The Eric Metaxas Show - Dr. John West

Episode Date: June 10, 2025

The day after his Socrates in the City event on C.S. Lewis and Scientism, The Discovery Institute’s Dr. John West sits down with Host Eric Metaxas to discuss his documentary Human Zoos: America’s Forgotten History of Scientific Racism.

Noble gold investments is the official gold sponsor of the Eric Mataxis show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals. Learn how you can protect your wealth with noble gold investments. That's noble gold investments.com. You checked your bucket list lately? Are you ready to take care of item number seven? Listening to the Eric Metaxe show? Well, welcome. Tune in and then move on to item number eight. skydiving with Chuck Schumer and AOC. Here now is Mr. Completed My Bucket List at age 12, Eric Mattaxas. Folks, welcome back. This is when we get to talk about something fun.

For example, gold, you know that on the program, we've had our friend Colin Plum from Noble Gold Investments. And, you know, gold is one of these things. Everybody's interested in different aspects of gold. but recently in the news, there's been something about the Pope's golden ring. And I thought Colin Plum, you'd be able to tell us about that. What do you have to say about this ring that we do? Yeah, it's for anyone that knows about it, and I know you know about it, it's the ring of the fishermen.

And it's what they've always done with when a Pope dies is they, and the reason it's the ring of the fisherman is because the first Pope, St. Peter, was a fisherman. And so every Pope has worn it. And what they do is after the Pope dies, they destroy it and they create a new one. And that's sort of the ceremonial gesture and the new Pope Bob will get his ring of the fishermen that will be different than the other ones. The interesting thing is that it sort of aligns a little bit in the idea of passing down something to the next generation, which we do a lot. We deal with a lot. We deal with a lot of people that they're thinking about their state. They're thinking about wealth.

You know, the idea is they're looking to pass down wealth to the next generation. Sort of this transferring, you know, people buy physical gold and silver, and they pass it on to their errors privately. So we see this a lot. But the Pope does it also, and obviously with his passing, they're going to do that, and he'll get a new ring. And so it's sort of interesting. And this article talks about the ring. being worth $520,000, even though it only has a few thousand dollars in actual gold. So really the value, in my opinion, the value of this ring is priceless.

I'm sure you would agree with that, right? Eric, I mean, it's a price. Absolutely. Well, that, yeah, that's, now, are, am I to understand that it's the same gold and it's melted down and they make another ring? Is that what's happening? Yeah, I mean, I think that would make the most sense ceremonially. It would make sense for them to have that gold content in there.

you know interestingly enough they're they're putting a lot of other metals in there because gold is typically a soft metal and they you know they don't want so much of a soft metal in there so that you know it's it's it's strong it can last a test of time so for everyone out there that's married and it's got a gold ring you know like if you bang that thing the wrong way like that thing will have a scratch or a dent in it so i'm sure they're doing the same thing for the pope but it's this idea of this legacy right passing on a legacy and at noble gold, we do this a lot. We help families and, you know, people that inherit money,

putting gold and silver wide and coins and bars. And it's just something that hands down. I've done, I can't even tell you how many transactions of people that have four or five grandkids and they'll buy gold for each grandkid or they'll buy golden silver. And I've done the same thing for my kids. I have separate areas of gold and silver for them. So it's just the passing of the guard, passing a wealth and doing it in a, you know, a valuable way.

And I think it's pretty fascinating. Well, there's just something undeniably beautiful about gold and silver. It's different than having a piece of paper that's worth X amount of money. There's just something about it. So clearly that is a huge part of why gold has the value that it does. And who doesn't want a gold coin? It's so, or a silver coin. It's so beautiful.

I mean, growing up, I was really into coin collecting. And I remember, you know, when I was, I don't know, 11 or 12 years old, just drooling over a silver dollar. Just thinking, this is so beautiful. You don't even know at that age, you can't even talk about it. You just know it's beautiful. Yeah, absolutely. It's better than a paper dollar. And why is that?

Well, anyway, I want to mention, obviously, since Noble Gold Investments is a sponsor on the program, And folks, if you want to get your hands on some gold, go to ericmetaxis gold.com. That's the website. It's the way in. Ericmetaxis gold.com. But Colin, so we're just talking about this. And what is it, you know, about gold? Because this goes back thousands and thousands of years.

