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April 25, 2021 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
01:37:01
LIVE: The Decline of American Christianity
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All right.
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.
This is Radix Live.
I'm Richard Spencer, and I have Mark Brahman, my friend, colleague, co-conspirator, on with me.
Mark, good morning.
How are you?
I'm doing well.
It is a good morning.
It's a pretty kind of overcast day here in Massachusetts.
That's more or less what it is out here in the mountains.
Yeah.
So we'll see.
Yes.
Well, we'll bring the light of the sun to this muddied atmosphere.
First off, we are going to talk about Christianity in America and the clear decline that you can see in polls that has expressed opinion to pollsters, which we should also always take with a grain of salt, but it does show something.
Also, a clear decline as measured by church membership or synagogue or church.
So we are clearly...
We've been discussing these the last few weeks, but just the issues of secularization, atheism, and belief in the 21st century.
And I think we can even add a kind of generational aspect to this because that's very important.
And most important of all, we can ask, where is this going?
What does this mean?
And where is this going?
What does this actually say about us?
So I would like to mention that we will take Super Chats and we do that through Entropy, which is a great service.
And so you can ask a question there.
We will read each and every question.
Many of them are very good.
Some of them are highly provocative and insightful.
Some of them are stupid.
But we'll read them all.
Let's jump into this.
There was a recent Gallup poll about, and I guess it wasn't quite a poll, it was a measurement of church attendance.
I'll share this on the screen.
It was pretty dramatic, just in the sense that we dropped below 50% for the first time.
And so I'll show you the poll right here, and I'll zoom in a little bit.
Throughout the 1950s, roughly 75% of the American nation was attending a church.
It was mostly churches.
Obviously, some people of Jews who are attending a temple.
I would say there were very few mosques in the United States in the 1950s, although I'm sure there are a few.
This more or less continued.
I mean, it's actually a remarkable statistic in the sense that we went through the uproar of the 1960s, the 1970s, and even the, you know, Heady 1980s, and yet that didn't actually affect church attendance all that much.
It was still around 70%.
But around the year 2000, there is just a noticeable, you could probably say linear decline of church attendance, and it's now getting close to a kind of parabolic collapse.
And we are below 50% church attendance.
Now, this is also interesting when you break it down in terms of denominations and male.
I'll first look at just breaking it down in terms of generations.
So, basically, church attendance is declining.
Pretty equally among all generations.
So we can look at this as a secular decline and a long-term trend in which younger people are more secular, at least less likely to attend a church.
But you see basically a 10% decline over the past 20 years with all generations.
They're calling them traditionalists here.
This is silent generation.
Baby boomers, Gen X. Millennials, we can just make that assumption.
There are also some real interesting statistics.
So what I see here, first off, these declines are happening.
Again, they're happening across the board.
It's somewhere between 10-20%.
But women are generally more religious, so churches are becoming more feminine, you could say.
These declines are particularly intense among Catholics, and they are occurring pretty steadily, but less so among Protestants.
So they just broke these up between Protestants and Catholics.
I think you could probably see some interesting divides between, say, mainline Protestants and evangelical Christians.
Although the fact is, this is happening across the board.
It's happening among Republicans, Democrats.
And so we kind of are getting to a certain type of polarization.
It's happening among married and non-married.
We're getting to a certain type of polarization where large numbers of, you know, there's still a strong majority of church attendance among conservatives.
We're seeing less so among Democrats and even less so among independents.
So why don't we just start talking about this?
Because these are just basically polls, membership roles.
They don't tell us much of anything.
There's just a bigger question of what this all means.
I would say that I probably wouldn't underestimate The power of new atheism, particularly on the internet.
And the fact is, this steady decline since the year 2000 is pretty directly associated with two phenomena that were kind of two sides of the same coin.
It's associated with, say...
Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion, which is a runaway bestseller.
I think it came out in 2006.
And new atheists kind of taking to the internet.
There was a time about 10 or 12 years ago where YouTube was dominated by skeptics and basically these atheist debates that were occurring at colleges and they were on YouTube.
And there were people...
Jumping on this bandwagon, people who didn't have degrees, but would make more fun, entertaining videos about atheism and BTFOing the creationist or whatever.
There was probably some interesting intellectual content, but yeah.
The other thing that was happening at the same time was the George W. Bush years and this impression among liberal critics and among evangelical Christians that evangelical Christians had taken charge effectively, that they were the ones, they were kind of running.
The Bush administration was really about them.
It was about being pro-life, about loving God.
And in fact, foreign policy was inflected by all of this.
That there was a kind of evangelical democratization effort going on where with this godly Bush and the American country, which is...
It's always been conservative and it's awakened.
And we are going to basically kind of take over the world.
We're going to turn Muslims into freedom-loving, patriotic, maybe even Christians.
And you can actually even see this.
Ann Coulter wrote an infamous column shortly after 9-11 that we're going to bomb their cities and convert them to Christianity.
That was the title, I believe.
And so there was kind of two impulses that seemed to be two sides of the same coin.
There was the evangelical impulse on the one hand, and the kind of liberal, it wasn't quite cynical, to be honest, but a liberal, openly atheist movement, on the other hand.
And they both seemed to have achieved the same thing.
In the sense that I do think that Dawkins and internet atheism had a great effect on the belief of average people.
Those ideas were out there.
I also think that evangelical Christians riding high in the saddle actually had a great effect on belief in the United States in the sense of I think it turned off a lot of people.
And it led to a kind of polarization where If you were Christian, that meant you loved George W. Bush and the Iraq War and were holding hands while we all go to the shopping mall after 2011 and waving flags.
These were real things, and it led to two things.
I think it led to people getting turned off from Christianity, but I think it also led to a kind of hyper-polarization, which on some level probably boosted Christian belief in the sense that You know, I'm a Republican, I'm a good American, therefore I must be Christian, even if I haven't thought about it too seriously.
But also, I think it was, and this is probably the primary aspect of it, I think it was a big turnoff to more sophisticated people.
It's kind of like, so this is what Christianity is?
Intellectually insulting, goofy, embarrassing president who's engaging in these catastrophically expensive and ruinous wars overseas.
That's not for me.
What do you think about that, Mark?
You know, it's interesting.
I've always had a kind of...
And people may be surprised to hear this, actually.
But I think I've always had a kind of sympathy for...
In that divide between Christians and atheists, I've had more sympathy for Christians.
I think for a while, I think I was more of the opinion, which might be an opinion that Ed Dutton has or other people have now.
Though I think this is not to suggest that anyone's insincere in their belief, in their Christian belief, for example.
But there is a kind of utilitarian value to Christianity.
I used to be of that belief that it had a cultural value and that it would actually be better.
If the society became more Christian as opposed to more bacchanal, as it were, more degenerate, right?
And if the left and atheists, to maybe a kind of lesser extent, they're more in the sort of intellectual realm.
But if the country were to go in one of the two directions, right, it would seem to me that it would be better if it went in a kind of Christian direction.
As opposed to a kind of more decadent or bacchanal direction.
But I think I'd always, you know, once you kind of read Nietzsche, you sort of can't go back on some level.
Or once you like, and I had an initial, and this is probably a reaction I think that a lot of Christians, or not Christians, but just people who are kind of of our general mindset, who are thinking about, you know, big ideas and big Picture stuff like the direction of the West and this sort of thing, right?
Even if they're sort of proto-racist or proto-nationalist, you know, white nationalist or whatever the question, however we want to use the terms.
But they're thinking about things in sort of bigger terms.
