The Culture War #30 - Surrogacy, Men's Rights, and Modern Parenting w/ Jeff Younger & Katy Faust
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One of the things that came up during our Timcast IRL episode with Mr. Jeff Younger was the concept of surrogacy.
And surrounding the issue of men's rights, a lot of this stuff starts coming together, along with a bunch of other ideas around artificial wombs, abortion.
There's a big conversation here, especially when it comes to surrogacy and men's rights as it pertains to their children.
When you go to divorce courts, who the courts favor, and I'm trying to just do like a wide spread on all these subjects that we've talked about before.
But on today's episode of The Culture War, we're going to be discussing all of these things and what it means for society and where we go.
I think there's a big question around the traditional gender roles, the roles of mothers and fathers, and how we navigate what's happening to our society.
Last, not last week, but a couple weeks ago, we talked with Fresh and Fit, Who have basically, they've lamented the modern state of dating and their solution was more focused on adapting to it and becoming something different as a man.
Whereas Jason Howerton, high value dad, said, no, no, you have to resist these things and retain those traditional values that make you a good father.
So I think we have a lot to discuss and to elaborate on.
We have a couple people joining us today.
Katie, would you like to introduce yourself first?
unidentified
Yeah, my name is Katie Faust.
I run the children's rights nonprofit, Them Before Us, which insists that adults bend to children's rights rather than insisting that children conform to adult desires.
That makes me a fierce advocate.
I'm sorry, a fierce adversary of surrogacy in all forms.
In essence, children have a right to their mother and father.
And we look at every marriage and family issue from the definition of marriage to divorce to same sex parenting, reproductive technologies, adoption, cohabitation, everything.
Through the lens of the best interest of the child.
So that I'm going to be representing what I hope is a very accurate picture of children's interests in this conversation.
I got embroiled in family law unwillingly when my ex-wife tried to transition my son to a girl and the entire government of the state of Texas basically sided with her and tried to chemically castrate my son at the age of eight.
And so that took me down this rabbit hole of exactly what parental rights are, how they're actually understood in the legal system.
I would like to say that I think Katie Faust has a sincere love of children, and I admire a lot of her work.
I want to talk about, obviously, traditional gender roles come into play here, the differences between men and women, men's rights, dating, relationships, all of that stuff will be big.
But we can just get started with surrogacy in general, because this was a point of contention on our episode of IRL when you were here.
Sure, so you mentioned two possible ways of dealing with the changes in the world, the technological changes in the world.
One was to try to maintain traditional ways of living, right?
I call that cargo cult thinking.
It's maintaining the forms of traditional life, But without all of the other things that enable it, right?
There's another approach which says you should just give into it and become a libertine, and I disagree with that as well.
If you go onto my Twitter profile, you'll see that I call myself a paleo-futurist.
And what I mean by that is, I believe that we should try to take traditional values and project them into an inevitable ultra-science future.
And the question we should be asking is, what values are we trying to hold?
Not the forms by which we've held them.
What values are we trying to hold and project them into this future?
Now the reason surrogacy ever came up to me is because a whole bunch of my followers, young men, We're telling me they were doing this, that they had most of them.
I, in fact, I met with them about a month ago in Austin.
I went to an event and they all hooked up with me.
I spent a lot of time with one, one fellow who was already going to Argentina and is planning to do this and has already funded it.
And almost all of them said to me the same thing.
I saw my dad destroyed by my mother in divorce court.
And they said it that way.
They didn't say it was destroyed by the courts.
It said it was destroyed by their mother.
And they do not intend to have that happen to them, and they were taken from their fathers forcefully.
And so their idea is to have children where they actually have rights, and then they can get married to a woman, but she won't be able to take their children.
And I think it's a rational approach to dealing with the risks of marriage in the modern world.
He is absolutely correct about how the divorce courts stack the deck against men and against fathers, and very often allow the woman to weaponize the courts against men who all they want is to love and be connected to their children, but then they end up paying through the nose for kids they never get to see.
And I feel bad for the men, but I'm enraged on behalf of the kids.
Enraged.
What they are losing, what Jeff's sons have lost is not something that can ever be quantified.
Not at all.
It's a lifelong loss that they are going to, they're going to experience that wound forever.
They're being starved of not just the male love that all children need, but the biological identity that comes from being raised by their own dad.
I mean, what the courts have done to Jeff and what they are doing to thousands of other men across this country is criminal.
Well, actually, I was going to say, as we're introducing these ideas of, you know, why is there even a conversation about surrogacy, perhaps we should pause and talk about no-fault divorce, which is the legal change and the social change.
But before we even get into the science of how society is changing, I think no-fault divorce, we've talked about it quite a bit, I think this is a cause of a massive amount of problems and contention today.
unidentified
Yeah.
So the way that we talk about it then before us is functionally what children are right now is accessories to be cut and pasted into any and every adult relationship, right?
We have an understanding of parental rights to their children, but we don't have an idea of children's rights to their own parents.
And those actually go together, right?
People care which baby they take home from the hospital.
They don't want just any kid in the nursery.
They actually want their baby.
There's something precious and special about taking your own child home.
There is something distinct and wonderful about your own progeny.
And we can get into adoption later, but we all, I mean, there was that ridiculous article like last week that was like, wanting your own biological children is what, what, what was it called?
It was a, it was a racist or I know she, she acquitted.
It was white supremacy or whatever it was.
And that is like all of these arguments.
And I think where we're going with your argument, Jeff, is this idea that you're going to be able to overhaul human nature.
No matter how technology changes, no matter how law changes, no matter how culture changes, you cannot overhaul child nature.
And children have a natural right to be known and loved by both of their biological parents.
Those two adults grant children statistically the safest home that they're going to experience.
Like if your wife remarries, the man that joins her life will never be as statistically connected to, invested in, and protective of your sons as you are.
Not only will he not be as connected and invested, he will statistically be one of the most dangerous people in their life.
Okay, so we have to get very clear about children having a right to their own mother and father.
The threats that have Disconnected children from that are cultural, legal, and technological.
So we'll be talking about one of the technological shifts that have commodified children and turned them into functional accessories.
But the legal shifts have also been at play since the late 60s, and it began with no-fault divorce.
No Fault Divorce was the first, in essence, redefinition of the family.
It transformed what used to be the most child-friendly institution the world has ever known, marriage, into just another vehicle of adult fulfillment.
It said, we used to have this idea that marriage was going to be permanent, and the only time you would break it up is if one spouse was found to be at fault of abuse, adultery, abandonment, addiction.
But we turned to No Fault Divorce.
And since women have sort of higher rates of Emotional expectation, they tend to be dissatisfied more quickly in the marriage.
And when you can get out of it for no fault, they get out of it sooner.
So that was the original redefinition of marriage and legally what put all of this in place when it comes to treating children as accessories.
But there is, you know, quite literally, if you enter into a spiritual, moral, and legal contract till death do us part, But the legal has been completely removed and the moral foundations of society have become dissociative or fractured, then you quite literally are just dating.
We've seen these fling marriages for a year or two.
You see all these celebrities, they're married for five years and then they're broken up.
But one of the fundamental things that we lost, and I think we lost it with the Enlightenment, but it really showed up in the American conception of rights, People have come to think of rights as floating abstractions, right?
