Neo-Nazism Is Entering Evangelical Spaces — and Who's Fighting Back | Ep. 38

Last week at a church conference in Ogden, Utah, a well-known neo-Nazi publishing house called Analope Hill had a vendor table selling and promoting their books in literature. Some of the materials displayed included the essential speeches of Adolf Hitler. An SS memoir, I was going to make a joke right there that I just thought you can't interrupt a monologue to make a joke about the collected works of Adolf Hitler, light airy summer reading. An SS memoir called Burning Souls, a handout recommending websites selling the Turner Diaries, which are kind of some of the most well-known neo-Nazi literature in the country. And a novel by an American neo-Nazi that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing alongside swastika jewelry and a book endorsing a pagan Nazi religion called Cosmotheism. They're a great follow on X. It's actually true. They started hitting me on X in anticipation of the Shiden. No, they existed. We wrote the monologue and you hear a word. And then suddenly the word starts appearing everywhere. It's like, oh, Cosmotheism. This is a really interesting concept. And then you're being attacked online by Cosmotheism. So thanks, guys. Cosmotheism worships nature and places the Aryan race at the top of the natural order. The organizers named their conference "Uni Ironically the War for Normal." The conference was organized through a publishing outlet called New Crescendom Press and hosted by two reform pastors of a church there in Utah. And the Antelope Hill story first broke. One of those pastors, I asked before how to say this guy's name. I hate to mispronounce the names. Brian Sove. Sove. Sove. Sove, Brian Sove. Said in response that he, quote, "didn't have a problem with Antelope Hill's publications. The other pastor, Eric Khan, posted a musical montage video celebrating white boys' summer to his ex-account that same evening featuring images of a Seag Heil, a Hitler, the Hitler Youth, the founder of America's Nazi Party and an elderly SS officer confirming that Adolf Hitler was, quote, "100% his hero." Doug Wilson, one of the most prominent Christian nationalists in the country, asked, "Why did Antelope Hill think there was a healthy market for their books at this conference? Why indeed?" One of the more prominent and vocal defenders of the conference and of Antelope Hill is Joel Weben, another pastor and founder of a media company called New Christian Right. This week Weben posted a photo of himself with Tucker Carlson and his friend JD Hall, with whom Weben traveled to Tucker Studio for Hall's 100 Minute episode, discussing with Tucker, quote, "the corrupting lie of Christian Zionism." In the interview with Tucker, Hall called Israel, quote, "a desert war cult." It's catchy. Said Muslims are, quote, "quite fond of Jesus and blamed Christian Muslim tension on, quote, Jewish talking points on the news." Yesterday Weben's own organization, New Christian Right, posted about Israel, quote, "they killed the prophets, they killed the Lord Jesus. Paul calls them the enemies of all mankind. Now they're trying to sabotage a peace deal in the Middle East. Why do we partner with them?" Weben himself posted in reply to his own tweet, "What fellowship does light have with darkness?" The same week that, say his name again? Brian Sude. Sude. Yeah, so many times. We should have spelled it that way in the prompter. The same week that Brian Sudevay's publishing house hosted a conference where Anilopil felt welcome enough to sell Hitler speeches. Weben was sitting in Tucker's studio with JD Hall, who was making a case that Christian should reconsider their relationship with the Jews and cozy up to Islam instead. These aren't unrelated events, and this didn't come out of nowhere. It's the visible surface of a year's long infiltration of neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideology into Christian nationalist spaces driven by specific teachers amplified by a tight-knit internet community and enabled by an institutional cowardice that names Will Kleftism, but refuses to name the wolves in its own flank. But not everyone is afraid to name the wolves. I have three people here with me who've been doing just that. John Harris is the host of conversations that matter. He's been tracking this pipeline for years. Will Spencer, a former Manispher influencer, who went to the very edge of the online neo-Nazi world walked away and now writes about his radicalization and how, or about how this radicalization captures particularly young men. And for the first time publicly, Ethan Hansen, who has been anonymously exposing these people on X for years under the excellent account Hitler hated Christ and who has decided to make himself known. For some reason, lack of good sense or decency chose the Chair of Ruporant Show as the venue. You do meticulous research, debunking memes, disinformation, historical revisionism, online neo-Nazi's, used to deceive and recruit, and we're very glad that you're here, not in an anonymous way, but as yourself, thanks for being with us. We'll get right into it. I mean, the very first thing is, if a guy decides he's going to show his face for the first time after doing the kind of work that you've been doing on the internet, "Hey, I want to know why," like what on earth got into you, what it came over you, and why now? Yeah, well, I mean, now is when I got invited on the Jeremy Boring Show. Man, we should have invited John. I had never got an invite for a running an anonymous Hitler Twitter account to play out to Nashville and film something. So thanks for having me, by the way. Thank you for being here. Really, I mean, we've just seen an acceleration in the last year or so, maybe year and a half, especially. A lot of guys that are calling themselves pastors or are prominent figures in this sort of new anti-Jewish, purportedly Christian right. And it's sort of getting to the point now, in my opinion, where it's not something that is going to fizzle out on its own. You need people that have spent a lot of time looking at these ideologies, know how to respond to them, are familiar with all of the different intricacies of the talking points. And I've been posting about this sort of thing for, you know, three or four years now, and quite a few years before that, having personal interactions with these type of guys in person and online. And so when I made my account, my intention was to just be a resource for information on the third-right information regarding Christianity and Nazism and their incompatibility. And it seemed like when I first made my account, there was a lot of hunger for that. People were hearing a lot of conflicting information around that topic, and my account took off. So I never expected it to get to the point that I would be people interested in my personal opinion about anything beyond just sharing historical references and things like that. But I think as some of this has become a little bit more mainstream, it's become necessary to speak out against it more vocally. And now I guess put my face on it too. So, well, I appreciate you doing that. You knew when you chose Hitler Hades Christ, like you were picking a fight. And I think that one of the biggest problems that we have in the country really right now is the anonymity of the internet. It provides real opportunities. So I think of what you've been doing as sort of like writing under Pupilius and writing the Federalist papers. I keep been doing really important work. And sometimes important work needs to be done within an MAD and in particular in the beginning. But ultimately, if we don't put our face to our work, we just make it possible for all this bot infiltration that's happening, all the sort of manufactured social proof that's happening. So I always appreciate any time. Somebody kind of steps out from behind their anonymous handle and decides to put their face on what they say. Let's everybody know that they're a real person. I think it couldn't be more important. So thanks for choosing this as the platform to do it. Thanks for having me. John, we're going to use a lot of language today and I think it's probably good, especially for an audience that probably isn't familiar with all the terms. There are concepts that are kind of common to those of us who are engaging with these ideas. But in Norm America, while it's starting to encounter some of these things, really, I don't think it's taken any sort of deep dive. Even Christian nationalism. Tell us what it is. Still man it for us. What is the case for Christian nationalism? Well, it's all as book written by Stephen Wolf, who's a friend of mine. It's also, I think, a broad concept that has been used as a catch all for Christians who want to be involved in politics and they conceive of the nation or the empire, whatever you want to conceive America as identifying as Christian. And so they want Christian laws, Christian identity, Christian mores, Christian principles in the government. And when this started becoming a topic because of media focusing on it and trying to get everyone to be scared about it, the people who used it positively started talking about things like blasphemy laws from the past or Sabbath laws or we're going to ban pornography. These were a lot of the discussions you saw online. The discussion has moved more into focus on Israel and the Jewish people more broadly. There's of course also still people talking about our identity as Americans. What does American heritage mean? So there's a lot of discussions going on. But I think there has been a shift in the conversation, at least on the internet. And there's people who are essentially neo-Nazi in their ideology, like the Stone Choir podcast, who will use that term of themselves. And there's also guys who are more paleo-conservative like Stephen Wolf, who like to use the term. So because it's so broadly used, it's hard to define and need to ask someone what they mean by it if they claim it for themselves, I think. Stone Choir played a big part in your journey. Tell us a little bit about what they do and that aspect of Christian nationalism and maybe how it's distinct from, say, the paleo-conservative argument. Yeah. I come at this sort of from an interesting direction. I spent 20 years in the new age, a little bit like Lucas Gage, who you spoke with last week. And so in that world, Holocaust denialism isn't framed in racial, ethnic terms. It's more as if we've been lied to about history and create this parasitic grid over the world. if you could think of things that way. And so that was the world that I was discipled in. And so then I find my way into reform Christianity. I find the Stone Quire podcast. And they're approaching that issue and they're approaching the issues of Jewish influence. And I've been discipled by the internet. I'm arrogant, I'm vain, I'm proud. And I think because I grew up in a Jewish family, I can handle these topics. And I was wrong. I was very wrong. So a pastor intervened. I posted the podcast. It was a six hour podcast, long as podcast. You were doing that. Me interviewing them. Yeah. So I posted the podcast and that day, that morning, actually, the night before a pastor named Joel Ellis. He saw that, you know, our friends. I would have been attending his church for a while. I wasn't a member yet. But he stayed up all night, laid up late into the night praying over what to do and woke up early praying what to do and decided to intervene in my life. And so he emailed me that morning. And he sent screenshots of a telegram that the one of the hosts of the coast of Stone Quire, Cory Moller had. And the screenshots that he sent me showed me who it was I had really been talking to. The one that really stands out in my mind said, "We will win down here and then we will make the enemies of God's suffer." And as soon as I saw that, I realized I'm in way over my head. And I had not done my research and I had failed. So I posted a repentance tweet for hosting the podcast, pulled it immediately, said, "This is entirely on me. It's my own failure of research. I failed to do my due diligence." And I expected that would be the end of it. But it wasn't. There was an outpouring of rage at me, completely unexpected. I had no idea. I just a short repentance tweet. I just pulled it. Didn't say anything about them really. I said, "A repent for associating with views that I found reprehensible." Something like that. I didn't want to be associated with that. I didn't say they should be deplatformed or anything like that. But the tweet did 250,000 views in the vitriol and the hatred that I received was really shocking to me. And I felt that after that point, that it was as if I had been in a very dark cave and something very dark had something very large had brushed up against me in the dark. And I realized I had touched something that was much bigger than I realized. And so it was after that that I found the book, "Black Sun" by Nicholas Goodrich Clark, which I recommend. You can get the Kindle Edition free for 50 pages. And I read that and I realized what it was I had contacted. And that sent me on the journey that's led me here today. - Is the Christian nationalism movement primarily online? - I would say so. There's certainly politicians who have used the label, a good friend of mine, Dusty Divers, has used that label in Oklahoma on the state level. And of course, there's people like, I think Lauren Boebar, at a Marjorie Taylor Green, who have used the term. But it's more popular online than it seems to be an actual campaign for political office. - When politicians have invoked it, do you think that they're invoking it? Sort of for the sound or for the actual substance. Christian nationalism, I mean, it has a, one can imagine that it's really just a way of saying that I'm one of the cool kids, right? I'm one of the cool kids and I'm Christian. But then it also has substance of meaning. Do you think that they're invoking that? - It's hard to say with all of them, I know Dusty the best and I think he has very pure motives and he looks at it as I just want the country to return to a state of normalcy where things were more Christian. It seems like they're less Christian now. And he's hoping that voters see it that way too. So return to moral standards that were slackening, especially under Biden. So I do think there's a way this has been used that people with good motives have tried to use it. There's obviously people I mentioned the Stone Choir podcast before who see it as something that's adjacent to or in league with other ideas like national socialism. So again, the problem is it is somewhat of a catch all term and it's developing and this is one of the issues with the internet is these terms come into being and they take a life of their own and they go places that maybe even the people who created them never intended them to go. - Is the, do you consider yourself today a Christian nationalist? - I've never used the label of myself. - Okay. - So people have attributed that to me. I'm just a Christian, I'm an American, I'm a conservative, I've called myself a paleocompan, before so I read Chronicles magazine and that kind of stuff, Paul Godfried. I mean, those are the guys that I like to read. But I saw some hope in the Christian national as thing, especially initially that there were guys who were talking about restoring Christian values and Christian understandings and Christian identity to their local municipalities on the state level and the federal national level. And that was something to be hopeful for. Now I don't know that it's kind of trailed off. I don't know if it has the electoral power that people who were positive about it were hoping it would have. But I don't think it's going away necessarily. There's new terms obviously being used. New Christian right is a term that got coined for people that didn't necessarily want the label Christian nationalist. They were part of the new Christian right. Now the Joel Weapons kind of taken that for his own brand. So that term has been sort of used now for something very specific. So it's very hard on the internet to determine what these words necessarily mean in the moment. 