I think it's probably because I had this reaction.
I came to Nietzsche and I read it and I was like, oh, wow, this guy's an amazing writer.
And he was saying all these sort of clever things that I was like, okay, yeah, that's obviously true.
But then I think I put it away and I was like, well, but come on.
I mean, Christianity, that's like the whole, and it is true on a very important level.
It is just kind of a fundament, a sort of core of the West is Christianity.
Let me describe it.
If you want to go on, I think I have a way that would explain your mixed feelings.
I think that we often have this sense, and Christians will have this sense, that we need to save people and that we need to either get them going to church or to give them a Bible and that that will cure their alcoholism or their...
Their degeneracy or will help them get married and so on.
And so it's a kind of this is the cart and then that's the horse.
But I think in some ways it's putting the cart before the horse.
I think the reverse is actually happening.
If you have these generally healthy evolved instincts to Procreate.
To be, you know, group-oriented.
To be a bit ethnocentric or nationalist.
To reproduce yourself.
That if you have these kind of generally right-wing instincts that are evolved instincts.
I mean, these are traditional instincts.
Forever.
And I'm using, again, broad strokes here.
They're species-level instincts, right?
Maybe even beyond species-level instincts.
I think proto-humans were kind of ethnocentric in some way.
It's about us, the tribe, being badass, kicking other people's asses.
That kind of stuff.
That you gravitate to religion.
So what I'm saying is you aren't...
And look, I'm sure...
And I'm saying this and everyone knows what my opinions are.
I'm sure there are some instances, and I think this is a good thing, where someone will join a church and they'll get their life together and get off the booze, the drugs, and so on.
That's great.
Obviously, no one's opposed to that.
But I think it's actually, that's putting the cart before the horse to see that as a general phenomenon.
Most people have these instincts.
They want...
Life to be great.
They want to reproduce.
They want to get married.
And so they go to church.
And that's the way it happens.
So I think it is kind of difficult.
It's difficult for us to be in our position where we are...
We are looking into what is the real meaning of the Bible?
What are these religious leaders actually saying?
What are the implications of all this?
What is this thing ideologically and originally?
What is this thing, Christianity?
And you're kind of counter-signaling a bunch of healthy people.
I mean, when I went to church for Easter, I guess I'm kind of a fair-weather Episcopalian, but that's...
Not unusual.
I felt at home.
It was nice.
I enjoyed myself.
That's kind of...
I wanted to be there.
I didn't go in and...
I didn't think that this is, you know, oh, this is, you know, Judea versus Rome.
It's a blood-drenched institution that's destroying the world.
I didn't think that.
I thought of it as a healthy thing.
And I think people who have generally healthy instincts are going to just gravitate to those things in general.
And so we feel as critics of Christianity or as Nietzscheans or Apollonians or whatever.
Whatever we might be, we feel like we're counter-signaling healthy people, that we're going against the grain of what we want.
And I think we're in a very difficult and maybe even kind of tragic position, but someone's got to do it.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah.
No, I would agree.
As you were speaking, I was just thinking that you and I might have had almost kind of inverted experiences, but you can tell me if this is correct.
I was in a liberal setting, effectively, and living in some of the most liberal towns in New England.
So I think that part of it, I had this instinct from like an early age that like I was sympathetic to kind of the Republican, you know, sentiment out in the country or like the, you know, you know, for example, like I, and this is something I shared with my brother too, we very much like the Lynyrd Skynyrd music and stuff like that.
So we had this, we had a kind of appreciation for sort of the rural culture, but it was a reaction to the sort of leftism.
So we were kind of resisting our environment in a way.
And I was wondering, because it might be that you might have had kind of the opposite reaction.
In other words, you might have been...
I think I did.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I remember my reaction because I grew up in the 80s and 90s in Dallas, Texas.
I was actually born in Massachusetts, as you know, but I grew up in Texas ever since I was two or three.
Yeah, I was generally right-wing.
I would kind of root on the Republicans and so on as youth.
But I came of age.
I was at undergraduate college and a young adult.
During the Bush administration, George W. Bush, And the Iraq War and Afghanistan in 9-11.
And I did react against it.
And I think correctly.
I mean, my opinion is now the majority opinion, even though it was a very small minority opinion 20 years ago, which was that these wars are terrible.
This is leading nowhere.
This is ruinous.
And that you can't spread democracy around the globe and what have you.
I really reacted against it.
And I think I also had a kind of instinct.
I'll just vaguely call it Nietzschean that was just kind of sickened by the let's fight terrorism by going to the shopping mall, which was effectively literally what George Bush was saying.
And all these people calling in to talk radio saying, you're a good American.
And I just saw a kind of sickness among this.
And so, yeah, I did strongly react against it, although I did live in a lot of liberal places.
But I remember, I also had my other instinct as well, where it was like the liberal reaction was correct against Bush and the Iraq War.
I think everyone agrees now that that whole period was terrible, at least in terms of policy.
There are all these liberal celebrities trying to revive the reputation of George W. Bush vis-a-vis Trump, which is just totally stupid.
But all of those things have failed.
That's a moment in time that we pass through.
The evangelicals haven't declared victory.
They're institutionally declining.
So the liberal reaction was correct in a way.
But I think it was kind of vicious and wrong.
I remember sometimes reacting like these liberal attacks on rural poor Americans who just had these instincts to be patriotic and they were kind of being torn down for really no reason.
Like they didn't launch these wars.
They're kind of following along this thing.
So I was very ambivalent.
And I did see, I mean, the other thing we should think about, like the concept of Judeo-Christianity, Christian Zionism, all of these things, these are wildly popular.
And these are top-down instituted to a large degree, but they're also kind of bottom-up.
That notion of Christian Zionism actually has roots well in the 20th century, 19th century, and that is kind of coming from the bottom up in a way.
So I think that even though you can see patriotic instincts among the evangelicals, there's a real strong...
Sickness, you could say.
A real big problem there as well.
So I was always deeply ambivalent, kind of felt a little bit out of place on both camps.
I mean, I don't think I've ever really been a liberal.
It's just kind of impossible.
Even though I voted for John Kerry and voted for Joe Biden, like if anyone talked to me for more than two minutes, they would be like, oh my God, this guy's not a liberal.
He undermines their most basic beliefs.
Yeah, I've never been a liberal either myself, but though I think that I'm probably living in liberal towns in New England, I think I've gained an appreciation for sort of the strengths of liberals in some ways.
And I've had many liberal friends, and often, depending on a certain socioeconomic...
Often, they're relatively intelligent people, and they can discuss things in a nuanced manner.
They obviously have their taboos and this sort of thing.
You realize, too, that there's a cultural aspect to these liberal communities where they do appreciate these things that are more authentic in a way, like bookshops and cafes.
This sort of thing, you know what I mean?
And you find those.
I mean, part of it is related to a socioeconomic factor as well.
But you find these in liberal settings, like in college towns, you find these sort of nice cultural features that are kind of absent elsewhere.
But so I think that, you know, one thing that kind of like sort of epitomizes my whole like ambivalence, I think is a good word that you used, was...
Leonard Skinner, to return to Leonard Skinner, there's a Leonard Skinner song that's actually kind of like a really brilliant, like sort of seductive song.
It's called A Simple Man or Simple Man.
You've heard it?
Yeah.
You've played this for me, I believe.
Oh, have I played it?
All right.
Well, I remember when we were visiting the last time, we were going through some songs.
We had dinner and we're having drinks.
We're kind of like...
Listening to music for a few hours.