So it really is amazing to me that it still has that kind of value. people still want it. It's shining. It's beautiful. Workable. You can make things. It's just, it's so fascinating to me. Yeah.

So a few things have happened. I think that should be mentioned is that first of all, consumer sentiment on owning gold is the highest it's ever been in recorded history. So 25% of Americans feel good about gold. They feel like they want to own it. Yet less than 8% of Americans actually own physical gold. So even though the consent of Americans, is high. There's still a lot of people that don't actually own the physical gold, so there's a

tremendous opportunity there. But I think that the roller coaster of the economy is a big reason. And I think people have felt it this year. I mean, you know, Moody's yesterday downgraded our credit. We've had one day in the stock market where the Dow is down 2,200 points in one day. So, I mean, we've seen this real roller coaster this year of the economy, the stock market. And so, So gold has been a traditional safe haven for that. So even though we've had this incredible volatility, gold is still up almost 14% this year. It's up about $50 today. So even with all the uncertainty out there, all the things happening in the world, gold has been seen as a safe haven.

And that's why you continue to see hedge funds continue to buy it. You see institutions buying it. You know, the retail market's starting to buy it. So I think it's been a real testament to the value of this metal. you said, it's been around for thousands of years. But I think in today's environment where things are so uncertain, the dollar doesn't feel very strong. Our economies, it doesn't look as great as it was. And then our debt, you know, $37 trillion in debt. How do you balance that out as an investor, as an individual? And I think that's the thing that people are saying is like, hey, I want to

sock a little bit away and get into something safe to just go through this year. Because I think most people believe the sentiment out there is that it's going to be a rough year in the economy. Things aren't looking as great as they were. I think hopefully a lot of the measures that President Trump would put in place in the next 12 to 18 months will be better. But I think in the short term, people are looking for that safe haven't investment. Okay. If people go to Eric McTaxasgold.com, what do you recommend? Is it that people buy gold coins? I mean, what do people typically want to do when they say, I like gold, I want to invest in gold.

Yeah. You know something in gold. What do you recommend? So I think you can, we just present all the options that are available. We focus. Bullion means anything minted in mass supply that is high purity, so 24-carat. So you want to focus on things that have the highest weight, highest purity, and easily liquid anywhere in the world.

That's going to be bullying coins and bars. Coins is like sort of a loaded term because there's coins that have numismatic value that are well above the spot price of gold, and they could cost you a lot. I would say for an investor coming in or someone, you should load up on bullion. Get the most value for your dollar. That's what we focus on. That's why we've built such an incredible reputation, thousands of reviews. We've sold over $2 billion in gold and silver because we really focus on the items that get the person the most value for your dollar. That's how you're going to win. That's how people today that bought for me five years ago have doubled. Some have even closely tripled their portfolios. So I think it's important to focus

on bullying coins and bars. But ultimately, we're going to present all the different coins and bar options that are available and the investor is going to decide what's better for them. A lot of people today are buying mostly bullion bars, but we do sell, we do sell a lot of coins too. And a lot of silver. Yeah, my new book, Silver is a new oil I dive into. There's a few hundred reasons that I lay out in the book that Silver, I think, is going to be the super cycle commodity in the future. But if you just think about where we're going, just all the technology, all the, I mean, the government alone, the U.S. government last year bought $400 million in silver. They bought $100 million in gold. This is for industrial use. They're using it for drones,

technology, all these things. There's so many uses that I lay out my book. And silver is still sitting at, you know, $32, $33 an ounce. It's a bargain right now. So, yeah. So I think, gold and silver, the two that I really, you know, focus on if you're coming in for your first time. Okay. So, folks, if you go to Eric Metaxusgold.com, you can also get silver. Correct. Texas, gold.com. The website is Ericmetaxusgold.com. Check it out. Colin Plum, thank you. Thank you, Eric. Appreciate it. There's been a national focus on eating only the healthiest of foods, and that's great news for balance of nature. Their method of producing a vibrant nutritional supplement is second to none. while so many others use chemicals and additives, balance of nature is made solely from whole food ingredients,

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800-858-0-263 to grab this exclusive deal. That's Mypillow.com. promo code Eric or call 800-858-0-263. promo code Eric. Since I'm in Greece or on a boat or something today, I thought we should rerun, you know, one of the best ofs of the program. What can we run? I thought, wait a minute.

