reader and so I was reading this stuff when I was 10 years old and so when

I went to college and I had to take a one or two English courses just to Meet a requirement and I can't believe people are sitting around Gabbing about about books that you should just read and enjoy and then move on and and study something else but now

English literature and all literatures are used if if it's what you might call a book with traditional conservative values if it's

Jane Austen or Walter Scott you either show that the author actually was meaning the opposite of what right or that the author is a moron and these people are very evil and those are your those are your choices the idea that you would read pride and prejudice and and and Understand that this is a beautiful depiction of social and moral relationships

Oh, that's impossible. These people didn't know anything. Yeah. Yeah, I think we were told it was a feminist novel because women at that I remember specifically my professor said women at that time

Were just killed and left in the gutter and everyone would pass them by and know again. I was like where there's no source

Yeah, so Jane Austen though she could see if she wrote against it The teachers who say this probably believe it because they themselves were raised in a system where they never had to learn anything about human reality

Yeah, yeah okay, so so we've talked about France and French intellectuals and an admiration that some of them had with the occult or at least these ancient religions and and this leading to this depiction of the

West as inferior and then also this Longing for things that we've destroyed in other cultures and so magnifying them one of the observations though I had

I want to get your take on this during 2020 when all the monuments were coming down, especially in the south

But it wasn't just the South I mean Lincoln even came down in Boston and there are Columbus statues coming down and all the rest.

I noticed that That controversy seemed to be unique or at least it was more prevalent in British and in British derived

Colonies former British tribe colony. So in the United States and Great Britain in South Africa, I think even in Australia in Canada there were these problems and yet France I remember

I think it was the president of France. I think it was still Macron at the time He basically said we're not doing any of that here

Yeah, and of course they have churches burning all over the place so maybe that's their version of that, but it just struck me that the this

British Empire Was I don't know if it was something intrinsic to the fact that they were an empire at one point

But they seem at that time to be more enthusiastic to take down their own traditions and their own heroes

What explains that that's it? That's an excellent point What I think one of the reasons for it is that the the

And the English the Anglo -American tradition, which is also then the same as Australia and elsewhere early on it developed a kind of rational revolutionary view of human society and Which by the weak party and it became known as classical liberalism

Now I have a lot of friends who consider themselves classical liberals libertarians and what they believe in is that human freedom is

More important than anything else and so in order to gain human freedom You may have to overthrow the king overthrow churches overthrow the authority of family

Yes The the wealth differences everything has to be made a level playing field

Now that means that traditions are really just a record of oppression people denying

Freedom to others and of course, this is ridiculous. I Used to spend a lot of time

During the during the wars in the Balkans when the break during the breakup of Yugoslavia I was there a lot as a journalist and I got to meet the man who claims to be king of Serbia and he was given back his palaces and things and I went

To visit him in in in his palace and he is he is the legitimate He's the he's the son of the last king and he's he's now given an honorary title of crown prince

And I was there with a few friends and there were still communist monuments on his property

And of course, it was the communists who overthrew his father destroyed Serbia. And so they asked they asked him

Well, why do you allow those commune what those communist monuments? He said I can't change history

History happened it's real and that's part of that's part of my life and it's part of the life of my people

I can't eliminate it, even though I hate it now It's he's maybe not the most brilliant person

I've ever met But the crown prince Alexander is not a moron and he realizes that yes

History is something that if you try to overthrow it and say it never happened

You can't learn anything from it. And you also it means you can't honor any of your ancestors

During the French Revolution, they not only destroyed some and blew up some of the most historic churches in Paris they also went in to to one of these churches the

Church of st Dennis and They defaced all the monuments of the early

French kings because they were good They're gonna start with a blank slate no more history

And in fact, they repudiated the very idea that they were French they said the Franks were

German invaders of a Celtic nation and we're gonna wipe out every gun the

Aristocracy our Franks and the rest of us our goals, you know We like the ancient people that Julius Caesar conquered

This is first of all, it's preposterous history because they because they fused about a thousand years ago or more so But the the goal was to wipe out the past Entirely so that they could build a new future

