April 12, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:02:35
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Joining me today is the host of the Relatable podcast, a speaker, a commentator, and a cat person, Allie Stuckey. | ||
| Welcome to the River Report. | ||
| Yes, thank you for having me. | ||
| All right, Stuckey, I have wanted you in the studio for quite some time. | ||
| Oh, I'm so glad to be here. | ||
| It is good to have you here, but I got two bones to pick before we do anything else. | ||
| Okay, well, I should have to do with cats? | ||
| Number one, you're a cat person. | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| You just met my dog. | ||
| Yes, and I love your dog. | ||
| She's so sweet. | ||
| I love dogs. | ||
| I have a dog. | ||
| She's a rescue. | ||
| I have two cats. | ||
| Cats are just, they're cool and they're easy. | ||
| They don't need that much of your time, that much of your attention. | ||
| I travel a lot like you do, and so it's nice to just be able to leave the cats, but you got to put a dog in a kennel. | ||
| You got to pay a bunch of money. | ||
| They need your time. | ||
| They need your attention. | ||
| They need to go outside. | ||
| Cats are cool. | ||
| They don't really want to hang out with you. | ||
| They're plotting to kill you most of the time. | ||
| They're looking at you. | ||
| They could lunge at you at any moment. | ||
| You know, that's a stereotype that I would expect someone on the left to make, but it's not true. | ||
| You have to take cats by their individual personalities and not categorize them. | ||
| Look at how you just used identity politics against me just like that. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| It applies to the animal kingdom too. | ||
| I just needed you to know. | ||
| Alright, that's number one. | ||
| We're just gonna have to agree to disagree on cats and dogs. | ||
| Number two, for about two years, I had the number one PragerU video. | ||
| Okay, why I left the left. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Then you came in there, you took number one away from me, but actually, I don't know if you know this, as of the last couple days... Did you eclipse me? | ||
| Somebody else took number one. | ||
|
unidentified
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Who? | |
| I'm not even kidding. | ||
| So we need to get them in here. | ||
| Now we have a bone to pick with them. | ||
| Yeah, I actually can't remember who it was or what even the topic was. | ||
| So this morning I was like, I don't even want to know. | ||
| I don't even want to know. | ||
| But you was, what was the title of it? | ||
| It was masculinity. | ||
| I think it was like make men masculine again. | ||
| Make men masculine again, yeah. | ||
| Or something like that. | ||
| So I guess that was a hot topic that people really wanted to hear about. | ||
| I mean, it was so fun to make, obviously. | ||
| we've made PragerU video too, but I didn't really anticipate it | ||
| being one of those viral videos. | ||
| I kind of just thought, okay, most people in general agree with me, | ||
| but the vitriol, of course, that it got, you just, you're continually surprised | ||
| by some people on the left who are so opposed to what are very traditional ideas, so. | ||
| Yeah, all right, well, we're gonna talk about some of those traditional ideas. | ||
| We'll talk about masculinity and Me Too and a whole bunch of other stuff. | ||
| Cool. - But for people that don't know you. - Yeah. | ||
| Where'd you come from? | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| Yeah, so I started in this whole kind of political, I wouldn't even say media field, but kind of about three and a half years ago. | ||
| So fall of 2015, I was working in PR, graduated from college in 2014. | ||
| PR, social media, just had kind of your normal agency job. | ||
| But in fall of 2015, I lived in a college town, Athens, Georgia. | ||
| And I looked around and the friends that I had, both in college and out of college, had | ||
| no idea what was going on in the election. | ||
| It was the primaries and I thought, "These are really smart people." | ||
| And a lot of them are conservative in their values, and yet they seem to be touting these | ||
| progressive views when it comes to politics, and they really have no idea what's going | ||
| on. | ||
| And so I really just kind of had a random idea when I was driving one day, called my | ||
| mom and I said, "You know, I think I want to tell sorority girls why they should vote | ||
| in the primaries." | ||
| Because they seem so apathetic, I feel like I can talk to this crowd, because I was a | ||
| sorority girl about a year before that. | ||
| And so I created this, it really was a nonpartisan presentation for college students for why they should vote in the primaries and I started reaching out to the sorority presidents and you can find that information online. | ||
| I just said, can I please come? | ||
| I want to speak for free. | ||
| It's going to be nonpartisan. | ||
| I just want to tell you guys why you should vote in the primaries. | ||
| And it worked. | ||
| I mean, I started speaking to some of these groups, and then I started getting asked by other organizations on and off campus to come speak. | ||
| And then from that, I started a blog, and that was called The Conservative Millennial. | ||
| Ditched the nonpartisan thing pretty quickly. | ||
| And then after a few months of doing that, I started making videos, and that's kind of when it took off. | ||
| So end of 2016, beginning of 2017 is when it probably officially became a career. | ||
| Started working at The Blaze and then that changed to I moved to CRTV, that's where I started my podcast | ||
| and that was the beginning of 2018. | ||
| Yes, I'm getting my years confused. | ||
| Beginning of 2018 that I started the podcast. | ||
| So still speak, still commentate, I still write, still do a lot of the same things I was doing | ||
| three and a half years ago, it's just involved into a full-time thing. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty sweet when you start doing something and next thing you know it's actually become something. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Not bad. | ||
| Do you come from a political family or anything? | ||
| Did you care about politics before this or was that just your wake-up when you realize nobody knows what they're talking about at college? | ||
| I would say both and, mostly the second one. | ||
| I grew up in, I wouldn't say it was an apolitical home. | ||
| I knew we were conservatives and I knew we liked, the earliest president that I really | ||
| remember is George W. Bush. | ||
| And I was really young during 9/11 and I remember the patriotism that my parents showed and | ||
| that we were supposed to show. | ||
| I knew we were supporting George W. Bush and we kind of grew up watching Fox News. | ||
| But politics, it wasn't a discussion that we had at the dinner table necessarily. | ||
| I just knew the values that we had. | ||
| My parents were entrepreneurs. | ||
| They came from very poor families in Arkansas. | ||
| They had no money when they got married. | ||
| They were 19 and 20 and they really went from nothing and then built a business and built | ||
| a life for my brothers and for me that was so much better than the ones that they had. | ||
| And so the idea of freedom, of entrepreneurship, of not having a cap on your potential was | ||
| just always really attractive to me. | ||
| So there was never a time in college, high school, even as a rebellious teenager, that I was like, you know, more government control actually sounds really good. | ||
| It just never occurred to me that that would lead to a better life. | ||
| I just always loved the entrepreneurial spirit and the idea of the American dream that my parents embodied. | ||
| So it was more of those values rather than talking about politics. | ||
| I did become a state representative when I was in college. | ||
| I think it was 2012. | ||
| And so, yeah, that probably spurred some interest. | ||
| I started probably getting more knowledgeable and more informed about actually what was going on. | ||
| But yeah, I would say it's more a lifelong value building thing. | ||
| And then by the time I graduated college, I was like, oh my gosh, I feel like our nation | ||
| is kind of at a crisis. | ||
| How does religion play a role in that? | ||
| It plays a huge role. | ||
| You know, we hear a lot, especially from people on the left, that your religious view should have no impact | ||
| on what you believe politically. | ||
| Well, that's just a false idea of religion and a false idea of your faith. | ||
| If your faith is the center of your life, which religious people believe that it should be, then it's going to affect everything. | ||
| It's going to affect all of your values. | ||
| It's going to affect probably how you vote. | ||
| And it's going to affect the things that you believe in politically and the way that you think that the country should go. | ||
| And so being not only a born-again Christian, but also a Protestant Christian, And having roots in even the Protestant Reformation and how that kind of affected the movement of the West towards freedom and towards individual liberty, I think has certainly been a legacy that was passed down to me. | ||
| And it all just, it all has always made sense. | ||
| I wish I had like a better journey story of changing my mind, but the idea of individual liberty and human dignity and all of the rights that come with that, it just, it just always made sense. | ||
| The stories that come from a little more of an evolution, they involve more violence and pain and anger and frustration. | ||
