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Nov. 20, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:44
WHERE IS GEN Z HEADING? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1216twi
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Is the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians the revival of an ancient conflict recorded in the Bible?
The nation of Israel is a resurrected nation.
What if there was going to be a resurrection of another people, an enemy people of Israel?
The Dragon's Prophecy.
Watch it now or buy the DVD at thedragonsprophecyfilm.com.
Hi, everyone.
I'm Danielle D'Souza Gill, and I'm so delighted to be hosting Dinesh's show today.
If you don't know me, I'm his daughter.
I'm also the author of two books, The Choice, The Abortion Divide in America, where I debunk the left's pro-choice arguments, and Why God, an intelligent discussion on the relevance of faith, where I go through different arguments made for Christianity.
And today, we are going to have a lot of topics to get to.
We are going to start by talking about Gen Z. We're going to talk about just everything we're hearing about Gen Z, from all the great things about Gen Z to all not great things about Gen Z.
And I think there's just a lot of confusion, especially because we hear such different things about, oh, they're super conservative.
Oh, but how come so many of them are trans?
So there's a little bit of some weirdness going on.
So we're going to look at Gen Z and analyze some trends there, especially with church attendance, whether they're conservative, things like that.
And then we're also going to talk to Jeremy Wayne Tate.
And you've probably heard him on the show here before, but he is really fascinating.
And we're going to talk about some classical learning and some things like that.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
According to research, Gen Z has been suffering from poor mental health compared to their older brothers and sisters, from self-harm to suicidal ideation, and just overall depression is much higher among Gen Zers than any previous generation.
Another pattern that's evident is that Gen Zers are more likely to evaluate their life positively and feel optimistic about the future while they're in K through 12 school.
But once they hit adulthood, the numbers of Gen Zers who report they're either struggling or suffering spikes by a significant margin.
As far as mental health is concerned, those issues track along with the widespread adoption of smartphones and has worsened in tandem with related trends such as increased screen time and decreased sleep.
Sleepless, phone entranced, self-loathing, this is a recipe for unhappiness.
In many ways, technology, especially smartphone technology, which can be very addictive, has done a real number on these young Gen Zers.
They're more atomized than previous generations.
With ubiquitous access to the internet, the geographical constraints on their associations have disappeared.
Now people spend virtually, you know, very little time with people they actually know in real life and spend a lot more time with relative strangers across the planet, not because they live in the same town or go to the same school, but most likely because they share the same online behavior.
This self-selective behavior means that younger people are less likely to encounter and therefore learn to tolerate ideas that might be different from their own.
You would think, oh, they're talking to all these people who live in different places, but in reality, oftentimes those people hold the same views because they're attracted to the same platform or whatever it is that's bringing them together.
So they choose to remain in their online communities where perceptions about beliefs are increasingly skewed.
There's no question that we live in a more ideologically driven world.
Many of us have been subjected to the horrible realities spurred mostly by rabid leftists whose unbending wills have spawned a succession of spirals over issues like race, gender, crime, immigration.
For them to disagree meant you were asking to be targeted for being evil.
And speaking of Charlie Kirk, as a heterosexual white Christian male, he represented the class that has been most heavily scapegoated by leftist Puritans.
Oddly, however, among those Gen Zers who report they are thriving, more identify as white males.
This group also skews politically towards the Republican side or Independent more so than Democrat.
This speaks to a growing sense of resilience among Gen Zers, which is actually a good sign given what they have had to deal with in our modern age.
While technology has ravaged their minds, culture, Gen Z's prospects for thriving are also threatened by immigration, globalization, and the rampant adoption of AI.
Many feel locked out of the housing market and that their employment prospects in the future can't be guaranteed because we are importing cheap labor.
There are robots, there's AI, there's computers to threaten their contributions or make them obsolete.
In many ways, however, these anxieties are typical of every age, especially when there are technological booms, but that doesn't mean that we should discount these anxieties and we should absolutely respond to them.
Men in many generations have felt an intense pressure to succeed when faced with establishing and leading a family.
The fear of failure is something that stalks all of us until the day we die, but especially men.
That's completely normal and natural.
And there are signs among this generation that many men are feeling that pressure, that it's easier to retaliate against the left's abusive victimhood mentality by embracing the same mindset in response.
It is dysfunctional to want to become the scapegoater after necessarily being the scapegoated, for example.
