Transcript
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Low Production Values Sphere Podcast. I'm your host, Baskin Emmanuel -Gobry, the publisher of Sphere Media. And with me is Wilfred Riley, who is a political scientist, an academic, ah but most importantly, because it's the most important thing in life, a Twitter personality.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: um I, you know, that's how I found out about you. I think we've been following each other on X for some time now. ah I think your content is very interesting. ah And, you know, you managed to like find the right balance between sort of being political and just being like common sense.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: ah Because a lot of people on Twitter, myself included, are basically political ideologues, which is fine. You do need ideologues, but that's not that's not who you are. um So we're we're going to talk about your books, but first, is does that portrait ah agree with you?
Wilfred Reilly: Yeah, i'd I'd say that's roughly correct. um I mean, when it comes to politics in general, I mean, I've had a number of leadership roles. I'm just a typical one. I was the ombudsman for Kentucky State for a while until a year or two ago. um I've run for local office and that sort of thing.
Wilfred Reilly: I tend to be pretty pragmatic about what actually works. So I mean, I think that a lot of people have very well outlined ideological theories in their mind in those sort of debate spaces like Twitter or Reddit, whether that's monarchism or communism or fascism or something like that.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: And I think just looking at that from the perspective of business or political science, there's there's often the question of, you know, would that actually work? Would that accomplish anything? So my question generally is a how effective would your ideas be in practice?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: yeah
Wilfred Reilly: And mine are often somewhat incremental as as a result of that.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah, well, that's that's good. ah but i i mean i I hate when people ask me that question, so I'm kind of afraid of asking you.
Wilfred Reilly: Okay.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: And so if you don't want to answer it, just just say, I don't have anything interesting to say. ah But I do want to ask about your Twitter style. like Do you think about how you communicate on X?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Do you think about like the way you phrase things, the way um the way you interact with people or is it just off the cuff? Because like for, you know, for many, many years now, people have asked me about my social media strategy and my answer is always like, I don't have one. Like ah it's literally just like brain dump from my brain to my phone. And apparently, you know, tens of thousands of people like it, but there's no strategy.
Wilfred Reilly: ah Yeah, it's it's very similar. I say what I think. And I mean, I i think I have a brand to some extent. I mean, um you know, witty or would be witty guy with a range of professional experiences who's good with numbers or something, you know, but I mean, I also comment on dating, you know, I talk about
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: That's true.
Wilfred Reilly: Yeah, and I think again there, the goal is sort of commonsensical. I mean, I remember that Manosphere vs. Feminist Twitter had a huge fight about a month and a half ago about these sort of questions, like, is it abusive to expect your female partner to sleep with you?
Wilfred Reilly: You know, most of the time, of course. Or is it abusive to expect your male partner to have a job? And there's an interesting philosophical question there, but the answer is, of course not.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: I mean, no one no one's going to date a member of those representative groups that doesn't do those things.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: So like that that's kind of the the presentation. But um no, I basically just say things that I think are interesting um and to some extent within brand, but really just things that i I think are interesting overall. And I think, by the way, if I were going to give young influencer types, especially guys on the right, some advice, it would actually be to do that.
Wilfred Reilly: You know, if you if you look at anything from basketball to European or American football to debate, there's now this whole polishing process that begins when people are 11 or 12 that actually, I think makes people pretty unrecognizable and artificial unless they're one of the very best.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: So you often would stand out much more if you just grew up independently reading, you know, everything from Kipling to Marx and then started saying, what is
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: right
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. Right. Right. Here, here. ah All right. ah So let's talk about your books. ah so hey Let's start with Hate Crime Hoax because I thought it was very interesting.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: ah i So i spent I spent quite some time before I even realized you wrote that book. like People would like post about some horrible hate crime and I would just post a picture of the of the cover.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: as a reply and like not say anything else like when you have these absurd things like you know like it's like like sometimes you can just tell right you don't even have to like look past the headline it's like oh you know uh you know magga thugs you know beat a black guy in manhattan it's like no that didn't happen
Wilfred Reilly: That's really fine.
Wilfred Reilly: Yeah, no I think that's that's correct.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Uh, so can, you know, can you give an outline of, uh, well, first of all, how did you notice this? What, what made you think, you know, even before writing the book, what made you think, Oh, like this, this, this happens a lot. Like, oh, you know, everybody assumes.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: There are some hoaxes, but like it turns out it happens a lot. And so what what was the thing that got you to think, oh, there's something there.
Wilfred Reilly: Well, I mean, I i think for me, the the kind of villain origin story that I've given a couple of times talking about this particular book is that in Chicago, I was a grad student. I was a member of the grad student community. This is maybe 2011, 2012. And around that time, there were a number of these very widely reported hate incidents in the city and around it.
