Jordan Holmes and Dan Friesen dismantle Tucker Carlson’s interview with Andrew Isker, a Christian nationalist pastor pushing separatist rural communities in Tennessee via Ridge Runner—a venture capital-linked land project. Isker falsely claims Minnesota’s liberal policies threaten his autistic son, while Carlson frames abortion and LGBTQ rights as "cultish" human sacrifices, ignoring actual conservative strategies. Their cedar-clad church, symbolically tied to biblical Temple wood, subtly hints at exclusion despite legal restrictions, echoing segregation-era tactics. Friesen mocks the performative outrage, exposing Carlson’s slippery slope rhetoric as divisive and hypocritical, while Holmes teases absurd counter-moves like "Dark Easter." The episode reveals how right-wing media weaponizes fear to justify control, blending bad-faith claims with racialized nostalgia—undermining both Isker’s hysteria and Carlson’s moral authority. [Automatically generated summary]
Forcing the U.S. government to pay attention to its own citizens.
You're doing none of that.
So, as far as I'm concerned, you're a non-controversial law body man, but you are doing one thing that's pretty wild, which is participating in the building of a new town.
It sounds almost like a Christian utopian experiment in Tennessee, but I don't really know.
Can you tell me what it is and why you're doing it?
So, I was listening to this, and I'm like, this is crazy.
As a like a premise introduction, I don't, I, you know, if you, I guess, if you want to go and start a church in the middle of nowhere, you know, good luck.
I mean, it really, it really is wild because the first thing I can think of is just being like, all right, we have Joseph Smith, and he's got some really interesting ideas about these tablets he has, and he's moving into the woods.
It's a fun game that he plays where he takes a criticism that someone he's interviewing has received and then he acts incredulous about it before moving on and pretending that that point has been invalidated.
He does this because he knows that if he were to dip into these specific reasons, people think Andrew is a bit controversial, it'd be a little harder to defend.
Andrew's an open Christian nationalist and is very opposed to things like universal rights and the democratic system.
Like most religious extremists, Andrew's fully aware that given a choice, very few people would actually want to live in the rigid, religiously doctrinaire world that he wants to create.
He knows that his side would never be able to get their way through popular support.
And I'm certain that he knows this because he said exactly that on an episode of his podcast from 2023.
I saw after Tuesday, there were all sorts of guys who were like, how many elections of Christian nationalists won?
Like, what are they going to win anything?
I don't care about Christian nationalism until they actually accomplish something.
And it's like that take is really stupid.
And I've seen people say that, and it makes me lose a lot of respect for them and their thinking because it's like the goal is not to have this electoral majority and try to produce what we want, a Christian America, through the ballot box.
That's not going to happen.
That's foolish.
And you look at Ohio, right?
A red state that overwhelmingly votes to enshrine baby murder in its constitution this last election because America's not there.
They're not ready for it anymore.
They're not ready to baby murder any more than they're ready to have like Sabbath laws.
What would it look like when we have political power?
All right.
So you set your eye on the goal and then you backtrack to, okay, how do we get from where we are today, no political power at all, to that.
What steps do you have to take?
What direction do you go?
It's not a question of, oh, here's the blueprint to win elections.
That's stupid.
And it's more about retraining the mind of Christian Americans to think within this framework rather than think within, well, you know, we're in this secular liberal society and that's just the way it is.
And we'll try to have moral Christian candidates in the GOP.
And that'll make things reject that whole thinking and no, we want a Christian American one day.
So I've listened to a little bit of his show, and I'll say that despite my strong disagreement with Andrew about just about everything, he doesn't really mince words too much, like on the actual show.
Like that's pretty clear.
Yeah.
He's not making any act about how he wants the U.S. to be a Christian theocracy, about how people following other religions is heretical and how this is kind of an ethnic thing.
But he also really doesn't want to talk about that.
Right.
He doesn't want to get into the specifics about the ethnic part.
I mean, what's interesting is that they seem to have weaponized two things.
They've weaponized the slippery slope argument.