| Yes, but they're interesting. | ||
| They make for a good story. | ||
| Yeah, they make for a good book, perhaps. | ||
| Perhaps. | ||
| Perhaps, maybe. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So when you got into the online world and started posting videos and podcasting and all that, were you shocked at sort of the tenor and the way people talk about these things and all that? | ||
| Well, you know, when I first started, when I first started the blog and then I started doing videos, I mean, one, I had no money, no backers, no idea what I was doing. | ||
| And I mean, the first videos that I did are in my living room. | ||
| I have no makeup on, no lights. | ||
| I'm using my phone, look ridiculous, got no views whatsoever. | ||
| And so it was after I persisted for a little bit, sometimes I look back and I'm like, why did you even persist? | ||
| No one was telling you to, but you did. | ||
| And then it's really the first time that you get any kind of attention or affirmation | ||
| that you also see the other side of it, that you also see the negativity. | ||
| When you're just doing it kind of for yourself and for the few people that follow you, | ||
| you're like, this is great. | ||
| Everyone loves me. | ||
| The three people that follow me all love me. | ||
| My parents and my husband love what I do. | ||
| This is great. | ||
| But then as soon as something kind of blows up, As they say, you see the negative side of it and you realize, OK, people don't just disagree with you. | ||
| They really hate you and they really think that you're a bad person, especially if you espouse any kind of faith. | ||
| That immediately comes into question if you disagree with them. | ||
| And that was hard. | ||
| I mean, I used to focus on the comments a lot. | ||
| You have to stop doing that, though. | ||
| It's so unhealthy. | ||
| So that's kind of that's changed over the past few years, definitely. | ||
| But yeah, I think the hatred threw me for a loop at first. | ||
| Yeah, well it just sort of comes and you don't really know what to do and then at some point I think I've come around to the place where it's like the more I get, I'm like, oh, I must be doing something right. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Because people used to lie about what I was saying and I didn't like that. | ||
| Now they actually quote me and I'm like, oh, wow, this is actually, this is what it must feel like when you made it. | ||
| I think it was actually you that tweeted the other day, some article by Right Wing Watch. | ||
| Was that you? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They did an article on me not that long ago too. | ||
| They quoted something that I said at CRTV and of course everything looks like it's some hit piece, but then I read it and I'm like, That's what I said. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| It was one of the first ones I was like, this is an actual, basically an honest piece because they were really quoting me. | ||
| They just quoted you, exactly. | ||
| And I'm like, if people think that's crazy, I'm totally fine with that. | ||
| But like you said, don't lie about what I'm saying. | ||
| Is it unique to be a woman in this space? | ||
| Use a little identity politics here. | ||
| I thought Republicans and the right, I thought they hate women. | ||
| They don't listen to women. | ||
| Don't they subjugate women? | ||
| Yes, they do. | ||
| I just like being subjugated. | ||
| Barefoot and pregnant? | ||
| You are pregnant. | ||
| I am pregnant, but I am wearing shoes. | ||
| And so I am against that part of it. | ||
| I've never really understood that argument. | ||
| I guess if you equate women's rights to abortion and to this mythical gender wage gap that needs to somehow be filled by the government, if you equate women's rights to that and women's empowerment to that, then sure. | ||
| I guess the left is the only place for women, but if you believe in entrepreneurship, if you believe in the marketplace, if you believe that women have the potential and the dignity that a man has and the potential to do everything that a man does in a way, at least as far as her career goes and leadership goes, then I don't see why you wouldn't be a conservative. | ||
| Unfortunately, we do have a PR problem on the right. | ||
| I voted for President Trump, but President Trump doesn't really help the rights case when it comes to women, not just because of things he's said and done with women, but also I think a lot of moms especially hear him talk, hear him at his rallies. | ||
| He's got a little bit of a mouth, and they're like, I don't really want my kids listening to that. | ||
| That's not who I want my kids to be. | ||
| I wouldn't marry someone like that. | ||
| And so I do think that he makes it a little bit difficult sometimes to make the case. | ||
| Is that the odd catch 22 of almost everything Trump does? | ||
| Because we talked about this briefly right before we started where it's like the policies pretty much make sense and if you can remove that from the tweets or the person it's like he's actually had a ton of high-level women totally in the administration if you care if that's what you're looking at. | ||
| Yeah, it just makes it more difficult. | ||
| I think that you're able to do it, but when the left has such a monopoly on media megaphones, when they have a monopoly on Hollywood, they have a monopoly on academia, I won't say monopoly, but they're controlling a lot of the messaging that comes out, and they're good at PR, they're good at the emotionalism that, not to be sexist, but appeals to a lot of women. | ||
| And so you hear the rhetoric of Trump is putting kids in cages, and he grabs women by the genitals, and you're a woman, you're like, I can't vote for that. | ||
| I can't do that. | ||
| And so in order to separate some of the lies from the truth and separate the things that Trump has said from the good things that he's done for men and women, you have to think and you have to go a step further. | ||
| You have to do your own research. | ||
| And a lot of people male or female, just don't want to do that. | ||
| When you can read headlines by just swiping your thumb, why are you gonna take the time | ||
| to actually click on an article and then double check it and make sure that it's right? | ||
| It's just harder to be a conservative for that very reason. | ||
| It takes more effort. | ||
| How do you cut through the clutter? | ||
| I mean, that's one of the things that, especially when I go to college, is that kids ask me all the time, like, how do you actually figure out what's true? | ||
| Because reading all of these articles, it's like, I mean, we know because they write them about us, and then it's like, well, I know what lies that. | ||
| We're in there, so what else are they lying to us about? | ||
| I mean, you really have to try to go to the source if you can. | ||
| If they said that someone says something, you have to actually go to the actual quote or the actual video. | ||
| I mean, a perfect example of this is when President Trump, just the other day, the clip of him saying, or allegedly saying that asylum seekers were animals was circulating. | ||
| I'm glad you're bringing this up. | ||
| Yeah, it was deceptively edited. | ||
| And so in order for you, someone like Chrissy Teigen who tweeted about it and said that, you know, he's awful. | ||
| Okay, in order for you not to believe Chrissy Teigen, in order for you to not believe the tweet that she quote tweeted. | ||
| And several Democratic candidates, by the way, tweeted this also. | ||
| So it's not just Hollywood celebrities, even though they know he wasn't. | ||
| Just to be very clear here, he was not saying that Asylum seekers are animals. | ||
| He was specifically talking about MS-13, which is a totally appropriate description of them. | ||
| But in order to realize that that's a lie, you have to jump through a lot of hoops. | ||
| I mean, because say I'm someone on the left or say I'm someone in the middle and I see Dave Rubin or Ben Shapiro say, that's not really what he said. | ||
| Well, why should I believe you anymore? | ||
| So you have to go to the actual source. | ||
| You have to go to actual reporting. | ||
| It's more effort. | ||
| That's something that you and I are probably willing to do because we know the game that they're playing. | ||
| But a lot of people just don't know. | ||
| But I also think that's why people are turning away, especially young people from mainstream media and from talking heads and listening to podcasts where there's conversations and when there's dialogue, where there's nuance and where people are willing to say, you know, I don't know that much about this. | ||
| Here's what both sides are saying. | ||
| You hardly ever see that on the news. | ||
| So I think I think that's part of it. | ||
| It's a change in the media landscape. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where do you think Trump fits in? | ||
| I try not to do that much about Trump in general, but since you brought him up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where do you think he fits in with sort of the future of conservatism then? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because I can sense a little push and pull with you on him. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I voted for him and I think I'll vote for him again. | ||
| It's mostly because I voted for him in 2016, mostly because lesser of two evils. | ||
| Then I didn't think that he was going to lead very conservatively. | ||
| I mean, especially pro-life is a huge issue for me. | ||
| He had just a few years earlier said he was pro-choice. | ||
