Culture Friday: A test of the West

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, the 26th of June. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It.

Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s Culture Friday.

Joining us now: Author, speaker, and co-host of WORLD Watch’s Reality Check, Katie McCoy.

Good to see you, Katie.

KATIE MCCOY: Good to see you guys.

EICHER: Well, Katie, on Tuesday we saw something really remarkable in the New York primary results. Socialists in New York were not defeating moderates. They were defeating progressive Democrats. 

Even the very partisan Democrat leader in the U.S. House, Hakeem Jeffries—he is from New York—he was criticized by the local socialists as "too soft."

Now, at the same time, a Muslim writer for The Free Press has a very fascinating essay arguing that among some younger American Muslims, political identity is increasingly being shaped less by traditional religious practice, and more by a broader anti-Western worldview.

Do you see a connection there, Katie? Is what we’re seeing in New York genuine evidence that the center of gravity on the left is moving away from the Western tradition itself—and more toward a politics built around oppression, victimhood, and resistance?

MCCOY: You know, Nick, it would help explain why so many far-left Americans are identifying in solidarity with a religion that is antithetical and even hostile to pretty much everything that they believe.

So what this Free Press author did was he identified what he called “third worldism“—that the Muslim identity of people like Mayor Mamdani is that it's more of an emblem of resistance to Westernism and whiteness.

So, you think about that—we saw that at work in Ivy League institutions in the last couple of years.

So, when I step back and look at why these two seemingly disparate worldviews are so in lockstep in American culture today? I think Islam and the militant left, they've got some common denominators at work.

First, they both despise the West and want to dismantle the ideas, the values, and the institutions that created it. And that’s even more than specific religion, like Christianity, or the family structure, although it certainly includes that.

But there’s another thing, too. Both of these worldviews rest on a foundation of conflict. They both need conflict to exist. So certainly, the religion of Islam is all about conflict. World peace is defined as global caliphate, meaning that they have the global domination of Islam and the subjugation of every other worldview and every other people.

And then the militant far left, they also rest on conflict.

You have the Marx dialectic that came from Marx and Engels, and later was propagated culturally by Lenin, that says family structures, private property, capitalism—all of these things need to be dismantled.

And in both worldviews you see a pursuit of a cultural replacement.

These things are working hand in hand right now because they have a common enemy—and that common enemy is the West.

I have to tell you, too, Nick, we’ve got to give Mamdani his props, right? He’s incredibly charismatic and charming. And you kind of have to be to sell one of the worst ideas in human history. Like, one that has precipitated and been the on-ramp for some of the greatest atrocities in the 20th century.

Because these candidates in New York, they are not socialists. I refuse to call them socialists. They are communists.

When you hear what they talk about, they’re discussing LGBTQ advocacy that is dismantling gender, sex, family, what we can know from nature. They talk about freeing Palestine, which you don’t have to be an apologist for the state of Israel to recognize the ideology behind that statement.

So this is not just the infiltration of socialism—they can call themselves whatever they want—this is communism.

So with the ideological Marxism that’s rising on the American left, and the promotion of this kind of third-worldism, anti-Western thought, these two things are in lockstep together—for now. For now. 

Soon, one of them is going to turn on the other.

BROWN: Well, Katie, let’s stay in New York just a little longer. Sometimes a picture tells the whole story.

A former Israeli hostage stood before a U.N. official and said, “I am the living proof of sexual violence by Hamas. Look at me. Will you apologize?"

And the official almost smugly sits there in silence.

Katie, this seems to me bigger than one U.N. bureaucrat. It feels like a moral failure of an entire international system that found its voice for almost every victim except these Jewish women.

What struck you about that moment?

MCCOY: Yeah, so a little background here: Welcome to the upside-down world of the United Nations where you have a so-called expert on violence against women. Her name is Reem Al-Salem, and she produced a report on the state of gender violence worldwide, and she left out the sexual violence against Jewish women on October 7 and thereafter.

It just didn’t make the report.

She also conveniently happened to leave out the sexual violence and torture of Iranian nurses who helped dissidents in Iran earlier this year when they were rising up against their government.

Not only did Iran punish the people who were trying to overthrow the government, but they punished the people who helped them.