And there's no real objective Child's best interest for everything there are are some objective things like for example having a mother a father I Am on the other hand not an idealist I am dealing with the world as it actually is today with the political situation as it actually is today where over half of children are being raised in single-mother homes and In that world men have to be very serious about protecting themselves before they have children before they get married
These are guys who know they can't or who believe they cannot find a wife in the United States because of the culture, the moral frameworks this country has.
So they go to other countries with traditional values.
But also a lower standard of living.
So they're viewed more favorably.
Like they mentioned going to the Philippines, where the standard of living is low.
So you have these young women who see an American come here, they're wealthy, they have access, and that is attractive to them.
So you're going to end up with a wife who is more committed and actually more worried about the relationship breaking apart.
Whereas in America, you have the feminist, more woke vision where women can have it all, do what they want and leave whenever they want, and courts will favor them if they do.
unidentified
Yeah, so there's a lot of work to be done, but the answer cannot be.
Whatever work needs to be done in culture, in law, and in technology, and there is a lot to be done, the answer cannot be, a kid is going to sacrifice for me.
I understand the system is broken.
I understand the technology is advancing way beyond our ethical conversations, but the solution can never be, this kid sacrifices so I can have what they want.
And ultimately, that's what surrogacy does in 100% of cases.
The Greek Orthodox Church did a longitudinal study of church attendance.
for children who go to college into these sort of atheist communist factories, and how many continue to attend church.
And the only thing that correlated with church attendance was whether the father brought them. - Oh, that's why men need to be the head of the home and the head of the church.
You say that the study... I guess what you're saying is that single parent with a father have better outcomes, but I wonder if it's just... Than single mother parented homes.
But I'm wondering if we're not tracking the detriments of not having a mom.
unidentified
So here's the thing, people will say to me, because I fight surrogacy at every front, in every way, traditional, gestational, altruistic, commercial, I don't care.
It is always the intentional loss of a child's mother on the day that they are born.
And we can, I'll give you the children's rights framework if you want.
But, you know, people will say, well, we have lots of data.
Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin had this conversation, you know, where they said, oh, there's so much data about the harms of father loss.
But There's not a lot about mother loss.
There's not a lot of studies about what happens when a child grows up motherless.
When you're looking at a study and you say, let's look at drug abuse, college attainment, crime, and you're like, hey, look, if a child has just a dad, they tend to do better than if they have just a mom.
But what aren't we tracking?
Between a child who has both parents and a child who doesn't have a mom.
unidentified
And I would say, why is it even harder to find the kids raised only by a single dad?
Because those households are harder to find.
And when you're talking about good studies, you can't just be like, hey, single dads, come volunteer for this.
You have to find them at random.
They are hard to find at random because there's not a lot of them.
Attachment, bonding, trust, levels of sensitivity to one another, ability to form formations.
I mean, I'm parenting a child who did not have any parents, had no mother for the first two years of his life.
It is very, very difficult for kids.
Well, we can talk about the distinctiveness of mothering if you want, but I want to get back to this question of why is it that we have endless studies on the impact of father loss in children and fatherlessness, but we have very, very few on mother loss.
Removing technology from the equation, the mother is required to be there for a substantially longer amount of time after the nine months.
unidentified
Right!
And you know what?
So, not only is she literally connected to the child, there's no other person in our existence, unless you become a mother yourself, where you are connected by a literal cord.
That's how connected mother and baby are.
Now, before we had technology, before we had bottles, or if you didn't have a wet nurse, the mom died, the baby died.
Our species does not have a lot of experience with motherless babies because babies cannot live without mothers.
Actually, our species is well adapted to mother loss, and it has been with us for a long time.
That doesn't mean however, I'm not stretching this to mean that the problems that we're talking about of motherless not being well studied, I think the real reason is that motherlessness is just comparatively much more rare in modern society.
And you have a hard time even getting study groups to do it.
Our main social problem is father loss and that's why.
unidentified
Because biology, again, women are working within a chemical system.
Once the baby is born, during pregnancy and childbirth especially, and then especially once you start breastfeeding, there is oxytocin spikes in the woman that literally will chemically bond her to the baby.
The baby is bonded to her.
And that happens on the regular for the first couple years of a child's life.
So when Jude was born, he would have died without modern medical intervention, and he came out very traumatized.
And, um, you know, I was the first one to hold him.
Um, and he went straight to the Neku and he was dying, um, straight up dying.
Um, so they, they have this thing where they often have the mother come into the Neko and Neku and touch the child and the mere touch of the mother Can cause a healing response in the child.
So not knowing that we had used IVF, they asked my ex-wife to go in and do this and it had no effect.
Um, what, what I, what I claim is that I'm, I'm actually just claiming this on a basic social level that we are going to destroy the lives of half the men that get married and the children.
In those marriages, right?
And I think we will have far less social damage if we have a nation of single fathers than single mothers.
And what I'm doing is not comparing against the ideal, which we agree on.
And I love you for promoting this ideal, right?
I mean, I firmly agree with you on it.
I'm saying in the real world where we exist today, in the legal framework, this horrifying legal framework that governs marriage, The way we reduce damage the most is to prevent fathers' lives from being destroyed so that they can be with their kids.
We need to make sure there's a balance between, you know, Fathers and mothers and the rights of the children.
We want to keep the families together.
But I don't necessarily agree.
I understand that the data we have so far shows that in the immediate, the things we care about the most, without a father, crime, et cetera.
But I have to say, I think if you have a society where there is a disproportionate amount of motherless children, you are going to have a dysfunctional society in some other way.
We can avoid destroying half of the men who get married, and so my argument only requires that it be no worse, and I claim that it is no worse.
unidentified
So let me break down what surrogacy is from the children's rights perspective.
What surrogacy is at its core is the trifurcation of the mother.
Okay, there are three different components of the mother that surrogacy in essence splices and gives you purchasable and optional choices about the woman involved.
So the three different women that you're splitting up in surrogacy is The genetic mother, that's the woman who contributes the egg, and that is the one that grants children their biological identity.
When kids go to bed at night and try to figure out like, who am I?
Where did I get my hair?
What's my ethnicity?
Does my mother know who I am?
Does she think about me?
Do I have half siblings?
They're thinking about their genetic mother, the woman who the big fertility World will say, oh, she's just a donor.
You can go right now and Google egg donor catalog and you can filter the results for your child's genetic mother based on hair color, Ivy League education, all of that.
And The big surrogacy people will just pitch this as, well, she's not a mother, right?
She's just an oven for somebody else's bun.
But the reality is that that is the only relationship that the child has at the moment they are born.
They don't know that they're not genetically related to the person giving birth to them.
Your kids didn't know that your wife was not their genetic mother, but that's her body, her voice, her smell, her milk.
That's who they wanted, right?
That is the foundation for trust and attachment in a child's life.
So, for example, we have almost 60 years of experience with infant adoption, and largely children who have been adopted as infants are adopted into homes that have more stable marriages, where the people are more wealthy, more highly educated, and statistically even spend more time with kids than the average biological parent.
And yet, Adoptees do not fare as well.
They struggle more in school.
They have more challenges with trust and attachment, identity issues.
And adoptees call that a primal wound.
They were wounded at the most primal stages of their development because they were cut off from the first and only relationship that they had, and they had to start over.
Okay, so that's the birth mother.
And then the social mother is the woman that provides that female specific love for the kid.
And men cannot do that.
Men do not do that.
And here's a few examples.