| He didn't seem to emulate any of the conservative or Christian values that I hold in my life. | ||
| But then I looked at Hillary Clinton and I looked at how I felt like the country was | ||
| torn apart by Barack Obama over the past eight years. | ||
| And I was like, OK, someone who is going to probably advocate for legislation and surround | ||
| himself with people that aligns more with my values or someone who I think is diametrically | ||
| opposed policy wise to everything I believe. | ||
| So I chose him and I think I would choose him again because again, not that I would | ||
| ever vote Democrat and I've never been on the left, but if I were, say I were a centrist, | ||
| I would be looking over to the left and saying, okay, this guy don't like what he says, don't | ||
| like his personality. | ||
| I think he's too brash and sometimes he doesn't make any sense. | ||
| He calls Tim Cook Tim Apple. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But then I look at people who are advocating for late-term abortion, open borders, and socialism, and I'm like, I like my babies and my private property. | ||
| I think I'm going to stick with Trump. | ||
| And so, yeah, I'm even more so in that camp because I am a conservative, and I do care about the future of the country, and I hate socialism, so of course I'm going to vote for him again. | ||
| And I think that's how a lot of people feel. | ||
| Still, it's sometimes a hard case to make. | ||
| Yeah, that's how I see it. | ||
| I mean, it's like, if you guys could just not be that bananas, then the refugees wouldn't be leaving you. | ||
| But you just can't not be completely insane. | ||
| No, they can't. | ||
| Give us something here. | ||
| Well, sometimes I wonder if it's a strategy. | ||
| Are they taking us to the nth degree? | ||
| Are they taking us to the most crazy Marxism that they can actually take us? | ||
| Are they taking us to, for example, Medicare for All, just so we'll get on board with healthcare for all? | ||
| Are they taking us to open borders just so we'll be okay with abolishing ICE? | ||
| Are they taking us to, you know, killing babies outside of the womb to where we can say, okay, as long as it's limited to the second trimester, because I mean, I don't think that's going to work, but I do wonder, are you guys pushing us to the limits so we'll settle for something a little bit less, but that's still liberal? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I suppose that could, well, you know, I don't know what the answer is, but I suppose they could be, I mean, Trump does a little of that, right? | ||
| You stake out something really far and then you come in. | ||
| I mean, that's what negotiations are about. | ||
| I don't know, but watching these guys go off the deep end has been quite something. | ||
| So I mentioned to you a couple of days ago on Twitter, you've been hitting AOC. | ||
| Pretty hard. | ||
| And I think your arguments, you never attack her personally, you always go for policy, or for the context of what she's talking about. | ||
| Tell me a little bit about why you're not thrilled with AOC. | ||
| Well, we hear a lot of people on the left saying, Oh, AOC gets to y'all. | ||
| She's really getting to y'all and she really bothers you. | ||
| And I'm like, yes, she really does. | ||
| I'm not even going to pretend like she doesn't especially bother me. | ||
| She specially bothers me because she is representative of millennials, which she isn't really, but she's representative of the stereotypes of millennials and she's a woman. | ||
| And so she is claiming to represent all millennials and all women. | ||
| And she is espousing and saying everything that is so diametrically opposed, not only | ||
| to what I believe in, but what is good for America. | ||
| And also like she just says dumb things, just dumb. | ||
| It's not that, okay, she's crazy. | ||
| Like I think Bernie Sanders is crazy, but I think he's probably smart. | ||
| Like he can make a pretty good argument. | ||
| She just isn't good. | ||
| She's not even good at fulfilling her own arguments. | ||
| And I think it's her, it's the hypocrisy too of saying, well, no one has any legitimate | ||
| concerns with me. | ||
| No one has any legitimate criticism. | ||
| I'm going to pull this random tweet from this person with 10 followers and say, well, this is all of the right making fun of my shoes. | ||
| This is all they've got. | ||
| Well, no, there's been a lot of people asking you for dialogue and debate and to discuss ideas and policies and you refuse to. | ||
| That's what bothers me. | ||
| Yeah, so what do we do about that? | ||
| Because the energy of the media, the focus, so much of it is on her. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I don't think she's particularly bright. | ||
| I think she has handlers that at times are writing her. | ||
| Look, she's not writing most of these tweets. | ||
| Yes, maybe she types them out, but it's very clear if you listen to her speak, the way she speaks and her No. | ||
| understanding of information is very loose. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And then in Twitter form, she knows all these things about history and policy | ||
| and all of these things. | ||
| And the idea that she wrote the Green Deal or any of that stuff, it's just all nonsense. | ||
| But what do you do if so much of the energy is focused there? | ||
| Which I think we're in agreement, it's dangerous. | ||
| How do you move that if she won't debate? | ||
| Yeah, I think that all you can do is advocate for your own policies and ideas | ||
| the best way that you can. | ||
| And yes, of course, to call out her lies and say, this is why it's a lie. | ||
| I mean, you might not convince everyone, but maybe there is one person who thought that her tweet was awesome, looked at what you said and said, OK, well, maybe now I am starting to see a pattern of not just her, but people like her that use identity politics and use We all fail sometimes. | ||
| system hood narrative, someone like Ilhan Omar as well, to say, "Oh, you can't criticize | ||
| me." | ||
| I'm seeing that a lot. | ||
| Maybe her credibility comes into question. | ||
| So I do think that's important. | ||
| I think it's important to keep it above board as much as we can with the criticisms. | ||
| Now, I'm not necessarily good at that. | ||
| Like sometimes I just want to- We all fail sometimes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I don't want to call, I mean, I don't think I ever go for anything super personal | ||
| or ad hominem, but there are times where I just want to be like, "This girl's an idiot. | ||
| She's an idiot." | ||
| And I don't think that's, that's probably, just to call myself out, I don't think that's | ||
| the most productive thing to do. | ||
| We should probably say why she's wrong. | ||
| But someone who I think is actually trying to play her same game, it's a little bit different | ||
| because he's older and he's a man, but Dan Crenshaw is using social media to his benefit, | ||
| to actually talk about what's going on in Congress. | ||
| Say, "Here's the legislation I'm trying to get passed. | ||
| Here's what the Democrats are doing. | ||
| Here's the back and forth fight." | ||
| We have hardly any transparency in Congress from the right. | ||
| We don't have a young representative that's saying, "Okay, this is what you're hearing. | ||
| Here's what's actually happening." | ||
| AOC is trying to do that, but you do have someone like Dan Crenshaw who's trying to | ||
| do it on our side, and I think that's important. | ||
| What do you think is the goal of this new crop of Democrats? | ||
| To me, they genuinely want to change every fundamental law and every fundamental philosophy that has underpinned this country for over 200 years. | ||
| It sounds alarmist, it sounds conspiratorial, but I think they're deeply unproud of what America is. | ||
| And it's very sad for me, as we talked about right before we started. | ||
| It's like, this ain't the party of JFK anymore. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It was one thing when we just disagreed on policy. | ||
| It's another thing when we disagree on patriotism. | ||
| It's when we disagree that fundamentally America was founded on good ideas. | ||
| Maybe you don't like the founding fathers. | ||
| Maybe you don't even like that they owned slaves. | ||
| Maybe you think that America has a bad history. | ||
| We can probably agree on that, that America doesn't have a perfect history. | ||
| But us not agreeing on basic constitutional values of individual liberty, of the rights that are endowed to us by our Creator, that creates a whole other host of problems. | ||
| We have not more complicated disagreements between this new crop, but more fundamental disagreements, more simple disagreements than we've ever had before. | ||
| That's what makes them so frustrating. | ||
| And people like me, like us, who care about American values and are down with the Constitution, It's really kind of mind-boggling, like we don't even know | ||
| where to take their arguments sometimes. | ||
| But when you look at what's coming out of academia, I mean, all this postmodern garbage, | ||
| it kind of makes sense. | ||
| I mean, they've been taught that America is this imperialist aggressor, and everywhere | ||
| boots have been on, American boots have been on the ground. | ||
| Evil has spread and white nationalism has spread. | ||
| That's what they're learning. | ||
| You're like, "Okay, I can see where they got that." | ||
| It's sad because it's inaccurate, but I think that's kind of where it's coming from and | ||