I must have been drunk if we got to Leonard Skinner.
I mean that in a good way, of course.
But a simple man...
Basically, the premise is don't be...
It's a simple song.
Don't be overly complex.
Be a simple man.
One of the themes is appreciate God.
That's the kind of theme in...
I remember finding that song.
I just thought it was a kick-ass song.
Again, I was in a resistive mode towards the liberalism and seeing the hypocrisy of liberals that I was around.
Understanding it is wrong, as much as I liked the people that I was around.
And I liked liberals, you know, who I knew on a kind of interpersonal level.
Right.
Just understanding the sort of ideology is kind of like just wrongheaded.
I mean, and kind of like sort of obviously wrongheaded, like.
But that song, though, I remember and I actually wrote an essay about it, like in, you know, English class in high school or something where I was like, I was basically describing the dilemma like.
I thought there was something kind of great about the song and this idea of being simple and not being complex or dishonest.
You know, an idea of sincerity and honesty.
These are all kind of great and attractive ideas.
But then I was kind of torn and I was like, well, but I mean, it is kind of describing a sort of ignorance or stupidity.
Like this song is kind of an inability or unwillingness to think sort of critically.
It's describing the herd animal in a very seductive and attractive way.
But we are a herd animal.
Civilization couldn't really survive if 80% of the population are atheistic intellectuals who are always arguing with each other.
I think the ambivalence can maybe be extended to two levels where there have to be people who are sophisticated and understand the implications of ideologies and so on leading.
And there does have to be, I mean...
Just to evoke Plato as a kind of bronze class of people who don't always question those things.
And there has to be layers to a society.
We can't just be a big head with no body.
We also can't be a body without a head.
And I don't know.
I think understanding that a certain kind of class dimension is important.
Yeah.
Actually, that metaphor is also in the cult of Apollo in the sense that he's also understood as a keeper of flocks.
Right.
In Homer, it describes how Mercury steals his flock.
Yes.
He's a Semitic figure, steals his flock.
Well, doesn't he?
He puts feathers or brooms on the tails of the cattle.
So that they'll wipe away their footprints as they're walking away.
It was a very sneaky thing that Mercury did.
I'm not, I can't, I don't know if that's Odysseus and the Cyclops.
Is that?
No, no, that's a myth, probably from Hesiod.
Okay, okay, yeah, yeah.
It's showing the kind of...
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I can't.
I don't remember the details that closely.
I do remember, though, in Homer, it describes how the flock is returned.
So he does return it to Apollo's house, and he vows never to steal again from Apollo's house.
So it kind of has a good, you know, it's sort of the, it's the cocked armies or whatever in that case.
But yeah, so in any case, but yeah, so that is true.
I think that there are classes of men.
As it were.
And maybe that was part of the thing that I was reacting to is that I didn't feel that it was sort of my position to be someone who was unquestioning or who was a sheep as opposed to a shepherd, as it were.
And maybe that was kind of the dilemma that you were facing as well with your ambivalence or your, you know, like in other words, it's related to a kind of will to power, kind of even a kind of individual will to power or recognizing you as someone who's distinct from the people who are around you.
But yeah, and I think that that is, just to go with this a little more, I think that that is kind of what we're lacking, is we're lacking a leadership class.
Yeah, we're lacking a gold class.
On the right, the right lacks the gold class, and it's kind of a big bronze coalition.
And a lot of...
Again, they think, and the silvers are all liberals, and they're progressively becoming liberals.
That is the auxiliary people, people who are not golden but kind of serve the golden class.
Those are liberals, often called the liberal elite, probably incorrectly.
But I think that this is a problematic type of society, and I think it's even more problematic on the right, where there's...
A total unwillingness to lead or to be sophisticated, to analyze these things, to understand implications, long-term implications.
And it's kind of a big mass.
And that is problematic.
I mean, there are no ideas on the right.
There are people who want to deconstruct liberal ones, you could say.
But there's no...
Aggressive, forward-looking idea on the right.
At least I can't name it.
And when the right gets in power, they kind of can't do anything because they're so intellectually stunted.
And just holding back the tide of the left, facing off against history, standing thwart against history and yelling stop, that's not good enough.
That is a losing strategy.
That will lose over time.
Might take some time, but it will.
Be defeated.
And that's the right in a nutshell.
And I think it's a tremendous problem.
And it's something that we're trying to solve.
And we get a lot of heck for that.
Let me read a couple super chats.
And then I want to talk about the generational aspect to this.
Because I think there's a counter argument that as generations go forward...
We're going to become more ethnocentric, and religious, and presumably Christian.
I think there's definite kernels of truth to that, but I actually would throw some cold water on that.
Before we do that, I'm going to read some super chat.
I didn't read this on air the last time.
This was for $50 from two weeks ago because I had to take off last week.
But Archie Bunker, I was listening to some of the old episodes from Alt-Right Politics.
By the way, what happened to Greg and Don?
You guys had a great chemistry.
And you mentioned that the AR should have a theme song.
Yeah, first off, I really enjoyed those as well.
Believe me, it is not me who stopped doing this podcast with Greg and Don.
Don's doing his own thing in his private life.
That's perfectly fine.
Greg goes with the movement.
I don't know what to say, but I do think that we had some great chemistry.
Those are great podcasts that are still listenable, even though they're...
A little bit from a few years ago, and they were timely at the time.
I'd like to recommend Dare from the Transformers 1986 movie.
This is the theme song for the alt-right.
Also, I don't know that song, but we can play that maybe later on.
Do you want to find that one?
Mark, find Dare from the Transformers 1986 movie and send that to me.
Maybe we'll play that on air.
Also, Conservative Inc's theme song should be Dare to be Stupid from the same soundtrack.
Dare from what soundtrack?
The Transformers movie from 1986.
I think I might have seen that in theaters when I was younger.
I don't remember it, though.
I kind of remember going in a way, but I don't remember the actual film.
Okay.
So this is now...
These are Super Chats from today.
So we've got actually some great ones.
Pete gave us $100.
Richard Mark, thank you for the work you're doing.
Wow.
Thank you.
We really appreciate that.
Here's Yehuda Finkelstein for $25.
Long-time questioner and donor.
Christianity has successfully morphed and adapted to different cultures since the time of Paul converting the Greeks.
I believe Christianity is rapidly fading as a religion for Europeans as it quickly is becoming the creed of the global south.
We see this trend with Pope Francis.
Richard and Mark, your thoughts?
I'll pass that to you.
First, Mark.
I certainly do have some thoughts on that one.
It's a good question.
Can you do it first?
Because I was actually looking for the Transformers.
I can't shoot bubblegum and walk at the same time, unfortunately.
Okay.
So Christianity has always kind of mutated.
It's always been all things to all people, as Paul said.
There was a kind of Germanic Christianity that arose throughout the Dark and Middle Ages, and it has changed.
There was a certain type of WASP Christianity that was the de facto national religion for the United States, including people who were Catholic.
So it's always mutated, but now it seems to be mutating to a religion of the global South, and that it's really not going to be ours anymore.
This has been something that's taken up by a lot of paleo-conservatives.
I'm forgetting the man's name at the moment.
He wrote a couple of books on this issue.
But yes, there is a definite turn in Christianity away from being a European religion.
You could plausibly say at some point, during the Age of Exploration, where...
Being a Christian meant that you were European.
It meant that you were white, effectively.
Particularly vis-a-vis races that were being confronted around the world.
I think we're now at a very different point.
Christianity is making massive inroads in Africa, in South America.
