140: Doug Wilson talks to Ross Douthat (Bad Faith Discussion, Part 2)
Sinister Christian Nationalist pastor Doug Wilson gets interviewed by chunky conservative media lolcow Ross Douthat. Amazingly, the person who comes out of this horrifying development looking worst is... Sam Harris? CONTENT WARNINGS. BECAUSE DOUG WILSON SAYING STUFF. EPISODE NOTES: Christian Nationalism vs Clown World | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAYWbbSeIhE Dogma, Tribe, and Truth (Sam Harris, Making Sense Ep. 449) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmtTAlbGv_M I Don't Speak German: 139: Bad Faith Discussion; Doug Wilson talks to Sam Harris https://idontspeakgerman.libsyn.com/139-bad-faith-discussion-doug-wilson-talks-to-sam-harris EXTRA NOTES re WILSON: Sons of Patriarchy Podcast - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@SonsofPatriarchy Inside the Church That Preaches 'Wives Need to Be Led with a Firm Hand' https://www.vice.com/en/article/inside-the-church-that-preaches-wives-need-to-be-led-with-a-firm-hand/ At Doug Wilson's DC Church Plant, 'Worship Is Warfare' - Christianity Today https://www.christianitytoday.com/2025/07/christ-church-dc-doug-wilson-pete-hegseth/ Doug Wilson: The New Right's Favorite Pastor - POLITICO https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/05/23/doug-wilson-new-right-pastor-hegseth-trump-officials-00355376 Examining Doug Wilson & Moscow - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@ExaminingMoscow Sexual Abuse is Inevitable in Christian Patriarchy; Just Take a Look at Doug Wilson's Christ Church, and its New 'Documentary' 'Eve in Exile: The Restoration of Femininity' | Religion Dispatches https://religiondispatches.org/2022/05/31/sexual-abuse-inevitable-christian-patriarchy-just-take-look-doug-wilsons-christ-church Culture war and the evangelical church: Doug Wilson's "No Quarter November" hit the mainstream this year. https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/12/evangelical-church-doug-wilson-idaho-culture-war-no-quarter-november.html Doug Wilson Says https://dougwilsonsays.com/ 5 Part interview with Doug Wilson at Darren Doane's podcast / channel https://www.youtube.com/@allmyfriendsareheretics1354/featured Doug Wilson's Religious Empire Expanding in the Northwest https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/doug-wilsons-religious-empire-expanding-northwest/ Rachel Shubin: Analyzing Douglas Wilson's Handling of the Steven Sitler and Jamin Wight Cases https://www.moscowid.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Analyzing-DWs-Response-to-Sitler-and-Wight-Cases.pdf Doug Wilson Archive | Champion of child rapists, Attacker of victims, Pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, Presiding Minister of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) https://dougwilsonarchive.wordpress.com/ Doug Wilson Believes - Quotes from the Moscow, Idaho Pastor https://dougwilsonbelieves.com/ Fundie Fridays: Doug Wilson, the Final Boss of Christian Nationalism https://youtu.be/6dhaNeJ9UDw?si=SbAJoNEqnhOg8ckF Confronting Doug Wilson - by Kristin Du Mez https://kristindumez.substack.com/p/confronting-doug-wilson In an Idaho college town, Doug Wilson envisions an American theocracy : Up First from NPR : NPR https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1224382120 Bible Experts React To Viral CNN Christian Segment | HuffPost UK Life https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/doug-wilson-pete-hegseth_l_689a2042e4b0be3f5edc4799 SHOW NOTES: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
So I've written millions of words and you can go through and pick out all the jalapenos and you can make them into a jalapeno paste and you can put them all into one cracker and get a completely different effect than what is happening in real time in these real battles.
Okay, and welcome back to I Do Not Speak German, the podcast about not speaking German.
It's been...
It's been a while, but I have been horribly ill and Daniel's also been up to one thing and another.
So sorry about the delay.
Well, the holidays happened and we always kind of wasn't there.
We do a little bit of a, we kind of go light on the holidays.
And then like I got sick and you got sick and then, you know, some personal life stuff happened.
Anyway, good things mostly.
Well, we're both healthy now.
So that's the good part, you know, but when one of us is uncontrollably ill, it's very difficult to record a podcast.
So we typically do not do so.
So apologies for the delay.
I've had a case of what we in Britain with our customary elegance call the winter pukes.
So, you know, it would have been hard to record with me stopping the conversation every two minutes to go and vomit.
So, yeah, I thought I'd better get that over with before we before we restart the recording schedule.
Professional that I am, that was my thought.
Well, I mean, sometimes it's more professional to not show up for work.
