An Honest Conversation with a Christian Nationalist - Andrew Wilson
The outcomes of Christian ethics, even on secular society, are the best outcomes. That's the case I would make for why I think Christians should be in charge of basically everything.
What you're talking about is dominance by one group over everybody else. Because we've got a better view, right?
Yeah.
You would outlaw homosexuality, I would guess.
Sure. Well, no, I would outlaw homosexual marriage.
But isn't homosexuality wrong also?
Sure, it's immoral.
So why wouldn't you outlaw it? You don't need to necessarily always place a law in against something which is immoral. I don't even understand what the purpose is of the vote for women. What is it? What is the point here?
Because it affects them as much as it affects us.
I've never seen a great reason why women should be able to vote because they can vote to send men to war that they themselves do not have to go fight. Why do women get exempt from that? If you want me to be blunt... Why do you hate leftists? There are psychopaths who are going to destroy everything that I care about through suicidal empathy. Well Andrew Wilson
welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Great to have you on. Tell us about you, your background, how you've come to be where you are, and also some of the things that you've become well-known for talking about and debating.
Well, I'm known as maybe the premier bloodsport debater on the right-wing side. I debate almost every issue imaginable from a Christian foundational view, including politics. So the way I got in the space was by pure accident. It was during COVID-19. They had shut all the businesses down. I was a robotics mechanic and I worked in meat plants
and they shut those down in Michigan because the governor at the time, her name is Gretchen, she's still the governor, Gretchen Whitmer, that was part of like her whole device for Michigan was shutting everything down. So I was basically furloughed and when that was happening I was extremely pissed off. And so what I did was I went on Facebook and other places like this and started arguing
with stupid progressives, much like the Coomer gremlin who you recently debated, people like that. And some of them actually had little video shows. And so I'd started to ask to come up and talk to them. Hey, why don't you have me up on your little show here? And then I'd go on the show and obliterate them.
And after a while, that picked up a little bit of steam. People started putting it on YouTube and then the content became popularized. And here I am. Never thought in a million years I'd be an entertainer and I never thought in a million years that I would be engaged in as many high-profile debates as I have been.
And why do you enjoy doing this? Because a lot of people think it's a weird thing to do. Because I hate leftists.
So, I mean, if you want me to be blunt. Why do you hate leftists? Because they're psychopaths who are going to destroy everything that I care about through suicidal empathy. Do you mean progressives or do you mean leftists? Like the entire left? I don't, look, I consider the delineation of threshold minute because Because when you really get into the granularity, it's all about ethics and they don't have any and so because there's no ethical foundation All you're talking about is degrees of psychopathy
What about people who just want like a little bit more wealth redistribution, but generally they love America I mean those people that they are decreasing in percentage on the left, but they do exist, right?
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β Ruben, Netherlands
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Get started freeWhy do they want it?
Because they think they have a different vision to the right of human nature, and they think that a lot of things that happen to people in life are partly about luck, and structures, and stuff like that. So they think that, you know, they think the right massively overestimates the consequences of agency. So the idea that sometimes, you know, the caricature of the right would be, well, everyone gets what they deserve because it's a matter of your hard work and talent and application
and whatever. And the left, you know, the sensible left, I think, left I think says well sure but luck is a big part of it thereby the grace of God go we therefore if someone is struggling you know not everyone is struggling because they didn't put in effort sometimes shit happens people get sick accidents happen whatever so we should look after people a little bit more than the people who want the lowest taxes possible that that would be the
steel man argument, I think.
Okay, so that makes sense. So the idea here is social safety nets, right? Right. Okay, so how come those aren't voluntary?
Probably because you can't achieve the level of redistribution you want without applying some level of force.
Interesting, because the entire idea of progressive liberalism is supposed to be voluntarism and that the left-wing government does not force you or compel you to do anything. No, but that's bullshit. But that's the promise.
No, the point of government is to make people do shit they don't want to do.
I completely agree, but the promise of the leftists, the promise of the progressive, the reason they demand that we have a secular government and we can't move towards Christian ethics or Christian nationalism is because secularists are going to do what's fair. And what's fair is you can do whatever you want, as long as you're not hurting anybody else we're not going to force you to do anything. The evil Christian nationalists will.
But here you just laid out a case for how it is that they're compelling me against my will to do various things.
Well, right. I mean, any government is about the, I mean, the thing that really defines a state is the legalized use of force. It's all about the use of force.
Totally agree. Right? That's what the state is.
Yeah, of course. But see, I think if we wanna have a discussion about progressives. And I was saying, isn't there quite a lot of reasonable people on the center left who would agree with us that the state is about shaping human behavior and making people do stuff, but what they want is well-motivated and actually based on some rationale that
we might agree or disagree, but it's kind of logical, which is about a higher level of, like, I don't believe in zero taxes and no government redistribution at all personally, right? So therefore it's just a matter of degrees. And it's about, is it 5% taxes or 20% taxes? But once you start getting into the high 80s, that's where I'm at.
You know what I mean? Like there's, do you see what I'm getting at? So that's where I think sometimes in these arguments the existence of the reasonable center right and the reasonable center left gets lost because we're constantly arguing with
the extremes of the other side. Well... Is that fair? Yeah I guess but maybe we can dive into semantics a bit. Sure if you want. Okay, when you say right or left, you agree with me that's dialectical?
What do you mean by dialectical?
Like, um...
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Get started freeThey're opposites of each other, you mean.
Well, not just that, but when we view politics in the paradigm in the United States, we view it through a dialectic that is dual. It's left, it's right. So, even you said center left, that plays within a dialectic, right? Yes, there's a center, but it's still left or right.
Well, there is a... See, this is... I don't mean to be pedantic either, but this is where it gets more difficult because someone could actually be in the center, meaning they have some center right opinions and some center left opinions that don't neatly align with either party. And I think the existence of those people is probably quite underestimated, even in a country as polarized as this one, just from talking to people.
Maybe. Yeah. But dialectic, I guess I think I agree.
Yeah. So there's a dialectic. So when we say left, what's the referent? And when we say right, what's the referent? Like what are we referencing here? Well, the position relative to the center. Sure, maybe. But I mean, what is left and what is right politically?
Is it social issues? Is it taxes? Is it a mixture of both?
Mixture of both.
Mixture of both.
OK.
So I think that we can break it down further into pillars. So I think that these are philosophical positions and people just don't realize it. When you're arguing with a guy like Destiny, the reason he's very frustrating for you to debate with, the reason that he wanted to bog things down
into the most ridiculous thing in the world, though it's unprecedented, everything's unprecedented. That's unprecedented, right? The whole idea there, and you pointed this out rightly, is, well, I guess words don't mean anything, right? We just use unprecedented, I guess, when we mean new.
When we get down to the core, the pillar that holds up the belief of destiny, what is it? What is the pillars that hold up the level? What is the philosophical underpinnings?
I don't know in his case. I think in his case actually the philosophical underpinning is people who don't agree with him are bad people and therefore they need to be destroyed by any means necessary. I think that's it. So it's about power really.
Well, I think I think the idea the philosophical underpinnings operate from the left-right dialectic. The left-wing pillar is based around anti-realism, anti-moralism. So that's why you end up with post-modernism and many of these other philosophies which come from left-wing liberalism. Those aren't coming from right-wingers, those are coming from left-wingers. Right-wingers are...the reason that they're so much more associated with things like traditionalism or things like religion, this kind of thing, is because they view society as being duty-bound, and
progressives view everything through the prism of rights. So I have a right to do this, I have a right to do this, I have a right to do that, and the right is saying you have a duty to do this, you have a duty to do that, you have a duty. So this is where that dialectic really clashes. From destiny's standpoint, there's no such thing as a moral fact, none. They don't exist.
Everything is dependent upon stance. So if that's the case, you can't actually do anything immoral, which is why he does so many things which are immoral, right, because from his perspective it's just dependent on stance. The right is saying there's universality with morality. It's not just stance dependent, it's stance
independent. The reason that they get so upset with the left is because they perceive them as doing things which are horrendously immoral. But from the left stance, they're like, well, but it's all stance dependent, so I can't be doing anything immoral. And that's why the underpinnings for the kind of like philosophical pillars, they don't align and why we're constantly clashing.
The right considers these people complete immoral degenerates, and from their view, they are. The left, on the other hand, sees that as being totalitarian and evil, and that they're there to control, destroy, oppress. Because from their view, what could they be doing immoral if everything which is moral
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β Peter, Los Angeles, United States
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Get started freeis dependent on their own stance?
Right.
Which I think is an accurate description of what happens when the right looks at the extremes of the left and the left looks at the extremes of the right. But what I'm trying to get in with you, first of all, because it's interesting to me, because our country, hard as it is to believe, if you look at social media, is not nearly as divided as the US, right? Like the binariness of the US is kind of weird for us a little bit, coming from the UK.
So I guess to me it's always weird when people... Well, I was going to say acknowledge, but I don't want to impose my view because, you know, Americans know their country better than I do. It's weird to me how little people give faith to the other side. And I see this on the left, and I see this on the right. Whereas my model for the world is there's like really good people within the 80% middle, and then there's pretty out there people in the extremes and what we see on the internet is those people arguing and pretending they represent the entire movement.
And then the other side is incentivized to argue as if they represent the entire movement as well.
Does that make sense? Of course. Sure. I understand what you're saying and that sells, right? It sells to be on that extremist end. That's what makes it fun. It makes it fun to watch people who come in and they say ridiculous over-the-top things
and then everyone's arguing, right? That's part of human nature. They want the fun. However, I do think that people are more divided than you think. I think that there's...the way that we operate in public, in survival mode, we'll be pretty nice to each other.
Good morning. How are you? No one's gonna like run you off the road because you're a Democrat. They might run you off the road if you're a Trump supporter and you have that stick. But for the most part, we'll treat each other fairly well. But when you start to get to the underpinnings of what people actually believe, there's a
lot more hatred here than you think on both sides. And it's even from the center. It becomes apparent once you start to get to the underpinnings of the pillars which hold up people's beliefs.