I just had a brilliant Socrates in the city conversation with John West of the Discovery Institute. Anything by John West and the Discovery Institute is worth checking out. So here's my conversation from Socrates in the city with John West. Charles Darwin was unavoidably racist. I mean, in the classic sense of racist. This is not meant merely as a pejorative, although it certainly is a pejorative. But, I mean, he was a racist, a racialist who did not view the races as equal and who saw the darker races as, according to his lights, unavoidably inferior to the lighter races. So that's Charles Darwin.

That is true. We start there. That is true. Now, scientific racism, actually, there were evolutionary thinkers before Darwin. And so there was, you know, there was a little bit of a longer story. but Darwin's theory was the one that really glommed on, and so it's the most important. One more caveat, though, because people who are watching

or who hear our conversation, a common refrain on the other side as well, will Darwin oppose slavery? Well, that's true. He did. His wife, who was a fairly devout Unitarian, not a Christian, came from a family that were, you know, believed in the abolition of slavery.

Of course, Darwin was writing decades after the work of William Wilberforce and others, so it was not fashionable to support slavery, so I'm not knocking that, but anyone who thinks that Darwin was, you know, leading the charge for abolition, that's ridiculous. He was, but he did oppose slavery. So he wasn't, you know, on categories of racist, there were people worse than Darwin. Having said that, his theory, he thought he had found scientific justification to explain why racism is true, basically. And that was tremendously influential on American scientists, and we'll unpack about it. But that was, that idea was then it was tremendously influential in a bad way.

Welcome to Socrates in the studio. We are in Seattle at the Rainier Club. Just last night, we had a Socrates in the city event with a wonderful crowd with John West as my guest. And now we have a Socrates in the studio event here in Seattle with John. West, but no audience, at least no audience here. There is an audience out there. John West, welcome. Thank you for having me again, a double header. Yeah, we've done a few of these in Seattle now, and you're a lifelong Seattleite. Is that a word, or is it pronounced satellite? Yeah, it's pronounced Seattleite. But technically, I grew up outside of the big city, so I wouldn't

consider myself a Seattle. But you're from this neck of the world. I am. Okay. I had never into this neck of the wood, before we get into the subject of our conversation, which is a documentary film called Human Zoos, which is at least fascinating. I just want to ask you about Seattle. So you did grow up in this neck of the woods. I had never, I'd never been here until, I guess, 26 years ago, my wife and I came for a visit of my sister-in-law and brother-in-law and lived up in Bellingham. And I was struck by the number of, like, cost. And I was struck by, like, coffee shops with clever names with they all had clever names you know and I do can you think of a clever coffee shop name or does it all just you're so sick of it you don't I'm sick of it

and I actually hate to admit that I tend to drink tea not coffee yeah but I'm from it publicly but the I came up at the time I was I felt challenged to come up with a clever coffee shop name and I think I came up with the most objectively the most clever coffee shop name. No one could top this. And it's in two parts. And I'd like to share them with you. You ready? Okay. Coffee shop named two parts. So I'll say the first one. I'll pause. Then I'll say the second part. Okay. Here it is. Bean me up. Biscotti. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much. Yeah, I don't think anybody can top that. I don't know. I really think that was a Rima word of

knowledge. But we're here to talk about something that is so fascinating, but let me ask you to frame it. What is Human Zoos the documentary and what was your involvement in making Human Zoos the documentary film? Human Zoos tells the largely untold story that most people don't know about of the history of scientific racism, specifically in America, and a particular part of it where we would put people, indigenous peoples, from Africa, from Asia, South America, on public display so that people could gawk at them, often in sometimes behind fences, and in fact, at least one dramatic case in a zoo in a cage, and often they were offered as lower stages of evolutions or missing links between humans and apes. So that's how they were portrayed by scientists. Yeah, this is before the Darwinian evolutionists realized that racism was bad. Yeah, interesting.