Catholicism is majority non-white.
I think probably...
Christianity will have a future, and it is not going to be a European religion by any stretch.
But what are your thoughts on that?
I generally agree with what you're saying, but an interesting thing occurred to me while you were talking.
I had an idea, rather.
Nothing very interesting.
I just had an idea, which is pretty unusual, I guess, right?
But I think that...
Rather than, because I think we tend, or at least I tend, and probably you as well, we tend to think about, you know, Christianity is degenerating.
And so if, you know, the fertility instinct in Europeans was owed on some level to Christianity, because it was so central to the culture, and it was such the kind of sort of basis of the West.
So as Christianity wanes, so also does.
I think you could say that reasonably.
I think that actually is putting the cart before the horse.
I think people who had a fertility instinct were attracted to the dominant cult.
I think it's actually kind of the reverse.
But I do think that the decline of Christianity is related to...
No question.
Yeah.
So, but in any case, I think that, so I think we tend to think about it in those terms, but I wonder, and this is just kind of an idea I'm coming up with now, so it hasn't really, something I've considered very deeply, but I wonder though, on a kind of subconscious level, If part, and I would just only say part of this phenomena of whites moving away from Christianity, is almost a kind of white flight.
You know what I mean?
Interesting.
Yeah.
In other words, because I do think it is the case, of course, that Christianity is becoming non-white.
In fact, the process might be very similar to what occurred in Hinduism, for example.
At some point, it became...
Well, I mean, look at India now.
It's all non-whites, right?
So at some point, it became a non-white religion, effectively, right?
Whereas formerly, it was not a non-white religion.
So a similar process is occurring with Christianity.
But I do wonder, though, because it does seem like two things are happening simultaneously.
And maybe, you know, I guess this is kind of a harsh thing to say, but, you know, the whites that will continue.
Without Christianity are probably on some level more sort of eugenically sound or just have healthier instincts in general.
So in other words, if you don't require Christianity to become reproductive, for example, then it would seem to indicate that you are a sort of healthier animal, as it were.
Right.
And to your point, so there could be both phenomena occurring.
When Christianity was the dominant culture, sort of eugenically fit people would be attracted to it.
Also, just to kind of fit in with the society and be social and be, you know, sort of civic-minded and gregarious types that are effective within a society, those would be sort of kind of healthy and eugenic traits.
Yeah, I think there's definitely a high IQ white flight from Christianity.
And I think this had a...
Had something to do with the new atheism fad, which I don't think should be underestimated.
I think a lot of people look at this and like, oh, it's a bunch of, you know, fedora-wearing idiots saying m 'lady and, you know, debunking the Bible, showing inconsistencies in the Bible.
Wow, what an amazing accomplishment, you know?
And just being...
I actually would not underestimate the power of new atheism.
I think it was actually a really significant force that should be thought of and considered and discussed.
But I think there's a high IQ white flight away from Christianity in the sense that the flip side of new atheism was W's America.
And there was a...
It kind of moved away from that, much like whites went to the suburbs, where higher IQ professionals, you know, it wasn't their Episcopalian or Presbyterian or Catholic church of old, where it was associated with being higher status and class.
It was something else.
And it began to be associated with low church Christianity, evangelicals fighting ruinous wars.
You know, charming snakes or whatever.
And it just, it was a big turnoff.
And I do think that, you know, again, I think our movement kind of needs to hear this, even if they don't want to.
But upper level professionals, people of higher IQ are getting increasingly turned off by this thing.
And not only are evangelical churches declining, but Which they are in just real numbers.
But as this kind of upper-tier people start moving away, and the Christian church has become more associated with the evangelicals, that's going to be a real problem for them to dominate the churches going forward.
That is going to be a major turnoff to people with IQs above 115.
It just is.
Yeah, and one thing I would want to remark that I think about, I guess, often is that efforts are sort of directions that you and I are kind of headed in, or different directions than Christianity.
We're kind of on a separate path.
And I think that, and, you know, Christianity is...
It is ostensibly a religion that doesn't suffer other idols.
So it is hostile to other religions.
It's hostile to paganism, at least historically it is.
Now, I don't know that it really feels like it has the muscle right now to sort of flex that kind of authority and start demanding the destruction of idols or the persecution of pagans or that sort of thing.
It doesn't really – it's not really positioned in the way that it could do that if it wanted to.
I think that, you know, in the DR, I think that, you know, I obviously am often sort of critical of the DR in general, but I think that, and probably too critical in some cases, but I think that This idea that there are maybe two different evolutionary paths right now.
So in other words...
If we take the example of Apolloism or kind of the sort of more pagan direction you and I are headed, there's also kind of a sort of non-mystical direction, which I think also makes it distinct from other forms of paganism out there.
In fact, I think that this sort of mystical paganism is in some ways more similar to Christianity.
They're both kind of engaged in kind of, if not superstition, a kind of veneration of mysticism and superstition.
I think that we can see a kind of evolutionary branching or two directions going in two sort of evolutionary directions.
And I would think that if people are, you know, kind of hold race as like sort of the number one priority, which is generally the thinking of the DR, the thing that is similar about everyone in the DR is that they...
They believe in race, or they believe in their interest in protecting their race, and their interest in the amelioration and survival of their race.
Now, if that were their sort of first priority, and obviously, I don't think it is the first priority of everyone in the DR. I think a lot of people in the DR have a religious priority that supersedes it, or even a political priority that supersedes it.
But I think that you would think that if that was the priority...
to other people going in a different direction and trying something else, right?
So yeah, they're not.
But I mean, so let's just imagine we're all in a sinking boat or something and there's two different boats that you can take, right?
And neither of us know ostensibly which one is seaworthy.
But both are options.
People would not be opposed to someone taking a different boat to see if that could be the way that we would survive, right?
So that's the only thing that I would say.
But again, I think that Christianity in its historical manifestation is hostile to people taking a different evolutionary route.
Yeah, I mean, it is the one true way.
And I think that's something that...
You can't get away from it.
And I think that's something that's deeply embedded within Judaism as well.
I mean, you can see that in that Yahweh is a jealous God.
That's at the very top of the list of commandments.
It's not love thy neighbor.
I mean, that's obviously Jesus.
But it's at the very top of the commandments is that there should be no other idols before me.
The actual meaning of tikkun olam, which is this, you know, almost become a kind of liberal catchphrase of heal the world, it is about resisting idolatry.
And what does that mean outside of the destruction of all idols?
So there really is a continuation from Judaism through Christianity in its universalist...
I mean, Yahweh or God in the Christian sense cannot really be in a pantheon of other gods.
It cannot tolerate other gods.
It is fundamentally distinct.
Whereas a Roman pagan, I mean, it's a subordination, unquestionably.
So it's kind of hierarchy.
But it is...
It is tolerant on some level in the sense that it can recognize other gods.
It can recognize foreign gods even.
There's no problem for Apollo or Zeus with other deities existing.
Whereas with Yahweh or God in the Christian sense, that is a major problem.
Those people are going to hell.
Those idols need to be destroyed.
I mean, even this kind of pejorative quality to the word, you know, idolization or so on, that you can't do that.
I remember, we were accused of being racial idolaters at some point.
That is a deeply Christian impulse, that somehow idolizing something is a problem.
I agree, in a perfect world, there can be different...
There can be, you know, I'll try this path, you try that one, let's see where we end up.
But I think there's something just so distinct, maybe unique in Christian monotheism that they will not tolerate that.
Yeah, no, it's true.
