#1026: Tucker, The Man And His Utopia
In this installment, Dan and Jordan decide to make it a Tucker Week as they discuss his recent interview with a Christian Nationalist trying to start a church in the middle of nowhere.
April 18, 2025 - Knowledge Fight
02:06:53
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Dan and Jordan. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| I need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Stop it. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Andy in Kansas. | |
| It's time to pray. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for holding. | |
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your word. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Knowledge fight. | |
| Knowledgefight.com. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey everybody, welcome back to Knowledge Fight, I'm Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around, worship at the altar of Selene, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Oh, indeed we are, Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Quick question for you. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| What's your bright spot today, buddy? | ||
| My bright spot, Jordan, is we were talking off air the other day about how I have not felt grabbed by a video game. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| In a bit. | ||
| Like, I enjoyed Assassin's Creed for a bit, but then it became a little bit of like... | ||
| It's a little drudgery. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Kind of the same. | ||
| A lot of stuff. | ||
| Totally get it. | ||
| I fucked around and tried out this game called The Blue Prince. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And, man, it got its hooks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah? | |
| It got its hooks in me, but bad. | ||
| What's it do? | ||
| I don't even want to... | ||
| Explain much, because there's a lot of mystery involved in... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Gotcha. | |
| A lot of exploration and puzzle. | ||
| First person? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's hit me in a way that a game hasn't... | ||
| Like, it's scratched a mist type itch. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And, like, that's a deep itch. | ||
| That is a deep itch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, way down. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| That'll get its hooks in you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so I really enjoy it. | ||
| It's a lot of fun. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| I beat it, and I still am going to keep playing it because there's still more stuff to uncover. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And what have you, and that's great. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| I enjoy it. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| What's your bright spot? | ||
| My bright spot is actually also video game related. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I finished Assassin's Creed. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| Beat it. | ||
| I put a lot more time into it than you did. | ||
| And I really kind of took my time going through all the nooks and crannies. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And then I did what I do with those types of games. | ||
| I was like, oh, well, okay, I'll beat the main storyline. | ||
| I know there's more stuff, but right now I feel like now's a good time to beat the main storyline. | ||
| And then I beat it, and then I just, I'm done. | ||
| It was amazing how the ending wasn't that great. | ||
| And then I was just like... | ||
| I never need to open this again. | ||
| It happened in an instant. | ||
| Yeah, I think a lot of games like that, you end up just like, I gotta clean up some stuff if I want to. | ||
| But once the main quest is over, I did it. | ||
| I'm happy for you. | ||
| I'm happy to be done with it. | ||
| Without giving away too much, I guess, how was the end? | ||
| Satisfying? | ||
| It was... | ||
| I would say that from a storytelling standpoint, it was very lazy and terrible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| But it's very satisfying to kill slave owners. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's hard not to argue with that, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How much of that unsatisfying end to the story do you think has to do with, like, choice? | ||
| Because there are some branching-ness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There are. | |
| There's some branched paths and stuff. | ||
| None that you cannot influence what... | ||
| I'm talking about specifically. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| There's a lot of really interesting things that you can influence. | ||
| I mean, we've seen some differences. | ||
| There's all that stuff. | ||
| But yeah, as far as I'm aware, the ending that... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Laser storytelling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Oh, well. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| Assassin's Creed. | ||
| Check out Blueprints. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| That's my next plan. | ||
| So, Jordan, today we have an episode to go over. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And I went a little bit off of what my expectations were on this episode. | ||
| I called a little bit of a late audible, and I have another Tucker episode to go over. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| It's Tucker Week. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Yeah, whatever. | ||
| Tucker Hewitt Edward. | ||
|
unidentified
|
T. Hewitt Everett Carlson. | |
| Yeah, he sucks. | ||
| And I just started listening to some more episodes of his show. | ||
| Great. | ||
| And I'm like, this is... | ||
| We gotta talk about this. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| So, we're gonna talk about him hanging out with a Christian nationalist preacher. | ||
| Fun! | ||
| And we'll get down to that in a minute, but first, let's say hello to some new wonks. | ||
| Ooh, that's a great idea. | ||
| So first, my pet rats definitely love it when I shout rat alert! | ||
| Thank you so much, you're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk! | ||
| Thank you very much! | ||
| Thank you! | ||
| Next, if you've been in an accident where the intro to a Wesley Willis song turned out to be the Macarena, you may be entitled to compensation. | ||
| Thank you so much, you're now a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a policy wonk. | |
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a policy wonk. | |
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And we have a technocrat in the mix, Jordan. | ||
| So thank you so much to buttons arrived on my birthday and overshadowed my partner's Lego gift. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a technocrat. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go home to your mother and tell her you're brilliant. | |
| Someone sodomite sent me a bucket of poop. | ||
| Daddy Shark. | ||
| Jar Jar Binks has a Caribbean black accent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's a loser little titty baby. | |
| I don't want to hate black people. | ||
| I renounce Jesus Christ! | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Yes, thank you very much. | ||
| Sneaky-ass button arrival. | ||
| That's brutal. | ||
| That's nobody's fault, but I would still be pissed off if I had gotten somebody a really nice Lego set, and then they're like, look at these buttons! | ||
| Fuck you, man. | ||
| It's not your fault, but fuck you. | ||
| Yeah, those Legos aren't glow-in-the-dark. | ||
| No, no, they're not. | ||
| No, no, but you know what? | ||
| I went now, and I got them for you, and that's why you don't care. | ||
| Isn't that it? | ||
| Because I was the one who got them for you. | ||
| I spend a lot of time scrolling through Lego sets and staring at them. | ||
| And being like, I don't have anywhere to put that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not going to get that. | |
| Why? | ||
| I want to get it. | ||
| I want to build it, but I can't. | ||
| I feel like that's what some people do with yachts. | ||
| Like, they look at yachts that they'll never be able to afford. | ||
| Ah, that one's too small. | ||
| For me, it's like, oh, there's a Lego set of the Thanos Infinity Gauntlet. | ||
| I don't know if I've actually even seen that movie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't care, but it looks pretty cool and I'd like to build it. | |
| Probably will. | ||
| So, this guy, Tucker. | ||
| Tucker. | ||
| This fucking guy. | ||
| This fucking guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He, on April Fool's Day, released an episode, like a fucking April Fool. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Interviewing this guy named Andrew Isker. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And he is a Christian nationalist fella. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Who has some maybe not great opinions about a fair amount of things. | ||
| Well, that'll happen. | ||
| And has... | ||
| Been in the news a bit recently because he's starting a church in the middle of nowhere. | ||
| Okay, now I'm listening. | ||
| Starting a community, a church-based community in the middle of nowhere. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| So Tucker has him on, I guess, to promote this. | ||
| Here's where we start off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So Andrew, thank you for doing this. | ||
| So, you're so controversial. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| God, I hate you. | ||
| Yeah, a married man with six kids who pays his taxes. | ||
| You're so controversial. | ||
| Very. | ||
| Controversial would be not paying your credit card bill and, you know, putting the banks out of business, convincing other people to do the same. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| 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-abiding 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? | ||
| Yeah, so it's not quite that. | ||
| It's not the Oneida community? | ||
| Yeah, we're not building some kind of Anabaptist community. | ||
| Okay, you're not the Shakers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Cold open. | ||
| Getting used to that. | ||
| That's a lot of fun. | ||
| So I was listening to this, and I'm like, this is crazy. | ||
| As a premise, an introduction, I guess if you want to go and start a church in the middle of nowhere... | ||
| You know, good luck. | ||
| That's Utah. | ||
| That's why we have Utah. | ||
| So go for it. | ||
| It just seems a little strange that this rises to the level of Tucker Carlson show guests. | ||
| I mean, 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. | ||
| I don't know why you're so controversial. | ||
| Yeah, seems crazy. | ||
| You found him in the woods. | ||
| We're going to move to the woods and that's it. | ||
| I don't know why everybody's mad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| People are just all... | ||
| These leftists. | ||
| What they need to do is pay their taxes. | ||
| Or pay their credit card bills. | ||
| Or not! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, Tucker... | ||
| Oh, called him Alex. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Tucker, he plays this game when he introduces guests sometimes. | ||
| Like this guy, Andrew Isker. | ||
| I don't know why this guy is so controversial. | ||
| What are people even thinking? | ||
| He's just a guy trying to create a fundamentalist religious separatist community. | ||
| It's not like he didn't pay his credit card bill or something. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| 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's 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. | ||
| We don't have political power. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| I saw, like, after Tuesday, there were all sorts of guys who were like, how many elections have Christian nationalists won? | ||
| Like, when 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 they're 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, like, you look at Ohio, right, a red state that overwhelmingly votes to enshrine, you know, 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 anymore than they're ready to have, like, Sabbath laws, right? | ||
| And so all these things you have to think about in terms of, like, a conceptual framework, right? | ||
| What would it look like when we have political power? | ||
| 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 so 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, you know, moral Christian candidates, you know, in the GOP, and that'll make things better, like, to project that whole kind of thinking and thinking. | ||
| No, we want a Christian-American one day. | ||
| Yeah, 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
| Odd how that works. | ||
| I thought the way that his co-host put it on this same episode of his podcast was pretty cute. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, I agree. | |
| I don't think you can get away from the ethnic aspect of things. | ||
| I'm not an ethnic essentialist where someone has to be of a certain ethnicity to have a full standing in society, so I'm not an essentialist, but I don't think you can get away. | ||
| I don't think you can separate it completely. | ||
| I think there are relations, coincidences, and correspondences there that we need to talk about. | ||
| Okay, absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, so I felt like that characterized the vibe that I got off these guys. | ||
| They're racists, and they know it. | ||
| They just don't think that being racist is bad, and they've intellectualized their position enough that I suspect they don't identify their position with bigotry and hatred. | ||
| It's somehow ascended for them. | ||
| Well, I mean, what's interesting is that they seem to have weaponized two things. | ||
| They've weaponized the slippery slope argument. | ||
| 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, right? | ||
| So you can't say, like, it's a slippery slope. | ||
| That's his goal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then he, I guess... | ||
| Weaponized, there are some good ones, argument. | ||
| Like, I'm an ethnic, I'm not an ethnic essentialist, which is like, see, I'm not a racist. | ||
| There are people who only like white people. | ||
| I acknowledge that there's like five or six good black people, so there you go! | ||
