Pints With Aquinas - Culture, Pro-life Movement, and Nashville w/ Jonathon Van Maren

Episode Date: March 29, 2023

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Welcome to Pints with Aquinas. My name is Matt Fratt and my guest is Jonathan Van Maron. Morin Maron, Morin Maron. Yeah, we're drinking coffee and Budweiser and cigars just to prove that we have testicles. It's great to have you on the show. Hey, before I begin, I want to say thank you to our sponsor Covenant Eyes, which is the best accountability and filtering software on the Web. And if you struggle with porn in any way, you should get it. It doesn't just block the bad stuff.

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30-day trial at the end of that 30 days If you don't want it, you can cancel but I don't think you will I use it on all of my devices and recommend that everybody get it Covenantized.com the promo code is obviously Pints is it really? I hope so We I don't okay, why do they pay us? Well, okay, here's the thing pints or mafrad just use one of those the link will work though because ryan said that's what I was going to say Yeah, they they tell us every week. We say we need to get the p the promo code

But the only thing they've sent us is a link as far as I can tell Jonathan it is so nice to have you. Yeah, it's nice to see you again finally. Yes. When did we last hang out? I think it was a big porn conference Specifically we hung with a whole bunch of mormons in houston or austin. Yeah, there was a I think was a big porn conference. Antiporn conference. Specifically we hung with a whole bunch of Mormons in Houston or Austin. Yeah there was a feminist, there was a Gale Dines remember? Yep vividly. She was there there was a whole bunch of former porn stars who were telling their story that was wrong. Yes one of them came up to me to thank me for my work and I had to pretend I didn't know who she was. I didn't have to but I did because I was ashamed as I should have been. Right. That's right. She would have been in the industry around that time.

It was hard. Yeah. Yeah. So we used to do that a lot together. And you're from Canada. I was actually born in the States, but I was raised in Canada and that's where I live now. So is the Communist Republic of Canada going or is that too harsh? So when people used to say that I'd be like, no, okay, calm down. Just pull that out to your mouth. Just a little bit more. There we go. How's this? I used to say that's a little bit too harsh? I know, so when people used to say that, I'd be like, no, OK, calm down. Just pull that out to your mouth just a little bit more. Hold this up to my mouth a little bit. There we go. How's this? I used to say that's a little bit too harsh.

Yeah. But especially with the assisted suicide regime that's been metastasizing and growing ever since it came in in 2016, Canada is, I think, objectively in very rough shape right now. Some of your listeners will know, your viewers will know that in 2015 our Supreme Court mandated that they legalize assisted suicide. They started to steadily move away from calling it assisted suicide because suicide of course is a trigger word for many people, obviously. So now they call it medical aid in dying or made, which makes it sound far more compassionate, right? Like your loved one will get put to death like a household

pet. And now they've actually just, they legalized it for those with mental illness and then this month they delayed it for a year to get it right, because all the horror stories have been trickling in about people opting for assisted suicide because they're poor, because they're disabled,

because they can't afford the care that they need. And so basically Canada's turned into an international cautionary tale in about 24 months and I don't think anybody is fully cognizant of how bad it's going to look just under a year from now if they do start permitting assisted suicide for those with mental illness because at that point the only thing you'll need to be eligible for assisted suicide is feeling suicidal so the government will be endorsing your cognitive distortions and will actually be facilitating and funding your own death. So Canada's not doing great. Is that the primary reason? What about COVID lockdowns and things? What was that like?

People come up to me on the street and they say like things about Australia. I'm like, dude, I haven't been there. I don't know. Like I hear it was rough in Australia, but what was it like in Canada? What is it still like? So in Canada, it varied. So it's over in Canada now, unless you talk to the Prime Minister, whoever wants to know, I'll genuflex in that direction just to assure everybody that he wasn't making things up prior before. But like each province was kind of different at the height of one of the waves. I forget it was very wavy for a while. There was like pretty much everybody I think had some sort of stay at home order or lockdown. I think the big news out of Canada, of course, was that they, the freedom convoy descended on Ottawa with hundreds of truckers and thousands of people and walked the capital down.

I went there to cover it like right before the crackdown, right before they sent in all the cops. Um, and the scandal that doesn't get talked about nearly enough in Canada with relation to COVID is that based on the dates We have now from the Pfizer data and from what Justin Trill was saying He ran a whole election on this idea that you didn't have to sit next to the unclean on a plane or a train And there was mandates for like interprovincial travel like you couldn't fly from Ontario to BC To visit a dying relative if you were not fully vaccinated And we now know that Pfizer already knew before this mandate went in, that it didn't stop transmission, which was the fundamental basis

for the mandate to begin with. And, yeah, nobody seems to be really picking up on that in the mainstream media as much as I'd like, because it's an obvious political scandal. He actually made the vaccine more political than it already was by running a whole election on it. So yeah, that wasn't great either. Mason- So what kind of pushback is the euthanasia position getting in Canada? Is there? Bregman- Yeah, here's the most depressing thing about euthanasia and assisted suicide in Canada is that when euthanasia was legalized by the Supreme Court in 2015, it was about

80-20. 80% of Canadians supported assisted suicide, 20% opposed. Now with the expansion of medical aid in dying to those who suffer from mental illness, or it'll be disability, it'll be basically anything. The law is worded so vaguely that anybody who isn't receiving care that they think adequately treats their condition can apply for this and be eligible it just basically means everybody and like for the first time we're seeing the polls shift the majority of Canadians actually oppose this and What's what's so almost confusing about the way this government and the justice minister David Lamedi is? That not only are the majority of Canadians opposed to this because everybody knows somebody who struggles with mental illness or has struggled

with mental illness. Pretty much all of us know somebody who has struggled with suicidal ideation or or has attempted suicide at some point. And the parliamentary committees have been hearing testimony from disability rights groups, from the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention, from mental health advocates, and it's been almost a complete and unanimous no to this this policy expansion and they're not backing down and in fact you had a very prominent doctor from Quebec who runs one of the gynecological societies and pediatric societies come out and say we should actually consider legalizing assisted suicide for infants

under the age of one with like severe disability etc. and as you know you can't assist somebody in suicide below the age of one and so basically he just openly advocated for euthanizing babies and one of the headlines that was really on point but kind of jarring to read in a national newspaper was Canada cannot become a country that kills its babies. Now of course we already do up until nine months through abortion. But like that was as a headline in a national newspaper, right? Not on some pro-life site or socially conservative oriented media outlet. No, this was just this was straight up in a national newspaper.

I think that even with that, the thing that genuinely terrifies me the most as somebody who has mental illness running on both sides of his family and one of my kids could easily have it just based on their genetics is that they're also advocating for assisted suicide for what they call mature minors which basically means somebody who's not old enough to drink, vote, or drive but somebody who is apparently mature enough to make the decision to opt for assisted suicide and in the parliamentary documents it actually says that although we understand parents would be very opposed to this, we have to recognize that the right of that child to suicide would override

their parents desire to keep them around, which means that a euthanasia provider could go into the family home, could euthanize the child in the family home with the force of the state preventing the parents from intervening. And this is not some wild theory. You can read this in the doc. Once you, once you read what the documents actually say, this is what they're advocating for. And so this genuinely terrifies me in a way that nothing's terrified me before.

Like, as you know, I work for a pro-life organization. I've been working on issues like abortion for years But this is an issue where I don't think those who support it fully realize what the implications are And I don't think people who are ignoring this is another cultural issue at the top Recognize that this will have a very real impact on their family at some point especially because we have Absolutely piss poor care for for those who suffer from mental illness and of course, coming out of coming out of covid, we have a mental health pandemic. When I live in Australia and Australia is similar to Canada, I think in that our news outlets are run by the lefties and there isn't a sort of serious contender to push back against them, even though in America you'd want to correct

Fox News and Daily Y. We all have different opinions, but it feels like there is a significant contingent within the United States that's able to push back. Whereas, at least from when I lived in Australia, I didn't feel like that. It doesn't seem like you have that in Canada either, unless I'm mistaken. No, so the National Post is slightly more right-leading, but I would call them libertarian, which meant that they were sort of, a lot of their speakers were very much at odds, or their writers were very much at odds on assisted suicide.

Although to give credit where credit is due, a ordinarily liberal writer named Andrew Coyne was magnificent all the way through the legalization process. And the way he did it was by posing really difficult to answer questions such as, do you need to sterilize the needle before you give somebody a lethal injection during assisted suicide? Does it matter?

Exactly, right? So he would actually, like he wrote columns asking questions like that. The national post would be slightly libertarian. There is no successful TV network that competes. So do you find that a lot of conservative Canadians are listening to the Daily Wire? Oh yeah. Well, it's very, this is a totally separate rabbit hole that we don't need to go down. But what's interesting about Canadian conservative politics now is that a lot of Canadian conservative

voters are very frustrated because they spend all their time following American politics. They're like, why can't we have a Ron DeSantis? Or why can't we have somebody? It's like America is accused of thinking it's the center of the universe, but we have good reason because every other country is looking at us. Yeah, so Canada is a post-Christian country, has been for a long time, has no unified national identity, and so what's possible in America simply isn't possible in our country. And I do feel sorry for the handful of very good members of parliament who constantly

speak to these issues, who are stuck being asked why they can't pull off the impossible. Obviously, America is declining or has almost hit the bottom. So I'm not pretending America is in much better shape than Canada. But when you look at our governmental structure, with our checks and balances, coming from the place that you are in Canada, do you see the value in that? Do you feel like America will be able to hold out longer because of how governmentally it's set up? So, not only governmentally, but I think there's a couple of fundamental differences that mean America has survival chances that are better than most of the post-Christian West. One

is that although America's becoming rapidly post-Christian, there still are over 30 million people who identify as evangelical. They're all armed to the teeth. They're all viewing their own media. A lot of them are building their subcultures. In Canada, just to give you an idea of what the decline looks like, and this would be largely true for most European countries as well, 11% of Canadians attend any form of worship regularly.

That's it? So that's not just regularly. That's it. So that's not just churches, that includes mosques, synagogues, goudoirs, temples. Wow. So 89% of Canadians attend no form of worship regularly, and regularly just means monthly. And so, and then now take the percentage of that

that would be say, like practicing conservative Protestant or practicing Catholic, and you're talking about an absolutely minuscule number of people. And so we're definitively post-Christian in that it wasn't our parents who abandoned Christianity, in many cases, not even the grandparents. We're talking about the great grandparents.

I first realized this, like doing pro-life activism, we're out in the street all the time, and you talk to people, and growing up in a religious community, you kind of assume people rejected your values at one point, and then talking to people, I'm like, they have no idea what I'm talking about. Like a quarter of millennials in the UK don't know who the baby in the manger is in nativity

scenes. So we've completely lost a way of speaking, a way of understanding the Christian social imaginary that once dominated all of Western civilization has gone. In the United States, that's not true. And that's what makes it very interesting. Like I always say that in Canada, somebody who wants to be Prime Minister, who's pro-life has to pretend he isn't.

And somebody who wants to be the Republican president in the US, if he isn't pro-life, has to pretend he is. And that means that there's a lot of political reasons for them to at least pretend that they hold these values. And so America still has a lot more going for it than anywhere else. Will Barron In America, we've seen this big exodus from blue states, California and New York. Are you seeing an exodus from Canada to America?

Will Barron So it started. Yeah. I, most people that I know, and I think it was during COVID, not even, regardless of your views on COVID restrictions and things like that, it was, I think, when they realized that a government that was profoundly hostile to Christian values could actually claim enormous amounts of power for itself, basically on a whim, and there was no recourse and the courts would back them. I know a lot of people who moved to the US. I know a lot more people who would if they could, and I know plenty of people who have been discussing it ever since then, for sure. I think I misunderstood you earlier. You were talking about this medical assisted what? They call it medical aid in dying.

Medical aid and dying. In dying. In dying, okay. How important, obviously the answer is very, but explain to us why, is the word game where you phrase the debate in order to change minds? Because now you have to ask people, are you against medical aid in dying? And they'll just say made. It's really interesting that you point that out. A couple of years ago I wrote a very small book with my colleague, Blaise Elaine called, how to discuss assisted

suicide. And one of the things we found was this is, and this is particularly interesting because you're a media guy, you'll be interested in this, is that when the debate started in 2015, people were still talking about assisted suicide or euthanasia. Now, just to parse the terms for a minute, euthanasia is when somebody else kills you, even if it's at your request. Assisted suicide is actually when you do it yourself. So in Oregon, if you want to kill yourself, you've got to order the pills, you've got to take the pills yourself.

If you can't physically give yourself the pills, somebody else can't give them to you. So in Canada, what we actually have is euthanasia, because it's the doctor doing it. So they're already lying by calling it assisted suicide. They've already clouded the terminology. But I remember the month that happened. I wish I could tell you, because I remember which year it happened, where we were talking about assisted suicide,

assisted suicide, assisted suicide, and a lot of pro-life ethicists were saying, no, this is euthanasia. This is not assisted suicide. And then suddenly overnight, every newspaper, like the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the Winnipeg Free Press, everybody started calling it medical aid and dying. And my theory is that they basically got the new talking points from from dying with dignity,

which is basically like the the suicide version of the human rights campaign down here. And that, OK, it's time to change all the terms, right? Just like the trans terms have changed so many times in order to sort of herd people towards the right thinking. And so then they went from medical aid in dying to made instead of assisted suicide. And the reason for that, I wrote at the time with my colleague, is that again, nobody can ever, you can't sell suicide because for the vast majority

of people, suicide will never be something they see as positive. Because the vast majority of people know somebody who has been suicidal, that they love very dearly, who they desperately attempted to help, desperately didn't want to commit suicide, because they knew that if that person died, some part of them would die with them. They knew this. And so they moved away from the word suicide because they couldn't sell it properly. And I was speaking in the Netherlands last summer on this issue and

I saw an article from an American columnist saying in order to get assisted suicide here in the United States we need to move away from the word suicide because it has too many negative connotations. So in the States I think there was half a dozen in my last count who are pushing for similar policies. Like watch the words. The word suicide is going to disappear at some point and they're going to replace it with terms that make it sound like end of life care, which you know didn't used to mean a lethal injection. It used to mean palliative care. And then you're going to see this very, very distinct shift. So you're bang on. And it's like that with all things that ought to be. We should think about these things with great disgust.

Sodomy is one of those things. So in order to sell sodomy, you have to call it gay, and you have to use a rainbow flag. And even then, you really need to be reluctant in allowing your two male leads to kiss in a movie, because people really don't want to see that. And we're now inserting that, but I don't know how people are that interested in seeing that

It's pretty disgusting and it should be disgusting So it it it feels like you have you have to do that you have to lie Have you ever read after the ball? No by Kirk and Madsen so after the ball how America will overcome its fear of homosexuality in the 90s Yeah, they make the case you just made which is that in order to get America on board with like same sex marriage, with homosexuality, what we need to do is de-emphasize the specifics that people automatically think about when this comes up and just start emphasizing things that they actually can understand properly.

So yeah, terminology is everything. It's like boring to bring up Orwell now, but anybody who hasn't read the Ministry of Truths in 1984, like you do have to read it because the reason it's boring to bring him up is because he was so bang on that everybody notices. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Golly. That's why I appreciate Matt Walsh and others referring to this quote unquote transitioning surgery as child mutilation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So how important is it then that we not only use the right terms,

but reclaim all the terms and start inserting that into modern parlance. So, uh, Anthony Ancelin actually makes that piece of advice and, and I think, uh, out of the ash, I read his last four and it's sort of like all his last four books are sort of stream of consciousness of all the things that he thinks he has like so when I go off about this stuff I kind of stutter and I pause and I rant his book out of the ashes is a very cohesive coherent rant well he ran but he inserts with Poetton and Dante all the way through but one of his points is clear the cat like we must

speak clearly we must not permit them to take over the language I had a fight with an editor actually at one of the magazines I wrote an article on Canada's killing regime for over the term made because she said this is the technical term That's what everybody's using and you do have a lot of conservative publications that are kind of like well We don't want to seem extreme I'm like well too late If you don't think it's okay to give somebody a lethal injection to end their life, you're extreme.

So the very least we can do is use the word that proves they're extreme, which is suicide, not maid. Which again, sounds so anodyne, doesn't it? It doesn't sound jarring or shocking. You might want your relative to have maid. Would you want your relative to kill themselves? Maybe we could have the maid offer the lethal injection. One old lady came up to me and said i think because women hate cleaning their house so much they called it made because people have a good view of what that is

i'm like i don't think that's what they were doing but i appreciate the point yeah so push back in regards to this in canada is just this one newspaper so you're screwed so canada's done so what's like profoundly dispiriting right now about the assisted suicide question is that nobody's on the government side this time. We've seen a shift. It's not 80-20 in favor of assisted suicide anymore. Everybody's found their line, and the reason they found their line is because I think the government boiled the frog too fast. Usually it takes decades to slowly expand the regime. That's what it's felt like here with the trans issue.

100%. Yeah. Very, very similar. But in Canada, the trans issue, like it came and saw it conquered. And almost immediately they've changed everything in university. You declare your pronouns and all the corporations, of course, wrap themselves in the rainbow flag for at least a month, if not more. But with the assisted suicide issue, we've seen pushback from pretty much all of the disability groups all the mental health groups And for some reason the the reason I don't understand it is because Justin Trudeau's mother has written like a very well-known memoir talking about how she struggled with suicidal ideation and deep depression and For me like expanding assisted suicide of those suffering from mental illness is just like such a basic failure of humanity that even for him I don't get why he's doing this. All right here are three big questions.

What is the West? Why is it dead? And why does that matter? So that's very interesting because so I would say the West was Christendom. And what is that? So Christendom would all would be collectively understood it would be the all the nations that were formed by Christianity so whether you've got the American Republic whether you've got the the British constitutional monarchy whether you've got the ruling princes of Liechtenstein or the monarch in Belgium

all of them are shaped by the Christian tradition and even when they disagreed about whether or not that tradition was Protestant or Catholic, they all agreed that it was in fact Christian. And that's what they were arguing about, was which form of Christianity it would be, not that it wasn't to be Christianity. And the reason I think that the West is dead, and in many ways, irrecoverable in the form

that we used to recognize it, is because Christianity itself, the West is definitively post-Christian with the sole exception of some places in America. In the United, or sorry, in Europe, if you look at the latest polls for most Western European countries, like, I remember, even the stats in Italy for regular church attendance shocked me, it was something like 17%. I already told you the numbers for Canada, somewhere around 11%. And what's really interesting about the way that this has changed is that it's not just that the West is no longer Christian, is that it has no idea what Christianity actually taught. So the reason Christianity

can be caricatured so effectively by progressives is because people are not aware of the basic stories of Christianity. They're not aware of the basic stories of Christianity. They're not aware of the Bible stories. Again, a quarter of UK millennials didn't even know who the baby in the manger was. Most of them have no idea what the Trinity means. Most of them don't even know what the essence of the gospel story is. Even basic ascetical differences between Protestants and Catholics are misunderstood. Yeah, so if they need to demonize someone they'll give him a collar Yes, but he'll be Protestant maybe or if they've got the angry old church lady who's very clearly a Protestant fundamentalist

She's wearing a medal of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Yeah, it just you're part of that group Yeah, and you guys are all very bad And so that's that's what I do find different about the United States Is that you like Christianity is still part of the public discourse and you still have politicians that speak clearly into microphones on CNN shows about their Christian beliefs, whereas you don't have that most other places. But I think that once you're a couple of generations away from it, you start to realize the extent to which it was the cohesion that allowed our

civilization to actually exist. And the best piece of evidence for this, interestingly, is I know you were, I was a huge Christopher Hitchens fan in university, not because I agreed with him on anything, but because his responses were just phenomenal. His debates were awesome to watch, right? But I remember thinking in college that the big debates of the next decade were going to be on the historicity of the resurrection and debates on the specifics of Christian history. Like, you know, can we be more nuanced about the Crusades perhaps? Or, you know, you've heard all the arguments.

The new atheists now have been replaced by atheists that have this nostalgia for Christianity that they're almost embarrassed about. So Douglas Murray... Yes, that's who I was just thinking of. Well, so I interviewed him and I actually asked him, do you think that the Christian conception of human rights, the idea of the sanctity of human life will survive into the post-Christian era? And he says, I don't think so. And it terrifies me. Sir Roger Scruton never fully managed to embrace Christianity,

but it started going back to church when they asked him why. He said, I'm hoping practice makes perfect. Charles Murray, who's one of the famous American philosophers who wrote The Bell Curve and a number of other books, I interviewed him for the National Review and he's an agnostic, but he told me that barring a religious revival, America will go the way of Europe and die. Neil Ferguson, who's probably one of the most famous historians, he's married to Ian Her Herceali, and he's written The Looming Tower, A History of Money, all sorts of fascinating books. He's recently

stated as well that without Christianity as the glue that binds civilization together, he thinks it'll all be over. And he actually said to me, he's like, I think people should go back to church. Like, you know, you really need to go back to church because we're seeing what happens when nobody goes to church, and this is not something that we can sustain over the long haul and then of course we got Richard Dawkins who it's kind of like watching the snake choke on its own tail right you've got Richard Dawkins who's now you know a culture warrior over transgender pronouns and things like that even JK Rowling right did you see the joke about Harry Potter

like what's the difference between right-wing literature and left-wing literature it's like two decades. Everybody said, don't read Harry Potter, and now everybody's like, and now she's a conservative. So I think what's most interesting is all these really intelligent atheists who have spent a couple of decades trying to figure out where we're headed and looked up and been like, oh boy, this is not going to be good. And it's because you can't undo the sexual revolution, and that's kind of shredded the moral fabric. What's sad about Murray is that he seems to realize that we need Christianity to survive, but he can't find it within him to accept Christianity. And so it

sounds like unless I'm misunderstanding him, that it would be good for society if we accept a fiction, but that we can't, that a lot of people just can't do that. You see what I'm saying? Yes. I'm going to do, I'll do a little bit of dangerous psychoanalysis because I've watched a lot of his interviews because I thought his books are the strange deaths of the death of the West, madness of crowds, or fascinating books. But I don't think it's insignificant that Douglas Murray is gay and apparently has had a longstanding partner because, and he's defended very vociferously the idea that homosexual love is just as valid as heterosexual love and things like that. I don't think it's insignificant that he believes that firmly.