Okay. So when did the film come out and where did it come out? Yeah. So the first cuts of it came out at the end of 2018. And it was shown in some film festivals. Then it was shown in some place in 2019 that got on the large Catholic network EWTN on, I think, the NRB network. It was screened actually in the world's largest African American History Museum in Detroit, among other places. And then in 2020, 20, actually 2019, 2020, it got on

YouTube finally after it had been screened on cable and in live audiences. And what was your role in making the film? I was chief bottle washer. I basically wrote it and directed it. I, So other than the people that we hired to actually film it and do a special. So, yes, you are the writer and director of the film. It was a pretty low budget. You're allowed to admit that, you know, because it's true. You're the writer. You wrote it.

I did. And directed it, which is what I thought. So the full title is human zoos, or is there a subtitle? I think there is a subtitle. But, I mean, the main thing is human zoos, but it's about untold history of scientific racism or something. Right. That was added because also on DVD and Blu-ray, even, you know, for you. urging people do those things anymore.

So we added a subtitle for that. But the main thing is human zoos. Human zoos, okay, so this is a documentary film that you were the principal architect of it. Yep. And when it went on YouTube, is it still available on YouTube? It is. Okay.

How many people roughly have seen it by now? About 4.4 million. And all of that is pretty much organic promotion from YouTube. We did virtually no advertising on it. And it's kind of the interesting. Because you might think so, 2020, it was on YouTube for about a year, not maybe 100,000 views, which doesn't add. But then around February, March, so this is before George Floyd, this is before a lot of the other things that happened that year. YouTube, for some reason, known only to its algorithms began to push it like millions of times.

And I still don't know to this day why they did that. And they kept pushing it and kept pushing it. And then it sort of went down. This is an example of... the normally nefarious YouTube being less than nefarious. This is, it's a wonderful thing because what you talk about in the film, and obviously I want to get into that, it's just undeniably shocking.

It's just shocking. It's fascinating because it's part of a history that has been, no pun intended, whitewashed. We basically said, we, we, we don't want to talk about that. That's embarrassing. It is more than embarrassing. It's horrifying. it is a very black mark in the story of science.

Let's be honest. And I think that part of what Discovery Institute, where your senior fellow has been just doing an inestimable service is in pointing out the limits of science, when science and where science has gone dramatically wrong, you know, as a warning to us. Like, be careful. science is human beings and human beings can get it wrong.

And this story of human zoos is it's the classic case. This is what made it controversial because, you know, people know that there's a history of racism in America. But we've kind of glossed over and certainly the scientists have glossed over the role that science played. And it wasn't just a marginal role that they were culturally racist already. I'm sure some of that was true. but there was a really tight connection between the scientific claims being made and the racist claims being made. So this wasn't just tangential that you had. Well, I want to unpack that because it's key.

In other words, it's not just, oh, they were racist. Their racism followed logically, inevitably, from their scientific views. It's not that you have scientists who happen to be racist. you have scientists whose scientific views are unavoidably racist, and that's what you deal with in the film. And that it provided this scientific justification that actually further pushed racism. Of course. Of course. So let's, I want to talk about that.

But before we talk about that, I want to find out or ask you how you came to make the film, what was, what preceded this? What got you interested in making a film about the subject? So I had a long-term interest. I wrote a book a number of years ago called Darwin Day in America. That was sort of a history of social Darwinism in America. And so the scientific racism was a small part of that book. And so I've been interested in how the abuse of science has led to things that we really should be questioning. And that's one reason we should have an open debate over scientific claims is because when you don't, bad things happen.

Another filmmaker actually who was told me about this case, which we can get into later, that the most shocking case at a New York Zoo, the Bronx Zoo, where someone actually was put in a cage. A human being. Yes, a human being. We're in the monkey house and put on display. And his name was Odabanga, and we can go into that. And he had been planning to do a documentary on that, but could never get it off the ground. So I knew about it in the back of my mind from my friend.