Do you think that's kind of why there used to be a rule that you don't talk about religion and politics at the table? Because when you start digging, like if you really pursue people's beliefs to the very ends of the earth, You do find out, like, people do fundamentally disagree because they have a different philosophical view. But if we don't constantly talk about this stuff, it's actually easier to get on with each other.
It's true.
Yeah.
It's true.
Well, that used to be a thing in the workplace. And it used to be a thing, like you said, around the dinner table with family. You call your family in and it's like, hey, we're all going to have dinner. We're not talking politics. We're not talking about sex. We're not talking, right? These are the divisive issues, right? Love, sex, politics. And of course, that's what everybody's talking about all the time now. But with the internet, this was bound to happen. Now you can have ideologies which are exported and imported, and they can be exported and imported quickly.
And so because of that, you can have a whole swath of a population begin to move towards an ideology which they never would have before because there was no way to basically deliver it. But now there is. And so now it's a race for power. It's made the best ideology win. And from my view, if it's not Christians who win it, then it's going to be somebody else who wins it and Christians are going to be ruled by whoever that is or whatever ideology that is. But if you think that I'm
wrong, explain Hassan Piker, explain Vosch, explain the rise of communism in the United States and the brand new communist lens in which many leftist progressives are now looking. These are the most popular streamers. Well, I mean that ideology was all but dead, but now it's re-emergent through the technology of the internet and introduced to a whole new generation as being edgy and, you know,
counter-cultural just like it was the first
Do you not think that the reason that we've seen this resurgence of communism is someone who comes from a country who sadly embraced it?
Britain. Yeah exactly.
Yeah, no we are embracing it.
I certainly have my own joke but it was a good one.
We are embracing it, which is Venezuela. Do you not just simply think that people grasp for anything when things are getting particularly difficult?
You mean for any type of ideology? Yeah. Sure, but what's difficult here? Well, the
gap between rich and poor is ever-widening. But you have a problem
there, right? That's true, but people are still getting richer than they've ever been. It's like, when I think of a gap between rich people and poor people, if we go back 500 years or 1,000 years, the difference was you lived in a dung heap and this guy lived in a castle. Now the difference is this guy lives in a castle
and you live in a three bedroom apartment. It's like, it is true that the guy living in the castle is richer than the guy in the castle has ever been. But the reason you're not a dung keep is because the poor are also richer than they've ever been. And so it's scalable. It's a matter of scalability. But show me in the fattest country in the world,
where's all the starving people? Where are they? But it's all understood within context, isn't it, Andrew? It's comparisons. So people will go online, they will look at their life, they will see that they don't have a lot of money, somebody else is doing very well. Things like, for instance, a housing crisis, particularly in cities like New York, LA,
etc. Yeah, so this is a strict materialist view. The thing is, is like, I don't know when this shift happened to strict materialism, but this seems to be part of a new conversation which people want to have. And again, that's part of what communism is. The lens of communism is strictly materialist. There is no spiritualism.
Communists kill anybody who's religious because that affects a materialist view. It's an oppressor-oppressed class. So if you're looking through everything from a materialist view, you can always find an oppressor class. There'll always be people who have more
than other people do. It's one of the big faults with communism. You can never reach this stateless utopia. But as far as that goes, where, like when I think historically, the endless suffering that happened to people inside of nation states, inside of city states, inside of places like that, in comparison to what you see in modern Western democracies, it's like,
if you, if these people had to deal with that in any capacity, they would, I mean, you'd just fall over dead. It was miserable. It was literally misery. Where is all of that? I mean, the West conquered that.
Industrialization conquered that. The starvation's gone. Where is it? You know, I've heard liberals, they've said to me, there's people starving right now. Where? In my nation, where in my nation? Where? I'll go feed them right now. Guarantee you I'll have a meal arranged by this afternoon if you could show me a person's actually
starving in the United States. They can't because they're not. We've conquered it. These are conquered issues. Like, so what are you bitching? Are you just bitching that this guy makes way more money than this guy? It's like, what's the complaint? You know, that's achievable. That sort of dream is achievable now to people. That never used to be possible.
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I think it also plays into the fact that this generation, particularly for example in the UK, is going to be the first generation to not do as well as their parents. And the things that they were promised, you go to college, you get a good job, you're going to be able to have a house, a family. For a lot of these people, they come out and they've graduated college, they're in enormous
amounts of debt, and they're looking and they're seeing, well, the life that my parents had, I am not going to have. And I think there's a great deal of anger, resentment and frustration because of that and I think people reach for an ideology such as communism in the desperate hope that it's going to somehow make everything better. I don't agree with it but I think that's the argument.
Well I think that, I think it's more complex than that.
Maybe we're having this conversation the wrong way around. Why do you think there's been a rise of radical leftism and particularly the appeal of communism now, as you do see with some young audience fans?
Because of the moral loading of the term Nazi, fascist, and other things like this. It's pure panic-mongering. The idea is that you need to move towards this shielding ideology because the Nazis are coming, the stormtroopers are coming.
Will Barron So you mean like since 2016 basically, I mean they did it before as well, but the far left has been calling the right Nazis and you think people are going for communism because it's the ideology that can protect you against
that? Communism, socialism, these are the... So it's a winner takes all. Like I said, it's a race to power for which ideology gets power. Is it going to be the Christian nationalists? Is it going to be the socialists? Is it going to be guys in New York like Mamdi or Mamadi?
What is his name?
Mamdani.
Mamdani.
Yeah. Communist Mamdani. Yeah. See, it's communist Mamdani. Yeah. Who gets it? Which ideology gets it? I mean, right now, the ideology which has been kind of traditionally getting it
is the status quo ideology. Well, that's changing. That's been changing since Trump. Like, I don't know who our future presidents are going to be, but they're not going to have the same ideologies that they held for the last 40 or 50 years. That's not where we're heading.
So which ideology gets it?
But that doesn't... I mean, I agree with what you're saying, except the one thing we started this with, which is the appeal of communism is to push back against the Nazis, right? But why wouldn't you just...I don't know, why wouldn't the ideology be like, we're against Nazism or we're for liberal democracy?
Michael Maher That's exactly how it's pushed. What did the Antifa, the anti-fascist people in both our nations say? They say just that. This is about our republic.
This is about our democracy.
Yes, they are. But this is about our democracy. This is about our freedom of speech, our freedom of assembly. This is about stopping Nazis and stopping fascists and stopping due process, you know, or allowing for due process. They literally market it the exact way you just said. So when you say, why don't they say that we're just anti-Nazi
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Get started freeand pro-democracy or pro-republicanism? That's exactly how they market it. No, because I guess the reason I'm saying is like, I would say I am anti-Nazi and pro-democracy, right? And I am, I'm also not a communist. So why is communism the appealing version of those statements?
Well, this is a worldview issue. So do you think that you think a Nazi is the same thing a leftist thinks a Nazi is?
No, No. Because a leftist thinks you're a Nazi. Well, I know what words mean. Right. But this is the problem is like, I know what words mean, right? So I know that Nazis exist. And by the way, there are some Nazis on the right, including in the US and you can see them, right? But I also know what a Nazi is and therefore someone who has right-wing or centrist opinions like me is not a Nazi.
But words do mean different things depending on worldview. They do actually.
If you are a postmodernist, they do.
Not just a postmodernist. So if you look at definitions of words, you agree they have multitudes of definitions, right? Well, those are applying often to the distinctions in worldview. When I say spiritual as a Christian, I'm looking at that from a Christian view, right? If you say spiritual as a Buddhist, are we saying the same thing?
I actually think in a way you probably are, but the structure that underpins that is different. But you're trying to point at the same thing, which is whatever it is that is greater than human beings, somewhere, and I'm pointing to the sky because that's kind of how people visualize it.
But the way we view epistemology, ontology, cosmology, everything is going to be completely different. So when we say that word, we may be pointing to a concept which is similar, but we're actually pointing at something which is different.
But what progressives do, and this is really worth discussing, I think, is what they do is they, if I say the word cabbage, there's 100 types of cabbage, but you know what I'm talking about, right? And what a progressive will do in a debate, as you referenced, is they'll pretend they don't know what a cabbage is.
Yeah, that's equivocation. So the phallus, debating with progressives, I've been doing it for years and years, the number one fallacy run into with them, fallacious form of argumentation is equivocation. They use the ambiguity of a word to switch between its meaning depending on which one serves them best at the time.
Which is why you have to pin them down on semantics immediately, because if you don't, they'll spend an entire debate session or conversation using equivocation to move between meanings in an ambiguous way, so that they never really have to give an accounting for the things that they actually think
because those things are abhorrent. I do agree with that. I also understand though, that meanings of words are going to change with worldview. From the progressive worldview, you are a Nazi. And I wish more people-
Because I don't agree with them.
I wish more people... Because I don't agree with them. I wish more people would accept... Well, it's not just because you don't agree with them. It's because from that frame, from that worldview, right, you... They're going to perceive you as being a white nationalist. You're a person who thinks that white people are above other people. Why? Because you're arguing against mass migration. The reason you would do that is because you want to see more white people. But I'm an immigrant myself.
Doesn't matter. Well, but no, it does matter though, because that doesn't make any logical sense.
Doesn't have to. World views don't have to make logical sense, but they are the prism in which we interpret the world. And so every debate that you have and every conversation you have, I wish more people would go in them understanding this concept, worldview is what shapes your interpretation of all of reality around you. It shapes the meaning of words, how you interpret them,
what people mean by the things they say and what they don't mean by the things they say. The reason I think I got very popular on the right is because one of the things I've always done is sit down and make my opposition actually explain what they mean and why they mean it
before I will ever even dive into a conversation with them. And the reason for that is because I wanna know what their worldview is. What is it that you're interpreting different here than me? And that's where you start to actually have a debate about. So debates are about worldviews.
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β Donni, Queensland, Australia
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Get started freeConversations are about worldviews, right? If we have completely different understandings of our interpretation, how do we even speak?
But there's also a level of deception we're talking about here, because if you take an ideology like Nazism, it's got, there's tenets to it. Sure. And if you then go, well, you're a Nazi,
but then you don't obey or follow any of the tenets, then that is fundamentally illogical.