It's shaped who he is. And at the same time, Christianity, he's too clear-minded to be an Episcopalian, right? I think he's too intellectually honest to be like, I can buy into Christianity and get rid of all the bits I don't like. I think it's his intellectual honesty that keeps him away from Christianity to a degree, because he knows it would ask more of him than he's perhaps willing to give. And that's true, I think, for quite a few people. One of the arguments he made on a recent interview podcast where he was talking to Steve Meyer. I found it interesting because he said what Christians aren't doing is they refuse to admit that we know different things

now than we used to know, so whether that's Darwinian evolution, etc. And so he said we can't just unknow those things and now accept the historicity of the resurrection. And I did notice though that in that discussion, I don't know, did you watch the same discussion? Mason- It was the one with four people. Yeah. I wish that Meyer had have got more of a chance to speak. But did you notice that they didn't seem to be particularly interested in Meyer saying, no, no, we do have an answer for that, right?

He would, he would continually bring up these sort of scientific arguments for why Christianity can't be true. And Meyer's like, no, no, like over here, I want a book. And they would sort of move on. Yeah. And so I do sense the sort of closed off attitude towards exploring the idea that maybe all of the evidence hasn't been trending in one direction. Yeah. Which would be really interesting. Saying things like no one wants to admit that they don't know things. It's like, well, that's fair.

Yeah. But it could be the case that you don't know about atheism being true, or that agnosticism is a viable position. And this is what the sexual revolution has done, right? Is that people have such a vested interest in the lifestyle that predominates in the West, and Christianity is such an extreme religion when it comes to how you treat most of those behaviors. And one of the things that I'm more and more convinced of is when I realize how many generations it's been since we were a Christian culture

that lived recognizably Christian lives, where we had parents and then kids and then grandkids and we had these big extended families and they all went to church and religion kind of shaped the way they lived and how they interacted with each other that were so far removed from that that people can't actually they don't actually know what it would be like to live that way and they don't know how anymore. And you know there's a line from from Tolkien right some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. Sometimes when I when I see people ranting like you know how could you how can anybody have three, four kids? At first I'm like, what are you talking about, right?

Like, my dad came from a family of 11, my mom came from a family of nine, I'm from five. I've got like, I think 110 first cousins, if you combine them, and then hundreds after that. But I remember actually, after a couple of years doing pro-life activism, like, okay, so maybe that's not just a screw off. Maybe, like, she's serious.

They really don't think this can be done. The idea of marrying one person activism, like, okay, so maybe that's not just a screw off. Maybe, like, she's serious. That they really don't think this can be done. That the idea of marrying one person and having a bunch of kids is so far removed from their experience and from the experiences that have shaped their skills and their view of the world, that they genuinely don't think it's possible. And I'm more and more convinced that that's the case. That they just don't think that it's possible to live that way anymore. And this goes back to the question of is the West dead? The next question I wanted to ask is why is it important and why is it even something of a relief to finally realize that as a Christian in your efforts to evangelize? So I think the relief for me in realizing that the culture was fundamentally dead is because we could actually just leave the old culture wars behind.

And my view on this is probably slightly controversial in some circles because I don't necessarily think that we should stop, for example, trying to take over school boards, to pass legislation, to keep gender ideology trashed away from kids. But I don't see that as retaking the institutions. I see that as harm reduction

to those who are participating in them. I don't think that as retaking the institutions. I see that as harm reduction to those who are participating in them. I don't think that anybody looking at the numbers, anybody looking at the last 30 years, anybody looking at the influences of the educators and the history of the public system can actually claim that we can take back the public school system. I do not think that it's reasonable to claim that we can take back the universities. I don't think it's even reasonable to claim that we can take back the universities I don't think it's even reasonable to claim that we can you know retake the entertainment industry and build something that shapes a social Imaginary different to the one that we that we are currently enduring and so all of those things are dead Which means we don't have to fight for them anymore

And as such we need to start building robust subcultures And as such we need to start building robust subcultures that have a strong defense and a robust offense And so a defense is this is why politics is important because we want the government to stay out of our communities We want to pass our values on to our children We want to teach them of the other things of the scripture We want to teach them what healthy sexuality looks like we want to teach them that the culture is garbage We want to teach them that many of these governments are enemies to a healthy, fulfilled, happy way of life. And the offense is simply loving your neighbor.

I think that any subculture that does not participate in the pro-life movement is abandoning God's call to care for the least of these, and is abandoning children to a horrifying physical destruction. I think that these subcultures must become places where the refugees of the sexual revolution are able to flee to flee because the wave we're going to see in the next 10 years, I think, are the victims of these ideologies that conquered so quickly. It's going to be astronomical. I was chatting with Jason Everett the other day who said that there's a subreddit group of D transitioners over 40,000 people within that group. Over 50,000 now I think.

Okay. Have you heard the, did you see Chloe Cole tell her story? Not yet. Um, she did it on Jordan Peterson anyway. She got a double must... Oh I did see it! So she had a double mastectomy when she was 15. Oh bless her, that broke my heart.

And so I did an interview with her for first things, I don't know, a couple of months ago. And like, the things she was describing to me it was such a weird moment because she's describing how like she had a double mastectomy so they've severed those ducts and her chest leaks all the time and she's trying to describe the things that are happening to her and I'm like I'm a 34 year old guy talking to a kid and the things she's describing to me are in relation to parts that like I shouldn't be hearing about at the same time it's because somebody took a knife to these parts and gave her drugs

that resulted in permanent deformation. Rumble.com. Go over to rumble.com and subscribe to Pints with Aquinas. Also matfrad.locals.com because I am kicking this hornet's nest. Well, Pints is with Jason and now you. So please, please go subscribe. matfrad.locals.com, rumble.com.

If you can make those the top two links. Yeah. Can we just really apologize for not being live on rumble and tell people why. Did I blast across the line? No, I want you to keep blasting. This is what I was chatting with Jason with the other day. If we choose to remain silent on these issues for, I mean, there's, there's an element in which prudence needs to dictate what you say. There's no point kicking a hornet's nest unnecessarily getting banned and then no longer being able to speak in this public square, which is YouTube. And yet if we choose to remain silent on these issues, all we're showing is that we love the platform more than our viewers and I don't want to do that. So I want to keep doing this. I just, I fight it

hard to believe that we'll be here for long. So, uh, the reason we're not streaming on rumble, we want to stream whenever we stream, we want to stream on rumble and YouTube. It's just, we had some complications today, uh, but this will be up. This whole episode will be up on rumble after this. So yeah, please do it. Where are we? Didn't mean to cut you off, but yeah, but you talked about, they've taken a knife to this girl. Yeah. And so I do think that these subcultures will have to be ready to receive all of these

refugees because so many of these people are going to find out that they've been sold out by the entire affirmation industry. And it's affirmed them in so many different ways, right? It's told them that, you know, if they want to be special and they want to be unique, that they can do all of these, all of these different things. They can have all of these different surgeries. And where are these people supposed to go when the healthcare industry is no longer interested in helping them? Chloe Cole talks about how hard it is to get help. Yeah,

Steubenville would definitely be an option. But so many of these people just don't know where to go after this. And I don't think, I don't think people are fully prepared for the level of anger and betrayal these young people are going to have when you consider that the second D-transitioner to sue her doctor was transitioned at age 13. And these are people, many of these people, according to the TikToks that they're posting, I just saw a Twitter stream this weekend, again from another one who's just realized

that I'll probably never be able to have kids, a decision that was made basically when I was nine or 10, whenever they put me on puberty blockers, and I'll probably never be able to have kids, a decision that was made basically when I was nine or ten, whenever they put me on puberty blockers, and I'll probably never be able to experience sexual pleasure because all of the equipment for that has been ruined by the drugs they put me on. Imagine making those two decisions before you're old enough to drink, vote or drive, it's just staggering. When I spoke with Michael Knowles on my show, he said something that I think will forever live in my mind, and that's the idea that we

have to give people an off-ramp. Yeah. If we're going to, as fun as it might feel, to curb stomp ideologies, we can't forget that these ideologies are destroying real people's lives, and we don't want to make the mistake of, you know, curb stomping people's emotions and their beautiful hearts made in the image and likeness of God. And so how do we gully? I don't know what the question is because I don't want to talk about what we've already talked about a thousand times before, but we've got to give these people an off ramp. And my fear is if these people feel deeply let down by medical professionals, by Joe Biden, who

says a child should be able to get a sex change quote unquote, or be sexually, rather, genetically mutilated, I don't want them to see us as their enemies either. Like I want them to know that we love them. That's actually you mentioned the language earlier. That's an interesting point because you said quote unquote sex change surgeries. I remember there was a there was a couple of months there where all of the major American newspapers, it was first like sex change surgeries, right? And then it was gender confirmation surgeries and it was gender affirmation surgeries.

Like there's been a distinct shift in all of the words they're using. Because what does gender affirmation mean? Right. We're just making sure the body aligns with the mind. Right. It's so, yeah, the language, the language is shifting there too. Why is it that you think that Peterson wasn't dinged for that, for having a detransitioner share her story? It feels like these guys are the greatest threat against this insane ideology. You mean Peterson?

Not Peterson, but the person he interviewed, Chloe. Chloe Kuhl. I don't know actually. I ask myself the same question because there's like a, the whole interview is is like Really emotionally mauling because she's so young and you realize what was done to her like long before she had any opportunity to understand What was happening? And there's a like this eight minute clip where all like Peterson can do is just sort of gawk and Like mutter God's name a couple of times in a way

that doesn't sound like blasphemy to me. It sounds like kind of like a prayer under his breath. Maybe I don't know, you would know more about this. Is there some people that are too big to cancel on YouTube? I don't think so. It depends if the incentive is there, I suppose. I know that I think Joe Rogan's perhaps too big for Spotify to cancel when they all came after him several months ago for his alleged racism and other things that he said. I think the only reason he wasn't canceled is because he's bringing in more money than they would bring in if they were to virtual signal by canceling him. That makes sense.

Yeah, this is very good. I'm certainly not too big to be canceled in case that's what you're asking. I'll be careful. Yeah, no, no, no, I'm certainly not too big to be canceled in case that's what you're asking I'll be careful. Yeah. No, no, no, I'm not concerned. I'm really not concerned Thursday wishes I was but I oh sorry. No, that's not what I'm I don't mean it in a cavalier way, right? I am honored for this platform and it's I'm so grateful That people watch it and I get to chat with wonderful folks like you. I love it. But if I got canceled tomorrow, I'd sleep really fine. Yeah, I'd have to figure out what we're going to do. Good thing about living in a Rust Belt town is things aren't terribly expensive,

you know? You can buy a house for the price of a top of the line VCR. But no, I really like that. The idea of understanding that our culture is dead is a relief because we're not going to be able to resurrect it through a through a president or something like that. No, and I do think that has to be somewhat better understood because you do have a lot of people who are trying to salvage something from a culture that's so obviously wicked and opposed to everything we believe in so you'll get these long think pieces about absolute trash TV shows or films where it's like well if you squint right you can really

see a redemptive message there yes and I'm like okay well it's like well like there's only like a handful of archetypal stories that show up everywhere. So not hard to do. But in addition to that, there's a ton of blasphemy, there's a ton of pornography. And so I'm sorry, you can't justify looking at it by claiming that it's got some redemptive element to it. Cause you got to wade through a lot of garbage to get there.

What standard do you think Christian should use when watching film or listening to music? So I have to admit that with a lot of it now, like I don't listen to pretty much any secular music at all anymore. Not because I think it's all wrong, but just because at a certain point, like the industry is pushing things that are so evil that I just don't want them in my life at all. Like it's kind of like Disney used to make, you know, like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and Cinderella and now they shoehorn some LGBT character into every single thing. You cannot actually have a Disney Circle subscription without your money being used to fund content

that's explicitly designed to poison your kids. Yeah, explain what Circle is for those who don't know. That's a Disney filter, correct? No, sorry, Disney Circle. Sorry, I mixed it up because we're talking about Pornert here. No, Disney Plus is what it's called? Sorry, the streaming service. But I'm sure the same is true with the Disney Circle, which is quite ironic. You're funding a company that's trying to poison your children by buying a product that's meant to prevent your children from being poisoned.

And I know everybody has to make different decisions, right? Maybe the shirt I was wearing was made in China or something like that. So the response argument to me will be, okay, but you know what? Everything we buy probably originates in something that's not completely ethical. And that's a decent argument. I would argue, however, that things like, so entertainment, which CS Lewis called the devil's substitute for joy, I think is far more powerful and far more insidious and I do not think that the sexual revolution would have gotten as far as They have without it

Because what we've seen on on a whole bunch of key issues is that stories and storytellers have reshaped the way a whole culture Thinks about it So I'll give you a couple of examples if you look at the way our culture views assisted suicide now, assisted suicide as a noble option, those who perform it being noble people, basically it's sort of the pinnacle of autonomy, right? Our culture worships autonomy and this is sort of the final, defied act where you claim your autonomy for yourself forever. I'm thinking of the Frozen song, Let It Go. Like that. But the films that

have been paving the way for this have been at work for decades. So you had Million Dollar Baby, where the struggling Catholic coach eventually finds it within himself to euthanize his struggling fighter who's been disabled, because apparently she's better dead than disabled. The medical show House mainstreamed euthanasia throughout the entire thing. He was always performing different forms of euthanasia. There's one episode where he gives, you can see it on YouTube, a whole speech basically saying everybody does it, which is the same argument the abortion activists used to say, right? Like we're not making sure it happens more. We're just going to put guardrails up and ensure it happens safely. Same arguments being made by TV shows like that.

Law and Order did the same thing. You may have heard of that really grotesque show Me Before You. I've heard of it. Never was. So there's this young woman who, I watched it on the plane when it first came out for an article I had to write. And there's this young woman who gets hired to care for somebody who has quadriplegia. And then what ends up happening is she falls in love with him, he comes out of the shell, he falls in love with her, and then he commits suicide because she'd be better off with somebody who could walk. Right? Goes to Dignitas in Switzerland and dies by lethal injection. And this movie was considered to be one of the best hits of the year and the

book sold a couple of million copies. And so are you familiar with the term social imaginary? No. So Dr. Charles Taylor wrote the book Our Secondary Age. Yep. And one of the things that he talks about is the social imaginary, which is all the stories and the storytellers and the traditions that shape the way we think without us even being fully cognizant of that.

And Charles Truman in his book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, discusses how the sexual revolution fundamentally changed our social imaginary in ways that we're not fully aware of. Something that's coming to mind is maybe 50 years ago, the American dream was a white picket fence and a house and a dog and a couple of kids. Whereas today it's been influenced largely by friends, where you live in New York City and you just have

a series of fornicating relationships and you have nothing to tie you down. Which was the explicit intention of the creators of friends. Is that right? So they were the second, they hosted the second same sex wedding on TV and they actually said upfront like we're going to get a ton of calls and we got to be prepared for this because we're breaking new ground here right it's like the one with the lesbian wedding right they got three calls like three calls in response and that's when they realized they were pushing at an open door there's that famous quote from Lenin right if you if you stick your bayonet in you feel steel

withdraw and push again when you feel mush keep pushing and so a lot of the storytellers of our culture have been testing the limits. How far can I go? And when they feel mush, they keep on pushing. And so that was true for Friends. It was true for pretty much every sitcom following that. And so our social imaginary has been reshaped by these stories and storytellers. It's mainstreamed the idea of assisted suicide. It's mainstreamed the idea of, you know, casual hookups because even porn was a punchline in Friends 24-7, right? It was like kind of hilarious. Yeah, the only weird thing was weird about a teen with absolute scorn

Mm-hmm and racism which they ought to have treated with absolute scorn, which is good But the casual hookups was celebrated laughed about worse than that is they actually celebrated the kind of predatory hookups that came to define the hookup culture. That's right. Right? Like you have Joey looking over at the bar and saying she's needy, she's vulnerable, I'm thinking to Ching. Or Ross Geller hooking up with a student. Yep. All that kind of stuff. And now we have like the LGBT movement has completely taken over the entertainment industry. We had, what's that guy? He plays Sheldon Cooper in the Big Bang Theory. Yeah. Whatever, something Parsons? Does that make sense? Jim Parsons. Yeah. So anyways, he does, he has a whole show now on like two parents discovering they have a transgender child. There's a non-binary

bison on a major kids show on Netflix. Blue's Clues featured a post-operation transgender beaver with chest scars and a parade to celebrate transgenderism. Velma of Scooby Doo came out as a lesbian. Peppa Pig has lesbian polar bears, right? I keep getting back to this is why the West is dead is good news because we don't have to get angry about this anymore. This is the new normal.

Yes. And it's only getting worse and you should expect it to get worse. and we need to create subcultures that have a strong defensive and offensive I'd like to talk about that a little bit more. Where are you seeing that take place? What subcultures are you aware of and where are they and what are they doing? Right? Interesting because there's you live Ottawa. No. No, I live in Tilson Berg, which you've never heard of. Okay, is it in Ontario? Yeah, it's a small town in southern Ontario. It would be it would it would definitely qualify as a subculture for sure. It's so subcultures.

There's a couple of key things. It's difficult to be a subculture when you have Big Tech and Disney pumping their poison into your homes and we're not willing to cut it off. So we want to be well, but we're allowing ourselves to be poisoned. So this would be my first my first point is that you cannot create a subculture until you cut off the sewage pipe, right? You have to stop the mainstream culture from poisoning the groundwater in order to have

a healthy community. And this is, there's a couple of points to that. We just talked about entertainment, right? If you basically allow your kids to have Netflix, to have Disney Plus, to have all of these streaming services, you are genuinely allowing the enemy to have time allow your kids to have Netflix, to have Disney+, to have all of these streaming services, you are genuinely allowing the enemy to have time with your kids. You are allowing their storytellers

to tell stories to your kids. Right, there was a joke, I forget which old comedian said it, this is like decades ago, where he said TV was an excuse, to have people that you would never allow into your home speak to you in your home. That's basically what these streaming services do. And so we're still trying to kind of have both ways, right? A lot of Christians defended Game of Thrones or what's another obvious example. Yellowstone is the new one that's

really, really popular and you have a lot of conservative hosts that push this trash as well. Now my understanding, I never, I watched, I think one episode of that, my understanding was they kind of get in the door and they show that you're going to be a rather wholesome sitcom that both left and right can enjoy. They did this with, was it Ted Lasso? Okay. Which was the, it was an American football coach who moved to England to coach a soccer team. And he was this good old southern boy, very optimistic, and then a ton of fornication and evil was pushed in like five episodes

in or something. Is Yellowstone like that, where it begins with some kind of promise that conservatives could appreciate it, and then what does it do? I suspect so. I actually only looked it up after a whole bunch of people at anti-porn presentations I was giving came up and was like, this is a very triggering show. There's a lot of really graphic sex scenes. Last weekend I gave four talks on this

and it came up at three of them. That Yellowstone was full of these really graphic sex scenes. God have mercy. And that sort of thing. I think we have to we have to cut that off in order. Your kids are never going to be interested in reading the great classics. They're never going to actually delve into what what Anthony Aslan calls the unused artillery of a culture war, which is this cultural inheritance, which is still ours, but we don't bother to use anymore until we

cut off all of the stuff that's being pumped in the Tik Tok, social media, entertainment and pornography. A decent chunk of which is persuasion technology that literally reshapes the way we think. It makes our brain unsuited to reading. It makes our brains like, like, like physically unsuited to actually enjoy the things that Western civilization did produce that we have now largely forgotten about. And so the number one thing that I think Christians can do to build subcultures is to admit that the mainstream culture is dead, to stop trying to redeem things from it, and I think really flimsy ways, and to cut it out entirely. Because who, which storytellers are you allowing to spend time with your kids? And you're not from it and I think really flimsy ways and to cut it out entirely because who

which storytellers are you allowing to spend time with your kids and you're not going to get a single wholesome kids show that isn't going to buckle eventually right mr. Radburn and Arthur got married to a dude there was gay moms and Clifford Peppa Pig had lesbian polar bears again the reason I like list off a whole bunch of them is because I'm trying to systematically remove people's excuses for keeping these streaming services. Yeah, because at the end of the day, you're going to have narrower and narrower and narrower choices, and eventually you're going to run out of them. But then you're going to be like, well, how do I distract my kids?