| I'm not a racist! | ||
| It's essential. | ||
| They're essentialists. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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 tiptoes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So I listened to a bit more of their show, and I got a pretty... | ||
| Good sense that they don't like Jewish people much. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So that's cool stuff. | ||
| Great. | ||
| But it did seem like they weren't in the storm front 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 I think that that's probably the story that's going on internally, and I think he believes it. | ||
| Yep, that sounds true. | ||
| This dude sucks, but as far as I'm concerned, I just have a fundamental difference of opinion that debate and reason aren't going to solve. | ||
| On a very simple level, he just doesn't believe that some people are as much of humans as he is, and he deserves more rights than them. | ||
| He's a Christian nationalist, but it's also not about Christianity. | ||
| And I know that because he says it himself. | ||
| Uh oh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it goes to the question too, CJ, of if, All eight billion people, or six of the eight billion people on planet Earth say Christ is Lord. | |
| Does that mean they can become Americans? | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's bullshit. | ||
| I mean, okay. | ||
| I'm actually pro him forming a community. | ||
| In the middle of nowhere, so long as it also can't contact anybody or affect anybody else in any way. | ||
| I guess if a bunch of racists want to get together and live in a hole, I'm not mad about that. | ||
| I did, unfortunately, learn that the plots of land do have internet connectivity. | ||
| See, that's what the problem is. | ||
| Sick memes coming out of there. | ||
| See, that's the problem. | ||
| They say they want a separatist community, but what they want is a bunch of them together so they can fight people better. | ||
| And also water provided by the city and electricity. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| The issue that I have and why I decided to do an episode here is that, like, 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. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| So we're gonna just create these enclaves. | ||
| But I honestly didn't know if that would have been all that interesting. | ||
| But there's a secondary dynamic to this that I think is important to keep track of. | ||
| This is not all ideological. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's an ideological aspect to this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But some of it is also a business thing. | ||
| Great! | ||
| Great! | ||
| And so the name of this business comes up that's behind all of this. | ||
| Good stuff. | ||
| So it's a company town and a religious town. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great. | |
| Good stuff. | ||
| Good stuff. | ||
| It's a company. | ||
| Ridge Runner is purchasing land and sort of facilitating a lot of things. | ||
| You're familiar with the Big Sort, where people are leaving blue states to go to red states and things like that. | ||
| It's along those lines where people are leaving. | ||
| I left Minnesota, a very blue state. | ||
| Everyone's now familiar with our governor in that state, Tim Walls. | ||
| Don't hire him to babysit. | ||
| No, I would not. | ||
| He would be the last person. | ||
| Yes, I think so. | ||
| So it feels like it might be time for these guys to give up on their fears about Tim Walz. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| It's past the expiration date. | ||
| It feels that way. | ||
| In that clip, Andrew is 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. | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ridge Runner has bought up multiple such plots around the house. | |
| Sure. | ||
| Good stuff. | ||
| Ridge Runner was founded by a guy named Josh Abitoy, 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. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Good stuff. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Good stuff. | ||
| Good stuff. | ||
| It's a smart move and a pivot for these type of oligarchs to make, since they never really cared about liberals. | ||
| social values to begin with. | ||
| And they're bringing about a power structure that will have contempt for the idea of regulation and consumer protections. | ||
| It works all to their advantage. | ||
| It's always a good idea to have a castle with serfs on it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Workers'rights are antithetical to... | |
| Don't even say those words. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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 I would assume so, yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| Definitely not Randy Weaver, buddy. | ||
| Great, great. | ||
| Not Ruby Ridge, it's Ridge Runner. | ||
| I feel very strongly about this. | ||
| For all of the... | ||
| Snaky, oily-ness of what's going on right now. | ||
| If I was going to talk to somebody who I ideologically despised, who wanted to buy one of these, I would be torn between two things. | ||
| One, you are obviously getting scammed. | ||
| And I don't like you, so go get scammed. | ||
| Screw you. | ||
| I don't give a shit. | ||
| Yeah, you're fucked. | ||
| Or two, I don't care if we disagree on something, this is a scam. | ||
| They're scamming you. | ||
| Maybe you believe in God and more power to you, but you're getting scammed, right? | ||
| What do I do here? | ||
| Well, I mean, I don't care. | ||
| Sure, I don't care either. | ||
| I think that it's interesting to understand and see this happening. | ||
| But yeah, I don't have any feelings about telling people to not get involved with this very clear scam. | ||
| I mean, if you buy one of these, you're getting scammed. | ||
| Unless you're quite rich. | ||
| Unless you're quite rich. | ||
| Because it's just land. | ||
| You have to build a house on it. | ||
| So that's on top of whatever you're paying for the land. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| 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 from. | ||
| And they're going to be so kind. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you get behind in your payments because you're living in the middle of nowhere and there's no jobs, in theory. | ||
| Oh, do they foreclose? | ||
| Yes, they absolutely do. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Yep, yep. | ||
| They remove everything and they own it now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I think that there is, like, a little bit of a, ah, I see what you're doing here. | ||
| You're stealing souls. | ||
| Is that what you're doing? | ||
| You're stealing souls. | ||
| For God. | ||
| For God. | ||
| My bad, my bad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I mean, it's honestly, beyond all that stuff, it's perfect. | ||
| Because you can just, like, get your friends together and go live in the woods together. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| Everybody should do it. | ||
| And so it's a platform to... | ||
| To be able to draw all of your friends together, it's like, well, we can kind of live anywhere. | ||
| Why don't we all live in the same kind of place and bring our families, bring our businesses, and build things together? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I bet you'll find out there are reasons. | |
| Drawing people that are spread out all throughout the country and can leave these places that are not great, living in... | ||
| Living in large cities or suburbs where you're just totally disconnected and really isolated, alienated from normal life, and you can have the American small-town experience once again. | ||
| It's so sad to hear you say that about Minnesota. | ||
| As a Scandinavian, I always thought of it, was told. | ||
| You know, it's like where all the Swedes are, and it's kind of, you know, lots of saunas and, you know, red-cheeked children, and it's clean and reasonable. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Not the case anymore. | ||
| Why did you leave there? | ||
| You know, for us, it was... | ||
| Are you from there? | ||
| I'm from there, yeah. | ||
| Born and raised in Waseka, Minnesota. | ||
| My children... | ||
| We're the sixth generation of our family that lived in that town. | ||
| Oh, gosh. | ||
| In the town? | ||
| In that town, yeah. | ||
| In the town of Waseca. | ||
| Are your ancestors buried there? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There's six generations that are buried there. | ||
| Even one of my own children that passed. | ||
| Will you be moving them to Tennessee? | ||
| A couple blocks away from the cemetery where all of my ancestors were buried. | ||
| Oh, gosh. | ||
| Oh, that's very heavy to leave a place like that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So heavy. | ||
| So heavy. | ||
| Tucker is going to be seriously focused on this six generations of his family living in the town thing. | ||
| Unsurprisingly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Me neither. | ||
| But I don't care where bones are. | ||
| I absolutely could not give less of a shit where bones are. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This mentality that you and your friends can just up and move to the middle of Tennessee is a little disconnected from most people's reality. | ||
| For instance, you can't just do that if you rely on a job that isn't something that you can do remotely. | ||
| You can work from home out there because the government they hate so much has set up electricity and internet access to these plots of land, but if you have to go into a physical workplace, rural Tennessee might be a long commute from where you need to go. | ||
| It's rough. | ||
| This would be tough for working people to pull off, and that's kind of because the idea, I think, is to move Silicon Valley-type people. | ||
| Out into the woods. | ||
| Naturally. | ||
| And create exactly what you said. | ||
| Company towns in these little pockets. | ||
| And people who couldn't just work online and shit. | ||
| There is no intention of building a factory or a mine or something. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, I mean, here's the problem with this. | ||
| And this is something that I think is distinctly American. | ||
| Every few years, somebody comes up with this brand new idea to do exactly this again. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It happens all the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And at no point in time does everybody go like, hey, how is it going that... | ||
| Nope. | ||
| It's always, we're going to do it right this time. | ||
| I've never heard anybody not go like, yeah, but we're going to do it right this time. | ||
| And like, hey, well, we've got a couple hundred years that says you're not. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I think that's the unfortunate cycle that we, like, especially with tech innovation, we seem to be trapped in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's like we're recreating network television on streaming shit. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| By just walking around. | ||
| We finally figured it out. | ||
| By standing still, we've gone everywhere. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And with rideshare stuff, we're eventually recreating public transit. | ||
| Holy shit, how did we not think of this? | ||
| A bus could carry all these people at once! | ||
| Right, and it just feels really fucking sad. | ||
| And that's what this feels like to me in a lot of ways. | ||
| But I do, I mean, I relate to the desire to go to the woods. | ||
| I ask you this question. | ||
| Has anybody said Tucker's name backwards three times to his face? | ||
| Do you think he disappears? | ||
| Because I feel like he does. | ||
| After I heard that, I was like, maybe that's what we're missing. | ||
| And nobody expects it, because nobody's like, oh, fairies are real. | ||
| But he is! | ||
| Right? | ||
| That's how we get rid of him. | ||
| Maybe that was part of the demon attack. | ||
| That could have been. | ||
| Yeah, maybe someone said his name backwards three times. | ||
| Arthur Conan Doyle saw Tucker Carlson, and that's why Houdini hated him. | ||
| That's the truth. | ||
| So, someone else who's hated. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tim Walls. | ||
| Yeah, I guess, for whatever reason. | ||
| He was really behind why Andrew had to leave Minnesota. | ||
| Is he? | ||
| He made it intolerable. | ||
| Brutal. | ||
| It was after the 2022 election where the Democrats took control of the... | ||
| The State Senate finally and Tim Walls 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... | ||
| The first committee when that bill was being heard. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Do you mean tiny dick god? | ||
| Yeah, they're like all these, you know, 60-year-old liberal ladies, senators, you know, are looking at me, scoffing at me, and just staring daggers at me and hating what I'm saying. | ||
| How dare he cut this Christian nationalist? | ||
| Lots of luck to them. | ||
| Good luck! | ||
| So this isn't true. | ||
| For one thing, it's... | ||
| Completely false that Tim Walz made it legal to kill babies after they're born in Minnesota in 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 SF-1, 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. | ||
| Andrew is fucking lying about this. | ||
| Yep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And as I recall, that's a sin. | |
| I feel like you're mocking God, buddy. | ||
| No, I'm mocking him. | ||
| No, he is God's representative, so to mock him is to mock God. | ||
| This is like somebody saying that maybe these plots of land are a scam. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| Get thee behind me and buy a plot of land over there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I did actually look at some of the land. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah? | |
| At the end of the day, we're both like, well, I mean, yeah, but the taxes are so low. | ||
| You can't not live there. | ||
| Honestly, there was a small part of me that's like, all right, y 'all want this? | ||
| I'll come. | ||
| I want to live in the woods. | ||
| I'll come be a pain in the ass to you. | ||
| You literally cannot refuse to accept because I'm not a Christian. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's against the law. | |
| It's against the law. | ||
| It is against the law. | ||
| But I was like, that's not worth the fucking headache. | ||