They did the same thing during the Russian Revolution. They wiped out all these monuments of Russian history

They killed the czar and his family including including children and and and the systematic it was actually it was

Stalin who stopped it because he realized that if you you couldn't continue this and Fight World War two at the same time and you had to bring the

Russian Orthodox people back into supporting the country I mean he had at least a lick of sense

He had more sense than our leaders who who they think you could run around first and destroy all these southern monuments

Years ago. I was asked by the Washington Post to write an article with my friend

Mike Hill who started the League of the South and basically, the article was on why the destruction of southern monuments is defined by international law as cultural genocide and That's what we're doing and I said in the article if look some of some of the evil southern slaveholders are named

George Washington Thomas Jefferson James Madison James Monroe The founders of this country that we if you want to honor the

United States You can't go around destroying monuments to the south and that I said your day the day will come

When everybody's monuments if you ever if you ever had a house servant or if you ever gotten to a quarrel with an

Indian You're going to be over you're going to be Dismissed from the historical record and of course it happened

But it's this hatred this hatred of the past It's you can write a if you have a blank slate that means you can make people do anything you want to do

You reinvent human nature and that's what Marx said Marx said man is the only creature who makes his own

Essence in other words, we we other creatures are determined a bear grows up to be a bear a dog is a dog

But we can be anything we can redefine ourselves. And so in the Soviet Union, that's what they tried to do

They redefined human society human nature. You don't need extended family. You don't need property

You don't need social hierarchy and in the end a tiny part of the population like one tenth of 1 % owned and controlled everything

And that is exactly what goes on when you destroy your past in the name of Liberation of minorities no minority is getting anything out of this.

It's only Pete the people who own the country They're the one who get everything. Yeah Well on that note,

I would like to ask another question of you because this is another narrative That I hear sometimes and I see some people in the comments

In fact, one person said that Montaigne was Jewish. So Half Jewish, okay, so you talk about Communism and this ideology and I I guess my own opinion which maybe doesn't matter since I have you on the show

But just for people who are listening who care. I think there's an ideological angle to this that's not

Specific to necessarily even Marxism, but more broadly speaking ideology itself does this kind of flattening and Eliminates tradition in the past.

But anyway, people will say if you're talking about communism Marxism, you're talking about a

Jewish project if you're talking about European, you know anti white hatred or whatever.

You're also talking about a Jewish project. These things are linked and it's because Essentially Jewish people lived as minorities in these places and There's a lot of resentment and they want revenge because of the way they were treated and so they're going to become the elites

They have strong in group preferences They're gonna control things and then that explains a lot of guys online think that explains all the anti white hatred that exists

Which I don't necessarily see that but I wondering okay. So is that a contributing influence though? Are there

Jewish people who feel this way and are trying to fuel this kind of thing? Yeah, you know, it's it's a it's an interesting question

And it's easy to go to go to go off the deep end on any question because there's no There's no area of human life where you could say

And it's the trouble with conspiracy theories. They make things very simple, right? the fact that the fact that the fact that Montaigne was half

Jewish probably is important to his dislike of Christianity and he

Supported King Henry the fourth who was who it was indifferent to religion

He was a he was a Protestant who what he said they'd said look Become Catholic and your king and he said well

Paris is worth a mass, you know, I mean a complete cynic I found a reference to of an

English travelers that I spent I spent the Christmas I spent Easter with The King we celebrated the

Eleusinian mysteries. I'm gonna think I was an occultist so anyway, my point is that The movement was not primarily started by Jewish people

However, it is also true That some of what people say is right

I mean that Jews feel uncomfortable in societies run by non -jews Just as Christians would feel uncomfortable in a society run by Muslims say

Middle Eastern Christians really have access to grind both against the State of Israel and against and against Islam and So they've been recruited

Over and over but they are they are you they are not the intellectual leaders who created this

These are largely Ex -christians who we have to accept we have to learn to accept the

Responsibility ourselves. Sure Jews have been recruited. I mean Marx was Jewish Lenin was at least partly

Jewish Trotsky was Jewish, but then you could have to look at all of the great lefty revolutionary thinkers of the past 300 years and Jews are only a small minority and by and by the way

Not the most important thinkers Marx is a very derivative Second -rate thinker he you can see where he gets all his ideas from and it's not from Jewish people.