'Cause once I define it tomorrow, it might take on a new life. Yeah, I mean, it is funny how singular personalities online can lay claim to broadly applicable terms. Like the way Nick Quintas did with America first, right? You've got a term that has always had meaning and it kind of has a story history in our country. But certainly in 2015, 2016 was not being invoked by say Donald Trump to possess the totality of that meaning. But then Quintas grabs it and now it's his. I always thought there would be funny in the middle of the Christus King controversy. If I started a podcast and just called it Christus King, just to piss everyone off. But also to do the same thing. To take this term that's being used for purposes that I didn't think were appropriate. And claim the kind of ownership over it so that you could imbue it with a particular meaning. I felt like that'd be kind of taking a page out of their playbook. But if I could just say with something that's clarified for everyone, maybe you would want the discussion to go this direction, I don't know. But I think, oh, we have no plan. We have no plan. That's very encouraging. So you guys aren't dispensationalists then. You don't have a chart, there's no plan. It's all kind of out there. I essentially have no eschatology. OK, all right. So I think that there's a lot of post-liberal ideas that are gaining momentum. And post-liberal ideas, that's a wide box. When you open that box up, there could be bad things or it could be good things. So I don't like liberalism. I see myself as more pre-modern, pre-liberal. So I guess you could say post-liberal. I want to challenge some of the liberal assumptions. But there's also people who want to challenge what they see as liberal assumptions. And they want to go in some of the directions that Ethan and Will have been talking about. And so Christian nationalism has borne the weight of just being Christians, I think, who want to be post-liberal. They want to conceive of nations as real organic entities and not just ideas. They want to look at identity as something that's more fulfilling and holistic than just an idea that you have in your head. So challenging the proposition nation idea has been a big part of this. And I think you believe that America is not a proposition nation. I challenge it. Yeah, I don't-- OK, well, I guess we're going here. So I think that nations-- and this is a biblical view from my estimation-- are formed organically as families move and they populate and they form folkways over time. So you see that in Genesis 11, Genesis 10, starting in Genesis 10. And then we see in the nation of Israel there's an example given of specific laws that benefit them. And there's an integration process into a covenant. And there are people that can be part of it, but they have to come in at a certain scale. It's not like the mass immigration we've had. And they have to identify with the people. The best example is probably Ruth. Your people will be my people, your god, my god. So that's the integration. It's not strictly reducible to ideas. There's ideas that are part of this. But it's a real tangible, very organic reality. It's like a family. And so that's how I look at nations. And I think America's an empire with multiple nations. In what way is the history of America though not propositional? Well, that's kind of an interesting way to word the question. I would probably push back and say, in what way is it propositional? Because I think-- Well, for the history of this country, the concept of America as being credal or propositional has always been part of our founding narrative. So we're not a country without a proposition. We're not a country without a creed. There are many, many countries, probably the vast majority of countries that have ever existed have not been formed around a proposition or a creed. Some have, I think Israel probably more than any other than America. I mean, in this case, both modern and historic Israel were founded around an idea, not exclusively an idea, but certainly were founded around an idea. In a way that, say, Britain was not founded around an idea. Britain was founded really around a geography. And then there were wars of who would control that geography. America unique, exceptional. And it's a-- the fact of its being exceptional, the fact of it being creed, the fact of it being an experiment. The American experiment is not a term of modernity or a term of the 20th century. That's part of how America has seen itself, part of America's identity. from the very beginning, that is part of what's unique about this country. It's also why, on a continent the size of Europe, we have been able for the majority of the history of the country to be a state instead of, well, you know, if you travel as far as anyone of you traveled to be here today in Europe, you're traveling over entire historic languages, historic currencies, historic militaries that war against one another for centuries, we were able to be a cohesive nation for the last 250 years, in part because we were bound by something more than, well, geography wasn't enough to describe it. Ancestry wasn't enough to describe it because America's always had large amounts of migration. I think that if we want to talk about migration since the 1960s, you have some real problems there that I think have been incredibly deleterious to the health of the nation, you know, you, if you put too much blue dye into a cup of red water, the water is going to turn purple in them blue. You put a drop every now and then the water stays red. Basically, the red overwhelms the blue. That's what it means to integrate. That's what it means to have a melting pot society. So if you're saying we overwhelm the safeguards that would make it possible for us to bring in people and have them become American, of course, those are all, I don't think you'd find any pushback from any major conservative on the idea that that's been deleterious to the country. But if you say that America isn't credulous or isn't propositional, then I think that you're essentially saying that America is completely other than it has ever identified itself because it has always identified itself along these lines as being a place where a particular, that drew a particular set of people from around the world who shared a particular desire to take part in this experiment, a particular desire to make their own way to be free from the kind of government overreach that existed in almost every other place on Earth. There's a reason that America has done so well at producing modernity. Part of it is that we have a system of largely pre-interprise, largely not a caste system, not a system in which you're trapped in your tax bracket. You can have upward mobility. You can make something of yourself here in a way just because of this strictly because of the economic system that you probably couldn't have in other places. But that's not the only reason. We also drew to this country because of the proposition, because of the creed, because of the experiment. We drew from around the world the kind of people who wanted to take those kinds of risks, who wanted to try to stand on their own, who wanted to see what they were capable of becoming. Whereas I don't think that some of the bad ideas that we had at the very beginning of the 21st century, it turns out man doesn't buy in large long for freedom. That's not a complete answer for what motivates people around the world. But it is what motivated the majority of people who crossed oceans to be here over the last 250 years. That's not. I mean, there is a reason that the migration all moved one direction and people were being drawn to this family. And I would say that is the idea. That is the the ethos of the country, not just the sort of ethnic background of the country, which was always very diverse. I'm talking to her, Jack. Real fast. I did just mention there in what you just said, that it's a family. So a family is largely. You have natural portions of your family that are when you have kids and they're born into your family. But other people can be adopted into your family. And your family has principles. I don't think that America is purely racial, ethnic, cultural, anything like that, because people aren't any of those things alone. And so I think maybe in John can kind of clarify that a little bit, but it was interesting you used the word family there because it seemed to be like what you were inferring a second ago, but you seem to think maybe John that that was outside of. Well, you also talk about particularity. So the declaration of independence itself, which I don't. I think America predates that because you had settlers coming hundreds of years before that document, but even in that document, the majority of the document is about rights as British subjects being abrogated by the king essentially. So you get to the constitution and it's for ourselves in our prosperity. You have these various states who have their own identities, their own religious tests, their own particularities. And I think of George Washington's farewell address where he tries to say to this diverse country, diverse because there's four British pathways here, folkways, that hey, you all have the same language, the same customs, the same religion, so you're Americans, you need to stick together. He doesn't talk about you all have the same ideas about freedom or equality or market participation, which I grant you. I think everything you said is true as far as the immigration has come here because there's opportunity. We had a lot of frontier, natural resources, and we did because of a very particular ethos that developed over hundreds of years in Great Britain, especially. We had a common law system that I think allowed people to exercise even their free market advantages. And so yeah, I think these things can be. They're not necessarily in disagreement, but to sort of get back on. Well, I'm only challenging the idea that we're not a proposition nation. I'm not challenging the idea that a nation is more than a proposition. Well, it's been so you mean by proposition nation. If America's reducible to an idea that you can just say I'm free, you know, but America is inseparable from the idea. Well, every family, every culture, every group has to have ideas. And I don't think that America is just one of many. I don't think that we're of a kind with every other nation. We have a very unique founding, and our founding was intellectual in a way that the founding of most nations has not been intellectual. It was an experiment. There was an idea at the. At the genesis of this country is also an idea. Well, what was the genesis in your mind? Well, the founding of the country is 250 years ago. And it was not a country before that. Okay, so that might be where. So I think 1607 is where it really starts. Tell me what? And then because that's when you have the first English settlers come to what was presently the United States. But they were English settlers. They were subject. They were subjects of the crown of Britain. So politically speaking, but culturally speaking, and the way that all the founders identified before they went to war with Great Britain was they were British subjects. And so they brought all of that with them into the formation of this new legal entity that they formed. So, and I did a documentary on this called the 1607 project. And we can keep talking about this if you want. But I think one of the things that's interesting about the discussion we're having is one of the knee jerk reactions I've seen and I'm not calling you a liberal, but I know that more liberal minded people make this is that if you define yourself as anything other than a proposition, it feels exclusive. It feels like you're being racist of some kind. You're saying a particular group and not other groups. And this has been the basis upon which people have gone after Christian nationalism and all the other things that we're going to probably talk about. But I do think I'm obviously sitting here. There are things that I find concerning. I see hints of 19th century progressivism and bio reductionism, racial essentialism, things that are brought in from other foreign countries like the neo-Nazi stuff is not sourced here. And those are things that I find very repulsive. There's also a lot of anti-biblical ideas floating around out there. And so I've made my stand on two things really that there's a political liability that is entering the Christian domain. And there's also a spiritual threat that's going on, especially in a rise in ecumenical thinking that hey, as long as these guys are like anti-Israel or anti-Jewish or something like that, we can get together under the banner of Christ as king. Like Joel Weven's conference is coming up. He's got people that one of his speakers thinks that there's a god in you and everyone has one and there no god is better than the other. And he's going to be speaking under the banner of Christ as king, which is a deeply theological statement. If Christ is truly king, then we have to submit to him. He owns us. And this is the Christ of the Bible is a particular person. And so if you do a conference in the majority of your speakers are, I mean, he's mapped his pastor. They're not even Protestant. And then there's some that have very dubious actions and professions and connections to things that are not Christian. Then what are you telling your audience? These are the people that know about Christ being king. Well, that's not Christianity. So I see that as a threat. Well, but that's because Christ is king. That's because Christ is king is a political statement. And not a religious statement. Christ is Lord is a religious statement. That's right. That's a confession of faith. I've actually argued this with some Catholic employees of mind. It probably wasn't the smartest thing to talk about at work. But I said, Christ is king. It's not a traditionally Christian statement. And he said, well, that's not true. I'm Catholic. We have lots of churches that are named Christ the king. And we have conferences. Christ the king. Well, I said, yeah, Christ the king is not what I'm saying. Christ is king is a political statement. Christ the king is a reference to Christ, who of course is king of kings and Lord of lords. I'm not saying that the idea that Christ is king is itself anathema to Christianity. Of course, it isn't. We believe that Christ is king. But the expression Christ is king as a political statement is not the same as a church being named Christ the king. It's a it is a distinct concept. Christ is Lord. Of course, Jesus is Lord. We can complete the sentence Christ is King of the Jews. Well, Christ is King of Kings. King Christ is King of the Jews as a statement by Pilate. Right, right. I mean, it's not a. That's not a. Well, it's for. The title that Jesus were. It's prophetic, though. He is the. He's gonna be seen on David's throne. I mean, this is sort of. That's the irony of it, I suppose. You know, Pharisees didn't like it. Right. But. Christ is King is the weaponization of Christianity in the public dialogue. It's pretty. It's pretty transparently that. And I wish everyone who said Christ's King had the courage to get on their livestream and also confess Christ is Lord and be held to that standard as opposed to the political standard they profess instead. That's right. Christ's King is the. Is. Of a kind with, you know, people shouting, "God is great in Arabic," like. True enough. True enough, but if you hear somebody shout it on a bus, you don't think, "Amen," that's not like the first thing that comes to your mind. You know he's right. The theme of Matthew, though, is the kingship of Christ. Like that is a theme of that gospel. So, I mean, there is truth in that, but the question is always, what Christ, and in what sense is he King? And if we water it down to just a political message, that means we're all anti-Israeli. Well, but I'm saying that, you know, it's not watering it down. It's. It is its exclusive purpose as it is currently invoked. The invocation today of Christ is King in public discourse is not to advance Matthew's perspective on Christianity claims. The Messiah claims Christ. And that's nothing to do with Christ sitting on the throne of David. It's a political statement that's meant to be exclusionary. And