Andrew Isker defines "Trash World" as an artificial reality erasing biological sex distinctions and prioritizing short-term economic gains over family stability, linking modern industrial infanticide to ancient idolatry. He argues that pandemic-era lies regarding safety and nutrition have caused young men to distrust all institutions, including the church, creating an epistemic crisis where traditional arguments fail. Isker contends that isolated Christian communities cannot defeat this force; instead, believers must wage a collective war within households to rebuild civilization with courage, urging men to reject blame and embrace truth despite systemic hostility. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Society's Design and Procreation00:15:14
Leave us a five star review on your favorite podcast platform.
I get it.
It's annoying.
Everybody asks, but I'm going to tell you why.
When you give us a positive review, what that does is it triggers the algorithm so that our podcast shows up on more people's news feeds.
You and I both know that this ministry is willing to talk about things that most ministries aren't.
We need this content for the glory of God to reach more people's ears.
Well, thank you so much for having me here.
Thank you, Joel.
A few weeks ago, I called Joel.
And asked him, I'm like, hey, you have not given me a topic to speak about at the conference yet.
And I'm like, what do you want me to talk about?
And he just says to me, you do know what the name of the conference is this year, right?
Just talk about Trash World.
Explain what that is.
So that's what we're going to do for the next hour or so.
I told Joel that it might be longer than that since this is the first time I've been involved with something with him and actually allowed to talk.
So this is great.
He's gonna be mad at me about that one.
So, what is Trash World?
I remember when I was writing my book, and my editor stressed to me the point about how important it is to be able to have an elevator speech about what it's about.
And I was like, well, I just don't do that.
I can't, I don't do elevator speeches.
How do you even begin to explain this topic?
How do you briefly summarize to someone that their entire existence, the world that they live in, is not real?
That everything they know, everything that they love, everything that they grew up around, their entire way of life, and the way of life of everyone around them, has been manufactured for them and isn't actually how human beings anywhere in history have ever lived.
If you did that, you would sound like an insane person.
I think you're crazy.
What do you mean it's a manufactured reality?
What do you mean it's not real?
They think you're some kind of schizophrenic.
But of course, this is what trash world is.
It is a manufactured, artificial reality that has upended and inverted the created order.
Up is down, left is right, war is peace, speech is violence, violence is speech, and so on and so forth.
And so I can give a few examples of what I mean by this.
The most obvious one, the most obvious example of you are living in trash world, is trannies.
There it is, trannies.
It isn't just merely the existence of mentally ill people.
We've had mentally ill people in the past, in history.
It isn't just merely mostly men who believe that they are women.
We've long had mentally ill men who thought they were women.
The difference with Trash World, of course, is all of us, our whole society.
We used to commit such people to sanitariums for their own good and for the health of society.
And instead, today, We make them the Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services or NCAA women's swimming champions.
We put them at the very center of society.
We force everyone at our corporations to call them by their preferred pronouns and have everyone put their own pronouns in their LinkedIn and their email signature.
We not only accommodate the delusions of insane men and women, but we also take children.
We take children before puberty and we surgically and chemically remove their genitals.
And very serious physicians and surgeons with prestigious degrees from impressive medical schools and highly respected hospitals, they go to work every day to physically and chemically cut off the sexual organs of children.
That is a thing that's still happening, still happening.
And all of it, all right, in public.
All of it treated like it's just very normal.
And if you object to it, you are you.
You, if you're the one objecting to it, you are the religious freak.
You're the bigot.
You're the crazy person.
And so, of course, the transgender issue is just like the latest and most absurd excess of trash world.
It's the final, hopefully final, act of blurring the lines between men and women.
If they're.
And so think about that.
Think about that.
There are no moral, spiritual, economic, political, or social differences between men and women.
The very last one is the physical differences.
That's the last one to blur.
And of course, thanks to the blessings of the science, we now are so much better at pretending men can be women and women can be men.
But that is hopefully just the high watermark of Trash World.
It has been growing and building for decades.
For the entirety of the 20th century, we have blurred the lines of distinction between men and women.
Women and men, as it turns out, this might be news to you, I'm telling you now for the first time, women and men are actually very different.
Very different.
God made them male and female.
Male and female, He created them.
Most people, they never really have to think about this.
You never really have to think about, oh, yeah, I guess men and women are different.
You just know.
Since you're a little kid, you know that men and women are different.
You know it implicitly.
Women have this incredible ability this incredible ability to create and to carry new people inside of them.
Only women can do that.
God, He didn't have to do it this way.
He didn't have to do it this way at all.
He could have made human reproduction any way that He wanted to.
He could have made human beings just spring up out of the ground.
We could have just divided single celled organisms, and there we are, a new person.
He could have done anything he wanted, but he chose to make human beings male and female.
To have them bond for life.
To have them bond for life.
Oh, man, this is the first time in my entire life that I've lost my place in a manuscript.
It's because all of you people are here.
To have them bond for life.
Men be bigger and stronger and faster than women, right?
To have their bodies filled with testosterone that makes them more aggressive, more decisive, more confident, and more assertive.
And he chose to make women smaller and weaker and gentler than men, right?
He chose to make them instinctively seek consensus, right?
To enforce social conformity, to avoid direct conflict and operate more subtly.
These are characteristics of men and women.
And of course, even saying these things out loud today is considered incredibly offensive.
What do you mean men are stronger than women?
People literally get mad at you if you say that.
There really are people, actual people, that sincerely believe women can be just as strong as men.
Or that women can be just as aggressive and tough as men.
And of course, I could point to myriad research papers reaching all the conclusions that I just stated as evidence.
I could say, okay, you could read this paper by this person over here or whatever.
But it's just so absurd.
And to even go that route, to even say, well, the science shows you, like, no, we don't even need to do that, right?
As if we need to justify what any child can intuitively know, what anyone can just see with their own two eyes.
But Trash World, Trash World catechizes people into believing there are no distinctions between women and men besides genitals and social constructions, right?
Like, why do women wear dresses?
Well, that's just society imposing that on them.
No, they wear them because they want to look pretty.
That's why.
People in Trash World, they really believe that a petite 90-pound girl can one day become a Navy SEAL.
They really do believe that.
They watch the Marvel movies.
They know that girls, 90-pound girls, they could toss around 200-pound men.