Dysfunctional, yet at the same time, it completely makes sense.
And it is a pattern that repeats itself throughout human experience at the personal as well as global level.
The bullied one day seek to become bullies.
And the story of communist failure is full of examples of the oppressed overturning their oppressors only to become even more bloody dictators.
Think of the Jacobins in the French Revolution.
They were all about equality, all about fraternity.
But once they took over, what ended up happening?
The terror.
They ended up killing many innocent people, and then they ended up with Emperor Napoleon.
No matter how justified we feel, embracing a vengeance mindset and just becoming the exact thing you hate is not the solution to fixing this problem.
And this damage isn't inflicted in a vacuum if we look at the mental health struggles of Gen Z. Just ask all of those who suffered in the Soviet gulags if their life improved after the Romanovs were deposed and murdered.
Clearly, it makes sense that you can't solve the ravages of the victimhood mentality by spiraling one's own victimhood mentality.
You're not solving the problem, but perpetuating the problem and actually making it worse.
But we do have very hopeful signs that Gen Z is aware of the causes of their distress.
One of those signs is that Gen Z is starting to ditch screens.
The generation has decided that what's missing is a more intentional and purposeful lifestyle.
So some people at Gen Z have started to collect, you know, records, use landlines, dumb phones, wired earbuds.
We're seeing kind of a revival of some retro things like that, even writing on an old-fashioned typewriter.
It's an analog life that's more about living in the moment, dedicating one's time to the creation of lasting things like crafts, personal hobbies that are not technological.
Gen Z has discovered the past and embraced it.
If you're from one of the older generations, you might view this techno-skepticism as a bit hardcore.
But Gen Z doesn't call it that.
They call it grandma core.
More encouraging still is the reported increase in church attendance and conversions.
According to a September article in Christianity Today, we have actually seen a huge increase in quote churchgoers between the ages of 18 and 28 attend church more frequently than their older siblings, parents, or grandparents.
A new study, part of the State of the Church Research Initiative from Barna Group and Glue found a post-pandemic surge among Gen Z churchgoers over the age of 18.
Today, when people born between 1997 and 2007 go to church, they attend on average about 23 services per year.
Churchgoing Gen Xers, in contrast, make it to about 19, while boomer and elder churchgoers average under 17.
Millennial churchgoers born between 1981 and 1996 attend 22 services annually on average, up from previously 19 and 2012.
The Barna study calls this a historical and a generational reversal.
That Barna Group study not only shows an increase in church attendance, it shows a rather remarkable change in the demographics of those attending churches.
Beginning in 2020, there was a shift in church attendees.
In the years prior, women out-attended men by margins of 2 to 12%.
Since 2020, that trend has been that men are now out attending women in church, such that in 2025, the margin is almost 10%.
A study by the Orthodox Institute also showed a similar change.
According to an article covering the topic, quote, a survey of Orthodox churches around the country found that parishes saw a 78% increase in converts in 2022 compared with pre-pandemic levels in 2019.
And while historically men and women converted in equal numbers, vastly more men have joined the church since.
Since when?
Well, since 2020.
The Orthodox Studies Institute also pointed out that since 2013, fully 66% of their converts were under the age of 40.
Not to be outdone, Catholic dioceses are also reporting influx of millennials and Gen Z. According to Turene Global, a market and research company, young adults in their 20s and 30s are becoming Catholic at incredible rates.
Dioceses all over the U.S. are reporting a dramatic increase in adult conversions, some experiencing year-to-year growth of 50 to 70%.
This counterintuitive renewal is not the result of cultural heritage, but a quest for depth, order, and truth, and actually a response to the growing depression amongst Gen Z. Many are finding that the antidote to that depression, to that anxiety, to that stressfulness about place in the world is actually order.
And so they are turning to a much more stable, deep religious conviction.
It's not true for all of them because we are seeing quite a few Gen Zs are radical leftists, but quite a few of them are turning to the right.
Here again, the conversions examined in the research mostly happened post-2020, which is significant because that means for Gen Z, COVID, the lockdowns, all of that was very transformational for them.
It came about at a time when they were adolescent and were really supposed to be around people, were meant to be around their peers, but were locked down and prevented from socializing.
And so that produced a lot of their depression.
And we all know that 2020 was hard for everybody, but especially those young people in school.
That was the year of the fraudulent Biden campaign.
That was the year the churches were shut down.