Like, you can't be like, hey, it's a slippery slope to listen to this guy because his explicit goal is to slippery slope us into where he wants us to go.
Listening to their show was that strange kind of experience where it's refreshing on the one hand because they don't hide some of their very objectionable political beliefs.
But on the other hand, there is still a similarity to a lot of the other tiptoe bullshit that you hear from these kinds of shows.
I'm not an ethnic essentialist, but there's an ethnic component to my conception of Christian nationalism that you can't escape is a ridiculous statement to make, unless you're just doing a half-assed job of trying to cover up the fact that ethnic essentialism is pretty important to you.
And you just recognize that most people don't like that.
They used the term, quote, the Jewish question a couple times, which is a bad sign.
I didn't listen to a ton of their episodes, but I did listen to one where they interview a World War II revisionist guy about how great Charles Lindbergh is.
But it did seem like they weren't in the stormfront sort of anti-Semitic camp.
But I found an article in Mother Jones that helped me get a better picture of where this guy is at.
Apparently in 2023, he tweeted, quote, I don't hate Jews.
Their religion is literally blasphemous and anti-Christian.
You cannot be a Christian without recognizing this.
I don't buy the whole not being motivated by hate thing, but having listened to his show, I'm willing to believe that Andrew believes that about himself.
He has a political and social view that's indistinguishable from a neo-Nazi, but he's definitely not one.
It's just a coincidence that his religious beliefs line up that way.
So, like, I think that that's probably the story that's going on internally.
Well, it goes to the question too, CJ, of if all 8 billion people or 6 of the 8 million people on planet Earth say Christ is Lord, does that mean they can become Americans?
Christian nationalism isn't about Christianity, clearly, because if three-quarters of the world joined together in forming a Christian state, that wouldn't be acceptable to Andrew.
This isn't about Christianity.
It's about domination, and Christianity is the vehicle that Andrew and his ilk have chosen to enable that domination.
He knows that the U.S. wouldn't vote to submit itself to his particular version of cultural dominance, so he's decided to do the thing that so many religious zealots and profiteers have done before him.
He's starting a church/slash planned community in the middle of nowhere, and Tucker Carlson has invited him onto the show to promote it while pretending that he has no idea why anyone would think this guy's controversial.
So the issue that I have and why I decided to do an episode here is that this is kind of wild.
For someone in Tucker Carlson's ostensible media position to be like whitewashing a dude who's going to start a Christian nationalist church in the middle of nowhere as part of a strategy that is essentially like, well, we can't ever electorally win power.
In that clip, Andrew's beginning to lay out the structure of this plan to form a religious community in rural Tennessee.
A company called Ridge Runner bought a 448-acre plot of land, which they intend to develop into plots that they can sell to people wanting to escape from secular society.
Ridge Runner has bought up multiple such plots around the Highland Rim area of Kentucky and Tennessee with the goal of creating a bunch of communities that can be used to create a parallel economy and culture to the evil world outside.
Ridge Runner was founded by a guy named Josh Abatoy, who's a managing director with an anti-woke venture capital firm called New Founding.
He helped create their capital fund, which aims to invest in businesses that skew far to the right politically, are Christian, and very importantly, are into cryptocurrencies.
According to Forbes, billionaire dipshit and past Rogan guest Mark Andreessen signed on as a limited partner and provided them with a nice chunk of change.
And it appears that he isn't the only Silicon Valley type who they're working with.
Yeah, workers' rights are antithetical to don't even say those words.
Right.
So anyway, this Christian nationalist venture capitalist firm with billionaire Silicon Valley backing is behind this Ridge Runner company that's going to sell Christian nationalists plots of land that they can create their own compounds on, presumably aligning with each other and using cryptocurrencies.
As their website says, quote, we welcome and encourage the adoption of Bitcoin and other disruptive technologies that can, at their best, promote economic sovereignty.
This is a marriage of Christian fundamentalism and tech bro bullshit.
One of their recent projects, the Bend at Cumberland River, which is in Kentucky, it started selling lots at least a year ago, and they currently have six sold out of 50.