| that's what they're promulgating. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are there parts of their right that you're not happy with? | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| I mean, if the alt-right is even still a thing, I feel like it's kind of had its heyday. | ||
| I literally pray that it's had. | ||
| Of course, I don't like them. | ||
| I think they're a bunch of internet trolls. | ||
| There are people also who think that the West is going to be won back through memes. | ||
| I don't think there's anything wrong with memes. | ||
| Nothing wrong with memes. | ||
| Don't piss off the me makers, please. | ||
| No, I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but I don't think that's primarily where | ||
| the battle is fought. | ||
| And then I do get frustrated with people who can't ever criticize Trump when he says things, | ||
| for example, and this was a while ago, saying, okay, we'll take away their guns and then | ||
| do process or something like that, or where they can't refute him on trade. | ||
| They can't push back at him at all. | ||
| Or they try to paint him into like this almost demigod savior. | ||
| That bothers me because, okay, let's not pretend that he's Ronald Reagan. | ||
| He might have even done better things than Ronald Reagan in a lot of ways, but let's not pretend that who he is as a man is Ronald Reagan, that he represents all of our conservative values. | ||
| I think it's okay to say, you know what? | ||
| As a Christian, I don't really agree with a lot of the things that he says, a lot of the things that he's done. | ||
| I still like his policies, but I'm just going to be honest that I don't love everything that he's done. | ||
| The people that will not say that, that bothers me. | ||
| I just don't get it. | ||
| Do you think that there's like sort of a sickness around the cult of personality related to our politicians the way we talk about them and think about them? | ||
| I mean, so you could take that with Trump from certain people, you know, | ||
| the certain just diehard MAGA people who would never find fault, | ||
| and you could take that with the obsession with oh, there's Beto with his shirt rolled up | ||
| standing on a table and skateboarding. | ||
| And just the way we talk about them, like they're all celebrities, | ||
| or that they have the wherewithal to fix all our problems, it all actually feels gross to me. | ||
| Like politics feels very gross to me for someone that talks about it as much as I do. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know if it's because it's gotten so dramatized that it almost feels | ||
| like our favorite soap opera, you know how someone has a character | ||
| that they just love and can do no wrong. | ||
| They're like, I'm fighting for this person in this show. | ||
| It's almost that our politics have become so celebritized, which really almost started with Barack Obama, | ||
| and so dramatized that people have picked their favorite characters, | ||
| and they feel like they have to pick one, and there's no way-- | ||
| It's like Pokemon, basically. | ||
| Yeah, there's no way that they're gonna pick the other one, | ||
| but I also think it has to do with the fact that they see their enemy as so bad, | ||
| as so crazy, as so radical, and the left is beating up on Trump so much and so unfairly | ||
| that I think they're honestly thinking, and maybe with good intentions, | ||
| why would I pile on that? | ||
| Sure, maybe I don't like some of the stuff that he does, but we never hear any of the good that he does, so I'm going to be a part of the group that talks about the good that he does and not the bad. | ||
| So maybe those intentions are pure. | ||
| Yeah, so I do agree with that. | ||
| I think that there's a certain set of people that think, well, wait a minute, this guy is relentlessly getting attacked and lied about and Russia investigations and everything else. | ||
| So when he says something like, to me, the one that you hit on, we'll take away the guns first and then the due process. | ||
| To me, that probably is the worst thing that he has said in the two plus years. | ||
| And I could see why a decent person that would know that that's wrong wouldn't go crazy about it because A, he probably was probably just like sloppy language, maybe, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| But B, it's like everyone's attacking the guy constantly like cut him some slack, but I guess there's a danger in that too. | ||
| Yeah, and I think it's that they look at his actions. | ||
| They keep saying, or I should say we, we look at his actions. | ||
| Like, do I think that he is ideologically pro-life? | ||
| Do I think he really cares about abortion? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| Now, maybe he's been awakened like a lot of people have with the New York law and the Virginia bill that didn't get passed and said, okay, that's really bad. | ||
| But I don't really care what he personally thinks about abortion because he's He's been a pro-life advocate, and I think that's a good thing, and I want him to advocate for the things that I believe in. | ||
| And I always knew, and I was always pretty confident in the fact that even if he's not an ideologue, which I think we all knew that he wasn't, he was going to surround himself by people that would push the values and the policies that conservatives believe in. | ||
| And nowadays, that's really all I care about. | ||
| Almost all. | ||
| I wouldn't say all, but that's most of what I care about. | ||
| Enough to get my vote. | ||
| So is that the irony, I guess, for Christian conservatives, is that you needed a guy that was gonna play a dirty game, and maybe you couldn't get Romney or McCain, or when they tried it the other way, those guys weren't gonna play in such a way, because it's not just that you're fighting the candidate, you're also fighting the media establishment and the colleges and all that. | ||
| That's not how I thought of it, because I didn't vote for him in the primaries, I didn't like him in the primaries, I actively talked about not voting for him in the primaries. | ||
| What do you make of the onslaught against Christians? | ||
| Because I talk about it, I talk about it pretty frequently on Twitter and here, and I'm not Christian, but I see what's going on, and it's like, this is now the state-sanctioned bigotry. | ||
| That's okay, not quite state, but like, if you care about what the media is allowing, you can always attack white Christian men. | ||
| and they're all homophobes and they're all bigots and all of this nonsense. | ||
| And I go to events with these people all the time and I find them to be decent and respectful | ||
| and willing to disagree and walk away without punching you and everything else. | ||
| But what do you make of just like the focus on that? | ||
| Well, it's part of intersectionality. | ||
| You posted the quiz the other day that it was like, what's your intersectionality score? | ||
| Yeah, it's intersectionality score. | ||
| Yes, and one of the things that you could slide was whether or not you're a devout Christian. | ||
| The more devout of a Christian you are, I guess, the more privileged you are. | ||
| The lower you are in the intersectionality scale or something like that, and so I think it's just associated because America and the West was driven by Christianity and was driven specifically by Protestants. | ||
| I mean, the Revolutionary War was seen as a Presbyterian rebellion, and a lot of those people aligned anything that is aligned with Americanism is white nationalist, is wrong, is imperialist. | ||
| Christianity gets tied up in that. | ||
| Now, for evangelical Christians, we also know, because the Bible tells us, that the Church of Christ is going to be pushed to the margins until the world comes to an end. | ||
| And so, we will be persecuted. | ||
| We will be more and more marginalized. | ||
| And, yes, we can continue to fight for Christian values. | ||
| We continue to fight for being left alone, really, is what we're really fighting for. | ||
| Just kind of leave us alone. | ||
| That's what Protestants pretty much have always done. | ||
| But, yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, we know that it's not going to end well for us, probably. | ||
| Yeah, it's really crappy situation. | ||
| Like, every day, just another tweet and another story, this nonsense. | ||
| You know, they'll do Chris Pratt's church, and they'll try to make it seem like, oh, he's a homophobe, and he goes to this homophobic church, and it's like, guys, you wanna do Ilhan Omar's mosque now? | ||
| You wanna do that, but they don't wanna do that. | ||
| Because actually, they're the bigots. | ||
| I mean, that really is the truth. | ||
| Yeah, and that's the thing is that they're fine. | ||
| They're really fine. | ||
| The left is fine with you being a Christian as long as you don't actually believe what the Bible says. | ||
| So as long as you believe the stuff about feeding the poor, as long as you believe that kind of stuff, but that has to mean... | ||
| The government feeding the poor. | ||
| You can feed the poor, but you have to do it their way. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| As long as you're down with that. | ||
| But you have to take away the wrath of God. | ||
| You have to take away Jesus being the only way, truth, and life. | ||
| You have to take away the biblical marriage stuff. | ||
| You have to take away the abortion stuff. | ||
| You have to take away the hard work that Proverbs talks about, that even the Apostle Paul talks about. | ||
| You've got to take all that away. | ||
| As long as you're the Christian that believes in wealth redistribution, you're good. | ||
| All right, so let's dive into some of the topics of the day. | ||