| Set up a big Cthulhu statue in the middle of their Christian town. | ||
| Why are you Dan Friesen? | ||
| Why are you doing this? | ||
| Because I'm kind of an asshole. | ||
| Yeah, I was bored. | ||
| I was bored. | ||
| So I was doing this podcast and I did a stray episode. | ||
| Shit got out of hand. | ||
| That's what's happening here. | ||
| This is what happens when things get out of hand. | ||
| So that was the first bill. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then there was a second bill that was like, I really, really gotta get out of here. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| And this is nuts. | ||
| The second bill that they passed, and these are the first two legislative priorities that they had. | ||
| The second one was a trans rights bill, which allowed the state to take your child out of their custody, or your parents' custody. | ||
| Sounds true. | ||
| If you opposed the transition. | ||
| Probably shouldn't ask any more questions. | ||
| And my oldest child is 12. A minor child. | ||
| Minor child, yeah. | ||
| My oldest son, he's 12 years old. | ||
| He has autism. | ||
| We homeschool all the rest of our children, but we don't have the resources to be able to educate him with his autism. | ||
| Who helps you? | ||
| And I'm well aware, especially if 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, that the majority of trans children... | ||
| Are on the autism spectrum, right? | ||
| These children are targeted, right? | ||
| And I'm thinking, okay, he doesn't talk about school. | ||
| He doesn't talk about home at school. | ||
| He categorizes all of his life. | ||
| He just won't do it. | ||
| So I would have no way of knowing, like, what is going on there. | ||
| They could be putting him in a dress and calling him a girl name. | ||
| And I would have no idea. | ||
| And then when I find out and I oppose it. | ||
| Right, boom. | ||
| CPS comes, takes him out of our custody, and he's gone. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| So that's when you go Randy Weaver at that point. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And you don't want to go Randy Weaver. | ||
| It didn't end well for Randy Weaver. | ||
| So just don't. | ||
| Take it off the table. | ||
| I don't want to go down that road. | ||
| Don't make the road exist. | ||
| And so it's like, we need to get out of here. | ||
| There's no road. | ||
| We cannot trust the... | ||
| Yeah, so I have pulled up the Senate's files from that session where there was the reproductive health care bill that was the first. | ||
| Bill that got passed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the second bill they passed was SF-2, which made allocations for... | ||
| How do you know it was the second bill they passed? | ||
| The number two. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Interesting. | |
| It was a dead giveaway. | ||
| All right, all right. | ||
| And the date, time stamps, and everything. | ||
| All right, okay. | ||
| I'm just checking. | ||
| I've got to ask these questions to follow up. | ||
| The administrative record. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| This was a bill that made allocations for the paid family and medical leave insurance program. | ||
| So I guess he's sinning again by lying. | ||
| Well, I mean, two is a very subjective number. | ||
| So there were a number of other bills like child tax credits, price gouging prohibitions, and down payment assistance funds for first generation home buyers. | ||
| But if you keep going down, SF-23 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 opinion. | ||
| 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, Sure. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nothing about this even comes close to involving child protective services. | ||
| But the way Andrew is telling this story is fascinating. | ||
| He's terrified of something that he's made up in his head, the possibility that his fears could be true, and it's giving him so much pain that he needs to flee from society in order to alleviate that fear. | ||
| He has no reason to think anyone at his school is trying to influence his kid at all. | ||
| He has no reason to think that. | ||
| Nothing has happened. | ||
| It is all in his head. | ||
| This also just doesn't make sense. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But he will in the woods. | ||
| Oh, he probably shouldn't be okay with that at all, right? | ||
| Well, he clearly isn't. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Seems like, yeah. | ||
| He's not at peace with this. | ||
| I mean, it is like, it's not like he's made it up by himself, you know? | ||
| No, the libs of TikTok stuff clearly plays an influence. | ||
| Even the way you describe that, too, of like, oh, this stuff could happen, you know, the libs of TikTok stuff. | ||
| Like, you're describing a thing that you could go to and talk to the people and listen to the people. | ||
| Yeah, you're describing falling into a hysteria. | ||
| Right, but through the lens of somebody who is absolutely nowhere near this place. | ||
| Like, you live there. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Just go talk to them and be like, hey, are you going to do this? | ||
| No? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| You live in a fairly small town. | ||
| How about this? | ||
| Ask them to write out, if I put your kid in a dress, then I won't take them away from you, and then sign it. | ||
| There's 400 kids that go to the school in his town. | ||
| Like, it's not a big school. | ||
| Insane. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is insane behavior. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's been a huge piece of right-wing media. | ||
| Libs of TikTok shit. | ||
| 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, although it is called Ridge Runner, Ruby Ridge. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| A little close. | ||
| And we've referenced Randy Weaver as being an option. | ||
| You don't want to go that. | ||
| Nobody wants that option. | ||
| So we're not going to take it off the table. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That would be crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| We always need to be able to go Weaver. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, it's just something that is inevitable at a certain point. | ||
| But then just go full Weaver now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just go do it. | ||
| So I think that his reasoning for leaving doesn't make sense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| Tim Walz did not make baby killing legal. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So that's all kind of dumb. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It all makes sense. | ||
| Makes perfect sense to me. | ||
| And he's just afraid that they're going to come and snatch his kid. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| They could steal him from us. | ||
| This could happen. | ||
| I don't want to be the... | ||
| As opposed to kidnapping him because we paid something to him. | ||
| I don't want to go through the legal battles and do all those fights. | ||
| I want my son. | ||
| I don't want to live in a place where that's even conceivable that that could happen to you. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| And so it was at that moment, I'm like, we need to get out of this state. | ||
| This is not a place where I can raise my children. | ||
| And I'm thinking, like, long-term, right? | ||
| Yeah, we've been in this place for six generations. | ||
| And it's a wonderful town. | ||
| Amazing place. | ||
| I mean, it's home. | ||
| I love the people there. | ||
| And many of them are going to be watching this. | ||
| Well, you must know all of them. | ||
| From my youth. | ||
| Small town, six generations. | ||
| A lot of the same last name. | ||
| My wife 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. | ||
| Oh, I love that. | ||
| And it's a wonderful play. | ||
| It's hard to leave that because you know it. | ||
| You're familiar with everything and all of the people and just the way of life. | ||
| Oh, I love that. | ||
| So which is it? | ||
| Are the teachers at your kid's school secretly trying to turn him trans, or do you know everyone in your town and they're all so wonderful? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Seems like it's not possible for both of these things to be true. | ||
| It would be very difficult for that to be true. | ||
| Andrew said that he's from Waseca, 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| This is fucking stupid. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| This isn't the faculty. | ||
| No, that's not how it works. | ||
| That movie starring Usher. | ||
| I thought Elijah Wood was in that one. | ||
| He might be. | ||
| I think it was Devin Sawa, maybe? | ||
| Might have been around that time. | ||
| I think that's a Harknet vehicle. | ||
| Josh Jackson, maybe. | ||
| Josh Jackson, hmm. | ||
| We got a lot of names. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I'm only sure of Usher. | ||
| Understood correctly, what Andrew is saying is that Waseca 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. | ||
| This is all about Andrew. | ||
| And now, because it's fun, I looked up the lunch menu at that school in Waseca, and I wanted to get your order. | ||
| Do you mean the lunch menu that turns you gay? | ||
| It might. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I actually have to get your order. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| There's some options. | ||
| There are not options. | ||
| There are. | ||
| When did this happen? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I assume some of it has to do with maybe dietary restrictions or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| That's fair. | ||
| I didn't have that growing up. | ||
| There's no school today. | ||
| School's out. | ||
| Okay, so I can't have anything today. | ||
| Yeah, but last Thursday you could get chicken strips or hot dog on a bun. | ||
| Which way are you going? | ||
| School-wise, you always go with the chicken strips. | ||
| You can't trust a hot dog on a bun from a school. | ||
| Yeah, I think I'm with you. | ||
| And I think I would want two hot dogs if I'm going to have a hot dog as an entree. | ||
| I'm on your team there. | ||
| One hot dog is not enough. | ||
| We're from Chicago, though. | ||
| What if you get fucked over, though, and you only get two chicken strips? | ||
| That's not enough either. | ||
| Yeah, but two chicken strips is something you can handle. | ||
| One hot dog makes you thirst for another hot dog. | ||
| They also have sides and stuff, but the sides are all pretty uniform. | ||
| This is just the main is really what you get a choice over. | ||
| I gotcha. | ||
| So on Friday, the choices were cheese. | ||
| Cheese quesadilla or sloppy joe. | ||
| Ooh. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| There is a nostalgic part of me that says sloppy joe. | ||
| But then there's the part of me that has a clear-eyed memory that says, avoid the sloppy joe at all costs. | ||
| And so that is what I'm going to do. | ||
| I'm going to go with the cheese quesadilla. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm going to go with sloppy joe. | ||
| You're going to go with sloppy joe? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You're going to make a mistake. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I feel like when you have a chance to do a Hail Mary, you do it. | ||
| And if you... | ||
| You know, the legend lives on if you catch it. | ||
| If you catch fire, you catch fire. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So these are all, like, kind of normal and they make sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But then this Tuesday, just a couple days ago, the options. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Shrimp poppers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Or, quote-unquote, yogurt basket. | ||
| I don't even know what that is. | ||
| I am confused as to why not even just name it Mystery Box, right? | ||
| More descriptive. | ||
| But ultimately, I think it's the same. | ||
| I think if you just said yogurts, it would make sense. | ||
| That would make sense. | ||
| What does the basket have to do with it? | ||
| It introduces questions. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But we can take that or shrimp poppers. | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| Yogurt by itself is already practically expired, so you can't go super bad with yogurt, right? | ||
| Or is that how it works? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, then I guess I'll go with yogurt anyways. | ||
| I'm going to go with yogurt too. | ||
| I think it's going to be an unsatisfying meal, but there's no fucking way I'm trusting shrimp properties from an elementary school. | ||
| That's unreasonable, yeah. | ||
| I'm not taking seafood. | ||
| Unrealistic. | ||
| I mean, I guess if you're Minnesota... | ||
| No, no. | ||
| No Midwest seafood at school. | ||
| There's no shrimp that you're ice fishing. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| There are no shrimps. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So anyway, that was fun. | ||
| Back to these dumb assholes. | ||
| Great. | ||
| 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, so 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How did they get there? | ||
| I think... | ||
| I mean, for all of them, the political power was captured by the left, political and cultural power. | ||
| I mean, I went to college in Minnesota in the early 2000s, and you could see the seeds of all of these things beginning to form. | ||
| And so all of the institutions were captured, and especially culturally in Minnesota, people... | ||
| People are very nice, right? | ||
| It's not a myth. | ||
| Minnesota nice is very real, and the ethos is if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all, which I just swim completely against that tide. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| I mean, not to point to genetics, but it's real. | ||
| It's Germans, it's Scandinavians, Norwegians, Swedes, some Finns. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good stuff. | |
| Good start. | ||
| It's like these are gentle, non-confrontational people. | ||
| You gentle. | ||
| Hey! | ||
| Yeah, they're very... | ||
| They're very kind, people that are, to a fault, unwilling to give offense. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And very tolerant of other people. | ||
| And have stolen half the land on the earth. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you can have... | ||