I'm not a real estate guy, but that doesn't sound very good.
It sounds like there's a bit of a low organic demand to this.
Andrew Isker is a pastor, and he's announced his plan to buy a plot in their Tennessee development to build a church.
It's all good stuff, and he and Tucker definitely don't feel the need to talk about how he's not Randy Weaver within five minutes of this interview starting.
And then you also, unless you're buying it outright, you're going to owe a ton of money to the venture capital firm that owns all the land that you're buying.
As a Scandinavian, I always thought of it, was told, it's like where all the Swedes are and it's kind of lots of saunas and red-cheeked children and it's clean and reasonable.
Which made me realize that in his interview with Alex that we just covered, he said he didn't want to leave the United States because his ancestors are buried here.
I thought that was just kind of an expression, but I think he was being a bit more literal.
My family moved around a bunch when I was growing up, so maybe I just can't relate to this.
It was, you know, after the 2022 election where the Democrats took control of the state Senate finally, and Tim Walz could do whatever he wanted to do.
The first thing he passed was in the wake of the Dobbs decision.
Full abortion allowance, even up to birth.
There were the stories during the election about even post-birth abortions that took place in Minnesota.
I went to the state capitol and spoke to the first committee when that bill was being heard.
And maybe later you guys can pull up that video.
But I just went there and said, hey, you think you won an election.
You think you can do this and just murder children.
But God is not mocked.
He's going to come with vengeance about what you're doing.
Yeah, like all these 60-year-old liberal ladies, senators are looking at me, scoffing at me, and just staring daggers at me and hating what I'm saying.
For one thing, it's completely false that Tim Walz made it legal to kill babies after they're born in Minnesota.
It would be very strange 2022.
However, I do have to give Andrew credit, and there is some truth to what he's saying, and that is that the first bill the Minnesota state Senate passed in their 2023 session was SF1, the Protect Reproductive Options Act.
This bill just states that Minnesotans have a fundamental right to use or refuse reproductive health care, and that lower government bodies were prohibited from making any more restrictive rules than what the state had set forth.
We homeschool all the rest of our children, but we don't have the resources to be able to educate him with his autism.
And so he goes to the instructor.
And I'm well aware, especially you see the things that happened in 2020, 2021, all of the activism, trans stuff in the schools, all the libs of TikTok kind of stuff.
So there were a number of other bills like child tax credits, price gouging prohibitions, and down payment assistance funds for first-generation homebuyers.
But if you keep going down, SF23 addresses prohibiting conversion therapy with children and vulnerable adults.
Conversion therapy is cruel, and I feel like it's on par with psychological torture.
So prohibiting it is a good idea by my count.
However, this bill doesn't even prohibit conversion therapy.
Great.
All it does is prohibit licensed medical practitioners and mental health professionals from engaging in it, and it prohibits payment for conversion therapy to be covered by medical assistance programs.
It's not illegal to subject your kids to this kind of treatment, but Minnesota regulates medical licensing, and the state senate is of the opinion that it's not professionally appropriate for doctors to do that shit.
For the sake of completeness, the bill also prohibits people from advertising conversion therapy services that, quote, use or employ any fraud, false pretense, false promise, false guarantee, misrepresentation, false or misleading statements, or deceptive practice by advertising or otherwise offering conversion therapy services that could be reasonably interpreted or inferred as representing homosexuality as a mental disease disorder or illness, or guarantee to change an individual's sexual orientation or gender identity.
This one's really about consumer protections, and it was amending language in a completely separate part of the Minnesota state code that had to do with fraud and advertising.
Like, he has a bunch of kids and he can afford to homeschool all but one of them, so that one has to go to public school.
How does it become more affordable to homeschool this kid when you pack up your family and take out a mortgage on a plot of land and set out to build a church?
Moving to Tennessee doesn't sound like a solution to any of the problems that Andrew pretends to be struggling with.
Well, if I understand correctly, I believe his point is that because the child has autism, he does not have the resources to educate a child with autism.
So he takes advantage of the publicly available.
Oh, he probably shouldn't be okay with that at all, right?