It's like, well, find a storyteller who doesn't want to poison their minds. And who's one of those? Who's creating maybe good cartoon or so? It's much more difficult movies. I mean, I understand there are some ideal would probably be read good literature, your kids and fair enough. But I recognize that that's also a lot of people. Do you have anything Mark Bauer line is written?

The dumbest generation and the dumbest generation revisited. He runs the podcast for first. And I interviewed him and he said, I'm actually just begging kids to read anything. He's like, their brains are so unsuited to reading That's very difficult for me to get them into like the kinds of books that you like like Dostoevsky is just sort of legions Away from where where they're actually gonna end up. So Here's a here's an interesting aspect of the discussion because so I know this is what daily wire is attempting to do Yeah, we'll see if they pull it off. Well, so I'm very unimpressed thus far for a couple of reasons. I don't have any opinion on their children's

entertainment, but when they produced their first film, right? What was it? Run, Hide, Fight? Right. And they announced that they were coming out with this movie and conservative entertainment. They were breaking into the industry. They were going to combat the streaming services. And I was pretty enthused because somebody needs to take up the space and they're probably the only guys big enough to do it. And so I just went to either common sense media or plugged in dot CA to check to see what this film was all about. And basically it's another revenge suit them like shoot them up flick that emphasizes all

of the same vices that the other revenge flicks Hollywood puts out does. It includes frontal nudity at one point that's listed. At least I think a woman was made to take her top off and her bra was exposed. Yeah, and I was like, well, okay, so basically this is the same trash that they're pumping out of LA, but I'm just giving my money to somebody who's better. And so I'm unimpressed by the take that a lot of the conservative commentators have to media, and it makes me wonder what kind of subculture they're going to create because Ben Shapiro, Lauren Chen, Andrew Claven, David French,

they were all posting nonstop, you know, spoilers for Game of Thrones and talking about what a great show it was and excusing this completely hedonistic show that tried to plumb new depths of evil season by season. And we now know from the stars who have done interviews that they were brutally exploited during all of this that you know, Emilia Clarke and the enormous bearded fellow she was starring with were drinking vodka to get through the sex scenes Because of how traumatizing it was for them because they were simulating rape, but it felt real and so the very people who are Spearheading this new cultural Renaissance that they talk about, I'm still I'm rooting for them.

I'm very much rooting for them. But based on their level of discernment about other shows, I I'm not particularly optimistic. Yes, it's like, where's that line where? You want entertainment, maybe. And so you want to choose what's the least bad, right? And what's the least bad right and What's least bad today

Would have been considered perhaps horrific, you know 50 80 years ago. Yeah Do we just wait? I mean, it's a difficult question to ask Like where do you draw the line because some of it does have to do with one's kind of personal some of it does have to do with one's kind of personal predispositions. I personally cannot watch anything that contains sexual content within it, by which I mean pornographic content within it, because of my own past. It's something that maybe my wife could go, oh, just fast forward that, but I can't even do that. So where do you think Christian should be drawing the line? Or is it, is that too difficult a question to ask? I don't really think so. I think the answer is simple, but most people hate it. All right, go on.

Well, like, so this is the show, Pines of the Aquinas. It'd be interesting to find out what Aquinas would think the line would be. Augustine wrote a lot on lust and things like that. I think we probably know where his line would be. I think the scripture is pretty explicit. So I find that people shift to getting very philosophical when we're talking about whether or not their favorite show with a sex scene in it is still watchable. And I just, give me an argument that's backed by church fathers, it's backed by scripture for why you were allowed to watch that. This would be a good parody video, you know, in 50 years you've got Christian commentators saying, well, yes, it was filled with rape, but it was heterosexual rape.

And so there was still that element of, you know, what God intends. It pissed all the right people off. Yeah. You know, which is basically the new standard for what you're allowed to watch is like it makes the people so angry. So everybody should get out there and watch. I also find myself disappointed with conservatives celebrating Chris Rock's latest stand-up comedy. He said a few things that may piss off the left, therefore he's

our new cultural hero or something. So I made the mistake of going, okay, well, I'll give it a watch. I'm sure you'll swear a bunch, but it'll be fine. Within five minutes, it was so disgusting that I thought, shame on me for even giving this a chance. It's very interesting you bring that up because there's a couple of very prominent conservative cultural commentators who are very intelligent, I like most of their commentary, who I think are getting it wrong on what comedians are doing when they say bring up abortion, which is one of the key things Chris Rock brought up, right? He said he's had so many abortions that he wants a death certificate for the baby and

he's almost won himself a free smoothie. We hear that and go, look at him admitting that he's killing a baby. He's celebrating. Louis CK did the same thing. So did, who's the, is he an Australian guy? No, the ginger. Bill Burr. He did the same thing and there was a fourth one. There was like four in a row, Dave Chappelle. So they all did a bit on abortion in the last like six or seven years and they all kind of make the same case the last like six or seven years and they all kind of make the same case that abortion kills a baby, but who cares? And I'm like,

like that's the punchline. Not the, that's what I mean. So like conservatives are so starved for mainstream approval and so starved to say, Hey, see, this person's one of us. We're like, look, he admits abortions, killing a baby. I'm like, I know. And then they say, but who cares? And everybody laughs. What I think they're doing actually is dulling moral sensibilities because the big mistake that a lot of Christians and conservatives made of comedy is they misunderstood the way it's used. And this is what friends did, I think, best and kind of led the way for this is if you can make sin funny, it is automatically unserious. Sin cannot be two things at the same time. Sin cannot simultaneously be a joke

and something so horrifying that the Son of God had to be nailed to a cross to free people from it. And so if it's consistently hilarious, right, when porn's the punchline, abortion's the punchline, hookups are the punchline, but they're simultaneously really amusing and hilarious, that doesn't work. And what these shows have done is we all sit down and we'll watch a sitcom on Saturday night and we'll laugh our faces off at one of the lovable playboys who's,

you know, betting all of these, you know, injured, damaged women who didn't have dads. And then the next day we'll go to church and try to put it on a basically like adopt an entirely new moral framework the following morning. And what you end up having is this sort of schizophrenia where we justify things that I don't think previous generations of Christians would have struggled with. I think we're struggling with it because we want to hang on to it, not because there's any good reason to keep watching it. So quit struggling. Yeah. And start fighting. Just get rid of it. Yeah. It's funny that you bring that up because I'm not sure if you saw that clip that came out, that Exodus series that Daily Wire is putting out. They just discussed last adultery

and that sort of stuff. It was disappointing to see, to say the least, to see what Prager had to say, which was essentially that if a man uses pornography to avoid adultery, it's not that awful. pornography to avoid adultery, but it's not that awful. If Prager is open to discussing this topic, I'll have him on the show next month. If he's not interested, I can't have him on the show next month. But there was a line in that clip that was disappointing where Pageot was talking about sin, and Peterson looked at him and said, because Pagio was talking about sin and Peterson looked at him and because Pagio says I sit all the time and Peterson said that's what you're such a fun guy And we all laughed and I'm not trying to criticize Peterson for that too much because I again I understand the joke and even Pagio laughs

Yeah, but is it serious or isn't it serious? I mean even sin is like we're saying no since fun It's like no if you are someone deeply immersed in sin. You're a boring Specimen of a human being like you're you're you're increasingly uninteresting sin dulls the personality Mm-hmm doesn't lead it to flourish and I think that I've heard you say this in talks before I think I heard you say it At that conference we were at in Texas years ago that you don't have a different brain to watch porn with. Right? So you don't have a brain for one thing and then a different brain for porn. Like it all bleeds through. The idea that I can watch porn and that somehow doesn't affect how I view women or sex is just biologically untrue.

And I think the same thing is true for entertainment. And I think that people are reacting to the fundamentalists and the religious right and the moral majority, because they think they were being too scrupulous about what was wrong. I actually think they got way more right than we do. Like by far, because if we're watching things that glorify sin, we don't realize what that does to our moral sensibility. So take all the heist movies, for example, right? Where end of the day who are you rooting for you're rooting for? The guys who were stealing not for the guys who were being stolen from because like that guy's a bit of a prick So therefore stealing is okay And you spend an hour and a half really rooting for the people who are doing something that you would recognize to be objectively wrong And because the story is so well made the actors are so talented the storytelling is so compelling the visuals are so stunning You get sucked right into it, and you don't even realize these, like these, these waves, these things are kind of changing your moral sensibilities and changing the way you think.

And I think that we make moral compromises while we're watching these things throughout the show, and that those moral compromises carry over into our life. And suddenly we're struggling with, I know this show has some graphic sex scenes But you know I think I'm probably holy enough to watch graphic sex scenes now I can handle it which if you can find me where like if you can find me that definition of holiness Somewhere in the last two thousand years. I'm holy enough to watch pornographic scenes, then we'll have a secondary discussion But I highly doubt you'll find it. Yeah Yeah Mournographic scenes, then we'll have a secondary discussion, but I highly doubt you'll find it. Yeah Yeah

So how then this is good. This is good getting into this because I think as the left is pushing harder and harder people are The tent for what is a conservative is growing wider and wider. So we're like, oh yeah, Joe Rogan. He's a conservative It's okay. I'd like to understand what a conservative is So you tell me what, what is a conservative or is that even what we should be doing? So the term has become kind of useless just because of precisely what you're saying now

as the line is moving so far that people are accidentally finding themselves on our side, like Bill Maher, right, who made a documentary just mocking religion and mocking God. And now everybody's like, look how conservative he is. And this is part of, I think, the Stockholm syndrome that Western Christians have too, is where they're so desperate for anybody

to say something nice about what they believe that Bill Maher can say this. They're like, see, he's on our side. I'm like, no, he's just driving the speed limit and the rest of them are boiling the frog too fast. So yes, it's true. When he went on Joe Rogan, for example, and said pornography is rapey, it's horrifying, Like when he went on Joe Rogan, for example, and said like pornography is rapey. It's horrifying

I don't I don't get why people like this people are like see even Bill Maher's admitting this I'm like no it's gotten so bad that not even Bill Maher can ignore it anymore Like this is not a sign that some people are waking up This is a sign that things are so degraded and so awful that not even Bill Maher can ignore how bad it's gotten So I just think that these people waking up and pointing out what's going on is not a sign that the left has gone so insane. It's noticeable. It's a sign of how much territory the left has actually conquered, that you've got Andrew Sullivan, who claims to be a Catholic,

but as one of the primary gay rights activists, probably, probably the man most responsible for mainstreaming the idea that same sex marriage could even be a concept. He wrote his book Virtually Normal, I think a couple of decades ago now, more than that probably. And now he's considered a very conservative guy, simply because he hit his line sooner than the people who were traveling down the same path with him did. He's like, no, I'm going to stop here. They're like, okay, well, we're going to keep going. And then a lot of us have moved towards where he did because we're giving up more territory too and we're thinking this guy who claims to be married to a man and mainstreamed the

destruction of the institution of marriage is now on our team and Barry Weiss is the same thing right she left the New York Times she's a lesbian who's married to a woman married and is currently attempting I believe to have children through some sort of horrific reproductive technology. Then you've got Douglas Murray. And I think the easy answer for why these people are now considered conservative is that these people are actually just comfortable with being dissident. Like it would not have been easy to be an out gay person in the 80s.

And I think the people who were willing to fight mainstream culture then, and are also writers and creative minds, are still comfortable fighting the culture culture now and so they're still dissident and creative tremendously talented but they actually haven't changed at all we've just moved closer towards them so for me a conservative first has to identify what he or she wants to conserve and then base his views on politics on that which is why I don't hold a lot of the same freemarket views that a lot of people who share my views would I find the experiment going on in Hungary right now The idea of a family oriented economy very very interesting I've kind of abandoned most of the specific

Ideological principles and I orient my views and I'm stumbling along and researching and I don't know enough about a lot of the stuff But it's start with what do you want to conserve? When there's nothing left to conserve, then cut it off and let it wither and die. Cause what's the point of, of, of trying to redeem Netflix or redeem Disney plus? What's the point of sending your kid off to be a missionary, you know, in the public school system, knowing they're probably going to get poisoned. So I think that you first need to know what you're going to conserve and then conserve that because I hold views that would not be considered conservative, but I think they're conservative because they're all oriented

towards what I want to see conserved in society. Yeah, we'll get to that in a moment. But even our criticism, light criticism of Daily Wire is going to be met with criticism in the YouTube comment section here. And I think part of it has to do with conservatives are so beaten down that we just we do want to Win and we are getting what I'm rooting for the wrong I am too and I love a lot of the stuff that they're doing but even a mild critique of a movie That's going to be like a revenge porn kind of show You're gonna have conservatives go. Come on. Just we need something we any criticism is gonna be met with Angus

Let me let me ask you this question then because then they put out their secondary film right on terror on the prairie, which was their first one with Gina Carano. That was an awful movie and it had like so I watched part of it because I was just interested to see what they were putting out. I'm like, okay, they bought run hide fight. This is something they made. Let's see what they've got it. Why does every show now have to have some sort of explicit rape scene in it that you

know kind of ends in a crescendo of gore like just what is conservative about that what is good or beautiful or true about it i just i don't see it and it's again the whole story is motivated around revenge which is not as you might know do you think a lot of concept do you think a lot of conservative political media is based around revenge like we're just we feel so beaten down we to, as I said earlier, curb stomp somebody. Well, I couldn't put it better than Donald Trump who said at his rally in Waco, Texas last week, I am your retribution. That's what he told the crowd. That was his biggest tear line. So very much so. And partly justified. People have gotten so sort of ground down and mocked and like their views despised despised have been told they're bigoted

transphobes there's a new phobia we possess that I find out about almost every month now and so people people are angry and they're responding to all of this by saying like smash it burn it down and I don't think that Christians are allowed to take that attitude as much as I feel it daily and as much as I understand it I empathize with it and we really like to engage with it. Might be that tension. That's so exhausting. Yes, it is. It's the tension of, I do want to burn these people, these, this, this institution of these people, these, you know, I want to burn it all down.

Um, so like, let's do that. But if it's like, well, you want to, and yet what's the right answer? Yeah. It feels like a defeatist sort of response. But that's also because we've been shaped, the entertainment we've been shaped by, pretty much like every action movie the last 20 years has a good guy who gets pushed a bit too far, gets a machine gun and starts mowing everybody down. Right? Like, look your way through the list. That is like the plot line Hollywood pumps out. It's right. Like, good guy who justifiably murders

a whole bunch of people. And so, again, the social imaginary thing, we don't realize what sort of things that we're absorbing, but what stories are informing the way we respond to events. And if those stories are the stories the culture is creating, those stories largely focus on things like revenge. There's no redemption in those stories except

for the fact that the good guy ends up being right, you know, with everything exploding behind him on a sea of corpses. You know, I think the reason you're on this show is several months ago when I went to the Ukrainian border and started talking about that more and more, I got a lot of pushback from conservatives and will today because of this conversation we're about to have and bring it on. That's fine. And, and so when you texted me an article you wrote, I'm like, Oh gosh, here we go. Like, there's another conservative telling me Russia's right and I need to get with the program. Uh, and I was really pleased to see that that's

what you, you weren't saying that, uh, break this open for us. Uh, it feels like because we have lefties wearing Ukrainian pins, that Ukraine therefore must be the enemy now, and we must be in some sense pro-Russia. Open this up. So there's a whole bunch of different things going on at the same time. Because I'm sympathetic to how a lot of conservatives got there, while rejecting their conclusions entirely. So I think the first thing we have to realize is that Putin has been the big bad wolf for years now. And so Putin is no longer a villain that anybody

believes in. Right? So you had the Russian collusion scandal with Trump that ended up being a nothing burger, but we heard about Russia being the bad guy and Putin being the bad guy for years and years. And then there was nothing. And then during COVID anybody who was a dissenting voice was spreading Russian disinformation. And so by the time Russia actually invaded somebody, it was the boy who cried wolf syndrome, right? People like, Oh, Putin's the bad guy again. We've been hearing that we're hearing this for the 10,000th time and in just a couple of years. So there's that. The second thing is one of the scarier aspects of our of our

institutions collapsing and being captured by the left is that they've rendered themselves Unbelievable even when they're doing reporting that that we should be looking at and so when you have newspapers that are identifying I just saw a BBC article this weekend Just the ugliest dude I've ever seen and I get three teeth, long hair, look mean. And it's like, you know, this is a woman who's being sent to a woman's prison because Oh, for goodness sake. And like there was another one, like this guy was honestly like he looked like he woke up, you know, from sleeping under a bridge, murdered four people, got arrested, and then introduced himself as Janice.

Right? It actually seems unreasonable to a lot of people to believe anything that those newspapers have to say because BBC is obediently following the pronouns of some thug who raped a bunch of people or murdered a child. Those are all real examples. They're all using phrases like gender affirmation surgery. We're also sort of in this moment right where Roe v Wade was overturned on June 24 of last year and the media's bending over backwards to not discuss the central character in this story,

which is the preborn baby. And so when you know that the media's lying brazenly to you all the time, when the media's throwing up pictures of like brawny rapists, calling them by female pronouns and saying, who are you gonna believe? Us or your lying eyes? They've set us up, right? So now when they report, you know, Russia's invaded Ukraine, who are you going to believe? Us or your lying eyes? They've set us up, right? So now when they report, you know,

Russia's invaded Ukraine, people are like, yeah, I bet. Right? And so the, like institutional trust in the media has collapsed precisely at the wrong moment for the poor Ukrainian Christians who are desperately trying to get their message out. And I know you've got some friends down there, so do I. A couple of them write for some of the same publications I do.

And I was talking to one who's right around my age and she said, like the most horrifying, depressing and awful thing for me is to watch all these conservative commentators who I follow in Ukraine basically playing footsie with Putin, saying he must not be all that bad because the New York Times says he is bad. And like these are the people that I follow. I share their values. Like, I'm a Christian, I'm pro-life, I'm anti all this garbage. And yet here you are, because the New York Times is reporting on what's going on, you won't believe it. And that's like, there's a, like, you notice the view of the Ukrainians themselves almost never gets discussed?

It's like, well, that's what the left says, and that's what, like, the neocons say. And this is what the right says. I'm like, why doesn't somebody ask the Ukrainians what they think? Right? A largely conservative people who would not be on board with this agenda. And just, and just so people know, I'm going to Ukraine itself. We're going to Kiev and other places to visit some orphanages, to offer some help. We plan on re-installing windows that have been busted out in this one bishop's house. And so I will get the story from them.

I'll get to record them and hear what they have to say. That'll be phenomenal. That'll be phenomenal. Another one is a lot of really prominent journalists. One is Julia Ioffe. I probably just completely butchered her last name. So I went to Russia in 2018 with a Danish journalist and a film crew to actually report on the Christianization occurring in Russia

Basically, I was told that Russia is rechristianized becoming orthodox. And so it was a wild trip We were there over the election like I was in Red Square For the rally they had to celebrate the annexation of Crimea five years earlier and like Putin was like 200 feet away Like it was a crazy experience and so what I wanted to do was interview a whole bunch of people and find out like what is this whole you know resurgence of orthodoxy thing yeah and what's really interesting is so the number of Russians who actually attend church regularly is below 10% still they have the highest abortion rate in the world still and what we've ended up facing is a scenario in which Vladimir

Putin who as everybody knows was a KGB agent who went Through this massive identity crisis after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he committed his life to there's a number of really good books About this. I think one of the best is probably the new czar by by Steve Meyer And I'm actually ignoring a couple of other really good biographies because some of their views might be suspect to some people so I'm recommending one that can be trusted. And basically when he was looking for a thread of Russian identity that actually connected the modern post-Soviet Union Russia

to the previous thousand years of Russian history, Orthodoxy was what he came up with. And he's explicitly tied the communist regime to Orthodoxy in many ways. And in ways I would hope orthodox and Catholic people especially would be very uncomfortable with. So he actually compares sort of Lenin's body, which you can still see, right, in the mausoleum and in Red Square. Very similar to the incorruptibles, although they spend millions of rubles trying to keep him minty fresh. And he tries to make all these connections

and try to claim that actually this identity is there's a continuity from 988 with the introduction of orthodoxy all the way to his reign now in 2023. And interviewing people, I kept on asking, is Putin Christian? And pretty much all the nuns and priests were like, he's very smart, is all they would say.

And then I said, so why is he rebuilding so many monasteries? 23,000 monasteries he had rebuilt when I got there, was the number. And basically what they said was, well, like he, it's not Christianity that Putin is embracing. It's Russian-ness, like Russian orthodoxy. So who's in these 23,000 monasteries? So they are at the orthodoxy is experiencing a very specific and very nationalistic resurgence.