| So they take our best qualities and subvert them against us. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Stole the land on the earth. | ||
| So it's pretty hard to be more explicit than that. | ||
| All of these Nordic groups that Tucker considers white are gentle, inherently decent people who just had that decency used against them. | ||
| Stole half the land on the earth. | ||
| This is a very old white supremacist talking point. | ||
| There's literally zero chance that Tucker doesn't understand exactly what he's doing. | ||
| Cannot. | ||
| He's slippery sloping whatever audience he has to the much faster slippery slope that Andrew represents. | ||
| Ethnic essentialism, if you will. | ||
| Yeah, but hey, we don't want to talk about that. | ||
| That's not important. | ||
| That's slippery slope number four, all right? | ||
| We're explicitly at regular slippery right now. | ||
| Right, and then we'll get down to Sabbath laws. | ||
| Ooh, Sabbath laws are going to be a real bitch. | ||
| If you're starting up here at the top of the slope, you're really going to be pissed off. | ||
| Scandinavians are cool. | ||
| Quick ride down to... | ||
| Takes you all the way down to... | ||
| I can't wear what? | ||
| Ever? | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| So, yeah, man. | ||
| White people are just too cool. | ||
| I've often thought that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tolerant, some might say, to the level of defenselessness. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Here's what I'll say. | ||
| I'll say, too cool to have, period. | ||
| Let's get him out of here. | ||
| Get out of here! | ||
| Tucker talks here a little bit about the defenselessness of tolerance. | ||
| No, it does. | ||
| I mean, I come from a family like that with some of them have strong views, but they would never impose their views on you under any circumstances. | ||
| They're just not in them. | ||
| It's a very specific Northern European culture where they just don't want to get in your face. | ||
| Never. | ||
| But it leaves them defenseless a little bit, I think. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And, you know, I mean... | ||
| Maybe I'm unique. | ||
| Maybe my personality type is such that I can't do that. | ||
| I can't see evil stuff happening, taking place, and not say something about it. | ||
| Not say, this is insane. | ||
| How could we... | ||
| I mean, just think a hundred years ago. | ||
| And that's sort of, you know, my book is, if you go back 100 years and you think about 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. | ||
| I thought Unix went out with the Ming Dynasty. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I can't believe we have that. | ||
| Yeah, we're bringing that back. | ||
| They would go insane. | ||
| They would fight. | ||
| They'd become violent if that were happening. | ||
| And we're like, well, you know, I really want to keep my job, so I'll put the pronouns in my email signature and on my LinkedIn. | ||
| You know, I'll just go on tomorrow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have content for you. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you hear that at the end there, Tucker? | ||
| I have contempt for them. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yep, yep, yep. | ||
| So I get the point that Andrew's trying to make about culture shock, but this whole go-back-100-years thing is fucking hacky. | ||
| Go back to 1925 and explain your love of Elon Musk without referencing space rockets, electric cars, memes, ketamine, or social media. | ||
| See how well you can explain all that dumb shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So a fun exercise might be to go back to 1925 and see if your definition of white bears any resemblance to your great-grandfather's. | ||
| They might have different answers about which group's... | ||
| Are included. | ||
| No! | ||
| 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 strike breakers were brought in in order to squash shit. | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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 anti-Fin sentiment. | |
| that began to be disseminated out into the public. | ||
| Smart. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Motivated largely from resentment. | |
| Right. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| But a judge ended up deciding that they were white enough. | ||
| I like a judge being able to decide that. | ||
| All of that is A-plus stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That didn't sway the public, though. | ||
| And people from Finland were still routinely called China Swedes in Minnesota after this. | ||
| Which is a real thing. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| But sometimes, listen, all racism fundamentally is ridiculous. | ||
| It's nonsensical and it's childish behavior. | ||
| But sometimes whenever they get too far childish where you're like, come on, you gotta know that China-Swedes doesn't make any goddamn sense. | ||
| It makes enough sense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Come on! | |
| It makes enough sense for, you know, demonizing and mobilizing the population against these people who are involved in trying to get workers' rights. | ||
| You know, it's so strange how regularly you can go. | ||
| Go back and you can look at rich people who are suddenly fomenting racial violence. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| 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 fins. | ||
| Time is tricky that way. | ||
| Time is a bitch. | ||
| Don't go back. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think you're making any kind of real valid point with, hey, the things of today would... | ||
| Confuse the people of the past. | ||
| Precisely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nobody should go back. | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| Even if you think you're going back to meet your progressive hero, don't. | ||
| Don't go back. | ||
| There's shit that you don't know. | ||
| At best, it's going to be confusing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, Tucker. | ||
| Tucker talks a little bit about how maybe all these people who have different opinions than him are into the devil. | ||
| That sounds true. | ||
| So, my theory is that those are the most secular states. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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, you know, there are lots of left-wing ideas that are liberal ideas or socialist ideas that, like, I don't disagree with all of them, honestly. | ||
| But some of them, a lot of them I really disagree with. | ||
| 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, that I can't turn away. | ||
| I'm like, the Canaanites did this. | ||
| I know what's going on here. | ||
| This is not, you claim you're secular, you're not secular at all. | ||
| These are religious rituals. | ||
| That's the way it feels to me. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| 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... | ||
| you know, variables. | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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, Yep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| 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 he's failing to take into consideration his own part in the right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| here, they must be up to something. | ||
| It's probably because that they're secretly using them to win... | ||
| Votes illegally. | ||
| There's truly only one way to defeat this demonic, cultish behavior. | ||
| And that is to move to a religious work camp in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee. | ||
| I think that's the only way to combat... | ||
| A Silicon Valley-aligned capital venture fund. | ||
| Because you hate cultish behavior. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Because you don't want any kind of cultish bullshit messing up your totally normal, sane, rational choices. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It's the only answer. | ||
| It's obvious to me. | ||
| So, you get to talking about atheists. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Those dum-dums. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| With their... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What else are they also guilty of in their world? | ||
| They might not exist. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| Tucker does say at one point, like, have you ever even met one? | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Good stuff. | ||
| But they're talking about, like, the pillars of the atheist communities, like a Christopher Hitchens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm sorry. | |
| They've never met one, but also they know the pillars of the community are? | ||
| In the past. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| There used to be atheists. | ||
| Not anymore. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Because the demons and stuff. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| No, you're right. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| Like today, like James Lindsay is one of those types. | ||
| Who's James Lindsay? | ||
| He is this atheist guy that opposed wokeness and things like that, but wants just a free liberal society. | ||
| Like it's 1995. | ||
| I'm all for a free liberal society. | ||
| It's just that there isn't one. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| That's my view. | ||
| Unless you're gay! | ||
| And so I don't want to break down people's doors to make sure they're adhering to it. | ||
| Unless you're gay! | ||
| I hate that. | ||
| However, you're either moving toward order or you're moving toward chaos. | ||
| You're moving toward... | ||
| You know, a society rooted in some sort of transcendent belief where you're moving toward trannyism, which is another transcendent belief. | ||
| It's like you pick a religion. | ||
| It's not whether but which. | ||
| There will be one, and that's part of it. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know if people can hear themselves sometimes. | ||
| I'm not convinced by Tucker's noncommittal interest in liberalism that I think he very much would like to break down your door and tell you how to live. | ||
| I mean, not everybody's door, but if you're doing something that he thinks is evil, he's got to do something or all society is going to be destroyed. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
However... | |
| I mean, you're going backwards or forwards, baby. | ||
| I do love a complete negation of any ideology whatsoever. | ||
| Like, hey, listen, I believe that people should be allowed to do what they're doing, but you're either moving towards order or away from order. | ||
| So on that concept... | ||
| I'm gonna get rid of all non-white people. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| I don't want to tell anybody how to live, but you're moving towards order or away from order, and having all of those other people is away from order, so there's nothing I can do! | ||
| I believe that everybody should have the right to live exactly how they want to live. | ||
| People have self-determinism, and they have a right, a fundamental right as humans in order to choose their lifestyle, and also I think that religious doctrine that I subscribe to should get rid of. | ||
| You specifically? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh. | ||
| But what if I don't? | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| I feel like you just negated the first part of your statement. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, did I? | |
| I don't know. | ||
| What you gonna do? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How about an ad for some zin? | ||
| Or whatever the fuck. | ||
| Tobacco pouches. | ||
| Isn't that a good time to smoke some? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So this atheism that happened. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It had the unfortunate effect of ushering in demons. | ||
| That'll happen. | ||
| Because Christianity went on a little bit of a decline, and that left us open to demons. | ||
| Is that how that works? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| The new atheism, all of those things, it broke down Christian morays and just cultural Christianity that was imbued all throughout the American public life. | ||
| It takes all of that down, but then there's a vacuum. | ||
| And that vacuum gets filled up. | ||
| And what's it been filled up with? | ||
| Insane stuff like this. | ||
| Child sacrifice. | ||
| All of it. | ||
| Sounds true! | ||
| It is a new religion. | ||
| It isn't a question of, well, we're just going to have pluralism. | ||
| We're not going to have any dominant religion. | ||
| No, there will be one. | ||
| There will be a God that you serve. | ||
| And the one that we are serving now is some kind of demon. | ||
| Well, I think so much better put than I could have formulated that. | ||
| But yes, exactly, perfectly put, exactly. | ||
| You're going to worship something, and now we're worshiping something really, really dark as a society. | ||
| But it's particularly pronounced in the states that have abandoned Christianity the most aggressively and just come up with this new pagan religion. | ||
| It all makes sense, really. | ||
| Let me ask you a question. | ||
| In this conception of religion and celestiality, if you will, are we doing Highlander? | ||
| Is that what's going on here? | ||
| How? | ||
| Well, I mean, there can be only one. | ||
| Do we have gods fighting each other? | ||
| Or are we always in a religious battle for dominance? | ||
| Is the Bible and Christianity, which, yeah, yeah, yeah, all the things it says, but who cares? | ||
| Is it about winning? | ||
| See, here's how I kind of look at it. | ||
| I'm making up this metaphor as I go along, so forgive me if this doesn't... | ||
| I couldn't put it better than that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I think that the way you look at it is like parents of teenagers. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So the parents are God. | ||
| All right. | ||
| They own the house. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| They are going to get their way. | ||
| Under my house, under my rules. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But if the parents are away, like Christianity is on the decline, Sure. | ||
| Those kids might have a party in the house. | ||
| That makes perfect sense. | ||
| That's the demons coming in. | ||