| You mentioned the wage gap. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was recently, it was, what was it, gender pay gap day? | ||
| Equal pay day. | ||
| Or hashtag equal pay day? | ||
| You're so privileged you don't even know our day. | ||
| I don't even know. | ||
| I just made sure to pay all my female employees less that day. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, okay. | |
| To just really drive it home. | ||
| Is it a myth? | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| It's a myth. | ||
| Well, it's partly a myth. | ||
| What they don't tell you is the entire story is this whole uncontrolled gap versus the controlled gap. | ||
| And I actually heard about this originally on a more left-leaning site that's an organization up in Seattle that fights for equal pay. | ||
| And they actually taught me on their site the difference between an uncontrolled gap and a controlled gap. | ||
| You wrote a great Twitter thread on this, by the way, which we'll link to in the description. | ||
| Yeah, the controlled gap account, or I'll start with the uncontrolled gap, does not account for job title, doesn't account for experience, doesn't account for hours worked. | ||
| It really doesn't put any factors in. | ||
| It's just the median, what women make versus the median, what men make, which is 79 cents to a dollar. | ||
| That is true, but it doesn't account for any choices or an experience. | ||
| The controlled gap accounts for all of those things. | ||
| So it accounts for job title, hours worked, All of that. | ||
| It doesn't account for like negotiating a raise, doesn't account for end of year bonuses or anything like that, but it does account for the big factors and that is 99 cents on the dollar. | ||
| So women make 99 cents to every dollar that a man makes. | ||
| But again, you're not accounting for a few factors there and that could be within the margin of error. | ||
| So no matter what, there is no proof that there is systemic sexism that is causing women to make less money. | ||
| Well, it also doesn't account for the fact that men and women choose different careers at the most simple level. | ||
| I mean, the best example of this is Sweden, where they've been completely egalitarian forever, basically. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| There are still more male engineers and there are still more female nurses. | ||
| So now they want to force people to do things that they don't actually want to do so they can get it 50-50, which is... | ||
| That's not really how freedom works, is it? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| I mean, there's a million different programs trying to get women into STEM, because they've said for so long that the reason why there are so many more men in STEM is because women feel intimidated and because there's this patriarchal attitude in the STEM field. | ||
| So they've tried so hard, they've put so much money behind it, and still, I mean, men are outpacing women, or there are so many more men in STEM, I mean, just as many as there's ever been. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| Any outside factor is probably because women in general are different. | ||
| How much of this do you think is just misguided sort of confusion? | ||
| So, for example, you're pregnant now, your husband's here in the green room, your careers are going to be a little bit different because you're going to probably take some time off to child rear. | ||
| Maybe he will take some paternity time, maybe not. | ||
| But just physiologically, we just are different. | ||
| They don't like talking about that either. | ||
| But that is just the nature of reality. | ||
| I saw a study the other day that was like breaking news, and it was some study out of the UK that showed that there's a difference between boys' and girls' brains inside the womb. | ||
| That is, as early as however many weeks' gestation that a child's brain is developing, they start going in these divergent paths. | ||
| And just how the neurons connect and women kind of being grown into these interpersonal creatures, whereas men are more focused in general on objects and data and things. | ||
| Women are more focused on ideas and words and people. | ||
| That starts in the womb. | ||
| And I'm like, I'm so glad science is finally catching up to God and finally catching up to the things that we've known for thousands of years. | ||
| And so you do wonder if that's going to happen. | ||
| If, OK, we're trying all of these cool social experiments right now, like, maybe, oh, maybe it'll be fine if we draft women. | ||
| Like, maybe it'll be fine if we just pretend we just are totally gender neutral with our kids and pretend, like, no binary definition of gender exists. | ||
| But I do wonder if science will catch up with us and be like, actually, all these things that conservatives were saying that the left thought were social constructs, they're just biological realities. | ||
| Well, they also might find out what if they found out that there was a gay gene one day. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And now they're pro-choice. | ||
| Would you have to be okay then with a woman deciding to abort that baby because it was gay? | ||
| Because they don't want the child to be gay. | ||
| And that does put them in this kind of ethical conundrum. | ||
| I mean, but it's the same thing with race. | ||
| I mean, I guess you would know what race your child is, obviously, before you have an ultrasound or anything like that. | ||
| But, you have, I mean, there is a racial aspect to abortion in that the majority of abortions happen in minority communities. | ||
| And so, when you ask a pro-choicer about that, they don't typically have any kind of answer, though. | ||
| All right, wage gap. | ||
| You briefly mentioned the trans situation or gender roles. | ||
| The trans issue, considering it's, you know, 0.01% of the population or something, and I have complete sympathy with the issues that they're dealing with, a little overblown in our national discussion? | ||
| Yes, and I think that the left does that a lot. | ||
| I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe with good intentions, because people with gender dysphoria, it truly is a struggle. | ||
| I know someone with gender dysphoria, and it is a struggle. | ||
| They didn't want this. | ||
| They don't like this kind of struggle of feeling like they don't belong in their own body. | ||
| It really is a psychological struggle, but you treat it as a struggle. | ||
| You treat it as something that, okay, We don't just say, well, live what you want to live, because they actually, the rates of suicide are pretty much equal afterwards. | ||
| It doesn't actually reconcile anything when we say, okay, just do what you want to do, because it truly is a disorder and a dysphoria. | ||
| And I think maybe in an attempt to be compassionate to the people that are dealing with this, and to help them not feel ashamed, the left has said, you know what, we are just going to validate who you are. | ||
| I personally don't think that's the compassionate thing to do, to lie to someone. | ||
| And I know a lot of conservatives feel the same way. | ||
| But then you do start finding yourself getting angry and defensive about a subject that we should have a lot of sympathy for because people force you to use gender pronouns that you don't want to use. | ||
| They force you to have conversations that you don't want to have. | ||
| And that's where things just get really sticky. | ||
| And that's when, unfortunately, conservatives, including me, we get really dogmatic about it. | ||
| And the sympathy and compassion is thrown out the window. | ||
| Yeah, so what do you do to fight that? | ||
| Because I get that. | ||
| It's tough if you just keep being called a transphobe or any of these phobes. | ||
| Well, eventually you're just like, all right, then enough of this. | ||
| I'm going to go for the destroys tweet instead of the compassion tweet. | ||
| Well, the tweets are difficult because the tweets is like, You only have so many characters and putting out the nuanced, compassionate tweet is typically not what comes to mind. | ||
| I think when you're just trying to put your idea out there, you don't have time to add the nuance. | ||
| You're like, I'm just going to get to the point. | ||
| I'm not saying that's right, but that's typically my tendency and our tendency and I don't think that's a good thing. | ||
| But in conversations, I always think it's really important to define your terms. | ||
| If you have a sane leftist who is saying you're a transphobe, Okay, well we need to define phobia, and we need to define what I believe and what you believe, and maybe we actually agree on a lot of the same things, we just disagree on the facts, we just disagree on the variables. | ||
| So I think defining the terms is important, starting with what you agree is important, and then working out from there. | ||
| How often do we do that? | ||
| Maybe not often. | ||
| Do you think it's fair to say that the average conservative, well, first off, when they keep putting phobe at the end of a word, phobe is an irrational fear. | ||
| So I assume you don't think that the average conservative has an irrational fear of trans people, right? | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| Okay, so what do you think the average, do you think the average conservative has the thoughts that you laid out earlier, which is sort of a sympathy for this, but then we don't want that to override our thinking brains, something like that? | ||
| I think some people are saying, you know what, I really don't care if you dress like a girl or you dress like a guy or you want to call yourself something. | ||