That's what we call work-life balance.
Totally agree.
Absolutely.
What are we doing today?
It's a bit of a follow-up on the last one because the last one was, of course, the episode where we looked at some clips from Sam Harris's conversation with Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson.
And yeah, we're kind of going back to the Doug Wilson well, aren't we?
Well, and this was meant to be like something we recorded like around the holiday season to be kind of like, oh, just a little follow-up episode.
And then it just kind of, the more I get into it, the more, like, the more angry I got.
And I think the more that you looked into it, the more angry you got.
And so I was going to, it was going to be like, you know, let's do, let's do more from Sam.
Like, you know, let's do the, let's do, because he titles his, like, his like little errata pieces.
It's like more from Sam where Sam just like peppers, where his producer just asks him questions and stuff.
And it turned out we are not going to do any more Sam Harris today.
What we're going to do mostly is talk about the conversation that Ross Duthat, who I call Duchette, but, you know, who we'll call Duthat today.
There's just so many insulting nickname possibilities there.
It's hard to choose.
And he's going to come across as kind of a good guy here for most of the episode.
Because as bad as this, as he is at interviewing Doug Wilson, at having this conversation, he is so much better than Sam Harris.
This just shits on Sam Harris even more.
We're not even really going to listen to much Sam Harris today, but it just becomes so clear all the things that Sam Harris did not do and his opportunity to interview, to interview Doug Wilson.
And so Ross do that.
Look, look, Ross Duthat.
I have hated since he was at Iraq War Booster from day one.
I've hated this man for over 20 years.
But you don't have to hand it to him.
But this is a little bit like the Bill Crystal thing where he's starting to sound a little anti-fie-ye occasionally and people give him some retweets and reposts on Blue Skin.
It's like, no, you don't have to do that.
We hate Ross Duthat here.
In fact, to show you how terrible, this is a bit, this is a bit that we had our friend, our friend Elliot Chapman, our wonderful actor, Elliot Chapman, record on our behalf.
This is from one of Duthat's books.
A dramatic reading.
A dramatic read describing a sexual encounter that he had in his days in a big university.
Yes, indeed.
You're about to hear the wonderful words of Ross Douchebag read by classically trained Shakespearean actor and professional audiobook narrator, Elliot Chapman, our friend, reading words that are frankly beneath him.
So I hope you enjoy them.
And I had to be the one to ask him because I was like, Elliot, Elliot, look, you understand I can't pay you, but please, would you do this for me?
And he 100% agreed.
He knew exactly where I was going with this.
I'm like, I'm doing an episode.
We just said, Ross Duthat, would you mind doing this for us?
He was like, absolutely.
So he didn't bet an eye.
He was like, all right, let me give you.
He even gave us a couple of options here.
So anyway, we're going to play the clip.
There are some roles you just can't turn down, you know.
You know, there's Hamlet, there's the entertainer, John Osborne, and, you know, and then there's, then there's Ross Duthat's autobiography of being at college and trying to get laid.
I mean, what actor could possibly thumb their nose at that opportunity?
We're going to have to do a Ross Duthat episode just to get, just to get, just to get the Doug Wilson out of our brains.
We might do that soon.
All right.
All right.
They'll do something.
All right.
Let's play this.
You and I will get to laugh at it.
The audience will get to enjoy it.
And then we get into the shit.
Okay.
That's what we're going for.
Like, this is the fun part.
Let's just keep that in mind.
This is all you get.
This is all the fun you get.
One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend's parents with a girl who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon, drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks.
Masticating me?
Masticating?
It had taken some time to reach this point.
Do most Harvard guys take so long to get what they want?
She had asked, pushing her tongue into my mouth.
I wasn't sure what to say, but then I wasn't sure this was what I wanted.
My throat was dry from too much vodka, and her breasts spilling out of pink pajamas threatened my ability to.
Your ability to what?
I was supposed to be excited, but I was bored and somewhat disgusted with myself, with her, with the whole business.
And then whatever residual enthusiasm I felt for the venture dissipated with shocking speed as she nibbled at my ear and whispered, You know I'm on the pill.
Just say you had whiskey dick and you couldn't get it up, man.
That's fine.
No, no, no.
Her fault for being for being a disgusting modern woman taking birth control.
Exactly, exactly.
Oh my God.
It's so disgusting.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
That was edited.
That went through a professional editor.
Yes.
Indeed, indeed.
All right.
So, um.
Sodomy and Societal Norms00:15:06
So that's Ross Duthat.
Let's have Ruth do that.
We don't like Ross Duth.
Hates women, hates contraception, hates anything modern, hates anything the Catholic Church doesn't approve of.
