FULL INTERVIEW Senator Josh Hawley: Toxic Masculinity and Manhood
United States Senator Josh Hawley is talking to The Babylon Bee about true masculinity being something good and what it's like to be the moraliser, neo-Confederate, and Tucker Carlson of the U.S. Senate. He gets into what his new book Manhood is all about and also gets to fanboy over Teddy Roosevelt for a bit. Check out Senator Hawley's book Manhood: https://www.amazon.com/Manhood-America-Needs-Josh-Hawley/dp/168451357X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1689614438&sr=8-1
Well, I think what the left has told men for decades now is that to be a man is to be toxic, that to be a man is to, in and of itself, make the world a worse place.
And so, that therefore the best you can aspire to as a man is to be passive, is to be a consumer, you know, boot up your computer, sit in front of your screen, and maybe buy some stuff, look at some porn, do as you're told, and don't rock the boat.
That's kind of like the highest aspiration.
And I think men get that message all the time from basically every quarter now of our society where the left is in control, which is many of them, maybe most of them.
And I think that that message is totally, fundamentally, profoundly wrong.
And now it's time for another interview on the Babylon B podcast.
Well, hey, hey, everybody.
Thank you for tuning in.
We're about to do the interview show.
I'm Jarrett LeMaster, and this is Sam Greer with me.
And also on, we have Senator Josh Hawley.
We're very honored to have you.
Senator Hawley, thank you so much for tuning in.
Where are you calling from today?
Well, today I'm in Washington, D.C., but hopefully soon back home in Missouri where I'm from.
Springfield, Missouri is home for me.
I've been to Springfield.
Okay, awesome.
It's a great place.
Yeah, it is.
Everybody should come.
Everybody watching this comes up.
They got frozen custard there.
Yes, sir.
Andy's frozen custard.
Yeah.
It's awesome.
That's a really weird thing that they have there.
I don't know if you guys have ever been to Frozen Custard, but it's pretty great.
So good.
All right.
So, hey, we wanted to talk to you about your book today on manhood.
So you're a pretty manly person.
When I see you on the floor of the Senate or wherever you are, when you're talking to people, I'm like, now that's a man.
Oh, he's not talking to people.
He's torching people.
He's lighting them up.
It's awesome.
All right.
So the manhood review by, what was it, The Guardian?
Oh, was pretty bad.
Did you happen to see that?
No, I haven't.
Although I think pretty bad, probably that's a good label, I'm told, for all of the lefties' reviews who hate this book.
The review was like, it was like a poker game.
It was like a royal flush.
They hit every classic lefty misrepresentation.
They hit you with the racist, the bigot.
They just checked all the boxes.
Yeah, of course.
The review was entitled Josh Hawley, Moralizer, Neo-Confederate, and the Tucker Carlson of the U.S. Senate.
So first of all, our first question is, how dare you?
How dare you?
And the Tucker Carlson, that's a pretty high compliment.
I got to be honest.
Oh, did you pay him for the endorsement?
Yeah, that's right.
They meant that as the ultimate, that to them is the ultimate slam, right?
They're building up to that.
And the Tucker Carlson of the U.S. Senate.
So thank you.
I appreciate it.
Now, what inspired you to write this book?
I'm interested.
Well, I've got two little boys at home.
So I'm a father of three, two boys and a girl.
My boys now are 10 and 8.
And really, this book started as me thinking about as a dad, what are my responsibilities towards my boys as they are increasingly entering the world of men.
And as they're more susceptible as they get older now to the voices of popular media and entertainment industry and one day social media, they're off of that right now for as long as I can possibly manage.
But what is my obligation to help them become the men that they were meant to be?
And so the book really grew out of that.
It's dedicated to them.
I describe it as an open letter to my boys.
And so that's really what got me started on it.
Now, really quick, just as a little bit of background, where are you from?
Like, what's your experience with your father?
Did you have a great father figure?
Did that inspire this at all?
Like, how did you, what was your experience growing up as a man?
Yeah, I, well, I was blessed with a great family and a great dad.
So I grew up in a small town called Lexington, Missouri, which is in right smack in the middle of the state of Missouri.
When I say small town, I mean small.
I don't mean suburb.
It was about 4,500 people.
Oh, wow.
Still is.
Yeah.
So a lot of times people say small town, like a couple hundred thousand.
No, like 4,000.
An hour east of Kansas City, for those who know the geography of Missouri.
So right along the Missouri River, great little town.
That's where I grew up.
My dad was a small town banker, worked there.
My mother was a public school teacher until my sister and I came along and then she stayed home with us.
And so I got a younger sister as well.
And, you know, my parents did me the great good service of loving me and my sister.
They stayed together, which was awesome and amazing.
And they just were, you know, they were great parents.
And my dad, when I look back on it, the thing that really stands out to me now, and as a father myself now, is that what my dad really did is he.
He brought me into the things that he loved to do.
So he loved sports, so I played sports from an early age and he liked to hunt and so he taught me to hunt and we'd do that and he would just he would bring me into what he was doing.
You know he liked to grill.
I learned to grill from him, you know.
So it's just, it's just those little things that that, as I look back on it, really became touchstones in my life and I write about that.
Some of the book and for me as a dad, has helped give me a bit of a template, because I think well, let's not overcomplicate it, right?
I mean, for my boys, I want them to grow up to be good, strong men, and part of the way I know how to do that is I just try to bring them into what i'm doing, like my dad did for me.
So you're grateful your dad was so self-sacrificial towards the family.
Does even a small part of you wish that he had been more like Andrew Tate?
Um no i'm, I the uh, Andrew Tate.
Um, I write about this in the book.
Um and, and listen, I I was saying earlier that i'm i'm not a huge consumer of social media, so you know, with that caveat, but but i've read enough about Andrew Tate, I think, to have a sense of of his message and his appeal.
And I just think that, for I understand why some young guys in particular are drawn to him in a world in which you've got the left constantly telling men that to be a man is to be toxic, that all masculinity is cancerous and is a a parasite on society.
You know.
So I understand, in that context, why some men look at Andrew Tate and are like yeah, we want somebody who who just says yeah absolutely, being a man is toxic and we love it, we embrace it.
But I actually think that that ethic of self self self, all about me, all about what I want, all about my power.
You know that that's not the men in my life who I admire, who changed my life, that's not how they lived.
They lived in a way that was self-sacrificial, that was about giving themselves away to others, and I really think that, as men, that's what we're called to do.
You know it's interesting.
You kind of bring that up and I know you're a Christian as well bringing it like in the church.
You know John Eldridge wrote that book Um, Wild At Hard, Wild At Heart, a couple years ago and that swept the nation, you know, and i'm not against.
I'm not against all that.
I I actually think it's really good.
I love the idea of encouraging men to be adventurous, to go do hard things.
You know, to grow beards and you know whatever it is that that he was doing.
But my father and I we were never we liked all that stuff, but there's a sensitivity that my father had and a and kind of a quiet introversion Version, just of faithfulness and stuff.
And I always remember kind of seeing a conflict between that and some of the guys that you go to these men's conferences and things like that.
And you'd see all these guys that are hyper-masculine, you know, talking about, you know, their experience as a sniper, you know, and like, you know, and all that stuff.
And I'm okay with all that.
But at the same time, I think there's something else that masculinity that men bring to the table that is not just all that craziness and all that wildness and stuff.
There's a control.
There's a maturity that needs to happen.
And I don't think Eldridge would disagree with that, but I think that anyway, so I really appreciate that you're writing this.
And I love the response against the Andrew Tates of the world.
Not that I'm not comparing Eldridge to Andrew Tate.
I just, can I just make that clear?
John Eldridge's upcoming sequel to Wild at Heart, Top G at Heart.