You know, women have a lower tolerance for children's cries, right?
We hear a baby crying.
This happened to me at the airport.
There was a baby crying and I was like, get the baby.
Well, I was letting the baby cry and I just wanted to get up and be like, give me the baby!
Men are like, she'll be okay, here's a few Cheerios.
And it's okay to have those different styles.
But when babies are in distress, they're wet, they're tired, they're hungry, their cortisol levels rise.
They cannot drop their own cortisol levels.
They are literally incapable.
Erika Komisar would say they don't have a central nervous system at this point.
The only way for their stress levels to drop is for their oxytocin to increase.
They can't express their own oxytocin.
Only skin-to-skin contact will do that, and only mothers have the level of responsiveness that will constantly bring down their cortisol levels Dozens and dozens of times every day and thereby establish that ability to emotionally regulate.
So here's the thing, surrogacy breaks women up into genetic mother, birth mother, and social mother.
None of these women are optional in the life of the child.
And if they are not found in one woman, that kid is going to experience loss.
I just want to highlight one thing real quick because this is something I had read about quite a bit throughout my life.
I just did a quick Google search.
The West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources says babies who are deprived of touch can fail to thrive, lose weight, and even die.
And what I've been told What I've read, you know, and that's not something I follow, but, you know, 10 years ago, I'm reading articles on this stuff, that if a baby is without touch from the mother, it literally just dies.
Well, it sounds like then if we recognize it is a detriment that we go through IVF and surrogacy because of what the legal system is doing, then it seems like the solution should be to change the culture in the legal system.
And I'm willing to compromise with people who want these sort of what I call emotional marriages.
I'm willing, okay, fine.
Let's do that.
I think we have to do some other things with...
You know, correcting the legal system around domestic violence and some other stuff.
There are legal ways to do this.
I'm just telling you that you're fighting because of Title IV-D reimbursements to the states, which are heavily invested in divorce and only exist when fathers are out of the home, just like the welfare system destroyed the black families in this country.
When these systems are so big, I mean, you're talking about trillions of dollars.
These are bigger than some of the largest defense programs.
unidentified
Jeff is the first one that educated me on this reality.
Yeah, they're larger than some of the largest defense programs, and we can't get rid of these defense programs.
The Marine Corps and the Army have been trying to get rid of the heavy division concept since the 1980s when I was in the military, and they can't get rid of it.
So my problem is, it's going to take five generations.
When we get into the details of laws, we could, again, I would compromise and say, okay, you become a prospective no-fault marriage partner until the birth of the child when it's genetically tested.
Well, but the problem there is... My point is... The testing would have to be... We have seen stories, there was one story, I think it was out of Wisconsin, where a woman got pregnant.
When she gave birth, she listed some random guy she knew as the father.
I think it was Wisconsin.
And then the guy was like, what?
I'm not the father.
Got a genetic test, proved that he wasn't, and the judge said, don't know, don't care, the baby needs a dad, so you are now on the hook for it.
Who started the movement against this but until I can tell you this in Texas until 2014 All children in the marriage were presumed to be the husband's.
The problem is that when we used to do that, like for all of, almost all of Western law, we presumed this, right?
But the issue comes when, you know, what are the conditions under which you can demonstrate that the child isn't yours and be relieved of your obligations, right?
Most states did not have a way to do that until just the last six years.
You know, Carnell, for example, I've talked to him at length about this.
I mean, he paid child support for 15 years.
For a child that wasn't his, and they just wouldn't stop, even though he had genetic tests.
So you have legal surrogacy, but you don't actually use somebody else's egg.
So for example, I've checked in three states, and there's nothing that prevents a married woman from entering a surrogacy contract.
So, you could get married, you have your wife sign a surrogacy contract, and then you have conjugal relations in a biblical way, and then the children belong to the father and the mother has the legal relation of a step-mom.
Because the biological mother, the birth mother, the social mother, should all also be the legal mother.
You do not splice woman into three different parts, the social, the legal, and the genetic.
From a children's rights perspective, all of those women need to be found in one place.
And just like it was an injustice to strip you of your rights to your children, even though you're the biological father, it's an injustice to strip children of their mothers.
What this tells me is that when we put women in the same conditions that fathers are in today, they choose not to have children and not to marry, which proves my point that under the current conditions, surrogacy is a legitimate option.
And so imagine how fathers feel when they are, no offense, but trad women are constantly telling young men To just suck it up, take the risk, and marry when we all admit that precisely zero women would do that under the same conditions.
Because the stepmother in this scenario, being a constant caregiver to the child, would have the same visitation rights as fathers have today.
They would have continuous visitation, continuous relationship, the courts would respect that.
unidentified
I understand, I understand that... Women won't do it, why should men?
I understand that it's risky, and the deck is stacked against them.
I'm not seeing any man who is living a happier, better life than the men who are married stably to the women and the mothers of their children.
And that is something to strive for and is ideal, but...
Like, I think Jeff is correct, the risks are there for men.
And we end up seeing this reflected in a lot of online communities.
A lot of men are outright saying, I mean, with MGTOW, MGTOW's not absolutely about any one thing, there's a bunch of different issues, but a lot of these men are saying, the risks are too great.
And Jeff makes a great point, just like a woman would say, I'm not going to enter into that agreement, men literally are saying that.
I've prayed for you, especially leading up to this conversation, but I actually think that it would be helpful for everybody listening to understand How this has impacted you and the depths of pain that you've experienced.
So I just want to hear if you're willing to share, how are you doing?
And you care about that stuff, which makes you special.
Um, so I've, I've described it this way.
Um, during the trial, I was being hyper-scrutinized for violent behavior or any, you know, in court, I would have judges bring bailiffs in if I moved too aggressively to grab a pen or something.
Well, no, they've completely pathologized all masculine behaviors.
And I'm kind of big, and they know I'm a boxer and all that stuff, so they're on edge about it.
So I had to sit there calmly, and be totally calm, and have no emotional, response as I'm literally watching my son be sexually abused right in front of me.
That's what was required of me to save my sons.
I accomplished that, so in 2019 I got 50-50 custody, no child support.
Right on?
So they recused my judge, the Dallas County Democrat judges, in a corrupt proceeding, got rid of my judge, put me in a non-random judge assignment, put me in the 301st District Court with Judge Bloody Mary Brown, I name names for people, And Judge Bloody Mary Brown systematically stripped me of all my parental rights.
I went all the way up to the Texas Supreme Court and the Texas Supreme Court, listen to this, said that my sons were no more at risk of being chemically castrated in California under the transgender kidnapping laws than they were in Texas where it's illegal.
Yeah, so what we have is a politicized, what's happening is the state courts are beginning to collude to allow children to migrate to trans-friendly states.
So I've established a residence in California and I've officially moved there.
I'm preparing my house in Texas to rent out and I've moved, you have to be careful, I've moved about 30 minutes away from my boys and I'm going to fight in the California courts To have visitation, and I also intend to go into the federal courts and challenge the laws, the kidnapping law, plus the law that strips parents of their rights if they don't affirm their child.
I want to just say one thing, because I think some people don't understand.
MGTOW means Men Going Their Own Way.
Online communities where men talk about, you know, they'll post memes of like a guy sitting on a cliffside with his dog and it'll say something like Serenity or whatever.
Yeah.
But I will also add, you moving to California, sir, is the political equivalent of running into a burning building.