| I just don't want you to force that on me. | ||
| I don't want you to take away, for example, my religious liberty in lieu of, like, I don't know, they don't want their rights trampled upon in favor of this small group. | ||
| However, I do think there are people that kind of see where this line of reasoning goes, that if, okay, we deny biological realities, we deny what science is telling us, and we buy into this delusion that a man can just wake up one day and say that he is a woman, then, okay, we kind of lose all truth. | ||
| What is truth anymore? | ||
| It's just what you feel. | ||
| We lose identity. | ||
| And it all sounds crazy to just wake up in the middle age and be like, well, now I'm a female, but it's like, at that point, I mean, this sounds bananas, but if you were a washed up male NBA player who couldn't play in the league anymore, you could be like, ah, I'm a woman today. | ||
| I identify as a woman, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm jumping in the WNBA and I'm going to be the MVP. | ||
| Watch this. | ||
| And then the feminists would have to say, your lived experience. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's the other problem with it is that you're kind of seeing some feminists push back on this and say, hang on. | ||
| Well, old school feminists have been kind of saying, okay, we fought for the uniqueness of women, the empowerment of women because women are women. | ||
| And now No, men are beating us at our own game. | ||
| Men are better at being women than women are. | ||
| That's not fair. | ||
| And so I do think you see feminists pushing back on that who truly do believe that, okay, the reason why we fought for the empowerment of women is because women are unique. | ||
| Only women can have children. | ||
| Only women can do certain things. | ||
| Women are better at some things than men are as far as leadership goes, as far as organization goes, things like that. | ||
| And they fought to bring those things to the forefront. | ||
| And now none of those things matter anymore because you can be a man and be a woman. | ||
| So there is just, I'm just so glad I'm not on the left. | ||
| It's confusing. | ||
| It's quite miserable. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Alright, so your PragerU video, Make Men Masculine Again. | ||
| Why did they have a man do that? | ||
| What was the idea? | ||
| We're going to have a woman talk about male masculinity. | ||
| I think it's because you're seeing a lot of women talk about how terrible toxic masculinity is and say, Men, they just, they don't even know how hard it is and they've oppressed us for so long. | ||
| We just need them to take a back seat and so we can kind of step up and do our thing. | ||
| And so I think they wanted the perspective of a woman to say, hang on just a second, women actually do, not only do we like masculine men, or not even necessarily traditional masculinity, I'm not talking about like riding a four-wheeler, I'm talking about taking responsibility for your actions and taking care of your family. | ||
| taking care of that provision and protection that men are so good at, | ||
| and I think better at than women are. | ||
| So you can still wear a nice shirt, let's say, but you should be able to take care of your family. | ||
| Yeah, it's more internal traits than anything else, and the actions and the habits that you have, | ||
| the responsibilities that you take. | ||
| Women do care about that, and actually, the complementarian relationship | ||
| that men and women have had forever has worked really well. | ||
| It's worked really well. | ||
| Not always, I mean, sometimes it goes over to a patriarchy, | ||
| and that's not good. | ||
| I don't think oppression of women is good, but the yin and the yang, | ||
| the back and forth, and the complementarian relationship | ||
| that we've had has worked, and I think you kind of needed to hear a woman say that. | ||
| So why do you think the left's trying to destroy that? | ||
| Because they think egalitarianism will equal equality, so it's equality through homogeny, which is part of why abortion is a really big thing that they fight for. | ||
| If a man can physically walk away from an unwanted pregnancy, a woman should be able to too. | ||
| I mean, pregnancy, the ability to get pregnant is really not one of the only things, but | ||
| probably the biggest thing that makes a woman different. | ||
| And so if we get rid of that through abortion, and then maybe men and women really will be | ||
| the same, and maybe they really will be equal, then there will be no abuse, no oppression, | ||
| no patriarchy, things like that. | ||
| But I mean, men are always going to be physically stronger than women, and there's always going | ||
| to be bad men and bad women. | ||
| So oppression won't stop. | ||
| Abuse won't stop. | ||
| Egalitarianism is just going to make, or not, I shouldn't say egalitarianism, but sameness | ||
| is going to make things more confusing, not better. | ||
| So I know you do public speaking, too, and when you go to colleges, do you find you have any tricks on how to wake up, say, some of the lefties that are, you know, at least open to some of these ideas, but they're kind of like, ah, she must be the bad guy, but I'll at least go and sit in the back of the room. | ||
| Well, what I try to do is I try to—my message is typically, when I'm usually speaking to mostly conservatives, is that, OK, you're hearing that you're crazy for believing in things like border security, for being pro-life, for being pro-capitalism, but here's where these ideas come from, and here's how they have worked. | ||
| And really only over the past 10 to 15 years have we heard all of this crazy intersectionality identity politics stuff that they are acting like is mainstream. | ||
| And so you're not the extremist. | ||
| You're not the radical. | ||
| You're not the one that's out there. | ||
| You're not the Nazi and the bigot. | ||
| You believe things that Americans have believed since our founding. | ||
| And they have a really good history and a really good basis. | ||
| And so I don't know if that has necessarily ever changed a leftist mind, but it is something | ||
| that's different than just talking points and saying the left is stupid. | ||
| It's saying, hey, we have good ideas and you have a right to believe they're good ideas | ||
| and you have a right to defend these good ideas. | ||
| Really the most disrespectful or the craziest. | ||
| I always get very respectful, great liberal students that come and listen and ask awesome questions, I think. | ||
| The only time that has been like, oh my gosh, I can't even get a word out without these people screaming is when I was at UC Berkeley, and I spoke to... Been there, done that. | ||
| Yes, and I spoke to a class, and the professor was awesome for asking me, and I actually | ||
| thought when I went in there, I was like, "I'm gonna be really tame. | ||
| I'm gonna be really tame with what I say. | ||
| I'm not gonna say, I'm not gonna throw any flames or anything like that." | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| I couldn't even, it was like they had never heard a conservative idea. | ||
| They had never heard someone who wasn't a liberal utter a word, and it was irrational. | ||
| It was irrational. | ||
| That was really my only experience where I was like, "This is crazy." | ||
| They've abandoned thought. | ||
| Do you, in a weird way, blame the baby boomers for this? | ||
| Because it's their kids, right? | ||
| Or it's the young end of their children. | ||
| So in a weird way, you can't blame the 16-year-old who now gets into college, a couple years go by, he's been indoctrinated in high school, gets to college, gets slammed with more of this stuff. | ||
| I have sympathy for him. | ||
| Well, when they're yelling at me, I don't have that much sympathy for him. | ||
| But I have sympathy for that condition because they were just thrown into that. | ||
| Not that you're looking to blame somebody, but if you had to sort of figure out where this whole thing started, where would you go? | ||
| Well, the baby boomers really like to talk about how terrible millennials are, and I agree with them to some degree. | ||
| I mean, a lot of the stereotypes that people have of us entitled and apathetic are true, but I remind them, like, we were raised, like, we were raised by someone. | ||
| We weren't raised by wolves, and I don't think it's so much that parents probably I don't know if it was a lack of values that were taught in the family, but also there was a significant change from the time our parents were kids. | ||
| Like my mom, for example, was, you know, she was driving to the liquor store to get her dad beer when she was like 13 years old. | ||
| I mean, car seats, like that just wasn't even a thing. | ||
| I mean, everything was a lot more free to the time where we were kids. | ||
| I remember there was like a new law that said you have to be in a car seat until you're like, In second grade or something like that, everything changed. | ||
| Everything became more safe and everything shifted from like the latchkey kids who were coming home and fending for themselves, that's mostly Generation X because both their parents had jobs, to kind of these helicopter parents and these everybody gets a trophy or this everybody gets a trophy mentality that we had in school. | ||
| It's not like we didn't have competition, but it was that everyone gets some kind of reward. | ||
| I would know, I'm terrible at running, I'm so slow, and yet, in every race that I got, I got honorable mention. | ||