Top G.
Well, similar with my dad, I grew up in a town of less than 10,000 in population, but he was a model of faithfulness and self-sacrifice.
And those things aren't flashing.
And also a hand model.
That's what you say.
And he was a mom.
And he was, well, he's still like helping keep together a church of under 30 people.
He's been worship leader there for 30 plus years and it's fluctuated.
It's, you know, been in the 200s, the 150s, the 50s, the 30s.
And just me watching, like, I was thinking about this Father's Day, me watching him just quietly serve.
It moved me fresh on Father's Day.
That's the inspiration.
We have generations of men that have done that.
Well, we are going to pivot this into a question.
We've got the conventional manliness, but we've also got, you know, the more centered manliness that you espouse.
So by either definition of manliness, we're going to lob you some names and we're just going to say who is more manly?
Riff, as you please.
Go ahead with question number one.
Okay.
Let's see.
Vladimir Putin or Andrew Tate.
Oh, I guess Andrew Tate between those two.
Are they all going to be this tough?
Yeah.
That one was hard.
All right.
Dylan Mulvaney or Rachel Levine?
I think maybe there's a category error there.
That was diplomatic, senatorial.
That was very good.
Okay.
RFK Jr. or Chris Christie?
Oh, RFK Jr.
Okay.
That's easy.
That's an easy one.
Karl Marx or Justin Trudeau?
Who is more manly?
Or the Dead.
Oh, geez.
Oh, well, Marks, you know, the beard.
So maybe, maybe that's a Trudeau strikes me as many things.
I don't know that I'd apply the adjective manly necessarily, but influential in a bad way.
Of course, the same is true for Marks.
I'll go with Marks just because of the beard.
Okay, that's a good answer.
I always thought Justin Trudeau is like, you know, pretty brave because he did that blackface thing.
Okay, but anyway, Theodore Roosevelt or Harry Truman.
Oh, oh, that's a good one there.
You know, Roosevelt, I think, is just, I got to go with Roosevelt.
Although I hold Harry Truman's seat, I'd like to say for the record, that's my Senate scene I now hold was Harry Truman's seat.
So great Missourian Harry Truman, but Roosevelt, he's just such a larger than life figure and a guy who, you know, was a sickly kid.
That's not a myth.
People often think, oh, that's all myth that he was sick as a kid.
And that's not a myth.
He was a really sickly kid.
They didn't think that he would live.
A doctor once told him when he was 18 that he probably wouldn't live much beyond his 20s.
And they told him to be quiet, not do anything strenuous.
Roosevelt, this is why I love this guy.
Roosevelt got that diagnosis.
And the first thing he did after that was go climb a mountain.
He's like, there's no way.
I'm just going to sit around and wait for my death.
And he was such a great figure in American history.
And you're like a Theodore Roosevelt enthusiast.
You're a Theodore Roosevelt scholar.
So bull moose party guy.
He got the assassination attempt and then kept on speaking for a long time.
And he stormed San Juan Hill all by himself.
Impressive stuff.
Yes, impressive.
Just on the speech, since you mentioned the speech, the assassination attempt, this is actually a great story.
Roosevelt, not a succinct speaker, a guy who could really get going, loved to hear himself talk.
So he had written out notes for his speech that he was giving that particular day, which was uncharacteristic of him, incidentally.
And he'd folded them up a whole bunch of times and put them into his coat pocket.
And the bullet hit him.
It was well aimed.
The bullet hit him, you know, right near his chest.
But what part of what stopped the bullet and stopped it from penetrating further was the thickness of his speech.
So it actually saved him.
Yeah.
So he had saved his life.
Yeah.
Like senators might default to filibustering.
If you've got that gift of loquaciousness, it might save you.
The only time it ever has saved somebody's life.
That's amazing.
It's like the Bible.
Isn't there a Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain story like that where it shot his Bible?
Yeah, I've heard the Bible.
Yeah.
No, that's a very interesting idea.
And you got to think about the velocity of these bullets again.
I mean, like, I'm thinking about this scientifically.
Like, how would you, like, first of all, how fast are those musket balls going?
And was it a musket ball?
Like, what hit him?
It's fascinating.
Instead of Kevlar, everyone should just have Bibles.
It must have a whole bunch of giddy.
Yeah, that's funny.
Oh, my goodness.
It hit him, you know, to be clear.
And what the speech is, it slowed it down.
It actually, it penetrated the flesh and it went fairly deep.
And he was, but the other thing, guys, will us is that on the other side of the ledger, he probably would not have been nearly as badly wounded had he stopped speaking.
But Roosevelt, you know, he's hit.
He looks down and sees that he's bleeding.
And for him, this is like a moment of glory.
So he says to the crowd, he actually opens his coat so that they can all see his bloody shirt.
And he says, friends, you know, I'm hit, but I must go on.
And he continues to speak for like another 25 minutes.
And then he basically faints.
You know, they take him down off of the stage.
You know, he's thinking he's going to go out in a blaze of glory, but he lived.
He lost the presidential life.
Where have all the cowboys gone?
Oh, so true.
That's amazing.
How we'll hang out on TR for a second.
How trumpy is TR, in your opinion?
Well, he, you know, in terms of a guy who has a pulse on the public and knew how to knew the value of how to create an image, how to capture the imagination.
I mean, very trumpy in that sense.
You know, and he, and he was regarded.
He was, um, he would not have liked TR would not have liked the label populist because that meant something very specific in his day.
William Jennings Bryan and the populist party that TR was against.
But truthfully, he had a very populist persona.
He was a larger-than-life figure and he was reviled, reviled, Roosevelt was, by the cultural elites of his day, all of whom, of course, he had gone to school with.
I mean, Roosevelt was born to great wealth.
I mean, one of the really richest families in America at the time.
And all of his neighbors, many of his childhood compatriots, he went to Harvard.
You know, they all came to really despise him because they thought that he was way, way, way too populist, way too interested in working people and way too hostile to the corporations.
So sounds like a pretty good guy to me.
Sounds familiar.
Yeah, Trustbuster.
And the TR story that comes to mind has all the earmarks of being apocryphal, but it's that the printers of his book on the Spanish-American War had all the I's wore out the letter I because he was inserting himself as like, and then I stormed the hill.
And then I, I don't know.
He's, he, he had that like, he had a good sense of publicity.
That also sounds like Donald Trump.
Yeah.
Well, here's a true story, though, about Roosevelt and the first person.
So it was one of the New York newspapers.
I can't remember if it was the New York World, but, you know, this is the day of newspapers in America, the broadsheets.
So, I can't remember which New York paper it was, but one of them during his presidency, his administrations, kept a running tally at the top banner of the paper of how many times Theodore Roosevelt had used the word I in speeches.
So, it was like a everyday update.
It was always there.
You know, it's what's the weather?
That's funny.
How often has TR said I this year?
You know, yeah, it's great.
That's satire right there.
Yeah.
You know, that's really interesting.
That's really good.
That's the Babylon B of the day.
Um, we have a go ahead.
We have a loaded question.
This one, okay.
This will be you're on the record here.
We're still on who is more manly.
Okay.
So, Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis.
I see what you're doing there.
I see what you're doing there.
Well, you know, I tell you what, I haven't endorsed anybody in this presidential race.
So, maybe we should just do it now.
We should just leave it at that.
Both young men.
I thought you were going to just do it right now.
That's what I was.
Yeah.
Ill advised.
Don't do it.
No, this is not the place.
No, I was going to say, hey, you have a lot of historical heroes.
It's like from just talking to you, who are your biggest historical heroes and influences?
Who do you want to be like when you grow up?
I mean, like, you are a senator already.
You're an author.