So we have to talk about getting away from cities and getting away from these jurisdictions if you can, and that we understand some people may want to stay in these places because of their kids.
Yeah.
And a lot of people have said, I can't move out of the city, you know, I got divorced, my kids are still here, what am I supposed to do?
And I'm like, that I view as your house is on fire and you refuse to leave until you know your children are safe.
I also want to point out that what Jeff is doing is the essence of true manhood and the best kind of father, the best that fathers can be, which is utter protectiveness and everything you can in terms of provision despite everything being against you.
And there really is something distinct.
I would say that it is a genetic, biological drive that good men have.
Really, until the 1950s, nobody was rich enough to do that, right?
Throughout all of human history, women raised young children, in most civilizations, the age of nine, The reputation that the Italians had for being mama's boys because it was still 12.
You know, that's where that comes from.
They stayed with their mother and then the boys went with the fathers.
And so girls and young children stayed with the mothers.
Men have always equally participated in child rearing.
And what men feel particularly is this horrifying thing where Your offspring are going to be raised in values contrary to your ancestors and to your own values.
And your children will be turned against your own values.
I have a friend in Houston whose wife divorced him and converted his children to Islam, and he's a devout Christian.
His children have been turned against his values, you know?
This is what men fear, tremendously.
It's not just physical precision.
unidentified
This is what divorce enables.
You know, there was a study done by a researcher named Elizabeth Marget, her study was called Between Two Worlds, and it studied the impact that divorce had on children.
And in close to 50% of cases, the child developed two different personalities because they had like, mom had one political persuasion, you know, mom's a Republican, dad's a Democrat, mom's a Buddhist, dad's a Republican or, you know, a Christian, you know, the screen limits over here are like one hour a day.
This is the interesting thing about the rights of the child.
If the parents are fighting, and it's bad, not to the point of abuse, but screaming, I think they should be reprimanded by the court saying, like, you are obligated to stop, and you have to tone it down because this is for the kids.
So we don't want children growing up in an environment where parents are just screaming at each other 24-7.
In natural law theory, rights and duties are two sides of the same coin.
That's correct.
So you're exactly right, Tim, that there's a lot of momentum on the right when it comes to parental rights, and that's good.
But parental rights has limits.
You do not have a right to chemically sterilize your child just because you think, I'm the parent, I can do what I want.
So I think parental rights are important, but insufficient when it comes to child protection.
That is why I use the language of children's rights.
Because just because an adult wants to do something like take their kid to Drag Queen Story Hour, you don't have a parental right to corrupt your child's mind through these sexualizing programs.
I just want to point out, what really bothers me is that It is a crime in, I don't know if I can say most, but I can tell you that in many jurisdictions, because I've actually looked at the laws, it is outright illegal to bring a child to a drag show.
And you want to give the widest scope to parenting, because we recognize that geographical and cultural conditions even in America are not-- Even just personality differences with kids.
Yeah, you literally couldn't, well yeah, like my two sons, you know, did I ever tell you the story about how I figured out their personality differences?
unidentified
No, but I want to hear it because I love this kind of thing.
So I was, I was, um, I couldn't understand modern cartoons, like I just don't even get them.
I can't even follow the plot.
So I got the old Johnny Quest cartoons, you know, because like they have real guns and people don't get up when you shoot them and stuff.
You know?
And so we were watching The Invisible Monster, which I guess is one of the more popular ones for the cartoon aficionados, and James was saying, you know, look at that monster, he's huge, he's gonna outrun Bandit, and Bandit, you know, Bandit can't get away, but Johnny's gonna try, you know.
And Jude was going, bandit scared.
Why is that monster so angry?
So I just realized, it just hit me, Jude was living the inner life of these characters, and James was living the outer life.
And at that moment, I raised them completely different ways.
My way of motivating them and disciplining them was never the same after that.
unidentified
Well, this is why God did not say, do this with every single kid.
God gave every kid a mother and a father who studies them, knows them, and is ultimately invested in them, and can tailor make their parenting approach based on what the child needs.
But because the reason I bring these games up is that in these games, you have a list of abilities that your character can improve upon every time you level up.
When I first played Fallout 3, I was introduced to it from a friend who was a Marine.
My character was a sniper who snuck around and had lock picking and computer hacking.
You play like I do.
So my view of the game was, I don't want any conflict.
Anything that would be conflict, I will win before it occurs, and I will avoid it.
And my buddy, who's quite literally like the Hurrah mindset, built a character around charging in headfirst and using pure strength to shut down the conflict.
- I thought that was really interesting to see because I knew that between our personalities, that mine was more strategic and staying back and his was more head on.
You could see the personalities of the individual in how they choose their character to be.
So does it literally need to be a video game like Fallout?
I've even seen it in my own sons with board games.
So Jude never loses board games, ever.
He beats me and everybody else all the time.
And the reason is very simple.
My son James and Jude, they learned how to play chess before first grade.
Good dad.
James could solve three-move problems.
Jude could solve one-move problems.
But Jude doesn't play the rules.
Jude plays the person.
And he's like, oh, he's very comfortable in these kinds of positions and he would put you in positions where you were uncomfortable and beat the crap out of you.
He's like, I know dad always goes for the expensive properties, right?
So I'm gonna lay traps for him by buying properties in little areas where, because Jude actually found out the dice probabilities and said, okay, if he wants to land on those spots, where would he be likely to be able to land on the move before that?
But one thing we've discussed quite a bit on Tim Cast IRL is abortion.
Colorado has no limit.
Oklahoma has a pure ban.
How can we as a country function when the view of human rights is spattered and different across all the different states, right?
Typically, we have a general view of your rights.
We have the Constitution at the federal level which supersedes all the states.
It's the law of the land.
But now we're running into this issue where The argument from the political left is it doesn't matter if you've gestated nine months and can survive on your own.
If you are in the womb, you have no rights at all and can be terminated if the woman desires.
And then you have other states that say, like, actually, from the point of conception, you are a human with human rights.
I mean, this is a bifurcation in the view of rights.
I don't know how we navigate.
unidentified
So ultimately, all the culture war issues that we're coming up with today have at their root the same question, and that is, what does it mean to be human?
Okay, these are ultimately philosophical questions, and hey, I'm going to look at the camera for the first time.
Hey, Christian theologian, you need to get to work on this.
Because we need a robust defense of the human person.
Because we cannot fight back, made in Canada, like medical assistance in dying.
We're not going to be able to talk about proper understanding of children's rights to their mother and father.
We're not going to be able to look at reproductive technologies the way we should.
Transhumanism, pornography, the redefinition of marriage, transing the kids.
Every single thing that we are talking about today comes down to the question, what does it mean to be human?
Christian, theologian, you are the only person with a worldview who is able to answer that.
You're the only person with the scaffolding to be able to give a human dignifying response to that.
So that is what we need.
That is the urgency here.
Okay.
And the problem with abortion, well, there's so many problems with abortion, but I will say that...
The reason why we have children being manufactured through big fertility, using somebody else's sperm, somebody else's eggs, somebody else's womb, is because we have said children exist for us.
We don't exist for them.
And that began with abortion.
That actually probably began with birth control.
I'm gonna control this situation.
They only come if I welcome them and if I decide.
Instead of saying, you know what, sex leads to parenting.
If I have sex, I am consenting to welcoming a child into my life.