And it is absolutely horrific—not only the crimes, but then the gaslighting, the international gaslighting. To leave them out and fail to advocate for them.

You know, this is what we’re seeing on that far militant left—it’s the same thing at work.

Because when you don’t have universal principles, when you have a truly secular state, secular organization like the United Nations—I think we can safely say they are—you have no transcendent principles to hook ideas onto, like universal human dignity.

So all you have left are demographic categories.

This young woman, this Israeli woman, was pure courage. She looked this woman in the eye and asked for an apology. And at the end, you could almost, I think you could see her trembling—just the courage that this took.

But this is part of what common-sense conservatism is up against, frankly. The United Nations, the European Union, our education system, the upper echelon of Ivy League institutions—they’re all slanted in one way.

So the United Nations, their Human Rights Council, I mean, it shouldn’t surprise us. This is the same body that added Iran to some type of committee to make human-rights policy.

That’s not a joke.

But they really are making a mockery of human rights.

And the reason for that is that, apart from the foundations—specifically of Christianity in the West—you have no foundation for universal human rights.

EICHER: Alright Katie, let’s move from New York overseas to London, to the U.K., because there’s a lot going on with Islam in the West.

The clash there, quite a few things: We've had reports of a near beheading, we've had reports of a young kid being stabbed to death, we've had these reports for many years of the grooming gangs.

And we just simply don’t have the language to discuss politely what has happened over there.

I’ll simply say that as I listened to a member of Parliament in the U.K. reading testimony from a brand new 200-page official report on the grooming gangs. I was struck by the cadence of the report, the way it was put together—and the way he read some of the stories.

He would describe an atrocity in fairly neutral terms and then say "Another." Then, "another." Then "another." And on and on for several minutes.

He concluded saying he could go on all day, and there's no question that he could've. 

It’s just devastating when you listen to him. And it pushes you to one of two ideas, I think: Either Britain doesn’t have what it takes to fight this, or perhaps it does, and Rupert Lowe—the member of Parliament—represents a flicker of resolve.

What do you think about that, Katie? Will Europe remain the West, or do you think of it as conquered territory at this point?

MCCOY: Oh. I hope it’s not conquered territory.

We’re seeing people in Britain rise up in protest against their government—in some cases, riots. 

You know, there’s a couple of stories with these grooming gangs, and just fair warning to anybody who would read about them: it is enraging. And it should be.

This is a civilizational clash with a religion that is married to a political ideology. 

And this religion—Islam, not saying Muslims, I’m saying Islam—is fundamentally incompatible with religious pluralism and the West.

But you know, Nick, I actually think that is only the secondary story here.

I think the outrage rests in the institutional failure of a government to fulfill its basic social contract with its own people.

Men in British communities were drugging, trafficking, and raping young girls, and law enforcement was punishing whistleblowers, blaming the victims, and calling them child prostitutes who made bad lifestyle choices.

And they did this because they were afraid of being "racist."

And keep in mind, this happened under multiple governments. This was not a new thing, this goes back decades. 

Which tells you that it evolved. These rings evolved and they became more prevalent and more sophisticated because they knew they would get away with it.

So what does this tell us?

It tells us that in the pyramid of victimhood, ethnicity is weighted heavier than gender.

It reminds me of the verse in Proverbs that says, “A false balance is an abomination to the Lord." The principle there being two different types of so-called justice—two different standards.

And it’s also why, just this week, Ayaan Hirsi Ali said there is no alternative to what the Christian Western civilization has built.

So these stories, they are genuinely alarming. There, but for the grace of God—and a few amendments—go we.

And speaking out against them is only part of what we have to do to keep ourselves from becoming like Europe.

What gave rise to this is their secularization. It was moving away from the influence of Christianity, to say nothing of the prevalence of Christians in public office in their country.

Yes, we need to confront ideas. Yes, we need to combat threats. But that’s not enough.

We have to recover a moral framework that comes from the Christian faith shaping a culture’s laws and ethics.

And that is our task if we are going to pass on to the next generation a secure America.

BROWN: Author, speaker, and co-host of WORLD Watch’s Reality Check, Katie McCoy.

Thank you, Katie.

MCCOY: Thanks for having me.

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