I've had multiple debates with people on whether or not Donald Trump's a fascist, okay, from their worldview. See, it's simple. All you have to do is you take the historic prism of what fascism is. They'll admit, clearly he doesn't meet that, but he meets certain tenets, which we can say have overlap with fascism enough that they reach
like a fascist minimum. Well, what the hell does that mean? Well, it just means that interpretively, from their kind of stance-dependent view, right, which means I made it up, this arbitrary metric, he meets it, therefore he is it. Now, unless you have some grounding which is objective, how do you argue with that? Well, you really can't because what most
political debating is, is it's taking a fact and then it's arguing about your feelings over that fact. That's 90% of what a political debate is. Here's a fact and now let's argue our vibes. So unless there's some objective grounding that you have to tell them that they're wrong, right, it's actually very difficult to get the upper hand in a vibes debate, isn't it?
So you really have to bring it back to not just facts, but foundation. They don't have any. This is why I hate them, because they're morally corrupt, ambiguous, no morality having scumbags. And that's what they want to do. They want to
take a fact and then argue their vibes about the fact. But when you get to their foundations, what is their foundation? They don't have any. Their entire foundation is there are no moral facts. So that's the case. How can you do anything immoral if there's no moral facts? How? You can't. You can't ever do anything immoral if you don't believe there's no moral facts.
Well, but they believe that we are with all our different perspectives, because we have different perspectives on things, you and I certainly. They believe that we are immoral. So they must have some kind of morality.
Stance-dependent morality.
Meaning, what's the difference between that and your morality? Because you would say your morality comes from God or the Bible?
Sure. There's two kinds of foundations for how it is that you can interpret morality. There may be more, but there's usually going to be two. It's, is morality real or not? If it's not real, then you're an anti-realist, let's say. If it is real, then you're not. When I say real here, I'm saying this is a universal fact,
that this is a moral fact. Now, the left and progressives and atheists and secularists, they don't generally believe in those moral facts. They think that morality is a social construction that we make up, and it's societally dependent. There is no overarching moral facts.
The religious say that there are, that God gave us moral facts, and these are the moral ways in which you have to live your life. And so they're willing to enforce that. They're willing to enforce those moral facts
because for them not to do that is immoral, right? Allowing my society to run around and do imm things. Obviously. I want to curtail that The other side thinks that that's totalitarian though, right? That's the worldview divide So the question is how can you tell a person? How do you tell destiny that it's immoral that he sucked 50 days? How do you do that? If it's the case that That's not a moral fact.
How? Well, you can't. And that's where they live.
Well, his sucking of dicks is irrelevant to me personally. I'd be perfectly entitled to suck as many dicks as you want. I encourage him to do more.
Yeah, but why?
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Get started freeWhy is it that this idea of only fans hookers and homosexual marriage and stuff like this, why is that stuff we have to deal with again?
Like why?
Why isn't it? Well, see what I mean though? Like even that question, why isn't it? It's like, that's not giving an accounting for a worldview. That's asking me to give an accounting for a worldview.
But the thing is... But you're insisting that there is a worldview that's correct. Sure. Right? You're insisting that there is a worldview that's correct, right? And therefore it's up to you to articulate why it is correct.
Sure, but when you say, why isn't it?
It's a genuine question.
I'm trying to probe your worldview, that's all. I'm going to walk you through it. If there are no moral facts, because I said so, that's why. And that's the failure of left-wing and progressive anti-realists. If there are no moral facts and you ask me why it is that I should enforce my worldview, because I fucking want to. And there's no way for you to ever object against that.
Any objection you have, which is stance-dependent, which it will be, is going to be the same objection that I give you, which is stance-dependent.
So which one of us is right? Well, that's why we have elections, so that that is adjudicated and then legislated on, right? Because ultimately there's philosophy and then there's politics, right? So you might philosophically believe that homosexuality is wrong, but at the level of society, we can have a vote and it may turn out that the majority of the country doesn't agree with
you. But do you agree with me that your morality cannot come from the majority? Because if it does, all you're doing is doing the exact same thing. You're just saying, hey, now the majority says there are no moral facts. Or only moral facts come from the majority. If that was the case, then we could have slavery, and that would be moral, simply because the majority said it was.
And at one point it was, right? And so that... And those people believed in God way more than we do. Well, yes. They did, right? Well, this is true, but the thing is, is like, that's the idea of presentism. The whole world always believed in that. Just like the whole world usually didn't entertain things like race mixing, though they had no conceptualization of race. They thought of things in a tribal way, but they didn't do that either. Like that was one of the things the United States always gets shit because in the, you
know, 20s, 30s, 40s, especially heading into World War II, post-World War I, well, you know, there was a lot of segregation with black people. Well, that was global though. That was global. You know, that was global though. That was global. You know, everyone was racist then. Like everybody.
Sure, sure, sure. And so you're looking at this through the prism of, you know, presentism and the reason that that's kind of...
Come back to the destiny sucking dicks point, because it's important, obviously. Right? Why is it that you think he shouldn't suck dick?
Because I said so. But that's fair enough.
Right. But then the question is, are you seeking to convert your philosophical view into political reality?
Why shouldn't I?
I suppose that's a fair question, actually. Why shouldn't I? Well, I guess it's a question of what happens when the majority of the public vote for somebody who doesn't
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β Dave, Leeds, United Kingdom
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Get started freeNow we're just outsourcing our morality again to the pop
But see there's laws that I don't agree with right and there's laws that don't exist that I think should exist But I accept that the majority of the country in which I live doesn't agree with me and that is a kind of compromise We all have to make at some level, right? Why do we have to make that compromise? Because we want to live in the society of other people who have different views, right?
Now we're moving into the right reduction. And so I guess maybe this is where I wanted to get to in the conversation. If there aren't any moral facts, and I just say, because I said so, and you say, well, that's fair enough, right?
Because that's all we're just, all of us are just doing because I said so, I guess. All of us are entitled to a view. Yeah, I don't want democracy because I said so. I want fascism because I said so. I want a new Hitler because I said so, right? Let's say that. If you can't point at that and say that that's wrong,
there's some objective appeal to a standard for why that's really immoral and you shouldn't do it, then what happens is erosion. And the reason that erosion happens is because everything becomes permitted. So an example of this, I was told with gay marriage that it's no big deal.
It's just like heterosexual people getting married. Well, okay, well, what's the argument against three men or four men getting married and then adopting a child? There really isn't one. You can't really be consistent and be against that.
Where's the consistency issue? You say, well, it's the outcomes. It's like, well, can you prove the outcomes will always be bad? No. Or can you prove that if there's two straight people who are heterosexuals who are from vastly different backgrounds,
they could have really bad outcomes statistically too. We wouldn't prevent them from having a kid. It's like, what's stopping 10 men from getting married and adopting a kid? Nothing. Nothing's preventing that.
And by the way, it's happening now. Now you see men getting married in threes and fours. And you see polygamy coming back in a big way. You see birth rate collapses. Like these are real issues in society.
And they- I mean, in fairness, I don't think birth rate collapses to do with 10 men getting married to each other, right?
No, it has to do, but it has to do with another issue. Okay. Which is women, if you want to get women pregnant, you have a small window. And it's best to do it in their 20s. And what we do is we tell women to defer their best childbearing years to go to college during those years, which is insane.
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. I don't know why you would take the opposite sex who has the most limited window for childbirth for healthy babies and tell them to squander all of that. Especially because they end up at college running, you know, the cock carousel often and things like this and
it's like it's just not good for society. But kind of back to what I was saying, we're getting to the idea of moral facts. This erosion begins, always begins with the idea of, well you can't really make a case, you know, like I don't believe in your stupid objective morals, I don't believe in any of this, and you can't really tell me that being a hooker is wrong, you can't really tell me doing this is wrong, you can't really tell me doing that is wrong. And so if you come to me and you say gays should be allowed to get married,
and I just ask you back, why can't three of them get married? What's your answer to that? What is it? I have people in my life who depend on me. Most of you listening do too. And if you're honest with yourself, you've probably had that moment where you think, what happens to them if I'm not around tomorrow? It's not a fun question, but ignoring it does not make it go away. This is why I think today's sponsor is worth paying attention to. Through Ethos, you apply in minutes, receive a quote instantly, and get same day coverage.
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Why can't three of them get married? What's your answer to that?
What is it?
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Get started freeI don't have one.
Yeah, exactly. So what's preventing it? Nothing. Nothing. And so then it just be, you see society become more and more and more absurd over time.
Why, why is it important? Why, what, what happens when three gays get married?
Like, well, individually, perhaps nothing, right? Like on an isolated, like what happens when one Muslim gets imported to the UK?
Nothing.
Well, it depends on what he does, but yeah.
Exactly. But now what happens when 50,000 of them get imported to the UK? Well, now something. And it's the same thing when it comes to the moral importance... The importance of moral character inside of a nation is the exact same way. What happens?
It doesn't matter... Well, to clarify for me, Andrew, so when you have... I mean, we have, I think, 4 million Muslims in the UK, of whom our majority are perfectly good people. When you have a large Muslim population, what we've discovered is you have a smaller percentage of extremists than Islamists, right? What happens when gays get married? What is the Islamist version
of homosexuality. What happens is, if you're gonna say three men can get married, then you need to be able to say one man can marry three women.
Why?
Because, tell me, what argument could you possibly have against it if you allow one and not the other?
What?
I suppose if you start unpicking laws like that, you'd probably unpick most laws, right? Yeah. On that basis.
It would erode the moral character of the very thing you're trying to preserve, which is your culture. But your whole culture is founded on Christian ethics. And so if you say, when you ask individually, what's wrong with three guys getting married? Maybe I could say, maybe the effect is so minimalistic, who cares, right? But that's not the point. The point is, is that if you let three men get married, then you have to let one man marry three women.
Why wouldn't you? What would be the consistent argument between the two?
That's a pain in the ass, man. Having three wives.
