 Joseph Kato joining me tonight is Luke Ford. Luke, how's it going? Good, Jess. Good to talk to you again. Very glad to chat with you. Yeah, it's been a long time since we last conversed. And it's very good to be to be talking once more. There's no shortage of stuff going on out there. So I think that we will have a very interesting conversation to say the least. But anyway, I mean, it's trying to figure out where to begin with this. But the GOP is being it's well, I suddenly lost you. You suddenly froze. Okay, likely. There, sorry, frozen there for 30 seconds. So yeah, that happens. As a matter of fact, just something to do with my my computer, the internet connection is fine. But it's just sometimes that that comes up. But anyway, the GOP seems to be doing in case it wasn't heard before what I was saying, not the greatest, but not the worst. And it has basically dealt with a lot of self inflicted wounds. In this election cycle, bad candidates, obviously the abortion issue coming to the forefront. Even though obviously economic issues now it's safe to say are of more importance to more voters than abortion related issues are. But the midterms are coming. They are a month away. And the GOP, given how badly the country is doing economically and how unpopular divide administration is, the GOP certainly should be in more of a routing. It should be on course to route the Democrats, whereas it seems to be on course to have a modest victory. Luke, anything to say starting out tonight? Yeah, I didn't understand that the GOP doesn't make crime the number one focus and just the dissolution of our cities under the just massive tidal wave of crime that's broken out since the summer of George, and then illegal immigration. It seems like those are two very solid vote winners and inflation number three. But the GOP has chosen to make inflation the number one issue. And I think crime, that's my sense of things that the country is spiraling out of control with this massive murder, rape and rampage crisis that has spilled out into traffic fatalities, pedestrian deaths, you know, all sorts of horrible statistics are spiraling upwards since the the summer of George. I would think the GOP would make that the their number one issue. You know, you bring up the summer of George and not to get too far into the past, but it is interesting because the George Floyd thing basically was like a religious sacrament. You saw people creating shrines to him, people engaging individuals, doing all these things that people would do basically to venerate a persecuted saint. And the obviously violent nature of the summer of George can't be overlooked. But there was like a bizarre spiritual component to it as well for a lot of people on the left. It's like you became the patron saint of wokeism, which I do consider to be an organized religion, just not a supernatural one, even though it does bleed into organized supernatural religious in the United States, most notably Christianity, where every major Christian denomination has been captured by the woke folks to some degree. Luke, anyway, anything to say about this spiritual element of wokeism? Yeah, I think much of life is a spiral. I mean, you're either spiraling up or you're spiraling down. And so to be a liberal is to be perpetually distressed by ever do manifestations of ignorance and bigotry. And so once you take care of one manifestation of ignorance and bigotry by making it completely unacceptable to display publicly, then your job's not done. Now you need to move on to new manifestations of ignorance and bigotry. It's just an eternal cycle, just like for conservatives, they have an eternal cycle of a fixation on disorder and contagion. So there will never be a point of order and purity where conservatives will say, Oh, we're good now, we can just go on with our lives. So I think we're all stuck in in spirals. And so for conservatives, they always want an ever more ordered and and purified society. And for the left, they always want to combat ignorance. And so George just just played into the left wing need of saying, Hey, look, look how far we have to go to educate Americans away from their their woeful ignorance about race, and the police that they're just so racist. And they're just our society is just oppressing black people and hoarding, hoarding them down and robbing them of opportunities we need to do better. Without without that kind of jihad, there's no energy in liberalism just like for for a Christian, right? Unless he's out there spreading the good news of Jesus Christ, where would he get the energy and enthusiasm? Do you think Christians can be filled with passion if they say, Okay, my belief in Jesus is a good path to the transcendent for me. But I don't feel any obligation to share it with anyone else. That would be a Christianity with its balls cut off. And so to an Orthodox Jew, who's leading an observant life, if he never felt any compulsion to share the wonders of Jewish observance with with another Jew, then he's practicing a type of Judaism with the balls cut off. So we all have this transcendental need for for meaning, because at the back of our minds is always this great fear that we're insignificant. And so I I stream, you know, five, 10, 20 hours a week to kind of help ward off my own feelings of insignificance, because I'm not married. I don't have kids. So I do my things to ward off a feeling of insignificance. People on the left do their things to ward off a feeling of insignificance. We're all standing here trying to ward off the feeling that our life doesn't matter. And so people get into various crusades, or various causes, or they they push themselves to absurd lengths to try to prove to themselves that their lives matter. It's interesting, though, because with the the summer of George, the level to which people devoted themselves to his memory and to whatever cause they perceive as being based on his life, which is hardly a life worth emulating or championing, but whatever. To me, I did see a level of it looks obviously like something that comes out of Christianity, being infused into these protests in favor of justice for Floyd, including organized chants, that sort of thing. People reciting verses as to what they believe, so on so forth. I think that perhaps the summer of George was a watershed moment, and that it marked the beginning of a new public religion. Yeah, I just don't see it as any different than any other basic attempt for for significance. I mean, that's what it is at core. So if I were to lay out to someone who wasn't already a believer, the fundamental tenets of Judaism or Islam, or the Mormon faith, or Roman Catholicism or some of the Adventism, anyone who wasn't already a believer would find it absolutely ridiculous. If I said, oh, you know, the Angel Moroni came down here and buried these plates of gold, or that there are these two million people who were led through the desert and led through the Red Sea and God provided food and water for them for 40 years when they lived in the desert or God sent his only begotten son to come to earth to die on a cross to save you from your sins. Anyone who doesn't already buy into that narrative would find it ridiculous. And so too, anyone who doesn't buy into the the liberal narrative about how our great fight is against ignorance and bigotry is going to find these manifestations ridiculous. But every cause looks ridiculous to someone who is not a true believer. I don't think most people realize how much we depend on non rational sources for our meaning. I mean, when I'm talking, doing my live stream and speaking to to 15 live viewers, I have a vastly exaggerated sense of my own significance. I mean, I don't think oh, in the end, you know, 400 people are going to watch this dream and another 100 are going to listen to an MP3. And maybe five of them are going to find something, you know, really significant in what I have to say, I would feel crushed by my own insignificance that I'd probably give up instead. I have this vastly exaggerated sense of the importance of what I'm doing. And almost everyone does. I mean, like we deal with people with Napoleon complexes, you know, in the workplace, often, they have, you know, one particular task, and everyone has to go through them to get something done. And these people are strutting around, like men, of course, you know, imbue their work with all sorts of absurd levels of meaning that it just objectively doesn't have. So I don't see the wokeness as any more absurd, inherently than any other yearning for meaning. Where I do agree with you is that it's definitely trashing our country. So there are a lot of pursuits of meaning and significance that are not trashing our country. But the woke summer of George and its after effects leading to the deaths of thousands of innocent Americans through all sorts of horrible means, whether automobile accidents, pedestrian accidents, or murder. I mean, that is just horrific. So someone who believes something about the angel and the Mormon faith, then they're not killing people. But people who push the narrative that the cops are just inherently racist and America's inherently racist holding down the basic inherent goodness of black people, they are pushing a narrative that's responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people a year. Well, talking about narratives being pushed in politics, there is this thing in the media about Christian nationalism, Christian nationalism taking over the GOP, American politics. I think it's greatly overstated. I think one actually has to define Christian nationalism very carefully before saying much of anything about it. To me, it is the desire for theocracy, in which case there's a state church and it's a variant of Christianity and it informs every aspect of this nation state's public policy. Very few people in the GOP want that, although the media makes it seem like Christian nationalism is on the march everywhere. I mean, you see your people like a gab, Andrew Torba saying X, Y, and Z, they call themselves Christian nationalists. I believe that Marjorie Green did the same and Lauren Bobert questioned the separation between church and state. But other than people like this, you barely ever hear about it, except, you know, on CNN and such where they say it's coming to kill everyone. What do you think about this matter? Right. So many things to say. I was only once in my life trapped it in a riptide and I was swimming in Brisbane, Australia, and I kept swimming to get back to the beach and I just kept getting pulled further away. So we're in a riptide right now that the left has steadily gained control of all of our major institutions. So to try to preserve your way of life, you have to swim a lot harder than you would in 1950s America. So that's probably the first way that I understand Christian nationalism. It's an attempt by many ordinary Americans who 50 years ago would not have identified as Christian nationalists, but in these particular circumstances, that is the way they see is the best to try to preserve, you know, something of their way of life. Like every living organism devotes itself to trying to reshape the environment around it so that it's most conducive for its own flourishing. That means sharks and beetles and ants and people and Christians and Jews. We're all trying to shape our environment so it's most conducive to our welfare. And so Christians who see United States of America that now makes gay marriage the law of the land, where many of our elite institutions think the transsexual agenda is a wonderful thing and that people who feel like they're remembered the opposite sex that they can go get surgery, like when you see that degree of degradation, when most of the coverage about monkeypox is we shouldn't stigmatize gays for participating in mass orgies with strangers. The right to participate in mass orgies with strangers is written in the Constitution and we should be very careful about stigmatizing this kind of antisocial behavior. When you look at that, then you start trying to construct a lifeboat out of that. And so nationalism has many different components and what people say they are frequently bears absolutely no resemblance to what they're really all about. So plenty of people who say they're a civic nationalist, they actually believe in a strong component of racial nationalism. They just simply recognize the cues and the incentives to not express that. So they just talk in terms of civic nationalism. And so to plenty of people with racial national identity, they understand that it's completely socially unacceptable to say that out loud. But they can rally to the banner of Christ is king. What makes it so complicated is that nationalism is primarily something that is non rational. It's an emotional feeling of connection with other members of your group, the largest group possible that you can strongly identify with. And it's also a frame of mind. And so people we use all sorts of terms, but that those terms don't denote what's exactly going on. The conflict in Northern Ireland between athletes and Protestants is not primarily a religious conflict. It's given it's given that terminology. But what you have the two different peoples with two different ways of living two different folk ways. And so calling it Catholic versus Protestant simply makes it easier. And so many of the people I think who identify as Christian nationalists, that's just a way that they can identify it with a particular group that provides a possible way out of the the hellscape that they see around them. And I don't think one should get too hung up on the details. Sure, there's a time and a place for getting hung up on the details what exactly is Christian nationalism. But in the big picture, nationalism is an identification with a people. It usually has a racial, a civic and ideological and frequently a religious component. But whatever component people choose to make for foremost isn't necessarily accurate. So I think people want safety out of what they see as a declining America. Oh, obviously America isn't declined. But I was going to say that the interesting thing is, if one wants to use the whole Christian label as a means of identifying oneself for the purpose of avoiding the collapse of a traditional America. Most Christians are trending quite to the left. As a matter of fact, every, as I mentioned, major Christian denomination has been captured by wokists. And it's not like this was an armed coup this happened within the you know, within the rule book and each and every single denomination. So it's done obviously to keep the religion as congruent as possible with the emerging ideas of those who patronize the congregants. So I think that people want to use Christianity as some means of getting around, you know, what America is becoming. They're not really seeing the forest through the trees. Perhaps they're not even seeing the trees at all. They probably have an idea of Christianity, which is very outdated. Well, we're all highly deluded like I'm here sharing my delusions. You're sharing your delusions. The audience is like reality is so complicated. You know, we struggle to get you know, some sense of what's going on. So yeah, we're all filled with delusions. But I don't