Many Christians were prevented from going to church, or they were publicly maligned by Democrats for disturbing someone's personal space.
In other words, it was the year that the stakes for going to church became real.
You had to really go out of your way to attend, find one that is open, put yourself in a situation where you might be socially even more ostracized.
And in the churches where pastors refused to bend to government overreach, people responded by putting their faith first.
As a GK Chesterton says, in a fallen age, virtue has all the thrill of vice.
So instead of being intimidated, people responded with courage and fortitude.
And the country noticed that alcohol stores were deemed essential, while churches were put under government padlock.
It seems in trying to insulate young men from faith, to prevent them from going to faith, we've seen others try to encourage them to go down a road of destruction.
But we know that the only answer to any kind of deep issues, deep just feeling unmoored in society, is to return to tradition.
And the bureaucrats actually have revealed how much they fear Christianity.
We've seen this in history.
We've seen that Christianity oftentimes is a force that stabilizes and leads a country down a better path.
And so people rose to the challenge.
Gen Z rose to the challenge, especially Gen Z men.
And this is significant.
Though maligned by the system for being both Christian and male, Gen Z didn't try to appease any criticisms of them.
They said, we are actually going to choose the better rogue.
We're not going to just play Fortnite and eat chicken nuggets.
We're going to rise up and be real, responsible young men.
So they responded by seeking refuge in the very Christ the left heaps scorn and ridicule on every day.
And it shows a really important lesson, which is that you don't just write off Gen Z. You don't just, you know, say, oh, you know, they're all a certain way.
No, we don't do that.
We actually see, wow, this is something that they're doing that's really good.
And so we should pray some for that.
We should focus on the fact that that is really good news.
You don't opt for the path of least resistance just because the person blocking your path is a 300-pound non-binary troll in a pink and baby blue face mask.
Though treated unfairly throughout their lives, Gen Z men did not wallow in self-pity and simply complain about the trans.
They met the challenge head on and said, we are going to change our life and do something about it.
And honestly, life has not been fair to many white men because there's DEI and there's so much horrible stuff that the left has done to them to prevent them from getting good jobs and being rewarded for merit.
They've been stopped by DEI in many ways.
And so it's been wildly more difficult to be a white male than it is to be another group.
And I mean, it's horrible.
It's horrible that they're dealing with this.
But honestly, the fact that they have risen to the occasion shows just how much they actually deserve the success that I hope that they enjoy because they've had to overcome so much.
Life is not fair to them.
And that's why we need to dismantle every DEI program across the country, whether that's affirmative action, whether that's in corporate workspace.
And fortunately, I think woke is dying.
Woke is dying, and the left is realizing that they can't continue DEI like this.
But I don't know.
I think after this kind of Republican revival, we're still going to have to keep fighting it.
We can't just take for granted that woke is dead.
We're going to have to really be aware because the Democrats aren't just going away.
They're not just disappearing.
I mean, all of these disturbed trans activists, they're still out there and they're still going to try to spread their message to the American people.
So the fight is definitely not over.
Every generation has its challenges and has to find their own solution.
So the fact that Gen Z men are choosing Christ, choosing to be more conservative, this is great.
And frankly, Gen Xers, boomers, they are from a different time, from a different period where they had different challenges.
And so they may not understand exactly what these young Gen Z men are dealing with.
As we look ahead, we see that young women, though, who are Gen Z are struggling.
And unfortunately, they are not shifting as much to the Christian solution.
They are increasingly more leftist.
We're seeing a lot of, a lot of them are choosing the feminist road.
And we know that the feminist road is the road of ultimate destruction because feminism really tries to dismantle the actual nature of womanhood.
Feminism operates off of the starting assumption that men are actually better than women.
things men do are better than women.
Working outside the home is better than working inside the home.
And so these lies, these horrible twisted lies that are told to young women, which is what feminism is, teaches them to, in a way, hate themselves, to hate being feminine, to hate being a woman, being a mother, any of those things.
And so they're left deeply unhappy.
They're left very anxious.
And they think that the solution is by being a CEO or being, you know, any of these things.
And it really isn't.
It really just leaves them extremely stressed, extremely anxious, feeling like they then have to manage, you know, work and their families as well or daycare, whatever it is.
And so a lot of women are turning to the left because the left gives them kind of the ability to feel like that's their solution to their problems.
It's just leaning in even more into feminism.