But as you mentioned, loves war and imperialist warmongers.
Although he's got to get somewhere interesting.
Towards the end of this episode, he's going to go somewhere interesting.
But we'll get there.
He should get on with Wilson, actually, because they're both profoundly dirty-minded.
Yes.
Well, what I find interesting is that this is A, Duthat doesn't have to pretend to not be interested in Pulse.
I think that's something that really comes.
And why Duthat is a better interviewer for Doug Wilson?
Because Harris, as you recall, just goes through the 13-year-old masturbating on his bed like atheist.
It's like, yes, but what about the throwing of sticks?
And do that, Duthet, you know, A, agrees with much of the, with much of Wilson's theology.
Even though Duthat is a Catholic and Wilson is a fundamentalist, a Protestant fundamentalist.
They're not, they're not, you know, they agree very, you know, the short-term political goals, they largely agree on.
And so I think there's an interesting kind of push and pull here of like they're kind of arguing optics and tactics to some degree.
And I think that that.
Dynamic is interesting, but it also means that Do that can go right to those like more core political questions, like I don't care how many angels Doug Wilson thinks can fit on the head of a pen, I care what kind of political project he's trying to do in this world today.
That's what.
That's what frustrated me so much with Sam Harris.
And here you get he's going to give some of the same answers.
I thought it was important to include that.
He, he literally had.
These are like stock answers he pulls out yeah somehow, despite this terrible person, as Do that is, i've got.
I really want people to know I do not like Ross Dothat here, because i'm gonna.
He's gonna next to Sam Harris, he looks like a paragon but like uh, we are gonna have to do something with this, is it we?
We are really being nice to Ross Doo Dothat uh this, because we're putting him between Doug Wilson and Sam Harris and basically, you know, you put anybody in that position short of maybe Ted Bundy or Joseph Goebbels, they're gonna look quite good.
So you know don't, don't mistake the comparison, for you know a a uh a, an absolute judgment.
I mean arguably, even like a Richard Spencer or a Mike Enoch would look better than those two guys.
Anyway yeah, takes the edge off anyway.
Well, that's sort of that's sort of.
That was sort of the appeal of the alt-right.
Sorry we got this is we're gonna get, we gotta, we gotta start these clips.
We're never gonna get anywhere.
Uh, we will do more with Doothat, I promise you.
I listen to his podcast every week now so we can, oh dear god, interesting times with Ross Dothat under the masthead of the NEW YORK Times, that's.
That's the thing that's important to note here.
This is, this is running in the podcast feed of the NEW YORK Times.
That that's.
That's that this is like, you know, for everything, for everything terrible, I believe, about the NEW YORK Times.
It is like a paper of record to this country.
It is, it is, you know, one of the mastheads of, and Doug Wilson and Ross Dothet get to opine for two hours or they.
They opined for about an hour about about, not drivel.
Anyway, I titled this clip like kind of what is Christian nationalism?
And the title of this podcast episode is actually titled Christian Nationalist versus Clown World.
And you remember where the Clown Word World meme kind of originated right yeah it's, it's a, it's a Neo-nazi meme clown world.
Yeah well, and it's funny that, like those memes like based, you know, based is something that people just say now, this doesn't, but that came directly out of that alt-right subculture in like 2015 2016, 2017.
Yeah, we we've, we've taken based from them.
I would say, but uh, Clown World I, I still don't use that one I, I can't, I can't, you know that's.
You know, I don't know that one, that one's too nasty for me.
Um, but no, and Clown World is very much like because originally that was intended to be that like you know any any, any world that is like allowing trans people to exist, that doesn't see Jews inherently evil, etc etc.
Is it's clownish that we might as well just be clowns running around.
It starts from this, very explicit, like Goy Talk, live like really explicitly white nationalist, like Accelerationist, white nationalist, Nazi subculture.
And they were so successful at getting that meme normalized that now it's just sort of a term that people use who don't like modernity.
It's just like, oh, we're living in clown world because, you know, we don't like trans people, but we're kind of more okay with the Jews and stuff.
You know, what?
And so like it is, it speaks to how reactionary this entire, like the entire Republican Party and half the Democratic Party practically is on a lot of this shit.
How they've seeded the entire culture with these ideas and memes and aesthetics.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So anyway, so that's the title of the, and so this is, I've titled this clip, What is Christian Nationalism?
And so these are longer clips, but I think we're going to, I'm going to dip in.
We're going to talk about them as we go.
Okay.
Yep.
So talk about the political project that comes out of this.
And you have, you know, the phrase Christian nationalism gets thrown around a lot these days.