| That makes perfect sense. | ||
| Right? | ||
| The demons taking control of the house. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, they might run amok and destroy a bunch of shit in the house. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But the parents still own the house. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's just a question of, like, how much are they gonna mess up? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, how much destruction are these demons gonna cause? | ||
| They're not other gods. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or anything. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I understand... | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Kind of, yeah. | ||
| That's no good. | ||
| It's bad. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| Backwards thinking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Also, demons aren't real. | ||
| Well, sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm wondering... | ||
| People have been very unhappy with me whenever I said the book is very important. | ||
| Well, actually, that's my question here. | ||
| Where is this coming from? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Except for he puts things in the Bible that are not there. | ||
| Which I find interesting. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Everybody knows that. | ||
| Well, I think that relates to Alex's idea of the hedge of protection is kept up by prayer warriors or whatever the fuck. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But he talks about that in this next clip, where the... | ||
| How he is just going from the book. | ||
| Sounds true. | ||
| And so I felt like maybe this could win you over. | ||
| Might? | ||
| Overall, the people in Minnesota, they're not used to the kind of preaching that I do. | ||
| The kind of... | ||
| I believe the Bible. | ||
| God is real. | ||
| He has spoken. | ||
| He's revealed himself to us in the Bible. | ||
| Therefore, I believe all of it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like Jesus said. | ||
| That runs totally against the Evangelical Christian ethos in America today. | ||
| Really? | ||
| It's all about, you need to be nice. | ||
| You need to make Jesus very inoffensive to people, and that's how you bring people into your church. | ||
| I'll say I'm not an evangelical. | ||
| I've always liked the evangelicals. | ||
| I've always defended them. | ||
| I'm very sympathetic. | ||
| I'm not even exactly sure what an evangelical is. | ||
| It seems more like a cultural descriptor, but I'm completely opposed to abortion. | ||
| So that has been, for me, the reason that I've always defended them. | ||
| But I always thought that the evangelicals were really forthright about their faith, another thing that I liked, and were way more on the kind of fire and brimstone side, which I'm for, by the way. | ||
| But you're saying that they're not. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, I'd say. | ||
| I'd say. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Lent is here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my God! | |
| No, you're fucking with me! | ||
| You're fucking with me! | ||
| That is not real! | ||
| Oh, that's real! | ||
| That is unreal! | ||
| That is too real. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| Yeah, there's an app for a prayer. | ||
| That is fucking insane. | ||
| That is insane on all of the levels that the book has ever spoken about. | ||
| To do that, the double, the back, oh baby, that's like a... | ||
| But it's also like... | ||
| I agree with all of those motions that you just made and the words. | ||
| I feel like I just watched 7... | ||
| I feel like I watched Tony Hawk hit the 720 for the first time all over again. | ||
| You mean the 900? | ||
| Yes, that's what I was saying. | ||
| Yeah, and it's like... | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| 720? | ||
| Apologies, apologies. | ||
| I was... | ||
| This was back before the 900 was the number. | ||
| No, it does feel like you guys hit all of it. | ||
| You hit all of it at the same five seconds. | ||
| Yeah, and it's somehow elevated even further by how bad the edit is. | ||
| Into the commercial is. | ||
| Like, it's clunky. | ||
| It's unsophisticated. | ||
| It's lazy. | ||
| It doesn't care how on the nose it is. | ||
| It feels like Joel Schumacher directed it. | ||
| Like, this is Starship Troopers levels of, like, we're being as obvious as we can about how this is insane. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think that a prayer app, I don't know why you need it, number one. | ||
| And number two, it seems like it's a bad idea for the paranoid type of Christian that Tucker seems to have in his audience. | ||
| Like, you download this app, and now the devil has a handy little list of all the real Christians. | ||
| You know, next thing you know, you're going to a FEMA camp. | ||
| You know, like, this is stupid. | ||
| Why would you get an app? | ||
| I... | ||
| If you were going to, like, say that... | ||
| Whatever, whomever was proven right. | ||
| Jerry Falwell? | ||
| If you will. | ||
| I can't imagine rereading the Left Behind novels if they were set, because again, the Left Behind novels are set in the apocalypse, which could happen at any time, and as we know, did not happen at that time. | ||
| No, that's true. | ||
| So now we're wrestling with the concept of a biblical apocalypse happening concurrently with prayer apps. | ||
| It does not get more obvious who's getting left behind. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I got the prayer app! | ||
| Well, that was a trap. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How could that not be a trap? | ||
| Hey, you got a prayer app. | ||
| I got all your information. | ||
| I sold it to my Silicon Valley friends who own this compound in the middle of Kentucky. | ||
| The concept of a several thousand year old religion being like, well, obviously we need apps. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| There's an app for that. | ||
| There's an app for it. | ||
| For your soul. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Not being kept in the priests. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The theses, all 90-whatever of them, yeah. | |
| That's a huge part of Christian tradition. | ||
| Big deal. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's about as far away as you can guess. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But again, it's this melding of the religious fundamentalist ideology with tech bro bullshit. | ||
| And I think that Tucker is right at this weird crossroads of that. | ||
| And I think that this episode is so illustrative of a lot of that. | ||
| If that's what we're witnessing, it does make everything make way more sense. | ||
| Because if you don't... | ||
| If you don't see that those two... | ||
| Because, I mean, before now, I honestly didn't think it was possible for those two to overlap. | ||
| But clearly, I am the fool. | ||
| I don't think it's possible for them to overlap for long. | ||
| That's probably a better... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that they're... | ||
| What is it... | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| Okay, so I was listening to this guy, Andrew, his podcast, and one of the terms that really stuck out to me that gets used a couple times is they refer to groups that are with them as co-belligerents. | ||
| Great! | ||
| Yeah, and so there's this idea of we're in this battle. | ||
| And like, yeah, I don't like these milquetoast Christians or whatever, but they're co-belligerents against the devil. | ||
| And so I think that they can think of Silicon Valley and venture capital firms and stuff like that as co-belligerents. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wild. | |
| And vice versa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I don't think that can last long. | ||
| Do you remember when you were growing up and you... | ||
| And I assume everybody gets there, but maybe I'm wrong. | ||
| You know, you're growing up in the church and everybody's talking to you, and then you get to the question where you're like, okay, but what if you've never heard about Jesus? | ||
| Do you still get to go to heaven or not? | ||
| And they all go like, bah, you know, whatever made-up answer you want to give. | ||
| I like to imagine that ten years from now they're like, but what about people who don't have the app? | ||
| Do they still get to go to heaven? | ||
| I use an Android. | ||
| Oh, no! | ||
| The green bubble! | ||
| It's the mark of the beast. | ||
| Does God get the green bubble? | ||
| The green bubble is the mark of the beast. | ||
| Brutal. | ||
| You have to have blue? | ||
| I mean, sure. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| 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, I believe, is the way that he's trying to sell it. | ||
| And I think it's because he wants to get them insecure. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He wants people who are in that evangelical wave that got swept up in Trump fanaticism to feel like, oh no. | ||
| I gotta go farther. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| It's kind of a marketing tactic. | ||
| I gotta up my subscription to get the same quality of belief. | ||
| Yeah, because I'm not a real Cutco salesperson unless I have the big box. | ||
| Right, I need Jesus Plus. | ||
| That's what we're talking about here. | ||
| Yeah, so he talks about that a little bit. | ||
| But throughout the 90s and early 2000s, they really changed course. | ||
| As the cultural trajectory is changing, they adopted... | ||
| You know, very seeker-sensitive movement where it's like, well, people are... | ||
| I'm sorry, what did you call it? | ||
| Yeah, seeker-sensitive movement. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Just come on in and have a good time and know that you're welcome here. | ||
| Come as you are. | ||
| We'll meet you halfway. | ||
| That was more or less the... | ||
| Why do you think they did that? | ||
| I think... | ||
| You know, a friend of mine, I think I could call him a friend, Aaron Wren, he's written about this, like, neutral world, or negative world, neutral world, positive world, where, you know, in the 70s and 80s, Christianity is generally understood culturally as a positive thing. | ||
| Like, if you said, oh, I go to church, I'm a Christian, I go to that church, people think, oh, that's a good guy, he's an upstanding, decent person. | ||
| But by the mid-90s, it was sort of neutral, right? | ||
| 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 negative world, where if you're an evangelical Christian. | ||
| You are suspect. | ||
| You're probably a Nazi. | ||
| You're probably a bigot. | ||
| You're probably a white supremacist. | ||
| Well, if the shoe... | ||
| Just to state for the one millionth time, the Nazis were not Christians. | ||
| They were not Christians. | ||
| But they love to throw those things around. | ||
| Nazis or Christians? | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| More Christians were killed by the Nazis than any other group. | ||
| Just a fact. | ||
| So anyway, no, the Nazis were not Christians. | ||
| I have to say that. | ||
| Good to make, you know, because they'll clip this and they'll say, oh, Andrew Isker is saying that the Christians are Nazis. | ||
| Yikes. | ||
| So I think that the Evangelical Church took on some of that more accepting attitude for the same reason like 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. | ||
| Like, yeah, Starbucks had sofas. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, because during the Inquisition, you know... | ||
| You caught just about everybody. | ||
| Because you just made it up, right? | ||
| But then during the satanic panic, you can't... | ||
| You can't just catch people. | ||
| It's not the 1600s anymore. | ||
| They did try. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They did try. | ||
| And the reason that it wasn't as effective is because you couldn't just... | ||
| You can't just grab people. | ||
| It's against the law. | ||
| Torturing stuff and all that, like, yeah, it didn't work as well. | ||
| It's a lot easier to get confessions out of people when you can torture them. | ||
|
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You bet. | |
| It just is. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And I think that that, like, sort of image rehab is something that the church felt the need to go through. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| And, like, getting with the times, because otherwise people were just going to... | ||
| Gravitate away from it. | ||
| Isn't it a nice little up and down further and closer away from the Inquisition? | ||
| That's just the story of religion. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So it's a little strange how Tucker will scream about how it's wrong for people to say that the Nazis were Christians. | ||
| But I wonder if he devotes as much energy to rebutting the claim that Nazis are socialists, which is constant in his world. | ||
| When Tucker says that more Christians were killed by Nazis than any other group, he's including people like Soviet soldiers. | ||
| Ah, yeah, obviously. | ||
| 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're really trying to, uh... | ||
| Trying to encourage a certain way of thinking. | ||
| Yeah, I'm a big fan of numerical-based genocide arguments. | ||
| Like, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. | ||
| I know that he specifically intended to do that one, but the rest of it, that's more people! | ||
| So it doesn't count. | ||
| The Nazis killed more Christians, you don't see us complaining about it, I say as I complain. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| While discussing the JQ, completely unironically. | ||
| You seem cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not confused Nazis at all. | ||
| I don't think it's confusion. | ||
| Well, that's fair. | ||
| I mean, I agree with you in the sense that they don't believe they're confused. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But I do think that the brain can't process all of this information without spectacular confusion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I think that this guy has some... | ||
| I don't think he's wrong. | ||
| I think that there was a softening of Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity, over this time period that he's talking about. | ||
| And then I think that the brand became pretty bad through the Iraq War and into... | ||
| Tea Party, Obama years. | ||