Wilfred Reilly: There were actually four or five, not when I think back when people reminded me of this, but there were three that really stuck in my mind.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Wilfred Reilly: ah One was a University of Chicago student named Derek Kalkali, and this is at the end of this time period, but who claimed that an entire group of conservative hackers, which he called the U Chicago Electronic Army, were chasing him around and sending him messages and threatening him with anal rape.
Wilfred Reilly: They we were going to kidnap his girlfriend, just all this crazy stuff.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Oh my God.
Wilfred Reilly: So this, this ran in the Tribune. I think the journal in New York picked it up. It was just a big city sort of crazy story. Hacker groups after this man. Um, there was another one where a bar called Velvet Rope Ultra Lounge burnt to the ground.
Wilfred Reilly: Uh, and this is a very kind of trendy little club style place in the west suburbs of Chicago. I've actually been to the bar a couple of times, I recall, but the, these horrific anti -gay slurs kill the faggots, excuse me.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Okay.
Wilfred Reilly: And so on were written all over, all over the walls. And again, so this is, this is a major story. You can still find both of these stories just in any, any newspaper archive.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: By the way, you can say hi to my co -host.
Wilfred Reilly: And there were a couple.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Uh, I told you this is a low production values podcast.
Wilfred Reilly: Oh yeah.
Wilfred Reilly: Look at that beast.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: So my, uh, my wife isn't here to take care of the dogs or the dogs here.
Wilfred Reilly: That's cool.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: And she, and she likes me very much. Doesn't she push it?
Wilfred Reilly: I like, I like Deggs.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Push it.
Wilfred Reilly: But um I said, I like Deggs, a line from the movie Snatch.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: What?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Wilfred Reilly: So, I mean, ah yeah, that's a a welcome co -host. But no, I mean, so there there was another one of these incidents, getting into some of the more obscure ones, but at Michigan Tech, which is a few hundred miles away, but, you know, an engineering school that feeds into Groupons and the Chicago Tech companies.
Wilfred Reilly: a guy allegedly threatened to shoot everyone on campus just a crazy crime like I'm gonna go outside and shoot every black person on campus and I was looking at these stories with the morning paper coffee and every one of them fell apart and they fell apart in hilarious ways I mean the uh the club owner velvet rope
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: turned out to have burnt down his own bar because he owed a lot of people money, which is not necessarily the thing to do in the Chicago nightlife business. So, um, he, he needed an insurance settlement, apparently set the place on fire. He painted all of the slurs himself. This came out later when he got into all kinds of other trouble. He was arrested for a DUI at another state. Women, his friends snitched on him. I think he was caught with some drugs. So in the insurance press, this became a story about like, we need to watch these young businessmen that are capable of
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Wilfred Reilly: saying anything. Um, but that was, that was the first of the stories. The, uh, Derek Cochlear case turned out to be completely fake as well. The FBI actually got involved and what they found was that because of how IP addresses and Mac addresses work, which I suspect, you know, the kid had just been messaging himself from different computers and different Facebook accounts and saying this, this crazy stuff.
Wilfred Reilly: And by this point, I think people were starting to kind of chuckle about this in the grad school scene. But I mean, all of them on Michigan Tech, that one was extremely Machiavellian, a fraternity rival or something like that of this this particular kid.
Wilfred Reilly: but And he had sent out a message on a messaging app called the Yik Yak, which is a lot like Twitter saying, I'm going to shoot everyone I see tomorrow a smile because apparently there have been some fighting between white and black men on the campus.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. Right.
Wilfred Reilly: And he was saying, You know, we're engineering students. Let's let's clear this up. But a friend, or not a friend, a a rival took this image, cut and pasted it. So it just said, you know, I'm going to shoot all of the black people and turned this into the campus security office.
Wilfred Reilly: And so, I mean, I would assume this guy's door was kicked in by the local sheriff at the least, but he was he was taken to jail and he his family was outraged.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Oh my god.
Wilfred Reilly: I mean, they they went to bat to clear his name. He um he got he survived the whole thing, got a job in engineering. But that was it. like All of these things were fakes. And kind of getting to the point, looking at this, and I later compiled a pretty good sized data set of incidents that I was keeping track of, and about two thirds of those turned out to be fakes. So like as I progressed forward, one of my ideas was you know if I get an academic job and I have a summer off or I get a sabbatical, this is something I'd like to write a book on.
Wilfred Reilly: How often does this happen? not a Not a quant estimate of what percentage of all hate crimes are hoaxes, but just how how many of these hoaxes are there?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: right
Wilfred Reilly: it The number's in over a thousand in the data set I have right now.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Wow. Yeah. ah do you Have you looked at like trends in the dataset? Is there a particular kind that stands out?
Wilfred Reilly: Well, yeah, actually, which is kind of interesting. um we find first of all that ah I find first of all that a huge number of these hate crimes or these hate hoaxes are concentrated on college campuses.
Wilfred Reilly: That was the most striking thing, that if you look at college, university, prep school campuses, that was about two -thirds of the total hoax incidents, and it was 1 % of the population.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Yeah.