Maybe, but the thing is, is like, how would-
Yeah, how would polygamy- So what's your answer wrong, basically. Well, I would say something more important, which is that Christian ethics, even if you don't believe it, let's say, I'm not a Christian, I don't believe in any of that nonsense. What you should believe though is in outcomes, and the outcomes of Christian ethics, even on secular society, are the best outcomes. So if that's the case, that's the case I would make for why I think Christians should be in charge of basically everything, is that the outcomes are still going to be best for even the people who aren't Christians.
Now maybe they don't like that, but so what? I don't like their view either, and I think Christians should be in charge, and they have no objection because they have no moral facts, so who cares? It comes down to, like you said, at the very beginning of the conversation, we'll circle it all the way back. It comes down to who has the force. Well, it's going to be the ideology in charge
who has the force.
So is it going to be mine? Or is it going to be yours? Is it going to be the commies?
Who's it going to be?
And that's what I think the state of actual world affairs and politics is now. who gets their first. It's kind of depressing. I don't know if it's depressing. Like, it's almost like, may the best man win, right? May the best ideology win. I don't know if it's depressing.
Do you not think all government is fundamentally, even in dictatorships, is about power sharing. What you're talking about is dominance by one group over everybody else because we've got a better view, right? Yeah, that's what's depressing to me.
Why is that depressing?
Because, like I say, in most societies, there's a recognition, it might be tribal societies, there's the Pashtuns and the blah, blah, blahs, right? The countries that do well are the countries where those different interests are regulated through some kind of peacemaking mechanism at the level of...that's what politics is for really, right?
Where's the country?
It is... Marc Thiessen Well, it doesn't need to be exclusionary though. Just because one, like one particular ideology holds the brackets of most of the power, it doesn't mean that it has to be exclusive or that it can't in some way accommodate other sections of society.
Andy Well, how are you gonna accommodate the population of San Francisco when you're in charge?
Well, I mean, tell me, how would San Francisco, like, die off if you stop letting gays get married there? It's not going to.
I mean, that's all they do, from what I could tell when I'm going to San Francisco.
But they don't get married there. They just do a lot of gay shit there, right? But they're not, big thing in San Francisco.
You see what I'm saying, right?
Yeah, but I can point to...
Because you would outlaw homosexuality, I'm guessing.
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Get started freeSure. Well, no, I would outlaw homosexual marriage.
But isn't homosexuality wrong also?
Sure, it's immoral.
So why wouldn't you outlaw it?
You don't need to necessarily always place a law in against something which is immoral. It's not always conducive to the society to do that. Okay, that's fair. So, for instance, I would say for homosexuality, you're not going to jail, right? None of this type of thing. But there doesn't need to be any glorification, right? You're not gonna get married. I'm not gonna... No one's gonna bust in the White House either. There's not gonna be any pro-gay government propaganda anywhere. Does that not go against the First Amendment? Well, I think that that would be the most important aspect of the First Amendment to
say that the government's not going to propagandize towards one ideology or the other. Isn't that the whole point of secularism? The second they put the rainbow flags up on the White House...
But what about Christian...
Yeah. What about Christian? What about it? Should that be in public communication? Well, so in this particular case, I do think it should be, yes.
But you just said the First Amendment is about non-propaganda.
Right, well, his argument to me is, wouldn't it be against the First Amendment to outlaw rainbow flags, right? I say, no, that wouldn't be against the First Amendment.
That would be more in line with the first amendment. So wouldn't it be compliant with the first amendment to outline crucifixes?
You wouldn't necessarily need to even promote crosses or crucifixes but what you could do is you could promote things like value structures. So let me give you an example of this. You're driving down the street, you look over to the right and there's billboards, you've seen this a million times right? What if the billboards had things like family, right?
Mom, and it showed a mommy and a daddy and the kids, right?
Controversial.
Yeah, exactly. And the push was towards the ideas of normalcy. The push was towards the idea of this is what we want to see in society. What if tax breaks went to married people, right? What if we drastically increase this to the point like some Eastern European countries have done, which is help their birth
rates, where it's like, okay, you have three kids, you don't have to pay taxes anymore.
Oh, sign me up for that. But you don't have to be Christian to pursue that. You could be a secularist politician and promote all those things.
Sure. But under a secular view, why do we need to have a domestic increased population anyway? They can just import who they want. And that's what they did in your country.
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β Peter, Los Angeles, United States
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Get started freeI mean, I...
That's what they do in my country.
I can give you lots of secular arguments for why having a bigger population is better and
having more...
Yeah, but why not import it?
Why not import it? Daniel Why not import it? Because you get issues with integration, cultural compatibility...
Nat Malkus Unless you import so many of them that the original culture is replaced.
Daniel Well, you don't know who you're importing. And also, you know, the argument for tradition...it's actually one of the interesting differences. I mean, we had Dr. David Starkey explain this to us. I don't remember if it was on our show or not. The difference between American conservatism and British conservatism is British conservatism is about tradition and history, whereas American conservatism is about religion and value. So you could argue for the preservation of a society or the multiplication of an existing culture through time from a non-religious point of view, which is like what we have is good, by definition,
a priori, because that's what it is. It's our country, it's our society. We want to make more of that.
So it's good because it's good?
It's good because we are already here, right? It's good because where we are is a product of where we've come from,
and where we are, we like ourselves, right? But then you can't argue against mass migration because it's just, what you're saying is just a tautology. This is good because it's good.
And that's good. This is good because it's, we've been given, look, we've been, okay, if my dad gives me a watch, right, it's not necessarily the watch and its unique qualities that make it special, it's the fact that I got it from my dad. So the culture that we got from our ancestors is worth valuing because we got it from our ancestors because it's where we've come to as a civilization.
But that's, again, a tautology.
Why?
Because what you're saying is, because I got this from my ancestors, it's good. What makes that good? Because I got that from my ancestors.
Yeah.
That's exactly what I'm saying. So, what you're doing is you're pointing to the identification of the thing as being the thing, right, which makes the thing the thing.
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Get started freeI get what you're saying, but I think you're missing my point.
So, then I say, well, mass migration is good. Why is it good?
Well, because it's good. No, but I think what I'm saying is, if you take the watch example that I gave you, my dad gave me a watch, right? There is a sentimental value to that. Why is that? Well, it's connected to the passing down from generation to generation. Why is that important? Well, it's kind of, I mean, you might not agree with this, but from an evolutionary perspective,
the point of life is to recreate itself. You'd probably say that's tautology if the point of something is to form.
Well, no, that, ands, or buts about that.
So that's why mass immigration is not good. Because you're not reproducing your culture, you're bringing in a foreign culture.
Why can't you reproduce your culture with mass migration? Because it doesn't work in practice, clearly. Let me give you the counter. Because people don't integrate. Let me give you the counter. Are the people that you're importing generally more or less traditional than you? Traditional to their tradition, yes. Okay. Do they usually, do their women get pregnant younger than
your women? Yes. Well then that seems like it's really good for reproduction. Of their culture, not of ours. Well, it's culture. If they don't integrate into our culture, they're not reproducing our culture. But you want to reproduce your genetics, right? From an evolutionary perspective, sure. Why can't you do it with them? Because culture matters. Okay, right, but... And our culture is better. But you said the primary edict is reproduction, not reproduction of culture. No, but it's like saying you said the primary edict is reproduction, so why didn't you adopt kids?
Well, no, I want to have my own kids. That's what I'm saying. But that would be reproduction. You reproducing your genes, you adopting kids, not you reproducing your genes. It's not reproducing, just like mass ingression. But culture itself, the idea of it, it's an externalized philosophical concept, or it's a concept of the mind, right?
You would agree with that? Sure. You're not reproducing that, you're reproducing your genes, that would be the evolutionary view. And so what the evolutionist progressives would say is like, this is the best way for you to reproduce your genes, because you can bring in a bunch of women who you can breed with younger,
so they're gonna have more of your children.
But that isn't what's happening. You're important people who bring their own culture with their own family structure
and they're reprodu producing that culture. Look, I'm not arguing this, right? I'm 100,000% with you. If I were in charge, if I was king of the UK tomorrow, monarch tomorrow, I would close the gates of immigration immediately and give Tommy Robinson a badge and be like, good job, man, you did the best you could with what you had.
But the thing is, is like, I guess what I'm getting at, before we get into too many reductio, I'm just trying to point this out. That what you're arguing, you see how what we just did is we took a fact and we're like vibing over it? But now I've introduced some philosophy to it. And so now I'm asking about the grounding.
What is the grounding? What is the thing under the pillar?
I think actually we were both talking about the philosophy. Your argument is, from a secular perspective, or from a perspective that's not aligned with yours, you can't argue against mass immigration. I thought I gave you some pretty compelling arguments from a secular perspective against mass immigration.
You can't, look, you can argue it, okay? What I'm saying to you is that if everything that you're arguing is just coming from a me perspective, all morality is just dependent on stance. Then even if these people are doing something you consider dumb, it's not immoral. How could it be immoral?
Or how could it be wrong for them to do that?
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β Adrian, Johannesburg, South Africa
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And this is a question when you reduce to the ethical purview. I realized a long time ago, Christians can basically do whatever the fuck we want to secular atheists progressives and everything because... What happens to treating others as you would like to be treated? Well so that's... so you're going to bank on the benevolence of my view? No, no, no, that's the
following... No, but I should because you're a Christian. Right, so if you're going to bank on the benevolence of my view are you ceding that my view is the right one? Because if it's not... No, but I'm saying benevolence is an inherent part of being a Christian. So, but if you have a foundation of just stance dependence for all of your moral claims, right, then even if I violated this and was a complete hypocrite and actually just verbally just paid at lip service for the purpose of controlling your mind, you can't tell me why that's wrong. You can't tell me why that's wrong.
You can't really point to it and be like, that's immoral because there are no moral facts.
But, okay, but that being the case, but what we're talking about is, you're saying that you want your ideology to dominate. Yes. Effectively.
Yes.
Is that a Christian way of doing things?
Yes.
Why? Well, I mean, if we want to look back through human history, we start with the Byzantine Empire if you want to.