it's a political statement that's both meant to exclude the Jews. You could say it's meant to exclude everyone who isn't Christian, but I don't actually think that that's what it's meant to do to your point. It's only meant to exclude the Jews. And it's meant to undermine the idea of the American founding. It's meant to. It's a rejection of liberalism per se of the entire idea of self-government or democratic government. It's an invocation of the idea of essentially a sort of integralist view that the church should run the government in a monarchy-all way. And those are the two ways that it's actually being invoked. It's not being invoked in any sort of. - Maybe from the big heavy headers. - Yeah. - Like make Foyntas and Candace Owen. - Of course, a lot of people. And this is why I asked about the politicians in the term Christian nationalism. A lot of people end up using terms that they don't know what the quantitative meaning of the term is. And so, you know, I've said this before, not every Catholic is an integralist. In fact, most Catholics have never heard the term Catholic integralism. And not every Catholic who uses the term Catholic integralist is a Catholic integralist. It's a term that becomes popular in the vernacular. And it seems to mean that you think Catholicism is integral to life. And so, of course, you go, "Well, yeah, I'm one of those. I take my Catholicism very seriously." I was like, "Well, yeah, but you're associating yourself now with an intellectual and philosophical movement." - It operates like Black Lives Matter. - Exactly. - And that's been deployed with, it's okay to be white and some other scenarios where the point is to get you to do a dialogue kind of like you just did, which will be collapsed. - Which will be collapsed. - And you know that. To say, like, "Oh, Jeremy Boring denies it Christ is King." - He says when you say Christ is King, if you think Christ is King, that means that you deny America or something, right? But you're right. It's the same way of just like, "Well, I don't support Black Lives Matter. Do you think Black Lives don't matter?" - That's right. - You know, and for people that are honest, they can tell that's happening. But the internet spaces that we all live in, and swimming are not honest spaces. And you're not dealing with honest actors. You're dealing with people who are broadly a very low character that will say things to get clicks online, to get any eyeballs that they can, whether they are domestic or foreign. And so, part of it is trying to figure out how to walk that line. I went to a, I attended a protest of a drag show for Kids in Dallas. This was years and years ago. And ultimately ended up with me being docks by Antifa at the time, actually. And at this protest, there were a whole bunch of people there. They were justifiably very angry at this happening. It was a drag show for Kids in a gay bar in Dallas. And just unbelievably deprived. And a lot of young guys are outside this event and they're protesting. And they're shouting, "Christ is King, Christ is King." And a race like, "You know, I'm bored with this." And then that same group of guys starts shouting, "Sexual slurs and cursing very loudly." And all these things. And I remember very distinctly, there was this one there, there with me with her child. She was a pro-life advocate. And she immediately turned on a dime and had to leave with her child. Because these guys that were shouting, "Christ is King," had become so consumed with their justifiable frustration and anger at the situation that they began just being depraved themselves. It sort of consumed them. And so, you know, what you're saying is correct about what that phrase is associated with. But the trick is to get you to go, "Oh, you know, you don't think Christ is King." That's the game. The beauty for me though is that I've had enough success in my life that I don't have to have anymore. That's right. (laughing) And that I'm sound enough in my faith in Christ that I don't need the internet to confirm it. You don't need the validation. I need the validation. And I operate from the actual perspective that most people, in the land of the norm, most people who are engaging with our content online, except when we find ourselves getting incredibly niche, of course, are only superficially aware of these problems. And if we don't give them language with which to immunize themselves against these tricks when the tricks present themselves, then they'll fall into them. - Sure. - It is not good to fall into, yes, you could say it's a trap to actually describe the problem of Christ as King in the vernacular. It's also a problem to invoke the term today in the way that they want you to, because you are associating yourself now ideologically with a group of people with whom you don't actually share and ideology. You're now you're aligning with Joel Weben and the people at his conference who believe that, will you check out Living In Us or whatever it is that you describe. - Right. - And you lose your ability to actually discern what's taking place. - And you disarm the trap by explaining how it works. - You disarm a trap. - Right. - I remember, and people did that with BL in back in the day. And now if you ask somebody, do you support Black Lives Matter? A lot more people now than maybe five, six years ago will recognize that what you're asking is supporting a movement and a cause rather than just, do you think Black Lives Matter, you know? - Of course. - Right. - So it takes time, but you have to dismantle it and show exactly. - This one's very difficult though, because when people accuse you of not believing the Christ is King or whatever when you talk about these things, it hits you in the place that's most important to you, which is your identity as a believer. I mean, if you believe in Christ, you don't like to hear that you don't believe in Christ. It's one of the very few slanders on the internet that actually has purchase, even for those of us who have battle scars from being online. - Well, they're very sophisticated pieces of verbal weaponry that are launched through the new social media battlefield. They're like honed for that. Do you think about war, civil war, war two, the developed pieces of artillery and ammunition that are suitable for that battlefield? For the social media battlefield, terms like Black Lives Matter, Christ is King, they're very finely honed that can travel very quickly over that battlefield. And so for Black Lives Matter, I ask at the time, well, what do you mean by Black? What is a Black life? And what does it mean to matter? 'Cause for example, they didn't seem too concerned about the rate of Black abortions, for example. So is that counted as a Black life that sort of takes apart the ammunition in mid-air? The same with Christ is King. Well, which Christ are you talking about? The one who died on the cross for our sins, that one? What do you mean by is? I don't mean to be like Bill Clinton here, like what is the definition of is? But it is kind of important. You're talking about a present state in what sense. And then King, is this a political thing you're talking about, or are we having a theological discussion? And as soon as you begin taking apart the pieces of it, it falls apart in mid-air. That's the strategy that I think works anyway. - So why is this movement that we're discussing getting so much purchase online? Is it only the excesses of liberalism and a rejection of them? Is it foreign propaganda? Is it an emerging political movement and people are falling into it for a long tribal lines about what's driving it? - It's all the above, I think. I mean, I've seen a lot of people saying it is a reaction to the excesses of liberalism. And I think there is some truth to that. But in the reading that I've done, and since my experience a couple years ago, I decided that it wasn't simply enough to not be wrong, I wanted to be right. So I started reading a lot, and I went on a journey of reading. And so I mentioned I started with a book, Black Sun, by Nicholas Goodrich Clark, that led me to a book called, "Warrant for Genocide," which is about the protocols of the elders of Zion by Norman Cohn. That led me to a book called, "The Plot," which is like a graphic novel version about the history of the protocols, which we can get into. That led me to "Rumor of the Jews" by Stephen Erich Brown, or which led me to "Kill Old Normies" by Angela Nagel. And finally, it came from something awful by Dale Baron, which is an excellent, excellent book. And through over this whole journey, I've been trying to understand these ideas that seem to emerge in the post-war era, they've traveled over the past 70 years into our dialogue today, and they've had a distinct trajectory. And so I think when people say it's a reaction to liberalism, I think there is some truth of that, perhaps, priming, but I think there's also been a strand running. through, it's been the American right. I don't think the politics themselves are right leaning, but it has been within the American right. That's there ready and willing and waiting to be like, "Hey, you're asking questions. Guess what? We have all the answers for you." And so these young men driven by their disillusionment, bitterness, vivallessness, in many cases, churchlessness fall into this morass of bad ideas that has been waiting for them for a very long time. And it's been documented, but I think nothing's really been done about it on the political right, perhaps out of fear, cowardice, opportunism, all of the above. But it's certainly not because of the excesses of the political left. The ideas have already been there waiting. I think a lot of it's ignorant, I'll be honest. I think there is some fear and cowardice especially going on now that these ideas have percolated and people are a little bit more familiar with some of these extremely dissident stuff that's out there than they were a few years ago. But I find that a huge percentage of people in real life, like, not just internet weirdo people, but people who you find and speak to, they're in conservative spaces in real life. A lot of them have no idea what to do with this sort of thing. If someone comes up and hits you with some long-dietribe dispensationalism and the skill field Bible and how the Jews have destroyed American Christianity, your average GOP voter, your average conservative person might go to church every single Sunday, very solid Christian, has no idea what to do with that. Some of it takes time and you have to explain to people where this stuff comes from, how to refute it. You have to get out the skill field Bible and look at this is what it actually says, and a lot of that's not happening. People are left with, "Well, this guy's saying stuff that makes sense if I accept his framing. I don't even have an alternative framing. What am I going to pick?" That's why your work is amazing. Just to compliment you. I appreciate it so much as that you've been doing the real dirty work of that for a long time. Thank you. I wrote a piece called Red Pills Without Roots for American Reformer, maybe two years ago now. There's three basic things. If I remember correctly that I highlight in that, and I still think this is true. Having observed from a ministerial perspective, I let a college career group, and actually I was involved in the conversion of a guy back in 2016 who was coming from the alt-right. The three things were number one, there is a de-rassination element to this. I've criticized some of this because even me being on this show, I'm getting all kinds of hate. I'm sure online right now because I've colored outside the lines and I'm sitting with Jeremy Boring and he's with the daily wire. The daily wire is owned by Jews or whatever. There's a very heavy tribal element here and people find their sense of belonging and appreciation in these chat groups and things like that. Whereas I think of my belonging as rooted in organic things, my family, my region, my religion. I think that that has become primary for some people with the out of it on the online. The second element is their leaders have betrayed them. There's a sense that we've been lied to. We've been betrayed 2020, really brought that out. A movement that gives you a transgressive ability and permission, I think is very attractive. We're going to go kick back to the guys who betrayed you. They don't like Nazis. Let's talk about that. They seem to like Israel a lot. Let's really trash Israel. I think there's an appeal there. Then thirdly, from the perspective of a lot of younger people and they're not half wrong about this, the outlook for them is not the same as it was for their parents and grandparents economically and even socially. A revolutionary movement that says, "Hey, you're a king. You get some muscles on you and you're going to have. " We're going to take back everything that's been stolen. That's a very attractive idea. Those three things, I think, are the animate what we're talking about. Some of the things you just said aren't true. The economic outlook for Gen Z is great. I mean, from their process. That's right. They're being told that their economic outlook is terrible and they're choosing, and I say choosing because I grant them some agency, not to say that they aren't actually being victimized because they are, but they're ultimately choosing to believe it. They live in the greatest time of economic opportunity that's ever existed in all of human history. Every generation is always told that they're not going to have the economic opportunity that their fathers had. You don't have to go back in time. I'm not exaggerating this. If you go 10 years into the past, just the other day, every magazine, every newspaper, every newscast was about how the millennials were being left behind. They weren't going to get to live the American dream. They were going to be the first generation in American history who didn't have it as well as their parents had had it. You fast forward 10 years later, they're the richest generation in all of human history. They jumped past Gen X. They jumped past the boomers at the same age. The same thing will be true of Gen Z. If we don't burn down the system in the meantime, they're going to be the most prosperous generation that's ever existed. They have the most opportunity in front of them right now that's ever existed. The voices that are feeding them, this feeling of economic despair, aren't doing so accidentally. That's a well-organized, well-funded political operation driving division in this country, which is one of the reasons that I think that it's funny that a lot of the young people who are accepting this argument that their country is bad or see them frame themselves as being like, you know, the we're going to take it back. We're the true Americans. America was never about these bad ideas. America is us. We are real America. And it's like, well, you are real Americans. There's no question about that. The thing that you're rejecting is also real America. And you're rejecting it you think because of its actual failures, when in reality, you're being used by people who want to destroy the thing that you claim to love and they're using you as instruments to do it. Now, that's not to say that every criticism that Gen Z has of the country is ill-founded. No, obviously, the most effective lies are lies that are rooted in truth. We destroyed these kids' lives in 2020. We raised an entire generation of particularly white, particularly male Americans to be the villains in every story that we told them about the country and the world in which they live. We locked them behind computers for years at a time. We've allowed social media companies to intentionally develop free from any regulation. The most addictive probably substance that's ever lived, which is the kind of social validation and dopamine that comes from social media. We've anonymized it and allowed it to become the actual breeding, not the actual, the actual battlefield for all of these foreign influence operations and domestic political operations, but primarily, I think, foreign influence operations. So we have felt, and in doing so, we also made it impossible for young men to meet young women, which is, you know, not going to be consequence free