And you have been willing to take full ownership of the phrase.
Correct.
So I prefer that phrase to what I usually get called.
Which is a theocratic.
And we'll get to that.
But first, give me just your definition of Christian nationalism.
Christian nationalism is the conviction that secularism is a failed experiment, that societies require a transcendent grounding in order to be able to function at all.
And as a Christian, I believe that that transcendent ground should be the living God and not an idol.
That would be my short-form definition of Christian nationalism.
Even shorter would be Christian nationalism is the conviction that we should stop making God angry.
And so that's the first purpose of your political project for America to stop making God angry.
Yes.
Now, I want to note, that's the exact answer, almost word for word, that he gave to Sam Harris when asked this question, right?
He's got this on a, he's got this on a loop.
This is what he says.
He's got bits.
Yeah.
He's got bits.
And most people think that when they are confronted with that project that we have, is they think that we want to get our tentacles into everything and start controlling everything.
I actually think we need limited government.
The government should be significantly smaller than it is.
And we need to curtail a lot of the busy bodiness that we have.
And so that's why I would call myself a theocratic libertarian.
There is a true libertarian element in this.
And I hear you laughing.
If you let me say something, please go ahead.
Well, I mean, that's not an opposition.
You know, your tentacles going into everything and shrinking the size of the government.
That's not an opposition because what you want is the government shrunk to the point where it's basically just a council of priests under your control.
So that's the same thing.
And it's the same old libertarian thing where they say we want small government.
And what they mean, of course, is small government for the ruling class and capital and big government for the rest of us.
I mean, this is, you know, this is standard stuff from these people.
Yes, exactly.
And yet, the transcendent grounding for what we're talking about means that we acknowledge the authority of God.
And we have racked up quite a body count of awful crimes.
And I believe the only way out is for us to repent and turn to Christ.
So, and repentance and turning to Christ would be things like no more pride parades, no more drag queen story hours, no more abortion on demand, no more legalized same-sex unions, no, you know, all of that done.
That's basically anything you can do with your nether regions to give you pleasure.
That's the stuff he's against, unless it's baby making.
I guess he would allow that part.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, God, it's an amazing coincidence, isn't it?
All the problems of America track straight back to the fact that God, Doug's imaginary friend in the sky, doesn't like certain things about, you know, the way people live nowadays.
And it's an amazing coincidence.
They all happen to be the exact same things that Doug doesn't like.
Exactly.
About women having rights and gay people having rights and stuff like that.
It's, yeah, it's quite extraordinary, really.
I wish God would tell us this.
He tells Doug how he feels.
Yeah, I mean, he doesn't tell us.
You know how easy it would be to have, like, if I had revelation, then they're like, oh, no, you're not supposed to be doing that.
Then, you know, I mean, I don't know.
I would presume that an omnipotent, omniscient God could tell.
Sorry, we're doing the dorm room thing again, but I imagine that that being could convince me that what I was seeing was actually true if that being chose to do so.
And the fact that that is not done, it's ultimately the human condition.
Like, if God exists, that's an issue that we all have to grapple with.
And if God does not exist, that's an issue we all have to get grappled with.
But like, just, you know, again, just like wishing I had Doug Wilson's hot line to Jesus or whatever, you know, it's like, well, he's going to say, well, it's in the Bible, but no, you're interpreting the Bible just as much as the rest of us, you asshole.
Anyway, as usual, when these people talk about God, they just mean their own egos.
That's all this is, and their own prejudices.
And note that, again, this is very much the same thing that he gave to Sam.
And the rest of this is going to sound very familiar as well.
Again, I wanted to play this to say this is on a loop.
This is on a tape.
He is repeating the same thing.
So you've heard this before, but I'm playing it again.
But this is not from that same episode.
It's from a different episode.
So, all right.
That's the repentance part by law.
Yeah.
By law.
But again, do that ask the like the real question.
This isn't just a custom that you're trying to say.
This is just you doing this in your own way.
You're asking this be done by law.
You're asking these things to be legally enforced.
And Sam never gets even that far.
No, those two words, by law, do that is already doing better than Sam does in the entire two hours that he spent with Doug Wilson.
When you say no more pride parades, you must mean that, you know, somebody with a gun or a bat on or whatever would turn up if somebody tried to have a pride parade and stop them.
And, you know, you must mean that it would become illegal in your government for people to do that.
You must mean that.
Otherwise, you don't mean anything, do you?
So, yeah, at least Duthat does ask that very obvious, immediate, simple follow-on question.
Yeah.
Of course, he doesn't really get much of an answer, but he asks it.
But I've been ministering, preaching for coming up on 50 years.
