Hello, bird feed.

This is Ledigold, an amusement's editor, and I am here with Brianna Renix, our senior editor.

And a very, very, very special guest, the one, the only, Daniel Walden.

You may remember such hits as Dismantling the West, which he wrote for Current Affairs.

It was a great article.

And we're going to talk about it. We're going to talk about a myth. We're going to It was a great article. And we're going to talk about it.

We're going to talk about a myth.

We're going to talk about lots of stuff.

And we're going to have some fun.

Yeah.

So, let's get started.

So, Daniel, your article, you wrote about West as a myth,

a myth that has been constructed by a lot of people over the years and is being upheld right now by the alt-right. So why was this myth invented and what

investment, what emotional investment do people have in it? So this thing, I think, was invented

for a whole host of reasons. One of the big ones was the need for some kind of sort of unifying

education, particularly in the wake of the failures

of nationalism at the end of World War I. You had these sort of high-level universities,

namely the Columbia and Chicago were the really big ones. And these universities decided that

they needed a new kind of education. This was also in the wake of the decline of the old

model of university education, you know, Latin, Greek, and mathematics, basically, were all it was taught.

And at Harvard, they had instituted, like, an elective system, and people were very skeptical

about that, which is warranted. I'm still skeptical about that. But so these other universities

...