When in reality, the solution is really the opposite.
It's to turn to tradition, to turn away from feminism and to celebrate the beauty of femininity and the complementarian view of marriage and the complementarian view of men and women.
It's not that men and women should be at war with each other.
It's not that women are inferior to men.
It's that women have a different set of skills and different nature that is actually really beneficial to men and to society and to children.
And so I think that the fact that women tell women tell other women, especially on the left, these lies about feminism really just leads to these Gen Z women being totally lost.
And so I think that's why then if you fast forward and we look at the dating culture for Gen Z, it's really just wildly challenging for them because they have these young men who are trying to turn to tradition, who are trying to go to church and to just kind of rise up against DEI craziness to, you know, succeed in this world.
And then you have these crazy feminist young women who are leftists and they just complain about how they can't meet a good guy.
But the reality is actually the young, younger guys are the better catches oftentimes we're seeing.
And so these women, if they turn towards more classic femininity, if they turn towards just away from feminism, honestly, anything you find away from feminism, then there will be many guys who are available for you to date, most likely.
So this dating culture we're seeing amongst these young people, though, we do have to remember that they spend so much time online on their phones.
And so even just the way that they meet each other is through apps and all of this stuff.
And so I actually think it would be great for people to unplug from that to meet people in person.
And I know that's a lot harder to do today because it requires a lot more effort.
In the past, it was a lot more normal for people to just meet up and meet through mutual friends or through church.
And today it really takes kind of some like fortitude and focus in order to meet people and even just to meet friends, honestly.
A lot of young people are very lonely and feel like they don't even have friends.
And so you have to go out of your way to kind of like maintain friendships, meet people.
And so I think just this world that a lot of boomers and Gen X lived in that was much more, much more wholesome, I would even just say, but much more natural, much more normal.
Like you go to college, you hang out with friends, you can get a job.
I'm not saying their life is easy.
There's absolutely no reason for anyone to say that their life is easy, but just society was a little bit more set up, I think, for dating, for family life, and all of that.
And today, society is just going to attack you and come after you if you try to go the traditional road.
So you have to really stand against the grain if you want those things in life.
You have to like really be different from the culture.
And that is because the left has completely co-opted our cultural institutions and has completely taken over a lot of these megaphones, which honestly, young women listen to.
Young women listen to Hollywood celebrities who have been abused, who are deranged, and think that those people are cool.
A lot of young women, I don't know, I mean, see all kinds of things on Instagram and think this is what life is.
They hear a lot of girl boss culture and think that that's good.
They spend so much time, I think, just kind of just inculcated by leftist culture.
And so I think just unplugging from leftist culture sometimes is what's needed.
And I don't mean to be unrealistic, but honestly, if that means that you have to like delete an app from your phone, you have to delete it.
If you have to make new friends, you need to meet new people.
And so, anyways, these young men are taking that upon themselves and doing that.
They're doing those hard things, going to church.
And so young women need to stand up and they need to do the same thing.
So as we look towards Gen Z, look towards the future, I think we see there's a lot of hope.
There's a lot of good things that can be coming.
Also, some not good things, but I think that those things can be turned around.
Have you heard about the new movie Call, Sign Courage?
It's the story of Space Force Commander Matt Lohmeyer.
He's the one who blew the lid off the military's DEI agenda.
He saw how Marxist messaging, critical race theory, and rampant DEI training was changing the culture of the military.
Suddenly, everyone was, quote, equal.
They stripped away merit-based selection and promotions, and the lack of accountability, competency, and effectiveness had actually become a domestic threat.
He spoke up how it was tearing apart the military's unity, readiness, and the whole reason why we have a military in the first place.
Lethality, the ability to fight and win wars.
They broke into his home.
He was spied on and threatened.
But Lohmeyer didn't back down.
So career officers kicked him out.
Then President Trump made him Under Secretary of the Air Force so he could solve the problem.
When the stakes were high, this guy stood up.
Don't miss Call, Sign Courage, the Matt Lohmeyer story.
Watch it and buy the DVD at salemnow.com.
That's salemnow.com.
I am delighted to welcome our guest today, Jeremy Wayne Tate.
He is the creator of the class of learning test.
You have maybe heard him here on the show before because we are such big fans of his.
We love classical learning.
And so, Jeremy, thanks for being with us.
Hey, Danielle, great to be back on the show.
Yeah, thank you.
Awesome.