And when I first began ministering, homosexuality was against homosexual behavior was against the law.
Note that he has to do homosexuality is not against the law.
Homosexual behavior is against the law.
You can be gay in your little brain all you want to, but the second you touch another man's willy, oh, that's when we're going to get you.
That's when we're going to get you.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And the country wasn't a totalitarian hellhole.
Yes.
Okay, Doug.
For you.
Yeah.
And again, and again, do that is going to, do that's going to, he's going to surprise you in just a moment.
And that was not a totalitarian hellhole.
That was not the handmaid's tale.
It was a free and prosperous country that I was grateful to God to be growing up in.
And yet we had, as a society, disapproved.
It's not free except for people who are arrested for sodomy.
Right.
It was not a free society for them.
Yeah.
Also not free for forgers and burglars and bank robbers and not free for them either.
Right.
Right.
So, but every society.
So I do.
Oh, God.
I must not do this because I do think it's fundamentally pointless debating these people or sort of arguing against their ideas because these aren't really ideas.
They don't come from anywhere.
I was just going to say, he's just, he's begging the question.
He's assuming that there is something fundamentally immoral about gay behavior, about being gay.
And you're assuming the point that you're trying to make.
Well, yeah, yeah.
So what he does is he says, well, yeah, laws against sodomy, but also like forgery and bank robbery, all that sort of thing.
Assuming that we assume that forgery, well, forgery would owe us by definition, but bank robbery.
I mean, I think there are some justifications for some bank robbery every now and then.
You know, we don't say that in public very often, but none of them are our real names, but you know, like, you know, anyway, we shall continue, but you know, but to assume that like there are these obvious set of things that are forbidden.
And then where he's going to go with this, and I'll have to play the last of the clip.
But where he goes with that is like, society has a set of standards.
And if you don't have those laws, you don't have a society.
But like, and he's opposed to the standards based on the biblical precepts.
We do have a society, Doug.
Yes, we do.
We do.
You know, it's just that we've decided that maybe being gay is actually an okay thing to be and not the same thing as being a forger or a bank robber, a heroic bank robber.
Actually, being gay is as cool as being a bank robber.
Be gay and a bank robber.
No, you're cooking.
Be a gay bank robber, just as long as you're stealing from the rich and not the poor.
That's the exactly.
And Duthat does not argue against this.
Do that will argue.
Well, he pushes back a lot more than Sam Harris does, but he agrees that sodomy is something that we really shouldn't be encouraging in society.
He just thinks it shouldn't be a law.
It should just be kind of a precept.
It should just be set as something that, like, we don't like, you know, like it's just icky and we just don't want it to be.
But, you know, he's under the master of the New York Times and therefore kind of has to, by definition, kind of like think that gay people are not as Doug Will.
Now, trans people, he's allowed to hate them all day long.
But even then, almost a bigotry of the New York Times.
It's God.
There's some of the articles that came out that were so anyway.
We're going to continue on here.
We're going to play another clip from a few minutes later.
It's actually about 15 minutes later, believe it or not.
And they're still on this kind of special kind of libertarian concept.
It's from the same episode.
Most of our clips are from this episode.
So do a skeptical read of your view would be that, you know, in the current climate, you feel like you have an affinity for Catholics like me, and even some affinity for monotheists who, you know, don't accept the gospel.
And you want us to like you and feel like we're on the same team.
And you don't feel that way about, let's say, feminists, gay people.
And so you'll say, well, of course, in the Theocratic Republic, we'll leave the Catholics alone, but we'll arrest some people committing sodomy.
But in your heart, you might want to arrest the Catholics too.
No, no, no.
Okay.
I'm just raising that possibility.
No, first of all, I love that.
No, no, no, no.
It's so great.
It's so good.
I'm going to set that to my ringtone on my phone.
No, that's it.
But also, I don't believe you, Doug.
I think, and heaven forgive me.
I think Ross Duthat is right on this one.
I think Ross Duthat is right on this one.
Yep.
Yep.
But of course, do that is like, they've gone through this.
I mean, again, they've been talking around these circles for the last 15 minutes.
God, I would play the entire episode if we could.
So your ears would melt.
Do that himself is kind of accepting that.
Well, you know, well, sodomy laws, I mean, you know, maybe they should be laws, but we don't like sodomy, et cetera, et cetera.
But Catholics, you don't want to really come after the Catholics.
No, all right.
Sharia Law Imposition Conflict00:15:17
So this is something that Switzerland did.
And I don't know what he's referring to there.
I tried to Google around it.
I don't, I don't know exactly.
So we're just going to have to let that by.