No, but-
Massive, massive Orthodox Empire. We can talk about the naming of kings by God himself. We can dive right into the lineage of the King of Kings if you want to. The thing is, is that I'm not here advocating for a monarch. What I'm saying is that society is better off dominated by Christians than dominated by non-Christians. And if you can point to me a society where that's not true, I'm all ears. Yeah. And what do you mean by dominated? Because a lot of people hear that
word and go, whoa, that sounds authoritarian. The social, political, well, there is some authoritarianism to it, I suppose, but I just think there's authoritarianism to each ideology which exists, including liberal ideology. It's just authoritarianism now by direct democracy. Now it's like, I suppose Christians might come in and say some things that are pretty controversial. They might be like, no, gays can't get married.
Prostitution's illegal. No more pornography, right? Blasphemy, ah, let's be a little more chill on that, right? Maybe they'll put in some things like that. Tell me how society's worse. Like, how's society worse because 18 year olds can't show their asshole on OnlyFans?
Like, I honestly want to hear, how's it worse? Like, it seems to me like by every metric, it's way better, right? And the people who argue, it gets to like, well, we don't want totalitarianism. That's totalitarianism? I'll tell you what I saw as totalitarianism was COVID checkpoints, potential vaccine mandates, communications going through Facebook and the government
to identify people who didn't wear their mask. That seems like a lot more of this totalitarianism, fascism thing than like, oh, sorry, you're 18. You can't put your ass all over the internet. Sorry. It's like, what?
At some point, maybe we can introduce rationality back into the scheme here, right? It's like, it's not you do whatever the fuck you want or it's totalitarianism. That's not how it works. It works like this.
We're a nation of laws and laws are governed by ethics. Like it or not, all laws are informed by a person's ethical worldview. So which ethical worldview you want to make the laws? The people who want 18 year old girls to put their assholes on OnlyFans or the people who don't? Which ones would you prefer make the laws of your nation?
But that is not just quite a simplistic way of looking at, for instance, if you look at literature. Yeah. We had Christians silence, well, saying certain books shouldn't be published. For instance, Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence, a classic of English literature. They didn't want that to be published. They were bolderizing Shakespeare.
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Get started freeOh.
Well, we do. But surely you're a freedom of speech guy, aren't you?
I mean, to an extent. There's no... So here's my view on rights. What is a right? Let's start with that.
What is it?
You tell us. Well, it's a social construction that we made the fuck up. That's what a right is. If it's something else other than that, tell me what it is. Where is it? I can't see it, touch it, taste it, smell it. So it's the social construction that you have a right not to be forced to wear a mask? Yeah. Why, what else would it be?
Okay, fine. Yeah.
So where's this going? What's your argument?
Well, the argument is, it's like, rights are made up. Here's what, here's what's actually right to do whatever you can do within the purview of force. And that's it. You have rights because people use force to ensure that you have rights. And the second, people don't ensure that there's force used so that you have rights. You don't have them anymore.
But the secularists, or in this case, not really the secularists, but the atheist mind or the non-religious mind, they can't ground rights in anything. They made them up. So they don't come from God, they just made them up. So what they're saying is is that we just make this shit up and somehow we're just all going to adhere to it even though there's no overarching real moral duty to do so. Where does it come from? Nowhere. So rights don't even exist you can't again can't taste them can't touch
them can't smell them right they're just products of the mind but come back to me
about the DH Lawrence boulderizing Shakespeare point yeah and you clutch your heart as if you were clutching pearls in a kind of mocking way which is interesting why do you feel that who gives a shit I give a shit well okay
great ground it ground why I shouldn't outlaw that book. Why is it immoral for me to do that?
Because you are American you believe in the in the First Amendment you believe in freedom of speech
So you're gonna appeal you're gonna appeal to my immoral so from your view your view
Why is it immoral for me to do that? Why why is it immoral for me to do that? Why? Why is it immoral for you to do that? Because I believe that artistic creation is one of the ways that the human being expresses itself.
Makes sense to me. Notice how you caveated that with I believe. Well, I don't believe that. Now what? Now where are we?
Well that's why we have democracy, so we can adjudicate.
So again, now we're just back to outsource. So as long as I can democratically convince enough people to outlaw that book, yeah.
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Get started freeWell, but that's kind of unavoidable, isn't it? Like, if you live in a society where 99 out of 100 people believe that something should be X and you believe Y, I mean, logically speaking, you're gonna end up in a society that outlaws X.
You would end up in a society which outlawed X, but that doesn't mean that's right.
No, I agree.
Or wrong, right?
But then, ultimately, you have a choice of whether you choose to live in that society or not, right?
To an extent. Yeah. I mean, to some extent, maybe you have some control over that. But I guess the point I'm making to you is not that I would outlaw this book. Right? The point that I'm making to you is that you don't have any justification for me not to. Like who cares?
Oh, you believe that?
So?
I believe different. What now? Now, what's the immediate, what, you know, like, what is the threshold breaker?
Well, now we're just going to appeal to a majority to outlaw the book. Bye bye book. Andrew, I'm not trying to argue with you for the sake of argument. It's a really enjoyable conversation actually. I appreciate the way that you stay calm and on the point, but I'm not clear what point you're trying to make here, particularly with the Shakespeare thing.
Rights or force, that's my point.
No, I agree with you on that.
Ultimately in practice, in practice what happens even it's even
Philosophically the case from the non-christian view when you say things like don't you appeal to the first amendment or this right? Right, that's what I'm getting at. Okay, don't you appeal to this right?
This right we need to have the adult conversation
Doesn't even exist It's just a social construction that we made up and it was pinned on a piece of paper and we pretend that it's something we actually adhere to. But it's really not. We violate it
constantly. I do not care. Well, you argue about it and that's why you have a judiciary system to adjudicate whether you are right. But I mean, it's not just some random people wrote it down. It's the founders of your country wrote it down because they were trying to set a set of rules for this society to operate by in order to fulfill what they thought would be a vision
of a new country that would be a good one.
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Go through 2026 with better digestion and more energy with Mass Zymes by bio-optimizers. The founders, what they wrote down was based on a massive compromise because beforehand they had the Articles of Confederation and the Articles of Confederation made each little kind of state, which wasn't a state even really then, their own nations and it didn't work out very well because they couldn't regulate trade or raise armies or things like this. So what they did via the compromise was they had a 10th Amendment. Now the 10th Amendment says that all the rights that are not given to the federal government
are given to the states prospectively. And at our founding, almost every single state had a state religion, almost all of them.
Okay.
Well, of course, and they were religious people. And they continued to have them, I mean, clear up until there was an interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which was, you know, widely viewed as being unconstitutional to this day. States were always allowed to have their own religion and put in their own religious practices, and those practices were to be adhered to if you wanted to hold office, if you wanted to swear oaths, if you wanted to do things like this. That was part and partial of American society
and the way that we did things. Now, that has changed as progressives have kind of demonized this, the whole idea that, well, that's against the First Amendment. And it's like, well, no, it ain't. And it was part of the initial compromise anyway.
When we're talking about the idea of rights, to get this back to the idea of rights, right, why is it that states don't have the right to do that? Well, it's because there's an interpretation of an amendment and then they said, well, you no longer have the right to have your own religions inside of these states. That's what they did. I was like, and who has the force? They do. So everything really comes down when you're talking about rights to the ideas of force.
And the reason that that's so important to understand is because this republic, when we moved it towards a direct democracy, the reason that that's going to fail is because people don't understand this concept that rights only exist as some kind of bizarre social construct if they're not grounded in God. How does a secular society uphold rights?
How? But how do you uphold your right not to have to wear a mask in the middle of a pandemic through scripture or God?
You still utilize it through force. Right. The scripture doesn't prevent you from utilizing force. Christian, but this idea of like Christian pacifism and Christians being pussies, I don't know where that came from.
Britain, I think.
Boy, that was never.
And so what about the teachings of Jesus Christ?
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Get started freeWhich ones? Which ones do you want to dive into?
Well, I was raised as Catholic, so I'm not as well versed in scripture as you. When he was on the cross, forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do.
Of course, and you should forgive people. I absolutely agree with that. I may forgive a man who attempted to rape my wife, but I'm going to kill him in the attempt, right? Like I don't, which thing's contradictory here? It's like, I can forgive my enemies,
but that doesn't mean I need to let them crush me. I can forgive people who've done me wrong. It doesn't mean I need to let them do me more wrong. I can forgive people for doing horrible acts against me. It doesn't mean I need to continue to let them do horrible acts against me. Christian ethics has been widely bastardized
by progressive leftists as being some kind of like hippie religion. It is definitely not. and I don't know where that came from. Yes, it's true the teachings of Jesus Christ are very heavy on loving your neighbor, and understanding forgiveness, and understanding the mode of sin, and that most people are going to engage in sin,
so we need the forgiveness of Jesus Christ for that. That's true. But it's not a pacifistic religion, and it never has been. Jesus told one of his disciples to sell a cloak and buy a sword. But these were not pacifists. Jesus ran money changers out of a temple
with a braided cord that he made out of feather and whipped them out of the temple. So, I don't know where the idea of pacifism came from. He called them serpents, he called people serpents, whitewashed tombs,
he called them all sorts of names. These were killable offenses in his day. I don't know enough about scripture to challenge you but it's interesting what you said but what I wanted to get back to so this idea of of boulderizing Shakespeare, cancelling books etc. I guess for me now thinking about it is the reason that it's not good is that you begin to silence ideas and what Christianity did and not solely Christianity but other religions did is it silenced scientists and people making breakthrough in the scientific fields. And I guess the ultimate example is people be worrying that essentially in schools is
we'd be back to teaching creationism, for example, if certain Christians were in charge and presented creationism as fact.
Why couldn't you just have a compromise there where you said, okay, you can learn either or you can learn neither. That should be up to the parents, don't you think, the education standards for their kids? Why should that be up to the state? You think the state should have control over that or do you think the parents should? So if the parents say, yeah, you know, I don't really want them to learn evolution, why can't
they opt them out?
Because evolution has been proven to be scientifically correct.
That's not your business what people do with their kids' education. That's their business,
right? Okay, well then why can't I raise my child to be a jihadist?
So you're going to raise your kid to blow people up?
No, but why not? I mean, if you say it's not your business, then it's not your business.