think the Christianity is as left wing, as you say, there are elements of it that are left wing. But if you told me that someone read his Bible every day, I would say that the odds are above 60% that he's going to vote Republican. Evangelical Christians were Donald Trump's strongest supporters. About approximately 70% of them voted Republican. Donald Trump made an explicit deal with evangelical Christians. He told them in a church in Iowa back in early 2016, I believe, if I enter the White House Christianity will have power. And so evangelical Christians in particular did a deal with Donald Trump. They didn't focus on his infidelity and his divorces and all that was gross and atheist about him. They focused on this is a man who will give you know, Christianity power, who appointed three Supreme Court Justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, which is what many Christians like this was. This was a really big deal for them. So. Yeah, it's is complicated, but but there's nothing inherently left or right about Christianity. Christianity for millennia for hundreds and hundreds of years acted as a vehicle for you know, racial nationalism and and civic nationalism. So Christianity wasn't always this, you know, wimpy, liberal thing that we see now. I was just reading a book on the history of England and it is by Peter Accroy, the foundation, the history of England from its earliest beginnings to the Tudors. And so from year 400 until maybe 1700 Christianity was a major force in English nationalism, like the Kings were aware of the advantages of the Christian faith. It was more effective than the alternatives. The Roman Catholic Church preferred the rule of strong kings and unified governments. It made the work of religious control much easier. The priests were the literate members of the kingdom. They were the ones drawing up legal documents and title deeds and proclaiming what the law was. And the kings were happy to adopt quasi liturgical roles as the embodiment of the people in public ritual. Now, did the kings have to believe in Christian faith to adopt this quasi liturgical role? No. So it wasn't primarily an expression of their religiosity. It was just a way of enhancing authority as a way of enforcing respect and ensuring obedience. So kings and saints appear at the same time in English history and they're part of the of the same team that is knitting together the various regions of the country into one nation. A single English church required a single English nation at this stage. And so Christianity is frequently being a force for nationalism, for racial nationalism. It's not like it's some inherent universalist left wing degraded thing. It's a Christianity. The thing of it is people can make out that whatever they want because inherently it has very little substance. It is something that obviously is an offshoot of Judaism synthesized with various other religious traditions that were popular in the Mediterranean during the Bronze Age. And over the not just over the years over the generations, Christianity continues to change. So if one reads the New Testament as I have, it's very contradictory. It's hard to take away any comprehensive message from it. And this makes it very good for various folks to use because as you said, Christianity is neither right nor left. And I presume you meant in a comprehensive sense. But that I absolutely agree. This is what makes it so utilizable and frustrating to me because I see it basically as nothing but other than like some syrupy words and then some stuff taken from this tradition, that tradition that cobbled together in a way where you literally see the contradictions from book to book. But then others know that most people are not this intellectual about religion period. And so they're not going to care about these inconsistencies. And because of that Christianity with its very, very deep reliance on personal emotion, it's easy to channel it into the interests of whoever is in power. And that's why people on the left and the right are able to use it so reliably. I think this makes it a very bad idea, though, over the long run for any country to base itself on because at the end of the day, there is no there there. And that makes it very easy for somebody to usurp what you're doing and say, no, I have the true Christian belief and they could point to something in the New Testament. Now, you I know you wouldn't, but the theoretical you might say, no, no, I have the true Christian belief is right here. But then somebody points to the contradiction of that and then you point to the contradiction of what they said and it goes on and on and on. And this is what makes Christianity to me so if you're reading, it's unique in that it's this substance free. But it's it's really, I think it's very bad for statecraft over the long run. There were iterations of it, as you said, that were very nationalistic and they did work. But of course they didn't last basically the more developed the society becomes, the more technologically advanced it grows, the more educated its people are, the less they're willing to accept, you know, supernatural reasons for X, Y and Z taking place. I think that the truest conservatism is based upon history, heritage and culture. And now religion does factor into that, no question, but it's in service of these things rather than being the centerpiece. And what a lot of American conservatives want to do, not I mean like most of them or anything like that, but a very noisy minority. What they want to do is make it so there's this abstract focus on Christianity as the substance for American conservative life and American life generally. But this Christianity, first and foremost, there's so many different denominations of the question becomes which variant of Christianity are we talking about? Some people on the right like torbidulis like ecumenical thing, but that's never going to work. You can't have a Christian nationalism based on Christian acumenism. It's impossible. But even beyond that, it's obviously a very desperate attempt to find some national identity where there is none. It's such we see in today's America. And it's very sad because this is sort of like people who are on a sinking ship trying to make a life raft out of wood planks. They can try, but it's not gonna work. It's not the genuine article. The genuine article in terms of legitimate conservatism is history, heritage and culture. The language you speak, your bloodline, how people live within certain geopolitical bounds that your group has lived in since time immemorial. That's real conservatism. But unfortunately today in America, we don't have any prospect for that happening. So we get this mech conservatism, if you will, which could be civic nationalism. It could be this Christian nationalism. It could be focused on abstract ideas such as you find the national review crowd. It's really pathetic all around. Well, nothing lasts. So sometimes my sinuses are all plugged up at night and I use a nasal spray and it unplugged my sinuses. But does that last? It doesn't even last two days. It lasts about 12 hours. But I'm so grateful for those 12 hours where my sinuses are unplugged. So just because something doesn't last is not a strong argument against it. Now, regarding theological disputes, my father was a theologian with two PhDs in theology. And so his whole life was built around arguing theology. And so I got a somewhat distorted understanding of Christianity because I thought, all Christian homes are like this. But when I started to expand my life, I realized most Christians don't give a damn about theology. It's really the play thing of a few intellectuals. One way of approaching this is what kind of sex life do you want? If you want to have kids, what else are you gonna do? You're gonna need to become a Christian or an observant Jew or a Muslim. If you wanna have kids and community, it'll be so much easier to do it in America in a Christian religion. If you just wanna bang and be promiscuous, then you're probably not gonna be religious. Now, I think that the left wing and right wing responses to life are genetically, written into us because in some situations, a left wing approach to life is more adaptive. So in some situations, welcoming strangers and egalitarianism and trying new ways of organizing people is more adaptive. And so those are the left wing impulses that we've had for thousands of years. And then in other situations, a right wing approach of distrusting strangers, an obsession with purity and order and maintaining traditional ways of organizing people, that's more adaptive. So we need both of these adaptations. Some circumstances, one is gonna be more adaptive than the other. But I don't think it really comes down to true conservatives based on history and culture. I think true conservatives are based on the family. And so if you wanna have a family, I just think it would be more adaptive for most people in the United States of America right now to be Christian. And it's not primarily about theology, it's primarily about hanging out with your friends. So I was taken aback by a sociologist who came from the religion I was raised in, who did a study and found that people tend to move out of their church if they have fewer than five friends there. So religion is primarily about hanging out with your friends and with your family and with your group. So I can go anywhere in the world and step into a synagogue and I've got a home, I've got a portable home. And so in an America that is so rationalized, that is so transient where people are constantly moving, a church is a version of old fashioned country living where people knew each other for generations. And so where else are you gonna get that kind of comfort? From a purely secular perspective, religion is primarily about providing people comfort. And so if people aren't getting their comfort from Christianity, where are they gonna be getting? They're not gonna primarily be studying philosophy. They're not gonna primarily be taking on the teachings of the Stoics. They're gonna be watching more TV. They're gonna be having more promiscuous sex. They're gonna be playing more video games. They're gonna spend more money going to rap music concerts. I just see the less Christianity in America, I don't see superior things by and large replacing it. I don't, I don't think that superior things are gonna replace what we have in America today. Period. And I don't think it's gonna be any kind of renewal or turnaround to bring Christianity back. Basically would mean that it would have to adapt to where people are today. So it'd be relevant to them. And that's where you get woke Christianity from where a Christianity that's not woke, but sort of like Joel Osteen where it's very emotional and highly subjective. And that really, I mean, I'll put it to you this way. I mean, I've obviously been out of high school for quite a while now, but I did, I'm not Catholic obviously, but I did go to a Roman Catholic high school and very few people even back then were believers at the end, that graduation. It was just something that they did or they weren't believers at all, which would be like me. And it's really, that was back then. This was quite a while ago now. Today it has to be something like that, but on crack. So I don't think that bringing Christianity back into this social situation that I'm describing is gonna save it. What saves people is living in a homogenous, culturally cohesive, one might say pro-social community. And that is what you get in some place like Switzerland where they do have robust conservatism or Uruguay. And now these are not places where conservatism is like Jerry Falwell, raging, evangelizing, this, that, the other thing, Rick Santorum bullshit. This could, the conservatism in these places much more subdued, but it's much more genuine. In Uruguay, you have the conservatism of Latin Europe, which also produces an extremely secular society, but all the same, one with tolerance, but surprisingly robustly traditional values, even though in Uruguay you're very likely to run into the average person who will laugh at you if you bring up Jesus to them. And in Switzerland, it's quite secular today as well. And it's the same deal except not Latin European, but it's either French, German or Italian, which would be Latin European technically, but the part of Italy that Switzerland draws inspiration from is in the North and that's very Germanic. That kind of Italian life has a great deal of Germanic influence for obvious reasons. So I think that what America can have today in terms of legit conservatism is absolutely nothing because it does not have this sort of homogenous community structure that's necessary for this kind of legitimate conservatism. If your country needs godly politics, then that means it's having problems because it means people are living in anguish. If your country does not need appeals to God and politics, that means it's doing quite well and people can self-manage and family units are cohesive and they function quite decently on the basis of a pro-social community system, not just a single community, system different communities organized within the same national framework. So I think that it's really interesting to see what works and what doesn't, but I think that America is always going to be very dysfunctional going forward because there is no national culture, there is no national language, there is no national identity, there is conflict and conflict produces desperation. And when people are desperate, they very often go, oh God, and that's where you get Christian politics on the right and the left from, by the way, a lot of people on the right will say, you know, we need to bring back Christianity to promote social conservatism. So the family can be bolstered and then the saying comes, it always comes in one way or another, the family that prays together stays together. But if one looks at one of the most religious communities in America in terms of actual church attendance rates, black Americans, they have an illegitimacy rate of almost 80%. And then other groups that are more religious than average, such as say Hispanics, even though they're not a single group, it's very heterogeneous, but you get the idea. They also have higher illegitimacy rates than average. So this idea that somehow Christianity is gonna solve all the problems of big rates of family, the idea that a lot of Americans, social conservatives talk about, it's not borne out by what actually happens. Yeah, but no one's arguing that Christianity solves all problems. What people would argue is that for many people, Christianity is superior to what else would replace it. And I'm sure even you would acknowledge that. For many people, Christianity is superior to its possible replacements. Oh, sure. No, no, no, to them it is. But my question is what kind of Christianity would you get in today's America by and large? There is this idea that things could go back to a more traditional day and age in which you had a Christianity that was very patriarchal and so on and so forth. That would have to be what happens if there's gonna be some sort of conservative social revolution on the basis of Christian thought. But that's not gonna happen. It's