I don't know the history of Switzerland enough to know what precise thing he's.
But so we're just going to let this play and kind of get his response.
And with some other people who are definitely not considered full citizens or fully able to be in this society, I think you know where this is going.
And it's not trans people this time.
You know, we'll save that for later.
It's not trans people.
It's somebody else.
Let me, this is something that Switzerland did.
Okay.
And this may illustrate what you're getting at here.
In my biblical republic, if Muslims were here, not citizens, but residents.
Muslims can't be citizens of his of his Christian country.
I mean, you know, which should be obvious, but you know, it's also something like, okay, they're here as residents.
They can't be citizens.
They don't get to vote, but you know, I don't know.
I don't know.
I mean, it's very obvious, but he does just say it.
He is not shying away from that idea.
I think that's interesting.
They were traveling merchants and whatever, and you had a number of Muslims in the same town and they wanted to get together and pray together.
Would that be a problem?
No.
Would they be allowed to build a minaret?
No.
Church bells, church bells, yes.
Yep.
Minaret, no.
So synagogues, yes.
Yes, but they're not trying to own the public space by the private sector.
Okay, okay.
So it really is just how much of a nuisance are you to Doug Wilson is whether he thinks you should get the last or not.
That really isn't about as far as he's going there.
No, and hey, we're going to hear this is the way he pronounces Muslims is just a little bit a little bit of that like, you know, Mohammedan kind of kind of language there.
Yeah.
Just wait, there's another word he starts using here shortly that even more so.
But and again, same stuff he said in Sam Harris's podcast, just to be clear.
Yes, we allow church posts because church bells are Christian and we believe that we are a Christian society.
And that's what we, so you're allowed to go and pray, like the Muslims are allowed to go and pray quietly by themselves.
Hey, I'm not sure if that really would sway either.
And, you know, but at least that's what he's claiming.
But they can't build, they can't build anything.
They can't build a mosque.
They can't build a Menaret.
They can't build something that would be obviously non-Christian in his world.
Again, very, very obvious stuff.
And he's just openly saying it.
And Dutet is not like, well, he said, well, what about synagogues?
Like, you know, I don't know.
Like, it's just fine to just be like bigoted against Muslim people.
And, you know, so long, so long as it's like, yeah, no, but the Jews, they keep to themselves.
They just, you know, they just had their little, they just had their little thing.
And, you know, it's fine.
You know, like, you know, a big, a giant synagogue.
I mean, there are pretty large synagogues in this country, you know.
It's just funny.
If you start talking about those, you start to sound like Hitler.
And so he knows, he knows what not to say.
But yeah.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I think we really need to emphasize that Doug is very focused on PR and optics.
And he's trying to promote himself.
He's trying to combat bad press and, you know, bad news stories that make him look very bad, rightly so.
And he's trying to create an impression in all these.
He does loads of media.
He does loads of interviews.
He was on, he did that interview on CNN, et cetera, et cetera.
He's very focused on trying to rehabilitate his public image and package himself in a certain way.
And Doug is a liar.
And, you know, I don't know anything about modern Switzerland and its immigration policies and its religious policies and so on.
If there are restrictive policies towards Muslims in Geneva in Switzerland now, I can only think it's probably related to the history of Switzerland with Calvinism.
Because, you know, Switzerland is where Calvin had his police state in Geneva.
Calvin's Geneva was a religious Protestant police state run by a consistory of five pastors and lay elders and people like that.
And you literally, you know, religious conformity was strictly and violently enforced.
And for all Doug's, you know, dodging and weaving and oozing and sliming his way around these questions, I have no doubt whatsoever that that is what Doug Wilson's Calvinist utopia would be like.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And I'm going to let this play a little bit more, but there's a little Motten Bailey.
He does a little Montenbailey here.
I don't like people who use the Mottenbailey thing, but he absolutely does it here.
So we're going to let's play a little bit longer than kind of get into that a little bit more.
Okay.
So basically, the society would acknowledge that Jesus rose from the dead.
And again, this is down the road.
This is my 500 years from now.
We'd acknowledge that Jesus is Lord.
And we would.
Yeah, I mean, the one question that Dutet really should ask here is like, so why aren't you saying you want this now?
Like, and he gets into this a little bit.
I mean, he kind of starts waffling.
And I, if you think this is a lot of words for a little content, that whole section was just.
He starts talking about a Christian nationalism 1.0 and a Christian nationalism 2.0 and our Christianity 1.0 and a Christianity 2.0.
And we're using a Christian identity 2.0, like kind of after the sins of modernism.
And I could never get like a really clear statement of like what exactly is the difference that he's trying to, it's like a less officious kind of version of Christianity.