Yeah, well, I mean, can you stop parents from raising their kids to be a jihadist?
You can. Well, you can make sure that within the confines of a school that they're not learning it. We have had schools in the UK where people have been,
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Get started freethere's ismus values and those schools have been closed down. Okay, so why is it in school that you're supposed to learn reading, writing, arithmetic, you're supposed to learn science as well, right? Yeah. Okay. So you're saying, well, this is a scientific fact so kids need to learn it, right?
Yeah. Okay. So parents say, well, I dispute this fact, right? I'm not gonna teach my kid evolution. How does that hamstring the kid exactly? What about that's going to hamstring the child?
Maybe they want to be a scientist. Maybe the way that they see the world, you're actually taking out a fundamental part of their understanding of the world and how it works.
That's a strictly materialistic view and it's silly. What about the ideas of metaphysical accounting? Accounting for metaphysical things like the laws that are immaterial, the laws of logic, things like this.
I think they should be taught in school as well.
I don't understand. They're not proven facts. Even though you believe in them, they're not proven facts, but you still want them taught in school?
Yeah.
Okay, so the Bible's not a proven fact, do you want that taught at school? Yeah, I believe you should learn the Bible as part of a religious study of education. Well, that's fantastic. Great. Okay. Here's my compromise.
Because now I tell you what...
You can teach evolution, you can teach evolution, or you can teach creationism, or you can teach both. The parents can have the kids do both or do neither, which is exactly what I said before.
You say, same thing thing they should teach both no no no no that's not what I was saying I was saying that you should teach you should teach evolution because it has been scientifically proven but you should also teach the Bible and you say this is what Christians believe and it's up to you whether you believe it or not okay so
then I don't understand why so let me me ask it a different way. Is it the case that if you're a religious Christian that your kids should have to sit through sex education hearing about homosexual sex? Should they should have to hearing about
homosexual sex? No they shouldn't. I believe that... Why not? Why not?
Hold on let me finish. I think the point there's an important distinction here between different types of sex education. Showing kids porn, as some of your schools do, it shouldn't happen irrespective of whether it's sexual, homosexual, whatever, straight, whatever. Yep. So that's an important distinction.
Well, you have to show them porn. Like I remember when I went through sex ed, they definitely showed the naked human body, walked through, showed you these are what breasts are, these are what ovaries are, this is what this is, this is what this is, this is where babies come from. Didn't appear overtly, it wasn't pornographic. Right.
Right? You do the same exact thing with homosexuality, right? But why do you think that religious fundamentalists should be able to offer kids out of that?
I don't believe that we should be able to offer their kids out of that? I don't believe that we should be teaching. I think sex ed should be about... I think sex ed should primarily be about safety, actually.
Primarily be about safety and also about how the biological functions work when you have children, et cetera.
So you don't want to taught in school at all?
What, sex ed?
Yes.
You do?
Yes, I do. Okay, great. So then why do you want the parents' ability to tell their teachers, "'Hey, I wanna opt my kid out of this." If you're gonna be talking about gay sex,
you're gonna be talking about this, you're gonna be talking about that. I want to opt them out of that.
Right, I wouldn't be talking, curriculum. Why though? Why? Because I believe that it actually could offend religious minorities. Oh, okay. Just like creationism. Right? No, not like creationism. But when you have evolutionary, that is a scientific fact. That is a scientific... I actually wouldn't go quite that far. It's a
scientific theory that's currently accepted. But look, it's actually...
The distinction between theory and fact, I mean...
Well, this is actually... I mean, it's interesting because just so... All of this will get condensed into clips on the internet where it's like, this person destroyed that person, which is really not the angle of conversation for us. Really trying to explore the arguments. I mean, I would say a stronger version of your argument is, should parents be able to opt their children out of being taught that climate change is real, right?
Because that's where you're going to get someone like Francis or me to go, yeah, I think they should be able to opt out of that, right? Even though that's the scientifically accepted consensus.
Well, I'm not here for destruction.
No, no, us are. But let me come back to a point that I think Francis made that you haven't addressed, which I think is a strong argument. What about the jihadi thing? Like, should devout Muslim families be able to create schools according to this devolvement of religion to the states or whatever, where they teach that particular worldview? No.
Because? Because I believe in Christian ethics as the dominant force in society and since that's the case I would tailor laws towards Christian ethics being the dominant force in society. So there would
be no schools that taught anything except Christian ethics? No it
wouldn't be that they would teach nothing but Christian ethics but we can definitely tailor laws against jihadist ethics or definitely tailor laws against even importing Muslims at all. The hell are we importing Muslims here for anyway? We don't need them here. Never needed them here. Diversity is our strength.
Has not been a strength having Muslims here. The idea that we can't tailor or craft legislation and laws around the things that our children learn or at least what you can opt into and out of. Let's just say for consistency sake, sure, you could teach your kid, I guess, theoretically, to be a jihadist, and there's nothing I can do about it, and there's nothing a secular state can do about it either, except not let them come in.
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Get started freeAnd then it's really hard to train your kid to be a jihadist, right?
Because you're not here. Well, so from a policy level, this is kind of ultimately comes back to the final question, I suppose, of what is... Do you call yourself a Christian nationalist? Is that your...
I would say Christian populist. Christian nationalism is often conflated with forms of ethno-nationalism. And people do use it as a cloak for ethno-nationalism. I would fall more in line with what's called cultural nationalism. You guys, I think, from watching your content, would fall more in line with what's called cultural nationalism. You guys, I think, from watching your content, would fall more in line with probably civic nationalism.
So cultural nationalism is talking about the glue which holds cultures together. And the ethno-nationalists obviously believe that's your race, right? Obviously I think that race is not enough to hold a nation together. There has to be some kind of cultural glue, and that usually comes from religion.
So all the laws that I can see seem to be informed by ethics, and those ethics seem to almost universally be informed by Christianity.
So you would support mass migration from Christian countries?
No.
Why not?
Well, I don't understand. I want my domestic population to grow. So if I want to tailor the best outcomes for my society, then I want my domestic population to grow. I want those families to be very happy. I want them to have the biggest slice
of that American dream, right? Because I'm Christian, but also a nationalist. So the idea here is nation first. Me importing a bunch of people from other countries, not putting my nation first, putting their nation first. So my list of priorities would be God, nation, right? Or I'm sorry, God, family, nation. So culture and borders are
very important for the nation. And so you're not a Christian nationalist, cultural nationalist, so describe to me the America that you want. What does it look like? What are the... You mean by tomorrow? Well... Let's say I was king tomorrow? Well, you seemed very keen on this idea, which I'm sure you're excited about. What I mean is, ultimately, you want to transform America into something that it used to be or that you'd like it to be or whatever. Let's not argue about that. Yeah, sure. Okay, let's just
say you want America to be a certain way. Is that fair? Yeah. Okay, what does it look like once you've got to that destination, once you've got to that perfect America which represents your values as someone who's really interested in Christianity being the dominant force in society? What can you do? How is it different from what we have today?
So while I would say that there's, this is a bit of like hypothetical utopianism, as long as you're granting me that this is a bit of hypothetical utopianism. So let's say I was King Wilson tomorrow, I'm King Andrew Wilson and my decrees and edicts go out to all of the land. First thing, mass migration, that's gone immediately. Next thing is focusing on domestic birth rates and domestic birth policies and trying to move America back to a one-income family.
The best way to do that is to prioritize from the government level down that women do not defer their childbearing years for college, but rather you offer massive incentives to families for them to get married younger, stay at home, have babies with their husband. And if you contract them from the workforce, wages are going to necessarily skyrocket.
The second you begin contracting women from the workforce, wages are going to shoot through the roof, especially if you're not filling those roles with migrants. So those would be some of the very first policies that I would put in place. I would also, I'd ban porn, I'd ban gay marriage, I'd put in some kinds of laws which had dominion over the airwaves when it came to degeneracy, right? Meaning,
I don't think you should turn on Fox or, you know, like Channel 32 and see naked women. I don't think that that's good for the public. I don't think it's particularly useful. I would probably outlaw smartphones or put age restrictions on smartphones probably until
you were like 18 years old. There would be some pretty restrictive things that I would put in place, but it would also maximize human ethical flourishing, right? The idea here is like, why do kids need to be looking at smartphones and training their brain towards smartphones? It's been terrible for them.
No, we just did an episode, recorded an episode on it. Well, several actually. So I agree with you on that. And is it important to you that that outcome has arrived at democratically? That like you persuade half the country that this is the way to be?
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Get started freeSo ultimately, the views of what's best for the nation, that's what's going to be first and foremost in my brain, right? Yes, the religious aspect, it's always going to be God first, but from like the things that I can do something about, it's gonna be from the national level. The nation that we have is a checks and balance based republic.
So obviously I'm gonna work within the confines of that in order to make as many compelling and convincing arguments and as many compelling and convincing things I can possibly do to move people towards this view. But remember, the problem with democracy, the big hole in it, is you can democratically remove it.
So you can vote out democracy. It's built in right into democracy to be able to do that. And the most American thing you can do is to remove amendments and put in new amendments. We do it all the time, right?
And is that what you'd prefer? You don't want America to be a direct democracy?
No.
What would you like it to be?
I would like it to be what it used to be at the beginning, which is a stakeholder democracy at the very least.
What does that mean?
It means you're either going to have one household voting, so that we're not dividing husbands and wives because that's really stupid. Or it means that you're going to have to have some kind of stake in property or perhaps four years of unpaid public service before you can vote. There has to be some skin in the game, in other words. I'd also raise the voting age probably to 25, right? I don't, I think...
Marc Thiessen Would women be allowed to vote?
Tom Clougherty I mean, yeah, to at least the degree that men are, but I don't want men to vote for the most part either. I don't think it's a great idea.
But it would be equal between men and women in your view. Really? It doesn't sound like it. If you want a household... What do you mean? Well, what I mean is, it sort of sounds like, forgive me if I'm misunderstanding this genuinely, you'd like people to get married and to vote as a household, which I imagine would kind of mean that the head of the family, which is the husband, would tend to decide that. And if a woman isn't married, presumably she wouldn't be getting a vote partly for that reason.