just not gonna happen. The women aren't gonna go back to that sort of very submissive lifestyle. A lot of men simply don't have the interests of mooring over women in order to make something like that work, eat if the women wanted it. And the way the economy functions is such that in order for people to have what's considered to be an acceptable standard of living, they're going to have to do a lot of work. And you can't really have this traditional state of affairs such as one would see in the 1950s or even way before that in a modern society where most often both parents are gonna have to work or you have a lot of single-parent households particularly ones headed by women in which case the woman obviously has to work. So it's really, I just think this traditional era cannot be gone back to, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. Right, but that doesn't mean that you can't do anything. Let's say that you want to belong to a community that is dominantly homogeneous. Pretty much the only way you can do that in a big city in America is to either go to a church or a synagogue. That's true. I mean that it is completely racially socially acceptable to go to a church or a synagogue that is 98% white and there is no other organization at which that is socially acceptable. So let's say you want to go belong to a community where being demonstrably gay is socially unacceptable. Your only alternative is to go to a church or a synagogue. Let's say you want to belong to a community where just guys get together, right? Pretty much your only option is to go to a church or a synagogue. Let's say you want a community where guys meet regularly just with guys and that your only choice is a church or a synagogue or I assume a mosque. Let's say you just want to feel something, right? So there was an article in The Onion about some atheists walking past listening to gospel music and wishing he could believe in some of that nonsense. Well, Christianity produces amazing music, amazing art and amazing feelings. Like people get a payoff when they go to church. It is meeting their needs for comfort. And so people want to feel alive. So when I was growing up at Seventh Day Adventist, our church services were stodgy. They didn't stay that way. So starting in the 1980s, there was this celebration movement where going to church was a lot like going to a rock concert. I mean, you really feel something and you go to a rock concert. The ticket is going to set you back $100. But you go to a church and you don't have to pay admission. You can experience all the things that people experience at a rock concert but in a safer environment where people aren't doing drugs and they're not high on alcohol and people aren't getting raped. So people want things that religion provides. People may want to feel free of the diversity agenda. People may want to feel free from the homosexual agenda. People may want to feel free from the transsexual agenda. People may want to feel free from the assault of wokeism. People may just want to hang out with people like themselves. I don't know any more effective community formation than what's going on in organized religion in America. The thing of it is a lot of what goes on in organized religion in America is not subverting wokeism or promoting homogeneity or anything like that. A lot of churches today promote diversity to a very shall I say artificial degree which is say they want so much of it that it's not what people would ordinarily see on a day-to-day level based upon what one might call an organic lived experience. And then a lot of these churches are also pushing social justice through Jesus. We're still able to do for the reason I mentioned before people get better Christianity to be whatever they want. So it's really something that even a lot of churches say don't provide the refuge you mentioned even though they certainly used to by and large. I don't debate that at all. And in large cities today it's basically your last hope as you said to find these more traditional things that probably have to be in a church. I live in a community that's quite homogenous and it definitely is not a religious community but it's not to say there aren't religious people here but the community itself is not based upon religion at all. And if guys want to hang out with other guys they can go to a bar and do so. There are clubs for people to join based upon shared interests in some cases something like heritage, something like that. So these things exist but in certain areas I don't live in a city. I live outside of one. So that's probably at least something to do with it but there are still secular things that are available but in most cities the religion would be one's last chance of finding stuff like this as Luke said even though I think less and less religious are offering the sort of environment nowadays. Well those religions that supported Donald Trump such as evangelical Christians certainly are offering this. I mean I can go to pretty much any Orthodox synagogue and it's socially unacceptable to be trans and it's socially unacceptable to be out as a homosexual and plenty of Orthodox synagogues I go to are essentially 100% white. And so if people want that kind of homogeneity and that kind of barriers against wokeism there are plenty of organized religions that will provide that. So just because there are woke churches and left-wing churches people are not stuck with only those options. People can choose conservative churches. You don't have to believe anything. Plenty of people go to church and synagogue and do not believe in God. Plenty of people go to church and synagogue have no interest, zip-zero, zilch interest in theology or in anything religious. They go there because they have friends there. They like the community there. Like where do you go to just walk into a ready-made manufactured community? So many people I know would be when they have to fill in that form for emergency contact they don't really have someone. Like many people I know if they have to get to the hospital they don't have anyone to give them a ride to a hospital. So many people I know if they are hospitalized they don't have any community that comes to visit them. People dying alone in their homes completely unvisited for weeks at a time. That would not happen if you belong to a church or a synagogue. If I God forbid broke my leg right now and had to go to a hospital people in my religious community would come check on me. They would help me out. If I fell on hard times I could turn to people in my community. If you lose a job you turn to people in your community and you get a job. Many rabbis spend the majority of their time like getting jobs for people, getting apartments for people. So yeah, you can go to a bar. Generally speaking I think people are much better off going to church rather than going to a bar. Now there is community in a bar but generally speaking if you get together with your fellow Christians or fellow Jews it's going to be a more elevated experience less likely to tip you into some dangerous or dysfunctional behavior by participating in organized religion than going to a bar. Now on the other hand I absolutely recognize that some people are far better off going to a bar than going to church or a synagogue. It's complicated. It's not like there's just one answer that everyone has to fit the cookie cutter of religion. Religion is not for everyone. And so people are different but I just don't think that most people who want to build a family for example would be better off doing that outside of the warm embrace of a religious community. You mentioned that you find these things basically that give you friendship, identity, a support network in churches or synagogues and one does find them in certain churches and synagogues. However, at your average American church there really is not a strong sense of community. It's very atomized relative to what one would expect say at an Orthodox shul. So it's interesting because I have some experience with this as people can deduce I've never been a church goer I'm not a Christian and I still have experience with the Christian church structure. I went to Presbyterian and Roman Catholic school as a boy and I did attend both of their services. I like the Presbyterian services better. They were quicker but regardless the Presbyterian services I attended were a mainline and the people there I was very young at the time but still the people there were, you know what tends to be well to do established in the community. I didn't get the impression though that they were all there to support each other. It seemed like they were all there to participate in a I wouldn't say a task but a sort of a communal activity and then they went their separate ways. Now I did spend much more time at the Catholic schools and at the Catholic church as I can say for certain that there was not a big sense of community. People drifted in, they drifted out nobody really followed your attendance there unless you remember of something what they call the parish, some kind of council or charitable endeavor or whatnot. You could come or you could go and nobody would blink and in the Catholic communities I don't think there's much community at all unless you join some group. So it's not just like attending the church or becoming part of the parish is that that alone is not going to get you the sense of community that Luke talks about. So what I'm saying is effort. You have to put in a lot of effort if you want a lot out you have to invest if you want to be able to reap rewards the investments that I get from belonging to the Orthodox community come with huge prices and I'm willing to pay that price. Now I'm willing to give up some sense of community for freedom to say what I want to say on shows like this but you don't just automatically reap the rewards of church or synagogue. You have to work at it but you have a choice how intense you want your sense of community to be. There are high intensity religious communities. They all come with a price. Everything comes with a price, right? If you don't go to church, that's a price. If you go to a low intensity church or synagogue there's a price that comes with that. If you go to a high intensity church or synagogue there's a price that comes with that. I primarily have experience with high intensity religion where people live their lives around their religion. I experience that in Orthodox Judaism and I've experienced that in Seventh Day Adventism. But I have some familiarity with low intensity religion and there are lots of advantages to low intensity religion in that it's not as intrusive and you have more freedom and you're not gonna be as trapped. Many people feel trapped by high intensity so you have to dial people up or dial institutions up or down. Many people would absolutely hate my guts if they had to interact with me every day but if they just run into me once a month it is perfectly fine. So some people we need less of in our lives or some institutions we need less of. So people get to choose. If you want high intensity community, there are options. They all require sacrifice, right? Nothing for nothing. If you can't deal with the price of high intensity community but you don't wanna be completely isolated then you can choose a lesser intensity community whether it's religious or not but everything comes with a price. We're just talking about trade-offs here between freedom and community. Definitely so. And I think probably most religions in America today are rather low intensity judging for what I've seen which would explain why so many people are falling away from one religion or another but this is an interesting question, Luke. You say obviously being in the Orthodox community works very well for you. It has for some time but you said it does come with costs. You've spoken about the benefits and the benefits are obviously very lucrative but what are the costs? That probably give people a good approximation of what it means to be in one of these more high intensity religious communities. Oh, so yeah, converting to Judaism is depending on the personality but many people find it so incredibly painful and degrading that they never wanna face anyone involved in their conversion ever again. It's fairly common that say attractive women get crushed on by rabbis who are overseeing their conversion that many traditional Jews see anyone who wants to convert to Judaism as an idiot and as an easy mark that they wanna screw over or take advantage of. Rabbis who do Orthodox conversions tell me that 99% of the people that they deal with are insane. So it requires an ability to assimilate into a community and particularly if you don't come from a ritualistic way of life assimilating into a highly ritualistic way of life like Orthodox Judaism is incredibly challenging. It's incredibly difficult because I grew up a Protestant. It was not a ritual religion. So I had to memorize the prayers. I had to be able to pick up a Cedur the Jewish prayer book and read from any random page had to read it aloud in Hebrew to demonstrate my competence in Hebrew. So learning Hebrew is not easy. Learning to fit in with a community where people have good reason to have considerable suspicions about converts because yeah, 99% of people who wanna convert to Orthodox Judaism are crazy. Also, of the people who do convert an astounding number drop away fairly quickly. So they Jews, Orthodox Jews have every reason to be highly suspicious of converts. Then you need to live your life within the good graces of your community. And so whatever that entails that's going to limit your freedom. So I was so assimilated to this that I'm probably not even thinking out loud. But I mean, some kids like who grow up Orthodox they go to a Yeshiva, they may stay there at a Yeshiva. And every night the rabbis come by and they rip the sheets off their bed to make sure they're not listening to non-Jewish music. That's obviously a huge price. They rip the sheets off their bed to make sure that they're still wearing their fringes, their seat seat. Other rabbis who teach in Yeshivas have been pretty free, smacking kids around, beating kids. There was a New York Times exposé on Hasidic schools. This major Hasidic school where 100% of the students the graduates of this school failed the New York state test in English and math. And so there's an in-group identity with Orthodox Judaism. So there's a dual moral code. There's more relaxed moral code for how you treat outsiders and a much more demanding moral code for how you treat members of your group. It's highly competitive. Like everyone seems to know your business. And so whether you're going up or down in life people know and you very quickly learn where you stand. And so the competitive nature of Jewish life it's a very expensive way of life. And there are just so many ways to look like an idiot because there are just hundreds of rituals and customs. You're just constantly in danger of playing the fool. My God. So yeah, it's very challenging. Certainly, yes. And just so people know about how different Orthodox Judaism is from perhaps a more familiar form of Judaism. I'm a Jewish humanist, Luke is an Orthodox Jew. We actually are at polar opposite ends of the Jewish