Although Christianity has been practiced in many ways by many different people, it's a faith of 2 billion people, 1.5 billion people, something like that.
Over the course of the last 2000 years, there have been many types of Christians who have organized societies in all kinds of different ways.
But, you know, what he means is like 16th century France or what it suppose.
I don't know.
Like it's just or, you know, like, I don't know.
It's like, it's so, it's all this, like, it's almost like one of those like religious dystopian fictions that, you know, you would see like Robert Heinlein wrote a couple of these, you know, where, and he's like, well, no, just like that, but, but, but it'd be good.
You know, that's all good.
Yeah.
You know, but he's saying, you know, no, no, I mean, yeah, no, no, all the horrifying thing, like, people aren't allowed to be gay.
They're not allowed to be poly.
They're not allowed to, you know, they have strict religious rituals and all that stuff.
But yeah, no, that's, that's, that's how you make a good society.
You see, you know, like it is, it is like, you know, you just hold up a funhouse mirror to, to, like, one of those.
No, no, we actually agree with that.
You know, when he says the handmaid's tale, what he means, what he means is it would be exactly like the handmaid's tale, except that I'd be writing the book, so it would all be framed as good.
That's what he means.
It's all framed as good.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I do, I do imagine like, you know, his, the hell world that he would describe in his like fiction.
I know he wrote a book, so we might be talking about a couple of novels.
We saw a trailer for one of his books.
We might, we might, that might be a bonus or something.
We might do that.
But, you know, the world that I would imagine is like a brilliant world in which, you know, like, you know, with black liberation and, you know, queer liberation, brown liberation, and, you know, where we all live in these multifaceted societies in which like being gay and being poly or being, you know, bisexual or whatever, all that stuff is trans is all free and easy.
And that for him is a hell world.
So I get, I get where he's coming from.
But like the world that I envision as being like the utopia that I would like to live in would also have a place for Doug Wilson.
Just he would get to be his Christian self.
He just couldn't impose it on anybody else.
And that's the thing that's really, that's why you need the Christian nationalism.
That's why, as I said in the last episode, he can't just kind of go off and be in his own thing and like build his alternative world because ultimately it has to be something that is imposed on the rest of us from above.
And that's the whole political project.
That's what Christian nationalism means, you know?
Yes.
They don't want freedom to be, you know, to believe what they want to believe.
They don't want to be tolerated.
What they want is precisely that.
They want to tell everybody else what they can and can't think and what they can and can't do and what they can and can't say.
That is their belief system that they should be able to do that.
You cannot just say, well, you know, in our world, you're, I mean, they, they are free to have those opinions, of course, but that's not good enough for them.
That's what I'm saying.
And this, this, you know, 500 years in the future, our Christian utopia that we're going to have 500.
That's another one of his bits that he does.
He does that in all these interviews.
He always does this in 500 years, you know, our Christian nationalist society that we have.
I don't believe you, Doug.
You're thinking in very immediate terms.
You are racing.
You are racing to get this done as soon as you possibly can, to get your tentacles to use your word into the American government, even as we speak.
You've got your new plant, which is what his his organization, what is it?
The Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches and Christ Kirk.
They call these sort of branch offices, plants or plant churches.
They've got this one in DC now, and they've got this member of Doug's organizations.
What's his name?
Pottiger or Pottiger, who's a, you know, he's fanatical Christian dominionist.
He's the new pastor at this DC branch where he's, and they've got all these connections to all these right-wing organizations and all these people in the Trump administration, including, of course, particularly Egg Seth.
And this guy who's now running the plant church in DC, he's basically, you know, there's no other structure around him, apparently.
He just, he just reports straight back to Doug.
So Doug is, Doug is racing to get this, to get this done as soon as he possibly can.
He's not thinking about 500 years.
He's thinking about five.
Yeah.
And I mean, what he's really, and kind of where I was going to go with this is like, he always, he slips between these two ideas.
It's like, well, and our, in our future Christian Republic, but like, you never get a, like, whenever he's asked like a really pointed question about some of these things, it's like, well, no, I'm talking about like in the future, not 500 years from now.
And not like, well, what do you want for five years from now?
What, how do you want to get what's your theory of change?
Right-wingers are terrible at theory of change.
Left-wingers probably are, but at least left-wingers know they're bad.
You know, at least they're, at least there's a concept of like, we have to have a theory of change.
Right-wingers are just, it very much is, we've threatened to do the underpants nom episode before, but like it really is the underpants noms of political philosophy.
Anyway, I'd say this is a Protestant Christian country and we have worked out, we have successfully worked out how to relate to Catholics and Jews.