Wilfred Reilly: So we are kind of creating these hot house environments where people can just say, I am a victim.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. Right.
Wilfred Reilly: You can't challenge that.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: um There were differences in group perpetration of these hoaxes. Blacks were a bit ahead of whites. But the group that really stood out were actually Muslim or Arab Americans who were a very small group, but were
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Oh, interesting.
Wilfred Reilly: over overrepresented something like 10 to 1. I mean, one of the most famous hoaxes in the book, Yasmin Soweed, the you know, the white men tried to tear my hijab off and abused me.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: All right.
Wilfred Reilly: That was that was a Muslim American hoax. So there there were some interesting patterns in the data. Yeah, actually.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: that's that Well, you know as as a Frenchman, I will note that I you know i have a memory. ah i I have to figure out how to say this because I believe it was off the record, but I was invited to a thing where a kind of roundtable between ah representatives of like the populist right and sort of Muslim European activists.
Wilfred Reilly: Okay.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: And this lady very seriously said, I've been a victim of over 100 hate crimes.
Wilfred Reilly: Okay.
Wilfred Reilly: Hmm.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Just like, what?
Wilfred Reilly: Well, it one of the things that if I could jump in there very briefly, i first of all, that's crazy.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: like you Lady, you would not be alive. like
Wilfred Reilly: Well, it all depends what you mean. I mean, so I've had feminist friends say that about sexual assault and I don't mean to be crude at all here, but when I asked them what they mean, they say, well, you know, during sex, people don't all wear oral sex.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: People don't always tell me when they're about to have an orgasm. So technically I can't consent to that. And I mean, if I point out that women are much worse about that, they'll say, well, then you're a victim of sexual assault.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Thank you for keeping in PG -13, by the way.
Wilfred Reilly: Like.
Wilfred Reilly: Yeah, but i mean just it's but it was is all that sort of thing. like you know i was I worked as a waitress and you know every third patron would lightly slap me on the ass and I'd turn around and whack him on the head.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right, right, right.
Wilfred Reilly: and you know That's not just social rudeness, that's sexual assault.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right,
Wilfred Reilly: And I think if you were to take the most extreme definition of anything without mocking real sexual assault or hate crime, you'd kind of find this.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: right, right.
Wilfred Reilly: like i mean you You go to the dojo, you're physically assaulted 50 times, like, after I tapped out, he helped the choke for three seconds.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: And normal people just don't talk that way, but activists do.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. That's interesting. ah That's interesting. So my my internal bet on the the most fake hate crimes ah would have been um homophobic hate crimes because there's this myth of like the bunch of like frat guys who like beat up a gay guy and like I'm pretty sure that it's
Wilfred Reilly: and Oh,
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: It's 100 % fake. like The most famous one is Matthew Shepard, which is famously not – I mean, he died, poor guy, but it was like a drug deal gone wrong and the guys didn't even know he was gay.
Wilfred Reilly: oh yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: um But ah i I guess it's Muslims.
Wilfred Reilly: Yeah, the the thing is, there are a lot of fake hate crimes, and I don't want to be cynical about this, but there are a lot of fake hate crimes in each of these areas, so it it can be a close race sometimes. But yeah, Muslim Americans were were in the lead there. And i I also think there's a distinction between kind of like, crime tends to be really stupid in Monday.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: Like, cops will use the term misdemeanor homicide to describe violence in black or sometimes poor white neighborhoods.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Wilfred Reilly: Like, what happened? Well, he stepped on my shoe.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: So what did you do? Well, I shot him 32 times with the Glock with the switch.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: So I shot him. Yeah.
Wilfred Reilly: Um, so at a lower level, it's even more than that. Like someone slaps you because they think you're gay. And so you're going to be soft as a man. Stuff like that probably happens as reported.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: What I found was that virtually none of the really high profile theater kid sort of hate offenses that were reported turned out to be real.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right, right.
Wilfred Reilly: Like they the two men that followed Jossie Smollett, this is the classic example, through a upper class Chicago neighborhood full of junior executives wearing MAGA hats and patriotic ski masks.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right, yes.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: in Chicago at 2am, just hanging out in Chicago at 2am on the street.
Wilfred Reilly: Yeah, none of that's ever real. no
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: ah All right. Well, thank you. That was very interesting. All right. Let's let's talk about ah the one you've got up there, which is lies my liberal teacher told me.
Wilfred Reilly: Okay.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: I'm very interested in this one because I grew up in France where the, well, first of all, we have a centralized system. So the the the curricular set by the Ministry of Education for the entire country. um And ah they are literal communists, like literally they're communists, the people who do these things.
Wilfred Reilly: um
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: And so the the going to school, particularly in history in France is, that you know, you get brainwashed. And I grew up in a conservative household. So I basically like every time I went home, I had to go through like the deep brainwashing session with my parents.