And then years later, I had the chance to be able, we had some donors and things who were interested in, you know, exploring the impact of social Darwinism. And so I thought, well, you know, this would be a good time to delve into this some more and to maybe even do a documentary on it. Okay. I think I wasn't going to start here, but it seems to me, and I've talked about this because I wrote my book, Is Atheism Dead? I speak about these things publicly, and it's, you know, come to my attention. It's just unavoidable that strict Darwinism is unavoidably, inescapably racist because the thesis is that there's no such thing as we're made in the image of God. equal in the image of God. Now, there's the Bible account says that every race of humanity is equal in the eyes of God and is equal, period.

We're all made in God's image, period, case closed, we're human beings. But if you don't believe in the biblical version, if you believe in Darwinian evolution, you would say, well, no, there's a continuum. And on that continuum, some races are unavoidably more evolved than us. others. Therefore, we have scientific, quote unquote, reasons to believe that some races are superior to other races and that some races are closer to apes than other races. I mean, that is an unbelievably damning thing to say, to conclude, to accept. So when you made the film Human Zoos, what you're doing is you're kind of looking back to the time before the scientific

establishment and the Darwinists realized like, uh-oh, this is not going to look good for us, that they were still thinking, this is just what is, this is what's true, and they didn't have any compunction about being openly racist. That's true. I want to say one thing. I mean, I'm not claiming that Darwinism is the only thought of racism. There were, even though I completely agree with you that the Bible is very clear on human equality, sadly, there have been many Christians, even apart from science, who tried to claim that, you know, races were separately created and they got, I mean, they twisted the Bible and did not follow it. And so there were, there are other founts of racism. Nonetheless, this scientific gloss on racism, I think, was really critical in pushing for some very vile things. And your point is right. In Darwin's view, We're not the human beings are not the epitome of something that God, we're not his masterwork,

you know, planned beforehand by God. We're the accidental product of this blind process of survival of the fittest. Now, when you get down to the brass tax, this is how it works out. Darm pointed out that natural selection or survival of the fittest works differently on different human populations because you have the accidental variations, but then it's your environment. that determines what helps you survive. And so Darwin was very explicit in his book, The Descent of Man, which is one of his follow-up books

on the origin of species, where he said, we have good reasons to believe that natural selection is going to act differently on different varieties of humans. And so as he put it explicitly in that book, we should expect races should have significantly different capacities in all sorts of things, including mental capacities. because natural selection isn't going to operate the same way on every human group. Because if you're in a hunter-gatherer society and need to do other things for survival in, say, a niche in Africa,

the things that natural selection is going to program for you is different than if you're in Iceland or something else. Now, if you have the Christian view, it doesn't really matter because underlying the same human race was created by God for the same reason. So, you know, you should expect equality. But in a Darwinian view, Darwinian view, Darwin was very explicit on this. You should expect dramatic differences. And that's what he actually said in the descent of man. But, well, I guess the distinction I want to make, though, is that the biblical account says you are either a human being or you are not, period, case closed. Yes.

The Darwinian view says there is no such thing actually as a human being. We are all in process. and therefore some human beings will be more closely allied to apes and monkeys than other human beings so that there really is no such thing as there's maybe the Darwinians would say this group is more evolved than others but they don't even make a distinction so there it seems to me and where we're going to go you know to get back to the film human zoos but that the assertion really is that some of these people that we would say are people, they would say, well, they're not quite people.

They're subhuman. Maybe they're not apes, but they are on the continuum between apes and the northern white races. No, that's very true. But the additional point, I'll come back to that, but the additional point I just wanted to stress is that even if you don't follow that continuum, in Darwin's view, you, all of our capacities are due to these blind chance variations acted on by survival of the fittest. And so if you have all sorts of different human groups, natural selection is invariably going to act

differently on those groups and give them different traits. And that's why Darn thought it was perfectly logical. In fact, that was what his theory predicted, that you would have human race, different races of humans who had dramatically different capabilities. His theory predicts that. But you were right that in the meta story is we started out subhuman and then, so we gradually evolved. And so then, well, different varieties of humans, where do they fit in that story? And Darwin was also very clear on that. The sense of man, he talks about how, in his view, the break basically between apes and humans, where did that come from?

It was it with blacks. Aborigines in Australia and African blacks. that they were the closest humans to apes. In Darwin, he was very explicit, and his followers were even more on that. So he had a friend, scientists, one of the most noted Darwinian scientists in Germany, Ernst Heckel. They corresponded a lot.