So we have always been controlling reproduction.
Birth control was the first step.
Abortion is the second step.
We've now taken that into reproductive technologies.
Instead of surrogacy or changing all the laws, the men out there who are trying to find a life partner and a wife just need to go to meetings that Katie set up for her nonprofit.
And then you'll meet women who are going to be as passionate about it.
unidentified
I have thought about setting up a matchmaking service, because I know so many good men and women who are like, I can't find the people that I want.
Nancy Piercy did write about this in her War on Manhood, and she's got the receipts for the fact that evangelical, not evangelical, men who attend church regularly with their families have the lowest rates of abuse and the lowest rates of divorce.
They are the most highly invested, and they have the happiest wives.
Where theology, you know, I went to a Roman Catholic university.
You know, I didn't go to university when I was 35, but I went to a Roman Catholic university, and if you went to one of the theology professors and said, let's go do some theology, they would take you to a library and they would apply philosophical categories to religion.
Orthodox theologians just means one who prays.
People who pray a lot.
Monks.
Saints.
Those are who we consider theologians, not people who apply philosophical categories to religion.
But the problem of our time is a philosophical redefinition of the human person.
And it's something I call expressive individualism.
unidentified
Do you call it that, or does Carl Truman call it that?
And this concept is deeper even than I think Truman talks about, where he kind of gives a genealogy of how this idea came about, right?
Um, but it actually goes back actually much further.
You, you said, you know, uh, this idea of abortion, uh, happened with birth control perhaps, or... The idea that you can control children and when they come to be began with, uh... Actually, you can go back to the Roman Empire and see this stuff, right?
Yeah, that's one thing Truman actually doesn't address.
And so one of the things that I pointed out to a lot of Christians who are trying to get their head around the California mentality is with this expressive individualism, and now I'm using it as Truman uses it, You know, your identity is your sexual identity.
And I think what you'll end up with is bleeding Kansas.
So, if you have a fractured view of human rights, You end up in a certain amount of time with, you know, uh, this is 18, what is it, 18, um, uh, 44, was it?
He just said, for us it comes down to, does a black man have the status of a hog?
Even the slavers didn't believe that.
And so there's no intermediate status in US law.
So they have full rights as citizens.
But here's the thing.
The war was occasioned.
By the desire to impose that on the South, even though probably the institution would have gone away in 10 years anyway.
But either way, what I'm saying is, that's what led to the violence.
I said, and my assumption was, if you want peace, if you want a peaceful union, you're going to have to realize people in New York are not going to live the kind of lives that they live in Dallas, Texas.
There's a lot of different issues that economically emerge, and everyone's going to try and pinpoint what was the inflection point that led to this.
You know, I've read quite a bit about it.
Many have argued.
I think mostly from the Confederate perspective, it's that when Lincoln called for conscription to go and quell the rebellion or whatever, that was what made everyone want to fight.
I mean, if you look at what happened in 2020 with Texas v. Pennsylvania, the argument Texas had was Pennsylvania, as well as many other states, were holding their elections outside of the Constitution.
And thus, it was impacting their participation in the union.
And the Supreme Court told them to screw off.
My fear is that if we try to take the approach of, let Colorado just determine that, maybe at nine months, The baby is crowning.
And eventually what happens is states like Oklahoma say, we will not participate in federal requests, requirements, taxes, laws, or otherwise, because you are a slave state.
Which I must point out is exactly what California did with its transgender kidnapping law.
It said that it would never return my son to Texas, even on court order.
It would never obey a subpoena from a Texas court about my son.
It would never allow any public servant to give me any information about my son, including the schools.
That's nuts.
That is already happening.
But I'm just saying, if you want peace, and you want to maintain the union, You're just gonna have, we're all gonna have to accept that we won't have the same ways of life.
I don't see how we can have a constitution which seeks to protect the rights, the God-given rights of its citizenry, and of all people, even people who are not citizens, have.
these rights because the Constitution does not grant them.
This is what a lot of people don't understand too.
They'll say, illegal immigrants or whatever don't have these rights.
unidentified
They're like, no, no, no, the rights came from God. - Yeah, they have the same rights. - Let me tie this back, if you don't mind, between slavery and the current discussion.
And I think that you are right that we might have, like we had free states and slave states, we'll have life states and death states.
But it's so interesting to me because reproductive technologies are actually feeding into this.
So when Virginia passed its commercial surrogacy bill in 2019, for the very first time since slavery, they deemed a class of people property.
Yeah.
And that was embryos, right?
Reproductive technologies have allowed us to commodify people in a way that we have not done since we had an industry and economy built on the backs of people that were deemed less than human.
And so I just think like when you are starting to create technologies that parallel slavery in terms of the laws that we have to use to govern it, you really need to start taking a look at, are we heading in the wrong direction technologically?
Not to deviate too far from the conversation, but just to mention AI.
We've got numerous prominent, high-profile individuals saying, AI will be our end.
And then people saying, why don't you stop doing it?
They say, you can't, because if I don't, someone else is already working on it.
Too many people are building a machine they know will destroy us, and they won't stop.
unidentified
People will kill their children.
You cannot stop abortion from happening, but you can take legal steps to massively limit it, and that's what I'm gonna do for all third-party reproduction.
I gotta tell you, I mean, the reason I bring up Colorado, Oklahoma, and this conflict is that There is, I am horrified, infuriated, and angered at the thought.
When I saw that video out of Virginia, where that, I think she was a state senator or a rep or something, was talking to a judge, and he asked her, like, clarify for me the limitations.
The baby is crowning, and you can abort it, and she goes, there are no limitations.
And the response from Governor Northam, which I think cost him severely, was, Well, you know, in these situations the baby would be delivered, it would be resuscitated.
Because, you know, me personally, I have the traditional pro-choice position, which still seeks to balance, it seeks to balance the rights of the mother and the child and find that it's really, really difficult, if not impossible, but we're trying as hard as we can.
They just say, I've asked them this.
You have two women.
They both, they're identical twins.
And they conceived with identical twin brothers.
At the exact same time, the baby's eight months on.
One baby is prematurely being born.
It is born.
The women are sitting next to each other.
Can the doctor come in and kill the baby that was just born?
And they all say, well no, that's killing a baby.
I say, okay, the baby...
Of the identical genetics and gestation in the womb.
Can the doctor kill it?
Yes, it's the woman's choice.
And I'm like, why not just deliver it and let it live?
They don't care.
They just say, it's the woman's choice.
She can kill it if she wants.
That is a moral line that I feel is absolutely untenable.
I reject it outright.
I do not feel that we are a sound society.
It's a shocking proposition.
It's a psychotic proposition.
Yep.
unidentified
Well, so that is why you're scared.
That's why you're a conservative, because I mean, like conservatism is just living in reality.
And the thing about progressives is.
Their feelings are their God, their self is their God, their own sexual identity is their God, because feelings and identity can change, their priorities can change depending on what the situation is, and so they are going to be logically inconsistent because they are not anchored to an ultimate reality.
If you look at Derrick Bell, one of the forefathers of critical race theory, he regrets the end of segregation.
He wants it back.
So actually, if you look to the history of the world, the classically liberal framework that we have today in terms of individual rights is new and has only been around for a very, very, very short amount of time.
And these people want to restore what once was.
You look at the eugenicists of the early 1900s, and you look at the critical race theorists, and they're arguing for a return to a segregated separate society where we can go back to the way things used to be.