So I'm not a psychologist, but it feels like Andrew's kid going to public school represents a loss of control that he feels over his child, and that feeling was entirely intolerable for him.
His mind was just a swirling mass of dumb shit he saw on social media that he was supposed to be afraid of.
And a lot of that has been about demonizing trans people for the last few years.
It kind of feels like Andrew felt that strain of impending individuation that his kid was going to experience out in the real world, and he couldn't handle it.
And what better way to swing the pendulum back the other direction really hard than by taking your family out to the woods to start a Christian nationalist compound that's totally not Randy Weaver-like.
And that bill that has to do with state funding and licensing of people who engage in conversion therapy has nothing to do with CPS coming and taking his kids away.
I mean, the irony of that is that the law that they wrote is explicitly about not being able to kidnap your children and torture them into saying the things you want to hear.
And that is what he interprets as them wanting to kidnap his children.
And children hated when I would go to the store because it would take an hour to get a thing of milk because I'd just stop and talk to people I've known my whole life.
Andrew said that he's from Waseka, which is a town of about 9,200 people with one elementary school that has about 400 students at it.
This can't be a wonderful town that he's so sad to leave and he stops and talks to everybody, but also one where the schools are indoctrinating all the kids.
What Andrew is saying is that Waseka was a wonderful town, and the people there were really nice.
His family had lived there for six generations, but when he sent his kid to public school, he got so freaked out that he had to start a church in the woods.
What I'm saying is that based on his telling of the story, I don't think a lot of this has anything to do with his son.
Why do you think so that the three, I mean, I have my own theories, but you've lived it much more personally than I have.
You tell me, why do you think states like Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, California have gone to a place that I think by any objective global standard, there's no country in the world that would nod and say that's okay, except maybe the UK.
And, you know, I, I mean, maybe I'm, maybe I'm unique.
You know, maybe my personality type is such that I just, I can't do that.
I can't see like evil stuff happening, taking place and not say something about it.
Not say, this is insane.
Like, how, how could we, I mean, just think a hundred years ago, and that's, that's sort of, you know, my book is, right?
If you go back a hundred years and you think about your, your great-great-grandfather, and you told him, hey, they're going to take little kids and little boys and remove their genitals and turn them into girls, right?
Are you okay with that?
Do you think that's all right?
Like, what would they do if that was even proposed?
Ironically, Tucker brought up the Finns, and this dude is from Minnesota.
So it's worth mentioning the 1907 Finnish immigrant labor strike on the Oliver Iron Mine Company.
About 16,000 workers struck when demands for better working conditions in the mines were ignored.
And that went on for about two months before strikebreakers were brought in in order to squash shit.
Sure.
This was one of the early instances of a large-scale organized strike, and it shook the bosses a little bit, a bit in terms of like anti-Finn sentiment that began to be disseminated out into the public.
Quote, after the 1907 strike, they tried to make the Finns be seen as Asians.
There was an Asian Exclusion Act, and if the Finns could be seen as Asians, they could get kicked out of the country.
The next year, a group of Finnish immigrants were attempting to become naturalized citizens, which was something that was only available to white immigrants.
So, yeah, maybe your great-grandfather might think that trans people are weird, but he might also be really confused by Tucker talking so highly of these dirty Finns.
And Maine is another one of the most secular states, unfortunately.
And those trends are rising there as well to Tennessee.
And there's something about that, you know, lots of left-wing ideas that, or liberal ideas or socialist ideas that like I don't disagree with all of them, honestly, but some of them I did, a lot of them I really disagree with.
Yeah.
But the transgender thing, the abortion thing, human sacrifice, and turning your children to eunuchs, those are so clearly expressions of cultish religion, of pagan religion.
So on one level, this is stupid, but on a deeper level, it's very stupid.
And it's also partially an act.
Tucker knows that no one supports access to reproductive health care because they love sacrificing babies.
He knows that access to birth control and abortion have granted women a giant level of autonomy in their own lives.
And he understands that people who advocate for reproductive health care support that end goal.
He strongly opposes that end goal.