And I think maybe the most telling passage is, I'm the truth in the way, right?
And only through me.
Effectively, can you go to heaven?
So I think that, yeah, I mean, you know, one thing, too, is I think that, and this is, I think this is something we can talk about as well, is that this sort of kind of mystical mindset,
and I think that this is something, I'm actually not totally clear on his position on this now, but Ed Dutton, I think, talks about, Our last exchange, I don't know where he is on this right now, but essentially, it does seem that studies correlate religiosity with lower intelligence, right?
And it seems like a kind of obvious thing.
Like, even if you can't find the sort of perfect conditions to run the test, and, you know, you can...
You can concede that there are contextual aspects to it.
As we were just discussing, if you're in a society where Christianity is dominant, the healthy instinct is to be a Christian, or the civic-minded instinct is to be a Christian and to go to church if that is what allows you to have status in your community and do business and whatever the case may be.
It does seem that religiosity, and I think that we are returning more to this primitive religion or primitive form of Christianity, as you've mentioned a number of times, that it is correlated with lower intelligence.
This will also get to the point that Christians are more reproductive than liberals.
As Ed points out, there is some Significant or very meaningful degree of heritability in terms of religiosity.
But to stay with my original point, which is, you know, whatever the number of Christians are left or end up being as we go through this crucible, as Ed describes it, of, you know, wokeism or liberalism.
It seems that one of the big problems with the model or the hope in that Christians are going to somehow become once more dominant in a sort of cycle is that they are effectively a less intelligent group.
The people that remain Christian, especially that are characterized by religiosity, as opposed to making a kind of conscious and political or utilitarian decision.
To remain Christian, which I don't, you know, I don't really think that that's what's going on in the main of Christianity.
I think that they are genuine and sincere Christians that do evince religiosity, which is effectively superstition.
But it is a less intelligent group.
And the difficulty with that, I mean, is, well, if they have numbers, then they have political power.
But really, I mean, we know that society is never run by the majority.
The majority is, it does represent this kind of herd that's manipulated by elites, by more intelligent groups that sort of point the direction of the society.
And Christians will have no ability to sort of, not even to like sort of secure their own existence as it were.
Yeah.
Because they simply won't eat whatever their numbers are, and their numbers are diminishing because Christianity is declining.
We're talking about white, you know, white Christians now.
They will end up being a less intelligent minority in a multicultural country that is dominated by Jews and now Asians to a certain extent.
Having a religion that effectively makes you less intelligent, even if it does give you a kind of zealotry, as Ed pointed out in...
Not his most recent book, but the one previous about Islam.
Even if it gives you a kind of greater intensity or zealotry and even fertility, it doesn't make you...
It doesn't allow you to sort of control the direction of societies or the direction of the world, which is really kind of the big question.
I mean, you know, we need an elite that kind of can sort of determine the fate of humanity or determine the fate of the world.
And that is connected to the state as well.
It's obviously connected to culture makers, and so that's very important, but it's also connected to the state.
And Christianity has always had this ambivalence towards the state.
Jesus Christ is railing against Jewish elites, certainly within his own community, but it's an anti-Roman thing at the very basis.
He was ultimately executed by the Roman state for declaring himself king of the Jews.
I mean, that is what happened.
And as Christianity grew, I mean, it's actually a remarkable story.
There have been some recent interesting books written about this, one by Bart Ehrman, one by someone else whose name I'm forgetting.
I think his last name is Stark.
But Christianity kind of grew much...
There's some parallels even with the alt-right and dissonant right or whatever.
It was a religion that was looked down upon.
The elite spat on it.
They did not see this as certainly a great thing or a positive thing at all.
And they were kind of...
Growing in these early stages by winning over converts at a kind of exponential rate where there might have been dozens of Christians at one point, but you start to grow and it grows and grows and you reach this mass.
But again, the big ambivalence of Christianity is the state.
Now, we shockingly don't know a lot about...
Constantine and his personal conversion and then toleration of Christianity and how that related to the Sol Invictus cult and so on.
But we reached a point where the state was beginning to not only tolerate Christianity, also canonize Christianity, kind of get it in line, because there are lots of different sects in those first few generations.
But then make it a state religion.
And I think there was a lot of state building that went along with the monotheism aspect.
That's not the only way to build a state.
Obviously, Romans built a state with pantheism, but in the Greek system, effectively, that they modulated.
But monotheism was a part of state building.
And as the...
The Central and Western Europe began to be converted.
This was connected to the state and connected to high leadership.
So there's this weird aspect with Christianity where it's kind of becoming itself again.
And it's returning to something where the state is certainly tolerating it, but maybe a little more hostile or kind of post-Christian.
Not quite a Christian, but post-Christian.
And it's kind of going back to its roots.
We're kind of seeing a revival of a certain kind of primitive Christianity.
And I even noticed this a number of years ago with people who are non-denominational Christians who kind of call themselves Christ followers.
And they have...
Reduced the religion, all of the smells and bells of Catholicism or high church Protestantism, all of those things have been dispensed with.
And maybe even going to an organized church has been dispensed with.
And what you're left with is basically this kind of primitive message of Jesus Christ, which is loving your neighbor, uplifting the poor, the meek shall inherit the earth.
Some basic dictates from Paul and Jesus as this kind of rudimentary core Christianity, the core message, moving away from the state, moving away from the pageantry of the high church and getting to the essence.
And in some ways, Christianity is kind of becoming what it is in this long cycle.
Yeah, you know, I was going to point out something a little different, though you did make me think of a couple of things when you were talking.
Maybe I'll return to them.
But what I was thinking, though, was I was thinking about how the fact that Christianity does represent a kind of superstition.
And it represents a kind of drunkenness in a way.
Like, it's a kind of irrationality.
I think that we overestimate the extent to which Jews are threatened by Christianity.
And you and I, the work that we've done, you know, evaluating cinema and art, reveals that they actually kind of understand Christianity and understand that parable in ways that we don't.
And they don't actually, you know, they identify with Christ as a Jew.
And there is a kind of esotericism that, you know, the common Jew is probably unaware of.
But I think that they have a different view of that parable.
And in a way, it's similar to Marxism in the sense that, like, you know, Christianity hasn't been tried.
Like, you know, communism hasn't been tried.
Like, I think that that might be a little bit more of the view of Jews because Jews are intelligent and they can look at.
The religion itself and realize that the religion is about loving your enemy, right?
That's one of the most important passages in Christianity, kind of one of the most oft-repeated passages in Christianity in terms of the propaganda of this sort of early stages.
Yeah, shocking passages.
Yeah, yeah.
So Jews know that that actually kind of represents a kind of psychological handle that they can sort of turn around on Gentiles and be like, well...
Doesn't your religion say love you or whatever?
There are many kind of nuances, I guess I would say.
I think they look at it and they understand there's a kind of creedal dimension to it that is ultimately not anti-Semitic.
But on the other hand, Christianity has been the source of pogroms.
So there is this irrationality, this mysticism, this superstition.
Of the Christian herd or flock, flock might be the better word, if that's actually the word that they use in the faith, that that superstition is a kind of dangerous thing.
Like they're sort of playing with fire on some level.
Now, I think what it does is that Christianity has the effect of kind of like making Gentiles sort of disoriented in like...
It lobotomizes them on some level.
It makes them less sober and in some ways dangerous.
Not dangerous in the violent sense of the word, but dangerous in the competitor sense of the word as being someone that can be a rival to Jews effectively.
So Christianity actually neuters whites on some level.
But I think that...