Well, maybe you can start by telling us a little bit about your introducing some legislation in order to kind of make this a little bit more mainstream.
Can you tell us about that?
Yeah, you always say testing, you know, may sound like the most boring topic under the sun.
Sometimes you will joke that the only thing more boring, you know, than taking a standardized test is hearing somebody talk about a standardized test.
But the reality, Danielle, is that standardized testing, the SAT, the ACT, is kind of like a lever.
And in some ways, it's the most influential thing in American education because it shapes education going up to it, right?
And so you look at what education used to be in America.
Look at like the old Harvard entrance exam back in the 1800s.
What are they doing?
They're required to translate passages of Greek and Latin on an admissions test to Harvard.
Well, what did that do?
It shaped the education up to Harvard up to that point.
And so we see this as the main driver of curriculum.
And what we've done is created an alternative to the SAT and ACT that is rooted in the great Western intellectual tradition, the Western canon, the great books.
So when students are taking the CLT, they might see Aristotle.
They might see something from Plato's Republic, maybe something from Dante or Boethius or Shakespeare, this great tradition that has really been censored by mainstream modern secular progressive education.
Wow, that's very cool.
One of my favorite things that I see on your Twitter that I just thought of is when you post about the classical architecture and great buildings and how people don't make the great buildings anymore.
Do you have any thoughts on how you can incentivize people to make them again?
Yeah, it's interesting.
The history of architecture kind of mirrors the history of education.
And essentially, you know, what was education like in America at our founding?
It was kind of like education was in the previous 2,000 years before that, right?
I mean, it's focused on rhetoric, penmanship, classical languages, classical literature, you know, the stories that were passed down and shaped an entire generation.
And then education does this crazy turn in the beginning of the 20th century.
And it's, you know, John Dewey and it goes to essentially pragmatic education, college and career readiness.
And so anything that was deemed to be not useful was chucked.
So philosophy, not useful.
Classical literature, not useful.
The study of Latin or Greek, not useful.
Well, you keep chucking these things that are not useful and you end up kind of losing everything that made Western civilization great in the first place.
And so we see this turn in architecture as well, right?
All of the great cathedrals in Europe and in America, 100%, were designed by people who themselves had received a classical education that's focused on the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty.
And at the exact same time, we go to pragmatic education, we go to pragmatic architecture.
What does this building need to do?
Oh, it just needs to hold people.
Why does it need to be so beautiful?
It doesn't need to be so beautiful.
And so you see this in churches built in the 60s and 70s.
They're so ugly, right?
But I think folks are finally waking up to this and they're realizing that the space we inhabit, I love the Winston Churchill quote, right?
We form our buildings and then thereafter they form us, right?
And I think anybody who's been in a great cathedral or a great space like this knows that it has this soul uplifting impact.
And I'm optimistic, though, Daniel.
I think we're seeing a return to that right now.
We've got great new classical architecture programs at Benedictine, Notre Dame, Catholic University.
A number of these programs are now coming back.
And we're seeing this with some great building projects as well.
Are you seeing a newfound love for the old from the young people?
Because I am very excited.
I feel like a lot of younger people are really interested in a lot of this.
And they're like, wait a second, there's something really special about all of this, about tradition and about the old world.
But obviously we have some other young people who are deranged and believing a trans activist.
But the other young people do feel like they're kind of drawn to what you're doing.
Yeah, I think there's a revolution happening.
I think it's actually connected to a spiritual awakening in America.
I think we saw this during Charlie Crick's funeral as well.
Young people in some ways feel ripped off.
People in their 20s feel ripped off.
Their education, you know, people that went through some of the best schools, went to a great undergraduate degree, sometimes went to graduate school.
In fact, the president of our academic board, you know, she went to Yale undergrad and she realized, she said, I realized I wasn't educated until I started homeschooling my own kids and realized she had never read Homer.
She had never read Dante.
She had never read some of the most influential works that shaped Western civilization for thousands of years.
So I think there's this great rediscovery that's really happening for the most part outside of the university.
You know, I love homeschoolers, these classical schools that are popping up all over the country.
And you meet these people, and I want to be careful not to bash public school students.
I went to public school, I taught in public schools for years, but you meet these people and you're like, what?
Like, it's almost like we forgot that 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds can be like this.
I mean, they're eloquent, they're well-spoken, and they genuinely love this treasure, which is the Western intellectual inheritance.