And it's easier to pretend that he's fighting against child sacrificers than it is to argue against women being able to choose if they want to carry through a pregnancy at the expense of their education, career, all sorts of other variables.
Similarly, he knows that no one is trying to turn your kids trans or gay.
He's against people creating and accepting safe places for LGBTQ youth because he believes that if they're deprived of any validation, they'll be cis and hetero eventually like God intended them to be.
These are two particular hot-button issues for him right now.
And this is where the act part of this comes in.
He's pretending like these two issues are the biggest concerns and obsessions of the leftists, like it's a part of a demonic religion.
But what he's failing to take into consideration is his own part in this.
The right-wing media has chosen these two issues as huge rallying points for their politics, so they're attacking LGBTQ rights and access to reproductive health care super aggressively as a cornerstone of their ideology.
Their attacks are what is prompting people to stand up for these issues.
And Tucker understands that dynamic fully well.
He's just pretending not to.
Tucker and his ilk can play this game about almost anything, and it's super easy.
They can advocate for the rounding up and removal of immigrants who are here legally.
And then when people are upset about it, he gets to pretend that these people are so weird.
Isn't it suspicious how much they want to keep immigrants here?
They must be up to something.
It's probably because they're secretly using them to win votes illegally.
Either you're moving quickly toward – I mean I will never give up my views of – I will never stop being liberal on the most basic level, which is I actually don't want to control you or your beliefs because I don't think you're a slave.
I think you're a human being because God made you.
He should have every reason to know that the person he's talking to is not a big fan of ideas like freedom or liberalism.
So he doesn't need to do this wishy-washy bullshit.
No.
But I do think it's fun that he has to qualify every fucking statement that is like, you know, I believe that everybody should be able to live however they want.
The new atheism, all those things that broke down Christian moraes and Christian, you know, just cultural Christianity that was imbued all throughout American public life.
So I understand when metaphors go one way to explain something.
What I don't understand is when metaphors go the opposite direction, you know, where you're like, no, you've made up a whole religion out of the metaphor and not the thing that you're trying to explain.
Well, but that you, when you're talking about people getting mad at you about saying that the book is important, you're talking about people who believe themselves to be Christians and don't believe certain things that are in the book in the Bible.
Right.
And one of the reasons that this guy stuck out to me as kind of interesting is because he has the same perspective as you.
Well, I think some of that could be a matter of interpretation of what he thinks some things in the Bible mean, which is a form of putting things into it.
I'm interested in which, was it the letter to the Thessalonians where it was like, hey, man, if you aren't constantly on this, demons are wrecking your shit.
And if there's an atheism rise, clearly that means that there's a commensurate demon rise along with it.
You know, overall, right, the people, you know, in Minnesota, right, they don't, they're not used to the kind of preaching that I do, the kind of Christianity that I have where it's like, I, no, I believe the Bible, like, like, God is real, and he has spoken.
He's revealed himself to us in the Bible.
And therefore, I believe all of it.
And I'm not embarrassed by any of it.
I'm not going to tiptoe around the things that might be controversial.
If anything, I'm going to lean into those things.
And like Jesus said.
And that runs totally against the evangelical Christian ethos in America today.
That was certainly, you look at like, you know, the 80s and even in the early 90s, like you have the moral majority where they very much were that kind of fire and brimstone.
And they've been vindicated by everything that has happened.
I think that one of the essential things about the history of religion, especially in Christianity, the progression has been about access to the divine.
And I think the idea of injecting an app into your relationship with God, as opposed to it being a direct one-to-one, I think that that's actually regressive.
So something that I think is also pretty well illustrated by this episode is the way that this guy, his presentation is a lot of like evangelicals are soft.
Yeah, they're weak.
Yeah.
They're like last year's model.
Okay.
I believe is the way that he's trying to sell it.
And I think it's because he wants to get them insecure.
It was the big movement in evangelicalism in the 90s and early 2000s where we're going to make it as easy as possible for people to come into the church and believe in Jesus.
And so we're not going to focus on things that might offend them.
We're not going to focus on sin and repentance and things like that.