| Like, I think that it did become more toxic. | ||
| And being a part of the evangelical church went from maybe a positive way back to a neutral to a negative. | ||
| People were a little bit sus on it. | ||
| So I don't want to, you know, I listen to a lot of people who are just like, all you're saying is detached from any semblance of reality. | ||
| And at least that kind of like, huh. | ||
| That thought makes sense. | ||
| You know, I wonder how much that means anything to me. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| Not in the sense that I'm saying that. | ||
| I mean more like they softened their image, but the fundament has remained the same, obviously, because here we are. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like there was a deliberate softening of the image that is identical to his slippery slope plan. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Would you describe it as an actual softening or as a bullshittery? | ||
| I think that it's like, well, I don't want to call it like a disease because that, you know, I don't know if I want to. | ||
| Feel free. | ||
| It's a disease that went dormant then. | ||
| Sure, okay. | ||
| You know, like it's like the John Birch Society in conservative politics. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| You know, like it didn't actually go away. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It went dormant and then resurged. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The softening of the image was on top. | ||
| Maybe the whole thing wasn't like this. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This wasn't what Christianity was the whole time as the image was softening. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But the potential for this to resurge was there. | ||
| Is it... | ||
| Because I truly believe this. | ||
| It is incumbent upon these people to then admit that they were lying, right? | ||
| You'd think. | ||
| Which is a sin. | ||
| I mean, it seems like it's one of the things that they should really have to repent for. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because that's what they believe. | ||
| Yeah, but that was before. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| God doesn't have continuity. | ||
| Time ain't real, baby. | ||
| Yeah, that's fair. | ||
| So, he talks a little bit more about the softening of evangelical Christianity. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So, Tim Keller's in New York City, and he tries to adapt Christianity to... | ||
| You know, upper middle class, you know, striver people in New York City would make it easy for them to come to church. | ||
| So he wouldn't ever, you know, 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, you know, famously. | ||
| I said in a sermon, well, the Bible just whispers about sexual sin, but it shouts about financial sin or greed. | ||
| So they want to downplay... | ||
| It shouts about both of them. | ||
| It does. | ||
| And the two are connected. | ||
| If you're greedy for money, you're also going to be lusting after the flesh. | ||
| The two go hand in hand. | ||
| But it's to downplay things that the culture... | ||
| Does not want to hear, right? | ||
| Because you'll be branded as a bigot, as intolerant, as a bad person if you're just like, well, this is what the Bible says. | ||
| Like this, you know, fornicators, adulterers, sodomites, they will not inherit the kingdom of God, right? | ||
| If you say, yes, I agree with that, well, you're a bad person, right? | ||
| You are outside of polite society if you say those things. | ||
| And you can reject it. | ||
| You can reject Christianity itself. | ||
| And you're certainly welcome to in this country and in all countries, actually. | ||
| But it doesn't just... | ||
| Say this parenthetically. | ||
| No. | ||
| Like, include it in a sidebar. | ||
| It says it again and again and again. | ||
| And in the church I grew up in, they're like, well, there are only four times where, you know, in the scriptures where people, you know, 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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From, like, the Hebrew scriptures all the way through the Christian to the New Testament. | |
| And like again and again. | ||
| Is that what you'd call it? | ||
| You know, again, you don't have to believe it, but if you're a believing Christian, it's not whispered at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you do. | |
| Shout it! | ||
| Yeah, you do have to believe it if you're a Christian. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like if you claim that this is the Bible, that God spoke in this, right? | |
| I agree. | ||
| Yeah, so... | ||
| Yeah, I guess the temperature is shifting over to this. | ||
| I can see that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No, everybody listened. | ||
| Well, I think a lot of people were very keenly aware of this, and you had dipshits like Tucker and Alex being like, no, no, no, it's totally different. | ||
| I'm totally cool with gay people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Except, I'm lying. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
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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. | ||
| Yeah, that's what they do. | ||
| Yeah, 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. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| But he is also still deeply manipulative and trying to slippery slope things. | ||
| It's such a different sort of balance of that. | ||
| Tucker is deeply... | ||
| Deeply bad faith in everything that he's doing here. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And everything that he does on his show in general. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, yeah, I don't know. | ||
| This guy's weird. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I hope he has a good time in the woods. | ||
| I mean, listen, as somebody who grew up in a place of people doing basically that, not gonna work. | ||
| Not gonna work. | ||
| Doesn't last. | ||
| So, again, this, like, I love liberalism, but... | ||
| It's the same thing he's doing here. | ||
| I was never against gay people, but it's very fucking clear from the Bible that in order to be Christian, you must... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Stamp this out, or else it's part of society going backwards. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| 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 them. | ||
| That's reasonable. | ||
| Everybody's free. | ||
| And Jewish people gotta go. | ||
|
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|
Whoa, whoa, whoa. | |
| I don't even know what that word means. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So they talk a little bit about atheism some more. | ||
| Tucker tells... | ||
| Not any specific stories, but reflects on getting drunk with Christopher Hitchens. | ||
| Fun. | ||
| I mean, that'd be fun. | ||
| And then suggests that you can't really be atheist. | ||
| Fair. | ||
| Just to go back to the atheists for a second, what do they make of this? | ||
| I certainly understand being agnostic. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| Yeah, I can see why someone would have that viewpoint. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| I think that's a pretty normal... | ||
| Do you know any? | ||
| 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 he has no idea. | ||
| Have you not seen the lightning? | ||
| It comes from the sky and it's made of magic. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| As long as you know nothing about science, science can't explain anything. | ||
| When is this ever not applicable? | ||
| At what point in human history haven't you ever seen the sky? | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| I definitely am 100% on board that there are some things that science can't explain. | ||
| As we understand it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That doesn't mean that an explanation eventually won't be available. | ||
| The things science can explain fuck me up. | ||
| I don't like any of that shit. | ||
| Because a whole lot of really mystical shit and stuff that feels entirely otherworldly and shit can be explained by some pretty simple chemicals that we just don't care to learn about that much. | ||
| There's a lot. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| I think this is really stupid. | ||
| And Tucker isn't that... | ||
| I don't think he's that stupid. | ||
| I think that reflects a hatred of his audience. | ||
| I mean, it is like using evidence like, oh, I meant to call my mom the other day, and as I picked up the phone, she was dialing. | ||
| Haven't you ever seen magic? | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, buddy, I don't... | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Haven't you ever held someone's hand while they're dying? | ||
| I'm working on a riff on Pascal's wager. | ||
| I'm going to call it Holmes' wager. | ||
| I will bet you everything that there is no God. | ||
| If there is a God, I'll shit in his mouth and go to hell. | ||
| That's my wager. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay, that's interesting. | ||
| What do I have to do? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Everybody just makes the bet on their own. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Okay, I'm out. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| I don't want to shit in someone's mouth. | ||
| I'm going to win. | ||
| So, Tucker, I think he's getting a little heady because he's talking about these invalidations of atheism. | ||
|
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|
Sure. | |
| And he goes off on a little bit of an ethics tear. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I like it. | |
| I think this is just so stupid. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So there's very few people, very few, especially now, that are like, you know, I'm an atheist. | ||
| There definitely is no God. | ||
| Okay, well then, why is murder wrong? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, exactly. | ||
| Ooh, you got us! | ||
| Boom! | ||
| Boom! | ||
| What now? | ||
| What now? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Because you feel that way? | ||
| That's your authority? | ||
| Your emotions? | ||
| And you would see this. | ||
| I remember... | ||
| So, like, the people you were saying were atheists. | ||
| Like, are they ever... | ||
| Some of them are smart, I assume. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| What do they say to that? | ||
| I remember... | ||
| I remember watching, you know... | ||
| Previous guest of yours, actually the man who trained me in ministry, Doug Wilson. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Debate. | ||
| Wonderful man. | ||
| Christopher Hitchens. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| And they had that discussion, right? | ||
| And it was shocking to watch Hitchens say, well, it's common human experience, solidarity with mankind. | ||
| That's why I think murder is wrong. | ||
| And, of course, Doug says to him, well, if you saw someone being murdered on the street, you'd think that's bad, right? | ||
| Well, why? | ||
| And he goes into his whole spiel. | ||
| And he's like, well, what if what if it's a pregnant woman and her baby? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You would just say, well, no, no, you need to have a medical license for that to kill that. | ||
| Double down! | ||
| You wouldn't go down that road. | ||
| This is some piss poor ethics talk. | ||
| And again, it relies heavily on Tucker being confident that the audience that's listening is very dumb. | ||
|
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Yep. | |
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's fucking stupid. | ||
| This is a dull argument that they're engaged in, and I can see why Hitchens wouldn't really be interested in taking these points seriously. | ||
| As for the port about abortion, if I saw someone who wasn't a doctor performing an abortion on an unwitting person on the street, 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. | ||
| There's a surprising number of things that in his conception could probably just be solved with somebody going like, hey bud, what are you up to? | ||
| You want to explain? | ||
| You need a drink. | ||
| How's things going? | ||
| Going great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Good luck with the church. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| So, they talk a little bit more about morality here. | ||
| And I think that, again, this is just convoluted shit. | ||
| It's wrong! | ||
| Okay, why? | ||
| Yeah, you can see why it's breaking down, though, today. | ||
| Under the weight of its own silliness. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Funny how that works. | ||
| And it's being replaced by something. | ||
| So, all of the moralistic energy is still there. | ||
| And now it's gone to... | ||
| To things like transgenderism, abortion, you know, Gaza, whatever. | ||
| Like, it goes to all of those routes. | ||
| It goes to, you know, BLM and rioting. | ||
| Yes, that's right. | ||
| And so it's highly religious. | ||
| It's in us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's in us. | ||
| We can't get away from the conviction, the true conviction that some things are right and some things are wrong. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's fundamentally human. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But an atheist would have to, by definition, be utterly non-judgmental about everything. | ||
|
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You would think they should be, but they're the most judgmental people. | |
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| I mean, Christopher at dinner was always lecturing about the Kurds. | ||
| And I'm nothing against the Kurds. | ||
| I went into them in Iraq. | ||
| I can imagine that conversation. | ||
| I did notice that. | ||
| Again, I'm not against the Kurds. | ||
| I'm not an expert in... | ||
|
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|
Kurdishness. | |
| But he, man, he would lay down his life for the Kurds. | ||
| I remember thinking, what is this? | ||
| And it was the need to sort of... | ||
| Find a good guy and a bad guy and put yourself on the good guy's side. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, like God. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 Sponge's radio show. | ||
| Good stuff. | ||