Is that fair?
Sure.
Okay.
Yeah, what's wrong with that system? Sounds great.
I'm just interested in explaining. Well, it sounds great to you.
The thing is, it's really hard. It's really difficult. When people think of things like, what's the argument against this? This is an immutable character. How could you argue that women shouldn't be able to vote or that men shouldn't be able to vote?
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Get started freeIt's like, well, at our founding, they couldn't. Women could not vote.
Well, at your founding, as you've said yourself, you had slavery, right? So things do change over time.
Sure. But the thing is, is like...
Sometimes in a good direction.
Sure. And sometimes in a bad direction. Absolutely. So the thing is, is like the idea that they had there was that most men couldn't vote. There was no universal suffrage for men, including slaves, right? For the most part were men. And women couldn't vote because most people weren't allowed to vote. Now, women, the arguments against women voting are pretty simple.
And it was, the idea is landholdership and force, right? Can women utilize force in order to maintain land? The answer is no. Generally, that takes men. So, the biggest, like the, if you're looking at feminism, for instance, you had the anti-suffragettes
and then the suffragettes. But the anti-suffragettes' arguments were way better. The argument was pretty simple. It just worked like this. You cannot erode or get rid of the patriarchy because you always have to appeal to it for your rights.
And that's a fundamental truth. And since that's a fundamental truth, I've never seen a great reason why women should be able to vote. Because they can vote to send men to war that they themselves do not have to go fight. They are not beholden to the draft. Only men are. And they can say, well,
you're not beholden to the draft perhaps because you're too old for it. But you were beholden to the draft when you were not too old for it.
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our code trigger to get 20% off a pro plan. That site again is venice.ai slash trigonometry. Could you not flip this argument the other way around and say women are able to vote, men are able to vote on things that affect women that don't affect men.
Right.
Well, all kinds of things. For example, their right to vote. I mean, among other things, but, you know, things to do with sexual health, abortion, all kinds of things, right?
Well, I don't understand. Abortion does have to do with men.
Okay, fine. I mean, it does, but it has more to do with women because it affects them more directly. But lots of other things. I mean, men could pass a law that women have to wear a headscarf, for example, right? So our votes affect each other. That's not an argument to deny the other sex the vote.
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Get started freeOh, I don't understand.
Like, your argument is women can vote to send men to war.
And my argument is- My argument is, it's called forced doctrine. My argument reduces to this. If you always have to appeal to one sex for your rights, right, then why are you, why are you being imbued with the responsibility of that at all? Because women have to appeal to men for the rights and anytime men want to take rights away from women they can, like that,
and there's not a damn thing women can do about it. And if you want proof of that, let me show you half the world. Anytime, collectively, men say women have no rights, they don't have any. And that's that. And there's not a damn thing that they can do about it. So the idea that they can erode the patriarchy or remove the patriarchy, or in some way get away from the patriarchy to be strong independent women is nonsense. They're just always appealing to the benevolence of men, always.
And so I don't even understand what the purpose is of the vote for women. What is it? We can literally via force take it whenever we want anyway. What is the point here?
Well, I would imagine the point is to include the voice of half the population, which is naturally set on different priorities to those of men. And since we live in a society which is half female, it would be worthwhile to include their perspective in how we make decisions, wouldn't it?
Why does voting not include that?
Because it affects them as much as it affects us.
Let me ask you a question. Are you aware that in the United States we abolished
alcohol? For a period of time. I've seen some movies about how that went. Who got that amendment passed? I don't know. Women. Okay. Oh no, no, no. If you want to have an argument about our disagreements with how women choose to vote. No, no, no, no. They couldn't vote. Oh, I see. That's what you're saying. Okay.
They couldn't vote. But? But they still got that amendment passed. Okay. The idea that women did not have influence or do not have influence or don't have moral influence on society because
they can't vote is stupid. So what's wrong with formalizing that in the form of a vote?
Well, I just told you the very idea that women, well, like, let's start with this. Do you want women to be able to get drafted in the military?
I personally don't, no.
Why?
Why? Because I've never really thought about it, but it's just an instinctive reaction, actually. I'd have to think about the exact reason, but I just don't think combat is what men do, I guess. It's a very simplistic way of saying it. And there'll be women who blow up and kick your ass, and there are women like that.
Sure. Great. But not generally.
I am not against women serving in the military, if that's what they choose to do.
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Get started freeYeah, but what about the draft though?
But I don't think they should be compelled to, no.
But men should?
I think in some circumstances, yes. Like when the survival of the country is at stake.
So women get a privilege men don't get?
Sure. Men get certain privileges too.
So why do they have equal rights? No? What privileges? So why do they have equal rights? No. What privileges? Name a single privilege men get that women don't have access to.
You mean legislative?
Anything. Like literally anything.
In life?
Any aspect, whether it be governmental, social. Women have all the privilege.
All the privilege?
Oh yeah. Hey, when the Titanic goes down, who gets on the lifeboat?
Yeah, yeah, but that's a very narrow context. Who dies in childbirth, right? I mean, come on, we're different and we have...
Almost no women die in childbirth anymore. Some still do. Sure, but I mean, some people die in...
There's probably more women that die in childbirth in America than people who die on the Titanic in the modern world. Yeah, it's childbirth avoidable. You just don't have sex, right? No, but what I'm saying is there are outcomes that are better for men in life than for women and that's a fundamental difference between men and women.
Yeah, I understand, but I'm talking about privilege. What are any, can you give me any privilege at all that men have that women don't? Whereas I can give you tons of privileges that women have that men don't? Whereas I can give you tons of privileges that women have that men don't. That's what I'm asking.
Um, privilege. Well, I mean, the privilege concept outside the legislative framework is a difficult one.
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Get started freeEven inside of it. I'm asking for both, either. Any, in fact.
Um, hmm.
I don't have the data on all this stuff, but I would assume there are contexts in which men are more likely to be employed for a certain thing because they're more likely to be perceived as authoritative, as leaders, things like that. Although that has changed with the kind of work agenda of the last 10 years.
And it works both ways. Like for instance, preschool teachers, I would assume that people would vastly prefer that their kid go to a woman, right? So it seems like that privilege is striped across the board. So like what what is the Why is it that women get all of the equality, right? But also get all the privilege that doesn't seem right to me. That seems like it's backwards So like what I'm still waiting to hear from anybody ever, what are these privileges men have over women
versus what women have over men. So if you can go and you can be drafted, you can be sent off to war, right? And women can't, but they can vote to send you off to war. How is that not something which fundamentally needs to be addressed immediately?
That seems to me like it's completely lopsided and it's giving one class of people a significant privilege over another.
So if we allowed women to be drafted, you'd be happy with them having the right?
Well, see, now we come into pragmatic problems though. The reason that you said earlier, I'm against women being drafted is because they can't really serve in combat roles, only in support roles. There's draftees of men would have to serve in combat roles. The reason women don't do well in combat roles is because, well, driving tanks is hard work.
It takes muscles and you got to, you know, run the shells and you have to carry hundreds of pounds of equipment with you and you have to do all of this type of thing. And generally speaking, women aren't equipped for it, which is why we've never had a female Navy SEAL to date, even though they've been trying for like 25 years. We still haven't had a single one. They can't do the job.
Now, what people always do is point out liars, right? Well, some women can do it. That's true. Some can't, but in general, they can't.
I guess, but when you vote for a government you don't vote whether to go for war or not. It's the government that makes the decision. There's plenty of people who voted for Donald Trump and are absolutely disgusted that he has started a war with Iran.
I thought government was force. We are agreed on that, right? Government's force? Like ultimately that's what it reduces to? When you say you're voting, you're voting for force, and you're voting for force use. Why does the United States have a massive military?
Well, because we're going to use it. That's why, we're going to use it. Why do we have a draft? Well, because we're going to use that too, and have used it. So the thing is, is that a lot of what we're voting on is force. We're trying to protect our nation from all foreign threats, right? That's why we have this massive military.
That's why we have a draft. That's why we have the potential for mass combat. That's why we entered in World War II, right? It's why we entered and there was a draft then. And we're going to institute a draft at some point again, likely. It's more likely than not.
At some point, we're going to do it. So the thing is, it's like, why do women get exempt from that? And if it's the case that you don't want them exempt from that, why is it that they don't go right to the front lines then and battle it out? Like draftees have at least the potential to. Well, that's a fundamental privilege
that is not being addressed, right? And yet women have the vote. seem like they care too much about men's rights, even though we're supposed to care about theirs. Seems like they have a lot of privilege in society.
Is that fair, Andrew? I think a lot of women care about men's rights, actually. There's a vocal minority which say that they don't and they hate men. We know those type of women. Let's be honest, a lot of women care about men's rights. They do.
Give me like three of the most prominent ones you can think of? Who care about men's rights? Well, I'm trying to think now, but...
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Get started freeI mean, we've had feminists on the show who are feminists, like Louise Perry, for example. They're a different type of feminist to the idiots that you'd be spending your time arguing with, but they're people who have a very sensible view of these things. There's lots of the things that doesn't make a lot of sense to me is, for example, yes, it's true, men serve in combat roles and women don't, but women bear children and men don't. And there's a huge disadvantage in all sorts of societal outcomes from a materialistic
career perspective to spending the time to bear the child and then to nurture that child,
right? So, we... nurture that child, right?
So we...
What? Like what? Well...
That's backwards. No, no, hold on. The gender pay gap discussion, which is kind of stupid in a lot of areas, is actually a reflection of the fact that there is a motherhood gap in lifetime earnings, which is if you're a woman who bears children and then looks after them... Take more time off and You take time off, then over the course of your life.
Less overtime.
Yeah, you will learn less. So that would be one disadvantage that I could give you where women contribute a different thing. So you might say, well, men get drafted, women carry children.
It's not a disadvantage. What do you mean? Oh no, oh, they have to stay at home and raise their kids. Oh, ah, where's the disadvantage again? The man's in the womb.
Oh no, the men get drafted. Where's the disadvantage?
They die. Okay.
They get shot in the face.
Yes, and women earn less money over the course of their lives and have to carry a thing that is a risk to their life, potentially.