Obviously, you are a well-accomplished person and highly intelligent.
You know, you've got a lot of education.
You got kids.
You got everything.
What are you hoping?
Where do you want to be in 10 years?
Like, what, like, who are your people that you look up to?
And I know there's a lot of questions in there, but like, I caught two main ones.
Yeah.
What's next?
Who are your heroes?
Who are your heroes and where are you going?
Well, heroes, if we could talk about heroes from American history and just kind of going chronologically, George Washington, you know, I've always admired as a guy who, to me, if you take George Washington out of the American Revolution, we don't have a country.
Even after the Revolution, if Washington isn't our first president, we don't have a country.
I'm fully convinced the country would have fallen apart.
He held it together and he did it by the force of his character.
You know, for some leaders, it was the force of their words.
Jefferson, it was the force of his rhetoric.
But for Washington, it was his character, not even like sheer force of personality, although he did have a strong personality.
It was character.
Men looked at him, men and women, looked at him and said, This is a man of integrity.
This is someone I will follow.
And I just think that, you know, he captured my imagination at a young age, thinking that, boy, I want to be a man of integrity, a man of character, as Washington is.
And I think of that in the context of this book, because really the thesis of the book, to boil it down, is the journey of manhood is a journey to character.
What's it ultimately mean to be a man in the way the Bible calls us to be men?
It is to be men of character, a person of character.
So I think Washington embodies that.
Roosevelt, we've talked about Theodore Roosevelt, huge, huge hero mine in American history.
If we talk about other kinds of heroes, the ultimate one for me is Jesus Christ, no question.
And you asked about where do I want to be in 10 years?
Well, I hope to be following Jesus.
I mean, to me, that's, you want to talk about the greatest adventure of your life, the greatest adventure of your life is following the Lord.
If you do that, there is no telling where he will take you.
I mean, it's just, I say this to my boys all the time.
This is the adventure of your life: follow the Lord.
He will take you places that you never dreamed of going.
He will put you in adventures you never dreamed of having.
And it will be the most incredible experience.
And it'll matter.
I mean, you want to leave a legacy, follow the Lord, be obedient to him, be faithful.
So, you know, what will I be doing in 10 years?
I have no idea, but I hope to be following Jesus.
And I hope that my boys and my little girl are following the Lord.
And I hope that my wife and I are having a great adventure together doing that.
Let's just, that's my favorite.
That's my favorite thing that you've said.
And I have the same thing.
That's all I care about.
All I want to do is be obedient to Jesus.
But I want to know how, how did you come to faith?
Like, my, what's your story there?
What's your testimony?
Yeah.
So, both of my parents are believers, which is amazing.
So, they were faithful to teach me about the Lord from a young age.
So, I'm one of those people that has the tremendous, tremendous blessing of not remembering a time where I didn't know about Jesus.
So, and really, my mother, both my parents were good to do it, but my mother really teaching my sister and me the scripture, reading it to us from an early age.
When I was five, I remember sitting on my dad's lap and praying to accept Jesus in my heart.
When I was 12, I made a more mature and public confession of faith in a church setting.
But really, you know, my testimony is knowing about the Lord, choosing to follow the Lord, and then growing into that, you know, at those different stages in life, going off to college.
You know, you go to college, you got to make choice.
And I went, I went a long way from home for college.
I didn't know anybody.
So, it was really one of those situations: like, hey, you can do whatever you want now.
I mean, are you going to are you going to keep following the Lord?
You're going to make Christian friends?
You're going to find a church?
Are you just going to go do what pleases you in the moment?
And so, that was that was a decision point.
And just trying to grow in the knowledge of the Lord, grow in the love of the Lord, be responsive to his call in my life.
So, that's that's kind of my story.
And then, marrying a woman who loves the Lord, loves the Lord with all of her heart and going on that adventure together.
That's what we've been doing for the last 13 years now.
Everything's amazing.
Every time you speak, I think, uh, let's take up a collection, get the organ going.
This is a like a sermon.
I was, I was talking to my wife yesterday as I was cranking through the manhood book, uh, the audio section where you were, I was reading the audio book.
I still count it.
So, you call that reading?
Uh, well, it doesn't count.
Yeah, that's iffy.
It's iffy.
When the section where you were describing how meeting your wife, it made you feel like home.
I turned to my lovely wife, Nikki, and I said, That's so true.
Like, it makes you feel like you're when you meet the one and you've got the unified mission, it suddenly feels comfortable in a way that other relationships don't.
That was just a very sweet section where you meet your wife.
Oh, appreciate that.
That's great.
For me, it was one of those things, since you mentioned it.
I mean, various people have asked me about this.
What was like when you met Aaron?
When did you know Erin's my wife?
When did you know that you wanted to marry her?
And I said, You know, it was definitely, I mean, excitement and, you know, butterflies and all of that stuff.
But what really for me, when I knew, like, hey, I think that this is the woman that I want to ask to marry me if she'll have me, is just seeing her heart and really in particular, her heart for the Lord.
And just when we were together, it was like I try to describe in the book, it was like coming home for the holidays when your whole family is there and you're like, oh, wow, I am home.
This is amazing.
You know, like, there's no place else I'd rather be.
When I was with Aaron, it was like, there's no place else I'd rather be.
I wasn't thinking about other things.
I wasn't thinking about, you know, oh, I'm excited to do this in a week.
It was like, no, there's nothing else I'd rather be doing than be right here with her.
And that's how I knew.
Man, that's great.
You know, I love this about Sam too.
I have that kind of marriage as well.
Both of those, both of our stories are very similar.
And we love our wives.
We're doing this whole thing together, conquering the world together.
It's a lot of fun just being obedient to the Lord.
And I always tell people this, young people that are looking for the right person, it's like, just find somebody that's obedient to Christ too.
Like that's if you're a Christian.
Find someone that's willing to be obedient to the Holy Spirit, even when it's embarrassing, even when it hurts, and then you'll be fine.
All those other things that work.
And you guys met when y'all were working in the Supreme Court administrative offices.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
We were clerks.
And so that's a role for law school grads.
And it's a one-year stint.
Each justice of the court, nine justices.
Each justice has four clerks who come on for a year and help him or her, the justice, with their opinions, research.
It is a great job for recent law school, Grad.
I mean, it's so much fun.
You learn so much.
You get to hear all of the arguments.
You get to work on the opinion writing.
It was fantastic.
So, Aaron and I were co-clerks.
We clerked at the same time and we just happened to start on the same day.
And the chief justice for whom we worked, he assigned us the same office.
So we shared an office.
So I like to say, you know, only half joking, that I wore her down over time.
Over time, she's finally like, okay, yes, I'll go out with you.
Most of us do.
Most of us marry up.
That's like a romantic comedy.
Yeah.
You hate each other at the beginning.
Yeah.
Anyway, I could write this out.
It would be a great story.
Anyway, do you have any funny Supreme Court justice stories?
Oh, let's see here.
I have Supreme Court justice stories.
I have funny ones.
I was around when Justice Scalia was still on the court, and Justice Scalia was a legitimately funny guy.
I mean, talk about a larger-than-life figure.
I mean, truly larger than life.
And I remember one time in particular that he came off the bench, and there was an attorney from the government, the U.S. government, who had argued before the court so many different times.
And this was that particular day happened to be his 100th argument before the U.S. Supreme Court, which is a lot.
I mean, that's an incredible number.
But Scalia came off the bench, and I remember he said to one of his clerks really loud, he said, Who was that bearded guy?
And why was he so unprepared?
And the clerk said, Justice Scalia, that's so-and-so.
This is the 100th time that you've seen him.
And Scalia was like, No, I've never seen that guy before in my life.