because as it turns out, young men have particular drives that can't be satisfied. Well, I guess they can be satisfied between it behind a screen in a superficial sense, but over time, the superficiality of that kind of satisfaction becomes itself unsatisfying because man is more than meat. Those are very real criticisms. Those are the actual criticisms that are being exploited to generate an artificial revolutionary fervor. That's the thing that really concerns me. It's actually why we haven't gotten to this question yet, but now it's probably as good a time as any. Why is it that the Jews in particular are the subject of the higher of all of these sort of diverse dissident movements? The thing that ultimately winds up uniting every faction of the dissident right is deep, skepticism. I think that's probably being very generous in my language, deep, deep skepticism of the Jews. Well, for one thing, I mean, this has been pointed out. I think Doug Wilson has made this point before too, about, you know, he believes that it's jealousy. And I think there's definitely something to that. So if you, if you are somebody who's feeling different, derasinated or in the case of being permanently online, if you are self-derasinated, you're sort of choosing to pretend like you have a different social group than who's actually around you. And then you see this group of successful people who are very, have a lot of social cohesion and take care of their families and seem to consistently be winning in all these different fields and ways when you feel like you're losing. It becomes very easy to just point to them as the root of all problems. And it's not a new phenomenon. Sure, but just once I'd like somebody to blame the Mormons, you know, they don't have to be called Mormons anymore. I try to blame the LDS. They have close-knit families, social cohesion. They succeeded everything they do. They're super, super nice. They may be coming down the pipe. Yeah, I guess so. Well, there's a couple, there's a couple different answers that that I could give just from my reading based on the Stug Wilson. It's another great answer about the not the innate spiritual knowledge that the sacrifice is coming from there. Like if the Christian story is true, then the sacrifice is coming from the Jews from that corner. And if it's not Jesus, then it must be them more broadly. Hopefully, I'm doing justice to what he talked about. I think it was in the introduction to his interview with Tucker Carlson of all people, actually. But historically, this is great because there's a book called "Rue about the Jews" by Stephen Eric Bronner. He's a professor at Rutgers. the book. books I've listed, by the way, are written by people on the political left. Because anti-symmetism on the right is not something that the right has largely talked about. The only book that I know about is In Search of Anti-Semitism by William F. Buckley. Not that there haven't been other articles and discussions that I'm talking about, but I'm talking about books. So Stephen Eric Bronner talks about it this way that it's kind of like the scapegoating function working at different levels of resolution. So when we were sort of in the medieval ages, if something was going wrong in the village, you know, there's an illness or something like that, the crop style you go and you blame the Jews over there in the ghetto. And so you go take your pitchforks and you go and conduct the pogrom against the Jews over there, they're the scapegoat. When you get to the level of nationalism, if something's going wrong within the nation, it must be some outside force that's coming in and polluting your nation. This is kind of like the Nazi view, like they were, the Jews were a polluting force in their pure area and blood and they needed to be exterminated, so coming from the outside. And now as we go to the level of globalism, who's the new scapegoat? Well, it's Israel because we now are working on a global level. So people looking for a scapegoat that locks their world to you and to place, they need to transcend that enemy to fixate on someone to blame things on. And it's that psychological function but operating at different levels of resolution throughout history. Well, and it's a convenient way to escape the reality of the gospel by blaming it on the other side. That's true. You don't have to deal with your own sin if you can blame it on the Jews. The Jews killed Christ and that's a fundamentally true statement than I killed Christ. Yeah, you're cooked. That's right. And all the implications of the gospel and your culture are newt. And when all the implications of the gospel and your culture get newt, you end up with Nazi Germany, you end up with who knows what? Yeah, this is part of the fundamental problem with Christ's king as a political slogan Christ's king. Because what you're ultimately saying is Christ is our guy and you killed our guy. Right. No, no, no, you killed your guy. Right. That's right. You know, are you less responsible than the Jews? Are you less responsible than the Jews? Everybody likes to be the hero in their own story. Like definitely, you know, if you had been in Germany in the early 1940s, you would have hidden in Frank Dupin your attic. And definitely if you had been like in the late 18 or early 1860s in the South, you would have been smuggled in black people north of the Mason Dixon line, you know, etc, etc, etc. And I believe you would, you would have been like saying a free barabas or whatever if you'd been standing outside pilots, or pilots, palis and Jerusalem. You're definitely one of the guys who would have been on Jesus's side, not like all those other losers like Peter. Right. You would have been one guy. You would have been John. Right. The only guy who showed up for him, you know, women, right? It's just John plus you and some women and some women. I had a conversation with a guy one time about this and he was using his proof text to pilot washing his hands. Of saying that the Jews had a higher accountability. And I said, do you think that he successfully washed his hands of that? Like when you read that, do you read, oh, yeah, I'm pilot. I'm the guy that said, and says, it's not me. It's not me. It's not me, but it's sorted. Like that's when the theological angle of this becomes so real is how easy it is to undermine the biblical truth of the gospel subtly. Right. And most of the people that push this stuff don't have that conversation on that level. Joe Weben will have that conversation on that level. They'll part you don't have that conversation. Cory Meller won't have that conversation on that level. They will not do it. You won't find it. If I could take from the just general evangelical perspective of someone who's gone from more of a normal familiar view to a view of making the Jews almost like a substitute for original sin or something. Because I've seen this happen. I had a teacher in my college career group, I lead years ago, who was a teacher at the school that the Buffalo shooter went to. And if you read the manifesto for the Buffalo shooter that was 2022, he says all the Jews should go to hell. And I asked her about what happened? How did they get to this place? Well, they were writing essays him and his friends for a long time, blaming the Jews, talking about killing minorities and so forth, and the teachers didn't want to do anything. They didn't want to fight with parents. And so this thing snowballed and it ended up with unfortunately 10 people dead. And that's like a very extreme example of it. But what was he believing? If you read the manifesto or the manifesto from a few weeks ago, the one in California, New Zealand, Buffalo, you should read these all. They're hard to find online if you need them. Send me a message on Twitter. Grock tells you for some reason if you just say, hey, find it for me. But it seems like what happened in 2020 was there was a need for an explanation. Though the world went crazy. This doesn't make any sense. People were going into Q and on or whatever they called it. I had some people I know that went that direction, but they were like trying to grasp an explanation that made sense of what happened. And there were a number of people that, and I know because I know some of them personally, who ended up starting to go down these internet channels where they'd say, hey, have you ever looked at something like Hollywood or pornography? Have you seen, they're juicing overrepresented in these particular fields? Maybe there's a conspiracy. Maybe they're working together to destabilize the culture. And then that's right when October 7th happened. And so there's all these images coming out of Gaza that looks like a hellscape. And so people who are buying into this, well, the Jews might be behind a lot of the things that went wrong in 2020 and general subversion of culture. Now they're looking at, wow, that confirms it. Look what they just did to Gaza. And of course, they're getting their news from like, herets and like, left-wing publications on what happened. Yeah. But I think that's what's created the perfect storm here for a lot of people to now be right for, you know what, we've been subverted. I can't trust any of my leaders. I can't trust my pastor. They're actually rethinking biblical passages and how to interpret biblical passages, which we can get into if you want. But I think that's what's going on. And it starts kind of subtly, right? Because it starts with things like, I guess we've mentioned Joel Webman before. So just off the top of my head, just some things he said, things like liberalism was crafted by Jews to undermine white civilization or white people. Or he said that JFK was the last president who said no to Israel. Joel Webman has posted fake news articles written by fake people that do not exist with Jewish sounding last names to get people to be mad at Jews. Well, though, then that takes the cake is the 440 Hertz that the music tone, the tone of C or whatever. I don't know. I can't say. Okay. Calvin Robinson had a whole thing on this. And Joel is nodding along and agreeing. Oh, yeah. And I posted online. I was just like, I refuse to believe this is real. This has to be AI. But yeah, they were talking about how the end of the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds got together to help everyone get ready for war for Israel by changing A to make it higher. So everyone would be aggravated and ready to go to war. And I'm like, what? Can I share something quickly about that? In the New Age world, that's a whole big thing. Like 440 versus 432 Hertz, but the bad guys were the Nazis. So as soon as I saw Joel and Calvin Robinson talking about them, it's the Jews. I was like, what's going on? Anyway, I'm sorry. I didn't meet a threat. Well, I'm a musician. So it hurts me, especially. I play 440 Hertz every Sunday at church, not because I want people to get ready for war for Israel, but yeah, I mean, I didn't think so at least. Maybe that's what's happening. They got to you. They got the call and you got the call. It's definitely for the rest of our lives, we're going to be dealing with the fact that the most arrogant people in the world, governments, decided to do an experiment in the experiment was shut down the earth. What if we just shut down the entire world? And then at a certain date in the future, we'll turn it back on and see what happens. That's not the kind of thing that is done consequence-free. I mean, it literally touched the majority of human beings on the planet and particularly the youngest, it completely broke them in a psychological way at the most formative moments of their lives, created exacerbated problems that already existed, fatherlessness and social media and loneliness, but you essentially locked people with those problems. And in some parts of the world, the most left-leaning parts of the world in particular, that prison lasted for years. I mean, you're talking about a prison that lasted 30 months in some cases for people. That's not something that we will not live to see the end of the consequences that flow from that. From that, from people's brains. Completely broke people's brains. Yeah, I think what's been really interesting for me to watch is the mainstreaming of conspiracy culture into now mainstream culture. It used to be the conspiracy world was a fringe thing that you had to go kind of looking for. And that was almost like there was a firewall. But then after COVID with institutional collapse, suddenly conspiracy thinking itself became mainstream thinking where the news isn't the news anymore, who did what went and where, and said, "Is what could this possibly mean? What is it saying behind the scenes?" And so conspiracy culture flooded into primarily the podcast world. But I don't think that they know is that the foundations of American conspiracy culture go back to the early 1990s with Bill Cooper and his book Behold a Pale Horse and then following after him a man named David Ike. These were the four fathers, essentially, of Alex Jones and Ian Terrell. But if you go back and you read Behold a Pale Horse, which is kind of at the foundations of American conspiracy culture, the last chapter of that book is a complete reprint of the protocols of the Elder's Zion. That's at the very foundations. And David Ike as well. And so as conspiracy culture moves into the mainstream, it brings with it this. a fictitious global conspiracy that the Jews are doing to enact world domination. And so that's the operating system that conspiracy culture is running on. Conspiracy culture is now mainstream culture. So I think that explains at least some of the fixation on the Jews. Everything is being controlled by some puppet group behind the scenes who is the most likely candidate historically, well, it's always been the Jews, right? And it never comes packaged with any sort of proposed solutions, real estate. It comes with the claim there are no political solutions. Yeah, that's right. It comes with the assertion that there's nothing that you can do that's going to solve this problem. Your enemies hate you and they want you and your family dead. And there's no political solution. What do you expect people to do when they hear that? Ironically, out of all the people that have pointed this out, there's an old clip from Nick Fuentes where he talks about this and he talks about it in relation to trans shooters. And he talks about how transgender shooters are told the exact same thing from the left. He begins them a lot of times talking about that. He says, "T trans shooters are told all day long. The right ones to kill you, do the walk for our lives. There's a transgender side." And you turn around and say, "That's a white guy's." And you say, "There's a white genocide. They want all your family's dead. There's no political solution." What do you expect them to do? You don't give them any sort of actionable alternative when you feed them this stuff. And so the people that are putting that out there without any sort of positive messaging for where to channel whatever frustration they're feeling, are they're generating people like the Buffalo shooter realistically. And we could say, "Oh, nobody individually is at fault for that," which is true other than the shooter. But this entire milieu is creating that environment for these guys. When you say no one is at fault, an individual basis, like I can't assert, that's right. There's legal culpability. And I am fairly liberal. I'm fairly liberal in a classical sense. I'm not of the left. I'm certainly of the right in the American tradition of being of the right. But I believe in human freedom. I believe it as a theological concept. I believe it as a governing concept. I believe that people should be free. And at the end of the day, that's what liberalism ultimately espouses. And so it's very important to me on a legal level that we not ascribe legal culpability to people who don't have it. So people on the right sometimes say, "Consent doesn't equal moral in reference to sex." I think that's true. But you have to have a legal standard somewhere. And consent is the only meaningful legal standard that could actually be applied across the free country. And so consent matters. Consent has massive import, legal. And of course, it doesn't define