spectrum. So me listening to this, I obviously know about what he's saying not through personal experience but from what I've heard from others. And it is totally, it is a unique experience in the Orthodox community. It's sort of like I suppose to compare to something that Christians or people from a Christian or predominantly Christian background might find relatable having someone who is a like a, how do I put this? Like ultra devout Orthodox Christian, that would be the analog of Luke. And then the analog of me would be something like a Unitarian Universalist. So it's really, the Unitarian Universalists aren't even technically Christians today, but some of them are. The domination actually allows Jews, Christians, anyone who's on the search for spiritual truth. It's a very unregimented but unfortunately it's been captured by the woke folks. So it actually has become very regimented. I'm sorry to say. But anyway, so that just goes to show this sort of religious diversity at hand here. But it's fascinating to hear all of this for a host of reasons. I think that, I really do think that when it comes to the United States, the right, it does not have a great future because the American right has no coherent vision. And as the Hebrew Bible says where there is no vision that people perish. So I think that America, it's hard to have any kind of vision for it today on the basis of some sort of tradition amongst its people because there are so many parallel societies in today's America that like I said, there's no common American identity nowadays. And the left succeeds I would say because it's constantly driving for change and the people who want this change are ideologically committed to it. So much so that it basically defines who they are as people. Their identity is based upon their politics. And you can't really, so for them there's nothing that's apolitical, everything is political. That's definitely something that is a sharp dividing line between the left and the right in the US. The right tends not to be as political as the left and the left has political fanatics who are devoted to their activism basically at any cost. Yeah, so I don't think vision's nearly important. As you say, I think right or left wing political orientations are evolutionary adaptations to changing circumstances. So people have instincts. They don't need a political philosophy. I love political philosophy, but people don't need a political philosophy. People just have an instinct. For example, if they see dog feces on the sidewalk, the more that bothers them, the more likely they are to be right wing. The more that their room is kept neat and tidy, the more likely they are to be right wing. The more people eat out at different restaurants and are open to trying new foods, the more likely they are left wing. So we just have these adaptations to circumstances which are constantly changing. So I mean, none of us realized that COVID was coming. We may very well be on the edge of a nuclear exchange with Russia, which would make everything else we're talking about kind of irrelevant. And I do think there is American identity. It's not as clear as it was say 60 years ago, but there's a terrific teaching company course called American Identity. And from the time of the American Revolution, prior to the American Revolution, Americans have had a self-consciousness. They think of their nation as representing something unique in the history of the world. And one major difference that I see between the American identity and British and Australian identity is there's much more of a can do attitude. Are you an American can or an American can't? So when I watch British and Australian drama, there's much more of a sense of fatalism. Fatalism is not a part of American identity. There's this sense in America that, yeah, we can do it. We can conquer. There's this tremendous faith in political democracy, in education. There's an anti-fatalist outlook. There's this belief that material and moral progress is possible. There's tremendous faith in the benefits of education. There's an eagerness to live up to national ideals. There's a belief that individual economic exertion will generate wealth and material development. So the inventiveness of Americans, the adaptability, the pragmatism of Americans is what Daniel Borstein would write about. The energetic approach to solving problems, the faith in human equality, belief in the boundless possibilities of economic growth, making education available to every citizen. Americans tend to have very high expectations for progress and Americans tend to be really into self-help, far more than almost any other country. Americans tend to be constantly striving to improve themselves and their societies. Americans work harder. America is full of worker-holics. In Australia, everybody gets a minimum of four weeks holiday a year, minimum. So Americans, yeah, they're not fatalistic. If something's wrong, they feel like they can solve it. They're pragmatic. They excelled in irregular warfare and ingenious military improvisation in the first two centuries of the country. They've tended to have an intense pride in their own country, much more demonstrative than many other nations. Highly self-critical. Americans have tended to be highly self-critical. Tremendous amount of religious innovation in America. America, for the last 80 years, has led the world in scientific research. America, since the 1880s, has been the richest country in the world. And Americans are always coming up with new devices and trying to put them to profitable use. So the stereotype of the shrewd Yankee businessman who knows how to drive a bargain, that's still with us. Pass. I think that the American identity you referred to certainly was true, although today, I don't think there is the spirit of innovation that can do attitude that still characterizes the country on the whole. Now, characterizes certain parts of the country, particularly the inter-mountain West, places like that, no question. But the country on the whole today, I don't think it does. I think that today, certainly the identity that you referred to is part of American history. It was, I can't say that what you said is wrong if it's applied to that history, but today, particularly over the last 30 years, especially since the year 2000, since the 2000 election that accelerated since 9-11, things here have been much more fatalistic and pessimistic and the old American can-do spirit still exists, but in pockets. I'm not gonna say it's not there, but if it exists in pockets then it really can't be a national identity. It's one identity among many. Today, looking at America, a lot of people say I hate this country or I love this country. I say I'm indifferent to this country on the whole because I don't wanna over-generalize to say this country is good or bad by my perception. Parts of it I like, parts of it I absolutely dislike, and as a result of that, I look at America in the same way that someone from the EU would look at Europe. Someone from Stockholm and someone from Palermo don't have a hell of a lot in common with each other, but they're still part of the same political superstructure of the EU. Someone such as me from central Florida, and someone from Seattle, and someone from Calexico, and someone from Fort Kent, where they speak French generally, and someone from Chicago, don't have a lot in common with each other, but we're still part of the same political superstructure. So when you have this situation of whether it's on the old continent or in the US, parallel societies, you get people who are very indifferent and apathetic toward, quote unquote, the nation, whether the nation is the American one or the European Union. So it's really interesting, but I think that the American identity you speak of certainly, I know 100%, it is part of American history, and it still exists today in certain places, but I think that for a host of reasons, America nowadays lacks the sort of spirit which it used to have, and replacing it is a bunch of things. It's not just like one thing. It's a lot of things going on all at once, which makes discussing the matter very difficult, but that's my take on it. Right, and so identity can't be triggered. So there were millions of American Jews who didn't really care about the Jewish state of Israel until the 1967 war. I knew that was coming. Yeah, and so after 9-11, my block had a block party where we all gathered together and broke bread for the first time. So you can experience a 9-11 and suddenly have an American experience just completely rekindled, or you can leave the country for a while, and then suddenly you realize what you miss about America. So our identities are often going to take us by surprise, and so America certainly has its share of problems, but I think primarily we don't see the world as it is. We see the world as we are, and so when things are discouraging to us, say we read a lot of news and we see negative directions for our orientation about how America should work, then one tends to become depressed about America, but life circumstances can change and suddenly, wow, this American identity that you thought you didn't really care about can just rear up and seize you. That can happen. I think that perhaps the identity that's most important nowadays is there's more of like a decline of patriotism and shared national purpose and all that would be your regional identity. Say someone from Pennsylvania moving to Australia might find that he or she misses pierogies or some such thing, or Snyder's, or us potato chips, stuff like that, and if he or she returned home, he or she would probably, maybe, I can't, it's not probably be maybe, if feeling homesick would say, wow, I really missed this, this is where I'm from, and that would be a resurgence of the identity. Now, if that person went to a part of America that he or she had never visited going there from Australia, that person would probably feel very socially alienated because I lived in, I spent my middle school years in Pennsylvania, in Eastern Pennsylvania, and there's no doubt that that's very different from Florida and even more different from someplace like, say, Portland, Oregon. So I think that this thing with America today is that it's so many different things all at once, and that creates confusion. It also creates conflict. And what I really find interesting is how ascendant the left has been over the last 10 years. I mean, it really has just like, I had this explosion of public support, particularly among the young, to the extent that was not previously seen. Any thoughts on that, Luke? Yeah, that's kind of concerning and bewildering as someone who does not share the work outlook on life. And it's also kind of bewildering how the Republican Party has kind of deliberately become the party of the uneducated and the Democratic Party has increasingly become the party of people who go to university. And so the Republicans have become the populace and the Democratic Party has become the coalition of the upper class and lower classes, kind of against the middle class. So what I do reject from many of my right-wing friends is that they just think it's all over. Like they think there's no hope. The left is gonna win on the basis of the trends that you talk about or racial demographic trends or any other trends. They're just absolutely hopeless. And that's what I reject because everything that we're talking about is contingent. If we got into a nuclear war with Russia overnight, and Russia, let's say, takes out five of our cities and kills 10 million Americans, I think you would experience a resurgent American identity. And so the world is constantly surprising us. And I don't think that we just faded to be doomed, right? There are many negative trends. I think it depends on what considers being doomed. I think that if there were some sort of catastrophic event like a nuclear war, which I don't think is any serious chance of happening, or if there were like another 9-11, which I hope doesn't happen, but it would certainly be likelier than nuclear war. I think America would not pull together the way that it did in 2001. I think it probably would exacerbate already existing conflicts within the US and it would render people even more angry if that's imaginable, although it certainly should be because things can absolutely get worse, as I think Luke and I would both heartily agree. But I think that when it comes to the right, the problem is demographic, but it's not as simple as race. I used to people just say, well, you know, because of race, we're gonna lose. And in some cases, you know, racial demographics are almost 100% correlated with electoral demographics, but that's not always the case. What has happened is something very interesting. I was just reading an article about this today in The Hill and men, even though the ancestral demographics among men have changed rapidly and they continue to change, men today are not any more on the left than they have been in recent history. Women, on the other hand, are much more on the left. They've had this, you know, surge of leftism within their ranks. So the change here is not, that's pushing leftism on the basis of sex is not so much racial as it is, well, basically any number of reasons that women are zooming leftward. So these are demographic issues and these demographics will doom the right. No question about that in my mind, but it's not something like say, oh, this race is going to have such and such a number so the right's gonna be non-viable in elections. This demographic situation I'm talking about right now, this specific case is one of a sex, about half of the human species in the US marching rapidly toward the left with no ended sight and only seemingly likely increases on the horizon. I believe only that 50, I mean, there are many different reasons but probably the most striking one is that only 50 some odd percent of young women today identify as being attracted exclusively to men. So they're certainly adopting this sexual identity thing which is leading them to the left but it's not just that, it's also getting quote unquote educated at university. It's them believing that somehow men are holding them back from being all they can be even though many top institutions today, society around run by women. So it's really complicated but in terms of demographics that I'm talking about here that absolutely is dooming for the right. That's doomsday because there's no way that the GOP can function in a society that continues in this direction. Well, everything you're talking about are adaptations reacting to incentives and when the incentives change the different adaptations will come to the fore. So the German Green Party was very much against nuclear power. It changed its mind recently. Wow, why did they change its mind? Because for the German Greens it was more important to support Ukraine than to oppose nuclear power. So Germany is firing up coal fired plants. Europe is firing up coal fired plants. Europe is looking at restarting nuclear power. Europe is completely remaking its energy policies on the basis of contingencies on the basis of real world events. Women like men respond to incentives. So we've developed an America where to be cool among