 All right, let's talk about Columbus. I think everybody saw, if you didn't see, it's a depressing video. I shared it on Twitter, it was making rounds of, I guess it was three, four days ago, of crowds, rioters, literally attacking police, throwing stuff at them, bottles. I don't know, I don't know if there were rocks, it was hard to tell, firecrackers, just throwing stuff at police and police who had, in Chicago, police who had surrounded a statue of Christopher Columbus and tried to protect it from the mob, the mob who was intent on tipping it out. And it was just this horrible, just horrible picture of a complete breakdown of law and order in this country, a complete breakdown of any respect for the police, any respect for the rule of law, and just rioters doing as they wished. Ultimately, the police had to retreat because they were being, they were getting injured, I think, from all this stuff. And they were helpless, helpless. They didn't have riot gear on, they didn't have the kind of weapons that would allow them to protect themselves. They weren't gonna shoot their guns because we know how that ends. And they should have had weapons that would allow them without inflicting death on people to protect themselves and to force the rioters back. Bottles of urine, somebody says, I mean, just a horrific scene. By the way, scenes that I've seen in Portland and other places as well. But in Chicago, it was just, because it was filmed from a variety of different angles, there were a lot of people there with cameras, just terrific. And ultimately, the cops retreated, the demonstrators or rioters more accurately, took over the space of the sculpture. The sculpture was wrapped. It wasn't even just the statue anymore because it was wrapped, I guess, to protect it. They tied a rope around it, tried to pull it down, but they were putting incompetent and unable. And they couldn't pull the sculpture down, they couldn't tear it down. And then the police reorganized, and I guess they got the right kind of gear and maybe they got reinforcements with some right police, and they pushed the rioters away. And it was, so ultimately, they backed off, partially because they had failed to pull down the sculpture, the statue itself, and partially because the police actually got aggressive with them and pushed them back. Now, so that's kind of the context. Now, this is Christopher Columbus we're talking about. We're not talking about treasonous generals defending slavery. We're not talking about commanders or politicians or even intellectuals who were defenders of slavery. We're talking about Christopher Columbus who sailed into the unknown, sailed not knowing where he would land up, thinking he was going to India. We're talking about Christopher Columbus who discovered a new continent, who ultimately led to the settlement of a new continent. We're talking about a man who achieved great things, who had a vision to imagine what it would be like to sail into the horizon and discover new things. We're talking about a man who, a man of his time, the era of exploration, really, one of the people who led and launched the era of exploration, a great era in human history, that at the end of the day, brought Western civilization to the Americas and to the rest of the world. And that is a massive achievement. Now, was he cruel? Yes. Did he view non-Christians, particular pagans, a subhuman? Yeah. I don't think he was as racist as much as he viewed anybody who was a pagan as subhuman. To me, what made Christopher Columbus vicious is much more his religion than his ethnicity or ethnic preferences. So, Christopher Columbus was vicious. He treated the inhabitants of the new land he discovered disgracefully. He treated anybody, I think, who was not one of the Christian, or I don't know what his attitude towards Jews was, but at least a Judeo-Christian with disdain and disgust and enslaved and treated them brutally. And that's all true. That does not wipe out. The history altering, history changing act that he did. We don't celebrate Columbus as a bigot, as a religious nut, as a religious fanatic. We don't celebrate him to the extent that he was a racist as a racist. We celebrate him as an explorer, as somebody who was brave, courageous, and pushed civilization forward. Now, Matthew says he's not sure Columbus was cool based on the Christian articles. It might be that I'm wrong, that the stuff I've seen suggested he was cool, but maybe not. It's cruelty, and there's various interpretations of it, but from what I've seen, this cruelty was primarily motivated by his insistence on kind of converting people to Christianity and treating people who were not converted really, really badly. But I'm not an historian, so I'm not claiming. But the worst, that's the worst you can say about him. And his virtues are significant. And not to understand him. I mean, this is a time where tribes, Native American tribes, tribes in Africa, tribes all over the world, primitive tribes, barbaric tribes, skinned people alive to sculpts, prided themselves in motor rape. I mean, this is not, people on the left primarily have this notion of, and it's interesting, because I talked about Rousseau in another show, but they have this Rousseauian, this notion from Rousseau, how about that? That before civilization, before progress, before maybe even Greece in the West, and before there were towns and cities, when we were hunter-gatherers, it was the Garden of Eden. It was, life was just beautiful. We were happy. We ate healthy food. We lived long lives. We had great sex. We never killed anybody. We wandered the earth naked and happy, and one with nature and other human beings. We were probably all vegans, because God forbid we probably didn't kill anybody. So it's probably not hunter-gatherers, it's probably just gatherers. Like, we probably didn't hunt because that would be kind of brutal. We were these noble savages. It really is a Garden of Eden fable of primitive man. And think about even the biblical story of Garden of Eden. I always find it interesting, like Jordan Peterson has this whole story of Bible stories, you know, all these lectures, thousands of people went to see it live, millions of people have watched them online, and a lot of it is just, he's not reading the same stories I am. Because think about the Garden of Eden. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve don't need to do anything. They care for the Garden, but it's not exactly clear what caring for the Garden is. And the food is just there. Everything is just there. And they're happy and content. But note that they're not human. So as you know, they have no sex, they have no kids, they have no knowledge, they have no self-awareness. In other words, in the Garden of Eden, in the story, in Genesis, Adam and Eve are pre-human. They're on the cusp of being human. You can even view them evolutionary as on the cusp. They have no reason. They have no free will. They have no ability to think, contemplate and self-contemplation out. They don't live. They don't produce. They don't do anything. And that, for some reason, you know, due to Christianity has instilled that as some kind of ideal, as some kind of perfection, as some kind of something to strive to. It's like people think of retirement. Oh, I'll just sit around in my, you know, lounge chair or on the patio or whatever and just be and just, you know, my Social Security money will come in and I'll just live off of that and I'll be so relaxing and so beautiful. And usually they die pretty quickly because it's boring as hell. How is Genesis not Christianity? Genesis is a foundational book of Christianity. Christianity is the New Testament, but the New Testament doesn't replace the Old Testament. The New Testament builds on the Old Testament. No serious Christian rejects the Old Testament. In particular, doesn't reject Genesis. Maybe they reject later on all the stories about the tribe of Israel, but they do not reject Genesis. Otherwise they're not Christians. They're a new cult that they made up. Jesus certainly does not reject Genesis. And they know Christian rejects the Garden of Eden and the story of Adam and Eve. It's foundational to Christianity. And indeed, Jordan Peterson speaks about it as such, but what is it that gets them kicked out of the Garden of Eden? It's eating from the tree of knowledge. It's becoming human, becoming self-aware. They cover their generals, which is a sign, I guess, of self-awareness when you're obsessed with sex. But they eat from the tree of knowledge. They gain the capacity, if you will, to reason, to think, to be. And that's what turns them into a human being. And then at that point, they identify each other as sexual. That's why they cover their generals. They have kids, ultimately. They live as human beings. They become human beings. The tree of knowledge makes them human beings. That's civilization. And that God tells them, because they ate from the tree of knowledge, they will lead a harsh life. That is what brings harshness to life. What makes life, according to somebody like Jordan Peterson, miserable, difficult, painful, essentially suffering, essentially suffering, is eating from the fruit of knowledge, becoming civilized, becoming human. And yet, for Rousseau, it is that pre-civilization, pre-being human that he strives towards. And therefore, we have this notion of a noble savage. And a noble savage, everything is forgivable to a noble savage. But Christopher Columbus does stuff that is wrong and probably did a lot of things that are wrong, particularly given our understanding of ethics and morality today, given our understanding of universal values, given our understanding of that we're all human, I mean, right? It's the standards by which we evaluate him absurd. So they want to take it down. A sculpture, a statue of Christopher Columbus, the A historic, the anti-Western civilization, the anti-everything the civilization represents. And Deborah asked the question, do you think the Columbus advancement of civilization via the discovery of America and the subsequent settlement and the founding of America are the real targets of the protests, animus, towards him? Absolutely yes, yes. What they hate is civilization. What they hate is the West. And what they hate it is its superiority, its success, its pro-man nature. That's what they hate about it. They are the spices of mankind. They are egalitarians who wanna bring us down to the level of savages. Down to the level of noble, so-called noble savages, a pre-human, they want Rousseau. And I talked about this when I talked about doing away with the police. Rousseau believes that it is these institutions of civilization, like the police, like a legal system, that create the criminals. It is the institutions of civilization, learning and science and reason more than anything that create by trying to put in a street jacket, the noble savage, is what creates criminality, is what creates disillusionment with society. It is what creates all the problems that we have. And what we're saying in these writers is exactly that. It's exactly that attitude, that attitude towards, towards history, towards man, towards civilization. They want, they're lashing out against America. They're lashing out against freedom. They're lashing out against capitalism. They're lashing out against progress. They're lashing out against Western civilization. And at the end of the day, they're lashing out against reason. And Christopher Columbus is just the latest victim of that. And they've been building towards, tearing down his statue for decades now. I remember Columbus, they has been under attack for 20 years or 30 years. And then, next, and already to some extent, other founding fathers. And beyond that, it's renaissance figures. It's enlightenment figures. Anybody, anybody who is promoting Western civilization, and that would be true, no matter the color of their skin. I mean, just wait. I mean, they've already turned against people like Frederick Douglass, and they will turn if they haven't turned explicitly, but they've turned implicitly against Martin Luther King. And I think even Malcolm X would be horrified by the ideas circulating among the so-called people who support the black community. So-called supporters, because I don't think they do. So yeah, I think when Christopher Columbus statues are coming down, it's an ominous sign. I'm all for getting rid of sculptures of treasonous, people who committed treason, people who fought for slavery, people who intellectually vigorously supported slavery. I'm all for getting rid of those statues. Again, using the rule of law, using the proper mechanism to get rid of them. But Columbus, founding fathers, absurd, ridiculous, insane, end of Western civilization kind of stuff. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning, any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims, or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of the stare, cynicism, and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist. Broads. 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