 he was banned from Twitter, right? I mean, that period and some of what we saw there in terms of the beginnings of next phase manipulation of information. So I remember when I was called in for a meeting with this Orthodox rabbi and he said to me after I justified my writing on the point industry, he says, I'm sure it's all very academic but we can't have that in our community. It's, and he had this look of distaste on his face and he says it's, it's Tame, it's impure. The chat says, Luke was doing embedded journalism total hero and autistic merit, but it's all research done for sex journalism with complete academic detachment. But still, we cannot have that in our community, all right? So you often hear the phrase toxic. And so talking to someone like Nick Fuentes or Richard Spencer, that is supposedly toxic and it is toxic for certain people, all right? Certain worldview, all right? What you find holy, right? That which is the opposite of holy in your worldview is going to be considered toxic. If you take for granted that marriage is a heterosexual institution between one man and one woman, you will find promotion of same sex marriage toxic. If you believe that the US military should be a heterosexual institution, you will find promotion of, you know, allowing same sex attractive people, LGBTQ into the US military. You will find that promotion toxic. If you believe in sort of rigorous social welfare spending where only the deserving poor get, get money and help, then you will find promotion of, you know, massive social welfare distribution. You will find that toxic. If you strongly believe that sex should be only within heterosexual marriage, such as the 12 step group, sex or holics, anonymous, then you will find any kind of laughter or humor or discussion of sex outside of heterosexual monogamous marriage. You will find all that talk toxic, right? If you strongly believe in God, you'll find all discussion that denies or cast doubt on the existence of God. You will find that toxic. If you strongly believe that God gave the Torah to man and that every word of the Torah comes from God, you will find all doubt and denial of that belief toxic. So when you find things toxic, it's because they dirty your hero system and there's no way to live a life without a hero system. You may intellectually be aware of the fictional nature of your own hero system, but the way that we viscerally experience life, certain things are just right and certain things are wrong. Certain things are heroic and other things are cowardly. What's right and wrong, heroic and cowardly, will depend upon your hero system. And that which you find offensive or toxic is that which impurifies, which denies the validity of your hero system. So when a person of religious faith lives in a pluralistic community, it's harder for him to carry on with his practice of his faith because so many people around him don't share it. And the existence of all these alternative hero systems around him will tend to make him question the possible fictional nature of his own hero system. So it's a lot more difficult, for example, for young boys, teenagers, young men who are Catholic in America to want to go on to become priests as opposed to if you're living in Italy where Roman Catholicism is essentially the only religion. If Roman Catholicism is the only religion, then it's going to seem much more natural to take for granted the validity of the Roman Catholic hero system and the vocation of priest will seem much more normal, natural and healthy. But then you get a pluralistic society of the United States of America where you can choose to be Christian or gay or Muslim or convert to Orthodox Judaism, all right, in such a fluid society where you meet all sorts of really nice people who do not hold by your hero system, it will inevitably tend to erode the level of commitment to a particular hero system. And so we're seeing throughout the West an inevitable erosion of commitment to traditional religion because people on a day in, day out basis meet so many good kind people who do not share their hero system, who are not religious. You may very well meet, you know, secular people at work, atheists at work, homosexuals at work, who are finer, kinder, more decent, seem to lead more upstanding lives than many people you know in your church or synagogue and that inevitably erodes the foundations of faith. So to compensate for that, you get movements such as Christian nationalism which is really just Christians or people who have sympathy for Christian civilization wanting to try to hold on to their civilization against this unrushing tide that is non-Christian or anti-Christian. And so to even maintain some semblance of Christian civilization, you have to go to much more extreme efforts than you did where Christianity was the only alternative. I grew up a Christian, all my friends were Protestant. All right, it was the only conceivable hero system in my upbringing. But then at age 14, we got a TV and I started watching more TV and then I became exposed to more and more hero systems and so I started practically becoming an atheist and it was a lot easier for me to just follow my own urges. And so people have very strong urges and without usually a strong commitment to a hero system, we're much more likely to indulge our urges, particularly if we live in a big city and there's much more anonymity and we can get away with playing around and violating the norms that we might have been raised with. So if you live in a close-knit community where everybody knows what's going on with each other, you have much less room to indulge in, consider, or practice things outside your hero system. People keep an eye on each other. Once you're no longer embedded in a high commitment, close-knit, highly