Wow.
That is really cool.
And what is your suggestion, I guess, to parents who are like, wow, I agree with you.
I want to do that.
How do they help their kids learn these things?
And what if the parents, what if they don't know those things themselves?
Do you recommend that they also learn learning or how can people kind of start to grow?
Well, you know, I love, you know, when we've chatted about your own education, you know, you'd say you went to some, you know, kind of progressive schools, but your real education was at home with dad, right?
And I think that that needs to be the case, regardless if you're homeschooling, sending your kids to public school, sending your kids to private school.
All right.
I love the Catholic catechism.
Parents are the first and primary educators of their children, full stop.
And a lot of parents have thought that you can outsource education.
You can't.
Education is parenting, right?
I mean, what is education, right?
Every other generation until recently understood education as the cultivation of virtue, right?
Growing in virtues like kindness, generosity, self-control.
That's parenting.
That's the hard work.
And there's really no outsourcing, even if the students are spending, you know, 8 to 230 at a brick and mortar school somewhere.
So I think for parents to re-embrace this, and kids love to see the humility of their parents discovering this tradition with them, you know, and I didn't really discover this tradition myself until I was well into my 20s and already had kids at that point.
And it's been sometimes through reading like the children's edition of the Iliad and the Odyssey and discovering these stories together that I think has been a lot of fun.
So I'd say, you know, just enjoy the process of being kind of co-learners with them and discovering this great tradition with them.
Yeah, definitely.
Do you feel like it has been taking off in terms of kind of like you're trying to change some laws and things like that to bring the classical learning test and do things more?
What's kind of your goal as far as maybe kind of expanding?
Yeah, you know, it's really been a fun grassroots movement for the past 10 years.
I mean, you would think of all things for people to get excited about a standardized test like what, but I think in some ways, you know, for at the university level, accepting CLT as an option, I think for a lot of parents has become kind of like a litmus test of, I mean, this is a test that largely draws from the classical Western intellectual tradition.
And so I think if a school is not open to receiving the CLT score as an equal to the SAT and ACT, that signals something that a lot of homeschooling families, Christian families don't like.
And I think right now, you know, we're at about 350 colleges have adopted, have changed their admission standards to include the CLT as an option.
But a lot of schools, places like Hillsdale, some of the best schools in the country, yeah, they accept the SAT and ACT, but they prefer the CLT because they know a CLT score indicates a type of student and it's simply a better indication.
Grove City College recently did a study, an outcome study on students who had come to Grove City, you know, via CLT.
And they discovered that these were the best students.
These were the students who had the highest GPAs, who were often the most active in class and on campus as well.
And this makes sense.
I mean, at the end of the day, SAT and ACT are in no way reflective of the kind of education that you're getting at a college like Grove City College, whereas the CLT is.
So I think with that, and we recently had a big, big win with West Point, the U.S. Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy, all adopting Pete Hegseth has been a huge fan of CLT.
And he understands at the end of the day that this is a lever.
And the way we understand it, Danielle, there's really four main levers that control 95% of American education.
And so these levers are these.
It's teacher certification, right?
What does it mean to become a teacher and get certified?
Often it means you have to go and ingest a bunch of left-wing nonsense to become an actual teacher, right?
So certification is something that a lot of radical progressives have gotten a hold of.
The other one is school accreditation.
What does it mean to be an accredited school, right?
Well, if it means you have to bow down to all the DEI stuff and whatnot.
The other one is the control of public funds.
We're talking here about school choice.
And the final one is standardized testing.
And I, of course, view this as the most powerful lever.
And if you can change kind of what is the most important test students are going to take, in some ways, it can redefine like what it means to be educated coming out of high school.
Yeah.
I mean, I think the fear would be that, right, if people took a classic learning test, like some students in a public school may not do well on classic learning tests, right?
So yeah, and we especially see that on the philosophy and religion part of the CLT.
You know, you think about it, even bright, bright public school students, sometimes they've never even heard the word philosophy.
They don't know what that means at all, right?
They've never been exposed to some of these thinkers and some of these ideas that they're grappling with.
I mean, how wild that for centuries and centuries, theology was the queen of the sciences.
This was the chief and highest study at Oxford, at Cambridge, at the University of Paris.
That we've gone from that to students have never even heard the word theology.
Like what, what are it's wild how much education has changed.
But people are waking up to it.