Wilfred Reilly: That's funny, yeah
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: ah And I thought this was like a ah unique French thing. But later on, I learned that it's pretty much the same thing in the US. So But of course, the specific lies are different because in France, they lie about the French Revolution, right?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: um
Wilfred Reilly: yeah Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: ah You know, nobody died in the French Revolution. It was, you know, it was definitely just the people rising up and not at all, you know, ah blah, blah, blah. So what are what are the biggest liberal, not liberal lies, but lies liberal teachers say to average kids?
Wilfred Reilly: There They're very similar in the United States. I mean, I opened the book with kind of two of the great classics, just because we often hear the USA and other Western countries are founded on kind of a double genocide.
Wilfred Reilly: This would certainly be true in the New World, the annihilation of the peaceful native peoples, and then they
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: unique importation of enslaved Africans. So, I mean, chapter one of the book points out that slavery, and this is a direct counter to formal lessons that are taught in the United States, by the way.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: I mean, I think you saw this on Twitter the other day. But 41 % of Americans believe that only the USA ever had slavery.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: ah More people believe that.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Wilfred Reilly: I don't want to get the figures wrong here, but it's well over a third of young white women and an astonishing two thirds of young black women think that white people invented slavery. So they don't really separate the Americans from the French there, but they think that it was the the white man entered it.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: Let's sort of Bambi run its man. The white man entered a peaceful, bucolic world full of
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: people sitting around eating plantains.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Noble savages living in harmony with nature and then white people invented slavery.
Wilfred Reilly: Yeah, that's a that's they formally taught in many countries. Anyway, so I open with the slavery chapter. I just make the obvious point. I think I read most of the best research ah published on this subject.
Wilfred Reilly: And I mean, slavery goes back to a point in time when humans stopped simply killing and eating there their enemies.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes, basically as as soon as it comes as a people develops the concept of private property, they start putting people in the box private property.
Wilfred Reilly: i mean
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Like the the the only the only people that don't have slavery don't have the concept of property and that's why they don't have slavery.
Wilfred Reilly: yeah it's like
Wilfred Reilly: Even some of them have slaves, they just call them something else. um Like the Comanche word would translate to broken.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: It just means defeated warrior. um but the yeah so slavery Slaves in fact were one of the first recognized forms of property. That's something I hadn't known.
Wilfred Reilly: But I mean, in African traditional law, if you go into West Africa, Ashanti, and so on, these are fairly civilized places in the sense of could pave the roads.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. Right. Right.
Wilfred Reilly: But I mean, the slavery was an endemic institution, and one of the three forms of property recognized was in slaves.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: So you would simply leave someone your slaves, like you would leave them your salt or your gold or your weapons.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: right
Wilfred Reilly: But anyway, slavery goes back way longer than that slave, one of the first five or six written human words. If you go into, I mean, it's funny,
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: I did not know that.
Wilfred Reilly: Yeah, so if you go into Sumerian and Akkadian hieroglyphs, first of all, if you read these hieroglyphic languages, including Chinese, you get an understanding of what humans actually are.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: um I mean, like a symbol for marriage will be something like the trade of a bag of money for a heart.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: And I'm not entirely sure that's supposed to represent a heart. You know, it's just like that sort of thing. You know, danger is or opportunity is danger plus chance. But anyway, slave is literally just the word for person from another society, usually in hieroglyphs, like man from the mountains, with a prefix that means like defeated.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: ah The slave is a defeated fighter.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: That's that's you see the genesis of it right there.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: But anyway, I go from there through the next 2000 years. I mean, the Roman slave trade, the Arabic slave trade in both blacks and whites, where you had these corsairs, including a decent number of blacks, raiding along the European coast for years like a plague.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Wilfred Reilly: And I mean, you had cities and counties or.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah, entire coastal areas depopulated.
Wilfred Reilly: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: um And, you know, ah white women were particularly sought after. I wonder why.
Wilfred Reilly: Yeah, no, the Arabs were... Now, one of the things that I've actually heard as a defense of the Arabs is that they weren't racist. Because if you talk about the Arab slave trade, the point is that they did enslave Americans, Frenchmen, blacks, Slavs.
Wilfred Reilly: So they they didn't have a racial bias. If you lost to them...
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: yeah yes But even that isn't true, right? Because like different different slaves had different prices.
Wilfred Reilly: Well...
Wilfred Reilly: No, that's correct.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: And like white slaves were more expensive, white women were the most expensive.
Wilfred Reilly: yeah
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: And to the point about Black slavery, so you know the Arabs captured a lot of Black slaves, why why are there no Black slaves, Black people in you know Iraq or whatever, is because Black males were systematically castrated.
