Liz Wheeler argues the family’s collapse—driven by 60 years of leftist control over marriage, schools, and media—is the core of societal decay, citing 82% lower poverty rates for kids in intact households. She blames churches for abandoning faith-based resistance to godless internet culture, which she ties to porn, objectification, and radical policies like transgenderism and critical race theory. While praising Trump’s reality-defending leadership, Wheeler warns conservatives’ focus on licensing reform over cultural battles costs elections, yet remains cautiously optimistic about America’s resilience against ideological indoctrination. [Automatically generated summary]
Liz Wheeler has interviewed me at least a dozen times.
And so I wanted to take revenge on her.
She, you know her from OAN.
She had that show tipping point with Liz Wheeler.
But now she's got her own podcast, The Liz Wheeler Show.
She is really one of the top-notch commentators.
And I'm delighted to see her.
Lizzie, you're there.
I am.
Thank you so much for having me.
And I have to say, I'm a little worried if you're going to seek revenge on me, because I think the last time we talked, I made you publicly admit that I was right to something.
You were right.
I know, because I said you were being paranoid, but nowadays paranoia is actually.
That's exactly right.
No, you were always a very hard line.
I have to say.
I've always admired that.
But what's the central issue we're facing?
I mean, if you had to say one thing, if you had to take one thing that you could change by snapping your fingers, what would it be?
Oh, probably the breakdown of the family.
I think that's the root of, I think that's the root of a lot of the bad things that are happening in our culture.
And I am a big believer that the culture war is central to, you know, our society.
It's central to our freedom because the old adage, we've heard it a hundred times, a thousand times probably, and we almost become numb to hearing it, but the old adage that politics is downstream of culture, that really is true.
And if we sacrifice, surrender the culture to the radical left, then we're not going to win the political battles.
We're going to have loss before we even start.
And conservatives, and I do point the finger at our own side, our own movement, not just our elected officials, but the people in our movement as well.
For the past 60, 70 years, we've really acquiesced and surrendered many of the cultural institutions in our nation that underpin our moral society.
And that includes the family and marriage.
And it extends to the public school system and the university system to religious freedom to Hollywood, movies, books, music, entertainment.
And we've allowed the left to take over those institutions to the point that we are back on our heels.
We're playing defense.
And so you not only have to fight the culture war, the central part of the culture war is the family.
So, you know, I was just watching this terrific documentary called Uncle Tom, and there's a lot of black conservatives talking about the destruction of the black family by leftist programs, by the great society, and losing fathers.
And a lot of times I look at young guys and I do think, you know, when a guy gets married, he feels like he's given up his freedom.
This is something that is generally true of guys.
But in the old days, in my day, when you got married, you also felt that you were getting something of infinite value, which was getting somebody who would give you a home, give you someplace where you belonged and where you were the father, you had authority, you had some, a lot of that's gone.
I mean, it seems to me that if you marry someone who's working just as hard as you are, if you're marrying someone who is not as interested in making a home as you might want a home, what are you getting?
I mean, what is in it for guys now to become fathers, to become husbands?
Well, I think if you're coming at it from a Christian perspective, then you get to live out some of the mystical union between God and his church.
And I know that as a Catholic, as Christians, that's what we believe, that marriage is this peak, if you will, into this love that God has for his bride, which is his church, that we can't fully understand while we're here on earth.
And God gives us this union between man and woman and says, love each other the way that I love my church, whether that's the respect, whether that's the, you know, the all-controversial term of submission, which we know does not mean subservience.
He tells us that this is a peek into the union between you, between us as God's children and God.
And so it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be a situation where you're talking about a 1950s housewife who cleans the house in her high heels and has her husband's dinner on the table for him when he comes home from work every day.
That's fine if that's what you want to do, but it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be practically set up like that for you to have this really solid, and I'm talking about culturally solid in addition to spiritually, this really culturally solid institution that prevents a lot of societal ills, right?
You don't have people on welfare as often when they're married.