| And in one of those appearances, he said, quote, Iraq is a crappy place filled with a bunch of semi-literate primitive monkeys. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| So maybe his take on the Kurds I'm not going to listen to entirely. | ||
| So there's no reason to conclude that not believing in a god makes you non-judgmental? | ||
| It's almost such an incoherent argument that I don't even know how you would approach it. | ||
| Well, I mean, I suppose you would approach it from the Calvinist direction, right? | ||
| And you would simply say that... | ||
| Any sin is an equal sin in its affront to God, which is what matters. | ||
| So murder, if you like, yeah, absolutely is bad, but murder is no better or worse than any other sin because the only thing that matters is the affront to God. | ||
| Right, the accounting of those affronts. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And even then, because that's already predetermined by God, it doesn't even really matter whether or not you murder somebody or not. | ||
| What matters is what happens at the very end. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, but I hear what you're saying. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Well, I'm not saying that. | ||
| That's Calvin. | ||
| But I get what you're citing. | ||
| Sure, gotcha. | ||
| But I think that what Tucker is talking about is kind of like judgment in terms of being rude. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Atheists are so judgmental. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not about, like, this is a greater sin than that or anything. | ||
| It's like Christopher Hitchens is on his high horse about the Kurds. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And where does he get off? | ||
| He doesn't even believe in God. | ||
| I mean, I don't think you're wrong. | ||
| I just, I don't know, I'm flummoxed by these dum-dums. | ||
| For all the arguments that they make, They claim to have studied a lot, right? | ||
| But the arguments betray a lack of said study. | ||
| Yeah, 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? | ||
| Fuck you! | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I cannot stress enough how anybody who's had an undergraduate philosophy class would have had these conversations. | ||
| At great length. | ||
| Both of these guys said they went to college. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Please don't ever make me go back there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, Andrew had a church in Minnesota. | ||
| And then he decided to go to Tennessee to do this stuff. | ||
| No golden tablets necessary? | ||
| No. | ||
| And he had to say goodbye to that old congregation. | ||
|
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|
Bummer. | |
| And tell them what he was going off to. | ||
| And I just told them that, you know, I have to leave Minnesota. | ||
| There is 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, you know, can grow up. | ||
| Because part of it, too, isn't just the things that we're leaving, you know, the political, cultural things that we're leaving in Minnesota, but it's also... | ||
| 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 a 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? | ||
| 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 it is for young people. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The Tennessee dream. | ||
| There's a future there. | ||
| The hope of refugees from time immemorial. | ||
| 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 Waseca, 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 Waseca'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 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 in 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's creating a new family legacy while mythologizing the one that he has rejected by leaving Minnesota. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it's pretty fucked up. | ||
| I think he's a weird guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I think when I was growing up, because 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. | ||
| Yeah, with their worldview imposed and non-threatened. | ||
| And because if you control the environment, it won't feel like imposition. | ||
| It'll just be the way that you grew up. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I feel like that made more sense. | ||
| 500 years ago, whenever the next 100 years would seem almost identical to the 100 years previous to that. | ||
| Now, the idea of molding your child's growth five years from now is absurd. | ||
| It's just absurd. | ||
| You have no idea what it's going to look like. | ||
| I mean, you have no fucking clue. | ||
| And then ten years from that, whenever they're actually making strong decisions about their own moral character from within, what is ten years going to look like with computers? | ||
| The level of control you would need to exert over some child in order to maintain that box? | ||
| Absurd. | ||
| In the modern world, it seems very crazy. | ||
| But, you know, God bless him for trying. | ||
| I suppose. | ||
| I suppose. | ||
| I don't think God's doing that, but I suppose we all should hope. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think, you know, you move your kids out to the middle of nowhere to start a church. | ||
| I think you might make them more likely to leave when they can. | ||
| That does tend to be the case. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That does tend to be the case. | ||
| This one sounds like a dud. | ||
| So, Tucker is a bit of a racist. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| An ethnic essentialist, I think I would call him. | ||
| Don't use those words. | ||
| He's an ethnic city essentialist. | ||
| He thinks of towns by their ethnicities. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Christians built your state. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And all of it. | ||
| And every bit of it. | ||
| And it's so telling when you go to the Twin Cities. | ||
| I think of them as Protestant and Catholic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think of them as Scandinavian in Minneapolis and Irish. | ||
| And others in St. Paul. | ||
| But both of them, especially St. Paul, just littered with churches and schools, and it's just like the infrastructure of those cities was built by Christians. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Six generations. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was true. | |
| This is what happened with my wife. | ||
| My wife is from St. Paul. | ||
| Her father's side of the family is Polish Catholic. | ||
| They went to St. Kazimierz Church. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| That's exactly in my mind what I think of. | ||
| In the neighborhood that they were in, it was all Polish people. | ||
| But now it's all Hmong, right? | ||
| Everywhere. | ||
| It's all Hmong and Somali. | ||
| And everyone there just left over the last... | ||
| What happened to their churches and parochial schools? | ||
| Well, St. Kazimierz Church is there, but it's largely empty. | ||
| We went there for a funeral a couple years ago. | ||
| People still attended, but it's not like it was. | ||
| Most of the parishes there have shut down. | ||
| The church schools have shut down, and they've moved out to the suburbs. | ||
| That was a Polish neighborhood. | ||
| It was this ethnic enclave. | ||
| If I could just say... | ||
| Showing myself to be an ethnic nationalist. | ||
| They're just like some of the greatest people I've ever met. | ||
| I don't think I've ever met. | ||
| I have to say they married one. | ||
| Yeah, I just think they're great people. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've met many I don't like. | ||
| But just salt of the earth, smart, hardworking, serious about faith and family. | ||
| Yeah, great people. | ||
| I doubt it was an improvement, the change to St. Paul. | ||
| In fact, it wasn't. | ||
| No, it's... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, I've got a fix. | |
| I fixed it. | ||
| I figured it out. | ||
| Alright? | ||
| I don't think it's possible for us to talk these people out of thinking segregation is a great idea. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, I don't think so either. | ||
| It's not possible. | ||
| No. | ||
| So, here's what we do. | ||
| We solve things the American way. | ||
| Reality TV show. | ||
| One house, segregation. | ||
| The other house, desegregation. | ||
| Who lasts? | ||
| We do it for a hundred years. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Whoever does best gets the country. | ||
| Um, I think, um... | ||
| I think it's a bad idea. | ||
| We can set up rooting sides. | ||
| You know, I think it'd be great. | ||
| I think it's a bad idea, but I think that it's a good punt. | ||
| Because by the time there's an answer, we'll all be dead. | ||
| That's the idea. | ||
| But what the point is, it'll keep the segregationist focused on the show instead of trying to make everything so goddamn segregated. | ||
| That's my... | ||
| Yeah, that's 4D chess, baby. | ||
| Yep, that's the idea. | ||
| So yeah, this is some racist shit. | ||
| Here's the issue. | ||
| I don't think it matters to say that this is racist shit. | ||
| They know. | ||
| They're aware of this. | ||
| He said ethnic nationalists. | ||
| They just don't think it's bad. | ||
| No. | ||
| We've now reached a point in the conversation where it is... | ||
| Like, we just don't believe basic concepts in common. | ||
| No, it's pro-segregation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| At very least, differential levels of rights among different populations. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| At very least. | ||
| No, because this is the conversation that they're doing again. | ||
| It is slippery slope. | ||
| On purpose. | ||
| So it is never going to be just that. | ||
| It is always going to be the next step on top of that. | ||
| I totally agree with you. | ||
| I'm sorry for getting very aggressive about that. | ||
| No, I totally agree with you, and it's a good point. | ||
| Analytically, from what they're saying, that's the least you could expect. | ||
| No, you're totally right, but that's their trick. | ||
| Pretending it's anything more benign than that is absurd. | ||
| You're pro-segregation. | ||
| Fine, we're done talking. | ||
| I'm anti-segregation. | ||
| I guess that's just how this works. | ||
| But the idea that there is more to talk about is their trick, not mine. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I think the problem that evangelicals have, according to this fella, is that they just haven't been taught the Bible. | ||
| Sounds true to me. | ||
| And then Tucker reveals that he hasn't, he doesn't have much familiarity. | ||
| Many evangelical people have not been taught really any Bible or theology at all. | ||
| And you see this in like surveys, like the Barna group does surveys and what people believe about different things. | ||
| And they haven't been taught any Bible. | ||
| They don't know it. | ||
| And so then when the liberal says, well, the Bible condemns eating shellfish and pork in the same way it condemns homosexuality, so what do you have to say about that? | ||
| And they have no idea how to explain that, what that is about. | ||
| And their faith is shaken. | ||
| God didn't destroy two cities with sulfur and fire because people were eating pork. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| He destroyed them because they tried to... | ||
| Commit gay rape on an angel. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, they did. | ||
| That's not why I did it. | ||
| Inhospitality. | ||
| No, it wasn't. | ||
| Well, I mean, I guess... | ||
| It was gay rape. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, the least hospitable thing you could do... | ||
| I mean, just read it if you want. | ||
| It's like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's pretty out there, yeah. | ||
| It's like, well, yeah, the least hospitable thing you could do to a guest is to anally rape them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All the men of the town came out. | ||
| They demanded... | ||
| Yeah, we need to know these angels. | ||
|
unidentified
|
...to have sex with these angels and then... | |
| Lot's like, I've got some daughters in here. | ||
| Take them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which kind of takes a lot off my Christmas card list for saying something like that. | ||
| But whatever. | ||
| He does that. | ||
| It's in Genesis. | ||
| And they're like, no, we want to rape the dudes. | ||
| So it's like, these are not euphemisms. | ||
| It's pretty straightforward. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I actually, I just read Genesis 19 to my children and there were some questions from the kids. | ||
| It was funny. | ||
| I read that a couple of years ago for the first time. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Couple years ago for the first time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| That's weird. | ||
| That is wild. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Care to read it. | ||
| All kinds of shit in there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| It's been around for several thousand years. | ||
| Yeah, it's not surprising to me, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. | ||
| I knew that as a kid. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I mean, I think they mock it. | ||
| But I think it's bullshit. | ||
| Like, you don't expect... | ||
| Like, why do you listen to a fucking PhD in Butterflies? | ||
| You're not gonna read... | ||
| Butterfly shit. | ||
| You're like, I trust you. | ||
| You have a PhD in butterflies. | ||
| If the priest guy says that the Bible says this, the idea is you're supposed to be able to trust him. | ||
| That's what the Bible's for, right? | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| You know, you shouldn't have to read it. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You shouldn't! | ||
| That was their argument. | ||
| But here's where it breaks down. | ||
| It's such a fundamental, like we talked about earlier, the progression of Christianity is this breaking down of the barriers between the divine and the individual. | ||
| Because you can't trust them. | ||
| Clearly. | ||
| Well, there's more power in that than butterflies. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| History has shown. | ||
| And that's where they miscalculated. | ||
| That is the problem. | ||
| Because the true power... | ||
| Butterflies. | ||
| Mothra. | ||
| Always been that way. | ||
| We need to call upon Mothra. | ||
| Two fairies? | ||
| I know they look like children. | ||