the barriers of what's moral. And morality itself doesn't define the barriers of what's righteous, which is a whole other, like level of the conversation that nobody ever wants to engage in. But similarly with this idea of legal culpability versus moral culpability, sometimes in radicalization, people who are openly engaged in a project intended to radicalize people do have moral culpability when those people become radicalized. And when they agree that they don't have legal culpability, because that would be an impossible standard that would only be abused by governments and would only be used as a way to clamp down on expression of ideas that are true. Of course, we know that that's a fact. But I don't want to like, I don't think that it emigrates their moral culpability, just that we can't put you in jail for it and shouldn't put you in jail for it. People are engaged in an actual project right now to radicalize the generation of Americans toward the destruction of our country as we know it. So that we can build a more perfect union, not so that we can see a better nation emerge as a result of it. It's ultimately so that we can see a nation emerge with it that's very broadly left wing, except on social issues. And one of the Tucker has actually talked about, if you go watch Tucker's monologue on Nicholas Maduro, in which he essentially defends Nicholas Maduro in the weeks leading up to the Trump administration removing Maduro from Venezuela. He says, yeah, he's a communist, but there's no gay marriage there. Abortion is illegal there. That really is the-- Which is the same exact argument for the idea that the Third Reich was some sort of Christian paradise. That's right. It's like, thousands, tens of thousands, millions of innocent people being murdered. They don't have cabaret shows in Berlin anymore. That's right. And the perspective on it is skewed somewhat because a lot of people, their moral framing has been created by leftists to only understand immorality through the lens of what's leftist. They can't see sin for sin anymore. A lot of people, at least in the spaces like we're talking about. I see John Non-Major. If I could steal man just for a second, maybe, could chew on this. I think the idea with-- like, Russell Kirk said about neo-Nazis, actually he was saying about old Nazis, paleo-Nazis, real Nazis. They were neo at the time. They were new and he said it. He said that they were revolutionaries and that they were a destructive force, essentially, which is very interesting. And he said they preyed upon the loneliness of the masses. And these were YMAR Republic conditions, essentially, that Nazism found in In-Road-N. And one of the things I keep hearing is that we are in YMAR Republic conditions. This is just as bad. And usually the first thing brought up is sexual debauchery. There's no guidelines. There's no rules. And so the idea is that liberalism-- or I should say it this way-- liberal arrangements have been abused. Because I agree with you, as I don't know if we would miss each other. But I think there are liberal arrangements. For example, religious toleration created a pan-protestant project instead of like a church of England or a-- you know, so we have liberal arrangements. But liberalism seems to think that these freedom solutions apply everywhere. Like, the libertarian obviously goes to, we should just have prostitution and everything should be legal. And obviously, there are limits to these things. So are we in a situation like the YMAR Republic? I'll throw it out there, I guess. Maybe we could talk about it. Where you need these very hard totalitarian measures to come in and create order because it's chaos. I think that's what's being appealed to. And maybe with people whose lives are chaotic, they want order. Well, I will say, like, we escape the roaring 20s without becoming a totalitarian despot state. That's right. So you're correct in identifying-- If the R was in the sit-nose. Well, I'm not prepped for that, it's good. But no, you have a good point on that. But I guess I'll push back and say to you that we need that to overcome that. I don't think any of these systems work without mass regeneration of the population. Amen. So what happens? If you have a country like America, any country, and you have almost no people that are regenerating Christians, there's no system you can put in place that is going to make that country operate in a way that reflects Christ and promotes righteousness in the population. And of course, totalitarianism has the potential for a kind of social conservatism. It turns out when you give someone absolute authority, anything they don't like doesn't happen. And so, yes, sometimes the totalitarian won't like certain things that you also don't like. And you see tinges of this with even like the policies in Nazi Germany on abortion law. Right. People say, "Oh, they banned abortion." They banned abortion in very specific ways, such that it only affects Aryans that can't get abortions. Right. But you've got letters from Himmler writing internally about, "Hey, we need to alter some of these rules. We need to tweak these so that the polls can kill their kids." Because they're not basing it on a biblical foundation of morality, right? And that's what happens when you have reactionaries. That's what happens when you have slop populism. You can elevate anybody who is of a totalitarian, authoritarian personality. And once that guy gets in there, if he's a Neaching and Free Show, you're screwed. And you have no other alternatives to be able to save your country. And people don't think about that because all they can see and think about is America's why more? America's why more. How do we fix why more? And America is not why more. They've been told that. It's not a question of America. That's what I was saying. Right. I just want to draw a line of distinction that's kind of running through the conversation in a way. Like, it's one thing to talk about values within a sort of a secular or a non-religious context. But a big part of this conversation is what is proper thought, speech, and conduct for Christians. Amen. Right? And I don't hear that discussed enough. I can understand if the manosphere guys want to go in that direction, Neaching, right? They have their standard and they shouldn't go that way, but we'll let them go do that for a moment. But within a Christian male men's conduct, there are standards that you're accountable to. Right? Rejoice in all circumstances, suffering is redemptive. These are all core parts of the Christian faith. And I see men throwing them out. First I see big influencers like Joe Weben, for example, and plenty of others not talking about those regenerating affections transforming parts of the faith that make it so distinctive in all of world history. They throw that out because they prefer something that suits their political project, which has nothing to do with the trend. Again, as you said, regeneration in Christ. And so I think if we're going to be talking about Christian men, we should be talking about Christian standards for thought, speech, and conduct. And no one wants to have that conversation. Well, left doesn't want to have that conversation, and I get why. But the right should be excited to have that conversation because it seems to me that the right's adherence to principles, to transcendent principles that are higher than them, is what distinguishes the right from the right. the left, but I don't see that conversation happening, and it should be happening in a Christian space first and foremost. Yeah, well, there's a. The softening in evangelicalism, I say often, evangelicalism is an American religion. It's approximately a hundred years old. And like almost every religious tradition reflects the culture during which time it became ascended. So Catholicism is hierarchical and monarchial and even imperial, because it emerged in the Middle Ages. Like that is what it was. It reflected the culture from which it emerged. And the same is true now of evangelicalism in this country. Someone has accused me of saying, "You're saying Protestantism is only a hundred years old." No, I'm saying evangelicalism, as we understand it. It means you're evangelicalism. Yeah, it's a very American reaction to consider those things the same way. Yeah, that's right. But evangelicalism is efficient, it's loud, it's brash, it's sure of itself. It can be somewhat superficial because it's American. It's commodified. It's easy to export. It's all the things that America is in the 20s. It's visual. We don't build beautiful buildings because we hadn't been around long enough to build beautiful buildings. And because there is something beautiful about the very fact that we don't have to build a beautiful building in this country because you start your church in a strip mall and you move to the school cafeteria until you hit 110 people and then you move into the old Baptist church down the street because they moved into the new Baptist church. Like there is something amazing about even our churches in this country are built to grow and they're built to exceed their limitations. And yes, it's sad that we don't have beautiful thousand-year-old cathedrals that certainly elevate the spirit. I mean, that is a thing that we've lost. Those churches haven't grown though in 500 years, right? They have only gotten inferior and inferior and inferior of anything except tourists. Over time, you go to the most beautiful cathedrals in England, which is where my heart sores. I'm not an Anglican, but I'm like aspirationally Anglican. Like I wish I was Anglican and I wish that the Anglicans believed in Christ. Like because you go to the most beautiful Anglican cathedrals in the world, truly the most beautiful churches in the world and they speak English. It's everything I want and these women devote their lives to being custodians of these buildings. And if you ask them, if you try to talk to them about Jesus, they're like, truly, I've had this happen numerous times. They're like almost completely shocked. Oh, you believe in, oh, you believe in all of this? I just have devoted my entire life to caring for this building because the building itself is so beautiful and culturally important. So evangelicalism has this sort of American tenor and that's part of its charm and part of what's wrong with it. But as America has become softer, the evangelical church has become softer. It reflects the culture and the softening of the evangelical church, the feminizing of the evangelical church, even in the last 20 years, it has, has really accelerated. And it's no wonder that young men in particular don't find anything fulfilling about it. They don't believe that it's actually preparing them for the world that they're being born into. Right. So you mentioned the buildings, which is interesting. So in your monologue earlier, you spoke about a video that was shared by one of these guys at New Christian Press. Yeah. And in that same video that included all sorts of neo-Nazi imagery, there's an individual by the name of Jonathan Bodin, who was a Nietzschean self-professed, Nietzschean vitalist pseudo-pagan of sorts, right? died last ten years or whatever. And he talks about how the faith of old Christianity fit the Aryan mindset because it was all about these soaring cathedrals and becoming like God and like ascending to Godhood and like that was the part of Christianity that he liked as a Nietzschean. Yeah. But he's talking about how modern Christianity, and I think this is always what real Christianity has been, has a sort of meekness to it, right? And this strength through that, your strength comes from Christ, right? The opposite of the Nietzschean vitalist perspective. And he hated that, right? And so you see that not just in the architecture, but some of these ideological entities that are pouring into this stuff, lighted new Christian oppress with Eric Cahn and some of these other guys. And I don't know how much they even consciously know that that's happening, but it is. It's very funny how we all take our modern conceits and sort of apply them to people who's lived in the past. As a though they could have possibly thought about things the way that we think about them. If you go to Jerusalem, there's two Jerusalem's, really, two Christian Jerusalem's. There's evangelical Jerusalem, and there's historic Jerusalem. So you go to the church of the Holy SEPLICAR, right? And you see where everyone who's ever lived before America thinks that Jesus was crucified and resurrected. And then you go to like the Garden Tomb, which is where essentially where American evangelicals think that Jesus was resurrected, right? But you sort of understand it. If you can separate yourself from the tribal instinct, you know, I'm not Catholic, I'm not Eastern Orthodox, the church of the Holy SEPLICAR. To me, it feels dark and it smells funny and it doesn't feel, it doesn't connect me to the moment at all. But that's purely an aesthetic, that's purely an aesthetic statement. And it's an aesthetic that's rooted in my cultural experience. And so you can imagine that if you were a Christian in the 1400s or the 1500s, right? Your life was so different than ours. You only knew what you only found fulfillment in family and geographic community because there was no other kind of community that was even possible. You were probably illiterate. I mean, the printing press, put me a little bit before the printing press for this example. You smelled bad 100% of your life. You bathed annually against your will, right? Because it rained on you. Like your wife's tank. You weren't immune to the fact that everybody's tank. Everybody just sank. That was like one of the things you dealt with in your life. You never got to eat meat. It's hard for Americans to understand that European peasantry did not eat meat. That part of what drew people to this country when America happened, yes, economic freedom, but you could kill and eat an animal. The deer weren't owned by the crown. And people came over here and they became giants because suddenly for the first time in centuries, men came over here, hunted and ate meat and got all of that protein and all of that energy. It's a huge part of what drew what drew people to this continent. So it's hard for us to relate to them, but you can imagine that if you were a person like that, and then you walked into Canterbury Cathedral and you've never been in a two-story building, right? And here you have a building with the ceiling that seems to reach to the heaven's stonework that centuries has been being built across centuries, light pouring in through stained glass. Can you imagine what that feeling actually? You had to journey for days to get there. You didn't go there to church on Sunday. You made pilgrimage to get there. And your spirit would be lifted. Genesis says again, and again, lift up now thine eyes. Very literally, this place lifts up your countenance to heaven. What an unbelievable thing that the church provided to people through these unbelievable projects of art and artistry and architecture that gave them the opportunity to feel closer to God. I live in a world where seeing Jesus walk on water wouldn't even be all that cool because I saw a zod walk on water in Superman 2 when I was like five years old. We live in a time where miracles are commonplace. We have CGI and special effects. We've all seen a trillion movies. We have the combined knowledge and wisdom of all humanity available to us. If we can just get past the porn, it's right there in our pockets at every possible moment. Anything you want to know is instantaneously available to you. You don't smell bad. You're rarely hot. You remember every time you ever sweat any time in your life. And it was character building like for me. And I have stairs that move themselves. I can stand on the stairs and the stairs take me up three stories at the shopping mall where I can get anything that my heart could ever possibly desire for almost no amount of money. For me, I sit at the garden tomb and I see, oh, this is what it looked like. Maybe this isn't the tomb. Probably isn't the tomb actually where Christ was laid. But the tomb in which Christ was laid looked like this. You know, there was a tomb just like that