You don't have people that are mentally ill.
You don't have people that are physically ill as often when they're married.
You don't have people that are committing crimes as often as when they are married.
And when it comes to children, children are, I think, 82% less likely to live in poverty if they have a married mother and father.
This institution is advantageous to our society in literally every single aspect, no matter how we're looking at it.
And yet we've thrown it to the side.
We've allowed communists who want the destruction of the family because they want people dependent on government to tear this down.
We've allowed feminists who, for who knows what reason, whether it's self-hatred, whether it's abuse, whether it's misunderstanding of empowerment.
We've let all these different radical groups tear down the institution of the family and it's cost us our culture.
First of all, that is a great answer, the answer that it is a spiritual relationship and a peak into spirituality because I found that to be literally the case.
I mean, one of the reasons I came to God was understanding that this love that I was experiencing went far beyond this marriage and the marriage was a symbol of something and I was living that symbol.
It actually does happen.
It actually does work in real life.
Putting the left aside for a minute, and how I wish we could, something seems to have gone terribly wrong with the internet, with social media, with the dissolution, the distancing of one another in physical terms, guys watching pornography and actually having more fun with pornography than with a human being.
People thinking that they are friends, people bullying each other.
Is there any way around this or is this our fate?
No, I mean, it comes back to the same cultural institutions, right?
So one of the reasons that so many men are addicted to pornography or turn to pornography is because of a godlessness in our society.
The reason, in my opinion, that godlessness is on the rise is because you're no longer allowed to talk about God.
You're no longer allowed to talk about faith in the public sphere.
You're not allowed to even say the word God in Pledge of Allegiance during the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools.
This used to be, Drew, something that was taught to children from when they were very young.
We understood, as our founders intended, that our free society, our constitutional republic was made for a moral people and would not continue to exist for another.
That was literally, the founding fathers said that when they created our nation, and that was taught to children.
It's no longer taught to children.
In fact, religious freedom is ridiculed.
It's actually persecuted in many ways when people live out their faith in the public sphere.
And so this has cost us this really important foundational aspect of our society, which has led to things like objectifying women and the degradation of marriage.
And I'm talking about pornography with both of those two things.
And it's cost us this moral compass that we have, which, I mean, you can look at what's happening in Hollywood.
You can look at the songs that are on the top of the charts.
And you can see that conservatives haven't really been winning the culture war if that's the kind of stuff that's, if that's the kind of stuff that's reigning supreme right now.
You know, it's funny.
There's an argument going on among conservatives, an insane argument where somebody, Yaff, I think, made a joke about making a big deal about licensing reform, professional licensing reform, which actually is an important subject.
But there are all these right-wing intellectuals saying, no, we must talk about this.
And I thought, like, yeah, if you want to lose every election from now until forever, because these are the things that are actually affecting people's lives.
I really do believe that.
Well, you know, when you talk about people falling away from God, now, obviously, the left is hostile toward God.
They've actually booed God at their one of their conventions.
But they don't have the power to simply talk people out of their faith.
Something else seems to me to have been happening.
I mean, is there a natural progression away from God as technology becomes more ubiquitous?
Or is there something else that's going on?
Is there a way back, I guess, is the question I really want to ask you.
I don't know if I would point a finger at technology because technology in and of itself also has the power to do immense good.
It has the power to allow the gospel to be heard by people who maybe wouldn't have otherwise heard it.
I think honestly that the fault, some of the fault lies within the Christian churches, whether it's the Catholic Church, whether it's the dying Protestant churches in our country, whether it's evangelicals who have great intentions, but have sometimes set their cultural institutions.
They've separated themselves from cultural institutions and created their sort of their own alternative institutions, which I understand why they do.
But in the whole cultural situation, churches have failed to respond to people when they are getting bombarded by all these anti-God messages.
They have failed to say, here's why you're here.
Let us teach you why you're here.
Let us teach you how to refute the other, this propaganda that you're hearing, this anti-Christian propaganda that you're hearing.