They've seen Black Widow.
They see what she could do.
And then they see that, and this is real, that this could happen.
And of course, it's absurd.
Of course they're not the same.
Of course they're not the same.
And of course the chief difference between men and women is that only women and only from around the age of, you know, around 20 to their mid-30s or sometimes later can produce new human beings.
But what does Trash World tell young women?
What does Trash World tell young women?
It tells them if you get married in your early 20s, what are you doing?
You are ruining your life.
You're ruining your life.
Don't you want to be a girl boss?
Don't you want to be answering emails and making PowerPoints for a decade or two?
Enjoying some disposable income so you can have brunch, so you can have Instagram vacations with your friends instead.
That's what they tell them.
That's what they tell them.
That's what is beaten into their heads.
Their whole youth, their whole childhood.
Ooh, no, you don't want to be married and have babies.
That is the worst thing that could happen.
To be shackled to a baby.
Oh, my goodness, they're loud.
They're noisy.
They sometimes smell diapers.
Ugh, yuck.
They make messes everywhere.
And they keep you from doing anything that's fun.
And so, the most natural urge, the one that is deep, deep inside a woman's heart, in her soul, that powerful hormones are going through her body when she's a young woman that she experiences at this age, the urge to have a child and to hold.
To hold him or her, nurture a little baby.
This natural urge to love them and care for them.
Have you ever seen a group of 20 something year old women, even pink and purple haired feminists?
Somebody walks in with a newborn baby, and they've got to really be rough if they're going to do anything other than be like, oh my goodness, how wonderful, a little baby, oh that's so cute.
That's just, that's in them.
That's in them to do that, to see a baby and say, oh, that's so wonderful.
Oh, right.
But that urge, right, what does Trash World do?
Trash World suppresses and destroys it in them to have that for themselves.
That's what Trash World does.
And of course, the urge to engage in the process of procreation, Trash World does not suppress that, to engage in that, it exalts it.
Yeah, you could go ahead and do that.
You should actually be free to do as much of that as you want.
Because after all, Man can do that as much as they want, and they're seemingly free from consequence as a result.
So, why can't we?
Why can't we do that?
Trash World believes it can usurp the created order, that it has triumphed over God, that it has built a tower that reaches the heavens, and it has done so without cost.
That it has transcended the created order, and that it has done so without a single cost whatsoever.
But there's always a cost.
There's always a cost.
The cost of eradicating all distinctions between men and women is tens of millions of dead babies.
An ocean of infant blood.
That is the cost of saying, no, men and women, they're exactly the same.
Anything a man can do, a woman can do.
There's no distinctions whatsoever.
What's the result of that?
Tens of millions of dead babies.
And so, incidentally, willful ignorance of this dynamic is precisely why Pro Life Inc. Is so utterly hapless.
Industrial scale infanticide is a lagging indicator of a society that is totally cooked.
It is not the leading indicator, it's the lagging indicator.
Women, and you've all seen this on the news, react with just endless rage, rage at the mere suggestion, the mere suggestion that someone maybe possibly just might stop them from murdering.
Their own offspring, right?
Maybe it would stop them.
No!
You can't do that.
It's usually like women well past childbearing age that are like the angriest about it, right?
Why?
Why?
Because to them, the ability to kill their own offspring is freedom.
It's freedom, right?
Freedom from the duties and the responsibilities of motherhood, of the thing that God has uniquely created them to be able to do.
To do, right?
I want to be free of that.
I don't want that.
It's freedom from those responsibilities, right?
You were designed by God to be capable of creating and nurturing and sustaining life.
Every time, right, every time we have a baby, we've had a few.
Every time we have a baby, my wife, she starts nursing again.
She loves it, right?
And each time, right?
Each time, she'll just look up at me and she'll say, You know, Andrew.
And it's like, just like childlike wonder.
Like, wow.
Andrew, God made me able to feed a baby from my own body.
This is incredible.
Like, just think about that.
The Miracle of Nursing00:14:02
Like, I don't have to do, there it is.
Like, there's milk for the baby to eat.
Like, this is unbelievable, right?
Wow.
Right?
And of course, it is incredible.
It is incredible.
It's almost like it's by design.
But the pro abortion rage is ultimately a rejection of that.
That they indeed are different and distinct from men.
My wife can do things that I cannot do.
I can't carry a baby.
I can't nurse a baby.
I can change a diaper, I just don't like it as much as she does.
I've changed a few, not that many.
They want all of the privileges, the pro abortion women, the feminists and people like this, they want all the privileges and benefits of being a man.
There are privileges and benefits to being a man.
There's privileges and benefits to being a woman.
But they want all the privileges and benefits of being a man, but naturally without any of the accompanying responsibilities.
And it isn't just their own individual calculus.
That isn't part of it.
All of these things are both individual and collective.
It isn't just their own individual calculus.
Our entire economy is structured around making sure that they are in the workforce.
Right?
And if we got to kill babies to do it, right, to keep the big line going up, there's a lot of that talk right now.
The big line's got to keep going up.
Right?
We need to keep the big line going up, and how do we do that?
We keep women in the workforce.
We don't want them having babies.
What?
No.
And if you like want evidence of this, like, because like, well, Henry Iskra is saying there's a secret cabal that's saying that women need to be in the workforce, somebody's pulling the strings.
Right?
Well, no.
It's decentralized, but they just all agree.
Right?
We want women in the workforce.
And all you need to know is, Just do a quick search.
Just type in, we need more women in blank.
It's actually kind of fun to do.
We need more women in STEM.
We need more women in the military.
We need more women in the police force.
The only thing they don't say is more women in septic tank and sanitation work.
We don't need more women collecting trash.
They don't do those ones, strangely.
But anything else, anything prestigious, anything high status, anything high income, we need more women in that.
Well, why?
Why did they do that?
Why do they say that?
Well, think about it.
If you are the big head of a big ginormal corporation and you want to make more money, you're sitting on the board, you're smoking your cigar.
They don't smoke cigars anymore.
This is 2025.
They don't do that.
You're sipping your soy latte.
It's like, how can we, crossing their legs, how can we make more money?
How could we bring up profits?
It's our fiduciary responsibility to make more profits.
Right, well, whoa, I have an idea.