What they have instead is they now don't have to pay for daycare and they can depend on somebody else's income which is taking care of them. Oh, that's terrible. Oh my God. You get to stay at home and you don't have to do anything except raise your kid, wow. And by the way, they're putting their kids on a bus
almost every morning to go to a public school. They don't even have them for eight hours out of the day most of the time. So like, how is this the most incredibly difficult job ever or in some way requires them to have, that's, they're the ones who are privileged. You know, there's an old comedian who made this joke, and I agree with it.
Any job you can do in your pajamas can't be that hard.
Bill, Bill Burr, favorite comedian of ours. But, he was joking though, knowing Bill, and now that he's married with kids, I think his perspective has changed somewhat. But I guess, you know, I'm married with kids, right? You're my, I mean, you watched your wife carry the baby
or babies inside her for nine months. Like that's a big deal.
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β Dave, Leeds, United Kingdom
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Get started freeSure.
So I guess that to me would be one example versus the hypothetical risk of one, seven, 50 years you get drafted.
In a two income household, it's a privilege that women get to stay at home. It's a privilege.
But we're not talking about staying at home. We're talking about carrying the child.
Yeah, but carrying the child has to be raised.
And most women in America then go back to work.
Yeah.
At a disadvantage, as we just said.
Well, that's not a disadvantage though, right? They don't have to have children. You have to go out for a draft.
Well, women do not. So, I mean, they are. I mean, they're definitely not. Your wife is, my wife is.
Yeah, but what's the birth rate? We're under, we're under replacement levels.
I know, but what I, you're talking about side argument. What I'm saying is in a society that wants to reproduce, men have to go to war and women have to bear the children. That's why they both when are they gonna start having the children part of this. I Mean my wife's doing it. Yeah, but you're doing it. So shouldn't they have the right way men?
You know, you're not fucking good fighting war. Are you men? Well, here's but nor is there the potential for that through the draft?
Well, like just the potential for them to have children. You say they're not, well, I could say you're not being drafted, same thing.
No, you can't, there is no equivalency and I can point out the distinction.
Yeah, the compulsion thing.
The compulsion, yes.
But for a society to work, men have to go to war and women have to have kids.
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Get started freeI agree, but you need to get to the, part before you can tell me that there's some equivalency to men being drafted because they're not having kids. And you're not being drafted. But I can be compelled because I've signed up for the draft. Where have they signed up to have kids? I think this is a splitting hairs argument. I think it's not. I think that the idea that my children can be drafted or I could be drafted even at my age because perhaps I have knowledge which would be useful to the United States military. They could do it in five seconds. They could bring me on.
In Ukraine they draft six-year-old men. Okay? If they need you, they're going to take you. And you can peel potatoes or whatever it is they need. Right? Women do not have to do that. They do not have to sign up for selective service. They're not compelled and will never be compelled. It's asymmetrical in that way. They can avoid pregnancy though, right? And if you're saying that they have a duty to have children.
I'm not saying they have a duty.
But do you have a duty to go fight a war if you get drafted? Correct. Oh, okay.
And this is fair how?
That's the asymmetry.
Where do we get to the fairness? symmetrical. But your argument initially was, where's the privilege that men enjoy and women don't? Well, I would argue in a function in society where we want to reproduce, women end up with the burden of childbearing and childrearing in a way that men don't. I think it's a fairly simple and obvious argument, right?
And yet they're privileged when it comes to custody and divorces. They're privileged when it comes to child support. They're privileged when it comes to alimony, they're privileged when it comes to all of these things. They have every advantage when it comes to having the child. And so
it's like... It's a different argument. What I'm saying is the burden of bearing the child is uniquely with women in the same way that the burden of
fighting in war is uniquely with men. So it's an ontological argument. The nature of woman is to have children, the nature of men is to go to war. Right, and so... Then the woman needs to be fulfilling her nature then, right?
Well, my woman is, and so is yours, right? So I would insist for my woman to have the right to vote on that basis, that she's contributing frankly at this point way more than I am.
Drafting's collective, right? So then the duty is collective? Then why isn't childbirth?
I don't understand. You're saying for women to have the right to vote, they must have a duty to bear children.
Yeah. Well, if you're saying that there's a duty for men to go to war, and you're saying that the reason that they do is because that's their ontological nature, and the ontological nature of women is to have children, okay, I can concede that argument. But we just ran into a problem then because if one is collective and then the other is collective, why do I have to fulfill my duty but they don't have to fulfill theirs?
Well, I never said that. I thought it was a collective duty for women to have children.
But it's a collective duty for men to go...
Yeah, yeah. Well, then again, that sounds like privilege. Yeah, well in the same way that fire safety in your own house is a personal thing that you do, but if there's a fire in the neighborhood, it's the collective duty of the neighbors to get together and try and put it out, right? There's a different, something can be... Do you go to jail if you don't do that? Yeah, look, I agree with you. The compulsion element is different, but not everything is exactly the same. I'm not even asking, like I agree with you, getting drafted and having babies is different.
We can agree with that, right?
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β Ruben, Netherlands
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Get started freeYeah, both important though, right, for society?
Both important. But the idea here that we are talking about, which should be equal, is the idea of duty. If we're talking about the compellence of you, if your country drafted you, even if you're in terrible shape, and they told you, look, we're in a collective war effort and we need you. And you're going to come in here and just cook food because our soldiers need food, right? Are you going to go do it? I would do it voluntarily, to be honest.
But yeah, I wouldn't be very useful. But yeah, terrible cook, terrible soldier. Now, you're compelled to do that. Right. to do that. And part of your duty and honor is that you have to go do it. I agree with this. Okay. But if we have a compelling duty that men have an ontological function, only men can do this, therefore they should. Why is that duty not applied the other way? That
to me is inconsistent and it's a hole in the worldview. It makes no sense to me.
I agree with you it's inconsistent, but that's because the acts are not equivalent. Like, not everything is the same. I don't, I don't, I think in order for the defense of the realm, so to speak, you'll have to compel all the men to fight in certain very rare circumstances.
Where do those men come from?
Women. Right.
So then one duty's being fulfilled?
No, I'm, I'm all with you in terms of we need a higher birth rate, I just don't think duty is the way to get there. Anyway, we've-
Wait, wait, couldn't you just, I'll just wrap up. Yeah, yeah, it's just a time thing. When you say duty, can't you instill the ideas of duty and honor even absent legislation, through propaganda, things like that?
Sure. Those are the routes that I would be more apt
to move towards. Well, yeah, to be honest with you, man, this is the thing is like, actually a lot of this discourse I think is misguided because the vast majority of women actually do want to have kids, but there are circumstances in their life which make them less likely to do so.
And so if we, I mean, you made this point yourself, there are countries that it's not, they're not having as many results as people would like to think, unfortunately, places like Hungary. But I think the way to get people to have more kids is to get obstacles out of their way, not to compel them through the draft system. Like, oh, here's your ticket, have two kids. You know what I mean? I don't think that's going to work.
But it seems we agree on that. Anyway, Andrew, it's been great having you on. You too, guys. I really appreciate the combo. You know, and it's actually interesting because like, obviously there's areas of disagreement, but it's just fascinating to me that it's so much easier to have a conversation from a place of complete disagreement with someone on the right than with someone who's progressive.
Well, that's because I think that this comes down a lot of times to being good faith.
Right.
I want to know your view.
And I truly believe that you want to know mine. Yeah, we do. And so the reason that this, what we just did right now, I guarantee you much of it's going to go viral and this type of thing isn't just because you have a huge channel and we both have big audiences, but it's also because people just saw a discussion that seemed real. Right. Well, it was real.
And that it seemed like we were trying to get at each other's views, try to understand them. And we're not killing each other. No. Right. So it's like, maybe we can start there.
I think that's a great place to start. And you know, and it just frustrates me because I would love, you know, I raised this right at the beginning with you, which is, isn't there a center-left sensible part of society? And I truly, this may be an article of faith on my part, but I truly believe lots of people like that exist. But where is their champion? Where is their champion? Because what we see now is people who can't have the come, like, there will be lots of people who watch your views on this, particularly outside the US where the kind of more Christian ethics-based worldview is more common, who will be horrified
by what you said, right? They will be completely horrified. But we explored that and we got to the bottom of what you believe, right? And you're entitled to believe what you believe. Other people are entitled to not agree. But if there was a progressive sitting in our seat, or even in your seat, we'd never even get to what the views were.
And that to me is so frustrating.
Yeah, it's a fundamental dishonesty. Like I said at the very beginning, I hate the left. And it's, there is a fundamental, there is a fundamental dishonesty that comes with their anti-realism views on morality that makes me sick to my stomach. And the thing is, it's like, look, maybe I don't get everything I want. Maybe I get 30% or 20% of what I want. Maybe you get 80%, right? At least I'm getting, we're getting to something. We're getting to something, we're addressing something.
These people, you can't even address it. Well, because why? Well, because it's unprecedented, says meth jaw. Well, it's unprecedented, but everything's unprecedented, right? The destiny is meth jaw.
These people live in ambiguity. And so that's why you can't ever get to anything. Everything's equivocation, it's ambiguity. They never want to pin down their actual positions. And then when you get to their actual positions, they know that they're untenable, so they just obfuscate away from them and they move on to other things. You can say, you can all disagree with everything I just said here, but you can't say that it's not reasoned out. You can't say there's no logic to it. You can't say that I didn't really sit and have a good think before I came to these views.
You can say that about progressives though.
Andrew, thank you for the discussion. What is the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we should be?
We're not talking about the birth rate enough. That's the critical view and component which keeps all of humanity and society going. And if you look at projections for humanity in the next 200 years, it doesn't look good. And ultimately, as a Christian, first and foremost, I am the ultimate humanist. I want to see human beings and more of them all over this planet, having more babies and families and all that good, wonderful stuff. So I think
that that's the thing we should focus on more than anything else. All right, head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where Andrew is going to answer your questions. After years of speaking with and debating people of opposing beliefs and values, what's After years of speaking with and debating people of opposing beliefs and values, what's something you've changed your mind on regarding your own beliefs and values as a result of
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