Let us steep you in God's word.
Let us allow you to be to evangelize to other people by equipping you with the tools that you need.
Churches haven't done that very well, I don't think, over the last, really the last century.
Maybe in the Catholic Church since Vatican II, the Catholic Church hasn't done a very good job of it.
And the price of that is many Christians go to church out of habit.
Many Catholics attend mass out of habit and aren't actually sure why they believe what they profess to believe.
And the fault of that, of course, can't be laid at the feet of the public schools.
That is the fault of the breakdown of the family because parents aren't passing their faith along and church and spiritual leaders who ought to be really hammering home to their congregations why it's so important that we believe what we believe.
No, instead they're hanging up signs that say Black Lives Matter and signs, you know, celebrating Pride Month and all this stuff, which, you know, nothing against anybody, but it's just those are actually things of the world.
They have nothing to do with the gospel.
They're actually anti-gospel.
Right.
The Catholic Church, for example, is very tied to this idea of social justice, which we know is essentially socialist.
So even though the doctrine of the Catholic Church contains anti-communist, anti-communist theology, they specifically condemn communism.
The Protestant churches are turning to wokeism because they have dying congregations and they're trying to bring other people in.
Instead of packaging the gospel in a way that's appealing to people or at least intriguing to people, they're abandoning the gospel in favor of wokeism to try to recruit new members.
And the evangelical churches, like I said, they tend to separate themselves a lot of times, not all of them.
They tend to separate themselves from things of the world because they don't want to be associated with that.
They don't want their children exposed to that.
All of that's understandable.
But when they do that, they tend not to reach as many people, I think.
So we just came through this period of Donald Trump, which was this tumultuous period of absolute hysteria on the left.
But also, in some ways, Trump liked to feed that.
He enjoyed it.
I think he enjoyed the drama and the fight and all that.
And it was kind of wonderful to see in many ways.
But it's now left us.
I mean, Trump is gone for now, and it has left us in this interesting place.
Do you think things have changed?
Has Trump changed anything?
Or was he just a kind of passing blip on the screen?
No, I think one of the most important things that we've learned over the past five years during the Trump presidency and in the short time thereafter is that conservatives as a whole, and this is people across the country, and maybe not even just conservatives, maybe common sense thinking Americans who don't want to identify with either party, conservatives crave bold leadership.
They don't want someone who is going to go to Washington, D.C. and sell their soul.
They don't want someone who's going to go to Washington, D.C. and be a squish.
They want someone who will identify reality, right?
That's one of the things that people liked the most about Donald Trump is that he wasn't particularly spectacular with his words.
And people loved that because he just identified what everybody was thinking.
And that's a skill in and of itself, but people want that.
They see that the Democrats are peddling delusion, whether it's telling little kindergartners that they can be boys or girls, depending on how they identify, and that can change by the day.
Whether it's telling high school athletes that the biological male they're competing against is actually a woman and therefore it's fair, whether it's telling people that unborn babies aren't really babies and therefore we can do whatever we want, rip them limb from limb.
People see that the Democrats are peddling delusion.
They crave, people crave reality because we're in this post-truth cultural era right now where it's not just partisan bickering anymore over what's true and what's false, who's lying and who's telling the truth.
We're in a ballot, a battle for the very soul of reality.
And people want to hear that from both thought leaders and elected officials.
So I suppose this is a two-part question.
The first question is, do you think Trump will run next time?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I think he's going to tease it up until the last second.
I think it probably depends on the temperature of the country.
It probably depends on if there are other viable candidates.
I'm not sure.
I don't have any insight or information into that.
I guess at this point, my true gut feeling would be he's going to tease it up until the end and then ultimately not run.
But I have no information that backs up that opinion.
No, but I actually agree with that.
I mean, just if I had to guess, that's what I would think was going to happen.
Are there people that you like?
Are there people that you're looking toward?
You know, I am the most skeptical pessimist when it comes to politicians.