in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and they destroyed it to build the cathedral because from their point of view, seeing a hole in a rock wouldn't lift your spirits. Even if it was the hole in the rock, you saw holes in rocks every day of your life. They actually tore down the tomb in which Jesus either was or at least the tomb in which they thought he was laid to build a church inside a church because that's the thing that would lift your spirits. But as a modern evangelical American, you actually want to get in touch with the thing that you don't get to experience the path you want to see the past. And so we're only having an aesthetic reaction in both instances, we're having an aesthetic reaction that in many ways is defined by our time. And we're describing to that aesthetic reaction our actual definition of like factual. truth. When in fact, probably both, I mean, I happen to think that God only recommends Himself and never recommends us. So I think like everything is basically the life of Brian. Like I think that the garden tomb isn't the tomb and the tomb that they tore down also isn't the tomb. And there's probably like a, a, you know, a grocery market right across from the church of the Holy Sepulchre that's actually built over the tomb where Christ was. Because I think God's just amused like that we have these centuries-long arguments over what was the actual hole in the actual rock. And he's like, it was never about the rock and it was never about the hole in the rock. And you guys are crazy. And I'll just be right here waiting if you ever decide lift up now. Now that I know is right. But I had the same experience at church. The Holy Sepulchre didn't move me except to your point, you go into the place where you can put your hand into the place in the rock where the where an actual cross was. Like you reach down in there and you can feel the contours of the hole and like, wow, that's square. That's where a piece of wood would have gone to hold an actual cross up. Was it the actual cross? Who knows? We'll never know. But there was actually a person probably more many more than one crucified in that spot. And that took me further than anything else around in the church. What we're talking about is enchantment. Maybe that's a weak term for it, but a sense of transcendence. That's right. You're small that God's big, that you live in a world that has all kinds of things you don't understand that perplex you and amaze you. And I think there are a lot of young people that are looking for that in healthy ways. We should highlight this. The fact that there's a lot of good things happening right now too. There are people who are coming back to Roger. I would say reenchantment. Reenchantment is not a bad thing. It's a good friend of mine, Jake Dell, who's a former Episcopal pastor. We're doing a documentary about that. But now he's in a congregational church. It's from the 1600s. And he talks about how young families from more Neo-Evangelical backgrounds are coming back to his church. And now listening to him's played on an organ, maybe for the first time. And this is something that they're attracted to because there's a deep sense of history and heritage with it. And there's also rich lyrics. And it lifts your spirits to a divine sense. And that's a really, really good thing that's happening. And we need to obviously encourage that. And I do wonder sometimes because I know the topic of our discussion is more kind of the negative things that are happening out there. To what extent Israel, the Jewish people, the old testament, this religion of 66 books all written by Jewish men, 12 disciples, Jewish men, a Jewish Messiah, right? A kingdom that you see all the passages from Genesis 12, all the way through Revelation leading up to the New Jerusalem. It's all Jewish coded as they say online. And there's a lot of Neopagans who are trying to capitalize on the anti-Jewish ideology that's out there by saying, "Look, your religion is Jewish. You're being enchanted by these Jewish things that aren't yours." And so there's Christians who are desperately trying to say, "Well, you know what? The most Jewish thing is that rejecting Christ. And so we have medieval Europe to enchant us. We have the Crusaders, we have these things." And to try to push back at that. But there is this sort of, I don't know if it's hard feelings or what, but like a resentment that this isn't really your story. And you need your own story and it's paganism or it's something else. And this is something we got to tap into as Christians who have people who follow our lead. We proclaim the gospel by grace through faith and the finished work of Christ alone. And then it's discipleship. It's so people can grow in knowledge of God to become more like Christ. And I think part of that is being amazed at who God is. And you see that in the pages of Scripture. And yeah, going to Jerusalem, I think, and Israel and seeing these sites and even other sites across the Middle Eastern world that are significant to Christians, this can be part of that discipleship and maturation process. I mean, I felt like when I went to Israel, the Bible came alive in ways it had it. You know, that like the sermon on the mount, I read it now and I visualize as the be attitudes are being read, I can see it. I can see him standing there. And having a location for that just means so much and it's so rich and it's so deep. And so I think there's something important about our obviously biblical history. And we should all obviously support that and see threats to it as a problem. Can I push on just a little bit? Please do so. So this is this is not about nothing you've said. It's just a question response. So one of the things that Christianity calls us to is to die to our families and our people if necessary. And this is this is not just a Jewish thing. Like obviously it's a even for mainland Chinese people, you know, who become Christians, they are sort of cut off from their own people, right? I think the term I spent time traveling through China. And so I know a lot of these new right guys talk about China as a monolithnic state. And we can certainly talk about the problems within China, if you like, but that'll be the side. But when a mainland Chinese person becomes a Christian, says, oh, are you eating potato now? The eating potato meaning like their stable carbohydrate is rice. It's our eating potato is a European thing, right? So there's a way you're cut off from your people. So the Christian faith calls people away from their people. At the same time, there's this tension of many people want you to rediscover their people. And so how do we how do we reconcile that tension? Like you have a say you have a all white Anglo-Saxon family and none of them are regenerate believers. And then you want to become a Christian, but they're all leftists. They're all liberals. But you still want to be Anglo-Saxon. Like how does that exactly work when your own people aren't the believers of perhaps their own faith or your a member of a, a, a, an ethnicity that has not traditionally been Christian? That, that that that tension is real, I think. Well, I have a friend who's from Iran and he lives that every day. When I went to Turkey, I think in American context too, though. Yeah. Well, I remember when I went to Turkey, though, I couldn't say missionary. I couldn't. They're very, and this was an Istanbul. So they're more tolerant there, but they're very hostile to Christians in ways that Israel's not and Western European countries aren't, which is a different concept for Americans to encounter. But when you meet someone from a communist country of the Middle East, that's their everyday life. They have a big commitment and identity shift that happens. And I would say I'm really grateful that I'm an American because I do have a rich heritage, a rich history to be proud of and to look to for guidance. If I don't have that, if someone doesn't have that, they have the scripture. And they also have the positive things from their background. And I think every background is going to have something positive. I mean, even if it's a language, it's inescapable. You have things you were raised with. So you're going to carry those things and you're going to now Christianize as much as possible your culture, your language, the terms you use. And that's the story of missionaries. That's the story of acts from Jerusalem to Judaism area to the ends of the earth. We're still in that ends of the earth phase. And God is achieving His plan on this earth, which started out with creating the world, choosing Abraham, people place a blessing. And then watching that blessing go to all the nations of the earth. There's people from every tribe tongue and nation. So that means that it doesn't matter what country you're from. You have a place in this story. But I think you're making a slightly different point, which is America has been culturally Christian since the very beginning. Cultural Christianity and biblical Christianity are not the same thing. Cultural Christianity doesn't save you. But cultural Christianity comes with a lot of great benefits. What you're saying is that to the extent that young people want to get back in touch with their American heritage, their blood and soil, nationalism, their history, the family that isn't creed old, the family that isn't a proposition to, I'm not describing to you a full dose of that, but there's a big group that would just reject the idea outright that America's propositional at all or creed old at all. Just funny because we have a creed. That the thing that you're trying to get back to is the very thing that God says we may have to leave in order to enter the land of promise. I mean, going all the way back to apron. He didn't say he didn't say the nation matters, stay in earth, you know, carry forward the traditions of your people in earth, but believe in me. He said, no, leave the land of your father behind and enter into the promise that I'll give you. The problem with nationalism, the problem with Christian nationalism, perhaps, is the idea that is the fundamental conceit that the nation itself is or could be Christian, when in fact the only thing that can be a Christian is a person. The only thing that Christ came to save as a person, he didn't come to save an institution and he didn't come to save a country. I mean, the idea of countries itself was pretty foreign at the time of Christ. He came to save those who would put their faith in him, you know. And so, are we conflating two ideas that while they share a lot of the Venn diagram in the final analysis, they're actually in conflict with one another. They're not only not the same, but they are in some ways opposed. Well, we do have Christian bookstores and Christian music and Christian schools and all these things that aren't redeemed like an individual's redeemed, but they embody Christian values and Christian rules. Sorry. Maybe they do. Right, but if America is a people, then it has to be Christian to be Christian. The people have to be Christian. This is the thing that I talk about credal versus if it's a people in place. The only way that a people can be Christian is if the people actually believe the gospel and follow Christ. And so I see what you're saying. But if it is a people, then that's a requirement for that to be an accurate description of the nation. Well, it's been assumed even in our founding documents, look at the Virginia Charter that this is a Christian empire that's establishing itself in the country and the Puritans, obviously, were even more big on that. So I think I don't think it has to be a hundred percent conversion. No, no, no. I agree. But you embody these mores and values and there's a respect for the Bible. These are things typically traditional Americans have understood that religions and escapable, there's going to be a default setting of some kind, religious, and so it's been kind of a baseline Christianity in our country since the founding of the country. And it's a Christian bookstore because it's run by Christians. Throw my Christians as for Christian purposes. And it's not a Christian conference because it's run by Nazis. But I do think also with the nation concepts. Right. You see the Old Testament. There are examples given of preferring one's own people, of not moving ancient landmarks, but during Jubilee, we're verding back to the property that just make it state in the nation or actually specifically in the tribes. Different laws about slavery and what you could do in terms of Hebrews and non-Hebrews. You couldn't have a non-Hebrew be a king or a priest. There's all these rules that seem to favor an identity that, yeah, you could integrate into, but it might take time. There is a national unity there. And I'm not basing that on anything Christian. I'm just saying I think that's a creation reality. It's just an escapeable. Well, maybe, maybe. Sometimes I think one of the problems that Christians have when we approach the text is that we look at the text to be examples instead of to be descriptions. We're looking for the Bible to be prescriptive instead of descriptive. A Spencer pair, I might say. And I think that's right. Like, there are things that God did with Israel. I don't know that the lesson that we're supposed to take is that that's the way that we're supposed to govern our nation. So much as it's a way of saying, no, this is how God told Israel to govern itself. It was a light to the nations, right? It was a light to the nations because of monotheism, not necessarily because of the structure of their government. It's law. Because the law that they put forth, I mean, that's even with the queen of Shiba, was marvelling at the wisdom of Solomon and how they functioned in their country. So I mean, it would seem to me that I don't think that that's ultimately. I don't think that the light unto the nations is the law. The light unto the nations is God because Christ is ultimately the light that came out of Israel and is the light to all the first to Jew and then the Gentile. The Jews may have thought that the thing that made them special was the law, but as Paul would tell them, you think having the law makes you special. A person who accidentally kept the law would be better than you who has the law and doesn't keep it light. The law ultimately isn't the thing that makes Israel was set apart before they were given the law. They were set apart to be God's example unto man of God's relationship with man, which is ultimately fulfilled in Christ. So the law of the Lord is perfect converting the soul, right? So the law of the Lord, it can't be wrong, obviously. We've got laid down these laws that would favor ethnic Israelites. It can't be immoral that he made those restrictions. I don't know if we're disagreeing on that, but I guess the only concern I have is that there is a real human need that God designed in us. Apart from just any religion, just the way He designed us when we're born into this world, we have obligations and we have, of course, an identity that's going to be filled up with experiences and so forth. So he does sometimes call us to leave that identity behind. He does. That's exactly right. I think that's the point where we're making. The left started a fight. I think it's fair to say the left started a fight and that's the racial fight. That spread all through many different kinds of minorities and now the racial fight has now spread to young white men. And so there seems to be this gravity that's pulling people towards the direction of their racial identity. It's a very powerful gravity, but the gospel, Christ, calls them in the opposite direction if the direction they're going is in itself redeemed by Christ. It could call them out of that racial family. And I think that's a tension that lives beside many young men of like they want to be part, they want the belonging, which I think is real. I think there is a longing to be part of something larger than yourself. But at the same time, if you actually do pursue Christ, he may take you away from those people you feel belonging with. And I think how great is your faith? How much do you truly want what Christ offers? How much do you want eternal life and a resurrected body here on earth versus this temporal