So, yeah, for all those young attorneys out there with delusions of grandeur, oh, the Supreme Court, I'm going to go argue.
And, you know, it's like, they don't remember that.
They don't know.
They don't know you.
Oh, that's amazing.
Hey, we have one more comparison.
Who's manly?
Okay.
Jarrett LeMaster or Sam Greer.
You have to pose for him.
Wait, who's the first one?
Jarrett Lamaster.
That's my name.
Sorry.
Oh, and it's like, yeah, you're like, I've never heard.
Okay, so here's okay.
So now, but here's my confession: is that I'm looking into a camera right now.
This is how I'm going to get out of it.
And I can't see you.
So I'm just, yeah, you can see me, but I can't see you.
So manliness is something you can tell by seeing is what you're saying.
Okay, I get it.
I get it.
That's cool.
Well, Jarrett most recently beat me in a wrestling match.
So I guess for now.
What kind of wrestling was it, though?
We were just light business office wrestling.
Okay.
Oh, I got you.
Yeah.
Jared's the type who can slip you into an arm bar and he didn't even see it coming.
Yeah, no, he is.
Anyway, Sam's being nice.
Anyway, all right, so let's move on.
What are the roles that God designed men to fill?
That's like, according to this book, according to what you believe, what are the roles that God designed us for?
Husband and father.
He calls each of us, I think, even if we're not yet husbands or fathers, he calls us to acquire the character of a husband of a father, warrior and builder, priest and king.
And I think as you look at the story of the Bible, which is really, that's what this book is, by the way, it's not complicated.
There was one reviewer, I'm told, I don't read any of the reviews, but there was one reviewer my team tells me who said, like, the book is really impossible to follow.
Like, there's no, you know, there's no storyline to it at all.
And I'm like, let me explain this to you.
It just follows the Bible.
There.
That is easy.
You know, it's very simple.
It's just chronological.
So if you look at the story of the Bible, as you start with Adam and you go up to Solomon, which is really what I go to, how I go through this, the timeline, and look at the different men, I think you see those roles emerge: husband, father, warrior builder, priest, and king.
And those are different qualities of character, I think, that the Lord calls us into as men.
So not court jester.
Because that wasn't on there.
I feel like the B is sort of that.
We're the guys standing on the sidelines laughing at everybody.
Thus jesters do oft prove prophets.
Yes, yes.
Satire often rhymes with the truth.
Like we do a joke, but it triggers the truth in people's minds.
That's a prophetic service.
I was struck.
As the book unfolded, at how it did maintain just a trudge through the Bible um, but with one singular developing, evolving argument.
When the first chapter was in the beginning and you launched in with early Genesis, I thought this is a wonderful launch pad.
I wonder where we'll go.
But then you didn't skip a chapter all the way through, like most of the Old Testament.
I thought wow he, he sustained the Bible as his, his singular source of argument.
It reminded me of how Jordan Peterson uses the Bible um, but within, with a twist, because we recently gently roasted Jordan Peterson with a headline that was, uh yes, Jordan Peterson uh, says that the bible meet.
Jordan Peterson argues for the Bible to mean anything other than what it says.
But we were gently roasting him because he will use it as a launch pad to talk about deeper myth and lobsters.
And you know what have you with you?
You did really like state the Bible story but then turn it into a broader, broadly applicable principle.
Yeah yeah, here's the thing that I think that we, that we see in the Bible, why it's so foundational and fundamental, is that it really reveals to us who we are as people, men and women.
The book is about men, so I, I zero in on God's call to men and that's why I start in Genesis and when I was writing this book.
Guys, the way this came about is, if you're going to write about something like manhood and you're going to say well I, I think to be a man, it means this, this and this immediately, naturally people are going to say, oh well, according to whom you know, according to you, according to what?
To history, to psychologists, to to whom?
So you have to ground it somewhere.
And, as I was thinking early on okay, how do I ground this?
For me, as a Christian, there just is no other place.
I mean it's, it's what I believe I, it's what shaped our culture, our history.
It is the Bible.
So that's why I go back to the Bible, all the way back to the book of Genesis, and look at God's call there to Adam as a man, the unique assignment that God gives to Adam as a man and really, through Adam, gives to all men.
And I can, I can distill that just like this.
It's, it's a.
It's a great story, but it's a simple one.
God calls men to expand the Garden of Eden into the wilderness.
I mean that's, that's the picture God creates a world.
He calls it good.
In the center of the world, he creates a garden.
He puts Adam and Eve in it and he says to Adam, among other things, you're supposed to care for this, keep it, tend it, cultivate it.
It carries the note of expand it, you know.
So, out there in the rest of the world, where it's wilderness and not garden, you're supposed to turn that into garden, I think, as men.
What does that mean for our lives?
It means Go has called us to bring order from chaos, to cultivate gardens in the wilderness, to be the ones who go to the frontier and push forward the boundaries of culture and civilization and create space for our families.
But let's not overcomplicate It.
At the end of the day, it's really to make a space for God that honors God, that brings his witness, his power, his presence into the world.
Yeah, that's a really good theology of work.
And it's funny how, I mean, work was something that was given to us before the fall, and it does carry over into the period that we're in now.
Organizing, you know, going to a place, organizing, redesigning, remodeling.
Like, I mean, all those things that you look at, you look at an old thing and you want to make it new.
I think as a man, women do it too, cultivating the garden.
I mean, all that stuff's super important.
Fresh cut lawn.
Yeah, that stuff, I really do think it's godly.
I do.
I think building things and creating things and writing jokes and writing books.
My old Bible study leader, Paul Twiss, would always say, you're being an image bearer when you bring order out of chaos.
And it's a common grace that even an unbeliever could partake in.
If you walk by trash in the church parking lot, bend over and pick it up.
You're bringing order out of chaos.
And I think of it, I think of it often.
That's good.
I like that.
Hey, so what is the, what are the biggest threats, do you think, in America today to this concept of this good concept of manhood?
Where do you see the biggest threats coming from?
Well, I think what the left has told men for decades now is that to be a man is to be toxic, that to be a man is to, in and of itself, make the world a worse place.
And so that therefore the best you can aspire to as a man is to be passive, is to be a consumer, you know, boot up your computer, sit in front of your screen, and maybe buy some stuff, look at some porn, do as you're told, and don't rock the boat.
That's kind of like the highest aspiration.
And I think men get that message all the time from basically every quarter now of our society where the left is in control, which is many of them, maybe most of them.
And I think that that message is totally, fundamentally, profoundly wrong, dangerously wrong.
And I think we're seeing the effects.
You know, more men than ever are lonely, are depressed, are out of work, are suicidal.
And one of the big reasons for this, I think, maybe the primary reason is total lack of purpose and sense of meaning in their life.
And I just think that that is a plague on American men.
And I'm just trying to do my small part to say, no, actually, your life has meaning.
Your life has purpose.
There's a destiny on your life and you need to live into that.
That's really good.
I was going to ask how we was going to point at the hat, but it disappeared.
We used to have a hat make satire great again.
It was a red hat modeled after the MAGA.
How do we make America manly again?
Mama.
Mama.
Well, how do we mammogram the country?
That may be a different question, but in terms of how to make it manly again, I think the single word answer there is fathers.
You know, I think we are in a crisis of fatherhood in the country, epidemic of it.
I mean, you just look at the numbers, the numbers tell the tale.
We've got more kids who are growing up without a father president in the home than almost any other nation, certainly any other so-called industrialized nation in the world.
I mean, they're just off the charts.
The numbers are off the charts in the United States.
This cuts across demographic groups.
It cuts across geography.
To a certain extent, it cuts across income.
So we've got a major crisis of fatherlessness in this nation.