I don't believe in identifying like rising stars because I think they always, whenever you put a politician on a pedestal, they will betray you.
They will disappoint you.
So I'm automatically skeptical, especially if someone says, this person's a rising star and they're great.
I'm like, are they?
Will they be in a year?
We'll wait and see.
So I really pick out individual actions more than individual people.
I think Ron DeSantis has done a really good job with rolling back the COVID restrictions, which by the way, he did implement at the beginning.
So he's not perfect either.
But he's done a really good job rolling them back.
He's also done a really good job with school choice and with critical race theory.
And I think he's probably planning on running in 2024 from the looks of it.
You know, a number of times during this conversation, you've mentioned reality and a crisis in reality, a war against reality.
I think it's fair to say.
You mentioned now critical race theory.
Many, many years ago, Peter Robinson on Uncommon Knowledge asked me why I kept using the word lies, why I kept talking about lies.
And I said, because really now socialism only has lies to run on this crisis of reality.
And it really is.
Crisis in Reality00:02:10
I've never seen anything like it.
And I've been around since John Adams.
I mean, this is like I've never seen I've never seen people talking about pure delusion like transgenderism, the idea that you can magically change your sex.
And, you know, not that there aren't people who are uncomfortable with their sex, but what does that got to do with who they are or what they actually are?
Critical race theory, which is bigotry straight up, this kind of notion that if you are white, you are inherently a bigot, you're inherently a bad person.
This absolute delusion.
I just read a poll saying most Republicans don't believe any of this stuff, but about half of Democrats do believe it.
About half of Democrats do believe it.
Where is that coming from?
Is that is that also a God crisis or is there some other thing that has arisen in our lives that have made people go basically insane?
Well, in that case, I would suspect that the half of Democrats who buy into that garbage haven't heard the arguments against it or haven't haven't heard viable alternatives that they are caught in their own echo chambers.
And it's easy.
And I'm not even I'm not I don't even blame them for being caught in an echo chamber in a sense, because it's very easy if you don't if you don't view the world as a skeptic does.
Because then you are funneled into public school when you are funneled into public school when you are four or five years old, you are taught this from the very beginning.
First, you're taught transgenderism in kindergarten, and then you're taught that white people are inherently racist.
There is a there's an Oregon school board right now that's going to force classrooms to hang not only the American flag, but the Black Lives Matter flag and the pride flag and include a, quote, land acknowledgement along with the Pledge of Allegiance.
A land acknowledgement for anybody who doesn't know that is essentially saying that we are living on land that was stolen from the Native Americans.
So children are indoctrinated from the very beginning in all of these different essentially Marxist ideologies, that there's no true reality, that you're racist if you are a certain skin color, that you're identified by the color of your skin, that there's nothing you can do about it.
There's no grace given to anybody, even if you apologize, that the family is a patriarchal structure, that everybody's a victim of some ism, and you're surrounded by this.
So first it's the school, and then it's the woke churches, and then you see it online.
The Spread of Woke Ideology00:01:04
You see it when you watch movies and when you listen to music, and politicians are echoing it.
And on college campus, you're told that you are a violent transphobe or some such nonsense if you so much as, you know, try to start a yaf chapter.
And so it's easy, in a sense, to get caught up in this, to believe this, if you don't actively seek out the reality, if you don't actively seek out alternative sources.
Yeah, the one thing that I'm hopeful about is America has gone through these things before.
We do go into these panics and hysteria.
It usually passes.
Some kind of Yankee sensibility arises, and people let it go.
It's great to see you, Liz.
The Liz Wheeler Show is available, I assume, wherever podcasts are sold, right?
Yes, sir.
And I would encourage people to get it, actually, on Apple iTunes, on Apple Podcasts, and give us a five-star rating, subscribe, write us a glowing review, of course, nothing mean.
Because this helps us, by the way.
This is how you climb up the charts on iTunes.
And if you climb up the charts, then other people will see it, and more people will hear reality than before.