| Honorable mention, I got something, and that's how we were raised. | ||
| I swear to God, so I'm Gen X, so I'm a little older than you, but I swear to God, I remember being in third or fourth grade field day, and I was a scrawny little kid, I was not a good athlete, I became a good athlete later, and I remember getting a slip I did not place, I didn't get a medal, | ||
| and I remember getting some sort of participation thing. | ||
| And I'm not kidding, I remember as a third or fourth grader thinking this is nonsense. | ||
| Like why would you give me this? | ||
| I felt shitty, I felt bad, I sucked it. | ||
| We were doing like a slow bike race and I sucked, so why give me anything? - And you knew | ||
| you didn't get it. | ||
|
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Right, right. - Yeah. | |
| But yet we've sold this. | ||
| Yeah. - As if this is how it's supposed to be. | ||
| Yeah, I think, I mean, it's parenting, it's technology, it's values, it's purpose, it's so much. | ||
| I mean, you do also, you can't deny just the effect the personal technology had on millennials. | ||
| And, I mean, we had iPhones from the time that we were probably 15. | ||
| We had cell phones even before that. | ||
| We had MySpace, Zynga, if anyone remembers that. | ||
| You had Facebook. | ||
| I don't even know what that is. | ||
| Oh, I think it was before my age. | ||
| I didn't have it, but I remember some people did. | ||
| You had AOL Instant Messenger. | ||
| So you had personalized technology from a really young age that told us that everything is about you. | ||
| Everything is focused on you. | ||
| And then the older that we got, we got Netflix, we got Uber Eats, we got all of these things that made life really convenient. | ||
| Instant gratification, always. | ||
| We don't know anything other than Amazon. | ||
| I don't know how to read a map. | ||
| Like, I don't. | ||
| I remember my dad trying to teach me how to read a map in high school. | ||
| I was like, Yeah, Dad. | ||
| Okay, I'll remember this. | ||
| The main thing you have to know about a map is how to refold it. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| The rest, it's like, whatever. | ||
| But if you just fold it back in the way it came out. | ||
| Well, I don't even know how to do that. | ||
| So, and I think most millennials don't, and so this instant gratification, things should be easy for me, as they are in the technological world, has really affected our politics, too. | ||
| Do you feel that the technological part of this has actually really screwed up a generation then? | ||
| Like, there's obviously a lot of goodness and we're doing this on YouTube and all of that, but that it really, like, we handed everybody, it didn't matter what age you are, we all got handed this incredible technology that opened the world to our hands, but especially if you're a 15 year old being handed that. | ||
| That's a lot to give a kid. | ||
| Yeah, I want to hesitate to blame all of it on technology. | ||
| I also see a loss of values in that we're not only the most progressive generation, | ||
| but we're also the most irreligious generation. | ||
| We're the biggest generation of religious nuns, N-O-N-E-S. | ||
| And I do think a lot of us are wandering, looking for truth, not really knowing what that is. | ||
| Not me, but a lot of people in our generation. | ||
| I don't know if that comes with technology at all or if that's connected, but it's certainly a factor | ||
| in why I think millennials just don't have any center. | ||
| They don't have any grounding, and they just think that their center is themselves. | ||
| And we're told this all the time on social media. | ||
| I mean, your favorite fitness blogger, your favorite self-help author is just love yourself. | ||
| If you just look in the mirror in the morning, you tell yourself you're awesome, that you're enough, then you're going to be fine, and that's what you need to do. | ||
| Everything's about my happiness. | ||
| So you cut out the toxic people in your life. | ||
| You cut out the things that you don't like, the things that make you sad, and you just do you. | ||
| Yeah, you're going to be pretty lonely. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, what do you do when the self-love runs out? | ||
| What do you do when the self-esteem runs out? | ||
| What do you do when you wake up in the morning and you're like, okay, I'm not that awesome and I haven't accomplished that much. | ||
| Should you just continue to coddle yourself or should you do something about it? | ||
| and the millennial is told, "Cuddle, you'll be fine." | ||
| And then you have someone like AOC saying, "Well, we're gonna provide economic security | ||
| "for people who are unwilling to work." | ||
| And so if you just want to be a watercolor painter, even if you suck at it, you should just keep doing it. | ||
| So that's where we are. - There's not a lot of money in watercolor painting generally. | ||
| I wouldn't know 'cause I'm not good at it, but I can imagine. | ||
| Gay marriage. | ||
| Let's talk about it. | ||
| From a Christian perspective. | ||
| So when we're posting this, we're holding this video for a couple days, but I just had Shapiro in here and we've talked about gay marriage and he talks about his feelings from an Orthodox Jewish perspective. | ||
| And we've basically gotten it to the place where we agree to disagree, well we agree to disagree on the fact that he's not okay with it | ||
| through a religious perspective, but he's not trying to legislate my life. | ||
| And I, as a citizen of this country, I'm completely okay with that. | ||
| I suspect that's probably similar to your position. | ||
| It is similar. | ||
| Now, as a Christian, there is a little bit of, I would say a second layer to that. | ||
| So he obviously believes that homosexuality is wrong because the Old Testament says it. | ||
| We believe it not just because the Old Testament, but it's reiterated in the New Testament. | ||
| And then there is this crazy picture and metaphor that is given to us in Ephesians 5 that says, OK, marriage is a reflection of what Christians call Christ in the church as Christ is the head of the church. | ||
| So the husband is the head of the wife. | ||
| And so it's this husbands are to love their wives as Christ loves the church. | ||
| And so that's where I stand as far as a religious perspective. | ||
| Now, I've heard both sides of it. | ||
| to the Lord. So there's this spiritual component, this gospel component to marriage being between a | ||
| man and a woman. So there really is no theological way for any Christian, they try, but to get out of | ||
| the dynamic that God set up, not just biologically and physically, but also spiritually. And so | ||
| that's where I stand as far as a religious perspective. Now, I've heard both sides of it. | ||
| I have heard conservatives and even libertarians that I respect saying, you know what, I just can't | ||
| get behind, I just can't get behind gay marriage from even a civics perspective or from a legal | ||
| You've heard libertarians make that argument? | ||
| I don't know that I've heard libertarians make that argument. | ||
| Like, not anyone famous. | ||
| I would say friends who probably have libertarian views still say, and maybe that was, maybe they don't feel that way anymore, but just say, it's so hard for me to separate the personal from the political. | ||
| But where I stand politically is probably the same, I would say probably the same place as Ben does. | ||
| I mean, one, gay marriage is here to stay. | ||
| There's nothing that's going to be done about it. | ||
| And I don't think I or probably any other evangelical in the political world is going to fight against it. | ||
| What does that tell you, quickly, about evangelicals in general? | ||
| Because I think this is important. | ||
| I've said this many times, but it's like, nobody cares about gay marriage anymore, really, in the big picture. | ||
| Like, I get your theological, personal belief, but in the public political space, something that was anathema to this group of people for a long time, now has become normalized pretty quickly. | ||
| I think, by and large, Christians have realized that their communities aren't getting worse, that the neighbors next door have kids and they're the same as everybody else. | ||
| You don't even hear Mike Huckabee going on about it anymore, or Rick Santorum, or any of these guys. | ||
| They've sort of moved on, and I think this is where I would love the progressives to have a little humility. | ||
| Like, just a little bit of, you know what? | ||
| Maybe you guys were wrong, right? | ||
| You were wrong, but then something happened, and you let it go. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| basically, and that would show a little humanity and humility, and they just refused to do that. | ||
| And again, this is where, then I can find myself building bridges with you guys all the time | ||
| because there's a place to build the bridge to. | ||
| Yeah, I think that a lot of evangelical conservatives realized, okay, yes, America was founded on Christian | ||
| values and we should continue to perpetuate those Christian values, | ||
| but the state does not define marriage. | ||
| God defines marriage, and I think that churches should be free to say, sorry, we're not gonna marry two men, you know? | ||
|
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I totally agree. | |
| Right. | ||
| And yeah, and I knew that you did. | ||
| And I think that we kind of made that separation and said, OK, God defines marriage in the Bible. | ||
| If I don't want to get on board with it because I am beholden to God and God above the state, then that's fine. | ||