Wouldn't it be we could drive down wages?
We could how are we gonna do that?
Well, what if we just double you know double the size of the workforce?
We got all of these people, you know, that don't do anything economically productive according to us and Like we just put them in jobs The wages would go down productivity would go up and we make a lot of money, right?
That's that's why that's why they think this, right?
Motherhood Motherhood does not show up in a GDP report.
All the freak out today and yesterday over the tariffs, all the freak out over that, nobody's freaking out about birth rates going down.
That's a line going down that actually matters.
Not the fake money economy or any of those things, all the junk made in China, that doesn't matter.
Many of you probably have 401ks and you're nervous about that.
But ultimately, what really matters?
Our people are having fewer babies than they were last year and the year before and the decade before and the decade before that.
That's a line that matters.
But it doesn't show up in the GDP report.
It doesn't show up in quarterly profit and loss statements.
It doesn't.
A woman spending her entire day changing diapers, playing with children, reading to them, caring for them, loving them, homeschooling them, doing all of that very hard work.
Many of the ladies here, that's my day.
That's what I do all day long.
And it's hard work.
It's very difficult work.
That doesn't show up in a spreadsheet.
There are no numbers to indicate those things.
That doesn't show up in any economic report whatsoever.
But is it economic activity?
Yes.
Is there economic value there?
Absolutely there is.
You're creating a new person that one day is going to be an adult, one day is going to work and produce things.
You're replicating yourself and spending massive amounts of time and effort and energy to do so.
It's a huge economic issue.
But what does Trash World do?
It takes people, this is something I talked about.
I think he knew what I was talking about, but he was asking for the audience.
Like time preference, low time preference, high time preference.
What it does is it makes people that otherwise would be low time preference, people that save for tomorrow, they delay gratification, they do things for the long term, it makes them very short term people.
We only care about the next quarter.
We don't care about 10 years from now, we don't care about 20 years from now, but having a child.
Having a child is a 20 year long, at least, proposition.
Okay, I've got to take care of this person, feed them, clothe them, house them, take them to baseball practice, all of those things.
For the next 20 years, that is a very low time preference activity.
So, a society that's hell bent on consuming as much stuff as possible, you don't want that.
You don't want that.
You don't want long term activity.
You want short term, very short term.
You don't want that at all.
You want to kill that.
And they do.
And they do.
And that's why I've long said, you even see this after the Dobbs decision.
After the Dobbs decision, there's a huge freak out from Wall Street types and big corporations and things like that.
This is bad.
We condemn this.
We believe in a woman's right to choose.
Why did they do that?
Why did they do that?
For a long time, I've said, if the president had. the unilateral power to just outlaw all abortion.
Imagine that.
Imagine what that would be like.
The president is just like, I'm in charge here.
There's no Supreme Court.
There's no Congress.
It's just me.
And we're not going to kill babies anymore.
We're not going to do that.
That's done.
We are not going to murder them in the womb with surgeons.
We are not going to do pharmaceutical abortions.
No more abortion pills.
Anybody who does that, they're dead.
We kill them.
Not me, the president, right?
The state.
Just want to make that clear.
There's a right wing watch there watching.
Right?
We're going to ban all abortifacient contraception, right?
All of it.
Completely done.
Right?
What would happen tomorrow if the president, you know, he becomes the total emperor and has all power and does that?
Right?
What would happen economically tomorrow?
Right?
There would be immediately a massive economic depression.
Right?
If you think like the last two days has been, oh, a bloodbath on Wall Street.
A couple of little tariffs.
We're just tweaking the tariffs a little bit.
It would be exponentially worse.
The Dow Jones is now at 2,000.
Not a 2,000 point loss.
It's just at 2,000.
That's what would happen.
It would be incalculable, the loss.
Because America does not run on Duncan.
It runs on the blood of dead babies.
That's what keeps our economic engines going.
And so the twin gods of Eros and Mammon work together.
They work together, and they always have.
You read the Bible, you read the Old Testament, and you think about this.
It was always strange to me when I was younger.
Very strange.
Where you'd be reading the Bible, and you'd be like, why are they, God told them not to worship these gods.
Why are they doing that?
That's so stupid.
Why would you do that?
I'm just a little kid.
I don't understand.
He said don't do it, and they're doing it.
Why?
That's dumb.
Those gods are fake.
They're not real.
But then you look at America today, and it makes sense.
You sacrifice your child to Molech, and what do you get out of it?
Oh, all my crops are growing.
My sheep are multiplying.
My wife now is giving me 10 more kids.
Like everything is great.
And meanwhile, you're over here, you're a faithful Israelite, and you're worshiping God faithfully, and things are really hard.
You see that, and you'd be tempted to do the same thing as well.
That's what Trash World does in our day.
You sacrifice babies to Molech, and it makes your stonks go way up.
Oh, the Dow Jones, it's way in the green.
That's.
That's our idolatry today.
And of course, again, idol, idolatry, way overused word.
So forgive me, forgive me, but it really is.
It really is.
Like, this is the one time you get to use it is, right, you are murdering babies to get rich, right?
That's idolatry, right?
If there ever was any.
Not the idol, idol of the family.
Come on, give me a break.
Idol of the family, right?
They hate the family.
They want to destroy the family.
What are you talking about?
No.
That's the idol.
That's the idol in our world.
Another aspect of Trash World, there's a whole lot of them.
Another one is that it makes people radically individualized.
Radically individualized, atomized.
It is designed to rip you from your family, to make parents reject duties to their children.
You see this.
Yeah, sorry, buddy.
You got to make it on your own.
Like, once you turn 18, you get kicked out of the house.
Time to sell RVs, right?
No, don't expect any help from me, right?
And it also causes children to dishonor their parents, right?
It's reciprocal, right?
Oh, parents are not helping out.
Now, well, I hate you, dad.
I hate everything you love.
I'm going to do the opposite of what you did.
I'm going to hate everything you love and love everything you hate just to show you, right?
It's designed to do that.
It's designed to do that.
It's designed to make you reject your own heritage.
To reject your own inheritance.
It's designed to make every one of you an Esau.
That's what it's designed to be.
It's designed to make you think every one of my ancestors before 1965 or so, every single one of them was racist, a bigot, a misogynist, anti gay, a homophobe, and of course a Nazi.