And I think the answer is: you know, how do you make boys into men?
Fathers.
And that doesn't always have to be your biological father.
I tell the story in the book about coaches, mentors in my life, pastors.
So I would just say to the men out there, hey, if you want to have some meaning in your life, you want to leave a legacy, become a husband, become a father.
If you don't, if you're not right now a biological dad, you don't have kids of your own, doesn't mean you can't father.
You can invest in other people.
You can invest in, you know, if you're an older guy, you can invest in younger men, mentor them, coach them.
That's what people did for me.
But I think that is the answer here.
And if that doesn't happen, then no government program, however important or well-designed, is going to solve that.
Nothing will substitute for fathers in this country.
So embracing the adventure of fatherhood and husbandhood, that's a good concrete answer.
Husbandry.
Husbandry.
I've got kind of a left field question.
That's also like a sideways compliment to Jarrett.
So there's an adjacent book, It's Good to Be a Man by Michael Foster.
I read it around about a year or two ago, and it had, it hit a lot of the same points as your book.
It comes out of like the Northern Idaho Moscow ecosystem.
But the surprise for me was that it mentioned Gravitas as a mark of manhood.
And it's funny.
I'm director of marketing at the Masters University, a small private Christian school here in Southern California.
And our director of communications lobbed me a question yesterday.
He said, man, that Jarrett guy, can we use him for an upcoming project?
And who knows if that'll come to fruition?
But it was, he said he had a real presence to him.
I thought he was just like really high up.
And I was like, well, he is.
He's our main sketch producer.
But here's my question.
The ability to shift the weight of a room when you enter it.
That's how Michael Foster defines gravitas.
Can that be learned, in your opinion, that more like misty element of manhood?
Yeah, no, I think it can be.
Maybe learned is the wrong verb.
Maybe it can be acquired.
I think it can be.
And I think that's a product of character.
I mean, we all know men who are naturally very magnetic, have magnetic personalities.
And so they can come in and take over a room, so to speak.
And, you know, in politics, I see that a lot.
But a lot of the time, that is very, that's a very surface level quality, you know?
So it's like, okay, yeah, sure.
So that guy immediately comes in and inserts himself in the middle of things.
But is there any stink?
Does that make me want to follow him?
No.
Does that make me respect him?
No.
Maybe I, maybe I enjoy him.
Maybe I think he's funny.
Maybe he can hold a room.
But, you know, does that, do I want to somehow connect my life to his?
No.
I think gravitas is something different.
I mean, that's character.
That's when you see somebody, whether they're loud or quiet, whether they're flashy or plain, you say, hold on, he's got something.
Like I look at his life and I say, man, I want to be like that.
I listen to him talk and I think, wow, there's real wisdom.
I want to learn from him.
So I think that's something that every man should aspire to.
And we do that by acquiring character.
I mean, we do that by doing the hard things in life, by living sacrificially and by looking for mentors.
I mean, this is something else that I think men don't get this advice enough.
It's great to go find mentors, you know, especially for guys who their fathers were not great presences in their life or were not there at all.
Hey, you know, you can go out and find a spiritual father, a moral father, someone who can be a life coach.
And I don't mean that in the weird internet kind of way, but I mean somebody real who you know in your life is like, hey, that's a good guy.
I want to learn from him.
Can I get coffee with you?
We can all aspire to be like that, to be men who others will come to.
I think that gravitas is really, to come full circle here is really a matter of character.
And that's, and that's different than I think what the manosphere would preach.
I know I gained the ability to really shift the weight in a room when I gained 60 pounds.
Ah, ah.
Anyway, so anyways, is how you know you've made a great joke when that's the transition.
Well, no, that's funny.
I do think this character thing is important.
I'm a person who collects mentors.
I collect them and put them and put them.
You collect them like chess pieces.
I do.
I do, actually.
I put them in categories.
And I try to find the people that I know that are good at things or people that I see that are, that guy has great integrity.
This guy has a real understanding of scripture.
This guy is really good at barbecue.
And so, you know what I mean?
Can you mentor me in barbecue?
You know, like, can you do that?
And so, I kind of have a tendency to look for mentors.
And, and, but for people that are speaking into my life, I always look for people that, again, it's like looking for a spouse.
You look for people that have been obedient to the point where they have a limp, you know, to the Lord.
You know what I mean?
Like, I'm looking for people that are limping around because God made them limp.
He touched their hips.
They've wrestled with God.
I know that is important to me.
Oh, my goodness.
Well, can I just jump in there?
Because I think that the way I would, I would label that is the virtue, the quality of humility.
And I think that that is so important because, you know, it's hard to trust somebody, particularly a mentor, if it's like, well, there doesn't look like there's ever been a point in his life where he encountered real hardship and where he had to say, man, this humbled me.
You know, so I think that quality of humility, somebody who's like, hey, I don't trust in myself.
I trust the Lord.
I don't want to draw you to myself.
I want to draw you to the Lord.
That to me is, that's what I'm looking for whenever I look for a mentor.
And I'm the same.
I collect mentors everywhere I go.
I try to find, I try to find mentors and in different fields.
If I see somebody, it's like, man, I admire how he does that.
I'll just reach out to him.
Like, hey, can I talk to you?
Can I learn from you?
But humility is so key.
If you see somebody's like, oh, yeah, I got it all together.
Let me tell you how to do it.
To me, that's really off-putting because it's like, well, I know that's not true in my life.
I don't have it all together.
So if you think you do, I probably, I don't know if I can learn from you.
Can you go ahead?
I was going to follow up.
Wow.
Thank you.
You see, you have so much humility.
Sam, can you teach me that?
No, I do.
I do.
I do think, have you ever had those moments?
I'm interested for, and for our listeners too, have you had any of those moments where you feel like you got humbled?
You had the dark night of the soul.
You feel like you really had to wrestle through stuff with God.
What are those experiences for you?
Just for kind of our listeners.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I've had a bunch of them, but I'll run through a few.
One of them, I tell the story in the book when I was 23, I lost my best friend.
He committed suicide.
And, you know, that for me was, it was totally shock.
I mean, it was not one of those situations where it was like, you know, in any way, saw it coming.
He was a believer.
Thank the Lord.
So I look forward to it.
I know I'm going to see him again one day.
And that gives me tremendous hope.
But that was as a 23-year-old, you know, you think, oh, the world is great.
All my life before me.
Everything is wonderful.
And then, you know, your best friend, we've been friends since we were 14, puts a gun to his head.
It's like, ah, wait a minute.
And somebody who loves the Lord too, by the way, genuinely, deeply loved the Lord.
How does this happen?
And, you know, what does this mean?
That for me was a real inflection point in my faith.
Thinking about, you know, the recriminations that go with that, like, gosh, I should have been there for him.
You know, I wasn't, I wasn't a good enough friend.
I wasn't, you know, I was actually overseas when much of this happened, right up in the lead up to when he took his own life.
And I look back on that, I was like, I was, you know, I was too distant.
So that kind of stuff.
I've had those experiences as a husband and father, you know, where as a husband, where I'm like, man, I can't believe I just did this or just said this to my wife.
I vowed when I got married, I would never do this.
You know, I would never talk to her that way.
I would never, I would never do something like that.
And then it's like, wow.
And here I am.
I tell a story in the book about one time I'm arguing with my wife and my boys were really, really little at this point, maybe, I don't know, maybe three and five.
And I'm arguing with her.
I don't remember now about what, which shows you how important it was.
But I do remember thinking at the time, like, I'm really winning this argument.
You know, it's going great for me.
Always a warning sign.
All the husbands know where this is going.
And so I'm in there.
I'm really like, I'm really making my point, whatever it was.