And it's very tied to the Russian state in a way that I think is hard for a lot of Westerners to understand. So me and my friend who went were like the second journalists besides Rolling Stone to get into the compound of the Night Wolves in Moscow. And the Night Wolves is a motorcycle gang run by a guy nicknamed The Surgeon. And they actually helped to liberate the Donbass with their machine guns back in 2014. They're banned from most Western countries now, but the Danish journalists we were with

got us in. And it's wild, because they were kind of explaining how to be Christian is to be Russian, to be Orthodox is to be Russian, and these things, the Russian state is fused with the Orthodox Church very similarly to how it was during the Soviet Union when, you know, the communist government was selecting most of the clergy and it was thoroughly infiltrated by the KGB. But the reason so much of what they're saying sounds sane, and this goes back to what we said before about the left has retaken so much territory that we're actually responding to their victory rather than actually speaking from a perspective of our own beliefs, is

you've got the Patriarch Kareli, right, say things like, own beliefs, is you've got the patriarch, Kareli, right, say things like, you know, it's insane that they say, you know, men are women and women are men. And we're like, absolutely. I'm like, thank you. That would be normal 20 years ago, right? This doesn't mean that he's good, because when somebody says something obvious and true,

it matters who is saying it, and it matters why they're saying it. Like Xi Jinping has also banned LGBT propaganda aimed at Chinese youth because he doesn't want to corrupt them. Right? Binochet, the dictator in Chile, actually implemented a lot of moral decency laws in defense of Catholic values while perpetrating horrifying things on female dissidents, specifically things better left unmentioned even on a podcast where you discuss pornography. And when you go through these dictators, like Gaddafi ran rape rooms in the basement of his palace while invading against homosexuality at the African Union, so did Robert Mugabe,

who murdered I don't know how many people, but at the UN condemned the Western export of LGBT values. So like even 20 years ago, we recognize that when somebody says something obviously true, it matters who is saying it and it matters why they are saying it. And so what we've come into is this period now where because the West is so insane and Putin seems saner on the gender issue than Joe Biden and objectively is that we suddenly shift our loyalties to somebody who is also obviously a murderer. You know, his political opponents have a bad habit of falling off balconies and

ingesting rare poisons and he locks up journalists all the time and even if you don't like the journalist he's locking up, as somebody who spends a significant amount of his time criticizing his own government, I do appreciate that I get to do that, you know, without ending up in jail still. So yeah, the Russian conundrum thing, I think that progressives created the conditions for Russian disinformation to flourish. I think it's the fault of the BBC and the New York Times that conservatives are so open to what Putin has to say.

He's just taking advantage of a lack of institutional trust and a collective insanity that's gripped most of our media institutions. Give me, it's be interesting to ask you, give me the best pro-Russian argument you can right now. Like try to sound more conservative than some of the conservatives that are defending Russia and then share with me why you think that's mistaken. So I think that the most interesting voices that have been critiquing the NATO position, shall we say, would be guys like Peter Hitchens, who say, look, there is actually a lot of nuance from the geopolitical perspective. And I will, and you read my article, I'm very

careful not to stray into areas where I don't know what I'm talking about So when it comes to geopolitical strategy, for example, I have no idea if Poland giving them planes is upping the risk of nuclear war I don't know. I not only don't have a comment. I don't have an opinion You don't necessarily have an opinion on America's involvement in the world. I don't because I do not understand. Yes Enough facts. So like I get there's two views one is that if by supplying the Ukrainians weapons They defeat Russia a significant geopolitical enemy will basically be humiliated at a very low relative cost On the other hand that Putin as a nuclear-armed power could up the stakes and then end up, you know It ended up turning into a direct confrontation. I don't know which one of those are right

They both seem reasonable to me, but that's not my area of expertise. So I'm not sure The most persuasive argument to me that still wouldn't be pro-russia But would be more sympathetic than most would be Peter Hitchens pointing out that NATO as an organization Created to restrain Russia and that the aggressive expansion of NATO post the collapse of the Soviet Union and that the aggressive expansion of NATO post the collapse of the Soviet Union Is one of the reasons that he felt compelled to invade if he did in fact feel compelled it's interesting Putin's also in his 70s now and The reason that makes him particularly dangerous is he has all the palaces in the Black Sea He'll ever want he's got more money than you know pretty much anybody in the world

All he cares about his legacy at this point. Right. So he might actually do something extraordinarily insane and risky for somebody who's 40 and wants to hang on to power for 30 years like a Duffy did when he gave up his nuclear weapons or even Saddam after after the first Gulf War. When somebody is that old they're thinking about history and legacy they're not thinking about personal enrichment as much anymore. So I think a case could be made that the West has been needlessly provocative, but for me I still don't understand how that results in the argument that they

therefore have the right to invade a sovereign nation. Because although I do think it's provocative in some way for NATO to be playing footsies with Ukraine and attempting to kind of draw them into the EU NATO orbit, I also don't think that gives Russia the right to invade and to do the things they've done. Like when I was there in September I went to the mass graves in Bukovic, some horrifying things have been done there. But these horrifying things that are done and are reported on are seen as suspect or probably not true. I know. I posted photographs of like bombed out buildings of interviews I was doing with real people.

And people were like, I can't believe you fell for those fake pictures. And I took those pictures myself. Like I got told by people that what I saw didn't actually happen. Like the burned out Russian tanks by the side of the road, like the high school that got bombed next to the Holstomol Airport near Kiev.

We went out to like to Turnheave. And my reporting on the Ukraine-Russia war, I think was very nuanced because I also in my interviews with with people in the military debunked some of the stories that were anti Russia. Like there was a couple of stories of specific atrocities going on that I tracked down soldiers and I asked them like did this happen? And he said there was a video going on around on Telegram But that's as much as we've gotten it hasn't been confirmed and I wrote that too Because with fog of war stuff like the job of the Ukrainians is to convince everybody It's so terrible that they get more weapons. Yes, and so I hundred percent believe yes, they're hyperbolizing. They're exaggerating in certain instances They're probably making some things up Yep

Because to Lensky's glad handing for guns, and he needs to sort of prick people's consciences enough that they give him Abrams tanks. So I get that that's what they're doing. But the underlying shift here with this discussion is that because, so we talked about how the West is dead, is that Christians and conservatives in Western countries no longer feel much patriotism or loyalty to their own country I saw a t-shirt that said I'd rather be with Putin than with than a Democrat or something. I've heard that I've heard that more times that I can count. Yeah, like I heard it last weekend and so the difficulty is when you have Westerners who have lost faith in their own governments and

worse when you have Canadians and Americans who believe that their governments are an active force for evil in the world. When they believe the EU is an active force for evil in the world. The UN is an active force for evil in the world, which I agree that now anybody our government opposes, like we also have to have good guys and bad guys. It has to be binary. It doesn't need to. Like Putin can be a horrifying, like war crimes, perpetrating leader and Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau can be decadent people whose policies pose an active physical threat to those struggling with mental

illness or gender dysphoria or children in the womb. Both of those things can be true at the same time. But it's like us talking about entertainment. It's like, I think the Christians are going to have to get in the habit of just rejecting all of the options were presented with. Yeah. And that's why the answer to the, I'd rather be with Putin than the Democrats is how about neither exactly. It's a false dilemma. They're like, what do you want? So what do you want? Do you want totalitarian dictatorship or do you want, you know, like aggressive decadence? Which one do you want? Well, maybe I don't want either. 1984 or brave new world. Or do you want, you know, like aggressive decadence? Which one do you want? Well, maybe I don't want either.

1984 or Brave New World. Exactly. So it's really difficult also, because I think that a lot of conservatives, conservatives have always been susceptible to the totalitarian temptation. And it's because when we see everything in society around us going to hell,

the temptation is because we do fundamentally have some authoritarian instincts, right? We believe in higher religious authority. everything in society around us going to hell. The temptation is, because we do fundamentally have some authoritarian instincts, right? We believe in higher religious authority. We believe that our lives are supposed to be hemmed in by rules and standards and by scripture and things like that. And so when we see all this garbage happening,

we're like, okay, so we need somebody in here to make all this illegal and make all of this stop. And so when we see somebody like Putin, who yeah, okay, he's invading Ukraine, but he's also banning a gay pride parade, the temptation is I want a strong leader who cleans up the streets and makes the trains run on time and gets rid of all of this garbage. And that story is the story of the entire 20th century. It was always the binary.

We need to back fascism to get rid of communism, or I need to actually, you know, make a partnership with the communists to beat the fascists. And again, I think the healthy Christian response would to be reject both camps because it's basically asking, do you want to get shot or poisoned? You said that you hold some views that conservatives would disagree with. This might be one of them. What else do you think that conservatives need to be careful about as they push back against the left? What are some errors you see people making that we need to stop making? It's a very big question. It is a big question.

Just because you, yeah, just because it might be fun to, what is the word, like piss off the libs or something? Own the libs, yeah. Own the libs, rather, yeah. Well, so one of my views is shaped by a book written by Mary Eberstadt, who, if you've heard of her yet, so she is, I think, probably the foremost scholar on the sexual revolution writing today, I think. I called her the female Anthony Eslin once when I was chatting with her and instantly felt very embarrassed, but she took it as a compliment, so I was relieved. But she wrote a phenomenal book called How the West Really Lost God.

I think the book is probably 15 years old now, a new theory of secularization. And basically she, page by page, rebuts the traditional view of how our society became secular, which is the Douglas Murray view, essentially, right? That, you know, scriptural criticism from the German school, the, you know, Darwinian evolution, all these things slowly eroded all of these, what Charles Taylor would call, bulwarks of belief that had been unmovable and created the conditions in which we lost our faith. And as we lost our faith, we had the sexual revolution, whereas the Paris rioter said in 68, it's forbidden to forbid. She actually says that

that is not the case. And I have completely bought into her argument, I've read the back and forth debate, but her book has profoundly shaped my thinking on this. She says that actually the sexual revolution came first. That the sexual revolution came into a fundamentally Christian society, where there had been all these baby boomlets, where there had actually been a surge in church attendance and engagement with religious traditions, and that what the sexual revolution did was it broke apart the family, and the family is the vessel in which faith can flourish. And so secularism was actually brought about by the sexual revolution destroying the fundamental

foundation that faith needs to exist in a society, especially institutional churches. And so the reason I find this theory so interesting, that it's actually the sexual revolution that predicates the, or sort of predates, widespread secularism and the worship of self, is because that actually has a political application that I think Viktor Orbban is trying in Hungary right now, where what he's attempting to do is using government policy to orient the economy towards the family and create the conditions in which family can flourish. So not sort of white-hot free market vulture capitalism, but creating the conditions in which all policy benefits young people getting together, getting married, and raising a bunch of kids. Right? So their divorce rate has been like half their abortion rates been plummeting

year over year for like seven years. Now I interviewed the family minister of Hungary for the American conservative. She's now I think the president of Hungary. But she kind of Katalin Novak. Yeah, she was. That's right. She was here at the university speaking recently. Did you go see her? I wasn't here unfortunately. But I am going to Hungary soon and I'm going to try to set up an interview with her. Absolutely. So she basically details all these things they're doing and what's interesting is it's not working on a scale I'd like to see it working, but it's working significantly enough to mean we should give those policies a second look.

Because if we're looking at the rebuilding of society and we all recognize that religious revival is something divinely orchestrated that we cannot trigger or bring about, on the other hand, if Mary Aberstatt is right and that the sexual revolution's destruction of the family is what predates secularism, then a society oriented towards the rebuilding of the family can create the conditions, I think, for religious practice to become normative again. And so when you see in Hungary the divorce rate plummeting, the abortion rate plummeting, they basically said that anybody who has a kid, half their student debt is forgiven.

You have a second kid, all of your student debt is forgiven. If you have four kids and you're a woman, you'll never have to pay income tax again for the rest of your life. Because the most interesting polling sets coming from both Canada but other European countries is that women are having fewer children than they say they want. Which is really really interesting and they're referring to all these different economic conditions that have led to their decision to have fewer children whether by contraception or by aborting. And one of the things Hungary found, just to show you the depth and the precision of their

research, is that a lot of people would stop three kids because Then they'd have to upgrade to a minivan and that was too big of an expense because they couldn't fit three car seats Into one car and so now they have a family tax credit to get a minivan so that families can buy a minivan more easily And so for me Mary abor stats the political application of Mary abor stats theory of secularization of the sexual revolution has led me to see government policy not oriented towards everybody has all freedom all the time to do whatever they want. But instead I am very, very interested in the experiment going on in Hungary and a couple of other places. And if it continues to work the way it's working, I think that policies

like that should be adopted by other countries. Because we can't put the family back together, but we can create the conditions for some young man in Steubenville who wants to get married but sees life as so brutally expensive. There's so many economic roadblocks to him doing the thing that his great grandfather would have been able to do without thinking about it, to buy a house on one income, to have a bunch of kids, to have a two-car garage So these so these policies can till the hardened earth in order to make Yes, so

Planting the seeds of family be be more hospitable Yeah, because there are an enormous number of people based on all the data We have that want to start a family that like like, you know All the rad trad memes and all sort of the trad wife stuff. There's a lot of people who find that attractive, but also see it as unattainable and these policies, the policies in Hungary are making it attainable for a significant percentage of the population. And so here's where you get conservative saying, but free market.

I don't really care because I'm the kind of conservative who looks at what I want to conserve and wants to actually move towards that. And so I don't I don't have any scriptural or Christian attachment to free market economics at all. And I hate libertarianism because I think it's like libertinism that's dressed up to be palatable. And Mary Aberstatt said that libertarianism is moonshine straight up. Very few people can actually handle it. People who can handle it are the rich people at the top. Yeah, libertarianism makes sense when you live, say, in Canada and people want to come

in override their parents' rights and euthanize your child. Libertarianism is a response to a threat. It's not an ideology that actually gets us to where we want to go as a culture or as a subculture. And so when I talk about subcultures, these are the kinds of policies that could actually till the ground and create the conditions in which these subcultures could actually flourish, not just be possible, but flourish. So this is an interesting conversation because we've gone from admitting that the West is dead, just leave it alone, to tremendous hope, right? Like there's a lot of hope here. It sounds like we're, we might not be at the end of the bucket right now. There's probably

a long way to go, but that we're seeing people, you can only drink your own crap for so long. To use an analogy that's no one has ever used before. It's like you can keep doing it and we can all die or we can. Well, I think that my response to that would be the West is dead. Long live the West. Yeah. Is the West as we knew it is dead, but it's our responsible. You're married, we have kids,

and we have to ask ourselves, like, how do we rebuild among the ruins? How do we create a subculture in which our children can live healthy, fulfilled lives? How can we protect them from the storytellers of the culture? How do we create a parallel social imaginary that passes on our values and refuses to allow them to

be inculcated into the old values. And so the West is dead, but the inheritance that the West has has simply been rejected by multiple generations. We can pick that up whenever we want to. Right? That's why Anthony Eslen calls the classics, the unused artillery of the culture wars is it's all still right there. Nobody's the government's not stopping you from reading Heidi to your kids.

Right. Or Laura Ingalls Wilder or any of the great classics of American literature that teach beautiful things about Sabbath observance and family life and living a virtuous life. They may be rewritten soon as Dr. Seuss was. Yeah, do buy physical copies. Right now. That's right. I don't remember her being a raging lesbian. Blue hair too. Yeah, they made Jill March from Little Woman a lesbian in one new version. To be fair, Dr. Seuss has had blue hair for a while.

You know, one thing that you brought up, you changed my mind on this, and that's the idea that UFC is something that we should be okay with. And I brought this up on the Yes or No show with Michael Norris in the day, because I think your arguments excellent. I like watching two people beat the snot out of each other. It seems enjoyable, but I don't like that.

I like that. Give us your argument against UFC and boxing. So my basic argument on on you, on UFC and boxing and most of cage fighting and sort of everything in that category would simply be that we do not have any right to physically maul and injure somebody for entertainment purposes. That's right. There are absolutely there are reasons. Yes. Money and entertainment violence on behalf of their loved ones. So self-defense training, learning how to use all of those fighting mechanisms, absolutely

doing it for training purposes, for military purposes, for law enforcement purposes, all of that. But to physically do damage to one another, which is the point of the sport, specifically for the purpose of entertaining a mob, that if you look at the people screaming and cheering, it's always chanting blood and they get most excited when somebody's head's bouncing up and down. I think it's pornographic in the real sense of the term. And I think it's coarsening and it's morally deadening

and I enjoy it for all of the reasons that you decided. I find it endlessly fascinating, but for all of the wrong reasons because you were actually sort of glorifying and kind of getting off on two people perpetrating violence against each other Because we like to see it and so the response arguments always as it takes tremendous skill Of course, most of those guys could pop my head like a right pimple Like I have no doubt they're a tremendously talented people

But all kinds of people are tremendously talented at doing things that I don't think Exactly Yeah, no, I think that's right. The counter example that's often brought up, and which Michael Norr's brought up against me to challenge my view, was that of football. My answer, and I want to hear yours, is that just because there might be some sports that I don't know, whether they fit into this category of being unacceptable or not, doesn't mean I can't decide what is unacceptable. It's the old fallacy of the beard.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. I don't know when a beard begins. Doesn't mean I can't say what a beard is. I feel that way with pornography as well. I can demonize pornography and there can be some morally, or let's say gray areas rather, where I'm not sure if this fits into that category of the pornographic or not,

but it doesn't mean I can't know what the pornographic is. What's your view on football? I think football largely fits. And by football, just so everybody knows, we have a worldwide audience here. I mean, I guess rugby, but also NFL. So I could be persuaded in either direction, but I will say that the American football industry, I think, is fundamentally a distinctive net negative on American culture writ large. Conservatives have this thing where they tune on to Super Bowl Sunday when they should be at church, and then what they do is they'll watch the Super Bowl halftime show and then

predictably get outraged, and then they go on Twitter and, can you believe? Of course I can believe it. They've been doing it for as long as I'm alive. And so like the whole spectacle, I think, is just sort of a decadent and hedonistic celebration of human violence, exhibitionist sexuality and Sabbath breaking. And that's my short answer. Mason- Fair enough. Matt Walsh recently said that we need these sports.

We need boxing. We need football because it takes male aggression and channels it in a healthy way." What's your response to that? Bregman You don't need to do that as a spectator sport though, because you can get fat drinking beer and eating chips on a Sunday morning watching it on TV. It's not doing anything for you. If he's making the case that sports are good for boys, I agree. If he's making the case that boys should be trained in self-defense, should learn boxing or mixed martial arts or Krav Maga, I totally support that as well. So I support the premise of his argument.

I would just say it doesn't apply to professional football. But isn't it a little inconsistent to say that I'm against boxing as a spectator sport, but I am okay with my son learning it and yet he's going to be learning in order to learn it efficiently. He's going to have to get hurt. That really depends because I do think that good coaches ensure that people don't get physically damaged and don't actually sustain permanent damage. But somebody who's preparing for an actual fight where something's on the line is going

to be a lot more prepared to engage in a real fight than somebody who's in a ring knowing he can't actually get that hurt. True. And so I will admit that I don't know enough about, so when we're talking about boxing and mixed martial arts, I have a lot of buddies who went through it and did the training and have learned all these things. I don't actually know what the rate of injury is afterwards and stuff like that. I do think that like males especially can take physical risks to gain a skill that is useful and and that and will help them Protect and defend the vulnerable. I think it's different when it becomes a spectator sport though Like if the same two people were fighting in a ring explicitly for the purposes of training

I think that would be different because they wouldn't be doing it for entertainment purposes I say I don't think two males fighting is always wrong. I do think that physically hurting each other for the entertainment of a mob is what I object to, fundamentally. It is a spectator sport. Will Barron Well, one of the reasons that cock fighting and bear baiting was... Sorry, did I pause too much after cock? Luke Hynes You paused way too much. Will Barron Cock fighting and bear baiting was banned wasn't just because of animal cruelty,

but because it vulgarized the masses. Like what kind of person will you be if you get into or get off on watching roosters tear each other to shreds? Like what kind of hand does that make you? And UFC doesn't seem to be. So when we're talking about football, UFC, entertainment, porn, and then we say, where do we draw the line? Like, again, I find this to be an interesting question because I feel like 50 years ago, most devout Christians who cared about building virtue would find it much easier to answer.

And I think that our hesitancy to answer some questions that I think are kind of obvious are simply because we don't want to give the stuff up. So what we, what we actually are trying to do is how close can I get to the danger zone and it still be morally acceptable rather than how far can I go away from this in the direction of pursuing other good, true and beautiful things? Um, and I don't know, I just find, I find a lot of the arguments, like, so all of the arguments that we have about really morally deadening entertainment, I don't think they're that difficult. Actually, I think they're difficult because we've chosen to make them difficult. Whereas the question ought to be how faithful can I be to the word of God? Yeah. And who am I when I watch? Why do I like watching UFC? You're always going to get, you know, some guy who's like, well, I think it's physical chess and it's great. You know, I'm sure there's a few. I'm sure there's a few few people who can who can view graphic sex scenes and movies and not have it bother them that much. I don't think that's a, arguing from the exception is how we got legal abortion and pretty much everything else. So I don't think it's a good argument.