| And churches shouldn't be beholden to the state in that regard either. | ||
| And I think that we kind of decided, OK, that's fine. | ||
| If they want to get married according to the state's definition of marriage, That's okay, but I and my congregation are not gonna change our views on it, and we just kind of wanna be left alone in that regard. | ||
| Yeah, so what do you make of when churches do perform gay marriages? | ||
| Do you think they're just sort of skirting their theological honesty or integrity? | ||
| Oh yeah, I mean, this is a huge thing in the United Methodist Church is that they've kind of almost had a split because they voted on this so-called traditional plan saying, okay, if you're a Methodist Church, if you're under the United Methodist Church umbrella, this denomination, you can't perform gay marriage. | ||
| Or you can't, yeah, you can't perform these marriages. | ||
| And there were a lot of people who were really upset about that. | ||
| And but from a Christian perspective, you just can't get around it. | ||
| There's no way to get there's no way theologically to get around it without making some serious, not just physical concessions, but spiritual concessions. | ||
| And so my question for anyone, and it's not just about gay marriage, it's about anything in the Bible. | ||
| My question is, if you don't take the Bible, As God tells us to take it. | ||
| Why are you a Christian? | ||
| Find a different hobby. | ||
| Like there's, you can, you know, you can be a moral person. | ||
| Yeah, you can be a good person and you can believe in feeding the poor without following Christ. | ||
| But Christ tells us to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow him. | ||
| And part of that is adhering to the word even when it's inconvenient and not culturally cool. | ||
| So, I'm just a little bit confused by those theological concessions, but yes, to answer your question, I do think that it's compromising on what the Bible says. | ||
| Yeah, what do you think that would actually, in practice, what does that mean? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, so in practice, gay people start getting married, now it doesn't matter, outside of the church. | ||
| What do you think the practice of that would lead to in society that would be Are you talking about outside of the church? | ||
| Yeah, outside of the church. | ||
| Did you see some sort of problem? | ||
| Well, I of course do think that God's way is better than man's way, and I do believe that God setting up marriage as a union between a man and a woman is better. | ||
| I think that it's better for, I think it's better for the family, I think it's better for children, and I think because it's better for the family, it's better for society. | ||
| Now, do I think it's going to be the degradation of society? | ||
| Do I think that we're, our whole thing is going to hell in a handbasket because of that? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| But of course, I think that the way God set up marriage and family in the Bible is better than how secular society does it. | ||
| And yeah, so that's where I feel like we are and feel like we'll probably be going. | ||
| However, homosexuality isn't different or necessarily worse than other sins. | ||
| It's a different kind of sin because it's a sexual sin according to Christianity, but it's not worse. | ||
| We don't believe that it puts us in a worse place than all of the other sins that America has dealt with. | ||
| It's so funny, I know what's gonna happen now. | ||
| So people are gonna clip this and they're gonna go, ah, see there's Ruben sitting with another homophobe, right to his face, sitting in his house where he lives with his husband. | ||
| You like hanging out with homophobes. | ||
| Right, and it's just like, I mean, I said it to Ben, so I'll say it to you, like, as long as you're not trying to legislate my life, Yeah. | ||
| And maybe there's a part of me that I'm like, maybe I should care more. | ||
| Should I be more offended or something like that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I just don't. | ||
| Well, I think part of it too is one, you want to be left alone like so many people, like Christians do too. | ||
| Go live your life. | ||
| Yeah, you want to be left alone. | ||
| And I think also, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of the problem that Especially Christianity on the left is that they conflate sexuality with identity. | ||
| And so if I disagree with your relationship from a Christian perspective, then that must mean that I hate you. | ||
| But I don't hate you. | ||
| I think that you're a great person. | ||
| I think you're a smart person and your husband's awesome. | ||
| And so they, a lot of people on the left, seem to not be able to separate those two things. | ||
| That I can love you as a person and respect you and admire you as a person and not agree from my own Christian perspective with your relationship. | ||
| Now, I also think it's important to say, though, it's not, if I were to, what Christians would say, witness to you, if I were to share the gospel with you, it would not be, hey Dave, you're gay and that's wrong. | ||
| That would not be the message. | ||
| What we believe that unbelievers, people who are not Christians, are repenting from when they come to Christ is unbelief. | ||
| It is not your primary sin is that you're gay or that you are a thief or that you're anything else. | ||
| It's that you don't believe in Christ. | ||
| And so that's what we believe that we are preaching the gospel to. | ||
| Unbelievers to be saved. | ||
| Not gay people to make them straight. | ||
| Now we do believe that through sanctification that we all have to repent from our sins. | ||
| But I think it's important also to distinguish that. | ||
| That when we're talking about salvation and sharing the gospel with people, it's not necessarily saying Our primary message isn't that you're gay and that's bad. | ||
| Yeah, but do you think people could just stop being gay if they repented and stopped? | ||
| Well, I know two different stories. | ||
| There's a really good book by someone who I totally disagree with in so many ways. | ||
| You're going to give credit to somebody that you disagree with? | ||
| In so many ways, but she wrote a good book. | ||
| Now, she probably wouldn't say that, oh, God makes people straight, but It's called Gay Girl, Good God. | ||
| It's by Jackie Hill Perry and she did live life as a gay person and then she kind of had an awakening. | ||
| She came to God and she's married and she has kids. | ||
| There are stories like that but I also know stories of people. | ||
| There is another amazing story and I don't want to say the title because I'm... | ||
| I don't want to say the title, but there is another incredible story of someone who became a Christian. | ||
| He lived life as a gay person. | ||
| He actually was in prison, and he lived life as a gay person, and he became a Christian, and he lives, as far as I know, he lives a celibate lifestyle, and so he is not married. | ||
| He is Probably never going to be married. | ||
| He might not ever be attracted to women, but because he is a Christian and Jesus has called us to deny ourselves whatever our desires are that are sinful, he lives a celibate lifestyle. | ||
| And so I think... See, that one just strikes me as deeply sad. | ||
| Like, I can get on, you know, like, really, like, you know, I'm pretty tolerant about this stuff, obviously. | ||
| That one just strikes me as, he is gay. | ||
| There is this religious piece of him in there that so the answer is then live alone and don't have kids and don't have a family. | ||
| Yeah, but that is where you start conflating sexuality with identity and romantic relationships with the ultimate fulfillment. | ||
| And that's not what the Christian believes. | ||
| Actually, Paul says for everyone, it's better to be single than to be married. | ||
| He says, I wish you were all like I was so you can be fully dedicated to the Lord. | ||
| And we believe that if you're straight or gay, straight or you're same sex attracted, then the gift of celibacy | ||
| is truly a gift that you can dedicate all of your passions to God. | ||
| So we don't see celibacy as this sad, awful, lonely thing. | ||
| We believe that in Christ you have full fulfillment, full satisfaction, | ||
| whether you are attracted to the opposite sex or the same sex. | ||
| And so I think he would tell you, great person, Hathorne, I'll tell you his name, but I would think he would tell you | ||
| that he finds full satisfaction and full joy in his relationship with Christ. | ||
|
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Now that does not mean it's easy. | |
| Right. Well, I was gonna say he would also sort of have to say that to rationalize his existence, right? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I don't know him, so I'd be happy to have the conversation. | ||
| I'm not sure that he would, I don't think he would have chosen, because he was living an actively gay lifestyle, his name's Christopher Yuan, and I think he's incredible. | ||
| I don't think he would have chosen to be a Christian, or I don't think he would have become a Christian. | ||
| If he didn't think that there was something to it, if he didn't think that it was worth it. | ||
| I mean, he's seen the two alternatives and he chose one direction. | ||
| So he obviously thinks that one is more satisfying than the other. | ||
| I mean, he got nothing out of, at least tangibly in this life, saying, OK, I'm going to give that up and become a Christian. | ||
|
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Yeah. |
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