feeling of belonging? I don't think that point is pushed hard enough because there's really no choice when you look at it that way. But to descend into the morass of racial politics, I think it's just missing the real goal that's right in front of people, particularly with Christianity, but they want to use it. Maybe to go back to the Christ's King, they want to use it as a political bludgeon instead of like, this is a liberating thing from your flesh. Do you not want that more than you want your tribal belonging? And I don't know that people do. At least not yet. Well, it's funny because I think the criticism that I hear a lot, maybe this is kind of what you're getting at, is that like, well, you're making too much of your racial or ethnic identity. And I've also thought the opposite. The chat group identity is stronger than whatever organic identities that God has given you in his providence. So I think of my own identity as like, I'm part of a region, I'm part of a family, I'm part of this country. I'm a link in a chain. I'm going to have children after me. I'm going to pass down good things that came before me. I'm assuming each one of us has those things and that fulfills us in ways. If your parents aren't Christian and you're going to be rejected by converting to Christ, like I know which is part of your experience in conversion is having attention and family and friends, then that's a hard thing. I don't think we can wash it away with just, well, like the church is like your new family, like it just stinks. The church is your new family because Jesus says there's a spiritual family. You were my mother and my brother, but you also are missing something in its heart. And I acknowledge that. And we just do our best. That's a broken fallen world. This is sort of what I'm getting at with the credal versus geographical definition of, or I know you're not only saying geographical, but familial definition of a country. I think the thing that I'm ultimately pushing against and that I think I would eventually push against here as well is I'm just, I'm like, I've had it, or we've had a whole decade of false binaries. I'm completely over false binaries. America is a credal nation. It may be one of only two credal nations in history. It's an exceptional nation. One of the only exceptional nations in history. It isn't just a place and it isn't just a bloodline and it isn't just a people. But it isn't just the creed either and it isn't just the proposition and it isn't just the experiment. That's right. America is a place and it is a group of people who are unified among importantly, but not exclusively by the creed in the experiment that our forefathers engaged in. Even the experiment of coming here in the first place, people got on ships and crossed to sea and left their homes and their families like Abram to come here. So even if you go back to 1607, they were here in 1607, not for King and Country. They were here in 1607 because of the promise of the new world. They saw this place as the New Jerusalem. They saw it as a religious land, a place where they could not only grow economically, although that was a huge part of it, not only grow in terms of political freedom because they were far from the crown. Of course, that was part of it. But truly, they have a kind of religious freedom that wasn't available to them in their homeland as possible. So America is both. My argument, America is both. Yes, at the end of the day, we all, the best lesson we could, if you could do one thing for the world right now, what would you do? If I could be a tyrant, like a true dictator, if I were the dictator for today, and I could do two things, I'd give it a motorcycle, don't run motorcycles, guys, they're really stupid. You have a 75,000% increase in chances of dying over just driving a car. And I would find a, I would, I would solve the problem of how to regulate social media. Because I agree with you completely. Your online community is, I'm not going to say X isn't real life. I know people have met on X and gotten married on X. I know, I know political movements that have started on X and changed actual laws. But X is only a small part of real life. And it's become disordered. It's become the social media that our online existence has become one of, if not the primary place where we find community, the primary place where we explore ideas, the primary place where we form relationships. And it should be rightly ordered, a very small part of how we have community, a very small part of how we exchange ideas. I've told the story on the show before, so I don't want to just keep picking on my mom. But I have the story where my mom gets very angry because a woman who had been our neighbor when we were growing up said something on, said something political on the internet. My mom's not even all that political. But probably in part because of me and in part because of the time in which we live, she's got a little bit more political, you know. So it hurt her feelings that this person has spout some left wing point of view and a kind of ticked her off. And I reminded my mom like, hey, if I'd been hit by a car when I was seven years old, that's the lady who would have come out and given aid. She's our actual neighbor. She's a flesh and blood human being. Her ideas are wrong on this political issue and who cares. She's our community and the people who we agree with in our broader social media community, they're not real, but they're not nearly as real. They're not nearly as urgent. They're not going to come out and help you when your kid gets hit by a car. They're not the person who's going to come over when your house is on fire. You know who's, this is true. If there'd been a tornado in our neighborhood, we didn't have a basement. And the tornado sirens went off. We went to that neighbor's house to go into the cellar in their backyard. Like, your online community doesn't have a cellar for you to go in. They're not going to hide you in their attic when the Nazis start coming around to solve up. So yes. So it's a very real possibility to spot you. With this podcast. Don't give them too much credit. Don't give them too. Yeah. The reality of geography, the reality of family, the reality of tribe is real and vital and important and we have forsaken it. Amen. And God might just call us to walk completely out of it. We may lose it. It may be taken away from us because God takes away things from us all the time because God ultimately recommends Himself not us. He recommends Himself not our family. He recommends Himself not our community. He recommends Himself not our nation. God made no promise that He would save America. God made no promise that Gen Z gets to have the same country that their boomer-grandparents had. I happen to think that Gen Z is poised to have the best country in his year of the world. It's not all, to me, the show isn't just about the problems. I think there's enormous opportunity for human advancement. I think there's enormous opportunity for economic advancement. I think there's an enormous opportunity to make the world better and more virtuous. I think that the fact that Gen Z goes to the movies in the highest numbers of any current demographic in the country is like one of them. We were promised that community was over, that the movies were over, that Gen Z was so atomized and their attention span so short that they'd never pay money to go to, they go to theaters the most. Why? Because they are pushing back against the failures and the excesses of the unbelievable amount of atomization that we've all lived through over the last 10 years in particular and even since 2020, even more particularly. So there's these great, there are these great indicators, terrible indicators too. There's always things to be worried about. The world's always been filled with vice and evil and temptation and people truly suffer with truly bad things happen. But Gen Z has huge opportunity. God though has not promised them a future. He's only made, he's only really made two promises to anybody as far as I can tell. In this world you will have your problems. I have overcome the world. That's basically it. So things will, you will always have problems. Your hope is only ever in Christ. If you embrace anything beyond that, I worry that you're a fixing your things to think, to ideas or institutions or structures that God may strip you of because in the end he's a jealous God. He will have all of you or he will have none of you. I mean that's ultimately, that's ultimately the truth of God. So I completely agree. By the way with all of that, you could crush your kind. and your neighborhood and everything that you hold dear, and give you yourself and you still, you're the winner. - How about you? - You're the winner. - That's right, you're the winner. - Can I add one thing to that just regarding tribes? - Please. - This has been for me one of the unexpected blessings of joining a church. I didn't grow up Christian, didn't really grow up, doing regular weekly services. And I am in many ways a child of the internet, so I got my first computer when I was a teenager, and I can remember them four times in Gen X. But I found a lot of community on the internet, which is very easy to get very siloed with people who think like you for the most part, who don't challenge your opinions, or who are similar to you in many constitutional kind of ways. But going to a church sort of forces you to be around other people, men and families who are nothing like you at all, but they have the most important thing in common, which is a love for Christ. And so there can be awkwardness on my part, on my part, and just figuring out what is my place around these people who I have nothing in common with, but this most important thing, and finding harmony and beauty and comfort in that, versus the desire, which I initially felt was just to seek out something more like me. It's like, no, I have to resist this, because this is where the word is being preached. This is where the truth is being spoken. This is where I belong. And if these people don't look or sound or feel like me, if they have their own unique paths, well, we're going to figure it all out. It becomes its own tribe. I have my own tribe of people that I come from. I have my own set of friends, of course, but finding that kind of tribe in a faithful church, I think, is so, so, so important. And that's where I try to send young men to, so they can have that friction of like, maybe not everyone here is going to agree with you on everything. But you're going to be here for one really important common purpose. Yeah, that's beautiful. Yeah. I reject the idea of remote work. A, I think, is just so much more efficient to work in community with people, where you can just, you know, hey, have we heard from someone? So, yeah, send them an email. No, no, no, just walk over to their desk. I send them a text. No, walk right over there. You can get to them. But also because if you, in remote work, I don't know who you're supposed to have lunch with. And I don't say that as a joke. I say it as like, no, especially in the kind of work that each one of us here gets to engage in. We're really fortunate to engage in the battle of ideas, the battle of truth. I want to be, I want to join that battle with my fellow combatants in person. I want to share parts of important parts of my life with them. I want to know what's happening in their life. I want to, you know, pick on them for the thing, for the bad decisions that they're making. And I want them to point out to me when I'm making bad decisions in my life. I want, I want to have actual real community. And I don't think community is only your family, although your family is hugely important. You know, I'm a homebody because I don't like to go out at night. I've got a wife. I want to be where she is. I've got a daughter. I like to look at her and, and, and, and, and, you know, throw on the sofa or whatever. Like, that's, that's the point of having a kid if you can't rough house with them. Amen. You know, that's, that's the whole, that's the whole thing. And then, so I love my family. I want to be with my family. But there are parts of family that you have to protect from the war. Yeah. And so the people who I'm actually in the war, I also want to spend time in person with them. Because I do believe in the sort of ancient definition of happiness that is the pouring out of oneself and pursuit of your, of the things that are the most important and the most, the things that are most important to you. And so I, I agreed that like, you should go to a physical church. You should, we should be fighting for community and geography. We should be fighting for family. We should be, not everything is ethereal. There are things of substance, our, our cultures become too consumed with the ethereal and not consumed enough with the substance. You know, I even think on a technological sense when we talk about like uploading ourselves to the cloud one day or whatever, you know, nonsense, the Silicon Valley guys. I say all the time, I'm glad that they get to invent cloud because cloud, if I invented it, it wouldn't work. But man, they have some really dumb ideas about what humans are. We're embodied souls. We're not software who can be stripped from the hardware. You know, we're not going to go up to spirit heaven one day. Jesus wasn't resurrected spiritually. It's resurrected in the body, in the flesh. We will, one day have a new flesh and occupy a new earth. Like the cultural Christian thing is that we go float in the ether somewhere in the clouds of heaven. But that's not the Bible, that's not biblical. The Bible is new heaven, new earth, new flesh. Paul says we don't know what it'll be like. But it won't be nothing. It won't be ethereal. We'll be people because that's what we are. And so of course we have to value what's real and what's tangible and what's practical. Because we're real and we're tangible and we're practical. Neither of them is all that we are. We're both. And so in all of our theology and in all of our politics, we have to find a way to recognize both of those things at the same time, to recognize both of those truths at the same time. What do we tell this disinfectant generation? You spend a lot of your time in particular, and I think kind of like showing, shining a light on these things that are happening. And you've done it, I think very well from a sort of investigative perspective. But what's the actual message to this disinfectant generation? He's just says, "Get off my lawn." That's a crazy, that's a big question. I mean, everything that Willa just said about, like, you need to find a church, you need to find a church, you need to get into church, and you need to stay in that church. And don't leave that church because the pastor is, you know, a bear left of you in some regard, and you can't defend him to your buddies and your telegram. Right. You need to get in that church, stay in that church, get married, have a family. These are all things I feel like that are consented to and understood by some of these spaces, but not always acted out either. But part of that is also your focus needs to be on Christ and guiding your family to reflect Christ, and not necessarily on all the intricacies of how horrible things are in the world today on Twitter. So the localization, I think, is a big one. I'm not a super-pastoral guy, right? I just win an anonymous Twitter dude. Not anymore. Well, no longer anonymous Twitter dude, but I think that's what we're called to as Christians in the body of Christ, more so than anything else. I take a different approach to this. I mean, yes, to all of that. We have a crisis of authority. I think that's just true. I think all forms of traditional authority have been undermined and undermined at themselves. And so I think people are especially young men are looking around to try and find out who they should follow. Who can direct me because maybe you're the son of a single mother and you needed a father in your life or maybe your father was absent or all the institutions that used to shape boys and to men are now basically no longer. And so just because a young man doesn't have a father doesn't mean that that part in him that's seeking a father switches off or goes away. It's still there and it goes seeking to attach itself to something. And so most of the voices that are allowed us today are not acting in these young men's best interests. They're exploiting them. The term is often used grifter, right? They're taking advantage of young men's bitterness and their disposable income and weaponizing them for political and economic purposes. That's what I see happening. And so, but that young man still needs something. What he needs is the same thing that I needed. I had Pastor Joel Ellis who I mentioned earlier. He didn't just send me screenshots. He sent me a stinging review through the email that I think will last with me for a lifetime. And I needed it. I needed it. He took me by the shoulders like young men smacking up side the head and I woke up. And I think a lot of young men really need that, but they would never ask for it. But the problem is Pastor Ellis is a man who I would accept that from, right? He was a man that I intrinsically respected and felt the sense of deference to. And men who embody that level of authority, that level of gravitas are rare. They squandered it in all these various ways. So who are those men that can turn to other young men and deliver that, I think personally, I think it doesn't come across the same way through social media, deliver it personally. And so if you're a man who has that authority maybe from time in the military or athletics or financial accomplishment, whatever it is, and you see a way where young man in your life, if you have that relationship with him, intervene prayerfully in the name of God, with scripture versus as well. But that young man that you can make a difference in his life, I think you have to. And I think young men are craving that reorientation like, oh, and I think that was the power of Jordan Peterson. I think ultimately for multiple generations of fatherlessness and both men and women, he stood up there on the stage and the suit and his tie. And it's like a whole generation went like, dad? 