Yeah, let's take a break. And then when we come back, we're going to take some questions from our local supporters and super chatters. So I'm if you're here watching right now and you're a local supporter, I'm about to make a post that's just exclusive to you and we'll do our best to get to all of your questions. Thanks so much. So if you haven't yet got the app Hello, what are you doing? If you have a smartphone go and download Hello but first go to hello.com slash Matt Fradd. Hello is the number one Catholic prayer and meditation app on the web and it's fantastic and it actually beat TikTok recently as far as in the app store. Did number one Catholic prayer and meditation app on the web. And it's fantastic. And it actually beat TikTok recently as far as in the episode. Did you know that?

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So it was a woman who mistakenly thinks that she's a man and it's believed that this person tried to target a Christian school like was targeting a Christian school. Thoughts? Have you heard about this? Yes, it's it's kind of wild because when the story first came out and it was a male they said was a male shooter and I thought, like that makes more sense, but then they say it's female, like it's very, it's vanishingly rare that a female does a perpetrates a school shooting, but I think part of this would have to do with the rhetoric. Like I wrote a column last week or the week before on one of these major trans TikTok influencers, I think.

Anyways, a social media influencer who's basically talking to young trans people and saying like, this is literally genocide. There was a story two days ago saying like, red States are denying trans people their existence and all these kinds of things. And with rhetoric saying like, we're literally being killed, we're literally dying,

we're literally suffering from a genocide. It was only really a matter of time before somebody decided to react like, you know, that was in fact happening That's horrifying though. Yeah, I hadn't realized people when it's a school shooting and so this is this is just to get the facts, right? This isn't somebody who's like in her late 20s 20 shooting like nine-year-olds. She's 28 the she and she's dead 20s six at three adults adults, three nine year old children. Yeah.

Reports indicate shooter possessed maps of the school indicating a premeditated planned attack. The pastor who runs the church that run the school, his own nine year old daughter was lost in the shooting. Oh Lord Jesus. Um, there was, this is also just real quick and then I'll. Yeah, go for it.

Shut up about, um, but this I believe, and I was trying to confirm this last night because I was prepping this stuff for Matt to have ready. But if I remember right, and I saw some like things in passing when I was looking through this, this is the second time in the last four years. Well, this is the fourth shooter in the last four years that has identified as trans. Really?

That's been a mass shooter. Colorado Springs at the gay bar. Right. And then there was another and I couldn't find I couldn't find the details but I do know this I do remember this but there was another female shooter who identified as male who was on testosterone. And we also have people as recently as like Jane Fonda on the view saying that the solution to people like the lifers taking away. Yeah. Like she backtracked that comment, but it wasn't very convincing. Al X on Twitter is sharing a conversation that took place between a reporter and a police

officer. The reporter says, do you have any reason to believe that how she identifies has any motive for targeting the school? The police officer said there is some theory to that. The reporter said, so was this a targeted attack? The police officer says it was. Gosh, there's so many ways to just butcher this right now. Isn't there something like particularly gut wrenching about the idea of a woman shooting

kids? To go back to our earlier comment, I think there's something particularly gut wrenching about watching women destroy each other in a ring for sport. There's particularly gut wrenching about that. Yes, this is disgusting. This is despicable. This is, how else to say it, just sad enough to make you lose sleep. Not to mention these poor mothers and fathers who lost their children. Yeah. But see, what this is going to become now is the right harping on the fact that this was someone who's transgender and the left saying we need gun control. Well, they're already blaming Tennessee.

They're already blaming Daily Wire. I saw it on Twitter. They pointed out that this is in Nashville. This is where all the anti-trans Daily Wire hosts are from. Everybody's going to make a mess of it almost immediately. And then both the left and the right are going to complain about the other side gaslighting them. Yeah. What's what's our response to this? What's our Christian response to this?

Other than prayers for the repose of these souls and justice to be done? One of the things I have not yet figured out is when is the right time in the wake of a tragedy that is so horrific and it's always more horrific when it involves little kids like when is the right time to actually write a commentary pointing out the political implications in the wake of a tragedy that is so horrific, and it's always more horrific when it involves little kids. Like when is the right time to actually write a commentary pointing out the political implications of it? I just don't know. Because it feels like, it feels ghoulish to be like,

okay, I write about gender ideology all the time, which I do, to, you know, hop right back on the blog, or, you know, write for a magazine, an article on how, see, this is about their rhetoric and stuff like that. I don't know, it feels disrespectful. I don't think it necessarily is, but I don't know, it feels very hard to know what the right thing to do when it's nine-year-olds who got shot. Like they're just little kids. Yeah, we got another tweet here from End Wokeness, and this person points out, not a single headline says the word Christian, transgender or targeted. And this is from, he's looking at papers from the New York Times,

Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and Wall Street Journal. Yeah. Well, you'll remember when all of those Christians got, got killed over Easter Sunday and then Obama and Hillary tweeted out that Easter worshipers had been killed, right? Like they'll bend over backwards to avoid portraying Christians as victims, because Christians cannot be victims, because in the culture wars, Christians are those with the oppressive ideology that's creating victims instead. Now as somebody who's from America but lives in Canada, what is your opinion on gun control? I actually don't have any strong opinions on gun control at all. I'm the kind of guy who got licensed to get a hand

gun and a long gun and everything in Canada and I just forgot to buy one for like five years. But wouldn't now be a great time for Canadian citizens to have some chance against people coming in to utilize their children? Oh for sure, yep. I just don't have a strong opinion on... So after these shootings always happen, everybody's like, it's guns, it's mental illness, it's this, it's that. I don't know what the right answer to that question is because you do go to other countries where, you know, guns are still available and there's less of them at the same time. You can't just say it's American culture because American culture is global culture. Now, you know, they, they export the same video games,

the same TV shows, the same movies. So we even wear in Australia American sports team. Yeah, like NBA NFL. So I don't know what the differences there are. And I feel like the same, you know, four positions are put forward every time there's a mass shooting, and I just genuinely have no idea which one's right. Yeah. Wow. God. God have mercy. One of the biggest victories in the culture war that we've seen in the last what?

Well, since the sexual revolution has been the overturning of Roe versus Wade. If it can be overturned, can it be re overturned? And is this something we should celebrate? Obviously, it's something we should celebrate. But is it something that we should have hope for in the in the distant future that this isn't just going to be turned again? Yeah. So I feel like we've had several conversations after we declared the West dead that indicate that, you know, it's might be worth slapping the paddles to.

I was referring to culture specifically, but with, I think that, so the overturn of Roe we weighed on, on June 24, 2022 was many things. I actually went to DC with my wife and we went to the front of the Supreme Court while the corpse of Roe was still fresh and the protests were still raging and One of the most significant things I think from an even international perspective is it is true That the sexual revolution has never received a blow like that and because so many people thought the overturn of Roe was impossible the pro-life movement in the United States has been declared dead a handful of times in my lifetime yes right it was declared dead when the human human life amendment failed in 80s it was declared dead after the Face Act

came in and Operation Rescue got shut down then it was declared dead and when I actually thought that it might all be over at least in terms of the overturn of Roe was when Obama got reelected, and we all thought he'd get like two or three more justices, and this was gonna be the law of the land for a generation. And then Roe v. Wade was overturned, and it's the only time I've enjoyed reading the left-wing press in years,

because the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post were all saying things like, if Roe v. Wade can be overturned, what else is possible? And I'm like, what a pleasant thing to think about. Let's go down that rabbit trail for a bit. So I do think that the encouragement that a lot of other pro-life movements in other countries got, I'm in contact regularly with pro-life groups from all over the world. And one of the significant things a lot of Latin American and South American pro-life leaders said is that if America, the sort of globalist blob that's exporting abortion

and LGBT rights all over the world, which goes back to why a lot of Americans don't feel patriotic anymore, if America can overturn Roe v. Wade, can say, as Samuel Alito explicitly did, abortion is not a constitutional right. If he can say that, then why are they telling us that we have to legalize abortion? Why are they ruling that abortion must be legalized because it's a fundamental human

right? And then you actually had one Planned Parenthood, international Planned Parenthood employee say, this is a setback, our work in Africa and Latin America, decades. Praise God. Your work is evil. I was very irritated by those who felt like, no, we should cautiously celebrate. I'm like, absolutely not. Everybody should be having the best weekend they've had in decades. This is an unambiguously phenomenal thing.

Yeah. This was a, this, this happened on my daughter's birthday on our way to a trampoline park and we celebrated together. And that's amazing. Yeah. It's a beautiful thing too. That was, I mean, talk about if culture means a life lived in common. It was a beautiful thing in Steubenville for people to celebrate together. Yeah. What's your thoughts on Steubenville? You've been here, what, 10 hours? Roughly Thursday gave me a bit of a tour.

The cigar lounge is just phenomenal. Those floors, the ceiling. Yes, fantastic. I recognize all the paintings on the wall good good good That was that was very neat But this this is the sort of thing that we're talking about with subculture is it's very we've talked about a bunch of but how Subculture should look but intentionality I think is a huge one You talked earlier about moving into the ruins and setting up shop. We did that literally here

Before you did but I saw the massive rusting steel mills, what four of them or something like that. The shadow of their American steel machine. Yeah, the shadow of the American steel machine. But what I really appreciate about what everybody's doing here is the intentionality they're recognizing that to create what, what is called a thick community, that you actually need to be very intentional about that. It's these common working spaces, these places where people can gather.

Those things are very present here and it's obviously been well thought out for those reasons. So it's really, really cool to see communities like this reforming and I hope this is something we see happening right across the United States, Canada and elsewhere. Yeah, it is beautiful to see. And one of the things I love about living in Steubenville is basically we just,

everyone picks a feast Day and has a house party on that day And also like the liturgical calendar lines up perfectly with the gray months How big is the community here? How many people would you say have moved here over the last two years if you could give it if you were like putting if there was Money on it families because if I had to guess families, then I would have let's say let's say people Let's say people is a lot of people that move to town people you had to put money on it. Because if I had to guess families, then I would have to do some math. Let's say people. Is there a lot of people that move to town?

If you had to put money on it, so we're not being hyperbolic, we're trying to be realistic. Are we doing a Price is Right style where I have to be close without going over? Should I hyperbolize it a little? No, I think close without going over because I fear that sometimes maybe I... I would get... So if people and not families, so I would say we've got at least Jacob has told me the last number Jacob told me was 14, maybe 20 families, families. And I'd say they on average have five members each.

Right. Because they average have three kids. Yeah. Some of them have none and some of them have more. Yeah. So I mean six, seven, 800 people. I wouldn't go that far. I was going to say like two to 300. Yeah. Catholics within the last two years, probably since I moved, we keep moved. We keep meeting people. I think buying up the downtown. Part of the blame is this show. Cause we keep talking about student bill. I keep meeting people to say,

I just moved here because of what you said on the show. Seriously. Yes. I think it's because people have a lot more flexibility with their work these days that they did prior to COVID lockdowns. We even had a couple, they were like, we just moved here from Hawaii. I'm like, Oh God, you're going to hate me in February. You're gonna judge. Luke works in the co-working space downstairs. And you remember a couple of weeks ago when it was like 56, he was still, when he went out to have his smokes,

wearing his winter coat. And he came back in one day and I went, dude, you are really from, like it's, it's 50 degrees out. Why are you still wearing a winter coat? He's like, it's cold when the wind blows. Yeah. I mean, part of it is, I think setting up shop by a good Christian university, which

is what we've done here. Right. So you necessarily have families who are committed to being here. Right. Fresh blood coming in, you know, university students coming. So it's it's been really good to see. Yeah, man. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. And I really try to try to say whenever I bring up Stephenville that I'm really, really not saying you should move here. But find somewhere like this. It's like our children just have so many families that they accidentally bump into and are being influenced by in a good way. No, and that's one of the reasons you do need communities. Cause like you do, you do this talk about porn all the time, but your kids can get you on porn on like the public playground and stuff like that. If you're not careful. Right? Like you do have to create

sort of a community ethos where you're collectively committed to keeping this sort of trash out. So your kid's not the only one with a smartphone or something like that. Yeah. Or that they're not just learning the culture from other kids who are still participating in the mainstream. I wanted to revisit this topic of what Dennis Prager and Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pagio said. I'm not sure how much of that clip that you watched. I watched all of it. Right.

So basically, Dennis' point was that if somebody is using... Well, he began by saying that he cares about the interior much less than the rest of you do, he said. Now, look, I run a talk show like this. I can't tell you how many times I wish I phrased things differently or even changed my mind and now that thing lives in infamy. So I really want to give Dennis the opportunity to perhaps rephrase, to rethink, okay? Because he's said a lot of things that I agree with or I respect him a great deal. But I think beginning with that point that he cares a lot less about the interior. And I thought, well thank God for Christianity. Thank God for Jesus,

who wants our hearts to be in line with the truth, not just our actions. If I have a child who has all these evil thoughts about, say racist evil thoughts, or thoughts about harming other people, I'm not satisfied if he just doesn't act on them. I want the good to become easy for him I want him to love the good not just obey the good out of some sort of obligation But he then said in regards to pornography and I do think he was going to put on the spot here, right? And I'm not sure what kind of editing went on You know unintentionally perhaps but He said that if a man uses pornography as a substitute for marital relations with

his wife, this is awful. He said, if a man uses pornography as a substitute for adultery, it's not awful. Well, I think both are awful. And I know you've spoken a lot about pornography. I have too. What are your thoughts on that? So the most charitable interpretation of what Dennis Prager said, I thought, is that he simply doesn't understand what pornography is in 2023.

So he talks about, you know, like looking at pictures and imagining, which like when my dad sat me down when I was 13 and warned me against looking at porn, that's what he was warning me about. Don't look at these magazines. Like I see, you know, old Playboys and Hustlers now and antique bookstores being sold as sort of like novelty items because we've moved so far past that era. Whereas I wonder what Dennis Prager would do again, because like I've listened to a lot of his stuff and so I want to treat him as an ally who's gone astray as opposed to somebody that I shred. But I wonder what he would say if

he'd read that essay in the Atlantic last year where 24% of American women between the ages of 18 and 34 reported being choked during intimacy as a result of porn or The report from one of the UK education ministers saying that kids as young as 12 were being choked during sexual play So one kids that young were engaging in sexual play and then two they were actually engaging in these kinds of behaviors. And that this is now rapidly becoming the norm. That fundamentally what pornography has done is it's reshaped our minds, and as such, it's mainstreamed the idea of sexual violence in the romantic context, which of course you know better than anybody because you've spoken on this all over the place. When I speak on porn, one of the things I want to emphasize is that it's not just spiritually corrosive, which it is, but it's also going to make your mind like physically, physiologically unsuited for what will actually bring you happiness, a real marriage, a real

relationship. And that because of like, I see pornography the same way I see TikTok or other social media platforms. It's a persuasion technology because it reshapes the way that we think. It actually, you know, like transforms our mind to be aroused and attracted to things that our conscience and our reason may tell us are reprehensible and vile, but at the same time, our body is screaming for them because we've trained our brains

to be attracted to these things. And the moment for me that the violence that was becoming prevalent in pornography broke through the mainstream in Canada was we have this famous for Canada host on the CBC, which would be our, our state broadcaster, state funded broadcaster. Um, and he got accused of sexual assault by 13 or 14 women. Um, and he came out with a statement where he accepted that he'd done all those things. Yeah. He had choked, he had hit, had hit he done all this kind of stuff and he said I had a 50 shades of gray relationship Basically, it was consensual which is when a guy says that kind of thing is consensual. He's basically saying yeah

I did but she was asking for it and Then what shocked me though was not that he'd said this because we're kind of used to celebrities doing that sort of thing these days Especially post me too, but there was an article in the Toronto Star, which is Canada's largest and most left-wing newspaper, which said, Gion Gomez has been accused of unwanted sexual violence. Like unwanted sexual violence. Inherently affirming this idea that sexual violence is now permissible. Yes. And so what I do when I give talks on porn is I get the teenagers to submit written questions

to me. So they actually will ask what they want to ask. Yep. Ask honestly. And I don't know what your experience is like, but the number of questions I get from like 13, 14, 15 year old girls who are like, my boyfriend is asking me to do this. My boyfriend is asking me to do that. A lot of it's unnatural, it's violent, it's degrading, it's horrifying stuff.

And these are young kids. And this is all learned behavior. So I feel like the people who were addicted to porn even 15 years ago were usually introduced to it as teens. Now, most kids are introduced to it five, six, seven, eight. And so their brains actually never get the opportunity to be shaped by any real wholesome, healthy view of sexuality.

And what we're having is a generation of young men grow up with fundamentally deformed brains who see sexuality as something that is fundamentally cannibalistic and inherently violent. Yeah. And if people want more proof of this, not to be too self-promotional, but you should get my book, The Porn Myth. It's a non-religious response to pro-porn arguments. I don't make a cent from the sales of the book. 100% of the royalties go to help sex traffic victims in San Diego.

But when I gave that book to Trent, he read the section I had on what former porn performers were saying about their experience. He said he almost threw up. It was that bad. And these women certainly got left out of the discussion on this Exodus show And you know again, I'm not picking on them This is a big topic and they weren't planning perhaps on having a whole discussion on pornography Charitably speaking

I just don't think he knew the stuff that we're talking about right now and to be clear if all pornography was was one single photo of one single woman it would still be in my estimation an evil thing because it perverts the conjugal act. And so Dennis gave a sympathetic, or what would you say, a heart-moving story of a man who was looking after his bedridden wife like a saint. And wouldn't it be okay for him to then look at, yes, it would be wrong. It would be wrong. So no, it wouldn't be okay. Yes, it would be wrong. It's important, I think no, it wouldn't be okay. Yes, it would be, it would be wrong.

It's important, I think, to point out a couple of things. Just because something is less bad than something else, it doesn't make that thing good. If I smoke a packet of cigarettes a day, smoking my cigar here, instead of a carton, that's less bad, but it doesn't make it healthy. Feel free to jump in there. No, I just think that one of the things he was doing was he's so articulate about why leftist arguments are so often finding a loophole and then driving a whole culture through it. And then what does he do? He picks an extreme example that tugs at the heartstrings and then says, why would it be wrong for him? This is the way that the suicide activists

brought an assisted suicide. It's why nobody talks about abortion without bringing up a 12-year-old victim of sexual assault. They bring up examples that genuinely appeal to our empathy, but I think it exploits our empathy and our compassion in order to bring in an evil that will fundamentally destroy many people. Mason Hickman And society. That's right. Another thing I think he seemed to misunderstand, or at least it wasn't, and this is what I'd like to do if he does come on the show next month to talk about this, is there is a distinction that needs to be made between sexual desire and lust. In Thomas Aquinas' commentary in Matthew's Gospel where our Lord says, if you look upon a woman with lust, you've already committed adultery

with her in your heart, he makes a distinction between what he calls a pro-passion and a passion. He says a pro-passion is when we feel sexual arousal, but merely in a sensual way in which the intellect is not yet engaged. And then he distinguishes that from a passion in which we are now engaging the reason. That distinction has to be made. If you don't realize that there's a difference between feeling sexual arousal and then say fantasizing about what you could do to this woman sexually,

if there's no distinction there, then obviously it seems insane to condemn lust because lust is outside of your control. And maybe this is why a lot of people think it's impossible to be pure, because they think lust is the same thing as sexual desire, but it's not. Mason- But did you get the sense from watching that clip, because I certainly did, that he'd never really thought about the issue particularly deeply, because all of his responses were very pragmatic, like this is the way the world is, he said at one point, men like diversity, and it just didn't seem like a very well thought out position, it seemed like just a response to reality. I would agree with you if he hadn't

have begun with, I've been saying this for years. I think he hasn't been thinking about it for years. Well, maybe that's true. And maybe he will now that he's getting pushback and that would be great. I do think it was unfortunate that Daily Wire clipped that because that was not a flattering clip to say the least. Yeah, they were probably attempting to be provocative because it certainly would have triggered a lot of discussion because like Ben Shapiro wrote a book called The Porn Generation. Yeah, but was that about pornography or was that more peripherally peripherally? Yeah.

Oh, and Walsh and Knowles talk about pornography quite a bit. And I don't think we're going to see them comment on this. I don't it because PragerU, don't they have a deal with the Daily Wire? It wasn't on PragerU, it was on Daily Wire. That's the thing. So it's like, it would be nice. It would be nice to see that. Because one thing I do respect about Daily Wire is they do allow a healthy disagreement between commentators. They definitely have different views. Yes, very much so. So it would be nice to see that. All right, we've got some questions here. If we get any kind of super chats or even interesting questions, feel free to

slack them to me or let me know. But we have a question here from Paul Lanhoud, who is a local supporter. He says, hi Matt, enjoying the interview. Can you ask Jonathan if he has looked into Syriac Christian lifestyle. His description of lifestyle seems very similar to it. So the only research I've ever done to the Syriac Christian communities is that they're currently under threat in most places where they still exist. But as for their lifestyles, besides watching some fascinating videos of their liturgy, I can't claim to know much much else about them. Now you're a Protestant Christian.

Yes, reformed. Reformed. I'm a Catholic Christian. Why is it important that we link arms here? It's certainly the case, I think, that brothers fight more viciously. And maybe, how do we draw the line between disagreeing and trying to kind of call each other to our side as it were, if we believe our sides in the truth, which hopefully we do, or else we wouldn't be in that side, and linking arms and fighting these cultural wars. So Francis Schaeffer, who is the guy who brought a lot of Protestants into the pro-life movement, has a great term he calls us co-belligerence. But there's so many of these issues that we are on the right side of that we can fight together on.