Wilfred Reilly: Yeah, well, all fighting men captured by the Arabs were systematically castrated, actually. So if you were a black or a white guy and your boat lost, I mean, like if you were, if you were fighting for Mali or you were fighting for Genoa would be one of the Caucasian city -states, a sense of white as we think of it, and you were fighting the Turk um and you were defeated, what would probably happen is that they would
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Wilfred Reilly: cut your cock off and you would devote the rest of your life to, you know, improving the agricultural and rowing endeavors of the caliphate.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: yeah Yes.
Wilfred Reilly: So this is some of the, this is some of the history that I talk about, but the Barbary slave trade, which is exclusively in whites, the Atlantic slave trade, of course, I devote pages to that. brutal, but i'm almost entirely in black.
Wilfred Reilly: But the the point is not that slavery wasn't bad by our terms today. um It's that slavery existed throughout history, and if anything, the West played a unique role in stopping it.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Wilfred Reilly: I mean, Britain devoted an entire fleet, albeit a kind of a small, creaky one, but of no one else did anything, you know, two blockading, slave trading ports.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: yeah Yeah. I mean, they, they put an embargo on Brazil.
Wilfred Reilly: Good.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah, and yeah the the french the French did nothing. ah Well, I mean, this is also an interest of mine because of the for the same reason, like because of all the lies, and I can go go on about this.
Wilfred Reilly: No, they didn't do some things.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: ah French slaves in Haiti were allowed to go on strike, which is my one of my favorite French facts.
Wilfred Reilly: Very, very French. but
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: But this this is this is literally true. they would ah I mean, it wasn't called a strike, but essentially the the slaves would escape, except they wouldn't go they would go like a short walk away in the jungle and wait.
Wilfred Reilly: yeah
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: And then the universe the overseers would come and they would negotiate.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: And then they would return. I mean, presumably, you know, there was some – again, it was slavery not defending it and so on and so forth, but it just it's just fascinating to see just the breadth in the history of that institution and the differences within it, like how it was practiced in different places.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: um
Wilfred Reilly: yeah, I mean, I also think that there's there's no real need for people that are making kind of coherent, sinner -right points to say, well, I'm not defending the practice. I mean, I'm not sure whether ultimate morality exists at all, actually, except for a few Ten Commandments level things humans have managed to agree on. Don't rape tribeswomen, don't eat people. But beyond that, I mean, like, the the idea that you shouldn't take defeated military enemies who've been trying to kill you and make them work,
Wilfred Reilly: That definitely is not a thing that humans inherently believe. um I mean, to some extent, you could argue that we do this today with prisoners and so on down the line. I certainly have no problem with that. So, you know, it's it's a good thing, most likely, that societies move forward when it comes to slavery. But yeah I think the basic point is that obviously, yes, the The societies of the past probably were not just constant terror from sunup to dusk.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: And that would actually be the focus, yeah, that that would be the impression that you would get from reading a lot of writing on the American or European continental left.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: That's an important point.
Wilfred Reilly: I mean, it it doesn't surprise me at all that in practice before you had modern automobile transportation or anything like that, if you had isolated plantations full of people that you were making work for you, there'd be a bunch of strategies that you would use to actually make that happen.
Wilfred Reilly: There also, I mean, there also are some pretty vague gradations here, right? Like the alternative to slavery in 1700 wasn't freedom as a banker, it was serfdom usually.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: So in Europe, they're Russia or France, you didn't you didn't have slaves, you just had peasants that couldn't really leave their land unless they wanted to
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: You know go to the one city in the country and live to be 22.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: So it the history was Brutal in many ways different from our time the foolish to judge and our moral term blah blah blah
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes. Right. I mean, so in France, they, so. France was perhaps the first, or one of the earliest, certainly nations to abolish not just slavery but serfdom. ah and but And so at the time when France was engaged in the slave trade and had slave colonies in places like Haiti, ah French peasants were not serfs. What they did do, however, was starve.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Uh, and like, again, not, you know, not saying blah, blah, blah, but like Haitian slaves or slaves in the Caribbean did not starve because when you're in a tropical climate, there's always stuff growing on the trees.
Wilfred Reilly: oh yeah
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: And so you can eat more or less well, but you don't starve to death until the invention of canning at the end of the 18th century. french people French peasants would sometimes starve to death.
Wilfred Reilly: Oh yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: That's the thing that they did and that ah Haitian slaves didn't do.
Wilfred Reilly: ah
Wilfred Reilly: Yeah, and I think that people, almost any up middle class citizen is going to be kind of reluctant to draw the obvious conclusion from that.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: ah and so it's like
Wilfred Reilly: But yeah, I think if you insist on comparing people in the past, it would certainly be accurate to say that some people who were slaves or battle captives had hard lives but less horrible ones than some people who weren't.
Wilfred Reilly: I mean, it's very obvious that being a peasant or being a serf in Russia and many other countries certainly did continue serf until almost the modern era.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: That's not an inherently, dramatically better state than being a slave.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Wilfred Reilly: So, I mean, there there are actually quite a few studies of this.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: Have you read Time on the Cross?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: No, I have not.