I reject that.
I say no.
And what they'll do is the Alinsky tactic of accuse your opponent that is, you know, what you are doing.
No, in fact, you mentioned in ancient, was it ancient Rome, or where the babies are, the corpses?
Oh yes, it's been the way of the world to sacrifice children on the altar.
We put a stop to that, and it's only in recent history we have taken the strong moral positions.
I want to point out though, because I'm an opponent of all forms of liberalism, including classical liberalism, neoliberalism, Left liberalism.
I'm even opposed to free market liberalism.
I'm opposed to all forms of liberalism.
I'm very unusual You probably won't meet many people like me But like I all of that stuff about human dignity and all that stuff about ending infanticide happened before the Enlightenment It happened with the conversion of Europe to Christianity, prior to the Enlightenment.
Under regimes today, we would consider unintolerably authoritarian.
By the way, we should give credit to our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters who maintained the anti-porn and the Hollywood production code all the way to 1959.
Wow.
Until it was finally overturned, and then we got the explosion of pornography.
But thank you, Roman Catholics, even though I'm not Roman Catholic, but they did the hard work there.
But I would say corruption of the systems is not an absolute statement that they're... So my point is... You think there's still some remnant of limitation?
Well, I think if you go back in time to the First Amendment, you couldn't carry signs saying certain things.
People would not allow it.
Yes.
George Carlin famously got arrested for his, you know, seven words you can't say on TV.
But I just mean that, um, I guess I'll just step back and say simply there are instances where the government does what the Constitution prescribes and instances where it doesn't.
So you can make the argument that the Constitution is just like a smiley face sticker on the wall and it's really just our morals that are deciding it.
And even as I'm thinking about it, you've helped me help me do that, actually.
Thank you.
So look, I think the Supreme Court, for example, looks out and says, you know, that the temperament around abortion is getting to the point where it might lead to violence.
So we need to outlaw it again, or at least allow the states to control it.
Like, I really think those are how the decisions are made.
I believe that if you were going to have an actual constitutional scholar judge and not a politician, when Texas sued Pennsylvania over the 2020 election, you had Thomas and Alito who said, it is our duty to hear this case.
This is how our Constitution works.
And the other judges were just like, Nah. - No, we don't need to. - Because it's not what is prescribed in the rules, it is what we as humans ultimately decide makes the most sense.
- Correct. - There is a balance that must exist in that worldview.
For instance, I think judges should be good people and actually use their judiciary discretion to protect those who are more or less, protect or punish those, depending on if they're more or less deserving.
If you have a man, and they mostly do, but not enough.
There are too many instances where a judge goes, well, I don't think it's reasonable, but life in prison, you know, because you jaywalked or something.
Right.
I think we need to see more discretion and leniency for those and too many people are just thrown into the system and mistreated.
Well, the thing is, and this goes back to some of the surrogacy issues that we talked about, because there are massive Um, government's economic incentives to put people in prison.
So let me give you an example.
I have this thing where I just, every once in a while I get so pissed off that I'll hire a lawyer for eight hours.
We'll go down to the Title IV-D court in Dallas, Texas, where, the child support court, Title IV-D.
They're actually called Title IV-D courts.
We have a statute in Texas, I printed it out somewhere, which basically says the courts are always to rule so as to maximize Title IV-D reimbursements.
It doesn't say in the child's best interest.
It's to reimburse Title IV-D.
So they'll have black men lined up in the hallway going out to the street And they're just putting them in jail.
All of them are just going to jail.
So I'll just hire, sometimes I just get so pissed off about this that, you know, I just hire a lawyer and they, he signs a contract for $1 with these guys and he just stands there all day and just represents these people and keeps them out of jail.
It just pisses me off.
But here's the deal, they go off the Title IV-D reimbursement program, and when they put them in jail, they go into the prison reimbursement program, which is $93 a day.
So the government just looks at these people as, you know, fathers, as just like economic transactions, right?
If you were a judge, and you were presented with a court case, That if you were to rule correctly based on the law of the land, the constitution, and your duty, it would result in mass rioting and widespread violence.
Would you choose to incorrectly rule?
Preserving peace.
unidentified
Okay, so weren't there protesters, death threats, murder plots against some of the justices when the Dobbs decision was leaked?
Yeah.
And they didn't bend.
So I'm a little skeptical about this idea that everything is going to be done because of ideological persuasion.
I mean, those justices ruled in that case, despite the fact that they didn't have a lot to gain personally or politically from it.
I'm just, I'm wondering your moral position on, is it better to be correct for, as to the law of the land, or is it better just to, it's sort of the, you know, to look at Texas v. Pennsylvania.
I'm sure the Supreme Court justices thought, hey, look, if we take this case up, Texas is probably right.
The election is subverted.
It goes to the House of Delegates.
There's going to be mass chaos.
They were writing in the Boston Globe that the Democrats would persuade Western states to secede from the union in the event of a Trump victory if Trump didn't concede some demands of theirs.
So I'm imagining that many of these justices were just like, the law doesn't matter.
We should just do what minimizes harm.
I'm wondering if you think a move like that is the right thing or the wrong thing.
Should the judges have been like Thomas and Alito saying, it doesn't matter what you think is right or it doesn't matter what happens tomorrow.
It happens that we uphold our rules as they are constructed and written for the preservation of the system.
You get the law wrong, you're going to get human behavior wrong.
I mean, I see that especially with the decriminalization of marijuana, for example, in our area.
Like, when I was a kid and I was in high school in the 90s, there were a few people smoking a little bit of pot, definitely a lot of drinking.
But generally, we weren't doing that.
We were like, pot?
No, that's illegal.
It's not just illegal.
It's hard to get, all of that.
No, it just wasn't really a part of our world.
Today, my kids will sit in the nurse's office with friends who are tripping out because they got a bad hit or too much content.
They're hallucinating, whatever it is.
And my kids are some of the only kids around that are not doing any levels of pot.
The psychosis, you know, the lethargy, the lack of interest in schoolwork.
We taught kids something when we decriminalized marijuana.
We taught them this is no big deal.
And so it does matter what the law says.
We do want laws that are grounded in natural law and what it means to be human, that has a proper understanding of human dignity and the rights of children.
And then you need courage.
I mean, probably courage is the thing that is lacking the most across society, probably with judges, but certainly with the ordinary man too.
It is time for ordinary people, with whatever position of power you have, or if you're just a mom and dad, it is time for courage.
Well, I have a, this is why I call myself a right winger these days.
I don't call myself a conservative anymore.
I am not, and I'm going to use this word, but I'm not pointing to anybody here.
I'm not naive enough to believe that there can be a government that is a nation of laws and not of men.
Governments are always of men.
And the question is only the moral status of the men in authority, because that constitutes what the law will ultimately actually be, regardless of what's written.
Let me put it this way.
If you have an immoral man in power, it doesn't matter how good the laws are, he'll still use them against you.
He will still use them against you.
If you have terrible laws, but you have a moral man in power, he will never use them against you.
The only thing that matters is the moral status of the people in authority.
And that's what I think we don't talk about a lot.
We pretend like the piece of paper laws constrain people from doing things, and they don't.
The only thing that constrains people is their conscience.
unidentified
Well, you can definitely see some of that with the two-tiered justice system that's going on right now.