We're just come on in and have a good time and know that you're welcome here, right?
I think a friend of mine, I think I could call him a friend, Aaron Wren, he's written about this neutral world or negative world, neutral world, positive world, where in the 70s and 80s, Christianity is generally understood culturally as a positive thing.
If you said, oh, I go to church, I'm a Christian, I go to that church, people would think, oh, that's a good guy.
He's an upstanding, decent person.
But by the mid-90s, it was sort of neutral, right?
It was sort of, well, that's just a cool thing that you do, right?
Just like collecting stamps or building model trains or being part of the Lions Club.
But by the, you know, by the Obama years, by like 2015, you're in a negative world.
Where if you're an evangelical Christian, you are suspect.
So I think that the evangelical church took on some of that more accepting attitude for the same reason that the Catholic Church eased up a little bit in the 70s.
Attendance was down, so they were willing to make a deal.
There's probably a bit of a burnout in the wake of the satanic panic apprehending literally zero demons.
And the church probably felt the need to be a little more positive and more inclusive, or else people weren't going to show up.
And that means no tithes.
It's a good marketing strategy to be a little bit more welcoming.
This kind of framing is something that you see a lot with crypto neo-Nazi types because it's meant to dilute the audience's image of what the Holocaust was.
Christians were the real victims, you see?
He knows exactly what he's doing.
You wouldn't deploy this kind of rhetoric unless you were really trying to encourage a certain way of thinking.
So Tim Keller's in New York City and he tries to adapt Christianity to your upper middle class striver people in New York City or to make it easy for them to come to church.
So he wouldn't ever talk about homosexuality or if he did, it would be, well, that's not so good for human flourishing, but we're not really going to talk about that too much.
There's the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, J.D. Greer, famously said in a sermon, well, the Bible just whispers about sexual sin, but it shouts about financial sin or greed.
And you're certainly welcome to in this country and in all countries, actually.
But it doesn't just say this parenthetically.
No, it's like included in a sidebar.
It says it again and again and again.
And in the church I grew up in, they're like, whoa, there are only four times where, you know, in the scriptures where people, you know, where Christian, where homosexuality is attacked.
And it's like, since no one ever read it in my church, no one knew, but like I finally read it.
What the hell?
Why not read it?
And I did.
And I've never been anti-gay or anything like that.
But by the end, I was like, oh, there's a really clear message.
I feel like years ago when we were doing this podcast, it was like, hey, it's very clear that attacks on trans people are going on in an effort to push towards the same sort of treatment being given to anybody, any gay person.
Well, I mean, it is something that I think I don't think it's unreasonable.
And in fact, I think it was very reasonable for people to behave within that time period as though they were talking to people in good faith.
Yeah.
And so if I were talking to them and I said, don't do that, it's a slippery slope towards them being like, we're Nazis now, then they could be like, no, that's unreasonable.
I'm going to take them at face value.
Right.
But now you can't.
You can't do that.
It's on you now to say that they are a slippery slope machine that makes slippery slopes as argument factories.
And that's one of the things that I found most interesting about this fella is that I think he is a little more good faith in some ways than a lot of the people that I generally listen to.
So again, this like, I love liberalism, but it's the same thing he's doing here.
Like, I was never against gay people, but it's very fucking clear from the Bible that in order to be Christian, you must stamp this out, or else it's part of society going backwards.
I'm totally fine with everybody making their own choices, except I get to determine what women wear when they go outside, and they can't be anywhere near another man without me next to him.
I think it's important to hear clips like this to have a reminder that Tucker has to think he's talking to idiots.
His big slam dunk on atheists is: haven't you ever felt something that seems like it's outside of science?
One of the reasons this is so dumb is because Tucker isn't a brain scientist and he can't honestly answer the question: Have you ever experienced something that science definitely can't explain?
Because a whole lot of really mystical shit and stuff that feels like entirely otherworldly and shit can be explained by some pretty simple chemicals that we just don't care to learn about that much.
His reliance on his God saying that murder is wrong is just as valid as me making up a God who says that murder is good.