professional circles, dentists, accountants, doctors, lawyers is to be on the left. Entertainment industry is dominated by the left. Academia is dominated by the left. Who's a more compelling speaker? Barack Obama or Mitt Romney or John McCain. Like Barack Obama was certainly cooler. So for many of the people you're talking about it's simply they are incentivized to identify with the left. But now you're getting the rise of extreme transsexual movement where you're having doctors saying this is a great money maker. Because once you start doing these transsexual surgeries people have to come back for repeat visits. And so there are plenty of people who are on the left who are appalled by this development. Other people are appalled by critical race theory indoctrination of kids. And they're pulling their kids out of left wing schools and sending them somewhere else. So as circumstances change when life becomes more serious. When life becomes more serious people become more right wing. So when you have good times people become degenerate. But if the good times go then people will adapt to that changing reality by shifting to the right. So if we have some major economic downturn if we get into some very nasty war if life becomes much tougher people will shift to the right. Then you had the governor in Virginia he ran a very smart campaign and he won Virginia. Republican governor people didn't think that Republicans could win Virginia anymore. Jair Bolsonaro won the election in Brazil. He was written off in this latest election and he did surprisingly well. Republicans won more house seats in 2020 even though the polls showed that they were going to get absolutely swamped. The Tories have had power in Britain for 12 years. The Conservative Party in Australia was in power for approximately the same amount of time. So all sorts of people who wrote books about the coming inevitable democratic majority that hasn't worked out that way because of circumstances change these adaptations will respond and what was a useful adaptation to say all these work things becomes maladaptive in a different circumstance. And now we're going to get to Streamlabs from SH Redstein. Luke has interviewed some very controversial guests. What does he think of Kevin McDonald and the culture of critique? Oh, I really enjoy Kevin McDonald. I really enjoyed the challenge of Kevin McDonald. Now, if you were to say compare the coughness critique with Kevin McDonald's work I think Nathan coughness critique is much stronger but I'm really glad for the Kevin McDonald challenge. Like I didn't really think about the points that he made and so I'm really glad for that challenge and he presents things in a way that is easy for me to engage in. It's not like, oh, let's kill all these people and no, he presents things in an academic manner. He fashions an argument, he cites sources and now coughness will argue that sometimes he misread sources or distort sources but I really enjoyed all my conversations with Kevin. I enjoyed reading Kevin's books and his articles. I enjoyed the challenge. It's like playing tennis for me. Some people like to play tennis. I like to play tennis over YouTube where someone swats an idea to me and then I swat it back. If someone wasn't smashing the ball back at me then it would be boring. So I'm glad for the Kevin McDonald challenge. I identify with his kind of lonely pursuit of what he regards as truth. I admire his courage even though I agree with many of the Nathan Coffness critiques of his work. And from Clemens Wenzel. What do you think of Candace Owens? Is she really more than an attention seeker? By the way, I'm glad you haven't been affected too hard by Hurricane Ian Joseph. Thank you very much Clemens where I live did not get much of an impact but unfortunately areas to the south of me did particularly South West Florida where the impact was and is catastrophic. It's not like it just went away after the hurricane left obviously but it's really terrible. I'm glad I didn't have any issues here but during the hurricane I was actually out of the country and the hurricane prevented my return to the country by three nights but I was in the Caribbean. So I was having a very nice time all the same. I really like the Caribbean Sea. My family has, my family, a lot of people know, but my father's side of the family is from the Caribbean. So the Caribbean Sea to me feels like home. It really does. And a big part of the reason I'm so attached to Florida that this is so similar to my ancestral homeland. Typically when I tell people that I'm of West Indian background they often say, but you don't look black at all and there is a reason for that. Not everybody from the West Indies is black and I guess I do enjoy shattering the stereotype. Anyhow though, talking about Candace Owens, I do think she is an attention seeker but I do think she's very intelligent. She actually is a West Indian background as well and she is someone who I think wants to generate controversy but at the same time she does so in a fashion that is rather intellectual. I think she is very much a product of this day and age where you have these media sensationalists who say X, Y and Z and they don't think about much more than getting publicity for themselves. But I do think she has more intelligence than a lot of people who do this. So yeah, I'd say she's more than an attention seeker. Do I think she believes in what she says? Generally, I'll put it that way. Luke, anything to say about what Clemens brought up? Yeah, I think that Candace Owens reacts to incentives just like everyone else. She can be the queen of the right by taking these right-wing positions. I think she's more than an attention seeker. She does some incredibly brave work. I think she's in the top 1% of black pundits of which I'm aware. It's not fair to judge her against a university professor. She's in the punditry game and pundits make their living and rise or fall in influence by dishing out to people what they want to hear. So given the constraints of the genre in which she works in, I think she often does extraordinarily good work. Now, I think she's absolutely nuts on some things but there's no essential Candace Owens just like there's no essential Joseph Cardo and there's no essential Luke Ford in some things, I am the slimiest, most dishonest, disagreeable, disgusting person you'll ever meet. In other things, I'm honest and forthright and courageous. In other things, I'm absolutely cowardly. Nobody is honest in all things. Nobody is strong in all things. Nobody is courageous in all things. It's all situational. So it's not like there's an essential self. It's not like, oh, if you know someone's black, then you know who they are or if you know someone's Jewish, then you know who they are or if you know that someone is like a true seeker, then you know who they are. The left is right in criticizing like racial determinism that if someone is of this race, therefore they must be X, Y, Z. But the same thing is true for all sorts of other traits. So just because someone, just because someone sucked a cock one day in prison doesn't mean he's a cock sucker. Just because someone is like an attention-getter in one aspect of their life, in interpersonal relations, they may not be that way. Someone may be the life of the party in one instance and be incredibly quiet and introspective in another instance. People who are faithful to their spouses frequently cheat in business. Preachers who give a great sermon are often stealing money. Rabbis who are great community leaders on the side might be diddling some kid. Like people are incredibly complicated. There's not like some true essence of anyone because who we are is reflected in the people that we interact with and the situations that we find ourselves. Of course there is a genetic basis to who we are in genetics and form. I think it's safe to say our personality generally, but there are environmental factors which also make us who we are. So I'd say who we are as individuals is a mixture of nature and nurture. And what some people would say is change within a person is not so much as that person fundamentally changing who he or she is, which I think would be impossible. But it's rather that new situations develop and people react to them in different ways. It's a process of adaptation. Well, I mean, let's say attention seeker. So all the people you might use the phrase attention seeker on, there'd be all sorts of situations where they would not seek attention. Or let's say you say, oh, this person is outgoing. They're gonna be, they study this and they find that people who are quote unquote outgoing, that's only true like 60% of the time. 40% of the time they're introverts. So someone you think is honest. These traits are only domain specific. So let's say you have an accountant who's honest in how he does his job. That tells you nothing about how he conducts himself outside of his job. Someone who you think is incredibly courageous and forthright on a YouTube live stream, it may be cucking to his wife, may be cheating on his taxes, may be diddling his neighbor, may be a big scaredy cat when it comes to lightning. So there are no traits that are universal. And from Clemens again, do you have any predictions on the upcoming elections in Israel? Netanyahu and his right wing allies seem to be able to possibly regain a majority. That's the impression I get. I would say that it seems more likely than not at this point that that's obviously Israeli politics are very complicated and they have a unique system that's almost impossible to explain, but it's a unique electoral system I mean, but I do think that it's very possible, probably more likely than not that Netanyahu and Likud will regain their majority. Luke, I think say about what Clemens brought up. Yeah, the Israeli left is very different from the American left. The Israeli left by and large is nationalist, is pro-Zionist, is very much rooted in reality. Israel is a very serious country. It has to be to survive. That the left in Israel, generally speaking, is a very serious group of people. And though I don't believe that the left will come to power in Israel, if they did, the nation wouldn't fall apart. It wouldn't have some kind of George, summer of George crime spree. So, Israeli is very serious people. Whether or not it's BB Netanyahu is the prime minister, the right wing has been ruling in Israel for over 20 years and there's absolutely no reason to believe that the right won't continue to rule. And whether it's BB Netanyahu or someone else, you can be pretty assured of a nationalist right wing government in Israel for as far as I can see. From Clemens, once again, what do both of you think of the newest claims published in the New York Times that Ukraine was behind the murder of Daria Dugina? That's obviously Alexander Dugin's daughter. I'm not surprised at all. I always thought from the beginning that the Ukraine was responsible for her death, that the Ukrainian government, despite what a lot of people in the West think, is not Sebastian of quote, unquote, Western liberal democracy. It is something that's run by a very ruthless and corrupt oligarchy, although now I guess it's run by the EU and the US and the UK. But the fact of the matter is that the Ukrainian government the way it operates, I would not at all at all be shocked if it killed outside of the law, its own opponents, it's something like a car bombing. So I'm not surprised to hear about this revelation in the New York Times. I thought from the beginning that Kiev was responsible for the death of Daria Dugina. I think it's probably safe to say that they were intending to kill her father and she just was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Luke, anything to say about what Clemens brought up? Yeah, absolutely shocked. Cause I just thought Ukrainians were just like the sweetest, nicest kind of people ever. You imagined that they would conduct an assassination on Russian soil. You could knock me over with a yamoka. I think what's interesting, Steve's sailor made this point that the deep state released this information because what they're really talking about is the Nord Stream pipeline. So yeah, I mean, I'm sure it makes sense that Ukraine assassinated Daria Dugina, but what's primarily on their mind is the Ukrainian interference with the Nord Stream pipeline. And even though the West is by and large the United behind Ukraine, they don't want them leading into World War three. So there's plenty of concern among powerful people in the United States and Europe that Ukraine stays in line. And from Clemens, once more, have you heard of the newest lark called Maga Communism? Yes, I have. It's sort of like a nationalistic form of Bolshevism as so far as I could tell. There is a voice for it online. I have more respect for these people than I have for the woke left, infinitely more respect. It kind of reminds me of East Germany a lot because in East Germany, you had a fundamentally conservative on social issues, communist government. And the Maga Communist remind me that the thing of it is that you can't really do East German socially conservative communism in the US of today because East German socially conservative communism was meant to conserve crushing identity. And today, as I said, America has no common culture, no common identity, no common language from my point of view. So it's really, but I have heard of this Maga Communism and it is a lark for some people, but I think some people actually do take it seriously, but I don't think it has a great future of any kind. Luke, anything to say about what Clemens brought up? Yeah, nationalism is not inherently right wing or left wing. You could have a nationalist communist state or a nationalist free market state or everything in between, just like there's no inherent left or right wing tendency to Christianity or to Judaism or to nationalism. And from, let's see here, Wojak Woz, how's it going Wojak? Gentlemen, why do Jews and Muslims have a spine but Christians have this spineless niceness to them? What makes Christianity so weak compared to the other two? I think praying for Jesus, rapture and Trump is just a coping cowardly your thoughts. I 100% agree that praying for Jesus, rapture and Trump is a coping cowardly. That's not surprising though, because as I was saying before, when one gets to the point of talking about God and politics amongst country, it's an act of despair. And in America, Christianity tends to be the doctrine of choice as a means of alleviating one's despair, but as I also said, I don't think that's a good idea given what's in Christianity, what it espouses. I think that Christianity, now obviously a lot of Jews in the US are on the left, but there are a lot also who are not. And Judaism inherently is a much stronger religion than Christianity is, as is Islam. Although I think Islam is strong in some very, very, very counterproductive ways. I'm not a fan of Islamic strength. I much prefer the Judaic strength, which is basically blood and soil, history, heritage and culture, nationalism. Christian strength is different. It's more universalistic. It's more imperialistic, dare I say, and it's much more self-contradictory than anything in Judaism or Islam. But I think that the