Wilfred Reilly: time on the Time on the Cross, is a this book took a lot of heat, mostly from Black activists, although it was written by very liberal people.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: What's that?
Wilfred Reilly: But it was an attempt to take a quantitative look at Black American slavery. And what the authors said was, well, by our standards today, Black American slavery was horrible, but it seems to have been roughly as horrible as most of the other options for people at the same class level or a little above it at that time.
Wilfred Reilly: So they actually compared the life expectancy of black slaves to that of, what do they pick, dock workers in England, Appalachian poor whites, like all of these other people, like people in central London at this time, and the slaves were in the middle of the pack.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Oh, fascinating. That's fascinating.
Wilfred Reilly: Like they didn't that didn't have great lives. I i don't know why I keep repeating that, but all these other people didn't either. Like and almost every condition of that time, like being a fighting man on a pirate ship,
Wilfred Reilly: would be unimaginably difficult for the average American bureaucrat arguing these topics today.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right, right, right. It's so funny that you say that because it was a very common argument made by southern defenders of slavery, which is like, oh, you know, oh, your workers are free, but actually, like, they're they're worse off materially.
Wilfred Reilly: yeah No, but it's accurate.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: And when I read that, I always thought, you're full of shit. Turns out it's kind of true. That's really funny. ah Okay, ah what are some other lies? So ah I, I assume there's a bunch of stuff on Native Americans too, which I'm also interested in, because i I know very little about this stuff. I understand.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: oh mo meant Maybe not most, but like much of the killing that happened was through disease, which was ah you know tragic but unavoidable if you have a new population ah that arrives in a continent when they they don't they don't have the immune system to defend against diseases. ah But also, the Indians were not angels.
Wilfred Reilly: Yeah, no, I mean, that that's chapter i mean that chapter three, actually. we moved One of the chapters on the realities of the Cold War was was thought important enough to to move up to the start as well.
Wilfred Reilly: And one sentence there, the the sort of Downton Trumbo narrative on the Cold War in the USA and the, quote unquote, Red Scare, that Americans, and to some extent Brits, just began panicking about communism with no evidence.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Oh, interesting.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: and locking up innocent liberals. No, I mean, like the USA with actually, is yeah, but ah like with some help from ah European NATO allies, as I recall, I mean, the USA has had decoded Venota cables for a while.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. and No, they were communist. Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Wilfred Reilly: Like we know who the Russian agents were during World War II and the 10 years after. And most of the people that were accused in these kind of cause -celeb trials like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg of being Russian spies were Russian spies.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Wilfred Reilly: I mean, we've known that for decades now.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. The Rosenbergs. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Wilfred Reilly: But so that's chapter two, but the Native Americans thing. um Yeah, the one of the points of the book is kind of what I just said, but with a little less wind. And I guess if you broke it down more simply, um ah ultimate morals may or may not exist, but humans certainly have not had shared moral systems across time.
Wilfred Reilly: Very few people historically behaved in ways that we would approve of today. By the way, they'd be horrified by nuclear weapons and factory farming and only fans prostitution where one in 20 women is technically a hooker and this sort of thing.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right, right. Right.
Wilfred Reilly: I mean, it' imagine ah you're a nobleman in any society thinking about this, that young daughters in your family are especially in demand and so on.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Oh yeah.
Wilfred Reilly: But anyway, um so you have to kind of avoid presentism while actually looking at the rates of measurable behaviors across society. And by that standard, I mean, no, the Native Americans were not peaceful angels in harmony with with the environment. The natives were some of the greatest warrior people in history once they got horses. And so I just talk about that through the chapter that Native American history prior to the arrival of whites was one of pretty constant tribal conflict.
Wilfred Reilly: There's a great article that just ran in American archaeology that makes the point the most violent era in US history was before Europeans arrived. And that's because the Anasazi, one of the really almost Aztec level advanced peoples in our Southwest, built
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Thank you.
Wilfred Reilly: to up to the point of having sizable cities and desertifying entire regions. And then they basically were conquered as they are the resources they use began to collapse, as population density began to collapse, they were overrun, everybody died. So the article says things like you know cities that had a population of 40 ,000 in year X yeah i don't think i'm overstating that it was it was 40 ,000 wasn't 4 ,000 but had a population of zero in year y and they described the you know the number of people that had battle trauma on their their hands their heads and so on
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: es anating Right, right, right.
Wilfred Reilly: And you know I go from there to actually discussing the wars between the whites and natives, which sometimes were mutually genocidal and sometimes weren't. I mean, 1 .5 % of America is Native American now.
Wilfred Reilly: I talk about the role of disease. And again, there's that point of you can't just oversimplify this as the bad people came and attacked the good people.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: In fact, the natives in most cases probably were the worst people. If you're going to use a modern Geneva Convention sort of of standard,
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Oh, for sure.