When you hinge an entire ethical framework on my God said so, you're making your beliefs more arbitrary, not less.
This is like freshman year philosophy stuff.
Like if your definition of what is right and wrong comes down to what God says, then why did God say X is right and Y is wrong?
Is the thing right or wrong solely based on whether God says it is or not?
If so, then your morality is just based on your belief about a deity's preference.
If not, then there has to be an external code of morality that exists even above God.
And you're following God's rules because you believe that God's a good interpreter of these sets of rules.
Neither of these is a good stopping point, which is why it's generally good to have a sense of morality that takes things at least a step or two deeper than God said so.
And I can see why Hitchens wouldn't really be interested in taking these points seriously.
As for the part about abortion, if I saw someone who wasn't a doctor performing an abortion on an unwitting person on the street, that would be concerning.
I think that in his stupidity, he's not realizing that there are a bunch of variables in these two situations that make them not analogous at all.
So if I understand the argument correctly, they're saying that humans have an inherent need to judge things and take on the air of moral superiority through that.
People like Tucker and Andrew are good and smart because they've outsourced this task to God.
And because they pretend to follow God's judgments, they get to take on a real air of moral superiority.
Conversely, in the absence of God, people like Christopher Hitchens have to find other things to find moral purpose in, like advocating for the Kurds.
Because they sought out moral actions and didn't just say, I'm doing this because God said so, they don't deserve to feel any air of real moral superiority like Tucker does.
So while we're on the subject, back in the period of 2006 to 2011, Tucker used to be an occasional guest on Bubba the Love Sponges radio show.
Or there's some amount of study and a willful rejection of the things you would have learned through that study in order to appeal to people who know very little and are easily distracted by jangling keys.
I mean, it's a disinterest in something that I do think is incredibly interesting and has a large amount of literature, the arguments over all of this stuff just through the Bible alone.
And they bet to ignore all of that and go, well, then what's wrong with murder?
And I just told them that, no, I have to leave Minnesota.
There is There's a place for me there in Tennessee.
And it's ultimately, you know, what is best for my family's future, right?
There's a place where my children can grow up.
Because part of it, too, is it isn't just the things that we're leaving, the political, cultural things that we're leaving in Minnesota, but it's also, you know, overall the things that have been done to the Midwest, to everywhere, where my children grow up.
And if they want to have a career and a life and a family and a success of their own, there just isn't much for them in small town Midwest.
And so they'll all just fly the coop.
I mean, this is what happened when I graduated from high school.
Most of the people that I grew up with, they all left.
They went to the Twin Cities.
They went to other cities for work and for careers.
And so that same thing was likely going to happen with my children.
And I look at it and I think, well, my family's been here for six generations.
And whether it's going to end here, right?
And I want to be in a place where we can continue that, where we can be rooted, where my children have the ability to stay in a place.
And so many friends are coming to Tennessee where we are.
They're bringing businesses.
And once you build things at scale, the more stuff you're able to do, the more businesses you're able to have, the more opportunity is for young people.
And so, right, if my children want to stay where we are and continue that on generation after generation, we actually will be able to do that.
It wasn't so much just, okay, we need to leave Minnesota, but it's also we're being drawn to a place for a particular reason.
So earlier the argument was that Andrew had a weird fantasy about what he imagined was going on at the public school and he didn't want the state to tell him he can't put his kid in conversion therapy.
So they had to get out of Minnesota.
Now I guess this has turned into a gold rush narrative.
It's a little different.
I understand that maybe employment prospects were tough in Waseka, but you have to understand that they aren't going to be better off in the middle of nowhere.
The place that they're ending up in is located a little ways outside of a town that's one-tenth of Waseka's size.
I get that the pitch here is basically that Silicon Valley type jobs can be relocated to a cheap place in the middle of nowhere and venture capital firms can create little company towns, but it's not going to fly.
You might notice that all of these people who are like relocating to Texas, like Elon and Rogan, they aren't going to the middle of nowhere in Texas.