question fundamentally of why Judaism and Islam have this spine that Christianity lacks is not one easily answered. If I had to guess, I would say it's because that Christianity was formed as a means of controlling people in ancient Israel without them actually having any societal change as a result of their actions. It was meant to get people focused on the next life as opposed to this life. And I think that's what really causes the spinelessness more than anything else. Luke, anything to say about Wojak's very good question? Yeah, I don't think spine or spinelessness is inherent to Christianity or to Judaism or Islam. They all manifest very differently in different circumstances. So in certain situations, a lot of Christianity will be spineless, but in other situations will be quite muscular that 70% plus of evangelical Christians supported Donald Trump, who's the most anti-Christian person you can imagine in his lifestyle, shows that a large number of Christians are incredibly pragmatic and they want power. And if that means supporting someone like Donald Trump, they throw in and do it. So there are very strong parts of Christianity still kicking around. And for example, the Supreme Court invalidated Roe v. Wade. So I mean, that is muscular Christianity. Whether you like it or not, you will now have all these states where they are influenced by Christianity ruling abortion illegal. I don't think there's anything like that in the Western world. That's muscular Christianity saying, you may not do this. So if you think that Christians lack spine, well, keep watching what the US Supreme Court does. There's no inherent reason that the US Supreme Court will not invalidate gay marriage. There's no inherent reason that the US Supreme Court won't invalidate the restrictions against having side of me laws. What if the US Supreme Court ruled birth control illegal? Watch what this US Supreme Court does. It's already done all sorts of things that five years ago all the smart people said, absolutely not possible, this will never happen. So you may see a lot more muscular Christianity coming down from the US Supreme Court. I don't know, but it comes to abortion, I don't think. I mean, obviously people do in the US tend to base their opposition on their Christian belief. But I have read the New Testament, something I often say. And there is nothing in there which I could tell the prohibits abortion at all. I think that's more of something that was a secular disgust for abortion that got looped into the American right when people discovered that they could use it to gin up a large base of people who thought that abortion was simply going too far. It actually comes out of in the US politics in terms of political activism. The anti-abortion movement, so-called pro-life, comes out of the left-leaning Catholic social justice movement of the late 60s, early 70s. And then the religious right discovered this abortion issue they could use as a wedge to drive people to the polls. And they started really getting people hepped up about it by the late 70s and then obviously it spiraled since then. I don't think that the Supreme Court will overturn Griswold or Lawrence or anything like that. That's my inclination. But obviously, I'm not giving any advice here or anything. It's just I don't see it going that way. I could be wrong, but one never does know. From a cleansing- Hang on, hang on. I just want to jump in on that. Christianity is not primarily a religious text. It is a culture. From a secular perspective, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, these are cultures and cultures have texts, but that doesn't mean that the texts are determinative. It's not like there's one text that then defines Christianity. Christianity expresses itself differently depending on the people and the circumstance. So in America, the last 50 years for I think primarily completely secular reasons, Christians have made abortion the number one issue for one thing because it's socially unacceptable to say we hate black people. So they couldn't rally around on the notion we need to preserve tax breaks for racially discriminating private schools. That's not something that's gonna bring people together, but you can bring people together. We want to save life. We want to protect the unborn. We've got this mass murder scourge. Abortion is not primarily about abortion. Abortion is a way of standing up against a degenerate outside world. It's a way of bringing people on the right together. It's a way of expressing your disgust at certain groups and their promiscuity. It's a way of organization. And so organization does not depend upon telling the truth. For example, this was a topic I wanted to discuss, but after January 6th, it looked as though Republicans overwhelmingly were going to reject Donald Trump, Republican politicians. Instead, virtually all Republicans have fallen in behind Trump's perspective that the 2020 election was stolen. Now, is it on the basis of evidence and truth? No, they got a sophisticated reinterpretation of Trump's claims, which made the point that voting regulations were changed and not by legislatures prior to the 2020 election. So they found a sophisticated, tenable way of falling in behind Trump's line, which unites people on the right. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the empirical truth of what they're saying, just like the power of Christianity or Judaism or some yoga cult does not depend upon the empirical truth of what they state that their tenants are. So saying that you're opposed to abortion is a much nicer way of saying, I hate black people. I don't think it's quite that. And the thing with it is this, I have been called a racist, not so much by people in the woke left, but by hardcore quote unquote pro-lifers. These people by and large are fanatically anti-racist and they make arguments, they'd expect to hear from the woke left, but they're just thrown into this anti-abortion perspective with some obviously changes from the typical left-wing pro-choice point of view to a supposedly socially right-wing, supposedly pro-life point of view. And the people on the quote unquote right today for anti-abortion are all about black rights and the white man oppressing the black man through abortion, black genocide through abortion, which is promoted by Margaret Sanger who actually disliked abortion and advocated against it, go figure. But today's anti-abortion folks definitely are not motivated, generally speaking, by some animus toward blacks. They are, if anything, Afro-and-marrow phylic. Let me challenge you on that. Do you think that most people who wanna make abortion illegal vote Republican? Of course not. I mean, of course they do. Of course they do. Okay, so they are dominantly on the right. Generally speaking, John Derbyshire made this elementary point. There are tens of millions of Americans who don't much care for black people and these people overwhelmingly vote Republican. But the people who are very committed to the anti-abortion cause, the activists who can't stop talking about it, they, number one, they support abortions ouster because they say, and they really believe this, that abortion is anti-black and that they are fighting as part of a new quote-unquote civil rights movement. If you want to have a population that's more traditional, I'll put it that way in the US, abortion is a great way of getting it, considering who gets the abortions, the demographics of who gets the abortions. I talk about the demographics who gets abortions quite a lot and there are many different ways of putting it. But speaking specifically about ancestry, if you want things to go back to the way they used to be, abortion is a way of having that done because of who gets the abortions. There would be a certain group that would be much more numerous today if not for abortion. And for people who are anti-abortion, to claim that people are anti-abortion to actually dislike blacks and vote Republican and oppose abortion rights out of some way of not being able to voice their dislike for American blacks, doesn't make any sense because what they're advocating for regarding abortion is something that would make the black population grow exponentially, but just to say banning abortion nationwide. Right, but people's adaptations don't have to make rational sense. People have these inchoate reactions to the world around them and that's what drives their politics. I mean, I think you'd agree with me that tens of millions of Americans don't particularly care for black people and that most of these people who vote of that group do vote Republican. Certainly, they do, I don't disagree with that at all. I just think that the people who are very passionately anti-abortion, they are, these people would, I'm telling you the truth, because I have had the terrible misfortune to speak with them at length and they would rather their girl bring home their young girl, their adult daughter, bring home a black guy who conforms to very unfortunate stereotypes, but it's pro-life rather than a white fellow who's very upstanding and going places, but it's pro-choice. These people believe this shit, they do. And it's quite, it's bizarre, it's actually anti-white in its own way. But it's not bizarre because they're simply responding to incentives. You're talking about activists who are in media spotlight or public spotlight, so they have to fight- They're people who are activists, they don't have to be- They're in a social circle where to be racist is completely unacceptable. If you're a professional, if you're college educated, it's completely unacceptable to be outwardly racist. So they're going to have to go over and above and beyond perceptions of Republicans and pro-life people as being racist. So they will go to ridiculous lengths to try to show their non-racist credentials. Like we're all responding to incentives. They're responding to incentives, I'm responding to incentives. The reason that these people are saying what seem to be absolutely ridiculous things are perfectly rational adaptations to the set of incentives that they operate under. And in a different circumstance, they would react differently. And from Clemens Wenzel to Luke. Do you think of Richard Spencer as an edgy liberal, a contrarian or as something different? I think of him as a contrarian, as something of a shock jock, someone who lives to make an edgy take. And I think he's more interesting than 98% of commentators of the alt-right. So yeah, I listened to Richard reasonably regularly, not as a source of truth or wisdom, but just like, oh wow, that's an interesting perspective, one that I never would have thought of. So I find a lot of like entertainment value listening to Richard. I don't see him as a source of wisdom and truth. Do you think he takes himself seriously? I mean, do you think he really believes what he says at this point? Yes, I think he takes himself very seriously. Is that supposed to be a joke or is that your honest opinion? No, absolutely, absolutely. He takes himself tremendous, he's got a tremendous sense of gravitas. He's got, he comes from a theatrical background. He wanted to be a theater director. And so he has more musicality in his voice. He has more of a sense of gravitas in his presentation. You kind of get the sense that he's singing his words on stage in a musical. There's that level of theatricality in his presentation. And yeah, I think he sees himself as a Nietzschean great man in history. I think he does, although I think that what he's saying now, it's so totally contradictory to what he used to say that it seems to me, he's trying to get back into polite society, from which he sprang. He comes from a very affluent, well-respected background, but his life has been destroyed by his activism. And I think now he really, really wants to go back to the way things were. Wants to put the toothpaste back in the tube and he understands that in order to get back to where he used to be before he became well-known politically, he has to conform to what polite society has become, which is wokeness. And if you read, I know you do read what he says and listen to what he says, he basically comes off as an MSNBC pundit at this point. And what he says, I think is so, I can't see how we went from what he used to say to this and actually means it. I think that what he's doing, it's just one man's opinion, but I think that what he's doing is trying to, I try to put this kindly, he is trying to become something that he thinks other people will accept in the circles that he wants to travel in, he's trying to shed his old skin and grow into this thing. And I don't think that him believing in what he says has a lot to do with any of that. So I think we all did that. I'm not gonna say anything on this stream that's gonna get me in trouble with my Orthodox Jewish community. We're all reacting to incentives and any person with any degree of health wants to become socially acceptable. Like porn stars who leave porn, why they become socially acceptable. And so I think that's perfectly true and legitimate that you want to emerge above ground and you don't wanna get punched in the face every time you walk down the street. Also, I think he is disgusted by much of the distant right. This is a trajectory that I saw from say 2014 on that a lot of people become red-pilled and then they start thinking, what else are people lying to us about? And they start embracing flat earth. They start embracing mine camp. They go in all sorts of crazy destructive direction so much so that it just empirically seems like most people who've become red-pilled that that has damaged their life more than it has benefited their life. And so Richard, I think, was right kind of in the middle of that and he saw this same thing. And so I think he's reacting against that. And yeah, I still consistently find him interesting. He's not a solid person. Like he's not a poor God-free, so I want a great substance, but he is tremendously entertaining if you like this type of musical theater. That is a very, very charitable way of looking at him. From S.H. Redstein, has Luke read The Perils of Diversity by Byron Roth? I know Lucas had Byron on his show and I have read his interview. How do Jews reconcile what Byron pointed out, the double standards on ethnocentrism and immigration to the West and Israel? Right, so Jews are all over the place, just like non-Jews and Asians and Christians. So Jews who support building a wall in Israel, support building a wall in America. So Jews who want to kick out illegal immigrants out of Israel, by and large support kicking illegal immigrants out of the United States. So Jews who are anti-Zionist are the Jews who are most likely to be on the left. So anti-Zionist Jews are at least 80% are on the left. So also in America, more than 90% of Jews in America are Ashkenazi and a majority of them come from Eastern Europe. So they come from backgrounds where for hundreds of years, they had a hateful relationship, by and large, with non-Jews who hated them back. On the other hand, there's a minority of American Jews who come from Western Europe where Jews for centuries had, by and large, admiration for the non-Jews around them. So it's all about what type of Jew and in what