| We need to take out Tucker. | ||
| It's unscientific! | ||
| Mothra, hear my call. | ||
| So, Tucker... | ||
| You know, he knows that they're going to go out to the rural areas. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And he's like, plant some wood. | ||
| Get some trees going. | ||
| Okay, yeah, sure, sure. | ||
| Are you putting in evergreens, please? | ||
| Oh, I think everything, yeah. | ||
| I mean, there's pines. | ||
| Please don't neglect the pine. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I know it's a fast-growing tree, relatively speaking, but it's beautiful. | ||
| It's the answer. | ||
| And cedars, if you can, if you have water. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know if we'll be able... | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| Since you're a preacher of Old Testament scholar, what was the inside of the temple clad with? | ||
| Cedar. | ||
| Yeah, from Lebanon. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Nailed it. | ||
| He himself said cedar. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| An accident? | ||
| He was pretty specific about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It smells great. | ||
| Maybe there's a reason my sauna has cedar on the inside. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I always tell my kids that. | ||
| Just think of it like the temple. | ||
| It's my senior church. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| No sacrifices, however. | ||
| Well, here's something you may not have known. | ||
| This network almost didn't exist. | ||
| Trademark issue almost prevented us from launching by blocking us from using the name TCN. | ||
| Now, a company called the American Country Network owned the rights to that trademark, and we were not sure if they would give them up. | ||
| Looking back, American Country Network could have demanded a lot of money. | ||
| They could have held us up at gunpoint in exchange for the name TCN, and a lot of businesses would have done that. | ||
| Instead, I have to do this ad. | ||
| They were incredibly nice. | ||
| They were so nice, I have to do this ad. | ||
| For free! | ||
| And they gave it to us quick. | ||
| Right away, I did this ad. | ||
| This is not your average company at all. | ||
| These are really, really nice people. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's leadership. | ||
| Excellent people of the same values that we do and we think that you do. | ||
| American Country Network is a family-friendly Christian group bringing the best country music to millions of households across the country and it's growing fast. | ||
| Fuck off with this folksy bullshit. | ||
| God will not be mocked, Dan! | ||
| I love this presentation that he thinks he's fooling anybody. | ||
| That it's like, these are such nice people. | ||
| I just decided to do this ad read. | ||
| I couldn't stop myself from doing this ad read. | ||
| I tried. | ||
| I looked in the mirror three times and I said, no! | ||
| And then I just kept saying the ad read. | ||
| It's so funny. | ||
| It's like, what world do you think people don't understand that this is a contract? | ||
| I mean, I just, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I feel like the appropriate response to somebody that blatantly trying to rip me off. | ||
| I feel like that's crazy. | ||
| I want to slap you. | ||
| Like, no! | ||
| Well, it just makes me think of when I went to the show in Pennsylvania, the sponsors all doing a little bit of time up top. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| One of them being for like... | ||
| Weird sleep syrup or something like that. | ||
| It's like, that's just what this is. | ||
| It's just a syrup that shares our values about sleep. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And also Christian nationalism. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they gave me a bunch of money, and so they're going to talk before my... | ||
| But it was God money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's cool. | |
| It's all cool. | ||
| And I really just wanted them here because they're good people. | ||
| They are great people! | ||
| Yeah, now granted they sponsored this. | ||
| We negotiated things and signed a contract. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, we have one last clip here, and it's because 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. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Because I don't really care. | ||
| No. | ||
| Like, I... | ||
| about what their religious tenets are. | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's funny a lot of the times when Alex has his misrepresentations of religion. | |
| They're delightful and weird. | ||
| But that's more about it being him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't really care precisely what this guy believes about various scriptures. | |
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I didn't farm those fields. | |
| Who gives a shit? | ||
| And the end is a bit of a plug for the... | ||
| Plots of land. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, it's just so amazing. | |
| It's so amazing how well capitalism has just conquered it, and they just let it go. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's genuinely amazing. | ||
| Yeah, do you think? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| 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, The venture capital group that owns the company that has this big plot of land. | ||
| This guy is going on Tucker's show. | ||
| Tucker knows Mark Andreessen. | ||
| Is this connected? | ||
| Do they connect? | ||
| I don't think it has to be. | ||
| I don't think it's necessary. | ||
| But it certainly looks kind of like it could be not above board. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And then it's also hard for me to think about this outside of, like, 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. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You get to be like, oh, look at the system demonizing us. | ||
| This is why you need to buy a plot of land out here. | ||
| That's how the real Noah's Ark nailed it. | ||
| Yeah, it kind of feels a little bit like that, but I can't tell how much of that is me just like, it would make sense if that's what this is. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that is kind of the thing, 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? | ||
| But he wasn't selling births on the Ark. | ||
| He wasn't selling rooms on there. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Well, he was selling tours on a fictional boat. | ||
| Was he? | ||
| That's what the real Noah's Ark was for. | ||
| Oh, I thought you meant the real Noah's Ark. | ||
| Not the real, real Noah's Ark. | ||
| No, that's true. | ||
| Noah was not selling. | ||
| Frankly, he was giving that shit away. | ||
| Noah had no capitalist kind of motivation. | ||
| Whereas this one has deep ones. | ||
| Very much so, yeah. | ||
| So anyway, here's just a little... | ||
| He actually even refers to this as a real estate venture. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And so he just talks about that a little bit here. | ||
| The people that I've spoken to, the people I've met in the town, They're very enthusiastic, actually. | ||
| Especially when they see the things that I do, see the podcast I do, or various things. | ||
| Like, oh, you're not at all like the TV man said you are. | ||
| And of course, these are people that we've been describing. | ||
| 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, conservative kind of guy. | ||
| And I'm like, yeah, I am. | ||
| I'm an open book. | ||
| You know, what you see is what you get. | ||
| What I believe, I earnestly believe. | ||
| Until later. | ||
| So people are very, have been very kind. | ||
| But the state legislature hasn't tried to mess with your zoning permits or anything like that? | ||
| No, and... | ||
| Any victimhood? | ||
| The thing is, the company itself is not saying, well, this is a community, like that would violate the Fair Housing Act, right, to say this is a Christian-only community. | ||
| It's just that my churches... | ||
| Allowed to build a church there, right? | ||
| There's no law against that at all. | ||
| And I can call up friends and say, hey, you want to move here and be part of our thing? | ||
| What are the costs like? | ||
| Oh, the cost of living is extremely low. | ||
| It's real good. | ||
| So yeah, they're just selling. | ||
| They're trying to sell plots of land on this thing. | ||
| It's very overt. | ||
| And I think you're a little too aware of... | ||
| Hey, this is Christians only, but we can't legally say that. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I found another interview with the guy who runs the Venture Capital group. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The Ruby Ridge Rider, or whatever the fuck. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| What is it called? | ||
| Ridge? | ||
| Ridge... | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Actually, I can't. | ||
| Now I can't. | ||
| Ridge Rider. | ||
| Ridge Runner. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And that guy has a very similar kind of thing of like... | ||
| You know, I can't say that it's Christians only. | ||
| That would be illegal. | ||
| But we're building a church there, and I hope that sends the message. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's cute. | ||
| That's very cute. | ||
| And what you see is what you get. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| As illustrated by the winking way that he's expressing this. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the irony of what they're doing and what he's saying is that 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 busing, like the only way to really force desegregation is to force desegregation. | ||
| Cause 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, Yeah, there are workarounds. | ||
| There are workarounds. | ||
| And that's clearly a big part of what this is. | ||
| Got a bus. | ||
| So, I think that if I were a rich Satanist, I would buy a plot. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| I would challenge them a little bit. | ||
| And I would build a church there, too, or something like that. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And then see what happened. | ||
| Just to fuck with them. | ||
| I mean, it's like the people, what was it, the Ten Commandments, and then right next to that was a statue of the devil, where it's like, well, I'm mad at one of those! | ||
| And it's like, yes, but that's the point. | ||
| You understand? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You understand the point I'm making is that you can't. | ||
| Yeah, if I had money to burn, that would be something that I would probably do just to fuck with them. | ||
| Well, you can't do this. | ||
| Aha! | ||
| But that's the point. | ||
| Yeah, I'm too busy and can't afford it, so I'll pass on this troll operation. | ||
| Just decorate Halloween. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's so fucked up every year, yeah. | |
| You know what I would do? | ||
| What would you do? | ||
| Dark Easter. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| That would be amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That would be three upside down crosses on your yard? | ||
| Maybe not that. | ||
| Maybe not too far. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| Not that dark Easter. | ||
| I was thinking of like a bunny. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But scary. | ||
| The bunny from Monty Python. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| You went a little off field. | ||
| I went real dark Easter. | ||
| That's an apologies. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I think that, look. | ||
| Hey, it's Tucker Week. | ||
|
unidentified
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It is. | |
| We're not abandoning Alex or anything like that, but I felt the spirit get in me that I wanted to talk a little more about Tucker. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And I think that this episode was really helpful in illuminating some of this point that I think is going to be important to keep in mind. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The synergy of really, really bad ideology and rebranding of Silicon Valley tech billionaire bullshit. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And it's almost perfectly encapsulated by this guest and the way Tucker is strategically presenting him. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And also, look, I want to say, I don't think I've seen you laugh as much as when, like, this episode you've been laughing. | ||
| It's been very funny. | ||
| I don't know if it's come across on the mic. | ||
| But there's been a lot of you being very amused by the bullshit these people are saying. | ||
| It's very bullshitty. | ||
| I have to admit. | ||
| I'm not missing... | ||
| I feel like maybe we were in... | ||
| Not we. | ||
| Alex has been in a fucking rut in his bullshit. | ||
| Well, he killed Gene Hackman. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And I feel like since there haven't been consequences for murdering Gene Hackman... | ||
| I felt a little bit of like, I need to take a break. | ||
| And this has been perfect. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This has been a perfect week of not doing Alex. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we can move on. | ||
| My birthday is next week, and I was kind of considering a gift to myself being, I don't even talk about Alex until I'm 41. Amazing. | ||
| I was thinking about that, but then that's all next week, and that might be too long. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| We'll play it by ear. | ||
| Anything could happen. | ||
| But seriously, this Tucker guy, what a dick. | ||
| Wild. | ||
| We'll be back with another episode to learn about something. | ||
| But until then, we have a website. | ||
| Indeed we do. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| We'll be back. | ||
| But until then, I'm Neo. | ||
| I'm Leo. | ||
| I'm DZX Clark. | ||
| I am the Mysterious Professor. | ||
| Woo! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| Woo! | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Woo! | ||
| And now here comes the sex robots. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
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You're on the air. | |
| Thanks for holding. | ||
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |
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