Ernst He was known for a lot of things. He fraudulently created some embryo diagrams that were false, but he also had a diagram that appeared in countless textbooks of human evolution, and you start with these ape-like creatures, And then you end up with these Teutonic nails. And in the middle, where's the break? It's an African-looking creature and then the first human.

And Heckel's point there was that the gap between the highest Teutonic male and the lowest human was larger than the gap between the lowest human and the highest ape. Okay. One headline from what you just said strikes me that Darwin, Charles Darwin was unavoidable. irmeadably racist. I mean, in the classic sense of racist, this is not meant merely as a pejorative, although it certainly is a pejorative. But, I mean, he was a racist, a racialist who did not view the races as equal and who saw the darker races as, according to his lights, unavoidably inferior to the lighter races. So that's Charles Darwin. That is true.

We start there. That is true. Now, scientific racism, actually, there were evolutionary thinkers before Darwin, and so there was, you know, there is a little bit of a longer story, but Darwin's theory was the one that really glommed on, so it's the most important. One more caveat, though, because people who are watching or who hear our conversation, a common refrain on the other side as well, will Darwin oppose slavery? Well, that's true.

He did. His wife, who was a fairly devout Unitarian, not a Christian, came from a family that were, you know, believe in the abolition of slavery. Of course, Darwin was writing decades after the work of William Wilber for us and others, so it was not fashionable to support slavery. So I'm not knocking that, but anyone who thinks that Darwin was, you know, leading the charge for abolition, that's ridiculous. But he did oppose slavery. So he wasn't, you know, on categories of racist, there were people worse than Darwin. Having said that, his theory, he thought he had found scientific justification to explain why racism is true, basically. And that was tremendously influential on American scientists,

and we'll talk, unpack about it. But that was, that idea was then, it was tremendously influential in a bad way. Well, I mean, it's just fascinating to me because at my alma mater, Yale University, they changed the name of my residential college. It was John C. Calhoun College. And they changed it because Calhoun was a racist. But he was only a racist. But he was only a racist the way everyone around him was a racist. He didn't have a unique theory supporting racism. In other words, if you're going to tear down a statue of John Calhoun, it seems to me that tearing down a statue of Charles Darwin would have to proceed that. But Darwin somehow, because he has this stature among enlightened progressives, he escapes that. But it's interesting to me, just to look at it, as we're

looking at it. Now, what you just said about, you know, to get back to the film, Human Zoos, uh, the, the human beings that were put in the zoos were always a black human beings, right? We, they didn't, they didn't say, well, here, here's a Norwegian. I mean, they basically, there were non-lawed, making their case that there's a continuum, that there's evolution, we're showing you evolution. And here is an example of something. that is not quite on the level of we white people who have put him in the zoo. So it's, it's disturbing. And what makes it further disturbing to me is that other than this film, human zoos, it's pretty much wiped away. We don't, we don't talk about it, which is one of the

reasons I want to talk to you about it, because I said, this is, this is a big piece of our scientific history. Yeah. So just to be clear, just to clarify to make sure that people know, they didn't call them human zoos at the time, and many of these were displays at world fairs or other things where they brought in indigenous people. And some of it was, well, let's understand their culture. But actually, if you actually look at how they were portrayed, like at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904,

where they brought in thousands of people, not just blacks, but people from Asia, from South America. They set them up in these villages, sometimes behind fences where people could sort of poke at them, and they actually, they advocate and describe them in many cases, both from Africa and actually from some from the Philippines, that they were evolutionary missing wings. Wait a minute.

At the 1904 World's Fair. In St. Louis. In St. Louis. Yes. So the World's Fair, it's not a zoo. These are not cages. These are displays. But in 1904 at the World's Fair, these human beings are described as missing

links. In other words, as not human beings, but as transitional forms between apes and human beings. They imported thousands of people, so from Asia, Africa, South America, put them in these villages, put fences around them so you can sort of look in, and then newspaper stories and things put by anthropologists. We're wearing your hoop skirt, carrying your parasol. Not that we would wear hoops skirts, but the point is that... Yeah, there are pictures actually of people doing that. That early Edwardian people would go to visit these enclosures.