I think... No, a French king could walk in and take whatever little hamlet he wanted, but a British king could not, because they had common law that almost predated the monarchy.
And I think Hans Hermann Hoppe, which ironically is a classical liberal libertarian economist, has done a pretty good analysis of this, right?
In democracies, you have to care what other people think and do because they vote and they can affect your life.
In a monarchy, you don't really have to care what they think.
They're not really affecting the laws that much.
And so people socially are much freer under monarchies.
And one of the reasons I think Christianity arose in the Roman Empire period, and it was more difficult during the Republic period, was precisely for that reason.
Right?
You were just freer.
You could just have a Christian religion.
Nobody cared because you weren't going to influence the Roman monarch.
You weren't going to influence them that much.
So this is why I consider myself a right winger on these issues, right?
The moral status of the authority is what's controlling, I think.
unidentified
I'd say if you want to dive into this, you should have Yoram Hazony on your show, because I think he is the absolute expert, mapped this out historically, looked at all the systems and understands common law and the British tradition.
I'm just making a general point about technological advancement.
The big thing now that everyone's talking about artificial wombs, and I believe, for the time being, let me pause.
Through science, we can probably do anything within the confines of the physical world, right?
Obviously, I don't think we're going to alter physics using technology.
I don't think it's possible.
But for the time being, the idea that a man, a biological male, could be given a womb and then give birth is not possible.
But there is a possibility in implanting a womb in a man and then having a C-section.
And so this is what's actually one of the big debates now with womb transplants for Logical reasons, right?
They start this because there are women who have damaged or injured their uterus and receive a donor uterus so that they can carry a child.
And now the discussion is, okay, well we did that for an obvious and logical reason, to help someone who is injured.
Now we can put a womb in anyone for any reason.
unidentified
This is how it always starts with a very sympathetic, understandable case, and it ends up with purchasing, buying, selling, discarding, and shipping children.
That's what it's going to end up at.
And actually, I don't know if children will survive.
So they have had some live births from uterus transplant from woman to woman.
They've had about a dozen or so across the world where kids have been born to this.
It's a very difficult surgery.
The UK just announced a month ago that they did it for the first time successfully in women.
It was a sister donating to her sister or whatever, right?
So it begins with this sympathetic case.
And we don't yet have the technology to transplant a womb into a man.
I was talking to somebody yesterday who was like, I don't know I don't know if you could survive.
I mean, like, it's not just a bag.
Like, women's brains, their bodies, their hormone levels, right?
All of that goes into sustaining a child.
It's like it has to connect from something into something else, and those somethings don't exist in men.
So really, it would just be a bag in a cavity that would be sitting there in the man.
You would still have to create the baby in a laboratory, gestate them probably for a certain amount of time, and then transition it to the bag.
Yes, it's been doing.
Transition it to the bag and then c-section it out because there's no exit.
Their pelvis literally cannot support an exit at that point.
So I don't know if babies will be able to survive in a male transplant, but I actually think that that's not the greatest threat.
I think artificial wombs are The more likely scenario that it's going to threaten children sooner, because you do have, you know, the prototype that was developed.
They had a lamb that was gestated, right, to virtual maturity.
And lambs are somewhat similar gestationally to babies.
It is intended to be a prototype.
And of course, pro-lifers are like, well, this is awesome.
Now, if you have a premature baby, then you can transfer them to the bio bag and then gestate them until You know, they are a full term.
But the reality is that's maybe that'll happen occasionally.
But what's really going to happen is when you talk about the baby assembly process, which requires sperm, egg and womb, sperm is very easy to access, right?
All those Japanese men that you were talking about last night, they could They could give while they're at work, right?
Eggs, female eggs are harder to access but we figured out a way to do it if a woman pumps herself full of enough hormones and then you laparoscopically extract them.
Wombs are the hardest and most expensive part of the baby assembly process to procure and that is why 25% of surrogates today that are renting their womb are in Ukraine.
Right?
Because these are economically desperate women that will rent their bodies out because their husband is at the front lines or he's been killed and they have to support their three kids.
Right?
This is why you've got countries across the world where brown bodies are giving birth to white babies because those brown wombs are cheaper than the white wombs here in the United States.
And it would be so much easier for big fertility to just cut out the female altogether in the womb process.
There's a movie that I just watched, poorly executed by the way, unfortunately.
You may have seen it, I forgot what it was called, but it's about, in the future, they create pods where you can put the baby in it, and so career women, instead of actually having the baby, they go to work and there's a closet where they put the fake womb in the closet and close the door.
Have you seen this?
unidentified
No, but there was that video that made the rounds late last year called like ectolife.
But China is working on artificial womb technology.
And here's where AI comes into the picture.
They are working on AI nannies, robot nannies that are going to adjust the oxygen levels, the nutrition levels.
They will be able to increase development or terminate development of the babies.
And so this is really where the concern needs to be, is right now, very often, if a child is created through a surrogate and defective, maybe there's too many of them, maybe there's a developmental disability, oftentimes the actual real-life woman is the only one, even though she's not genetically related, standing in the way between life and death for that kid.
And we saw this with the situation, Brittany, I forget her last name, but the woman that was pregnant with a surrogate's baby, the two men, right, who she found out at week 23 that she had an aggressive cancer and she needed to start treatment immediately.
And the two men said, terminate that baby.
And she said, But it's unlikely, but I could deliver the baby.
The baby could survive.
And they said, we don't want a premature baby with all the medical conditions.
And she said, OK, I will find people to adopt the baby so the baby doesn't have to die.
And they said, we don't want our genetics out there.
Kill the baby and the baby is dead.
They did kill it.
The baby is dead.
She was opaque about whether or not it was an abortion or a delivery.
They're gonna, you're gonna go to a designer baby factory as a single person and be like, I'd like a child who's strong, tall, with perfect teeth, and then they're gonna give you a list of genetic options, be like, how about this eye color?
How about this eye color?
unidentified
So that's already happening.
You can already choose eye color, hair color of your children.
And I grabbed that kid and I picked him up and I went, oh shit.
These babies aren't crying because they've been trained to never cry.
Wow.
Right?
It's not because they're on a schedule.
It's because they have lost hope that anybody is ever going to respond to their cries.
And so I held that baby for two hours.
I didn't pick up another baby because I couldn't handle the thought of putting that baby down and listening to her cry.
So that is a level of human deprivation.
So the only touch that those babies had was a bottle propped up in their mouth, regular diaper changes.
I mean, they were changed.
They were clothed.
They were fed.
They had a nail trim once a week, but nobody touched them.
Nobody looked at them.
Nobody made eye contact with them.
Now I've adopted one of those children.
You know, my son was in an institution until he was almost two and the emotional Short-circuiting that takes place because they did not have human touch very often will make it difficult for them to function emotionally throughout the rest of their life.
Deprivation of human touch is a level of starvation, human starvation, that is, you know, cruel.
Like we punish people with solitary confinement.
Correct.
And it's considered one of the most cruel forms of punishment.
Yes.
People go insane.
They do.
That's what happened to those babies.
Now, at least they had nine and a half months of touch from their mother enveloped in her smell, her movement, her dietary changes, the light and the dark of her moving by a window, the sounds, her language, all of that.
I actually don't know if babies in artificial wombs will survive.
I don't know if they will, but if they do, they are going to be so horribly damaged.
And in fact, uh, you know, socially isolated people may be a desirable trait for some of these people that are doing this.