So the There's an interesting man in Russia great mathematician was a friend of Solzhenitsyn Igor Shafarevich I went had the pleasure of having dinner with him in Moscow and Shafarevich is hated by the

CIA. They claim he's an anti -semite because he wrote a book called Russophobia and Russophobia is about in Russia the same thing that we're talking about today

Russian self -hatred of their own traditions and he wrote a book very smart book of Tracing it and you know about a third of the people he talks about are

Jewish and so he's accused I've read the book and it's funny because they don't they don't publish a translation

But a friend of mine of the CIA gave me a copy of the book so I could read it in English And in fact, it's a very sober sensible book and he never blames the

Jews He just but he points out that this tradition of Russian liberalism Means we

Russians don't come from this like we're not French. We have our peasant traditions

We are deeply Orthodox. We have all sorts of patriarchal traditions and If you compare us to France and England while we're very primitive people and so this the writer after writer intellectual after intellectual political leader after political leader

Adopted this point of view which makes the Russians seem petty and stupid and primitive

And of course there were there were Jewish writers who subscribe to it. The Jews didn't invent

Russophobia they latched on to it, but they didn't they didn't invent it and it's time to quit

Yeah, hold everybody responsible for what he does But but there's no point in trying to shift the burden off ourselves because we're responsible

Post -christians have done this to us. Yeah I actually there was a Twitter thing a few weeks ago where people were saying basically all the immigration problems or it's all

Jewish It's a Jewish project in America. And so I just asked a simple question Who let these

Jews in? Yeah, you know because at the beginning there was I think I was looking at a census from 1790 and I think it said 500 probably

Sephardic Jews probably in South Carolina Mainly we're in the country and I'm thinking so, you know, obviously the immigration

Policy was crafted by Anglos, you know from the beginning. So And by the by the way, you know a lot of the

South Carolina Jews were very loyal during the war You know Bernard Baruch who is the richest man in America the 1930s a big advisor of Franklin Roosevelt and obviously

Sephardic Jew his father was a Was a physician, but he signed up for the

Confederate Army and after the war he even joined the Ku Klux Klan There were Wow.

Okay, like talk about narratives not working, you know Well, was it who was the guy

Moses Ezekiel, right it was Jewish and they just took his statue from Arlington and then Judah P Benjamin was the

Treasury Secretary of the Confederacy different wave of immigrants though because One of the things that's interesting is

I grew up in Charleston I was born in the north, but I grew up down there and I noticed that like Italians Jews Irish who are often very troublesome in northern cities

That is to be the the Irish that they were their potato famine rhetoric The Jews was how we've suffered the the

Sicilians very clannish in Charleston they were all Charlestonians. They were aggressively

Charlestonian, right? massively pro -southern and they all and that very little of this and and this was very clear again in Gone with the wind, you know, it's their eye.

They're Irish. I Viciously loyal to the south and and it's the difference between a urban liberal

Unitarian culture Which was New England and a rooted?

culture which can transform immigrants a Certain degree of immigration can be healthy as long as they become in the first generation artificial in this case

Americans But if you don't have the Mechanisms if you don't have if you don't have the mechanisms of church and family and at local pride

Then they just become disruptive like all these Germans who came to the north after the

Revolution of 1848 They were all left -wing revolutionaries, right? So called shirts who becomes the first secretary of the interior his wife starts the first kindergarten in Wisconsin I mean all these terrible

German ideas who came in here through them but in the south like in Texas more

Germans per capita signed up for the Confederate Army than anybody else and The same thing in South Carolina the

Germans the Germans were very loyal that reason Journalism is fascinating to me and I know that's not the subject of our discussion exactly

But it does seem that immigrant groups who traveled south at our early stages in our Republic behave differently yes, and integrated better for some reason and there was this tradition that they tapped into and contributed to and Whereas I mean

I live about an hour and a half north of New York City. So the Ellis Island Reality is is very clear here

And you know, my wife and I will even say like, you know, and this isn't true across the board But we've noticed things just just from living

I haven't studied this but I've just noticed if you go to the town north of me, Kingston, New York That's about the northern most like like that's where the

Italians stopped, right? Because the Italians tend to travel with each other it seems like more so grandma and grandpa's there and they just and And and so you get north you go to Albany and there's not as many

Italians There's some but you know, it's it's less and less whereas like the Irish people who came Oh, they just like spread out everywhere.