Every single one of them, all the way back into history, that's what they were.
It makes you, through economic, cultural, and social disincentive, also to reject the deep seated desire to create new generations to pass anything down to, both men and women.
Men and women, both.
I don't need to have kids.
I don't want that.
I'm going to be child free.
And so, it's interesting.
Among the things, there are so many fascinating things in the Bible, but among the things that is so fascinating to me in the Pentateuch is.
The law in Deuteronomy that forbids both eunuchs and bastards from entering the assembly of Israel.
And roughly speaking, in current terms, basically what that law means, if we were to apply it today, I'm not saying that we should, but if we did, if you were a man who was illegitimately born, or if you were unable to produce a child, you didn't get to vote.
You're not part of the body politic.
And it's fascinating to me because you think the point of the law, the point of Torah, To teach Israel.
It's to teach Israel.
It's to have them mature and progress into godly wisdom.
Why would God give them that law?
Why would He command them that?
What's He trying to teach them?
Well, if you have no connection to your father and to your fathers, or you have no connection to the future, to children, to future generations, then you should not be making decisions for the present.
And not just for yourself, but for everybody else.
You shouldn't be making decisions for the president that affect everyone else.
So I made this point about Kamala Harris right before the election, and naturally it gets clipped by Right Wing Watch, and I got a lot of hate mail for that, and Joel's like, oh yeah, you get some hate mail?
Connection to Future Generations00:05:35
But think about it.
Kamala Harris, she literally is an anchor baby with no connection to America whatsoever.
She's here for like five minutes, and boom, now you're a United States Senator and Vice President.
And of course, Nat, she is a childless woman.
She's the stepmother to somebody else's kids, but she has not produced any children herself.
And oh man, all the hate mail go, how dare you say that?
How dare you attack her for that?
You religious freak.
But actually, that matters.
That matters.
She has no connection to the past, no connection to the future, and she is making so many decisions.
Well, she wouldn't make any decisions, but nominally, she's making all these decisions for today.
That matters.
She was the perfect, even better than Biden, the perfect president for Trash World.
She perfectly embodies what it's all about.
But that is what Trash World seeks to do for everyone.
Everyone, right?
If somehow you are not murdered in the womb, right, any connection to your own history and your own heritage has to be eradicated.
Any hope that you have for the future, both individually and collectively as a people, That too must be eradicated, must be destroyed.
Your purpose is to exist to drone away and consume your little treats that they give you.
Your little treats.
Oh, there's a new series on Hulu now for you.
You could have that.
Here's a little treat.
Chipotle has a different ingredient now, a different thing you could add to your burrito.
Isn't that so great?
That's what you exist for to buy product and get excited about next product.
Right, you belong to nothing bigger than yourself.
Right, nothing bigger than yourself whatsoever, and yet you're totally alone.
You do not matter.
Your life is insignificant.
Eat Uber Eats, drink Coca Cola, be entertained, for tomorrow you die.
That is the motto of Trash World.
And so, ladies and gentlemen, that more or less is briefly as my elevator speech for Trash World.
As briefly as I could put it.
This is why Joel and I get along so well because I'm exactly like him.
Right, that's it.
Right, male and female does not exist.
Marriage and households, they do not exist anymore.
We destroyed marriage.
It's gone.
Sorry, that's it.
Right, nations do not exist.
Your heritage does not exist.
You have no future.
You exist as a deracinated individual in a borderless economic zone, consuming product until you die.
Right, that's trash world.
That is trash world.
Right, that is not the world that God made.
That is not at all the created order that God has given us.
And if 2020 showed us anything, it showed us just how much people love that existence.
They love it.
They love it.
I cannot tell you how many people I know from growing up and everything else, how many people just loved lockdown.
They're like, oh, wow, I get unlimited time off.
I get to be home all day.
I get to order food.
I just ate six tubs of Ben Jerry's and watched Hulu all day.
Netflix, like there's some cool series out and I want to catch up.
Right?
Just locked away in their little apartments, right?
Living like the humans in Wally, right?
And they love it.
They think this is great, right?
And incidentally, like the moment I knew, like, I mean, I knew for a long time, but the moment I like really knew this is all fake, this is not real, is when the NFL announced, yes, we are going to have a season in 2020, right?
The world's deadliest pandemic is as bad as the bubonic plague.
You are all going to die.
But there will be an NFL season, so you don't have to worry about that.
I was like, I think this is fake.
I don't think this is real.
Right, so none of the important things in life, none of the important things in life that really matter, right, if you remember, I mean, it's easy to forget.
It's been five years.
Right, none of those important things that matter the most could happen.
But the people who live in Trash World, that love Trash World, the bug man, they don't care.
They don't care that there's no weddings celebrating a new marriage, a new household being created.
They didn't care that that didn't happen.
They didn't care that there were no baby showers or baptism parties celebrating the birth of a new.
Yeah, snuck that one in there, Joel.
Celebrating the birth of a child.
No funerals to honor beloved relatives that have passed away.
No senior year of high school football.
They didn't get to have football.
NFL did.
Consumed product.
High school kids, nope, sorry, you don't get to do that.
You just get to miss the coolest year of your life.
Too bad.
No prom, none of those things.
No graduation ceremony.
No real freshman year of college where you're finally away from home for the first time.
Guess what?
You get to be at home for your freshman year of college.
Reality of Natural Law00:10:14
Isn't that great?
I want you to love that.
None of those significant, great, momentous events in life.
Could happen.
They're all wiped away.
But to the bug man, it doesn't matter.
It does not matter one bit.
I have all the treats that I need right here, right here in my pod.
You want me to die of the deadly virus?
What?
I can't leave the pod.
By the way, trans women are real women.
It's called just being a decent person, man.
This is what they believe.
If you don't believe me, just go on this site called Reddit and you will find so many of them.
So many.
And so the question is how do Christians, how do pastors, how do congregants, faithful Christian people, How do you even minister the gospel to a people like that?
How do you do it?
Just forget, even for a moment, persuading them that the Bible perfectly accords with the natural order, with the created order that God has made, that it tells us that there is a creator who must exist, and he's spoken and he sent his son to redeem us.
Just even forget trying to persuade them of that for a moment.
Whichever method you're going to use to do that, just forget about that.