On another level, on a very primitive level, it has this also aspect of something that because it can create sort of a wild environment because of the superstitious aspect or the spiritual aspect of it, is that it can be the source of pogroms.
And I actually think that this is in the future as things go forward and as conditions worsen.
That this could also be a role of Apolloism because our demands are very, like, reasonable.
We just, you know, we want the survival and amelioration of our own people.
We just, you know, that's something that we demand.
We're going to continue existing in the world.
We're going to exist forever.
That's just what we're going to do.
Nothing you can really do about it.
So you're either going to help us or, you know...
Get out of the way or whatever, right?
So that's the kind of non-negotiable aspect of what we believe.
But I think that we, though, are a reasonable—we can be talked to in a reasonable way.
Like, Jews could actually reach out to us in a reasonable way, right?
Whereas I don't think that its conditions worsen and things become more anti-Semitic among right— Right-leaning Christian groups, these right-leaning Christian groups become the source of pogroms because they're kind of drunk and mad in a way, right?
Because they think it's the synagogue of Satan or whatever.
They think it's the sons of the devils.
That sort of very dramatic language that appears in the Bible that they're actually misinterpreting, that they're not interpreting correctly.
You know what I mean?
Because it's actually...
Look at QAnon on January 6th.
That was something, because QAnon was post-Christian, you could say, because it was all about politics and the deep state and all that kind of stuff.
But it was structurally Christian.
It was deeply Christian at its most basic level, with Trump as kind of a new fallen savior in a funny way, and these devils in charge and so on.
It was a deeply Christian movement.
Every single person, probably, who was involved in that was kind of post-Christian on some level.
That they resonated with those structures and the kind of root belief of it.
And it can get absolutely out of hand.
And, I mean, what is January 6th but a kind of Dionysian?
Explosion where these people, on one level, they were fighting with the police, pushing the men, smashing windows.
On another level, they were being allowed into the Capitol, and they're walking around almost like a deer in headlights.
Like, we've won.
It's a revolution.
And they're peaceful in many ways, but just totally deluded and lied to.
And I don't want to overestimate.
I don't think we're ever really in danger of a violent takeover, but that's the kind of outrage or outburst that is potential with these people.
And it's still potential.
I don't think it's going to happen tomorrow, but it's still there.
I mean, I can see this something, a lot of energy and tension building to something like that again, next election cycle even.
So it is a danger to the stability of the current order.
And again, you could see, I don't think there would be anti-Jewish pogroms, but just the fact that someone, Well, there already have been, Richard.
I mean, there have been synagogue shootings, right?
Right, there have been.
There absolutely have been.
And even like Marjorie Taylor Greene, she's objectively pro-Israel and not anti-Semitic.
Clearly.
But then she's kind of flirting with these, you know, oh, the Rothschild family has space lasers or whatever.
Again, I don't want to overestimate these things that, you know, people post nonsense on Facebook all the time.
But that type of person, that crude, rude type of person is clearly a potential danger.
It's someone who can be corralled, but someone who can go off the reservation.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think that that, so it seems like because there are, as we discussed, I mean, it does seem that there is a Jews on, like, let's call them, hopefully it's not a vulgar term, but let's call them arch-Jews.
Like, say, sort of, you know, the more intelligent Jews that kind of can look at Christianity and see the nuances and see how it is actually valuable and useful.
I think, you know...
level where it's, you know, they don't want Jews converting to Christianity, for example.
So they, there is a kind of, there is, I think, you know, Judaism also has its sort of laity, as it were, but it's kind of a less obvious laity, it seems, in Christianity.
But the division between priest and laity seems like a kind of more, you know, a more striking one, whereas the distinction between rabbi and a congregation, you know, maybe there's a kind of closer relationship there, you know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
That's my impression, at least.
But I think that, nevertheless, there's sort of...
Grades within Judaism where there are Jews who are not religiously or symbolically or artistically inclined.
Whether they're intelligent or not, they're just not oriented in that way.
So they have this uneasiness with Christianity.
And they have this idea of the freedom riders down the south, the Jewish freedom riders down the south getting pulled over by Bubba.
You know what I'm saying?
That's a real kind of thing in their psychology.
And I don't think it's without, you know, as we said, I mean, now because people have these automatic weapons and there are these shooting sprees, you know, occasionally going forward, it's just a kind of unfortunate thing.
You know, both churches and synagogues are going to get shot up.
Everything's going to get shot up.
You know what I mean?
but so I think that that, um, um, is a product of Christianity and the kind of the breeding that is a result of Yeah.
Let's do this.
Let me read a few more of the Super Chats, and I'll just put that up there.
If you want to make a donation and ask a question, we will read it.
It's done through Entropy.
You can see the URL right there.
It's entropystream.live/radixlive.
I'll read a few more of these.
And then I want to talk a little bit about going forward and what we're going to see.
Because there is this argument that you see.
Eric Kaufman has made this argument in a full book called Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?
Dustin makes this argument.
I've even seen this argument trickle down to conservatives.
Steve Turley is someone who has a very large YouTube following.
Tim Pool.
Maybe we could say that when Tim Pool adopts a position, that means it's wrong.
But anyway, let me read a couple more Super Chats and we'll talk about that.
So I'll just refresh this.
This is David Beer.
Byron's, Christianity is about the afterlife, which consists of either trillions of years in bliss or torment, based on the right belief.
Thus, the best a person can do is to become a missionary to get people saved.
This would make heritage, belonging, the arts, and family not so important.
Thoughts?
Yeah, I mean...
Yeah, well, I would simply agree.
I mean, you don't go to heaven because you've embraced your family and tribe and the state.
You go to heaven either through faith, maybe even faith alone, or through these types of works, whether that's conceived of uplifting the poor or spreading the faith around the world.
So it is a certain kind of problematic injunction.
You cannot believe in, you can be an atheist and serve your people and community and Yeah, no, I agree.
We've discussed this before, but to the extent that the afterworld becomes a valuable metaphor for us, I think we talk about Our, you know, progeny, we talk about our children, we talk about works that we leave behind that are beneficial to the world, and especially, you know, from our perspective, for our people, and also civilization, because we also connect civilization to our people, right?
But, so I think that, and Christianity, I mean, this is a kind of...
Christianity doesn't need us.
I mean, whether we need Christianity is an interesting question, and that would...
But fundamentally, Christianity does not need the white race or Western civilization.
There's no question that it emerged in a powerful global form via the white race and Western civilization.
That's just an historical fact.
But it ultimately does not need us, and that could be viewed as...
A moment in time that is now past.
All whites could perish and Christianity would still be true.
And again, whether we need Christianity, that's an interesting question worthy of discussion.
But whether Christianity needs us, I don't think is actually a debate, theologically speaking and even historically speaking.
Yeah, no, I agree.
So it's against the cosmos or it's against the here and now versus the hereafter.
And not even just the here and now.
It's also against ultimately the future here and now that your children will enjoy.
Yeah.
So this is Son of John.
Love the 90s boy band haircut, Richard.
A fresh start for the spring season or a botch at the Barber College?
No, I actually asked for this.
Yeah, you know, I've been kind of growing the hair out longer.
I just kind of wanted to just a kind of short, fairly standard haircut, but thanks.
Okay, this is Son of John as well.
More intellectual question.
Can church in America really be saved when its white congregations are so culturally ambivalent from another?
My childhood Lutheran church stayed strong due to the fact that families all came from the same Swedish immigrants who formed the church.
Yeah, you know, there was a...