And I see out of the corner of my eye some movement in the room, and I look over.
It's my two boys who have heard us arguing and have come in to watch, and their eyes just wide as saucers and their mouths just open.
And I, if you know, you talk about conviction, I stopped instantly and just saw in a moment, what an idiot.
First of all, treating your wife like this.
Secondly, this is what you want to model for your boys.
And for me, that was a moment where I'm like, man, is this the kind of father I'm going to be?
Where what they take away is dad could never be wrong.
Dad could never admit a mistake.
Dad would browbeat anybody who disagrees with him.
You know, and it really made me think, like, what am I doing here?
You know, what am I doing with my marriage?
What am I doing with these boys?
Like, what am I modeling?
So, you know, there have been experiences like that as a husband, as a father, that are profound challenges because I think being a husband and a father really exposes your character.
At least for me, it made me realize how incredibly selfish I really am.
Yeah.
You think, oh, I'm a pretty giving person.
And then you get married.
It's like, no, not at all.
Actually, you're really selfish.
I'm a real jerk.
Yeah.
Another that's what I figured out.
Another dark night of the soul moment that I remember from the book was that harrowing ordeal with your son.
I think it was Elijah and his hip that was looking like it was going to deteriorate.
And then, praise God, he's now playing soccer happily.
Or as of the publication of the book's time, can you tell us about how that brought you and your wife closer together?
Yeah, absolutely.
So this is when Elijah, this is a few years ago.
Elijah, we noticed, was limping.
Actually, I was, I had this tradition of taking my boys to eat donuts on Saturday mornings.
So I had him out to go do that.
And we're waiting in line.
And I'm holding his younger brother, Blaze.
And Elijah is in front of me.
And he is, he's limping, I noticed.
And I didn't think a whole lot of it right at the time because I thought, well, my kids are very active, very, very active.
So I thought, oh, you know, whatever, gotten in a wrestling match with his brother.
But I did mention it to my wife, who being wiser, said, Well, I think maybe I'm going to call a pediatrician.
Long story short, we take him in.
The pediatrician says, I think we have a real problem here.
And the initial diagnosis from we then, you know, saw a cascade of specialists and parents out there can relate to this, you know, what a nightmare it becomes.
But the initial diagnosis was really bad.
It was that he had a degenerative condition.
We thought at first in all of his joints.
And so, you know, they're like, well, it's, it's, you know, it's this hip now, but it's going to be the other hip, probably in his, his, his arms, um, you know, his shoulder sockets.
Um, I was like, oh, what are the implications of this?
And like, well, you know, he may be in a wheelchair as he gets older and it's it's degenerative, you know, over time.
I mean, terrible.
It ended up that he had that the condition was localized to one hip, praise the Lord.
So that was the first moment of Thanksgiving, a real breakthrough.
And the hip was deteriorating and it and it did degenerate, but then it regenerated and it did that in such a timely fashion that it synced up with the other hip and he kept growing.
And now he is basically 99% in that hip.
So, but your question was really what effect did it have on us?
For me as a dad and as a husband, it was a major gut check moment where we had to face the possibilities there.
And for my wife and me, it was getting onto the same page and thinking about, okay, what is the Lord's promise for us and over our kids' lives?
He does not promise us that we will never have hardship.
He does not promise us that everything is going to be smooth sailing.
And no, what he promises is he will be with us, that he will deliver us, that he will use every circumstance for good in some way, however terrible the circumstance.
And so there was a period of months there where it was, you know, we were praying harder than we've ever prayed.
We were just trying to trust the Lord, but it was a real crucible for us as a family and for my wife and me together as husband and wife to really say, we're going to trust the Lord in this.
We're going to anchor down in to the Lord.
We're going to trust each other.
I mean, we're going to really come together in this and do this together and face this prospect together.
And, you know, praise be the Lord.
I mean, like I said today, he's playing soccer and swimming and running and doing great.
Both Jarrett and I are officially misty-eyed.
So I'm going to do a hard pivot to get us angry for a second.
Oh, yeah.
Because that's touching.
So let's real quick talk about your prior book.
The tyranny of big tech is a double whammy in that the book in itself is obviously more than stimulating.
But the story around it, it's like you got a two-for-one deal.
The story around the book's cancellation and then the book's content.
You got a bunch of free press from Simon and Schuster pulling the plug.
Well, actually, I don't want them to sue us for defamation.
So we'll hide the name.
Byman and Booster.
So they pulled the plug on your book and they said it was because of your no vote for certifying the election results in 2020.
Can you speak about what your vote meant and how it's not unusual for Republicans or Democrats to vote no on certifying an election?
That there was recent precedent and that the pulling of your book was political.
Can you comment on that?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Totally.
Well, first of all, as to, I just want to thank Simon and Schuster for canceling the book and attempting to cancel me because it made it a New York Times bestseller and it was fantastic.
So thank you so much.
And the attempts to, I always say that you can really only be canceled if you agree to be canceled.
I mean, you guys know that.
They've tried to cancel you so many times.
Like if you submit, you say, oh, I'm so sorry.
Okay.
Well, they might have a chance.
But if you just say no, like I'm not going to be canceled, I'm going to keep whatever I've said that I believe in that's got me in trouble.
I'm going to keep on saying it and I'm going to keep on going.
Then I think that the bullies, because that's really what it is, it's an authoritarian impulse on the left that it just, it doesn't work if you won't submit to it.
And so that was the story of this book and the Lord really blessed it.
As to the circumstances leading up to it, yeah.
So I, you know, I famously, I guess, I suppose, objected to the certification of Pennsylvania in particular.
The way that the electoral college certification works in Congress, I came to learn, was that it goes state by state and any member of the House of Representatives and any member of the Senate can lodge an objection on whatever grounds to the electoral votes state by state.
So I objected to the state of Pennsylvania, which I said weeks in advance I was going to do.
And what I said was that, listen, Pennsylvania changed their rules about voting in the middle of the vote.
They didn't follow their own state law.
And they changed what absentee ballots could be counted.
They changed what the rules were for counting.
They did a mail-in voting thing that is not permitted under their own state constitution.
So to me, that's just lawless.
And their own courts wouldn't review it.
So it's one of these deals where there's no place to review this.
There's no place to get any justice.
The only avenue was to raise an objection on the floor of the Senate.
And as to the precedent, yeah, Democrats had objected to electoral votes from particular states in the year 2000, in the year 2004, in the year 2016.
You might be asking yourself, what's the common pattern?
Well, it's every time a Republican won.
So every time a Republican won, Democrats raised objections, which under the law, they're entitled to do.
So I said, I'm going to do the same.
I did it for Pennsylvania.
The riot broke out and they cleared the chamber and there are all those hours while they were trying to clear the Capitol and so forth.
I think what really, really ticked off the left is even after that, I went right back into the chamber and I filed my objection.
And just in the sequence, I had to object after we'd already had the Capitol issue and the riot at the Capitol and the people in the Capitol and out and so on.
I did that afterwards.
And that really, the left, I was just, they couldn't believe it.
They were like, don't you learn your lesson?
You know, you need to admit that you caused the riot.
And I'm like, that's not true.
Number one, number two, I said I was going to object.
I'm objecting on principle and I'm going to do it.
And you can disagree with me.
It's fine.
But this is the place for these concerns to be heard.
So I did that.
And then the next day, Simon eschuster, literally the next day, Simon and Schuster said, That's it.
We're canceling our book because of your disturbing attack on our democracy.
And I was like, what?
For doing what Democrat, multiple Democrat members of Congress have done in every single election of the last 20 years that a Republican has won?
I mean, the hypocrisy was unbelievable.
But again, thank you.
It worked out great.
Do you get any responses from people when you say that kind of stuff from the left?