Wilfred Reilly: Yeah, but I mean, i think we I think we forget that now, where you'll watch things like dances with the German shepherds, you know, the the sort of American content on a Native American Indians. And it really is like these cruel hairy savages came from across the plains and taught them the words for rape and murder.
Wilfred Reilly: I mean, if you actually read accounts of the people who fought the Comanche or the Iroquois, I mean, these people were very
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah. They were not kind to prisoners, for example.
Wilfred Reilly: Yeah, they were very skilled torturers. I mean, they would do things like tie people out over ant hills. And I think some of this had to do with the lack of entertainment.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: If only did had TikTok.
Wilfred Reilly: I mean, it was it was sort of something to do at night. Well, they didn't they didn't really have much of anything to do. There was s sex training and, you know, entertainments of various kinds.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Wilfred Reilly: And that was one of them. People tend not to like their enemies. So it's this is something that's actually been commented on in different tribal societies up until almost the modern era.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah. Yes.
Wilfred Reilly: I mean, like Kipling's line ah when you're wounded and lost on Afghanistan's planes and the women come out to cut up what remains, you know, roll to your rifle and blow out your brains. But that's that's something that many people have said, fighting warrior clan level groups for a thousand years.
Wilfred Reilly: And that that was the experience of someone trying to build a family in, say, Kansas or Texas, where you had the you had the Comanche and the other great tribes, the Sioux, Kiowa and so on.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yep. Yep. Uh, good, good. Okay. So what's the gimme, um. I mean, i'm I'm interested in knowing what they are, what the lies are, and like having the list, but I'm also interested in like, what's the biggest? What's the most impactful? Like, what's the – I mean, i I assume slavery, but like, you know,
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: um how – I guess another way of phrasing the question would be, ah What percentage of the like K -12 curriculum is sort of like, you know, prop race propaganda or anti -American propaganda versus stuff that's just history or maybe just left -leaning history, but not stuff that's like, oh, America is evil.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: You know what I mean? Like, is there, do you have an answer to that question?
Wilfred Reilly: Yeah, I do know what you mean. I don't think that the the worst kind of propaganda is more than 20 or 30 % of it, but that's a lot because it sort of sets direction.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: I mean, when you get out of an American or I'd assume modern European school, your starting point of view is that your society is bad, not that it was good.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Wilfred Reilly: Like we've done some great things, but we conquered heaven.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Wilfred Reilly: would be kind of a standard opinion that someone might might reach based on what they were taught.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: And I have a real problem with this because it's all bullshit. I mean, so the the propaganda is pretty heavily layered.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: it's It's not the majority of the content. But in terms of the other question, but each of the lies in the book tries to reflect that. So I mean, one of them is white flight wasn't a thing that just happened unprovokedly because of racism.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah,
Wilfred Reilly: Um, white flight primarily happened in, yeah, we talk, we talk about it.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: they talk about white flight and history in schools.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: That's that's, that's amazing.
Wilfred Reilly: Modern, actually, there's an important point here.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Okay. Well, yeah.
Wilfred Reilly: Modern American history classes tend to be very backloaded. So, I mean, when I asked my students about historical figures, almost none of them know who Henry Ford was or who the Wright brothers were.
Wilfred Reilly: For that matter, if you want to talk about black people who, you know, Sheriff Bass was or something like that, most of them could get Harriet Tubman, but they know a lot about Malcolm, Martin, both of the Kennedys, that this kind of thing.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Wow.
Wilfred Reilly: So there's actually a lot of discussion of Vietnam.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Wilfred Reilly: There's a lot of discussion of the civil rights movement. The things that really inspired kind of the the Boomer has, yeah, it's Boomer revision to the curriculum.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Very boomer. It's very boomer centric. It's like...
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: That's crazy. Oh man, at least at least in France, they try to sort of equally go from like Mesopotamia to today. So what they say in the process is bullshit, but they don't pretend that history began in 1945 at least.
Wilfred Reilly: Yeah, no, I think that's good. And it's, yeah, I would, I would say the Europeans have a somewhat better history curriculum than the United States does. Definitely. That's, that's one of America's weaknesses.
Wilfred Reilly: I mean, bear in mind, the country's only 200 years old also. So the the people have in a mini noble and glorious history as we all fought each other and came here and so on.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Wilfred Reilly: But 1776 is when the, the USA actually began. So there's, there's a shorter period to condense in there and it's definitely been kind of boomer chopped at the end. But yeah, I mean, so white flight was a response in very large part to, I mean, crime surged about 500%, 800 % for blacks between 1963 and 93 of the years I usually use. This, by the way, is kind of the great thing in American society that's just never mentioned.
Wilfred Reilly: One of the points that I make is that this can't be trackable to racism.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: yes Yes.
Wilfred Reilly: Crime surged for whites almost as much and racism was declining against blacks this entire period. It's also almost impossible to track this to genetics.