I think there was also kind of a degree to which, like...
Being a Catholic in the American context, it was a form of Irish nationalism.
So you were looking towards Rome in Italy to some extent.
You were part of a universalist of religion, but vis-a-vis the WASP, when you said you're Catholic, that's kind of about us, our tribe.
And I think that is one way that Christianity can function.
Christianity can be all things to all people.
It can wear different vestments.
And I think it's increasingly not wearing that vestment.
And to kind of look at Christianity Yeah, I agree.
I presume you agree.
Well, you don't have to go into your...
Is your background in Catholicism or in Protestantism?
Well, it's...
Let's see.
It's ultimately neither, but my mother was Catholic.
I think she's still Catholic, actually.
My father was...
He's Protestant, but he was never really, you know, I don't think he was ever really religious.
And he kind of, which I guess in hindsight, I'm kind of grateful.
I don't know.
I mean, I'm sure I would have kind of come to the same conclusions ultimately anyways.
But he, but so it was never really a kind of thing.
In our family, I mean, it became at some point, I think we were going to church, but by the time I was like, you know, growing up as a young guy, we basically effectively stopped going to church, but we would go on the holidays effectively, right?
Yeah.
Which is a kind of common thing.
And then, but I think that what took the place of it, and it's kind of Greco-Roman in a way, is that...
Because the church is a way to be with your family for some period of time during the week.
So it is a kind of family activity.
And family activities are healthy things, generally.
But I think that one of the things that took the place of that was athletics.
So we would play sports.
And that was a way, but it was also a way of connecting with our family and enjoying time with our family, effectively.
You know what I mean?
I see that as a kind of healthy thing as well.
Now, I mean, obviously, the sports culture as it exists in America now obviously has many sort of toxic features to it.
But sports itself, I think, is a good thing.
It's just the way that it can be abused, as it were.
Okay, well, let's talk about this issue of the future.
There is a meme.
Again, I think Eric Kaufman might have been the person to first put this into written form.
But you can see this cropping up.
You can definitely see it cropping up with Dutton.
It's even matriculated into broader conservatism.
And that is that just let's just hold on a minute and we'll win through the power of the womb.
And basically all of these, you know, Uppity, high-IQ whites are leaving the church en masse, and they're going towards wishy-washy agnosticism or outright atheism.
But the people who are Christian are reproducing.
There was one statistic, which was actually in Ed's book, Making Sense of Race, which was that when you measure people on the opinion of pro-life or pro-choice...
Pro-life women, that is, they're opposed to abortion, are having 1.5 or 1.75 children for every one child of someone who's pro-choice.
And you can see this actually globally, where the fundamentalists in all countries, even secular countries or religious countries, the fundamentalists are outbreeding the wishy-washy or the secular.
Project this forward, you would say that it might take a few generations, but we will win in the conservative mind.
They've also taken the stance of looking at expressed polling, so expressed opinions and polling.
So if you take a snapshot of generations in a current year, you will generally see that Older people are more conservative than younger people.
And this goes back to the famous Churchill line, you know, who is not a liberal in youth, has no heart, who is not a conservative in old age, has no head.
And so the silent generation and the baby boomers are more right-wing, at least as that is understood.
Actually, what we see from current polling is that millennials and Gen Z are very similar.
But this is the thing.
It's that across generations, the...
The difference between Gen Z and millennials is slight.
And so the way the argument goes is that, yes, Gen Z just expressed polling.
And I can share this screen and show some of these things.
You know, questions, you know, pro-life questions, question of gay marriage, questions of...
Are Blacks mistreated, etc.?
Millennials and Gen Z are far to the left of Gen X, Boomers, and Silent Gen. But the difference is that there's less of a difference between generations.
And so once Gen Z gets older, they'll kind of all go right-wing, basically is the assumption.
So we're going to win, folks.
We just need to give it some time.
I would just say that I simply don't buy this at all.
And first off, millennials and Gen Z are starting from a much more left-wing position than Gen X or the boomers ever started from as a whole.
So even if it's true that you become more conservative as time goes on...
The degree to which the majority of Gen Z who support gay marriage and think that blacks are being persecuted and support transsexuals or whatever, the idea that that's just going to flip to something more conservative than the baby boomers just is not plausible.
And the other aspect of this, first off, Gen Z is 50% non-white.
That has its own...
Yeah, with the definition of what is conservative is changing, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
So what was conservative, you know, what was liberal, rather, I should say, 20 years ago is now conservative.
Or it's actually even a smaller window than that.
It's like five years ago now, right?
It seems like it's a kind of closing window, right?
Oh, we've already gone to transsexual conservatives.
Sure.
That took five years.
It took like 15 or 20 with the gay marriage thing, where it's like the conservative case for gay marriage.
We just blew right through it.
We're already there.
Caitlyn Jenner is running for governor.
The other aspect about this is that I don't think it's so much of who is not...
I think it's actually a polarized direction.
And polarization means just that.
It's polarizing you.
You're separate.
You're on different poles.
It also means polar in a different context.
You're frozen in ice.
In previous elections...
Decades ago, there was a lot of churn.
So people would vote Republican, they'd vote Democrat, they'd split their ticket, etc.
Now people are tightly polarized.
They are frozen in ice.
That is what is happening.
It is not a generational thing.
It's a polarization thing.
And this notion that all of the Gen Z are just going to become traditionalist Catholics and vote Republican, In 20 years, I think it's actually kind of preposterous.
And all of these problems that people like Dutton, not so much Kaufman or Steve Turley or whatever, the problems that people like Dutton are talking about, the kind of spiteful mutant thesis in the sense that child mortality has, of course, collapsed with the marvels of modern medicine, industrialization, etc.
And so, so many people who would not have survived early childhood in previous eras are now walking amongst us.
And because the brain is, say, 80% of the genome, a mutation, a mutational load, a mutation of the body that you're, you know...
Asymmetrical or weak or sickly, etc., that that's likely to also have a mutation of the mind.
And thus, you will have maladaptive ideas like, you know, women should never have children.
That's evil.
Like, you know, we should value Africans above Americans.
It's only good and right to give over all of our wealth and privilege to other people.
Those maladaptive ideas are going to be present in these spiteful mutants.
All of these trends are there for Gen Z, as they are for all generations since 1800.
So again, they might be polarized.
And I think they are.
That's clearly the dominant trend.
But the idea, as you said, that conservatism is going to change in some new way is also clearly there.
There's just no reason to believe that all of these people are going to be kind of healthier than previous generations.
Yeah, and the other thing, too, is that Ed points to a significant heredity.
Of religiosity.
But there's also a not insignificant percentage that is not heritable.
In other words, if you have five children, they're not all necessarily going to become Christians.
Some are going to become liberals.
Whatever the percentage is, you know, one or two are going to become liberals.
And often they will be the more intelligent ones, the ones that have greater sort of cultural sophistication.
And the people that will sort of more likely occupy the sort of upper positions in a liberal society.
We live in a liberal society.
But this sort of less intelligent Christian group will not be able to master this sort of bacchanal environment that it's in.
You know what I mean?
As it becomes this sort of dwindling minority and it doesn't become more intelligent, you know?
And the intelligent members of that group will become liberals or will become secularists.
I mean, Ed points out, which I agree with, that intelligence doesn't correlate with nonconformity.
I think that that's true.
But I do think it obviously does correlate with critical thinking.
And again, I would argue very strongly that it correlates with sober-minded thinking as opposed to superstitious thinking.
Combined with high testosterone clearly is connected to nonconformity.