circumstance. So Sephardic Jews, for example, don't tend to be on the left. They don't have a knee-jerk anti-Christian attitude. Jews from Western Europe tend to have very different politics and reactions to Christianity and to non-Jews compared to Jews from Eastern Europe. So Jews are not a monolith. There are a whole varieties of Jews and they express themselves differently under different circumstances. And yes, I read Byron Roth. He's been on Kano Ga, Alfred. I hope to speak with him later, it was a conversation. I really, as going to say, I think that there is, I almost try to figure out how to say these things without coming off in a way that that's unsettling. There is on the American right an expectation that Hispanics will save, you know, the Republicans. There's no question that the Hispanics, although I don't even like calling them the Hispanics because they're a very heterogeneous group. Hispanic is just a label that Uncle Sam made up by people from who that's held by the Spanish Empire. But as much as I hate using the term, I'll use it here for conversational purposes. It's a frame of reference that most people would get well enough. The Hispanic community is certainly trending more Republican than many people, myself included, I think definitely is a skillet. But a lot of people on the American right are absolutely obsessed with getting more of the American black vote. And I say American black because the right in the US does get a surprisingly decent portion of the Caribbean black and obviously Sub-Saharan African black vote. And that can definitely be improved upon. But a lot of American conservatives bend over backwards trying to get more American black specifically, I guess the other kind of blacks just aren't good enough for them. But it's really interesting because no matter what these American conservatives do, the American black community spurns them basically at every turn. It's very interesting to see how people on the American right try to more or less prostrate themselves before American blackness. But the American black community does not reciprocate to say the absolute least. Anything to say about that, Luke? Yeah, I think there's a fundamental difference in our world views. I always try to understand what people are saying and doing from what would be their rational reasons why they act this way. And you seem to often point out how highly irrational various groups are. So when people on the right are appealing for the black vote, it's not about appealing for the black vote. It's about making it socially acceptable for non-blacks to vote for the right. So just like... That's a good way of putting it. That's a good way of looking at it. Yeah, so just like being anti-abortion is not primarily about abortion because there's virtually nothing in Christianity that would make anti-abortion a crusade. It's a way of organizing people with a certain worldview, a bridge with another worldview so that you can get certain things done in society. So all those people on the right who are appealing for the black vote, they're not doing it to get the black vote. They're just making voting Republican more... Trying to make voting Republican more socially acceptable by saying, you know, look how anti-racist we are. What's very interesting is that in the black community, when there is a black Republican running for office, that person tends to get less of the black vote than a non-black Republican does because in the American black community, someone has thought of as... Not terms that particularly like, but an Uncle Tom or a servant of Mr. Charlie. If you are... The general perception of you, if you are an American black from people in your community is that if you are a Republican, you are trying to quote, unquote act white and therefore you are being servile to Mr. Charlie and you are an Uncle Tom. There's even a documentary made about black conservatives called Uncle Tom and it wasn't castigating them. It was just talking about the sort of abuse they face from their own community. It's really, really something to see. But so what Luke is saying does make sense if one views what's happening. These Republican appeals to blacks and running black Republicans. It's not really about winning the black vote, rather it's about a form of social acceptance and acceptability. Right, it's just like Karl Rowe being so pro-Hispanic. It's not because Karl Rowe, you know, just loves Hispanics. He sees it as a way of diluting black influence if we just bring more Hispanics into the country and he sees it as a way that, you know, Republicans can use this to their electoral advantage. He may be right or he may be wrong, but he's like, you know, pro-Latino immigration perspective is not about being pro-Latino. It's about trying to neutralize the black vote so that Republicans can win elections. Why do you think that the black community is so resiliently loyal to the Democratic Party? And I do want to stress that's not necessarily everyone who's black in America. We're talking about the American black community, not the far more politically open-minded Caribbean or Sub-Saharan African black communities in America, but the Afro-American community in particular is something that is of almost indescribable loyalty to the Democratic ticket. Any ideas to why that might be? Yeah, I think they're acting rationally because the people on the left by and large are more interested in sending social services their way. It would be irrational for most black people to vote Republican in the current setup. Now, 80 or was it 100 years ago, it was more rational for blacks to vote Republican because Republicans were more pro-black than Democrats. But right now, by and large, Americans don't want socialized medicine because they don't want to see a huge percentage of those funds going to black people. And people on the right, they generally speaking want to shrink the size of social services because they see them as going to people unlike them going to black people. So it just makes perfect rational sense to me why the overwhelming majority of blacks would be on the left because the left wants to shovel social services their way and the right, generally speaking, wants to minimize that. I think it's more than that because blacks and Afro-Americans who have no need for social services, who do very well for themselves, are resiliently loyal to the Democratic Party. And the Democrats don't just talk about giving the black community handouts, they talk about anti-white things which more or less are used as a rationalization for why things are so bad in the Afro-American sphere. I think it's much deeper than just money. Oh, yeah, it is deeper. That's just one manifestation. I remember after Donald Trump was elected, a liberal white Jewish friend of mine was driving down the street and he just felt a surge that he just didn't want to put up with the rantings of some black woman that he heard. It's like, you know, we're back in power and you don't have power anymore. You know, Barack Obama is gone. So people, every living organism wants to create an environment that is most suited for their thriving. So many, you know, black people felt a tremendous surge of power and they just felt good when Barack Obama took office, when blacks vote cohesively for the left, they are perhaps better able to, you know, maximize the shaping of a type of environment that they want to live in. And they get a narrative that's fed back to them where blacks are at the center of the universe. So for people on the left, for the Democratic Party, you can't talk about almost anything in America without first asking how it would affect black people. So whether it's crime, law enforcement, education, public transport, zoning, everything is about how will this affect black people? Black people rule the Democratic Party. Like why would you not vote for your group that rules, you know, the dominant political party in America? Blacks run the Democratic Party. Blacks dominate the Democratic Party. It was the black vote that got Joe Biden over the top to win the Democratic nomination. So people want to feel good. People want to feel powerful. And due to the homogeneity of the black vote, you know, blacks are the single most powerful element of the Democratic Party. Why would they leave that? Very, very good way of putting it. Yeah, it's interesting because obviously this is an issue, the whole black identity thing, which political identity, social identity, racial identity, obviously, so on and so forth, which American so-called society is not getting away from anytime soon. So dealing with at least this element of it is highly important. I would imagine that a lot of people on the American right are not so much interested in making America great again in terms of making America what it once was. At this point, I think perhaps their desires are much more humble and realistic. It seems to me that they probably just want things to be more functional, the economy to be better, inflation to be under control, obviously violent pride to be dealt with, among many other issues. What do you think about what most people on the American right want today, Luke? Well, the primary right wing incentive or impulse is order and minimizing contagion. And it's been that way for thousands of years and it is still operating. So that manifests itself differently in different circumstances. So right now it's a concern about crime. It's a concern about immigration. It's a concern about the trashing of white Christian America. I think pushing back against like the transsexual and degenerate sexual agendas because people just want to feel safe and clean and they just see spiraling disorder and spiraling contagion. So monkeypox, aides, spiraling numbers of sexually transmitted diseases and then immediate fixation on the most important thing about the monkeypox story is that we don't stigmatize people who participate in gay orgies like regular American is, you know, sickened by that when they hear doctors talking about doing transsexual operations as a great moneymaker for this university hospital because it requires a lot of follow-up care. Like when people hear about this stuff, they're just sickened. People want safety and they want order and they want to reduce contagion. Now this transsexual thing, which you had mentioned before and you just mentioned again, the whole trans rights thing, this has been quite recent. It came about immediately after Hajj's, which legalized gay marriage, needless to mention. And it is something which is now for the left next to blackness all consuming. Why do you suppose this trans-right thing came so quickly and why do you think it's found such an audience? Like over the last like five years, basically, the amount of people who suddenly discovered their trans has spiked drastically. I mean, obviously there had to be some problem there beforehand that something like this was just able to swoop in and make such a remarkable, remarkably awful difference. Yeah, I mean, remember past satanic panics in the United States or past witchcraft or witch panics or remember the recovered memory delusions where all these, you know, upstanding citizens and schools and churches were accused of carrying out, you know, satanic ritual child abuse and it was based on recovered memories that turned out to be nonsense. So life is hard. A lot of people are unhappy and if they can find an explanation for their unhappiness and offered a solution to their unhappiness, it's like, oh, you're really a girl inside. I mean, that's incredibly tempting or if someone can help you recover a memory about how your father used to molest you or the priest would molest you. Like recovered memories and satanic, you know, panics and transgender panics, people want an easy way out and whether it's like some Scientology offering to audit you for theatons or if you just believe in Jesus, you'll be saved forever and you'll be very happy or if you just observe the Torah then your problems will be solved. Like a third of the population I would say is pretty unhappy and a substantial portion of that third is gonna be highly amenable to offered solutions, particularly if they are regarded as core. Also, there's an inherent tendency on the left to want to continually badger people, educate people, bully people against being ignorant and bigoted and sticking to traditional folk ways. So this is the latest manifestation and there will never be an end to that. There will never be an end to the left wing compulsion to try to improve people away from ignorance and tradition and folk ways. It's something, it really is something. What's interesting is that children are being trusted to make these decisions effectively about the rest of their life. It used to be, I don't know if it still is that you couldn't even get a vasectomy basically unless you were 21 years of age or older but now you have these people beginning to take gender transitioning quote unquote of therapies before they're even 10 years old. Having giving this sort of latitude to children I think is inherently destructive and it shouldn't be a left or right issue to see that it is something which should not be had. What's your take on this? Yeah, I think there's also something quintessentially American quintessentially liberal in it in that you get to choose your own identity. So in America it's perfectly acceptable to convert to Judaism or to convert to atheism or to become gay. Like you get to choose your identity. That's like a very American thing like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So in British culture, if you watch British drama it's much more about learning your obligations. And in America it's much more about following your bliss like discovering who you really are. And so there's something like quintessentially American in this trans mania. And then there's something quintessentially liberal in that liberalism holds that we have a, that we have kind of a buffered identity. So I'm not liberal. I'm much more meat evil. So I feel like if there's something going on in the next house, let's say there is consensual incest between adults going on in the next house that bothers me. I feel like that harms me. Gay marriage, I feel like it harms me. Doing away with the ban on out homosexuals in the military. I feel harms me because I have a conception of the armed forces being a heterosexual institution. So I don't feel like I live in a buffered identity. I feel like everything that's going on around me is penetrating me and it affects me. But liberalism developed really out of the Protestant Christianity. It's much more of a buffered identity where you have autonomous strategic individuals rationally making up their minds about what is true and good and beautiful and how they wanna lead their life. As someone who's much more meat evil, I'm much more skeptical of the powers of human reason. I don't think that people are primarily buffered strategic autonomous individuals making rational choices. So it comes back to these two fundamental ways of experiencing the world. So think about back in the 16th century, if you're a Lord, you're the Lord of your matter and you could break wind, you could belch, you could say whatever you wanted at your dinner table. Then when