These people cannot even admit reality exists.
How do you do that?
How do you show them that, okay, reality exists and the Bible's true?
How is that done?
How are you going to convince them that the reality they already don't believe in perfectly fits with what God has said in his word?
And so it's kind of funny.
I mean, I know there's going to be a debate between Stephen and David later on theonomy and natural law and so forth.
And so people sometimes will ask me, Andrew, are you still a Ventilian presuppositionalist?
Are you a natural law guy now?
And I'm like, I don't even know how to answer that question anymore.
Like, I mean, asking, like, what convinces me personally, right, persuades me the most?
I mean, I could give you an answer to that, I guess.
But we are in such an epistemologically weird territory that I just don't even know.
I don't even know how to say that, right?
Mostly it just depends on who I'm talking to.
Who are you talking to?
Like, what argumentation is going to work in the moment, right?
What will persuade them and direct them to the truth?
The best.
I'm just going to use whatever method that is.
I mean, I'm sure many of you, Joel referenced it, there was an interview I was on recently with Tucker Carlson.
And I'm sitting in my own interview, and it's always fun watching this stuff.
I watched so many of his with other people, and I'm thinking, I wonder what's going through that guy's head while he's talking.
Somebody being interviewed.
That was my prep work for the interview.
It was like watching the old ones.
Okay, how did they do?
What did they say?
And there was stuff going through my own head.
And in the moment, maybe you saw it, the moment in the Tucker interview where we're talking about atheism, and he's like, you know, these atheists, I'm just like, how are you able to tell what's right from wrong?
Like, by what standard can you know what's right and wrong?
And in my head, sitting there at that moment thinking, like, when this airs, right, every theonomy guy is going to be like the Joe Rogan UFC meme.
Whoa, yeah!
Like that, I am like, that's what was going through my head in that moment in that interview.
Like, they're all, or the Leo meme, like, right, like, all of them, all of them are going to do that.
I didn't ask David about that, but I'm sure if he watched it, like, that's what he did.
He was just sitting on his couch, right?
Instead of a, you know, a cigarette and beer like Leo in the meme, he's got a cigar and a scotch.
He's like, up, up, up.
He could confirm or deny if that's what happened.
So, all this is to say, sometimes that line of argumentation really works.
It's effective.
Sometimes something better works.
I think I'm going to remain, even after the debate, I'm sure.
I'll be like, I like both those guys.
They're so great.
Isn't that cool?
But with people who will tell you with the utmost sincerity, like just straight face, you really believe this, that Congressman Tim McBride is actually a woman named Sarah, where do you begin with people like that?
I mean, I was in Campus Crusade in college.
We did all sorts of evangelism, we had the four spiritual laws.
Imagine sitting down with the four spiritual people, like, yeah, Congresswoman Sarah McBride.
It's like, that's a dude.
Right?
Oh, okay.
So, anyway, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, and you're a sinner, and you need his grace.
Like, that is not going to work with these people at all.
Right?
How do you communicate the gospel to them in a way that works?
And the truth is, I don't think that we can.
I don't think that we can.
I don't think that we can.
This is the reality of things.
God hardens people.
How do you read Exodus and see God say, I'm going to harden Pharaoh's heart?
You're going to talk to him.
You're going to tell him exactly what's going to happen.
And then it's going to happen.
And he's going to say, I'll let you go.
Actually, no.
I'm going to harden his heart.
His heart gets hard.
He's not going to let you go.
We see it from God writing it and that perspective.
But imagine being in the moment, being Moses and talking to Pharaoh.
And knowing everything you say, he is just not going to listen to it at all.
And you are literally saying things that God just spoke to you audibly.
Go tell Pharaoh this.
Okay.
Well, Aaron's the one saying it.
Okay.
No one fact checked me on that.
Aaron's saying it.
But imagine being them in that moment, and Pharaoh's just like, it would be like talking to someone who thinks that trans women are beautiful.
What are you talking about?
What?
What?
That's what it would be like.
That's what it is.
God hardening people judicially so much that they believe absurd, insane things.
And nothing like we do or say is going to change that.
Only if God breaks their hearts through the Holy Spirit and just crushes them and breaks them down is that going to happen.
It will be us just.
Continue, like just like Moses and Aaron saying what God says to say and waiting for judgment to happen.
Right?
That's what happened in Exodus.
That's what's going to happen today, maybe, unless they repent.
Right?
Unless our nation repents.
And so, as distressing as all of that is, right?
I mean, that's the thing.
Like, even in the book, I'm like, you know, I don't want to blackmail people, but like, things are pretty bad.
I have to write about it, I have to talk about it, but.
The whole second, I could tell which people only read the first half of the book.
They're like, man, yeah, that's not really a bad book.
That's a bummer, man.
This is hard to read.
It's like, you need to read the second half.
There is hope.
There is hope.
Because, as distressing as all of that is, something else was revealed in 2020.
There is a minority, but a large minority in the country, in our nation, That really does still believe in reality.
A large minority of people who see that the emperor actually has no clothes on at all.
He's just stark naked, right in front of everybody.
Many of them are Christians.
Many of them.
You people here.
Many of them are Christians.
But just as many, if not way more, are not Christians.
It is that group of people, the ones that see that we are living in reality, that they themselves live in reality and see everyone else as nuts.
That group of people who, I think, this is my opinion, take it or leave it.
That group of people is the most ready for the gospel on the entire planet.
That group of people.
And I mean, many of you here, some of you I know, you were that group of people in like 2020, 2021.
That was you.
We're like, man, things are really messed up.
Really messed up.
And I could see just all this evil everywhere.
And so I know there must be a God because I could tell everything's evil.
There must be a devil because there's evil, there must be Satan.
So, if there's Satan, there must be a God.
And if there's a God, well, I think it's the one in the Bible because that's the one all of the people that hate me hate the most.
Right?
I mean, that's the apologetic method.
It's like, who do all the most evil people in the world hate?
Right?
They don't hate Hinduism.
They don't hate Buddhism.
They hate Christianity.
They hate my God.
They hate Jesus.
Right?
So, must be true.
Right?
There are so many people that reach that conclusion through that line of reasoning.
So, it's like, oh, presuppositionalist, natural law, whatever.
Like, that's it.
That's the track.