identifying in-group, you start losing your commitment. So it's taken for granted, for example, in Orthodox Judaism that people move outside of the community. Even if you visit Australia, for example, when I went to Australia for a three-week vacation in May of 2014, all sorts of people in the Orthodox Jewish community when I came back said, did you give it all up? There was kind of a sense that if you go three weeks without living in the burning, beating heart of a high intensity, high commitment in-group of Orthodox Judaism that you'll be so much more susceptible to giving it up and you see the effects of COVID, right? People got out of the habit of going to church or synagogue and a substantial number of them never returned. They never returned to religion because religion requires effort and practice that is not necessarily biologically easy. And so when you don't question your level of commitment to your religion, then it's a lot easier to keep doing it. But anything that causes you to question your commitment to your religion will inevitably diminish your commitment to your religion, you meaning a mass group, right? Certain individuals did not diminish, right? For many people, even most people who are regularly going to church or synagogue prior to COVID, right? Continuing to go to church and synagogue after COVID but a substantial number, probably at least 25%, you know, have not returned to church or synagogue at anything the level of commitment that they had because once you interrupt that commitment, once you have to start considering the nature and practice of your hero system, once any doubt creeps in, once any possibility comes into your life that maybe you don't have to do these practices and carry on these commitments anymore, right? Once you start opening up that level of freedom, right? Many people will drop out of that commitment. Did my father actively resist bringing TV into the home? It was my father's idea to bring TV into his home. So I've been thinking recently, what was my father like at my age? So I am now 57 and I've been thinking, how many more years do I have left of, you know, high intensity work? Because I remember my father started significantly slowing down into his 60s. So I'm now 57. My father at age 57, that was 1986. So in 1986, I was 20. So my father, when I was 20 and he was 57, was still highly ambitious. He was still working seemingly as hard as ever. But in 1980, when I was 14 and my father was 51, it was his idea to bring a TV into his home because he was in the middle of this giant theological controversy. And in the end of 1979, the church withdrew my father from the Seventh-day Adventist College, Pacific Union College in Angwin in the Napa Valley in California. And they brought him to Washington D.C. so that he could prepare a defense of his controversial views, denying essentially the chosen special nature of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. And he was put on trial by the church for gathering of the top church theologians and administrators at Glacier View in August of 1980. So for the eight months prior to that Glacier View conference, my father had to prepare a defense of his views. He felt under a lot of pressure. And my mother sent mother and my father, now living alone in Washington D.C., they left me behind in the Napa Valley so that I could finish eighth grade with my friends. So because I wasn't around, they felt more open to getting a TV so that my father had a way of relaxing. My father finds it very difficult to relax, found it very difficult to relax. Never had any hobbies. He wasn't particularly interested in interacting with people unless he could instruct them or unless they shared his interests, which were quite narrow, basically, evangelical Christian theology and preventative health, unless they shared his interests and they had level of knowledge and expertise in these areas that he could respect. So this is an exceedingly small number of people. So my father, generally speaking, could not relax around people. He did not enjoy their company and he had no hobbies. So he thought maybe watching old movies when they were still under the Hayes Code. So my father liked the movies that he knew from growing up, 1930s and 40s movies that he thought were wholesome. So he got a TV, something like January 1980 in the center of watching old movies as a way to relax. Then I joined them in June of 1980 and it's like, whoa, we've got a TV. And when my parents were out of the house, I'd watch as much TV as possible. And so we brought the TV back with us to Auburn, California when we moved back to Auburn in September of 1980. And so the world of TV with its sexiness and excitement and this worldly pleasure just absolutely captivated me and significantly hacked away at my willingness to commit to our religion, particularly now that we're outside of an organized Seventh-day Adventist community. My father would tell people that we belong to the Invisible Church of Jesus Christ. Well, the Invisible Church of Jesus Christ didn't have a lot of youth programs. All right, there wasn't a concrete real life community that I could belong to in the Invisible Church of Jesus Christ. And what we had as evangelical Christian community that my father's Evangelical Christian Foundation Good News Unlimited developed in Auburn was just a very pale imitation of the quality and intensity of the high commitment, high in-group identifying life that I had at Seventh-day Adventist College campuses at Pacific Union College and Avondale College that I was familiar with. So my religious circle was diminished. The intensity and vibrancy of the community I was in was much diminished and instead I was increasingly seduced by the attractiveness of the outside secular world.