I think we're rediscovering the tried and true that really shapes souls in all the right ways.
Yeah, definitely.
Do you feel like the goal is to replace the SAT?
Or is it kind of meant to be like complement to the SAT?
Or what do you think about things like the SAT?
Yeah, 100% to replace.
I mean, we are very aggressive.
In some ways, we try to have a Nike or Under Armor kind of mentality at CLT.
I mean, we're here to do battle.
We want to dislodge the college board, the SAT and the ACT is the primary college entrance exams.
And we feel like we can do that with better content, better vision, better customer service, better user interface.
These are big, behemoth, sleepy, flabby companies that are primed for disruption.
And we've seen that.
Students don't like them.
Parents don't like them.
Teachers don't like them.
Administrators don't like them.
And the colleges and universities don't really like them either.
And because they're so deeply embedded in legislation at both the state and the federal level, they've been allowed to be not very good and to still keep their places.
But we've had, you know, this past year, we had big, big legislative wins in Texas, where you're at, big legislative wins in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana.
And by 2040, our goal is to be number one over the SAT and ACT.
And we are ahead of pace to do that right now, which is a lot of fun.
Wow, that's very soon.
How long has this been going on?
How long have you been working on this?
Yeah, so I launched the classic learning test in 2015 and really launched it out of an experience working at a Christian school.
You know, I was at a Christian school and I saw the influence of the college board.
And, you know, the main way, Danielle, this showed up first was the school I was at wanted to launch a couple new classes, an introduction to philosophy, an introduction to Christian apologetics, and students simply didn't sign up.
They didn't register for these classes.
And I was part of asking students, like, why didn't you want to take philosophy or Christian apologetics?
The number one response, Mr. Tate, it's not any AP points.
It's not any AP points.
And I thought, this is crazy.
We can't get our smart kids at a Christian school to take the classes we care about most because it's not AP, which is just secular, progressive, left-wing testing company in New York City.
Like, why should that company be dictating and influencing what's happening at our Christian school at all?
So I think people have had an appetite to diminish or push out the influence of the college board for a long time.
And I think now that there finally is an alternative, people have gone, you know, kind of crazy for it.
So it's been a lot of fun.
Yeah.
Do you think you'll be able to get rid of the AP as well?
You know, we're launching an alternative to AP right now.
Hopefully, starting off, the plan is to start off with an alternative to APUS, AP World, AP Lit, and AP Lang.
I mean, you think about something just like AP Lit.
And I was looking at their reading list just a couple of weeks ago.
And I'm biased, but look, I will say to anyone, I think the Christian literary tradition is the greatest literary tradition in the history of the world.
We've got all the best from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas to Dante to Shakespeare to Jane Austen to Flannery O'Connor.
I mean, it's incredible.
And they've got a tiny bit of Shakespeare, AP Lit, and that's it.
And then it's all about this, you know, whatever, you know, multiculturalism.
And so the students are being starved from, you know, their inheritance and they're not being fed with these great, great stories.
Yeah, so I think it's prime for disruption.
And, you know, with this, we think we can allow Christian schools to be truer and more faithful to their own missions.
Yeah, definitely.
Wow.
Well, Jeremy, thanks so much for being with us today and for sharing all this with us.
Hey, Danielle, yeah, thrilled to be a guest.
Thanks so much for having me.
And thanks for being enthusiastic about what we're doing here.
And keep up the great work.
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People are shocked to see how media personalities like Ellen DeGeneres, Rosie O'Donnell, the cast of the view, they seem to have age twice as quickly as their counterparts on the right.
It's not just a trick of the eye.
There is actual science to back this up.
At the opposite of the emotional spectrum of self-centered perpetual dissatisfaction and sullen anger is gratitude.
That's a feeling that the left barely recognizes.
These leftists, these specialty women, they become much older, they become angry, they spend all of their time spewing hatred, and it really goes to show in their appearance, if you even look at all of the work they've had done and still how horrendous they look.
A 2024 Harvard study on gratitude and aging revealed that elderly people who ranked high in gratitude died less.
The study revealed, quote, gratitude appeared protective against every specific cause of mortality studied, most significantly against cardiovascular disease.
Why is it so hard for the left to recognize gratitude?
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that it requires one to recognize that goodness is not a product of one's ego.
According to professor of psychology Robert Emmons, there are two main components to gratitude.
The first is to affirm the good.