Like it's just just cultural things But but but they do they did retain their

European identities much more strongly It seems to me at least and and and not becoming as much

American Maybe that's because of the high volume of people we brought in. I don't know but it's volume, but it's also

It's also a powerful culture Forces people to assimilate because it's an attractive thing to do whereas a culture that's sort of just based on on on money and on principle abstract principles of Equality and all of that.

It doesn't it doesn't work that much. Yeah, I think even in the in small -town

Midwest people assimilated much better than they did in the big city

Midwest so say Chicago versus versus some town of a thousand and like for example

I know a fair amount about the about different like Sicilians and Serbs and I noticed that That Chicago Serbs are very clannish

They're there and they think of themselves as Serbs who live in America even after the two or three generations whereas I've met

Serbs from Southern, Illinois who went down there to work in the mines in the In the second they think of themselves as Americans.

Yeah. Yeah fascinating Well, I I have a million questions, but I need to get to some of these questions from the audience and Let me do this one first just because I think this one's for me and I think the rest are for you

So someone says I made a stupid argument about immigration I'll just say that I'm not saying that Anglos are to blame for all immigration policy

I I was just saying like you can't have one Ideological explanation for the whole and say well it's all

Jews and just leave it at that and you don't ever actually study the issue and It's a combination of many factors that have led us to the area that we're in and history is like that There's so many converging sources like feminism who gave women the vote

Not women They had no political power so we it was

Jews I'm in on the problem Right. All right. So here's some questions for you.

Dr Fleming is the Enlightenment impulse to question the received or accepted narrative a useful perspective when surrounded by the narrative creators

I don't get this question creators surrounding us today. Let me read this again. I think I lighten this Impulse to question the received or accepted narrative a useful perspective.

Oh, I see. Okay. I see what he's saying If skepticism was the is what destroyed civilization don't we need

Skepticism today and the answer is this is very interesting of the skeptics, right? Yeah, and you can turn you could

I I meet all these people to say they're religious skeptics I said have you ever thought about questioning your own skepticism?

I mean because you you're using certain fundamental assumptions that you you hold as unassailable.

Well, let's look at them and because and It can be useful. The problem is when you simply adopt the technique of your enemy

You become just like your enemy and so while using skepticism You should always at the same time be rooting and regrounding yourself in your own tradition and that's why studying the

Studying the history studying the literature studying the the traditions which we have going back to the ancient

Greeks That is something that is as Power as more more important even than adopting a skeptical position about everything you're told today

Because in the end, it's what you learn positively. It's what you learn to love not what you learn to hate that will define you

But it was a good point an excellent good good great wisdom. Yeah. Here's another question for you.

Dr. Fleming Please ask about the troublesome prevalence of masonry in southern circles

So yeah, that's an interesting thing. I'm not familiar. Oh, yeah. I mean I've read about masonry and I know in the

South Go ahead it free masonry came to America, you know Washington was a mason

Jefferson was a mason Lafayette was a mason when they when they laid out the DC Washington DC and they put the putting the foundation stone of the capital they had a

Masonic parade Led by Washington wearing a Masonic apron Sewn by Madame de

Lafayette. I mean it's there's you could look at a dollar bill that it's just it's just Masonic imagery

So from the beginning, but these were Scottish Rite Masons. They were sort of naive

They are they were not like the French Masons quite different They they had it's it's it's it's a dangerous movement in any event

But the the American version of it was much much until recently was was much less dangerous because it emphasizes brotherhood and That you they would argue you can be a good

Christian and a good Mason Well, I but then why do you have two separate burials? for example Mason you can get if you're a