There are people in this room that that happened to that have gone down that road and have heard many of our speakers and been led to the faith through that, through men speaking the truth in a costly way.
And there are so many more of them.
Men Facing Rejection00:02:56
There are millions, millions more of them, especially young men.
Especially young men.
Young men in their 20s and early 30s.
Most of them are.
Raised in a totally secular environment.
No contact with the church, no church upbringing whatsoever, very little or no knowledge of the Bible at all.
But they see all the problems of the trash world.
Even if they're not fully able to articulate exactly why everything is wrong, they're like, this is just messed up.
Men do not become women.
I know that.
And these also are young men, many of whom, most of whom, they did everything right.
They worked really hard in school, tried to get into the best college they could, they get rejected by all the good ones, even though they have good grades.
So they go to a different college and they work their butt off there.
They get a 3.95 GPA.
And then they apply for all the different jobs.
And what do they find out?
Oh, Ginomo Global Corporation, Fortune 500 company.
We really don't need you at all because, well, you're a man.
You're white, you're Christian, you are not gay, because if you were, you would tell me, because that would benefit you.
And so just leave, we don't need you.
You don't check any of those boxes, so we don't want you.
So many men have gone through exactly that.
And they also, they're young men, they're 20 something years old, they discover.
They're out there like, okay, time to meet the ladies.
And they meet the ladies, and it's like, whoa.
Right?
These women, like, it's like, I just want to have what my dad had, my grandfather had, what everybody had, which is, right, you go to college, you get a job, you work hard, you get married, you buy a house, you have a family.
I just want that.
That's all I want.
I just want that.
I just want a normal life.
And it's like, sorry, all those things you don't get to have.
College, you get to go to your 15th choice.
You're not allowed into any of them, any of the good ones.
Don't think about Harvard or Yale or even the University of Michigan.
I don't know if Steve is here, that's a joke for him.
But you're not allowed in there, you're not allowed to have a good job, and then you go try to meet young ladies, and it's like, none of them want to get married.
They all want to just hang out with their friends.
They all want to, and there's probably obvious examples.
There's a singles thing after this.
I'm not talking about you, ladies.
Dreams of a Normal Life00:04:41
But they find out, it is so hard.
It is so, like, these guys, and they're good-looking guys.
You look at them like, okay, buddy, I've been in your shoes.
You probably lose a couple pounds.
No, they're good-looking, they're fit, they work hard, they have good jobs, and it's like, I can't even get girls to talk to me.
Are you kind of weird?
No, you're a normal guy, you're fine, interesting.
That's the experience of so many men.
They discover all the young women, they want to be strong, independent women.
Strong, independent women.
I don't need no man.
And they've also discovered that, well, maybe, just maybe my ancestors, all the Americans that came before me, that built this nation, maybe they weren't the most evil monsters in all of history.
Maybe they actually were pretty good.
Maybe they were good people.
And they're not perfect, they did some bad things.
Every human society everywhere does bad things.
Right?
Yes.
Yes.
What?
Yes.
But they were good people.
Right?
This is a nation to be proud of.
A country to be proud of.
It's a history to be proud of.
And they discover this, and it's like, whoa, everything my 11th grade history teacher told me about American history is like, if I just believed the one, it's like George Costanza.
Right?
Where's the 80 problems?
It's like George Costanza, right?
The Seinfeld episode.
George discovers that everything that he's ever done in his life is the exact wrong decision.
And so he just begins to do everything by the opposite instinct that he would have.
So he sits down, he orders the exact opposite sandwich at the diner, and he walks over to a woman and tells her, my name is George, I'm unemployed, and I live with my parents.
And she gives him her phone number.
Where was I going with that?
Okay, oh yeah, yeah.
Your 11th grade history teacher, it's the same as like a stanza.
Your 11th grade history teacher tells you, oh, well, I can't even think of an example.
I mean, CJ and I have been doing this history series, they're all in my head somewhere.
Literally everything, it's the opposite.
Oh, the Civil War was entirely about, here's a good one.
John Harris is here.
The Civil War is entirely about slavery.
All the people in the South, every single one of them owned slaves, they hated black people, and they liked to whip them, and they were very evil.
And of course, everyone in the North was glorious, wonderful angels, and their only concern was the plight of black people in slavery.
That's their only concern.
Then you discover whoa, it was actually way more complex than that.
Of course, slavery is an issue.
Yes, thank you.
Way more complex than that.
You discover things like that.
You discover so many things about history that's completely, completely wrong.
Like, oh, the progressive era?
Well, that actually wasn't good.
Wait, I thought they were fixing society.
They didn't do that?
Oh, weird.
Every single, oh, the New Deal was bad?
Oh, my goodness.
What?
We'll skip over some other stuff that's controversial.
We'll skip over other things that.
I don't want to get in trouble like Daryl got in trouble.
I'm not going to say anything about Churchill, any of those things.
None of that.
We'll just skip right to Richard Nixon.
Richard Nixon's an evil villain, the worst president ever.
And it's like, no, he was not.
They kicked him out because he was already doing Trumpian type stuff.
So, anyway, all of these things.
We're taught history.
It's just absolutely 180 degrees different.
And young men are seeing this stuff.
They're seeing, oh, I've been lied to about so many things.
So many things about the entire world, and they don't know who to trust.
It is, again, it's an epistemic crisis.
They don't know what, because you live in a world where people don't understand reality whatsoever, and it can mess with people really badly when it's like, oh, hopefully this is not on YouTube.
But, like, the vaccine, it's safe and effective, right?
If you take this, you'll never get the virus, and there are no downsides to it whatsoever.
Living in an Unreliable World00:15:32
So, take it, right?
And they see that, and it's like, oh, it's not good.
I was lied to about that.
What else have I been lied to?
Wow, right?
If you eat 17 helpings of grains every single day on the food pyramid, you'll be, don't eat too much meat.
That's bad for you.
And you discover it's like, man, if I just stop eating all the grain and eat like three times as much meat, I just, I instantly.
You know, look like a He Man action figure, right?
Like, they discover that, like, seriously, the right, Robert Kennedy is probably one of the most important guys right now because diet and nutrition, right, like your physical body, you find out that you've been lied to about everything on that, and then you discover, what else have I been lied to about this world, right?