You are willing to...
You are kind of autistic of an extreme male brain.
You are willing to question everything and break the rules.
Create a new paradigm and lead us into the future.
That's clear.
Now, I would say mid-range high intelligence, the kind of silver class or the midwits, that clearly is correlated with intelligence.
Excuse me, with conformity because they're able to kind of go with the flow.
It's like if you are a corporate...
I wasn't talking about badasses like ourselves.
I was talking about the general intelligent people.
If you're a middle manager at Netflix, you'll be like, I sense a social trend here.
I'm able to kind of intuit.
I see where the trend is going, and I'm going to feed that trend.
And in order to not get fired from my job for being a racist or sexist or whatever, I'm going to just imbibe these new rules and live my life by them.
That is a kind of mid-range, high-intelligence thing.
Now, I think there is a badass high intelligence where you're like, fuck the rules.
I'm going to create my own new rules.
But those are exceptional people.
But yeah, clearly mid-range, people between the IQ of 110 and 125, they see where things are going.
They're able to kind of see a little bit ahead, and they're going to go with that to attempt to be the middle managers of this new demographic.
I mean, I just think that's clearly going to happen.
The idea that we're going to put our chips in...
With this growing, low-IQ population that can't understand the rules of society, that they're going to win out by sheer numbers, I don't buy that at all.
History has never really worked that way.
And I don't think that's going to win.
Then the other aspect is just...
We don't want to underestimate new atheism, as I said before, but we don't want to overestimate it as well.
So many of the arguments that Dawkins and Harris and company were in our making are not new.
They're kind of like retread arguments from all of this withering critique of Christianity that occurred throughout the 19th century and even before.
The idea that we're just going to forget all of that is also just not very plausible.
There are long-term trends of deconstructing the Bible, Christianity itself, the ideology of the religion that are just not going to go away and are going to have a very deep effect.
Now, those things can change.
Yeah, no, I mean, I, you know, I think that just the things that...
You and I have seen in the last five years are just amazing things, actually.
You know what I mean?
Because we have seen basically what we now call the DR, which is really a kind of...
It's sort of a...
I don't know.
It's a corpse of the alt-right, which is effectively that you were like...
Maybe even kind of unofficially, but maybe officially the sort of leader of back in the day.
But what we're seeing now, though, is it basically became a kind of Christian movement, largely.
You know, it also kind of fragmented into other sort of like odd areas.
But I think that the most kind of noticeable and salient trend is that it became Christian.
And in some ways it became...
More politically effective, like with the Fuentes phenomenon and that sort of thing, and less of a kind of intellectual movement, but more of a political movement, but more Christian, definitely.
It became a voting bloc, in a way.
Yeah.
And not an insurgent...
Alternative right that was, you know, breaking away and kind of scaring the old conservatives and so on.
It became a more extreme version of the conservatives in a kind of voting bloc.
And it became a lot like previous Republican voting blocs who also bashed the GOP establishment and conservative ink or whatever they want to call it.
And that has its uses.
And is kind of arguably more powerful, but it's also yet another dead end.
Yeah, powerful in what direction, though, is the question, right?
Yeah.
Where does it ultimately lead?
It seems like it ultimately leads to more of the same as conditions worsen.
But, yeah, one thing, though, I was thinking about, this is a little bit off the topic, though, is that back in the old days, in 2015, In the DR, there was this kind of interesting coalition.
There was a kind of intellectual milieu.
And there was this interesting coalition of people that had different ideas and that were kind of approaching the central question of, let's say, the West, the fate of the West, rather than, say, the fate of the white race.
Because I think it was a little broader than that.
And maybe that was more the theme back then.
It was the fate of the West.
And, you know, sometimes I wonder, like, what would occur if Trump didn't happen?
I'm sure you've thought about this before as well.
Like, how would that milieu have developed?
And in some ways, I wonder, like, is it better that there was just kind of ultimately a kind of just a radical break from that milieu into this, we were suddenly accelerated into this sort of political...
And we were unprepared for it, essentially, right?
We were still this sort of chaotic coalition that hadn't really defined itself.
But I wonder if that was either bad or good, ultimately.
In other words, maybe ultimately all the same divisions would have happened, but they would have just happened over a kind of slower period of time.
And maybe they would have happened in a healthier way.
Probably that's the case.
Like probably it would have been a sort of healthier intellectual development over that period.
But sometimes I wonder, it just kind of like we immediately sort of knew who was on our side.
And you know what I mean?
Like whatever differences, even the smallest differences ultimately became sort of augmented.
And in a way, it kind of clarified thinking or clarified ideas and positions.
It did.
Yeah.
I think, look, it was inevitable in the sense that it happened.
And I think it kind of ultimately was good.
There was a time where everything was working in unison, and that broke down.
I think it kind of more coincided with Charlottesville.
I think Charlottesville is more a catalyst of that break than a real cause of it.
That's the way it's remembered.
We can't do Charlottesville anymore.
But I think there was a willingness of a certain segment to...
Criticize Trump to criticize the typical conservative dynamic.
And that is really at odds.
It's kind of existentially at odds with the, you know, America first, American nationalism.
We're a voting bloc of the Trump movement, MAGA, y 'all.
Those are ultimately opposed, and they just had to break away.
And so things have become, you know, more divisive, more poisonous, smaller.
But I do think that that break was necessary and is ultimately good because it allows us to go off in a new direction.
We're really not connected with them.
Every day that goes by, we have less and less in common with a pro-Trump populism.
As each hour goes by, we have less in common with them.
Just had to happen.
And it's ultimately good so that we can go off into a new direction.
And if you think we're going off into this horrible direction and whatever, fine.
You know, you don't have to join us on this trek.
But this is where we're going.
And I think you can see it as like a tragedy or you can see it as a liberation.
And I see it as the latter.
Yeah, and it's also because people became, you know, Such shitheads, basically, that we no longer really have hard feelings about just more clearly defining our position and just saying, all right, yeah, well, actually, Christianity, definitely not the way.
Sorry, guys.
You know what I'm saying?
So we can kind of just not pussyfoot around because they weren't interested in pussyfooting with us once the shit hit the fan, as it were.
I guess it's ultimately a good thing that it was accelerated.
All right.
Let's do that.
I think we can put a bookmark in it right there.
Thank you.
We had a couple hundred dollars in Super Chats.
We appreciate that.
I sent you the song, by the way.
I didn't know if you wanted to take us out or whatever.
Did you send that on the private chat?
Yeah.
Let me see if I can play this.
I will...
Let me share it.
I think there's an ad going on right now.
Let's see.
Skip ad.
I'll share the screen.
Share the audio.
Share the audio.
This will take us out.
Sometimes when your hopes have all been shattered, there's nowhere to turn.
It's a good one.
You wonder how you keep going.
Going.
Think of all the things that really matter and the chances you've heard.
The fire in your heart is growing.
You can fly if you try leaving the facts behind.
Leave the thoughts behind.
Heaven only knows what you might find.
Death, death, maybe you can survive.
You want the future in your head.
It's kind of an indie track, huh?
Yeah, that's a cool song.
All right.
Alright, I'll slowly fade.
That's a good song.
Yes, we can leave the past behind.
Kill it if we have to.
We're going to survive.
It's not like an ironic song, like it's really a bad song, but it's a good song.
I don't know.
There's a lot of 80s retro going on there, so I like it.
Alright guys, we'll leave you on that hopeful note.
I will talk to you soon.
Mark, thanks for being on.
See you next Sunday.
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