You're like, look, you guys did this.
You know, what do they say?
Oh, they always tried to deny it.
They can't deny it because, you know, I could, I could read you the list of people, many of whom are still members of Congress.
You know, you got some people who have objected over the years who were when they were Democrats in the House and they're now members of the Senate.
And these are the people who were denouncing me and saying this is unprecedented.
And I'm like, wait a minute, you objected multiple times.
So what they try to do is change, they say, well, well, well, but this was different because Trump, you know, they usually just Trump.
Yeah, Trump.
Trump makes it different.
I'm like, oh, so, you know, if it's a Democrat who's president, it's fine.
If it's a Republican who wins, it's okay to challenge it.
But if it's a Democrat in the White House or a Democrat who has won the election results that you're challenging, then no, you can't do that.
I mean, that's just, it's any rational people on the left.
I mean, you know what I'm saying?
Like, why do they feel like this is okay?
They know they're doing this.
They know that this is a double standard.
Why don't they, you know, who's out there that you can point at and say, you know, that guy's got it together?
Well, I will say this: that I think what's telling is if you look at the Democrats in the Senate in the aftermath of my objection, what a lot of them, I think actually most of them did is they just said nothing.
They did not criticize.
And, you know, saying nothing is not necessarily a profile encourage.
But I think in this instance, when a lot of their party and the media was just screaming and saying that this was some of this was a criminal act, for heaven's sake.
How dare you?
How dare you object?
How dare you, you know, follow the law that allows you to do this?
How dare you do anything?
I was struck by a number of my Democrat colleagues refused to criticize, refused to join that bandwagon.
And I think it's because they knew.
They were like, hey, listen, you know, we've done this.
This is this is if you have a problem with electoral votes, this is the place you register the objections.
The law provides for the law provides for debate in Congress.
That's what the law says.
That's why we have it.
Objecting on principle.
I think they know that.
Yeah, objecting on principle was the word you used.
It's like Mr. Hawley goes to Washington.
You were the loan from a small town.
All this graft.
I'm going to filibuster.
From Springfield, Missouri.
Well, and then profiles and courage.
It's like profiles and quietude.
You're right.
The Democrats who didn't raise.
It took moral courage for them to stay quiet.
And they're not allowed to contradict the party.
Like, I think that's the other thing with the DNC.
It seems like you're not allowed to say anything against the leadership.
So, well, you made an appearance in the intro to Tucker Carlson's The Long Slide, where he recounted the drama around the book publishing and then his own conversations with Simon and Schuster executives.
And in that, he said, Man, I may be naive because I knew that overall news media was long gone, but I thought publishers were still a bastion for free speech.
So our question to you is this: when the publisher reacted that way, do you think it bodes well for free speech in publishing in, you know, in a country where the publishers react that way over someone who votes in a way they don't like?
How do you think that bodes for our future?
Badly.
I mean, it bodes very badly and it bodes terribly for free speech, and where you can be intimidated by an online mob and immediately, immediately bend the knee.
I mean, again, it was the day after January 6th, I think it was a Wednesday, maybe, but it was whatever the day of the week it was.
It was, and remember the voting because of the interruption, like we didn't get started on this until on this being the certification process.
It's like one in the afternoon, I think it was.
And then immediately, almost immediately, we've been in the chamber for maybe an hour or something.
So it's around two-ish, 2:30, something like that.
The Capitol Security clears the chamber.
They have us leave the chamber.
They take us to a different room in the Capitol complex.
And then we're there for hours.
My point is, by the time I file my objection, it's like eight or nine at night, maybe 10, and we were done at like midnight.
And the next day, by like midday the next day, so 12 hours later, Simon Schuster cancels the book.
So we're not giving this a lot of deliberation.
It's not like, oh, we really struggled with this.
It's like, no, no, no.
We're rushing to do it, rushing to bend the knee to the mob.
I mean, you know, to the liberal mob that wants to squelch any kind of dissent, any kind of debate.
And you see this with the online social media giants.
And this has happened to you guys, right?
You see it with big tech where they're like, oh, wait, you said something we don't like.
We're just going to cancel you.
We're going to deplatform you.
We're going to shut you down.
You see it in the White House now.
We have a president who is not shy about making lists of people.
He wants news corporations and media corporations to silence.
I mean, do you ever think we'd reach a point in American history when the White House spokesperson can, without any shame, like get out the list and say, these people are spreading this information, and we've asked big tech to take them down?
I mean, wow, in America, it's really, really something.
It's a dangerous moment for free speech in our country.
So, would you say that responding the way you have and maybe the way we have is probably the way forward for us speaking out and continuing to sort of be obstinate with our views, not listening to the criticism?
How do you feel like we, the average person, can move forward?
Well, I think that you just can't give an inch to the people who are the authoritarians who want to shut you down and bully you.
I mean, it really is.
It's kind of like being in junior high again, you know, or grade school, where it's like the bully comes over and punches you.
And it's like, if you give in to that, right?
And then do as you're told, like that kid's going to keep bullying you.
You know, you got to stand up for yourself and say, no, I'm sorry, but you're not going to intimidate me.
And I think it's the same thing now with the authoritarians on the left.
And I don't use that word lightly, but that's really the spirit that animates much of this on the left now.
It is a form of authoritarianism.
It is, if you disagree with me, it's not just that you're wrong, it's that you're dangerous and evil, and I will stop you.
And I will use the power of government to stop you.
That's what they're trying to do.
So, and I just think to that, we've got to say, no, you just cannot get into that.
Now they're onto it with the transgender issue.
You know, as you guys will know, I mean, if you question that ideology, if you say, hold on, hold on, if you even make fun of it, as you guys did, then it's like, oh, no, the authoritarians are coming from you, coming for you.
We just cannot give into this.
And I just say to folks out there who so many people have been deplatformed, have been, you know, throttled down, have been shadow banned.
And we're seeing this coming out more and more coming to light.
But this is one of the reasons why I felt it was important in my case with my book and, you know, my own small example to take a stand because for everybody else out there who has been shadow banned, who has been deplatformed, it's like, no, you've got to stand up and say, no, I refuse to allow you to do this to me.
And then I think it makes them think twice about doing it to other people.
So the activists obviously are good at isolating the pressure points and then applying pressure.
Despite that, it sounds like you're giving us a white pill, not a black pill.
Sounds like you're saying free speech has a chance at surviving in our culture.
Any other additional insights on how an average person can do it?
To reiterate Jarrett's question?
Yeah.
Well, I think that being bold to speak and to take up to speak in whatever avenue you can.
I mean, so, you know, if you're on social media, stay on social media and don't be afraid.
I mean, don't be bold in the workplace, I think.
It's important that Christians in particular be willing to take a stand.
I always say to people, listen, I'm not telling you to go out and deliberately try to lose your job, you know, but I do think that if your HR department is asking you to do something that you know is wrong and that you're totally opposed to, hey, I mean, this is this is the time.
This is the day and age to say, no, I disagree with that.
And I will not go along with that.
I think that is wrong.
I'm not going to be a part of that.
And I just think the more that we create these little points of resistance, you know, where we're saying we're going to speak up, we're going to fight for the First Amendment.
You know, the First Amendment, I always say, is the right to be wrong.
I mean, I try to remind my friends on the left this.
I'm like, listen, you guys want to get rid of all speech you don't like because you say it's wrong.
The First Amendment's the right to be wrong.
We can all agree that if you're inciting a criminal act, that's different.
But that's not what we're talking about here.
We're talking about speech that they don't like and that they want to go away.
And I just say there's no way we're going to have a free country if we can't maintain that right to freely speak and air our views.