Right.
So I think it's a very powerful people want this to happen.
And a transhumanist agenda is real.
And I don't think it's, it's not just about mind machine.
It's not just about artificial births.
It's a program to take control of human evolution, totally control, total control of it.
And, um, you know, I think one of the fears that Elon Musk has talked about, for example, about some of the threats from AI, he subtly hints at this as the major threat.
It's the control of human evolution.
And I think they're going to be able to do it.
unidentified
So it is absolutely happening.
You have eugenics concerns already among kids created through these technologies.
We've got kids that are saying, this is a eugenics process.
I am a product that was designed, conceived by two specific specifications.
Every single step that we take away from children being created in the marital embrace has only resulted in damage to kids.
I mean, even now with surrogacy, we already have cases where you've got like the baby factory dad in Japan, like a single guy, Japanese guy who created dozens of children through surrogates in India and Cambodia and Thailand.
Single guy, rich guy.
He just made all these genetic children, I believe, with the egg of a white woman.
He's raising them, you know, in a big apartment.
You already have kids.
Here's the other thing about Big Fertility.
We talked last night about adoption being a just society's response to children who have lost their parents.
In those situations, the child is the client.
Adults have to go through all kinds of screenings and vettings and background checks, home studies.
That is not how it works in Big Fertility.
In Big Fertility, if the bank can clear your check, you get the baby.
So we already have situations of pedophiles creating children Through surrogacy, who would never have passed an adoption background check.
What I'm worried about is the fact that we give money and have an economic incentive for women to have children without fathers, and it is the biggest social problem in America, far larger than surrogacy will ever be.
unidentified
It is the biggest problem in America.
Fatherlessness is the biggest problem in America.
When you're talking about the commodification of children and the danger to trafficking, surrogacy, and artificial wombs are going to blow that away.
But should we compare against an ideal that probably we can't attain, given the reproductive technologies that are coming?
Or should we look at, particularly men, look at the current system and the risks in the current system and decide what to do to achieve the best outcome?
I think you have to be... I propose that we not be starry-eyed idealists and instead what we should do is be realists and try to achieve the best outcomes we can in the broken system that we have as we, you and I, work together to change that system.
unidentified
I propose that we recognize the realities of the child, that they come from a man and woman, get their biological identity from a man and woman, are maximized with their development by that man and woman, are statistically the safest, most loved in the home of that man and woman, and that all law, culture, and technology bend to the reality of the child instead of Forcing kids to fit the mold of whatever's going on.
And so as we sit here today, I imagine it's going to be like 30 years and someone's going to pull up the archive and they're going to be like, look how stupid they were.
They had no idea what was coming.
And there's going to be like the weirdest cloning.
And when we had Fresh and Fit on the show- They don't vaccinate their cattle.
Fresh and Fit's- They do not?
Well, it's all just like organic, raw, the earth.
But Fresh and Fit's position was, this is the reality of the world, so we must have men learn and adapt to it.
And, you know, they said, you know, look at how these women behave, what their expectations are.
No matter who the woman is you meet, she's on Instagram.
And so there's gonna be some famous guy or some guy with 300,000, 500,000 followers in the blue verification.
It's gonna send her a DM and it's gonna be, oh wow, look at this, you can move up.
And I said, and the likelihood of that happening if you meet your wife at church is very low.
unidentified
So that's the other thing is like, I heard them.
I know that that world exists.
There also are other worlds that exist.
There's my world that exists.
My world, where we've got people that are living by a shared set of values, raising our kids a certain way, to believe certain things, right, to recognize human dignity, to live according to that human dignity, to not define themselves based on their sexual feelings.
But you had people seeking out dry land and it was a myth.
They said, dry land doesn't exist.
But they found it and there were like horses running and there's flowers and food and trees.
And so my view is, you can choose to sit on that boat and just float in the ocean and say, this is life and I'm resigned to it.
Or you can seek out that dry land like they did in Waterworld and they found it.
My point, in reality, is it may be very, very difficult, but I think there are a lot of political, social arguments to be made about what we should do, where we're going, how it should be.
But first and foremost, for the individual, what they can do is, yeah, you need to be away from these things.
Like I was saying to Fresh and Fit, If you are concerned, man or woman, that you're going to get a dopey guy who's going to leave you with the baby and run off, or you're a guy who's worried the wife is going to bring you to divorce court and take everything from you.
But, I would argue, move to a small town, very small, with responsible, hard-working people, seek it out, find it, and meet the people who are like-minded through community and who have social obligations.
If you're going to church regularly, and I am not a Christian.
I do believe in God, but I know a lot of people might be like, I just don't feel right going to, you know, I don't believe.
Find a place where there's community gathering and social expectation, and then you find a person who says, maybe in time we grow to not get along, but we recognize our duties and responsibilities.
So while we may not be having fun, we are being responsible.
You find someone who can recognize that Maybe you're not going on date night anymore.
Maybe you're not watching movies together.
You actually don't like the sounds or smells or whatever, but you also recognize you have a responsibility to your kids and to your family, and you learn to work together, not for yourselves, but for the children you've created.
unidentified
Okay, so all of this has to do with what does it mean to be human?
Are you going to recognize the biological realities that, for example, men and women make babies?
But I will also say, you know, Fresh and Fit, they were talking about their 50, 60 women that, you know, the body count they need to get.
There is, you know, I do respect this kind of idealism and I agree with the ideal.
Um, but you know, I get this a lot from women.
They'll say, uh, Jeff, you just chose poorly, you know, and, and the, a lot of women say, well, just choose better, choose a spouse better.
Well, first of all, women fall for most divorces.
They're the ones choosing poorly.
College-educated women, it's like 90% of the filers are women.
They're choosing very poorly.
That says something about our education system.
But I don't believe that choosing wisely can overcome the massive economic and social incentives that cause women to, or not cause, but incentivize women to divorce.
And the incentives for divorce are mainly for women to take sole control of the children.
That's what the evidence shows, right?
And if as someone who has ardently tried to change these laws in several states, I can tell you there are entrenched interests that are going to prevent that.
You're not going to change those incentives anytime soon.
So the idea of, you know, go be Amish, go be Mennonite, find a church.
It's pretty obvious that there are a lot of men that want to do this.
They want to find wives like this.
They can't find it in America.
They're going to the Philippines to do it.
Right?
In order to find it, it's a way of kind of stepping out of society as well.
But the vast majority of men are not going to do it and are not able to do it.
If, uh, if you want to offer some final thoughts, Jeff just spoke.
So Katie, if you want to just give your final thoughts.
unidentified
My final thoughts are you've got all kinds of challenges, adults.
You're unwanted singleness.
You're in a struggling marriage.
You're post-divorce.
You're dealing with infertility.
You have same-sex attraction.
You want to be parents.
You have a lot of struggles.
Those struggles are very, very real.
The solution is never to make a kid bend and sacrifice for you.
Someone is going to do the hard thing in those situations.
It needs to be you, the adult.
You are the one that sacrifices.
We don't make kids sacrifice for us.
And I'm sorry, but this culture is telling you you can do anything that you want and the kids are going to be fine.
That is a lie.
You are not allowed to harm the rights of your children, their right to life, their right to their mother and father, their right to be born free and not bought and sold.
No, you adult have to sacrifice for children because the only alternative is for kids to sacrifice for you.