That's what's happening to millions of young men simultaneously around the country right now, at this exact moment.
And The church has an opportunity, right?
An opportunity to lead, right?
An opportunity to tell the truth.
But what have our churches always done?
Especially with young men.
What do we tell them?
Joel is stealing all my stuff in the introduction, so hopefully this is taken well.
What does the church tell them?
Evangelical churches tell them that, well, you just need to man up, right?
The problems that you have.
You can't find a good job.
Well, obviously, it's because you're lazy.
So stop complaining.
You lazy, lazy, good for nothing guy.
Oh, you can't find any girls to marry?
Well, the problem is probably you.
You're a loser.
Because women, they actually can't sin.
Did you know this?
This is what we tell them constantly.
For years, for decades.
This is what I grew up in.
This is what we all grew up in.
Oh, men are the problem.
You go to church on Father's Day.
Man, you're bad.
You need to get your life right.
You're the worst.
You're so lazy.
You don't do a good job.
You're not a good dad.
You're not a good husband.
Right, Mother's Day, women, you are so wonderful.
And we're so happy you're here.
You're so great.
I just wish I could be a woman.
That is what they say on Mother's Day and Father's Day.
It's what happens constantly, every time.
Never, never, never, never are young men given a sympathetic ear.
Never are young men told yes, things are very, very difficult for you specifically today.
Things are bad.
But in spite of it, you can still have a good life.
You can.
But this is the hand you've been dealt.
This is where God has put you today, where things are way harder for you than your fathers, than your grandfathers.
And to have the things that, they just had to show up.
And they got, like, you just show up and boom factory job.
Your wife can stay home.
You have a car.
You have a house that you paid $10,000 for.
This is great.
You can't just show up.
You have to go way out of your way to work extremely hard to have the things that you want to have in life.
And yes, you have been lied to about so many things.
You were lied to during the pandemic about everything.
I mean, this is what happened to me during the pandemic.
I just assumed they were lying.
I always assume they're lying.
Anything on the news is just 100% wrong.
So if you remember, in the very, very, very beginning, they're like, Nobody worry about this thing out of China.
If you worry about it, you're probably a racist against Chinese people.
Don't buy masks.
Don't wear masks.
Don't do any of that.
So, what did I do?
And you're all going to make fun of me.
But I just went out and got as many masks as I could.
I'd be wearing them everywhere.
And I'd walk around like an idiot.
Everywhere.
Like, it's got my mask on.
And people are looking at me like I'm crazy.
My parents are here.
I remember calling them in March of 2020.
And they're in.
Again, this is all when the media is telling you racist if you are worried about this.
And my parents are at Disney World in Florida.
I'm on the phone with them.
What are you doing there?
You're old.
You're going to die.
Get out of there now.
They will confirm that I made that phone call.
And then immediately the media turns on a dime.
Because I'm thinking, if a pandemic is real, if we were going to have something like the bubonic plague ever again, they would not tell you that's going to happen.
Same thing like the meteor thing or any kind of disaster, like they're going to tell you that's going to happen.
No way.
If it's fake, they're going to tell you about it all day long, nonstop, period.
The opposite, it's usually a pretty good heuristic.
It failed that time, but usually pretty good.
And young men, they went through that and they adopted that heuristic that whatever I'm being told, I cannot trust it.
All of the institutions that had built up Decade after decade after decade of social trust just burned through all of it in a year.
All of them.
Not just the medical industry, the media, academia, Hollywood.
I didn't have a whole lot.
All of them just burned through all of it overnight.
And people were like, I don't believe anybody.
I don't believe anyone at all.
And you do that, and you can go crazy if you don't believe anything.
You can go nuts.
Instead of taking a red pill, you take the entire bottle of red pills.
And you will OD on them, right?
You'll believe, oh, that's not true, right?
That, right?
That the CIA told you that, right?
Like anything, like literally anything you'll believe is just an op.
Everything is an op.
You will not believe actual truth.
And this will happen in the church.
This happens to people where it's like, I don't know, is the Bible really true now?
Like legit faithful Christians will start questioning things that they hold absolutely true because they don't trust anything at all anymore.
An epistemic crisis begins to develop.
So therefore, It's incumbent on the church, it's incumbent on us to be institutions that gain their trust, that gain people's trust.
And how do we do it?
By actually telling them the truth.
Actually telling them the truth about everything.
That's how you gain credibility.
That's how you gain trust.
It comes very slowly.
You make little deposits here and there and here and there over time.
That's how people, any kind of trust, that's how it happens.
And the biggest one that we can be doing right now. Is telling young men, look, you're not evil.
You are not evil.
You're not bad.
You're not a loser.
You're not terrible.
You're not evil because you're a man.
You're not evil because you're white.
You're not evil because seeing a tranny that looks like Danny DeVito's penguin makes you want to throw up.
You're not evil for those things.
That's normal and good and fine to be that way.
And there are millions of young men just like this that know that things are very, very, very wrong.
And they are desperately looking for someone with answers and any kind of strategy to make things better.
That's what they're doing.
That's why I wrote the book, The Boniface Option.
And I began thinking about those things actually for years, right after reading The Benedict Option.
And actually, I like that book, The Benedict Option.
I liked it a lot, even though the author is a pretty loathsome guy.
And my only problem with that book was that.
Even if you withdraw to intentional Christian community, which I'm a big advocate for, believe me, you have to individually and collectively consciously be at war with Trash World.
Every aspect of it, internally, individually, as a person, as a household, as a family, as a church, as a whole community, you have to be at war with it.
Trash World isn't just out there, it's inside of.
It's not just enough to withdraw from it, just go somewhere else, because wherever you go, it's going to be there still.
You can't just hide away from the trash world.
You have to despise it with everything in your being and be constantly at war with it.
And the flip side is that defeating the trash world is not simply about individually rejecting all of its premises by yourself and living the way that human beings everywhere used to live.
Having a household, having a wife, having children, raising them the way God wants us to.
You can do those things, but it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do that totally alone.
And by totally alone, I don't mean just living out in a cabin in the woods or something like that.
I mean, you could be in churches where you're the only one doing that.
You can be in a community where you're the only person that is consciously, things are really messed up.
We want to raise our kids this way.
And everyone thinks you're nuts.
It is hard.