But in terms of calling each other out, like I'll give an example of, I, I, this is a Trent Horn recently did a video calling out, it was James Dobson, Jordan Peterson, a couple of Protestant thinkers for being very weak on the issue of masturbation and things like that. I actually agreed with pretty much everything he said about masturbation, disagreed with all of the Protestant thinkers. And so I think that iron sharpens iron is a very healthy way to do it, especially when so many of the questions our culture are facing are about what it means to be human, which I think provides

the space to have the sorts of discussions that you very frequently have here on the show. There's a great line in the second Vatican council that says when God is forgotten, the human creature becomes unintelligible. That's a great line. It's a great line. I'll show you the meme afterwards, but there's actually one of these like hilarious memes of a Protestant saying Catholics are ridiculous.

And then a Catholic saying Protestants are ridiculous. And there's, you know, like the woke guy screaming like, believe science. And then the two guys saying we have more in common than we previously believed. Yeah. Well, one way that Catholics have been sharpened by our Protestant brethren has been, I would And then the two guys saying we have more in common than we previously believed. Yeah. Yeah. Well, one way that Catholics have been sharpened by our Protestant brethren has been, I would say, kind of theistic apologetics. I'm sure Trent Horn would agree that he would.

He has learned a great deal from people like Dr. William Lane Craig and others who have had him on the show. Have you not? Yeah. Yeah. Once upon a time, I went down to his, uh, his church, his Baptist church in Atlanta, Georgia. And we had a bit of a discussion, you know, disagree with that guy on certain things, have a great deal of respect for him. It was Dr. Peter Crave who said, when a maniac is at the door,

feuding brothers, reconcile. That's in his, his book, how to destroy Western civilization, I think, right? Okay. I don't know. It's a very interesting book. You've read a lot of books on the demise of Western civilization What was that one you mentioned by is it Eberstadt? Eberstadt, how the West really lost God. I'm gonna have to read that Yeah, she's her most recent book I think no not most recent her most recent book is Adam and Eve after the pill Revisited and I will give a shout out to it because anybody who wants to understand the background for a lot of what we're talking About is in that book and her book Primal Screams, how the sexual revolution created

identity politics. Also just her best line in that whole book, I think was identity politics is the screaming bastard child of the birth control pill. Say that one more time. Identity politics is the screaming bastard child of the birth control pill. I'm going to buy that book immediately. Oh, it's so good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Another question here. Uh, Matt Hartman says, Jonathan, what would you say to Christian parents who would be against their kids reading Dante Plato or other classic literature because they have explicit content? This is coming from a teacher that teachers at a great book school, but faces this pushback. Just pick the age. So I think there's two lines of thinking here, and I'm sure you deal with this as well.

Did you ever get a lot of pushback doing presentations on pornography to high schools because there was a contingent of parents who were convinced you were actually introducing the concept to their kids rather than warning them off it? It's a good question. I would say in the beginning I had people who would not want to talk specifically about pornography, but then something changed and everyone realized we're going to take our head out of the sand. And I got almost no pushback. There were some people, usually some ignorant teachers who were under the opinion that their 15 year old boys and girls hadn't maybe even

heard of pornography. That's a possibility because after all this is a Catholic school. But thankfully those were the minority and so kudos to them for allowing me to come in. So I got that a lot as well and I think that the reason parents need to be culturally informed, which does not mean watch all the garbage, but know what's out there, know what most young people are looking at, is to understand where you're going to put the boundaries and when to introduce your children to which things. And so when it comes to when you introduce your children to certain pieces of literature, I actually don't have an opinion. I don't know how young somebody can understand Dante anyways. I think I've met some like 10 year old boys who should be at my high school presentations. And I've also met some like, I don't know, like a 17 year old homeschool girl who definitely shouldn't be.

I find that tough as grade to be grade seven. Cause the kids either look like they're 36 or they look like they're an eight. And so, and there's like nothing in between. So like there's a whole bunch of kids there who really need the blood presentation and a bunch of kids there that are like, people do that. And so it's very hard to discern what's what. What, uh, your opinion on smartphones for children, I will, before I ask you that, let me share with mine, because a lot of people ask me about this.

We got a gab phone for our son. He's 15 years old. He still uses it. It's essentially a smart looking phone that you can group text, send photos. It even has like a weather app and a Bible app, but that's it. Like you cannot get online. There's actually no way at all that you can do it. And you know what's funny? I would, I even regret giving him that phone at the age of, I think he was 14 and a half or thereabouts when

we bought it for him. I regret that because, and I won't do it with my other children, even though I gave him a gab phone. I know there are people watching this thinking, bloody hell, I bought my eight-year-old an iPhone, forgot to log it down. Because it really kind of, in a way, took him out of the family unit, even just a little bit. Not by most people's standards, it wouldn't. But to have him be in constant communication, even just through texts, with other people.

And I don't, I mean, he's a wonderful boy and he'd be way more disciplined than most. But even that kind of took him out of the family. He's now engaging in conversations with friends around the neighborhood instead of having to be here with us. So even that I regret, but I certainly think that giving your child a smartphone is, well, let me put it this way, giving your child a smartphone and not locking it down, I think is an act of serious neglect and something you need to repent of. So I'll start by saying my kids are five, three and one, and nothing is more irritating than somebody with tons of advice for parents of teenagers, because they'll all say, well,

wait till your kids are older. So I want to say that out of the gate. But I agree with everything you say because one of the, so this is interesting with regards to the previous discussion we had right before the break in terms of cutting off the mainstream culture. So I'll start with smartphones and then work to other phones, is that if you do such a good job,

you don't have the streaming services, you know, you got filters on everything and you're working like crazy to make sure that your kids are actually imbibing your values and participating in your community rather than being influenced by the mainstream culture, which we have now definitively declared dead. I think that you're basically shooting yourself in the foot. You give them a phone, you're giving them constant access to what the culture is selling. You cannot be on any major social media platform now

without the entire pride agenda being rammed down their throat by Google, by Instagram, by TikTok, right? As you know, TikTok is something that the Chinese want for American kids, but won't let their own kids have because it melts their brains. And so you are not going to successfully

form the imagination and the moral sensibilities of your child if you give them a smartphone. You're not. It's going to be replaced by persuasion technology that is literally as Sean Parker, the former CEO of Facebook put it, it's actually exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology is how he put it.

And so there's a lot of parents who say, I wanna teach my kids how to use this responsibly. When you look at a tool and ask yourself, okay, how am I gonna use this tool? You first have to ask how the designer intended the tool to be used. And when it comes to smartphones and when it comes to social media platforms,

these things were literally designed to be addictive. And so when you give your kid a smartphone, you're pitting them against neuroscientists making seven figure salaries to exploit vulnerabilities in their psychology and keep them scrolling forever. If your kid gets addicted, they are using the tool as the designers intended the tool to be used. And so the usual Christian approach of discernment,

of using it properly, of keeping it in its right context, I don't think works when you consider the way the designers intended these things to be used. On your point too about communicating with people in the neighborhood, one of the things that I think people On your point too about communicating with people in the neighborhood, one of the things that I think people need to point out more often is that what these devices do is for the first time in recorded human history, allow young people to create subterranean social networks that are impervious to adult oversight. And so you just fundamentally

don't know what they're doing. They're not part of sort of the embodied community of persons They're part of this community where adults can have no idea what they're doing Which is why you have these horror stories where like my kid committed suicide because they're being cyber boy We never even knew they were getting bullied, right? So these subterranean networks that do not have adult oversight at the age in their life when they're most prone to make mistakes and most In need of adult wisdom and oversight I think is just setting us up for failure. I want to preface what I'm about to say with a preemptive statement, which is I'm not saying that in order to be a good Christian parent, you have to homeschool.

I'm not making that claim. But it sure is a lot easier if you plan on not allowing your children to use smartphones. Whenever I would speak to high school students about pornography, I would request, not just request, but require that I speak to parents. I wouldn't go and speak somewhere unless they would let me speak to parents. And the parents always want to know how are they going to not allow their kids to have a smartphone by going to school? And I just couldn't think of anything else to say, but like your child will be a

social leper by the time they're eight, nine or 10. That young already? I think so. And maybe that's okay. Like maybe you're okay with your child having to deal with that, but that's what they're going to have to deal with. And it's going to be brutal. If I can, if I can interject, I was in middle school over 10 years ago now, If I can interject, I was in middle school over 10 years ago now, so over a decade ago, and I was one of the last people in my grade to get a phone at 16, over a decade ago now. So it is that young.

Yeah, so you've become a social leper and that's a lot to deal with. Whereas if you're homeschool, like you actually don't have that problem. So let me ask you this, because I'm still kind of trying to work out exactly what I think about how communities can collectively deal with this, because it is totally true. A community is supposed to be, we have standards we share. And then those standards are easy for your family, because the family next door has the same standards as you. Is there anything that can be done now that secular authorities are openly testifying as to how this persuasion technology was designed, that you have the news from Silicon Valley that the designers aren't allowing their own kids to have this stuff on and on and on and on? Can we get to a point where a bulk of parents, like 30% of parents collectively

agree that we are not going to have these phones? Because I keep on maybe naively thinking that that should be possible. No, I don't think that's possible. Cause I think we, the parents are just as addicted as our children. And we lie to ourselves by saying that, no, it's really not a problem. It doesn't. I can put it in its place. Like we're deluding ourselves. Um, it's kind of like the parent who chooses to watch pornography is going to be in a poor position to explain to his child. He won't even be in a a poor position to explain to his child.

He won't even be in a position to want to explain to his child. Now, obviously pornography and smartphones are very different things. I'm not saying that phones are intrinsically evil, but if I have to justify my own continual use of the phone, I'm going to be much less likely to put impositions on my child from using it, I think. Yeah. Because as soon as you open that bloody world, your life gets a lot more complicated. It's like, yeah, it's a good thing to have carnalized. It's a good thing to have all these other apps like this app will share with you

while text messages are coming through and you'll get this notification from this app. If your child did this and, well, there's an interesting book by Frank Mulder. He's a Dutch journalist called hyper reality. And he said, that's the problem with everything that the phone brings you is it makes the rest of reality kind of an acquired taste because what you see on the phone is the best, most attractive, the sexiest version of everything, right? Right down to if you go to see Victoria falls, which I have, it looks nothing like the TikTok drone footage

of Victoria Falls, right? Like the experiences you have in real life are never going to be able to match up with the images being portrayed. You've got a generation of kids growing up where phones, like what they see on their phone is actually better than real life. And they've never had, if they're getting phones

at six, seven, eight, then yeah, they'll never have an opportunity to experience a world that's not mediated by a digital filter. You mentioned earlier that it kind of gives us a distaste for reality. It forms our brains in such a way that we're unable to engage in other forms of media like literature, I say. And that's true of me. I typically take off August from the internet. I don't think I'll be doing it this year because I was away in Guatemala for like six weeks But I find that during that time I'm able to read and maybe I think but when I'm in internet land

It's a lot more difficult. So how have you personally sought to struggle with this Twitter is my is my crack for sure Because I write for a bunch of different publications So I can excuse my Twitter use all the time as something that's necessary for work, regardless of the fact that it constantly invades my life. And I'm very interested in what other commentators and writers who are far better than me and more skilled than me in their craft. So an event happens and now I can do three or four scrolls and I can get what all of the best and most insightful

writers in the world are saying about this in real time. And that's been really terrible for me. So I've done deleting all of the apps off the phone. world are saying about this in real time. And that's been really terrible for me. So I've done deleting all the apps off the phone. I've done basically, so I don't have the Twitter app on my phone anymore, but I'll still like, especially if I'm traveling at the airport, I used to read for an hour now, I'll just catch up on the news. And that takes me a whole hour because I have access to everything going on all the time. Part of the problem is like, just like we talked about the left changing terminology to make

things more palatable like made. We do that regarding the behaviors that we really should be ashamed to engage in. Like I remember my parents did that. They're like, hey, don't you care about what's going on in the world? Like that's why you're watching the news. That's not why you're watching the news. Like this is your form of entertainment. Like people don't watch or listen to daily wire because they want to be informed. Now

that's obviously that's part of it. But the reason you find it so addictive is because there's something in you that craves that kind of novelty perhaps. And I realized that one of the reasons I read so much slower is I read a lot of history because that's my primary interest. So as you've got a stack beside the bed and a stack beside my chair. But now with the internet, I'll read about like a minor character in some history. Like, oh, very interesting. And then like 20 minutes later, I know everything about this guy. I've read his whole Wikipedia page and I haven't gone back to my book and I didn't shoot through like six pages.

Well, I'm glad to hear that actually, because I was afraid you were going to say something like I've never gone away from the dumb phone and make me feel deeply ashamed about myself. But that would have been cool cool by the way, if you had done that. But for me personally, um, I have, and I share this because I'd like to encourage other people to do it. I was using a particular dumb phone before and then I ended up going to the Ukrainian border and needed my iPhone. And then I got sucked back into the vortex. But I have my wife block the app store, which is quite easy to do on an Apple phone.

So when you go into settings and you can block the App Store and you do that through, let's see, screen time, there's a way to do that through screen time, and there's a particular password it asks you to enter in order to make these changes. And that password is different from the one that you use to log into your phone. So I pass it to my wife, you set the password, don't tell me what it is, and then I go and I delete the app store and then I delete all the apps that access the internet. But which apps suck all of your time? Which ones? YouTube. But I don't have it. I don't have apps on my phone. That's the, that's what I'm saying. It's, if I did have it I would just be continually refreshing to

see how different videos are doing, let's say. Right, right, right, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's also your job. It's, yeah. But it's, but you know what's funny is that you say it's for your job, but it's what kind of like destroys your job because you're no longer interested in engaging

in deep conversations and reading through things that you could be discussing with your guest. So that's been, that's been really, that's been really cool. Yeah. Yeah, so I would recommend people do that. They can either get a dumb phone, block their app store. The other thing that I need to do and that I have been doing is I leave my phone and computer here at night when I go home.

So I kind of called Thursday as he was picking up you from the airport and then I just dropped my phone, dropped the computer and went home. And then I feel like a drug addict just like fainting for a fix, man. I want it. Where is it? Especially if somebody texts me like do you see this on the news and you're like I didn't but now I need to know everything that's happening as it's happening I heard of our friend andrew jones thursday, uh his father. I hope it's okay to say this jacobie mom shared it with me So I hope it's true says he uses his phone to call and text people But he doesn't answer calls or respond to texts. I thought what a boss

call and text people, but he doesn't answer calls or respond to texts. I thought, what a boss. Because the problem with this evil little thing is it makes you feel guilty about not responding. You're always on alert. It now has that little demonic red or unread message below your text messages, which by the way, you can turn off in settings. But to me, that is the most difficult thing about putting my phone away is I'm afraid that people think I'm ignoring them. Yeah, yeah. Of course I come to the conclusion that it's okay to ignore them. Yeah. You know, they have no right on your time.

Your family does. 100%. Good. Well, there's my little rant on phones. I agree with everything you said. People love it. Any interesting chatter? We had one, I said to you in Slack, but I could just ask it, but because it's short.

Yeah, feel free to ask it. So it was a young man. I'll leave his name out because the topic, but he... Thanks. Yeah. Basically, the gist from the question seemed that he's an older, a younger man, a young man who's older. Can I read it?

Yeah. Yeah. Let me read it because I think it's an important question. I think we get some good answers, good thoughts on this too. Older brother in the chat asking if he should address porn with his middle school brother because he thinks his parents will not,

and if so, how to do it? I have an answer. You go first. All right. So I am a big fan of the excellent children's book. It's called Good Pictures Bad Pictures by Kristin Jensen, Porn-proofing Today's Young Kids. And it's a beautifully illustrated book designed for parents to read to their children about pornography in a way that

is age-appropriate. And I don't think there would be anything wrong, let's say, with an older brother explaining to their younger brother in this way. So the way this is done, and I did this with my eight-year-old. I've talked to all of my children about pornography. I'll say to say a seven-year-old or six-year-old, I think six is a great time by the way for parents to talk to their children about pornography. You say pornography is pictures or videos of people showing parts of their body that their bathing suit should

cover. And if you ever see this, you should always tell mommy and daddy, we'd be really proud of you. We wouldn't be in trouble. That is not a complete or even sufficient definition of pornography, but it's sufficient for an eight year old. So that's what I would say. What would you say? Go to defend young minds to get the book. They've got all sorts of, why is it the Mormons who make all the best resources? The Mormons are the best. We just talked about Gab phone. I'm pretty sure they're behind that.

Yeah. We have the light phone with them too. I think the light phone was not, no, that's like, I think I like a Manhattan secular company. You might be thinking of the wise phone. Yeah. But that's not made by Mormons either. So defend young minds has a whole bunch of resources and it helps walk people through it I'd be interested in your thoughts on this because I

Don't actually have a problem with like an older brother if they want to check with their younger brother on How things are doing just because at the end of the day? If you've got brothers and sisters were close to each other They're gonna feel more comfortable actually going to the older sibling and And that's who they're going to get their questions from. Because for me, I was the oldest, right? And my younger brother probably asked me most of the questions he had about the stuff and not my parents. And my dad joked before too. He's like, yeah, I know I have to make sure you get all this information because it's likely where your brother's going to get it from after that. I'm deeply ashamed by what I share with my younger brother.

God have mercy on me a sinner. So if you got somebody saying, I'm worried that my, uh, my younger brother might struggle with porn. He might actually, if he is admit it to his older brother way faster than he'll admit it to his dad. And so anybody who wants to check with their friends or their family members on whether or not they look at porn for the purpose of Encouraging them to get free should do it. Yeah, because unfortunately some people don't have parents who are receptive to the

Conversation some will have parents will be stunned and shocked and yell And some have parents who just don't want to deal with it Yeah, because they don't know how to talk about it And so they're like they do you know the talk that like one thing at 20 minutes long when you're 17, where everybody wishes they were dead and they never discuss it again. And so if you're the kind of person who recognizes that this is a problem or has been a problem for you and you want to talk to younger people about it, please do. Yeah.

And I would just say, be careful that you don't share too much scandalizing the youth really is a, is a serious sin. Our Lord said that if you cause one of these little ones to stumble, it would be better that a millstone was tied around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. And as Peter Crafter once quipped, I do not believe he has begun manufacturing styrofoam millstones. So it is a serious thing. We don't want to pique our children or our younger siblings' curiosity, let's say, or pervert their imagination by describing sexual acts to them. But saying, showing parts of your body that your bathing suit should cover is not that. And you might follow up with saying that it's precisely

because the body is good that we veil what demands the reverence. You know, it has to do with the body's goodness. If the body were meaningless, then we couldn't degrade it. You can't degrade what's meaningless because what's meaningless has no grade to begin with. We don't talk about degrading paper clips and washing machines. We talk about degrading men because we believe that men have inherent dignity. And so it's been said that the problem with porn isn't that it shows too much, but that it shows too little in a way because it reduces the mystery of femininity, right? The, the, the, the mystery of the human being to a two dimensional object for my consumption. And so here's a question for you.

Um, so when I'm talking to somebody who has been, as I said, that they're, they're hooked on porn, I never proactively offer information. I ask them questions. I ask them what they've seen, what they've been looking at. And so I think a lot of the viewers might find this helpful too. And I'd like to hear your answer to this question because I get asked it all the time

and I'm not completely sure is if you got a kid. So I talked to a kid recently, was 15. I asked him how long he'd been hooked on porn. He said, for 10 years. So this was five. Back in the day you would tell people get like pick an accountability partner, somebody who will actually hold you accountable, somebody who does not struggle themselves so that you're not, you know, messing up together and essentially forming a codependent relationship. What do you do now when you've got a five-year-old who's been addicted for 10 years who basically had was robbed of his childhood by the pornography industry?

Was not actually able to form a lot of healthy reactions and responses to things because his brain is being reshaped How does somebody like that get free like I got a message from parents a little while ago saying like that 13 year old been addicted for a few years and they couldn't even allow them around technology anymore Yeah, but they were like, okay, so the filter doesn't work You know even radical amputation doesn't necessarily work because of the way the brain functions. So therapy is what I've usually recommended. What do you recommend when you get a case of a kid whose mind has been shaped by this stuff? Yeah, I think I'd agree with you. Finding a certified sex addiction therapist in your area, CSAT for short, there's many different websites

where you can punch in a postal code to find a therapist, a certified sex addiction therapist. Now you might think, well, what if I don't trust him or her? What if I don't know what it is they think is acceptable or not? Interview them, ask them questions. If you yourself want to go see a therapist, you might stipulate the terms of your sobriety. You might say, I'm opposed to, whatever, contraceptive sex, quote unquote sex with self, otherwise known as self abuse. Can you work with me within these guidelines? And a therapist will, hopefully,

say, of course. And most of them are just oriented towards reduction of the behavior you want to reduce. So most of them would be fine with your parameters. Yeah, I would say so. I mean, I'd be afraid that you would find somebody to say, well, in order to avoid pornography, just masturbate or something like that. And see, this was my other- Use the hard drive of existing porn in your head. Exactly. This was my other kind of problem with what was shared on that Daily Wire clip.