Wilfred Reilly: You saw an 800 % increase among the same population. So the question is what actually caused it and the answer is just absurd social policies like pay -per -child welfare that it is almost forbidden to discuss in our polite society.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Wilfred Reilly: So because this is the gigantic elephant that is untouchable in almost every room, we keep making, and I see other countries do this too. I think the USA is the worst on this.
Wilfred Reilly: We keep making the same mistakes over and over. Like the George Floyd campaign, why don't we defund the police and give urban areas more welfare? We tried that. And I mean, we saw after George Floyd's death, the same thing happened that we saw happen in 1963.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah, it was exactly the same thing.
Wilfred Reilly: It was, yeah, murder reached, ah literally murder reached back over 20 ,000 per year.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: ah
Wilfred Reilly: There was, it was that identical process. Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: All right, so I understand you have ah to run to a class pretty soon. ah So we have a traditional last question that we asked to all our guests.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: It's a very long and established tradition from three weeks ago, um which is ah recommend a book that's not in your area of expertise.
Wilfred Reilly: fair enough.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: It can be any book, just not what's in your area of expertise.
Wilfred Reilly: I recommend a book that's not in my area of expertise. um Oh, actually, yeah, what a book that I'd recommend is the the case for marriage. This is not in at all in the quant political science zone. This is written by a two female academics, one was a feminist, one was a Christian, but in about 2006.
Wilfred Reilly: And they respond to most of the claims that were made by kind of third and fourth wave feminism about families being you know traps full of incest and perversion and abusive fathers.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Oh wow.
Wilfred Reilly: And they say, well, statistically, that's not true at all. Like men are, in fact, as the old stereotype goes, quite protective. You're you're much safer as a wife than living with ah a live -in boyfriend or something like that.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: men actually have slightly more sex in marriage. I thought it was funny that it was slightly more like the women seem to have measured to some extent, kind of know what the cutoff is for you not to divorce.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: i I think now it's much more like Brad Wilcox at the University of Virginia, like, uh, uh, has studied this and it's like, it's at like being married is, is, is good if all you want to do is have.
Wilfred Reilly: Well, I think that, first of all, like it's good that people truly love their lovers. I mean, also, women tend to be wittier and more amoral than men.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Wilfred Reilly: So you have to wonder if whether some of that is a response to the open dating market that now exists and pornography and so on.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: Like, well, I still want to get married. I guess I might be returning to domesticity a bit. But if men and women are keeping each other happy in the bedroom even more so, and men are cooking now as well, and both people often have jobs, good.
Wilfred Reilly: i mean that i think'
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah, it's it's both the frequency of of sex and like self -report, like are you happy with your sex life? Like married heterosexual couples, like just way higher than anybody else.
Wilfred Reilly: Yeah.
Wilfred Reilly: Yeah. And I will note that's especially true for women, by the way. Now for women, a big part of it is how happy your partner is.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Oh, interesting.
Wilfred Reilly: So that's something for the ladies to perhaps keep in mind, but yeah it's.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah, because sex with someone you know is better.
Wilfred Reilly: Yes. Yeah. Well, especially for women. I mean, so like the, the difference between women's ratings of sex with like a loving husband and women's ratings of sex in like a club bathroom is dramatically just thinking of like nightlife party sort of experiences.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Wilfred Reilly: Like they women would rate one at an eight, not nothing perfect, but very good. And one at a two men would probably rate one at a nine and one at an eight.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Wilfred Reilly: So, I mean, there's, there's a very, there's less. but There actually are less advantages.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: yeah but Men are always going to rate sex at a nine. It's like, it's it's like nine or 9 .5.
Wilfred Reilly: It's all within the range of nine, maybe.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Wilfred Reilly: ah I don't know about that in the modern era, but like but I think in general, though, all all banter aside, like The Case for Marriage is is a great book. It makes the point that you know sexually, financially, again, in terms of what do men do, like marrying a competent man with a regular job like engineer on average increases your income by 300 % to 400 % as a woman.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: yeah yeah
Wilfred Reilly: So, I mean, just all of those sort of things. You're not going to be living in the projects or a council of estate. Like, you and your husband will both be more sexually satisfied. You'll both be in love, all the stock breeding stuff aside.
Wilfred Reilly: So, I mean, that that's a good book. And I think it's a book more people should read because it just makes some very obvious points.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: and's dead Yeah, that should be that should be a class, you know ah fewer lives from history teacher and more ah solid life advice that our grandparents used to give, but some for some reason no longer do.
Wilfred Reilly: and Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: All right, I guess I have to release you now.
Wilfred Reilly: Well, thanks for having me on.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: ah this was but Listen, said this was a lot of fun. ah We didn't get to go for as long as I wanted to, but ah this this was a lot of fun. I learned a ton.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: I hope people buy your books and follow you on X because you're a lot of fun to to follow there.
Wilfred Reilly: Thank you.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Thank you very much.
Wilfred Reilly: Thanks, thank you for having me.