He says, quote, first, it's an affirmation of goodness.
We affirm that there are good things in the world, gifts and benefits we've received.
This doesn't mean that life is perfect, doesn't ignore complaints or burdens or hassles, but when we look at life as a whole, gratitude encourages us to identify some amount of goodness in our life.
The second component is to recognize that goodness doesn't come from within.
He says, quote, we recognize the sources of this goodness as being outside of ourselves.
It didn't stem from anything we necessarily did ourselves in which we might take pride.
We can appreciate positive traits in ourselves, but I think true gratitude involves a humble dependence on others.
We acknowledge that other people or even higher powers, or if you have a spiritual mindset, gave us many gifts, big and small, to help us achieve the goodness in our lives.
Reading this, it's easy to see why the left has such a hard time with gratitude.
It's almost impossible to talk about it without invoking God, because you have to think who are you grateful for.
Who are you talking to when you say that you're grateful?
Indeed, if God does exist, then this goodness must come from him.
Goodness must come from somewhere other than the self.
Then the source of that good has been universally recognized by Christians as God himself.
Dr. Emmons lists a number of benefits to being grateful.
Physically, gratitude leads to stronger immune systems, being less bothered by aches and pains, lower blood pressure, more exercise, and being more mindful of one's own health, and sleep that is both longer and more refreshing.
On the psychological side, benefits include higher levels of positive emotions, being more alert and awake, experiencing more joy, more pleasure, being more optimistic, happier.
But it's not just our own bodies and minds that benefit from being grateful.
There are also social benefits.
These include an increase in compassion and generosity, being more forgiving, more outgoing, feeling less lonely and isolated.
Does this sound like a cure for all of the ills that have been plaguing the depressed member of Gen Z?
It definitely does to me.
I think this generation sees very clearly that there are two paths forward.
One of those paths leads to becoming like Rosie O'Donnell, hyper-obsessed, spiteful, ungrateful.
People like her will never admit that Trump has done so many wonderful things for this country.
Things like ending forever wars, increasing oil production domestically, lowering the price of food and gas or our historic tax cuts, ending two-tiered law enforcement, closing the border, working to deport illegal immigrants, working to get DEI out of the government, and shutting down the trans insanity.
Would you ever, you know, think that your average, you know, Democrat ever think that any of this is good for the country?
No, they wouldn't because they are not grateful for anything that Trump has done.
And if you were to look at, you know, what they've been clamoring for for decades, well, Trump has supplied the answers to so many of our country's problems, and yet the Democrats want absolutely nothing to do with it.
So certainly something like an increase in higher paying jobs, shrinking the welfare state, those are all things that we can work toward, right?
Those who've lost their minds to blind hatred, though, they'd rather have people on welfare.
They would rather people's lives have no upward mobility and continue to live the way they've been living.
And if we look at these kind of isolated people in Gen Z who are turning toward leftist, kind of socialist things that are pulling them in, we see that they are suffering from a litany of mental illness born from a psychotic break with reality.
Everyone needs to take a page from the Gen Z playbook to rise above this.
They've discovered the real secret ingredient to happiness.
To live a fulfilling life, we need to embrace simplicity, conservatism, gratitude, and most importantly, Christianity.
And we need to be grateful that these wonderful things are still around to embrace in the first place.
The very existence of that goodness is a sign of the hand of God in our lives.
And we have to think about all the persecuted Christians in Nigeria, for example, who are killed because of their belief in Christ.
At this time of reflection, this time of gratitude, as we lead into Thanksgiving week, it's important to understand that when we recognize goodness himself in God, we then are transformed by that as well.
And I think that will be the solution for a lot of problems in our culture, whether that's with Gen Z or with really just everyone, honestly, because as we've seen our societies become more atheistic, as we've seen people turn away from God, we can even look at Europe, we've seen just the amount of destruction that has occurred there because of their turning away from God.
And so here in America, we do not want that to happen.
We do not want to go down the road that Europe is on.
We should be warned by what they're doing and see that if we turn to Christ and we focus on our things that we are grateful for from him, then we will have a much happier life.
Well, that wraps up today's show.
If you enjoyed the show, make sure to find me on social media.
I'm at Danielle D'Souza Gill on all the platforms.
I'm on Facebook, Instagram, TrueSocial, X, Bumble, YouTube.
Make sure to find me there and I will see you all tomorrow.
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