The idea being that if, you know, pornography can be used to avoid adultery, then it's okay. I've already pointed out less bad doesn't mean healthy. But the idea that pornography quells and doesn't inflame sexual desire is false. You know, this is, it irritates it. It's sorry. You know, have you read Ross Duthatt's book, The Decadent Society? No. You know who Ross Duthatt is? I've heard of the book, but I don't know anything about it.

So he's the resident Catholic editorialist and opinion columnist for the New York Times. Wow. I should get to know him. He is a, you know what, he'd be a fascinating interview. He's incredibly intelligent, a fantastic writer, very, very unapologetic on issues that the New York Times usually is apologetic on, things like abortion. His column on the Eighth Amendment in Ireland was just- Well, they allow him to write there. It's kind of bewildering to me often because he's even late, he wrote a long essay last year

on the contours of the LGBT culture war, in language I'm stunned they let him use. But in his book, when he's talking about the decadent society, he kind of tries to make the case that it's not a radical decline, it's that everything's stagnating rather than declining. And the section he has in his book on pornography, I think, is the biggest mistake that he made where he basically says, look, in fact, pornography is reducing the rates of sexual assault.

My argument would be no, it's now actually mainstreaming them. So you have sexual violence is more popular than it's ever been. It's just now called a 50 shades of gray relationship or consensual. And so things that used to be illegal are being moved into the legality category and being accorded. You know, the solemnity. Wanted sexual violence, for example, you gave. Exactly.

But he actually, he actually doesn't seem to totally understand what you're getting at, which is that pornography actually ruins you for a healthy sexual relationship in some ways. He would 100% say it's a sin. He would say it's a, ruins you for a healthy sexual relationship in some ways. He would 100% say it's a sin. He would say it's a grave evil, all those things. But the social and cultural impact of pornography and the extent to which it's transforming boys at the key ages of their development, I don't think it's properly understood. I really hope you get a debate, Prager, because I think you could probably, he's a very reasonable

guy, but you could bring him around. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even if it were the case that pornography prevented rape, I would still say pornography is evil. You know what else would prevent rape is castration. There are certain things that are intrinsically disordered and wrong

that ought not to be engaged in regardless. But no, I agree with you that, and besides what kind of love do we have for a person if we say, say well stick with your violent sexual pornography so you don't commit sexual violent acts on real people. What wouldn't we want that person healed? Why would we be okay with them? It would be like saying to somebody well it's good that we have sort of even animated pedophilia to prevent people from no wouldn't you shouldn't we be healing

these people? So there's that. And we, there was actually a generally very good columnist with the national post in Canada named Barbara Kay, who kind of wrote a column on this new phenomenon of like child sex dolls for pedophiles and basically made the argument that this is better than them taking out their abuse on real children. But if pornography has taught us everything is not that it satiates desire. That's like giving somebody a big glass of salt water and telling them it'll quell their thirst.

What you're actually doing is you're entrenching that feeling, you're developing it further, and you're making them desire it more. You're normalizing it. So if you give the pedophile one of these dolls, all you're doing is ensuring that he's accessing those desires he's cultivating those desires and he wants to act on them even more but the relationship between porn and behavior is not understood very well in my view. Hmm.

Yeah. Yep. Well, I'm with you. F.C. Baggett from locals asks Jonathan I love your opinion Thursday like that. Sorry, F.C. Baggett from Locals asks, Jonathan, I love your opinion. Thursday like that. Sorry, FC Baggett. I actually happen to respect your last name. I think that's a bit, Matt.

I think he's just getting you to say no, I don't think so. FC Baggett, it's not FC Agate. It's FC Baggett. All right. We'd like to apologize. And we'd also like to thank you for not trusting us with your first name. Yeah, Jonathan, I love your opinion and it really seems to ring true that secularism comes from the sexual revolution. However, where would you say the sexual revolution comes from?

So I'll emphasize that this is not my opinion, not because I'm passing the buck, but because I'm giving credit. This is Mary Aberstatt's theory in her book, How the West Really Lost God. Very, what is secularism? Secularism. So there really depends on who you ask. Charles Taylor in a secular age basically talks about the Christian society was society in which had what he called bulwarks of belief. And how he defined bulwarks of belief were beliefs that took a great effort not to believe in. The path of least resistance was to believe in these things. Now our society

has bulwarks of unbelief, which Douglas Murray is referring to when he talks about scriptural criticism, when he talks about the debunking of miracles, when he talks about Darwinian evolution and the origin of humanity. And so now in order for somebody to become a Christian, there's these bulwarks of unbelief they must overcome. So I would, for the purposes of most discussions on this, define secularism as a culture in which bulwarks of unbelief have replaced bulwarks of belief. Which I think is a helpful way to kind of bifurcate. We're in the sort of post-pregnant widow moment where Christendom is dead and we don't know what's going to come next yet. So we're sort of in this in-between moment that we're all trying to figure out together.

But what Mary Aberstead said, I interviewed her and I asked her the same question, is the sexual revolution was a rebellion against a whole bunch of things and not all of them were bad. So you also had with the hippie movement, sort of this rejection of materialism. If you listen to a lot of the things that they were rebelling against, it sounds very much like a traditionalist suspicion of free market vulture capitalism or something like that.

But I asked her, I understand a youth generation rebelled. I would actually pinpoint the rebellion of the intellectual classes, which then spread throughout the rest of society at places like Berkeley and in Paris at the 68 riots with what Kinsey did to undermine faith in the greatest generation. And so when you have Alfred Kinsey who releases his Kinsey reports in 48 and 53, right? I assume most of your viewers are familiar with them. We just had a big discussion of this with Jason Everett last week.

So one of the unremarked on aspects of what Alfred Kinsey actually did is he releases these books and basically makes the case that over 90% of Americans are by the standards of the law at that period, sex criminals. Now what do you think that would do to the confidence of a young generation of people brought up in the church, brought up with a set of moral values who are then told your grandfather was lying to you, your mother was lying to you, most of your dad's used prostitutes, none of them waited until marriage. Apparently if you were on a farm, you were very likely getting it on with with the livestock. These are all things that were

in these reports and they were accepted as true, even by conservatives who now recognize that they were lies. So you had William F. Buckley, you know, the sort of predominant media Catholic of the day, genius guy, in his discussions about the Kinsey reports on the show in the fifties and sixties saying things like, we know that this is true, but Catholic doctrine still holds. And so for me, I've always thought that one of the answers to why so many young people rebelled is because a culture collectively bought the lie. That they cannot trust their superiors. All of their, don't trust anybody over 30. Why? Because the Kinsey reports told us what they

were getting up to in between the sheets and then they were being told you, you need to behave this way, but nobody else had. So what the Kinsey reports did was damn the previous generations as abject hypocrites, that they were expecting a standard from young people that they themselves were not living by. And as such, it was very easy to reject that standard because Kinsey had created this myth of the greatest generation that was in fact deeply perverted in many, many ways. And so add to that, you know, the Vietnam War, add to that these consistent things like the Watergate scandal, which were creating even more widespread distrust

in institutions. And you get a generation of people who feel lied to by their parents, by their grandparents, by their government. You have working class people being sent off to fight in a war in Indochina that most of them do not in fact believe in. And you get a generation of people who basically says,

we can't trust any of you, and we are gonna live the way we want to. We're going to enjoy free love. And then the question I asked Mary Eberstadt is if you look at the polling data, which David from who's gone off the rails now, but he's got a great book called How We Got Here on the 70s. And he tracks the data on young people abandoning the sexual ethics of their parents, mainly because in my view, they didn't believe their parents actually practiced those sexual ethics. But then that generation later in the eighties, which is ironically the decade of the great conservative backlash to the sexual revolution, you have parents who got married, didn't leave their spouses, lived those traditional sexual ethics, which has got on board.

And so I said to Mary Aberstead, I'm like, what I don't understand, I understand why the youth abandon those values. I understand why the sexual revolution happened. What I don't understand is why there wasn't more pushback from the parents. And she said cowardice is the most powerful force in human history. And sometimes the answer is very simple. And most of them simply did not push back. Um, they, they did not discipline their kids. They did not fight against the lies that were told them about Kinsey, which were accepted by not only the elite institutions, but it sold 100,000 copies in like the first month, I think. So this was an objective bestseller by like regular standards, and it's a boring, you've probably seen it before, right? It's a boring, dry book full of tables, and hundreds of thousands of people were buying it.

So that's in my view why the young people adopted the sexual revolution, and Mary Aberstatt's answer to why the parents didn't push back is cowardice. Yeah, cowardice being shamed into it because if you were to question Kinsey or Playboy, you were uncouth, you were unsophisticated, backwater. Hugh Hefner was also on like William F. Buckley's firing line in a suit puffing on his pipe and he wasn't respectable, but he was given respectability. Like this idea that the Playboy philosophy was anything more than sort of the carnivorous desires

of elite men who, did you hear about that documentary series Secrets of Playboy that came out last year? Tell me about it. It's on A&E and basically all these women who are abused by Heffner are now coming forward and telling stories that are better left undescribed not only on YouTube but anywhere. But one of the lines that really stuck out to me because I think that for me it's it's a microcosm of what the sexual

revolution did is he's one of the the women who worked for Hefner said Hefner and his pals like to bring in sort of naive girls from small towns the all-american beauty and then watch the light go out in their eyes. That it was what they were doing was was deliberately facilitating corruption and destruction. And uh, Hugh Keffner was unfortunately one of the most significant historical figures of the past century and we're all living in his country now. Yeah. God have mercy. Um, Ryan says, uh, how ought young people in a university setting attack the various issues of obscenity for peers around them?

Do you think it is even possible at most secular universities to mount a real opposition? Thank you. Love the episode. Huh. That's tough because I went to university, Graduated with my degree in 2010 and I went to one of the most left-wing universities in Canada And I had a blast because I debated my professors. I ran the pro-life club. That's where I pity your professors That's where I met Stephanie Gray actually and Stephanie Gray asked me to abandon my my plans of academia and instead Invited me to join the organization I work for now. So she kind of set my career path into the pro-life movement.

Bless her, love that woman. And things are so different. Transgenderism was a joke when I was in school among the progressives. And that is like, again, we're talking like 2010, right? So what I would say right now is that go to university, attempt, so I'm a huge fan of pro-life clubs. If you're gonna, if you were gonna mount

any kind of opposition, reaching out to women on campus who think they only have one option is the one thing that you can do to love your neighbor and to actually save real lives. You can make your degree count for human beings that will actually like live out their lives, get married, have families, just because you decided to put a pro-life table next to the planned parenthood table.

They are on every campus. And so if you're gonna pick one issue to speak out on, that is the one I would so encourage you to speak out on because I have, I could tell you so many stories of women who canceled their abortions just because we set up a display. And like there's children who are alive right now simply because some university students

proposed an alternative to the abortion industry, which is on every campus. The difficulty with knowing what you're going to do with your professors is the radicalization that's happened. So I know this is true on Canadian campuses now. You're usually asked to declare your pronouns in most classes. So you're asked to sort of participate in this broader lie that's destroying our civilization. I don't think that Christians can in good conscience participate in offering their pronouns

because I think that it is submitting to and confirming premises of an ideology that are fundamentally anti-Christian and wicked. At the same time, I understand that students are in a tough position if they want to just finish their degree and get out. I know students who are almost done their degree, now this comes in, are they gonna blow up their whole education over it? All I would say is I would encourage people

to prayerfully consider what their stand would be. I wouldn't give direct advice because it would seem too cute and too easy for me to do, to ask them to blow up their whole education over what may appear to them to be a minor issue. I'm always calling this into the fact when I have these discussions that like, my job is to understand these issues,

write about these issues, to do activism. And so to expect the same standard of engagement from somebody who just wants to get their schooling done so they can get married and have a family is probably not fair. Yeah, yeah. Well, I also think we have other options too. I mean, there are good universities

like Franciscan University of Steubenville where the peer pressure is to become a center. Where was that again? Steubenville? Yeah, you know, it's like in most college campuses, it's the peer pressure is to What about it? Be a degenerate or a party. Here you can do that if you want I'm sure there's ways of doing that and there are people who would Who would encourage it even among the student body. But those that I speak to and invite them to be really honest with me say, that's difficult to do.

So Franciscan isn't the only place to do that. It's which which direction is the peer pressure pushing you in here? I think that's the question between the two different universities. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's fun to be subversive, too. This is like the new punk rock is to, well, this is what I kind of tell everybody. I wrote an article for the European conservative called how to be a counter-revolutionary. And I said,

for all you people who've wanted to rebel your whole lives, like now is your time and you get to rebel in defense of everything that's good. You get to rebel and defense of goodness and truth and beauty and marriage and family and the great works of literature. Like, who would have ever thought we have enemies that are so stupid they would abandon the great works of the classics and the composers to us? Like this is what they've left us to defend. Like it's, it's, it's, it almost boggles the mind when you consider the sorts of things they're throwing out and we can now pick out of the trashcan.

And I also, you know, I've gotten to travel like quite a bit, meet pro-life organizations around the world, pro-life leaders in every country where the sexual revolution has taken root. There's been a backlash to that sexual revolution. And so I always say I get to visit a country and visit the very best people that are there. And like what a group of warriors we get to do battle with

when it comes to being a counter-revolutionary, right? So, you know, the long answer for subcultures is, you know, settle down, you know, start a family. This is going to take a while. But being a counter-revolutionary gives us all of this sort of the joy of the combat that they wanted in the 60s, but we're on the right side. Yeah, I love it. Let me give you an argument against swearing, which I think is compelling, but it's one that I don't want to believe. Okay.

Because I enjoy swearing. How would you define swearing? As I have to say. Okay, so I would like to distinguish between blasphemy, vulgarity, perhaps. Swearing, I suppose, potty language or the F word, things like that, when they aren't used in a sexualized way.

Right. But I think even that needs to go. And I'm saying this as somebody who swears more than everybody listening to me right now. Okay. But I'm trying very hard not to. Okay. And I know that outing myself in this way is only going to come back to bite me when I

swear on the next episode or in the next five minutes. And but I welcome it. It's something in my life that I'd like to get rid of. Right. Right. So here's the argument. And you tell me what you think. All right. So I think that most swearing and I've shared this on the show before. So apologies if you've heard it or if there was watching a board by it. I've heard you do it once. Let's hear it again. And you feel free to interject and interrupt and pick at it or make it better. Cause I actually like to keep swearing. So you can help me keep swearing if you can take this apart. So I think that most of our swear words revolve around three things, the bedroom, the toilet or religion. That's fair.

We're all going to roll a deck of awful words filing through our brains right now. There might be some that aren't that way. Okay. These seem to be the places that human beings are most vulnerable, which I find interesting. Right. Religion, the bedroom, and the bathroom. Okay. Let's just put aside religion, since I think we should agree that blasphemy is intrinsically

evil. So let's talk about the bedroom and the bathroom. Okay. When you examine human beings, you see that they Institute rituals of a sort that, uh, elevate these experiences that we share with the beasts. Uh, so beasts copulate and defecate. Okay. Uh, we're not like that. We're rational animals. And so the way we do those things when you examine human beings differs.

If you came over to my house after this and I allowed my 10 year old to defecate in the backyard while you and I were there, this isn't good. This isn't healthy. You would have serious questions about my mental well-being or what I'm like. If you encounter someone fornicating in the middle of the street or at a club, this also is something that's devious, deviant and reprehensible. So rather we go into rooms, we shut doors, we even put the fan on so that we can urinate without being heard next door where the kitchen is.

All right. When we swear, we're verbally tearing down those barriers that we seek to erect around those activities to elevate us from the beast. That's the basic idea. We're verbally tearing away at that. And someone might say, okay, fair enough. But when I say S-H-I-T or F-U, et cetera, when I say these words,

I'm not actually using them in a sexual way. But I think the response to that is, and yet they still mean the things that you know them to mean. Maybe in a thousand years, the F word won't mean that anymore. And like, just the word, like the word gay doesn't really mean happy today. Okay. And at that point, we could perhaps, we could perhaps use that word, but today is not that day. It still means that.

And when you couple with that, James's, St. James's advice in the Bible about guarding the tongue. about guarding the tongue. Again, why would I flirt with something that I'm even unsure is moral or immoral? Why wouldn't I seek to be pure in my speech? All right. So let me just put that to one side and then say, I think what I enjoy about swearing and what I enjoy, like if you and I were to get into conversation, you would just start like letting it fly. Like I enjoy it. I like it. And I think I like it because it signals to me that you are not on guard. You're actually, you're actually in candid. Yeah. Very can. I really appreciate that. So I actually like it when people swear around me.

Maybe I shouldn't, but I do. And yet I still think that argument holds. What's wrong with it. Why should we swear? Actually, so so I would make a couple of distinctions I agree with pretty much everything that you said on the effort by the only question I would have is so you did you read gail dines book pornland? Unfortunately, I read excerpts of it. Yes same and then Louise Perry has a book that came out last and I only say unfortunately because There was some things there that I didn't want to know I came out last year. And I only say unfortunately, because there were some things there

that I didn't want to know. I, I, I, I only- And I would not recommend the book. No, I read it so that other people wouldn't have to read it. But I only got a little ways into some chapters. I don't need to go all the way down to the sewer to know that it's the same stuff down there. Yeah.

But they, and Louise Perry in her book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, both of them use the F word as an actual literal descriptive term. I see. Of what a certain form of sexual activity is. That it's, because it's crude and degraded and predatory, that the F word is the best word to describe what's going on as opposed to sex.

So I would agree with you using it in casual and colloquial terms, yeah, 100%. I can't come up with a, I can and I wouldn't come up with any good argument against it because it does seem also to be, you know, it's being crude about one of God's gifts. But then from when I read it in those two books, they weren't using it as an expletive or a swear word. Like it was literally used. It doesn't, I could quote a sentence, but I won't. But like, I remember getting through to the end of one of Louise Perry's chapters and then her describing something that often happened after nightclubs.

And like when the word used, it punched. It was like, like, and it was used in context. But I didn't feel like that was offensive. And if one of my kids as a teenager wanted to read that book to educate themselves, I wouldn't feel like the need to warn them or black it out. Like I felt it worked there.

Yeah, I think usually you keep going. Honestly, I've never considered shit to be a swear word. Right. And like I grew up in farm country where like, like it would be said like, Oh no, we're going to go out and spread shit now. Like it was like, it was literally used as that term. I grew up in Australia. My wife, when we were dating, visited Australia, she said to me after one conversation with

my dear, beautiful mother, Debbie, who I love, I have not heard this many swear words ever. Like I had to, I accidentally taught my wife some swear words that she had never heard before. I found the Irish were like that too when I was unspeaking to her there. So I recognize that there's plenty of people who find that word to be a swear word. And I like, as somebody once told me, it's like, it's not that I think it's bad. I think it makes you sound uneducated. And so I just, if I find out it bothers somebody, I will definitely avoid it. But I don't feel bad about saying it.

My wife and I were away on a trip recently and she encountered somebody and said, oh, the restaurant's over there or something. And the woman just like dropped SH just as if it was like, ah-ha, like that. It just came out like it was normal. Exactly like that? And my wife, ah-ha.

And I think she was from Quebec. What was that? It was an amazing noise. I and my wife yeah and I think she was from Quebec. Amazing noise. I think my wife is like why would you assume that you can just meet me and say this word I think it does it is illustrative of the baseness of our culture that we've begun to speak like this just among people that we've never met before and around ladies and there's a lot of standards that should have stayed up but do you notice that when you're talking with guys, guys will often kind of feel each other out to find out which words they can use?

Not up, they'd feel each other, not up. I said out. Yeah you did. I just want to make sure that people heard you. Everybody heard that properly. You know what guys, get together. But you know like they'll kind of see how the other person talks and stuff like that to make sure that you know nothing they say will be offensive.

Yeah and I'm gonna, to reiterate, I'm not offended by it. I like it very much. I just think that this is something in my life. I think your argument is very stable. And this doesn't originate by me, I should point out. This was a friend of mine shared this with me several years ago. But I just, I'd like to get better at it. I'd like to, this is an area in my life I'd like to get better at. So it's like to be able to point at the culture and say, look how decadent it's becoming while I drop F bombs and S words. It's like, yeah. I thought the blasphemy has gotten a lot more common in Christian communities too. And I think it's because of the entertainment, like, oh my G, like, is you hear it a lot more often.

Like if I ever said that at home growing up, I would have, I would have gotten beat. Well, I like your point earlier about when you heard Peterson saying that word. It's difficult sometimes to discern whether or not something's blasphemous or a prayer, because sometimes you hear something so horrific that you just go, oh God. The example I always think is when I first watched the footage of the 9-11, when people were jumping and you hear people saying, oh my, it didn't seem like a swear, but I'm so, as the way I was brought up, I'm just very instinctively uncomfortable with any improper usage of it at all.

Like it's a name. That's why Jewish people have a dash between the G and the D. It's you pause and you think, right, about the holy name. So yeah, that I think also is sort of the one that everybody can agree on. Got more questions coming in? No, but this has just been so fantastic. Yeah, I'm like jealous that you're 36, 34, 34. I'm so grateful for you.