Catholic Mason you have a Catholic funeral and then the Masons have a Masonic funeral for you during the war between the states there was in in Louisiana There was the day the wars the war stopped

They because they wanted to arrange a Masonic burial of a Union officer off off a ship on the

Mississippi So it is a problem But it most of the southern

Masons like most of the old Yankee Masons were pretty decent solid people

You join the Masons largely for social and economic reasons

Nonetheless when you have a church, why do you need the Masons today? a lot of the

Masons have got like leading sort of intellectual Masons have actually been going back to France and reestablishing ties with Revolutionary Masonry and it's and it's becoming it's becoming dangerous again,

I think the Southern Baptist still Condemn all all Masonic affiliation or at least they did when there were still really

Southern Baptist left in America Yeah, there's much more. I would want to say but I want to be respectful of your time.

We have more questions John says good morning. Dr. Fleming. I have followed and read you since the beginning of Chronicles magazine

I've always appreciated your paleo conservatism and I have I think modeled is what he meant to say

Modeled my life after your insights. I'm sorry high praise. Well, thank you very much.

Yeah Alisa says question. So is this also why many feel like going back to simple times?

Seeking the old days. I think this is back in our discussion when we were talking about gone with the wind and so forth

Is it running away from the reality or a real need to go back to the way things were?

She she raises This is this is a serious question because there's what you might call the the the

Amish temptation, you know Since everything in the modern world has has gone to hell

Then we should then dress like we should wear I go to a church where I see a lot of people

It the girls dress like they're in the little house on the prairie episode They don't bathe as often perhaps as they might and they you know, they're gonna get off the grid and and all of that Oh, I I don't think this is especially dangerous, but it's also not especially

Practical you have to deal in the world that you're living in What what

Christianity came along in the earliest period of the Christians you see like for example?

It's a great apology written about 100 AD and which is we don't dress funny. We don't act funny.

We're good citizens We're good neighbors We set an example to people and all we do is men don't make love to men and we don't kill our children

That's you that's how we're different. But other than that, we're normal people and I think that You if you if you if you could buy a farm and live out on it and be self -sufficient great

But but very few people are qualified or or really want want to do that ultimately

But to reject the bad things for example, you you you you can quit watching network television you can quit watching

NFL games you can quit watching Hollywood movies and this doesn't mean you can't watch a movie from 1935 or You can you can quit looking at internet porn and you can watch this podcast

I mean, there are a lot of things you could do with modern technology now get if I had my choice

Yeah, I'd do away with everything but that's not I never wanted to I never wanted to drive a car But when

I got married, I couldn't I could hardly see my marriage beginning with my wife driving away from the church

So I had to get I could drive a car and I had to get a license There are things you have to do to put up with the world you live in Otherwise, for example, if you don't if you if if you repudiate air travel,

I can't I can't go to Italy Which I'm doing in two weeks for the for a month. There are a lot of things you can't do

For example, it's hard to buy a lot of you can't afford to buy books anymore But you can get a lot of a lot of free or very low price books through various Services online so take what's important is to develop a question of a core.

What is it? You really believe? What is it? You really want? Avoid the bad things like for example,

Rick don't go to McDonald's. Does that mean you're gonna quit eating food? You know, there's the don't you know if yes

Pornography and promiscuous sex is bad. Does that mean you shouldn't get married and you should just be celibate you have to take the basic human needs and the basic facts of human society and our basic needs and find ways of accommodating them in a world which admittedly has

Is going to hell in a handbasket But you you can make the the mess the best of a bad situation and by the way

That's all humanity is ever able to do Great advice great advice Where do

Democrats get their white people don't have a culture narrative asks Christie That's that is funny because they get it because they don't have a culture narrative

I did the Democrats saying that have no knowledge of history culture tradition and they just I Remember reading something by Jack Kerouac who's not the worst

American writer, even though he's actually French -Canadian but he says I I walked down the street and I may oh if only

I could be a Negro a Jew a honky a hunky Italian instead of just a white guy and James Baldwin the black novelist said

I wouldn't I wouldn't say those things in my neighborhood but the point is that this when we have stripped away our symbols our culture repudiated our