I mean, it's horrifying. But the fact that you're saying that they were actually labeled as links. At least some of them were. And it gets even worse. So as part of this, they brought in scientists to study these people. So in the deep bowels of one of the fair building, they would do testing, not just IQ testing, but testing for pain and other things of these people to try to determine just how much lower were they than white.

It was even worse than that. There was anthropologists at the Smithsonian, Els Berlitschka, who his career was gathering brains from people so that he could show higher and lower evolved people. And so he went to the fair hoping that some of the people would die there so that he could then harvest their brains, which they did. And he actually, even now, actually just within last year, this has been a scandal that the Washington Post finally wrote about, because he had a collection of hundreds of brains, often got not with really permission of people, to try to show that they were, you know,

evolutionary backward. And he stored that they're still stored in a facility, non-public facility in the Smithsonian, in these vats. And so, I mean, there has a deep history here, not just the displays were the public part of it, But the way that they, you know, engaged in testing on people, the way they harvested brains to try to, and then put some of those brains on display. Because of my Bonhofer book, I'm aware of the Nazi doctors having precisely this disturbing view and behaving toward Jews and others whom they considered inferior in precisely this horrifying way. way. I mean, I want to leap to Otto Bengay because that is the classic case. It's in the

film, in the film, Jim and Zoos. But tell the story of Otto. Underbaga. So, Otobanga was Congolese. At the time, he would be called a pygmy because he was short. Today, we don't really use that language as much. But so he was a young man from Africa who he was brought along with other Africans first for the 1904 World's Fair to be put on display. Then he was allowed to go back to Africa, but then he was brought back by a guy named Samuel Werner, who was a one-time Presbyterian pastor, but by this time he was sort of a scientist.

He was hunting people for the, you know, to put on display first in the World's Fair. Then he brought him back to New York City. And he, with other specimens, he brought in. chimpanzees, other things, because he would try to sell things to museums. I mean, he sort of considered Odebega, considered him his friend. And so, you know, it's a really strange relationship. But the bottom line is that Samuel Werner, who brought him back, didn't know what to do with him. And so basically made a financial arrangement.

I won't say sold him, but made a financial arrangement with the Bronx Zoo, which was run by people like at Columbia University, Henry Fairfield Oswald, one of the nation's top paleontologists. He was also involved with the Bronx Zoo to put Odabanga on display with a monkey in the monkey house in a cage. What year was this? 1906, September. Okay, so this is the classic case. I mean, you make the case in human zoos a little bit more obliquely, but this is not at all oblique. This is putting a human being, a dark-skinned human being from Africa in a cage with a monkey, with an animal, with an animal.

In the monkey house, not just in a cage, it was in the primate house for monkeys. So that is as horrifying a thing to talk about as anything. You talk about the dehumanization of a human being. You talk about the objectification of your fellow man. And this is the classic case. So this is 1906, Otto Bengay, a Congolese man treated in this way. What happened to Otto Bengay? So over 200,000 people flop to this exhibit.

It was the toast of the town, the toast of places like, and we should talk about the New York Times role in promoting. this. He was, on some of the days, he was actually, when he was let out of the cage, he was actually people chased him down. I mean, people were not nice to him. So it was a pretty awful thing. Now, there were a few people who stood up against it. The first was a white Baptist minister, a Reverend Stuart MacArthur, and he said, this is wrong. This is treating, demeaning someone, and by even doing, you're demeaning yourself by demeaning him. And I want to point that out because it was a white minister.

He knew that it was wrong. But then there were a number of black clergy, particularly James Gordon, who was part of an orphanage and who stood up. And James Gordon made the point that we blacks are human beings just like white and that neither whites or blacks came from the lower animals and that, you know, this is promoting this Darwinian view that degrades all human beings, and he made a very eloquent argument against this, and that blacks are people who have souls just like whites.

What's very interesting is how the intelligentsia of the time in New York City reacted, the secular intelligentsia, particularly the New York Times. And we actually quote, I quote, in the, you know, people can hear what the New York Times actually said. The New York Times basically sniffed its nose and actually attacked James. going for how dare you you know everyone accepts darwin's theory now it's like the multiplication table