I mean, you've said you've I've read I read your articles. I think how is this fellow in his 30s? You've got a lot of wisdom. Thank you. So who are you working for right now? Like who's your, do you have an employer or do you just, are you like a freelance writer or I'll let you light that cigar and then we could talk about the morality of cigars I suppose at some point. Please let's not. Yeah. So no, I still work full time for the Canadian Center for Bioethical Reform, which is the pro-life organization Stephanie Gray founded.

And we hold internships where we confront millions of Canadians every year with the truth about abortion. This year we'll hopefully have over 50 people on the team across the country. So the pro-life movement is still my first passion and always will be. Because when you're out in the streets and you're having discussions with people, like you see such obvious results, people changing their minds, people canceling their abortions.

And so that's my main job. And then I'm a contributing editor for the European Conservative, which is a journal based out of Brussels and Vienna. And I got to do a lot of the longer essays on stuff like this. The pro-life movements actually got me thinking about all this,

because it was when I first started going out in the streets and on campuses and having discussions about abortion, I just realized it very much looked like the way Trump talks. I don't like it at all, so I'll stop. I grew up in an amazing family in which I had a mom and a dad. I never doubted that people loved me. I had grandparents again. I had dozens and dozens and dozens of cousins. Going off to university and starting to do activism and realizing how broken the culture was, was a real eye-opener. And that's what started me off on the path of kind of doing all this research and trying to figure out,

like, when did things fall apart? Like, I realized I had kind of lived in a subculture, while the rest of Christendom was dying around me. I was living in this sort of patch of green, where I could still grow up the way my parents had grown up to a large extent. To grow up without TV, without movies, just reading the same books my dad read when he was a kid. But then realizing how broken the rest of the culture was and with my background

in history I started doing that research so now I get to write for a whole bunch of places and I really enjoy doing it. I get to write for First Things and the European Conservative and I don't know, seven, seven or eight other places. Have you written books yet? Yeah, a few. Yeah. In 2016, I wrote The Culture War and it was almost immediately outdated.

My favorite one that I got to write was Patriots, the untold story of Ireland's pro-life movement, which is the story of how the Irish kept abortion out of Ireland for 35 years. I bet the Catholic, the Irish Catholics love you for that. Oh yeah, I got to do a book tour in Ireland last fall finally after COVID. And it's such an unbelievable story. And one of the things I'm very passionate about with my writing is you see the sexual revolution and because the sexual revolutionaries own the social imaginary,

our heroes who fought to stem the tide, who fought for pre-born babies, who fought to hold these things back, are only ever portrayed as villains. And so in our own culture, Kinsey gets a blockbuster movie with Liam Neeson and and and Milk, what's his face, Harvey Milk, right? He gets a blockbuster movie, Statutory Rapist, with Sean, starring Sean Penn. And then, Phyllis Schlafly, who's the great Catholic activist who almost single-handedly stopped the Equal Rights Amendment and kept abortion from being enshrined. She gets Mrs. America, where she's portrayed as this cold, evil witch with a, you know, a miserable marriage. And so, a couple of the, a lot of the articles that I write and some of the books that I have written and I'm working on are to tell our side of the story because right now our

subcultures don't have the stories of the counter revolutionaries of the Phyllis Schlafly's, Ted Bifield in Canada, Mary Whitehouse in the UK, the pro-life movement in Ireland who saved at a minimum 250,000 babies in managing to keep the eighth amendment in place for 35 years, right? You can look at it as the story as all the abortion activists finally won or you can look at the story of Ordinary men and women with big families put boots on the ground every day in a country where abortion was already legal Just because they cared about children not their own and saved a quarter of a million of them, right? Like that's that's our story. These are our heroes.

These are the people that we should be looking to for inspiration and an example. And so that's what I said in my book tour in Ireland. If you want the inspiration and the encouragement to go on, the answer is look at what you've already done. Look at the past 35 years. If we can see light at the end of the tunnel, it's because we stand on the shoulders of giants like them. Mason Hickman I'm not sure if you're aware of this or not, but my friend, Father Jason Shron is a Ukrainian Catholic priest is going to be building a shrine to celebrate the overturning of Roe versus Wade here in Pittsburgh. And it's going to be the biggest in Pittsburgh. Is it now? Are we? Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's going to be great. And one of the things he wants to do is to actually enshrine pro life heroes in a kind of museum section of the place.

So who would he pick out of curiosity? I'm not sure. Right. But he called me, um, just, I think it was right after Roe versus way was over to maybe, I think it was even before when we kind of got wind of it, we weren't, we weren't sure if it was going to happen. The leaks, the leaks ruin. And he said to me like, how many, you know,

rosaries have been offered, uh, you know, for the overturning of this, how many beautiful old women stood out in front of these abortion mills and prayed for this to happen. And now that it's happened, what are we going to do to thank our blessed mother? I'd know what that sounds like as a Protestant hearing me say something like that. But the point is we're going to build the. Yeah. Yeah. So have you ever heard of Joe Schidler? Yes. Godfather of the pro-life movement. Okay have you ever heard of Joe Schidler? Yes. The godfather of the pro-life movement. Okay.

He died in his mid nineties, like right. It was the last flight that I made it into the States before COVID hit down for his funeral. He died just before OV-8 was overturned and he'd fought for it his whole life, like from Roe until then. And there was pro-life leaders who flew in from all over the U S. I said that like, this was the closest thing the pro-life movement had to a state funeral. You had the head of operation rescue there, Scott Klusendorf of Life Training Institute, all these leaders there. And he was in the Navy too, so when they carried his casket out, it was covered in the American flag and everybody sang Battle Hymn of the

Republic as they carried him out. And I was like, people, we should know who he is because we all know who Kinsey is and Hugh Kefner is and Larry Flint is. And then our subcultures need to have our own heroes the people Who actually carry the torch through this dark period where? Everything was being thrown out and these are the Joe Scheidlers and the Phyllis Schlafly's and the ordinary Irish pro lifers And and they're not gonna get a Hollywood blockbuster movie, but this is what I look at the daily wire I'm like this is what your opportunity This is what and some of the stories are so phenomenal like how has nobody told the story of Malcolm Muggeridge yet?

Right, the journalist who exposed the whole of Des Moines was almost everywhere at any point then discovered Mother Teresa and became one of the great Christian apologists. Like there's so many stories out there that Hollywood will never tell that conservatives have the opportunity to tell and introduce to our kids.

Like it's not for lack of heroes that we have no stories. It's because we don't have storytellers who are telling them. And that's something I think that we need to fix because the reason our social imaginary has been shaped the way that it has is because those storytellers are compelling. They're good at what they do, right?

I think too often Christians have been like, well, that movie's, it's ugly, it's gross, and you know, it's not even funny. I'm like, no, it's funny. It's really beautifully put together. The story is very powerful, but it's wrong. If you just tell kids it sucks, they're gonna be like, well, I think it's not even funny. I'm like, no, it's funny. It's really beautifully put together. The story is very powerful, but it's wrong. If you just tell kids it sucks, they're gonna be like, well, I think it's great.

You have to admit that these are very talented people using their talents in the service of evil. Yeah, that's right. And so we need to celebrate our own heroes and realize that the counter revolution has been going on as long as the sexual revolution has. And there's some really incredible stories almost nobody knows.

Have you heard of Michael Corrin? Canadian journalist, was a Catholic, and then God bless him has gone off the deep end. Any viewers from Canada who are watching right now just started hysterically laughing. I've been writing columns at him and back and forth since his third conversion. Read his terrible book called The Rebel Christ. So I don't know if he's part of the Anglican church or some version of it. This is a fella who went from writing books,

defending the Catholic church, because he was a Catholic, church's position against abortion. His book, I mean, he has a razor sharp wit. He's a very talented writer. The book would have been quite charming if it wasn't advocating for child murder and sodomy. Anyway, it was just, it was awful.

But one of the points he gets hung up on, and I'd like you to respond to, is the idea that Christians are very much against abortion, even though Christ said nothing about abortion, but they're not interested in sort of like governmental changes that would seek to raise the poor out of poverty. We don't care about the poor, maybe individually we do, but you know, you've heard these objections. What do you say? So it's really interesting because I've often said that right now Michael Korn's writing is like a cage fight between Michael Korn and Michael Korn with the main casualty being his credibility.

He wrote a book himself called heresy in which he debunks the feeblest arguments against Christianity and he has a chapter and he has a chapter on this exact point about that. Those critiquing Christians about abortion are, are, are fundamentally disingenuous. They're ignoring all the facts. Like anybody who read the books he wrote previously as a Catholic and then read the books he wrote now, it honestly, it's like he's doing a Stephen Colbert impressive impression of his former self. Like he just writes the same column over and over and over again. At this point, I could write the same column that he writes, but better and more interesting than he does. Because he says the same thing.

Oh, Chad GPT, Michael Korn column. Okay, we'll do that later. In response to, I have a twofold response to the idea that pro-lifers don't care about government assistance, et cetera, et cetera. The first response I'll make, especially with regard to the United States, is that there has been over 3,000 crisis pregnancy centers set up with the explicit purpose of actually reaching out to the needy, to supplying them everything they need, to persuade them not to have abortions, and then to walk with them after they've chosen life. Now, many of them do not believe the government should help and are willing instead to put their money where their mouth is. So these are not cold-blooded conservatives who are like, this is the free market.

And so as such, you know, you're going to have to struggle and suffer alone. What they're saying is the government shouldn't do it. We will. We will donate generously hundreds of millions of dollars a year to set up this structure of crisis pregnancy centers to help women in need. So the whole, the whole premise is just either a lack of research or in his case, willful and ignorant propaganda. On the other end though, I participated in a project with Eric Scheidler, Joe Scheidler's son who runs Pro-Life Action League now, Dr. Charlie Kimosi, and several others to write what we call a set of post-ro principles where we're actually

advocating in a post-ro era, the government to take steps towards doing what we talked about before. I'm having a family oriented economy and ensuring that all of the governmental pressures are in one direction and that is erring on the side of life and family. And so some of the things that we advocated for were for example, making birth free because right now it's cheaper to have an abortion than it is to give birth. And most American hospitals, it'll cost you around 10 grand to give birth in most places. It'll cost you four or 500 bucks

to get a first trimester abortion. All the incentives are running in the wrong direction. I think it should be completely free. There's a lot of different policies we detail in this document on post-reel principles, which is posted online, where we think that the government could actually intervene to reduce the abortion rate,

looking at countries like Hungary, Israel, which have actually done it. This has been signed on to by hundreds of people now, Dr. Monica Miller, Erica Bakiocchi, who just recently wrote a phenomenal book on pro-life feminism. Another book, so Mary Aberstead also is on board with this plan of using the government to skew the incentives, pardon me, towards life. And Kristen Hawkins of Students for Life of America, Lila Rose of Live Action, like there was representatives from every different wing

of the pro-life movement, the intellectual wing, the activist wing, the educational wing, the pastoral wing, all of us saying, no, actually, we would love the government to skew the incentives in the favor of life. So all of this is to say that Michael Korn invents new ways to be wrong every time he puts pen to paper. Yeah. Yeah. God bless him. It was an exhausting little book to read.

Why did you actually read that book? I read it because I was going to do a debate with him on Justin Breyley's show. Unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Did he back out? No, I did. And then the, and then the debate got canceled because, well, I shouldn't say, because I'm not sure if things have become public. No, I'll be honest with you. I I've participated in one debate before. It wasn't a formal debate. It was on unbelievable with Justin Briley. And I was debating, uh, somebody who said that they were a, uh, well,

one of them was a sex worker and then one of them was a libertarian and it was me against them on pornography. And I think I did quite well, but I'm not good at debates. I'm not good at thinking on my feet. And I was gonna take this on. And so I got the book and was going through it and decided that I wouldn't do a great job at this. And so I asked if Trent Horn would take over,

who's a much better debater than I would be ever, even if I took 10 years to study the art. And so Trent agreed. And so I wasn't gonna just back out. If Justin would allow Trent to do it, I would have let Trent do it. If Justin had said, no, only you, then all right. But then

something happened that didn't have to do with Michael or Trent. Okay. Yeah. I just, I haven't heard that name in quite a while because he's kind of a parody of himself in Canada. He really is. Because he spends all of his time writing columns that explicitly rebut his previous positions. So now he'll write columns defending radical sex education. And there's one humorous journalist for a newspaper

who has a habit of just sort of like quote tweeting him with an article saying the exact opposite thing. Much better from like a very short amount of time. He's blocked me on Twitter so I can't see him anymore, which is annoying. But well, you know how Thomas Aquinas writes where he posts arguments against the position he will then make to refute those objections.

I mean, someone needs to just mine Michael Corrin's work and make arguments, you know, that he's currently citing and then refute him with himself. So I've done that before. And that's when he blocked me. Give me that. I did a Michael Corrin versus Michael Corrin. Please, I want to read a whole episode just based on that. And just if people think that we're being a little too hard on this fella. Absolutely not. No, I mean, he's, he's promoting abortion. He's promoting transgenderism. If I'm not mistaken,

he's promoting these things knowing better. Right? So the first time I ever met him, I was, um, he was one of the speakers at a pro life conference in Toronto. There was three, four of us, I think speaking. He was, he was one of them. And he was basically debunking all of the arguments in favor of abortion. So nobody actually knows. People have like literally spent theorizing. That's like one of the theories is that maybe one of his children did. Nobody's completely sure. It has to be personal. We don't like to psychologize because it's a fallacy, you know, this sort of genetic fallacy

as it were. But there does have to be some sort of explanation for how he abandoned all of these things. Especially how like he does this thing where he would send a provocative tweet bashing Catholics or bashing conservative Protestants or sort of bashing one of the issues that we care about. And then predictably, you know, some people on Twitter will be like, if you, I hate you so much. And then he would retweet it and see like, look,

I'm such a martyr. Look what I put up with, with these loving people. Like that is the cheapest trick in the book. Like I don't know anybody who couldn't play that game. Martin does yeah, you familiar with this. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh Gosh You know ask Catholics used to point at you Protestants and say look at the mess you are and well Pride comes before a fool. I suppose because there's a lot of infighting that goes on among Catholicism Yeah, good. I got one more question before we wrap up,

and that is how do you justify violent imagery when advocating against abortion? Yeah, so A, I would reject the framing. It's not violent imagery. It's imagery that shows violence that's being done to a human being. So to say it's violent imagery is very much to accept the premises that like speech can be violence. What I would say is that abortion victim photography shows people what actually takes place during an abortion. And like every other social reform movement in the history of social reform movements, the victim must be made visible in order for the public conscience to be made aware of what's taking place behind closed doors. So William Wilberforce and the Society for Affecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade used horrifying imagery of what was being done to slaves in order to wake the

average Kurdish person up to what was going on. A photograph of the battered corpse of Emmett Till was used to trigger the Civil Rights Movement in 1955 with both a public funeral that tens of thousands attended as well as photographs published in Jet magazine which actually prompted Rosa Parks to her famous act of defiance. The same thing would be true for child labor practices behind closed doors. Lewis Hine of the National Child Labor Committee would sneak into these places, take pictures of kids with mangled hands and would publish these things. And so as Dr. Monica Miller puts it, only by actually showing the only baby photographs of these children that were ever taken can these children take their rightful place among

us. I will always say when a Catholic specifically argues against these things, I always think of the fact that like the Mexican— Don't you guys have crucifixes? Yeah, there's that. And then there's like the, you know, like the Mexican priests who were executed in photographs of them or what triggered massive You know resistance in the first place

injustice that remains invisible Inevitably becomes tolerable and then again injustice that remains invisible inevitably becomes tolerable Greg Cunningham of CBR first coined that phrase when he described the fact that the reason most of us can tolerate abortion is because We're never confronted with it. We can go about our day like you know thousands of people aren't being torn to shreds behind closed doors and these images allow us to see what is actually taking

place. They introduce us into another truth and a parallel reality that's actually taking place and they are therefore I think essential to show people. The pragmatic argument I would make is that the organization I work for, CCBR, actually runs polling before and after people see the images to test their effectiveness, and by double digits, it's more effective than anything else we could do.

67% of people who see an image of a baby who's been killed through abortion feel more negatively about abortion explicitly because of what they saw, and one of the reasons for this is because we refuse to allow abortion to remain a euphemism. If we are going to have a collective cultural conversation about abortion, we have to know what it is that we're talking about first. And what we are actually talking about is a human victim that's been destroyed.

And so the best way to combat this is healthcare. This is a clump of cells to show them what's actually taking place. So I would defend its use even if it wasn't effective. But because it's effective, I also think that it's imperative that we use them because it's the best way to wake people up to the truth of what's taking place and the best way to save lives.

Do you think it's becoming increasingly less effective? Here's why I say that. You know, we used to get told that abortion wasn't killing a baby. And then we have modern sonograms becoming increasingly less effective. Here's why I say that. We used to get told that abortion wasn't killing a baby, and then we have modern sonograms, and you can no longer say that. And maybe in the beginning, the sonograms proved some people wrong,

and they decided, okay, I'm pro-life. I'm not sure if sonograms do that anymore. It's the same thing happening with these photographs. So I have three separate answers to that question. The first answer- Like Thomas Aquinas. Number one. So the first answer to that question would be, because we live in an age that's so dominated by imagery of all kinds, these images are less effective

than they would have been 25 years ago. But I would argue that their use are even more imperative because we need a message that competes with all of the other visual messages. A visual culture needs a visual message because that is how it understands things. It doesn't understand the really clever arguments that are often put out by pro-life apologists because that's not the way people think anymore,

because they don't. Secondarily, I think that one of the reasons that these images are becoming less effective to some people is because, yes, there is nihilists that you'll meet, especially on campus. When you debate abortion with people often, you figure out which conversations you just need to disengage from and move on very, very quickly, because you realize this person's worldview doesn't actually encompass human rights at all.

And often they're so hurting and so wounded that they just don't care. They'll say, I wish my mom had aborted me. They'll say things like that. And so it is true that as we discussed with the comedians before, that there's a growing number of people coming around to the idea that yes, it is killing and yes, I endorse this. And that's why people like Douglas Murray are concerned that the sanctity of human life will not survive into the post-Christian age. The third reason is that the only religion our society has left is human rights, which is ill-defined or defined differently by different people. And so when we point out that human beings have human rights,

human rights begin when the human being begins, science definitively tells us when a human life begins and therefore abortion is a human rights violation, that argument still works with a plurality of people. I can see a time when that does get rejected. At this point though, most of the people who work for our organization have had thousands of face-to-face conversations with pro-choice people on the streets. Because people still instinctively buy into the concept of human rights, that argument still is persuasive to many people.

Okay, in regards to human rights, Matt Walsh put out a documentary, obviously, called What is a Woman? He may have to soon put out a documentary called What is a Human? Or What is a Human Person? Because often pro-life advocates are told, okay, maybe it's a human life, but it's not a human person. You see, we're kind of redefining things. So what do you say to that?

So there's the complex personhood argument, which I'm sure you've heard before from other apologists. In terms of what works best on the streets, at least for me, is what I point out is that they're using the language of exclusion. The concept of personhood as understood by human rights activists has only ever been used not to include people, but to exclude a group. So when women were human beings, but not persons, that was because you could then deny them certain rights. When African

Americans were human beings, but only like three fourths of a person that was for the intent of denying them human rights. And now the same thing is true for the preborn. So what I point out to people is that when they use the term personhood, they're using a term with a long bloody and exclusionary history. that's been generally used as a tool by people with the intent to victimize the group excluded from the umbrella of personhood. And people do not like being accused of being exclusive. Yeah, no, that's excellent. Thank you very much. Where can people learn more about your stuff? And do you have an actual website where people can see all your books and articles? The Bridgehead.ca is my website and I have a sub stack if you just go to the Bridgehead

with Jonathan van Maren. I have a sub stack newsletter where I send out all my ruminations on the decline and fall of Western civilization. And so if you would like to be depressed bi-weekly you can find it there. Bi-weekly or fortnightly depending on whose side you're on. We put a link to that. The Bridgehead. Thank you, Thursday.

Excellent. And what do you got in the works? What's coming up? Right now, I'm working on two projects simultaneously. One is an updated version to The Culture War, where I'm trying to pull together. Which will be outdated three minutes after it's published, but good for you. What I'm trying to do is a deep dive

into a lot of the phenomenon that are actually happening. So even the institutions of indoctrination, how porn has metastasized further in the culture and the effect that it's having. And I'm basically trying to take all of these thinkers like Mary Abert Stat and Carl Truman and all these people and create a one-stop shop readable book for people who feel like they've gone insane

to understand the historical chronology of how we got where we are. Wonderful. And so they can read it and feel like, no, I'm not nuts, everybody else is nuts, and this is how we got from A to B. That's really helpful. All right, God bless you, brother.

You bet, thanks for having me. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you, Thursday. And if you are watching right now, do us a favor. We've got three things to ask of you. Subscribe, that'd be great. Click that bell button. And then thirdly, please subscribe

to Pines with Aquinas over on Rumble, so that when YouTube inevitably bans us, that may not happen, but it's not unlikely, let me tell you that. We'll still be able to put out these excellent interviews and have these wonderful guests for you. Thanks so much.