Tradition when once upon a time like even in my childhood, which is admittedly the 1950s

You had to read Shakespeare to graduate from high school. You had to read four plays now That's not a lot. You should have had to read 20, but or at least 10

But the fact is nobody reads Shakespeare. Nobody reads Milton. Nobody reads Homer Nobody we have no knowledge of our and we don't know any of our history and our our, you know

We used to have Independence Day now, it's July 4th, which sounds like some revolutionary holiday we

We you get rid of your institutions and your traditions. Well, of course, it looks like you have no cultural narrative

In fact, we have the most brilliant and powerful cultural narrative In history of the human race and it goes back to the

Old Testament and it goes back to Homer Even even the Chinese who have very long and deep cultural traditions would have a hard time keeping up with us

Mmm, good point When Christianity was in political ascendancy

Jews were being run out of Christian countries and states. Why man? I'll let you take as long as you want.

I think I told you I we're gonna do an hour We're at 55 minutes, but I'll let you take as long as you want with that.

Sure. Well, first of all There were periods in which Jews were expelled from various places

Often like in England, they the Jews were persecuted because they loaned the king money and then he didn't want to pay it back so there what what

Jews were allowed to be money lenders in them in the Middle Ages when Christians were forbidden and and so usually in the more civilized parts of Europe like Italy and France and most of England and in Scotland and Jews were not allowed the same privileges as Christians because for example

Why weren't they allowed to go to universities? Because universities are primarily places for the clergy and for training a

Christian clergy first Catholic and then Protestant clergy if if if in in you can't go to Oxford You couldn't be a student much less a professor at Oxford or Cambridge unless you were a professing

Christian So they found they had and even later on you Catholics couldn't go because you had to be an

Anglican So every society Has not only the right to make its own rules and decide who is qualified for which position

But it has the duty to do that It's got a duty to say what women can do what men can do what children can do what citizens can do what aliens can do

And so it yeah, do people abuse that kind of authority all the time because we're human do do do do pastors accuse

Do they abuse their their ability sure everybody does Because we're imperfect creatures, but that doesn't mean that these that these traditions and responsibilities are wrong

Question what is the best introductory book on paleo -conservatism? Don't waste your time on that.

I mean look I I think I have your book that you did with Paul Gottfried Yeah, they might start with that.

We invented the term We were sitting around with a great Burke scholar Peter Stanlis and we were talking about the

Neoconservatives and so Peter Stanlis said well, what does that make us paleolithic, you know, like we're

Stone Age and I said, yeah we're paleo cons, so I If I were recollect

I read I Actually, it's a it's a difficult book But I'd read my first book the politics of human nature because in that I tried to argue

It's we're not just talking about traditions, we're not just talking about faith or belief we're talking about the way

Humanity is constructive how we have to live We can't live productively by pretending men are women or that the family isn't the essence of society so when when when when when

I and my friends used the term we meant it a Political view based on the reality of human nature as revealed through human history

Big Yehuda says you should call it the Neanderthal, right? I don't think that's gonna catch on No, I don't think so.

The and it's also not very not very attractive people the thing about the thing about Human nature is is the same

Everywhere the basics but but but that's like saying, you know that two two pianos are the same but when when

I play the piano and When a great pianist plays the piano, it's different so different societies have evolved and created very beautiful things with art and music and philosophy and theology all sorts of wonderful stuff and It's not

Neanderthal, you know, I was having a discussion with someone yesterday I'm wondering if you would agree with this who I had made a statement online that you know

Ideology isn't compatible with conservatism and and and then this person wanted me to explain myself and I was

I was thinking about neoconservatism and and I was thinking like, you know, it's basically like a

I Mean, there's all these other inputs like you have liberalism and and classical liberalism and so forth

But it seems like it's a freeze frame like it's a universal Freeze frame that they say like these principles these ten things here, you know free markets and strong defense and you know

Whatever get your list together. That's conservatism for all times and places Yeah and and the thing about real like paleo conservatism which you're talking about is like the thing that doesn't change isn't the principles that you apply necessarily in a political context

It's human nature that doesn't change and the situations do change and the policy prescriptions do change and the issues you focus on do change so it's very circumstantial and Definitive not universal

I don't know if I'm just curious of you to agree Absolutely, right. Look there used to be the great tradition of ethics from Aristotle to Cicero to Thomas Aquinas to Some of the great

German Protestants and the great English Protestants. It's tradition where they say, yeah, we have a rule

But then how you apply that rule varies from person to person from situation to situation

And you've got to understand that you can't you know, I'm okay. It's wrong. It's wrong to kill a fellow human being

Well, what about if he's trying to kill me? Well, that's something. Well, what if he what if he's sleeping with my wife?