'Cause they'd never seen that image before. So where is that now? And that I think is what people are looking for. - I had a good father, right? I didn't grow up in a broken home. I had to stay at home, mom. Like I had all the things, we didn't have a lot of money, but when I was a kid, it's in particular. But I got all those, you won the lottery kind of things when I was growing up. And there were still other men in the community who played an important role in shaping me. I think of, you guys, I mean, you really can't imagine how bad I am at sports. I'm blind to one eye and have no depth perception and have all the way. This has been true since I was born basically. So like, hitting a ball was always like an abstract concept to me. Like, I was aware that people could do it. I have no idea how they did it. If I was looking at the picture here, as soon as I turned my head, the ball just went away. So it was always awful and sports were terrible and I hate them. And yet I look back on coaches that I had coach Hernandez when I, it's this great guy who, I had him as a sixth grade science teacher, his first year teaching. And then every year that I moved up, 'cause it was a small town in West Texas, every year that I moved up, he got a promotion. So he was like my science teacher in the sixth grade and then my football coach in the seventh grade and then my science teacher in the eighth grade and then my science teacher in the tenth grade and all the way up, right? And he was one of these guys who just like, he was young enough, he wasn't jaded, right? He saw his students and he invested in us. And I remember I won't go into too many stories here 'cause we've gone long, but like times where I would get in terrible trouble at school. And instead of him, he would be in charge of disciplining me. And instead of some sort of traditional discipline, he would find the thing that I was interested in and use it as a way to sort of reach me and instill in me whatever more or less than he wanted to instill in me, but also to expose me to these ideas and grow me intellectually. I think that it's become harder and harder for men to do that because we have a culture now of helicopter parents who don't actually give permission to the community, to discipline their children or to invest in their children or to share wisdom with their children. And there was, like Eugene X, there was a different sort of cultural reality, I think when we were coming up. You're taking a risk if you try to do that now and it's a risk worth taking. You should invest in the lives of particularly fatherless young men, but all young men around you. That's part of being an old man, which we're fast approaching. Part of being an older man is instilling wisdom down. Wisdom, wisdom doesn't move up. Wisdom isn't a thing that young people have. This is one of the great lies of leftism. That kids are born with all the wisdom and, then you forget it as you get older. We could learn so much from them. Like no, they don't know crap. You ever met a kid? I don't know, nothing. - Got a couple. - Yeah. It's our job to do that. It's our job to give to them from ourselves. I think that's a beautiful answer. - Thank you. - Yeah. I've had some experience with real life people I've known who have been on the more neo-nazi path. And some go in the wrong direction after discussions and so forth. And some go in the right direction. One in particular, I referenced him earlier, I was privileged to lead to the Lord who was kind of in that world. And the first thing, and I just give this advice to people listening who might be unfamiliar, but maybe you hear a young man say something that's transgressive and you think, I mean, I mean, I can be a young man. I mean, with everyone saying transgressive things, these days probably more likely a young woman. Anyway, someone says something, and don't lose your mind right away. That's one of the things that I think you have to do is like, sometimes a bit of a dance going on. Can I trust this person? It's like a hazing ritual. If I say this, is he gonna reject me? And I think you have to not be phased by those kinds of things. I've done some reading. Before this all came about, I had already read mine comp and had a grad school class in Holocaust. And there's sort of a lot of things I already knew, but if I didn't, I would have read those things just to try to get an understanding of where's this guy coming from if he's really someone I care about. And then of course, if they're not a Christian, which if they're going down this path, it's very likely they're Christianity probably, if they have any needs, needs some addressing, preach the gospel, right? The problem is sin. It's not the Jewish people behind everything. Yes, there's certain industries that have high levels of Jewish participation that might be undermining. And so don't deny reality when he says, Pollywood has a lot of Jewish people in it. Of course it does. But it's not necessarily a cabal that's now the original sin category for like in two steps or less. We, in fact, there was one person who tweeted about this podcast that it was like a messadopped before you told me, they get on the like, like not everything is related to this. The major problem people have is sin. And that knows no boundary when it comes to ethnicity. And so we need to get that taken care of. And I think when someone sees that, they see God's providence. God's got a plan. You fit into it. All the bad things, you know what? God's going to turn them into good. But you need to repent. You know, turn from your sin, put your faith in Jesus Christ for forgiveness and He will forgive you. He'll give you the Holy Spirit. He'll empower you to live a Christian life. And the friend that I referred to earlier, this is what happened. And he told me, he said, when he received Christ, that I see, he said, I used to hate certain minority group. And he said, I love them now. I go to church with them. And so that's been kind of a fruitful thing. Getting people to come to a community that where they're going to be affirmed and they have a place of belonging. So those are just a few things I'd throw out there is helpful. Yeah. You know, another thing that I would say is, almost every conspiracy theory is not only false, but it's like utterly false. That so many of the things that you bake in, like even just like the assumptions that undergird them are false, no one knows everything. No one is capable of executing a plan to perfection. It's never happened. Conspiracies happen all the time. And we usually end up knowing about them because people aren't very good at conspiracies. People aren't very good at anything. You know, like, people fail. The Jews, if the Jews could do all the things that people think the Jews can do, then they should. They should run the world and we should be their slaves. If you know, we get the Jeremy's razor guy to be the king, that's right. If 15 million, there are about 15 million Jews, plan out of eight billion people. Right. If they're able to perfectly execute all these plans and they are otherworldly, they should do it. You also completely lose the apologetic of the reality of the gospel's authenticity. That's right. Because you throw out the idea that, you know what, maybe everybody can, maybe conspiracies are completely achievable and happen at Mass scale, pulled off perfectly all the time. It's like, okay, well, what do you believe the gospel's? Right. That's right. And that's not the sole reason, obviously, you believe the gospel's. But that is one of the reasons we believe they're reliable is that we don't believe that the Iowans accounts of Christ were all collaborating in some massive cabal, you think of Peter and I. And you go, the Jews who killed Christ weren't even in collaboration because Peter says, "You did this with wicked hands." He accuses them and their pierced to their heart. And then he says, "But actually this was the plan of God and the foreknowledge of God." That's who was really planning this. Right. Which kills the deicide thing on the other side of that as well. And there are so few Jews in the world that's actually almost impossible to comprehend. Because humans can't, once a number hits like 100,000, our ability to actually conceptualize the number collapses. 15 million sounds like a lot. 15 million of 8 billion is a nut. The Jews are a rounding error. They're a rounding error of a rounding error. I've lived a life in which I've spent a lot of time around Jewish people, both in Hollywood and in conservative media where Jews are also disproportionately represented. And yet I can tell you that so much of what people think about that isn't true. Secular Jews who work at high levels in Hollywood have very little in common with religious Jews who are highly represented in conservative media. They don't vote the same. So even on like fundamentally who should run the country? Fundamentally what kind of policies should we support? Wildly disparate, perspective-son, questions of that magnitude. And then just a lot of things that people say because people say them and then you take them for granted and assume they're true. The daily wire was never owned by Jews. Ben Shapiro owned 20% of the daily wire when I was there. That means 80% of the daily wire wasn't owned by Jews. It was owned by-- Yeah, but they're only 2% of the population. So he was overrepresented in his daily wire ownership. Saying, "Gotcha." Yeah. Of the four people who owned the daily wire, he was highly represented. You know, I think that same tweet that you refer in this, that this was Masad. I wish I could-- I should have pulled up the tweet. It was pretty great. It said, "This Masad operation, this Israeli paid for assassination." I think it was the word "assassination." Yeah. "Massad assassination." Yeah. "To assassination of Joel Webb in these case." Yeah. We don't even remember who it was. No, I don't know. I don't know who he said. But who he said. But the point just being the Jews didn't own the daily wire, the Jews didn't pay for the daily wire. I don't currently work for the daily wire. So this ain't a bunch of the tweets are like, "You're going on a daily wire show?" Yeah. Yeah. Well, for self-sealing. That's right. If only-- here's the thing. I say this all the time. If the Jews want to give me some money, I will take it. Like, BB, I have multiple times sent my Venmo account to BB. I'm just like, "Hey, bro. Like, if you ever get tired of not paying me, here it is. You can just do it. I'm for sale. I'm not cheap. But I'm for sale. So far, no offer has come." But the way the conspiracy-minded person thinks that the world works, I think you're making the point that it's sort of antithetical to our faith in the accuracy of how-- or not the accuracy of how we got the Bible. You're basically granting the premise that powerful men just sat around and conceived of the Bible. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Why not? What presubesition do you have to protect you from that claim that you've already conceded the conspiracy mindset as being completely valid? But even on a pretextual philosophical level, if there are people capable of such things in the world, then there's no need for the gospel. The gospel exists expressly because we are off-flog and limited and because of-- in many ways, because of our inability to achieve with any perfection anything. Because even those who didn't have the law became a law unto themselves and fell short of that law. That even if God didn't have-- even if the Jews didn't exist, you still fell short of even any standard that you created. Only because of that, this Christ have to exist. The central premise of Christianity is the sufficiency of Christ. And that premise is an answer to an equally important premise, which is that we lack such sufficiency apart from Christ. The sufficiency of Christ exists in exact answer to our insufficiency. It actually completely overwhelms our insufficiency. So I guess it isn't an exact-- it's not equal to it's greater than. Well, if the Jews are so evil, the logical Christian response and probably one of the major responses would be to share the gospel with them, to be good neighbors and share Christ. And that is something that I see very much lacking. There's a lot of trying to expose things that aren't like, for example, things like look in Israel, they're making churches pay taxes. When you find out, well, it's for secular purposes. And in the Ottoman Empire, well, they were just great at preserving holy sites. Yeah, if you paid the Jizia and you couldn't testify in court, and you could like-- there's just these like apples and oranges things that are like, hey, did you know this? And it's layer upon layer of that. That's what seems to really interest people. And then they don't go fact check it. But one of the things that you would expect to find among Christians is if you really think these people are doing these evil things all the time, you really need to go and evangelize them. Like, put some resources towards that. And I just don't see that a lot. Shouting Christ's King, you filthy Jew in a Twitter comment is not evangelizing. I mean, the Lord can use weak things, but-- And recommends the Lord. It doesn't recommend the text. It doesn't recommend the technique. But, fellas, I'm sorry. Oh, I was just going to say, I think it underestimates the power of sin. If you say that, you know, minus this people group, we would live in this utopia. Like, no, it's not because of this people group that we're going in this direction. It's this decaying power of sin that came in as a result of the fall that has captured all of creation is dragging it downwards. And so to say, like, oh, it's only because of this. The Jews didn't shut down your church during COVID. That's right. Fauci didn't shut down your church during COVID. Your pastor shut down your church during COVID. My church. But yeah. Yeah. But that's the thing that nobody wants to hear. The sin that you're concerned about is right here. That's right. It's right where we are. We're the ones who need and thankfully have received a savior. fellas, thank you for making time making the trip. Thank you, Jeremy. Thanks for having us. Love to do it again. Absolutely.