I know many of you out there have lived through that.
The only one, everyone thinks you're crazy because, oh, you're homeschooling your children?
Aren't they going to turn out weird?
It's like, look at how the kids do turn out to go to public school.
No.
You are not designed to be alone.
You're not designed to do things alone.
You're not designed even to do things alone as a family.
You're designed to live in community.
You need to be around many others who also see this world for what it is.
Others who see how fake and gay all of everything is.
I don't know if you guys have seen the meme that was going around where it was like, you know, women's Bible study, or girls' Bible study, right?
God loves you.
How did you feel about that Bible passage?
Men's Bible study is just a video of Joel and me and AD saying, you know, fake and gay.
Fake and gay.
For like two and a half minutes.
But it's real.
It's real.
Right?
You need to live around people that would laugh at that joke.
People that can live together and build a tiny world outside of Trash World's control, to the extent that you can.
To live around others who live in reality, who have households, actual households, who are raising families, who are building things that they intend to last for generations and to pass on to their children.
That's what we are doing in Tennessee.
That's what the Ogden guys are doing.
And Ogden, that's what Joel is doing right here.
Many people, and others.
There's a place up in Idaho, I think, that they're doing things like that.
They are, and you need to have people that have your back, that will support you.
You need that more than anything else.
You need to not be alone in the fight against Trash World.
And fighting against Trash World, I'm probably almost out of time.
Oh, I'm pastime.
Oh, Joel's never going to let me live it down.
Fighting against Trash World is what each of the speakers here have been doing, are doing, and will continue to be doing.
Even if they don't all use that nomenclature, I hope they do, because it's my word.
I made it up, I think.
Maybe I got it from the internet.
Who knows?
But it's in mine now.
So, Joel has caught some flack for having such a wide array of guests.
Up here, and you might have discovered we don't actually agree with each other on every single thing in the world.
How about that?
In fact, I disagree with some of them, or with each of them, on some things.
So I'll go through a few of them.
For one, I'm happy to let Joel and John Harris be totally wrong about the sacrament of baptism.
It's okay.
I mean, it's not okay, but I put up with it.
It's all right.
I am.
I'm happy to let the Ogden guys think that living in Utah is better than living in Tennessee.
And also that beards are better than mustaches.
Although, if you look at Ben Garrett back there, I'm starting to win the argument.
So we'll see what happens in June.
I'm happy to let Steve Dace believe that the Lions are better than the Vikings.
Although he knows that J.J. McCarthy is going to be awesome.
So he doesn't know what to do now.
And there is a little minor disagreement about eschatology in there.
Calvin and I have a minor difference in opinion on the Reformation.
But maybe he'll permit me to offer my counterfactual history that goes something like this.
If Henry IV hadn't have abandoned the Huguenots and France would have become a Calvinist paradise, the political, social, and economic problems of the Anchon regime wouldn't have festered for two more centuries and culminated in the French Revolution, and bam, no trash world.
So, tight logic there.
With Orin, man, I'm really trying to get into metal, man, but just can't do it.
I'm just not going to be able to sip a martini while listening to Pantera.
It's not going to happen.
Stephen Wolfe, Stephen Wolfe is not post mill, but being post mill myself, I am confident that one day he will be.
With Mr. Reese, I too love Rush Dooney and Bonson, but not nearly as much as he does.
So that's okay.
That's okay.
That's okay.
And I left out CJ because you can watch the show and find out what we disagree about all the time.
Oh, and lastly, A.D. Robles.
I hope I didn't leave anyone else out.
But A.D. Robles.
All right, that guy.
Oh, man.
Right?
One of my things is like we each get one deviation.
We get one thing in trash world that we get to enjoy.
Defeating Trash World with Boldness00:03:15
Like mine, I mentioned, is football, NFL football.
That's how I knew the pandemic was fake, because the thing I liked was coming back.
Mine's football.
He chose Major League Baseball.
A sport where they now let guys go up to the plate with a bowling bin.
Have you seen this?
These torpedo bats.
And just think about how they massacred that sport with money.
I used to like it, I used to love baseball.
They massacred it with Moneyball.
It's three hours long, almost as long as one of Joel's sermons.
And nothing, nothing happens but walks, strikeouts, and the occasional home run.
Talk about it, nothing ever happens.
That is Major League Baseball.
So each of these men, I have disagreements with some significant, some trivial, maybe funny, I don't know.
And we have differences with each other, we don't agree on every single thing.
But there is one thing, one singular thing that unites each and every one of these guys is that they have demonstrated tremendous courage at various points.
Every single one of them has taken stands that have cost them something.
Every single one.
And each of them have inspired other men to do the same thing.
They have, and women too.
I won't leave the ladies out.
More than anything else, more than anything else, to defeat Trash World.
To rebuild a functioning civilization, to rebuild a Christian civilization, it will take men with tremendous courage taking action.
Some in great ways, some in ways that you'll see, you'll know about, like doing oppressive, great, awesome things, but even more importantly, multitudes of men doing courageous things in very small ways ones that don't make the news, ones that nobody knows about, but lots and lots and lots of them doing the little things in life that matter.
The most, right?
All of them taking risks, all of them doing what is right, no matter what the cost is.
And so, if you want to smash the great idols of Trash World, if you want to chop down the grotesque, bloody tree that is Trash World, more than anything else, you must cultivate courage.
And so, if this conference does anything at all for you, let it inspire you to live with boldness, the boldness that is required to defeat Trash World.
Thank you.
All right, Joel said I can come back and talk for another hour.
I don't have any more jokes.
I'm sorry.
No, he wants me to pray, so it's only going to be 15 minutes.
Prayer for Grace and Blessing00:01:06
Gracious Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day that you have given us, for the life that you give us each and every moment, for all the things that you bless us with.
We thank you for the privilege that it is to be here, be among all of these men and women.
We pray that you would bless us.
That we would grow, that we would become more faithful, that we would become more bold, that we would know the things, both great and small, that require courage that you want us to do.
We pray, Lord, that we would leave from here tonight and each night of the conference, that we would leave from here encouraged and strengthened to serve your kingdom and to build your kingdom and to grow your kingdom in every way that you've given us.
We pray that you bless each and every person here, that you protect us and keep us safe, and that you would be honored in all that we do.