the social political circumstances change so that you needed to be at court to maintain your status, you couldn't belch at court. You couldn't say whatever you wanted. You had to measure everything you said at court with how would it affect someone? Were you appropriately deferential? You would have to be constantly attuned to what was going on at court. So liberals have much more of a court identity. They want us to be constantly attuned to what's going on for other people. How will that make the retarded feel? How will that make the transgendered feel? How will that make homosexuals feel? How will that make black people or Jews feel? So it's a court morality. People who are not liberal have much more of a traditional way of approaching life. So it's much more of a sense that, you know, we're all kind of Lord of the matter in our own home and therefore we can say what we want. We can belch if we want to. We don't have to weigh all our utterances up against how they affect other people. A very interesting way of putting it. I had not thought of that distinction which you made between manorial and court morality but that is a very fascinating way of putting it. No question. Now, I think, you know, as we obviously are beginning to why things down here, unfortunately, it does beg the question of why the left is simply so appealing to so many people, whereas the right is not. Because if you look at, like I said, this explosion in left wing politics among young women in the last, over the last very few years, obviously there's an appeal that the left has that the right doesn't. And I don't know exactly what this appeal is but I think perhaps Luke might have some thoughts on the matter, anything to share. Yeah, the left dominates all major institutions. So if you go to university, of course, make your life a lot easier if you're on the left. If you're in any of the professions, your life will be a lot easier if you're on the left. If you're interested in media or you simply like to watch TV, your life will be a lot easier on your left. It does you have, it's painful if you're not on the left and you watch TV and movies because everything that you hold to be sacred is frequently urinated on. So conservatives understandably feel a sense of cultural oppression and Ronnie Goodman wrote the great book on this on the conservative case for cultural oppression. He's a man of the left, but he uses left wing analyses to show the legitimate reasons why conservatives feel oppressed in America. So it's not the explicit ideological appeal of the left, it's that the left dominates our institutions. It dominates how we are supposed to speak. You're going to be much more effective working in a corporation if you're on the left because you have internalized that court way of being where you're constantly measuring what you say to how it affects. You're going to do much more effectively in navigating life among America's major institutions if you take on their strategic autonomous buffered sense of self where it doesn't matter if the neighbors have a gay marriage or if the neighbor has trans children, it doesn't matter because you have this buffered strategic autonomous sense of self where we can all just rationally make our choices and you look down on ignorance and traditional superstitions and folk ways. So given that the incentives are strongly aligned with every thinking person facing many more incentives to be on the left than the right, it doesn't surprise me at all. Now there is the question of why this impacts women, at least very recently, more than men, this attraction to the left in the US. Any ideas to why that might be? Yeah, because women have always been much more sensitive to social feedback. So women are far less likely to color outside the line. So women have always done better than boys in school, but if you ask teachers and professors who their best students are, it's almost always guys because women are always very careful to color inside the lines in school. They want to meet the approval of the teacher. They don't want to fall out of fashion with other people. And so women are particularly attuned to, the left runs all our institutions. It is socially unacceptable to say anything racist, sexist, transphobic, Islamophobic. They pick up these cues and they have much more of a court morality. Women constantly moderate what they say by what could be the implications on other people. Men are much more likely to belch, to fart, and to say whatever it is that they're feeling. Men act much more like the Lord of the Manor. Women act much more like people are caught. Yeah, that's very true and very, very, very interesting because obviously it's ramifications far beyond the realm of partisan politics. What do you suppose will happen over the next several years because there's going to be a lot of guys who are looking for romantic partnership, but a lot of gals who are not interested in anyone who doesn't share their politics are going to be dismissing these guys. And then of course you have to decline in heterosexuality among females, although I don't know how legitimate that is because I'm not of the opinion that anyone could change their sexual orientation. But anyhow, what do you think will happen with a lot of these guys who are going to be able to find female accompaniment? Or do you think maybe somehow they will be able to? Because if they're not, obviously this is going to cause an extreme problem in so-called society in the United States going forward. Yeah, we have an extreme problem with loneliness for among the reasons that you just mentioned. But those women who turn up their noses at traditional guys, they're going to find it much more difficult to get married, to find a guy who will stand by them. And so they are not going to be able to reproduce. So I really like the framework of evolution. So if an adaptation is not adaptive, it's going to be outcompeted by adaptations that are adaptive. So generally speaking, the religious have more children and those people who are adopting gay identities, trans identities or turning up their noses at forming a marriage with a guy who's traditional in any way, those people are simply going to disappear from the gene pool. True, but there are a lot of guys who are going to be wanting a relationship with a woman and they're not going to be able to find one. And as history shows, when guys aren't able to find their romantic outlet, they channel their energy into some pretty destructive endeavors. But I mean, on the other hand, this is true of a large number of guys in Japan and they're not going around shooting people. So I don't think it's necessarily the end of civilization. It's a reduction in civilization. It's a problem, but there are enough women who do want to be with a man. Definitely we were having a decline in marriage, particularly since gay marriage makes marriage much less appealing to men. Men are not naturally attuned to marriage in the first place. Now that we've got gay celebrating marriage, it's probably even decreasing the interest of men in getting married also because divorce laws are so anti-male. So we've definitely got serious problems. We've got a steady decline in the marriage rate. We've got growing levels of hopelessness and bachelorhood and men who have a hard time finding a woman. So we have these big problems, but there is a community where guys can go to where they're much more likely to meet a tradwife and that's a religious community. Yeah, it depends upon the community, but certainly, although obviously even in some of these communities they don't find what they're looking for, which it's just because of, I guess, supply and demand. There's a great demand for these, at least seeingly, trad women and the supply of them is not great enough to meet the demand. So it's interesting to say the absolute least and we are really getting, we are not beginning this, we're going on for a little while, but we are really winding things down. Now I am sorry to say it has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. Luke, as we bring things to an end here tonight, what do you think will become of the Democratic Party going forward? We talked about the future of the American right and the GOP, but what do you think will become of the Democrats? What sort of situation do you think they're in? Well, it looks like they have the whip hand here, but circumstances are constantly changing. So just like what you see with the Green Party in Germany, they suddenly are reducing their, many of their environmental commitments because they're so committed to Ukraine. In California, for example, we had to fire up some gas powered power plants during a recent heat wave. So even though California has been run by Democrats, the state still works. So that which cannot continue will not continue. Eventually the transmania is going to diminish those aspects of the Democratic agenda that just cannot continue, such as defunding the police will eventually reduce. Democrats don't like crime. Like liberals don't like high rates of murder and rape. So Democrats by and large don't like homelessness. So when certain liberal policies proven to be failures, then liberals will adapt those policies. So when big government became unfashionable, Bill Clinton ran on a platform, the age of the big government is over. So I feel confident that that which cannot continue will not continue and that those adaptations of the Democratic party that are maladaptive, such as defund the police, pushing transmania, I think will eventually diminish and be overtaken by more adaptive responses. And I think that for thousands of years we will have right and left wing responses inclinations to stimuli. And in some circumstances, the right wing approach will be more useful than other circumstances, the left wing one will. This is something that I mean, you can talk about the Ukraine just a little bit, but in the West, it's not just a US thing. The media has really, and the governments have really hyped up the Ukrainian government as basically the bastion of truth, justice, and the Western quote unquote way. Why do you think there has been this idolization of Zelensky, the Kiev administration, and so on? And the full on demonization of Russia, all the while ignoring some truly egregious things done by the Ukraine, not just since the Russian invasion began, but during the years leading up to the Russian invasion. It was basically the Ukrainian government so far that they were able to give Moscow the pretense of justification for the quote unquote special operation. Well, if you know anything about anything, it's always stunning to read the news and notice the overwhelming emotional uniformity of the news on almost any topic, whether it's CNN or the LA Times or the Washington Post or the Miami Herald, there's almost always on any major story, there's very quickly in agreement on the sort of emotional tone that you wanna take with this story. So Ukraine versus Russia is plucky Ukraine fighting big bad Russia, but it's not just that story, almost all stories are the same way because people in every profession, they don't wanna fall out of step with other members of their profession. They just instinctively carry on the worldview of the more prestigious members of their profession. So yeah, it is stunning to see the uniform nature of Ukraine coverage, but if you think more critically, you'll see the uniform nature of almost all coverage. It's not just Ukraine versus Russia, this is throughout the news, there's very quickly a certain emotional tone that is taken to a story. For example, on the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Tom Wolf went out into the streets of New York and asked New Yorkers, who do you think did it? And the Puerto Ricans, maybe they blame the Anglicans and white people blame black people and all these different racial groups for blaming other racial groups for the John F. Kennedy assassination. Guess what, that story never saw the light of day because it's not the right emotional tone. So the news is constantly telling us, we should feel sad about this. We should feel hopeful about this. We should feel excited about this. We should feel scared about this. It's kind of stunning how uniform the emotional coverage is of almost every major story, not just Ukraine and Russia. It will be definitely interesting to see how the media handles the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian crisis. I think obviously Russia is going to be much wealthier for it, but we'll have to see as to what exactly happens. But yeah, I think the West just needed something after COVID to distract itself from its problems, and that thing happened to be this Ukrainian situation. Yeah, I mean, it feels good. I mean, I 100% emotionally support Ukraine. 100% emotionally, I feel good when Ukraine stands up to Russia. The rational part of me thinks that us subsidizing Ukraine is dramatically increasing the odds of a conflagration in Europe that could go nuclear and is a bad idea. But I 100% emotionally understand why people side with the underdog. I mean, I love virtually every underdog sports movie that I've ever seen. It's like the one genre where I'm never disappointed, and so too with the news, when you can portray a plucky underdog, almost everybody loves that type of story. Certainly, and although now the Ukrainians receive so much military aid from the West, that I don't know that it's... Well, it definitely is the underdog in terms of its manpower, but I think that in terms of defense technology, it is at least on par with Russia at this point. Right, like in some ways, David was not the underdog versus Goliath. David had a slingshot. Goliath didn't have a slingshot, so it all depends on the perspective you take. So I'm a Dallas Cowboy fan. I can get myself riled up. The refs are against us or they all that. Like to be a member of any group requires a sense of victimization. Like if you're an identifying Jew or an identifying Christian, you have a keen sense of how Jews Christians have been oppressed. So it's just built into the human condition to have others that you hate and to have a blinked view of your own group. Like we're all wired to be very good at spotting when other people try to manipulate us because we did not evolve to be gullible. We wouldn't be here if we were easily manipulated. On the other hand, we're all wired to be terrible at spotting the flaws in our own thinking because it's not evolutionarily adaptive to be constantly questioning yourself. It's much more adaptive to go around with a great sense of confidence in your understanding of the world. That it is. And on that very interesting note, we shall conclude tonight's show. Luke, it has been too long since you showed up, but I'm very glad to have you on tonight and I hope to have you on again in the very near future. Thank you, Joseph. I have enjoyed it. Absolutely, I've enjoyed it as well. I hope everyone watching this has enjoyed it. It has, I think, truly been a fascinating discussion that went in many different directions, each and every single one of them worked well. So everybody, please do take it easy. Stay safe, be well. If you liked this episode and want to support the show, you may do so at the link below.