Well, that's something. Well, what if you know, what if I'm temporarily crazed? Well, that's something the point is you have you have a basic principle, but you understand that its implementation is not simplistic

So something like free trade, you know There are periods if you dominate the world Economy free trade is great because then you bust open everybody else's markets and you can ever you can grab all the goodies for yourself

But when you're competing with a large number of other powerful Economies who all whose leaders cheat and we're cheated

Outrageously by the European Union by the Chinese then free trade. You said well

What did we want is a pot trade policy that benefits your country? I think so what so if you start saying well

I'm a I'm a radical free trader and I believe in open borders all of none of these things are absolutes and so an ideology takes things that have are relatively true under certain circumstances and it and it as you say it freeze frames them it makes them a

Static thing that works forever and nothing in human life is like that. Yeah.

Yeah. All right I appreciate the the vote of confidence there. I said the right thing. All right, this is the last question

This is the last question because I want to be respectful of dr. Fleming's time here Darrell Dow asked dr.

Fleming was a longtime friend of the late Sam Francis Does he have thoughts about Francis's framework of the

Middle American Revolution and whether it has relevance to current politics?

It does and it doesn't the the obviously Sam and I had known each other even since graduate school he we

I didn't know him well, but he we had lunch and met a couple of times then and We were involved politically for a long time

Sam believed that there was that middle America that is parts of the

South the West since in the Midwest Were basically being ruled and exploited by people on the on the two coasts who were not over educated but they were over schooled and and they had they had simply monopolized all power and were and were

Exploiting the rest of us and that periodically the Middle American radical element would rebel sometimes on the right sometimes on the left with the populist movement the

Progressive movement all of the the Wallace movement all of these things could be seen as Middle American uprisings

The trouble today is every new generation of Americans is less educated

But also less has less knowledge of the real world they can't they can't plant a tomato

They can't fix a car. They can't hunt They can't you know great Hank Williams jr

Song about about the Middle American types is I can I can skin a buck and I can run a trot line because a country boy

Can't survive how many of those country boys are left when I go back south what I see is a bunch of a bunch of Bubba's living in trailers and Running meth labs so a lot of the element of the core element of what would be the middle of American Revolution has been

Rotted out and on the other hand a lot of them are suckers for things like Fox News and other really completely implausible sets of liars that you get in the meat

Tucker Carlson these people they Carl said, you know is is a pampered member of the old elitist father of his work for the

Council on foreign relations good grief but if you if you fall for these gurus and talk show hosts and You you in you write nasty things on the internet all day long.

You're you're not gonna fight a revolution that way and What we need is is to restore some of the

Sanity that used to be that used to be in middle America and in middle American families and communities

But as long as they as long as they keep watching the TV, that's not going to happen Man, that is such a good point

We should probably send the podcast with that because that's I want that to sink in on people

Because I've seen these conspiracies and and just things that you can't do anything about practically with your like limited time that we have as humans and People get sucked in and they'll spend days and weeks and years of their lives devoted to things that aren't really productive

And and so thank you for making that point that we need to be more productive the old serenity prayer

Jesus give me the serenity to accept what I cannot change and then teacher and You can't control who's president.

You can't control who's go. You probably can't even control who's mayor You can put your own life in order and that's the place to begin

All right with that. Thank you. Dr. Thomas funny if you want to find out more about Dr.

Thomas Fleming's work. You can go to Fleming foundation and There's a number of resources there.

Is there anywhere else? You'd like me to send people. Dr. Fleming know that that'll be a good gateway Okay. All right.