And I just think that everywhere where we can practice the virtue of free speech, we can speak out boldly, where we can defend other people who are doing it, this is a vital, vital fight to have right now.
Well, our producer is trying to cut our free speech.
He's telling us to make sure you're still good on time.
Yeah, are you good?
How are you on time right now?
Because we still have a few questions.
But if you are, is that cool?
Can we keep going?
Yeah.
All right.
So I want, I'm interested in this.
We've been talking about a lot of crazy stuff that's happened in the Senate.
What is the craziest thing you've ever seen?
I've been watching a lot of your videos leading up to this interview and you've had some really interesting interactions, but I want to know what the craziest thing for you was.
Well, probably the craziest exchange I've ever had with a witness in the Senate was when they had a professor from a law school accuse me of being violent and transphobic because I said that men can't get pregnant.
That's probably my, that's probably my all time.
I saw that one.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah, that's a crazy conversation.
I mean, this is where I said the deal was she wouldn't use, this is a hearing on women's rights, by the way.
And I noticed that this, and this is a very smart person.
This is a professor to law school, highly credentialed.
This is not a stupid person.
This is a smart person.
But I noticed that she wouldn't use the word woman.
She kept saying persons with capacity for pregnancy.
And I started keeping a tally on my little pad how many times she said it.
So it got to my turn finally.
And I said, I just have to ask, like, persons with capacity for pregnancy.
Is that a woman or what?
And she immediately said, I'd like to recognize the transphobic nature of your questioning.
And I was like, man, we are in an alternate reality now.
And finally, she said to me, she said, well, you're, you know, your questions lead to violence.
I'm like, it leads to violence to ask why you won't say woman.
I mean, it is, it is an alternate reality.
So that's probably my all time.
Then well, then another question, because we don't get a lot of chances to talk to senators.
Yeah.
So you're in the Senate and we have it on good authority that many Democrats in Congress are really lizard people bent on world domination.
Do you have any evidence of this?
Have you seen heat lamps as office decor or a study supply of live crickets in the cafeteria?
They do keep pushing that cricket thing.
I'll just say there's all kinds of crazy stuff that goes on in the Senate.
Lizard people confirmed.
It seems like a crazy place.
That's all I'm saying.
It seems like a crazy place.
Is that true?
Is it nuts there?
Yeah, it is.
I mean, it is.
I will say this: the word I would use is surreal because going into Washington as a whole, but particularly Capitol Hill, it's such an insular place because everybody there, it seems like the only people they talk to is everybody else in the building.
So, you've got reporters, Gob's reporters, but the reporters all talk to each other and only each other.
And then the members of Congress all talk to those reporters, but it seems like only them.
So, it's like its own ecosystem where you go in there and it's a total, you talk about alternate realities, total alternate reality.
You know, where I so I'll come from home, I'll go in the Capitol.
I'm like, nothing you were saying bears any resemblance to anything a real person in the state of Missouri has ever said to me, you know, and yet here we are.
And I just, it is a complete, completely different world than everywhere else.
And I do think that that shows up.
You know, if you've ever wondered, like, why do these people go to Washington?
And then pretty soon you hear them saying this stuff and you see them on TV and it's like, why are they saying that?
I think it's because they've just listened to everybody else in Washington.
You know, and again, everybody just talks to each other and nobody goes home to their families and nobody, you know, talks to real voters anymore.
And it really just feeds on itself.
And it's, it's weird.
It's very weird.
That's so incredible.
I'm amazed.
Well, listen, with every single one of our guests, we have 10 questions that we do, and we only have like three minutes to do them.
So we want to make sure we get through them there quick.
So quick responses, quick questions.
Why don't we start?
Have you ever met Christian rapper Carmen?
Have I ever met Christian rapper named Carmen?
Oh, no, I know who that is, but I've never met him.
Well, at least you know who it is.
All right.
I know who that is.
Oh, for sure.
Are you a Calvinist or an Armenian?
Oh, these questions are not easy.
These are not questions.
Goodness.
Goodness.
Well, I would describe myself as reformed.
So that would be closer to the Calvinist side of Legend.
You guys are going to get me in big trouble with these.
Possibly.
You can add one book to the Bible, any book.
What do you choose?
Oh, now you're tempting me into heresy.
Where's this going?
Really?
We have a heresy jar.
If you cross over, we'll put a dollar in it.
I think we're right on it.
I think we're right up to it.
I don't know the answer to that.
I don't have a good answer.
Okay, then what about this?
What's any one book you think everyone should read?
Yeah.
What's a book everyone should read?
Did you say?
Oh, gosh.
A book that everyone should read.
I'm thinking, I'm thinking, I'm thinking.
I really think this sounds kind of nerdy, but it's been a really significant book in my life.
Edmund Burke wrote this great book, Reflections on the Revolution in France.
It's a great, it's not even a full book.
It's like a long essay.
It is a great book.
It really, for me as a conservative, it really defines a lot of what I think it means to be a conservative.
And also, Burke was a Christian and what a Christian worldview looks like.
So there's one.
I think it's a great one.
Love that.
Okay.
Cigars or pipes.
Say that again.
Cigars or pipes.
Cigars.
You could hang out with any three people, living or dead.
Who do you choose?
And you can't choose Jesus.
Okay.
C.S. Lewis.
Yep.
Winston Churchill.
Of course.
And oh my gosh, I got to narrow this down.
I got this narrow.
Maybe David Martin Lloyd Jones.
I've been reading.
He's a preacher, was a preacher.
He's all these guys are dead, but Lloyd Jones is a preacher.
I've been reading a bunch of his sermons recently with some buddies.
And man, that guy could preach.
I'd like to ask him for some tips on public speaking.
Yeah, mentor, another mentor.
All right.
So whiskey or beer?
A beer between those two.
I'm not much of a drinker, but beer.
This one may turn into a prophecy fulfilled.
What would be the first thing you could do you would do if you were president?
Oh, this is a funny question for people that like work it wherever else we're asking for him.
It's a different kind of question.
All right.
Yeah.
The first thing I would do.
Oh my gosh, guys.
I don't know the answer to that.
Abolish the Fed.
Well, we get that a lot.
Yeah.
You know what?
How about this?
We'll ask you again when you get there.
Yeah, it's a good idea.
We can move on.
We'll move on.
Okay.
Okay.
Have you ever punched anyone or been punched?
All right.
So what's the story?
You punched them on the floor, on the Senate floor.
Oh, on the Senate floor?
No, I'm just kidding.
But yeah, no, I've been in fist fights for sure.
Yeah.
Listen, I went to Catholic high school.
So it's part of the deal.
I say that lovingly.
It's not a bad thing.
Having, I say this around my wife.
She doesn't like it so much, you know, because she's told me don't repeat this to my boys.
I'm like, you know, honey, sometimes guys get into fist fight, like it can be good, healthy, clears the air.
Should be in manhood.
There we go.
It is.
One concert, any band in history, who would you see?
Well, one I want to go to now is I love the band Need to Breathe.
And they've got a new album coming out this fall, and they're going to go on tour.
So I've got my dad into it.
And I've said to my dad, we ought to go together.
So maybe we.
I saw them once.
They're fantastic.
Okay.
And the final question.
Do you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?
Yes.
Awesome.
That's the easiest one.
He's in.
We got him.
Thank you so much, Senator Holly, for being here.
We so appreciate your time.
This was great.
It was amazing to talk to you.
Thank you.
And we hope to talk to you again sometime.
I would love that.
You should be in one of our sketches.
You should be in a sketch with us.
Oh, I don't know.
Okay.
I'm only funny unintentionally, which kids tell me is all the time.
The next time we talk, it'll either be a new book he's promoting or we'll be talking to President Holly.