They're going to Austin because that's a city that has the infrastructure and all the other amenities you need to accommodate large businesses like Tesla or Rogan's media and supplement operation.
The story Andrew is telling here is a farce.
He says that he's going to this new place because it's a chance for his children to have roots, but he's leaving a place where they already have deep roots and this history of six generations.
None of the points he's making line up together or make sense, which leads me to a strong suspicion that this really is mostly about control.
And it even makes sense that there would be this obsession with like the roots stuff, but he wants to control even that.
He wants to break from the roots that he had so he can be in control of the beginning of these roots.
He's creating a new family legacy while mythologizing the one that he has rejected by leaving Minnesota.
You know, I think when I was growing up, because this is what this was, you know, it's always, think about the children.
Oh, think about the children.
What are we going to think about the children, right?
And so the parents in these kinds of communities want to create a world for their kids that kind of allows them to grow up still believing the same stuff.
And then 10 years from that, whenever they're actually making like strong decisions about their own moral character from within, like, what is a, what is 10 years going to look like with computers?
But both of them, especially St. Paul, are just littered with churches and schools.
And it's just like the infrastructure of those cities was built by Christians.
Yeah.
And so it's a little bit crazy that, first of all, it's been taken over by people who have made a point to stick a finger in the eye of Christians to make it impossible for them to live there.
It's like you're being driven out of your own homeland.
I think that in the same way that like, you know, I mentioned that like sort of some mystical experiences can be easily explained by brain chemicals that you just willingly or unknowingly don't know anything about.
Yeah.
The Bible says a bunch of shit that's mind-blowing if you've never cared to read it.
And we're glad this happened because it let us get to know the American Country Network.
It turns out it's a great place.
Its leaders are excellent people of the same values that we do and we think that you do.
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So we have one last clip here, and it's because at the towards the end of this, well, I will say, I probably would have cut out some more clips, but I decided to leave a lot of the theological alone because I don't really care.
I mean, I wonder if this is too conspiratorial of a thought.
And that is that, you know, like Mark Andreessen put money into the company that owned, like the venture capital group that owns the company that has this big plot of land.
I mean, it's a hard world to live in where conspiracy is one thing, but at the same time, when a small group of people set out to accomplish a thing and then accomplish it, I understand that that is a conspiracy, but it's just like what we would regularly call a small group of people accomplishing a thing.
And then it's also hard for me to think about this outside of its advertising use, in as much as, like, okay, you've got this Christian nationalist guy who said a bunch of really dumb, bad shit in the past, who announces that he's going to start a church on a plot of land that this Christian nationalist, anti-woke venture capitalist group has bought.
That's courting bad publicity.
I mean, that's courting coverage in the media about like, oh, look at these Nazis going out to the woods.
And then you get to play victim.
Sure.
You get to be like, oh, look at the system demonizing us.
Sure.
This is why you need to buy a plot of land out here.
You know, the guy who set out to build the real Noah's Ark wasn't courting negative publicity, but I mean, I'm assuming that he had to know that people were going to be like, now you can see you can't fit everybody in there, you know?
The people that I've spoken to, the people I've met in the town, are very, you know, they're very enthusiastic, actually, especially when they see, you know, see the things that I do, see the podcast I do, or various things.
Like, oh, like, you're not at all like the TV man said you are.
And of course, these are people that, you know, that we've been describing.
Like, they don't trust the media.
They don't trust journalists.
So they're already distrusting of that.
I'm like, oh, it just seems like you really like Donald Trump and the United States and Americans and the Constitution and our freedoms.
And you seem like a just normal, you know, conservative kind of guy.
And I'm like, yeah, I am.
I'm an open, open book.
Like, there's no, you know, what you see is what you get.
I mean, the irony of what they're doing and what he's saying is that it's like it's very similar to segregation busing.
Like, most schools that were the most segregated, like, most areas that were segregated remain so.
Most schools that were segregated remain so because they stopped bussing.
Like, the only way to really force desegregation is to force desegregation.
Because otherwise, you can say, like, hey, you can't explicitly say you can't buy here, but also you can segregate your school as long as everybody's white.