We have a long history of that.
Yeah, there's a really long history of that.
And I'm not sure if I were a Catholic or a Jew, I would really want to be very near you in that case.
Calvin's Geneva.
That was how you worked this out.
You've already worked it out.
You've got a template.
Calvin's Geneva.
Yes, yes.
We do not know how to take 3 million Muslims who want.
I wonder what word he was thinking of there.
Yeah.
What word did he censor?
3 million.
Yeah.
No, I won't hesitate to guess, but it is interesting that he pauses on that specific word.
To live under Sharia law and put them in the middle of Michigan, we don't have, we don't have the mechanism or the wisdom.
Do you think most American Muslims right now want to live under Sharia law?
The ones in Dearborn do.
Okay.
No, they don't.
No, they don't.
No.
That is a racist right-wing conspiracy theory.
It's what that is.
And it is pervasive.
If you Google Dearborn Sharia law, you get it.
And it's all easily debunked nonsense.
Like it's, it's, it is, it is, you know.
Yeah.
Also, Sharia law is a bogeyman and it's this range of, you know, people always identify Sharia law as like you're immediately living under the ISIS caliphate.
You know, that's right.
It's a, it's a range of, I don't want to live under Sharia law, but Sharia law is not instant sort of Muslim totalitarianism.
That's a right-wing misconception.
It's a range of all sorts of different ideas.
And thirdly, again, not that you have to hand it to Ross, but he's doing better than Sam Harris could ever do.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yes.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Wait till you get the, wait till you get Ross's, the next sentence.
You're going to want to throw Ross through the window.
So let's just, let's just, let's just, let's just hit play on this.
All right.
He's going to go a little bit differently, but I had to include this.
This is interesting.
Okay.
And so just keep in mind, you know, do you think that most American Muslims right now want to live under Sharia law?
The ones in Dearborn do is his response.
And this is Ross's very next sentence.
I did not cut this.
This is the next sentence.
Okay.
Well, we'll table that as a debatable point.
Okay.
Okay.
You're a crazy person.
I'm just not.
I'm going to continue this.
I'm going to continue as if you did not say that absolutely horrifyingly racist thing to me just now.
I'm going to pretend you did not say that because otherwise we would, we would have nothing to talk about.
Clearly.
Anyway.
Yes.
Ross, here's a proposition for you.
Most Catholics are in favor of the popish plot to overthrow the government of non-Catholic countries and impose direct rule from a tyrannical room from Rome, a rule from Rome.
Should we table that as a debatable point?
Indeed.
Well, and this kind of Catholic Protestant like wariness of like respecting each other, so long as they have similar political goals, this has a very recent history in the United States.
This really goes back to like the early 80s, late 70s at the earliest.
When John F. Kennedy was elected president, there was a secret papist and all that thing because he was the first Catholic president.
And, you know, it really, I mean, there really was this, like, as long as they could get the same like political goals, as long as you were hating the right people, they learned to live with each other.
They have learned to live with each other.
But if you actually started seeing like overt, you know, Protestant, you know, theocracy in this country, well, coming again to this country, I would imagine that would go away very quickly.
So, or the other way, if the Catholics took control, then, you know, I'm sure the anyway, we don't, anyway, they've agreed to put down their weapons now, but they're not, they don't really admire each other outside of being able to wield political power together.
I'm going to repeat the question.
Do you think most American Muslims right now want to live under Sharia law?
I would say the Muslims who come here to assimilate are coming to assimilate to a Christian country.
And I have no objection to that.
Aren't they coming to assimilate to a country that has fallen away from Christianity and is engaged in all kinds of public debauchery?
No, we're talking about my idea.
Oh, okay.
It was never a Christian country.
It never has been.
It's not, and it never has been.
It hasn't fallen away from being a Christian country.
It was a constitutional republic that had separation of church and state from, you know, not boost, not booster of the United States, you know, obviously.
But it was, it was from its inception.
It was, it was founded by a guy by a load of guys who ran the gamut of sort of enlightenment thinking on religion.
A lot of them were deists and stuff like that.
And it was a constitutional republic that had separation of church and state built into its governmental structure from the beginning.
Sounded Reasonable?00:06:45
Not perfectly, obviously.
It was never a Christian country.
This is just one of the fictions that these people convince themselves of.
Precisely, precisely because of that same kind of sectarianism was ultimately the kind of proximate cause for that.
One of the first letters that Thomas Jefferson wrote in the early 1800s was to, I think, to people of Tunisia acknowledging that Muslims had a right to live in this country.
I mean, it goes back to our very, to our, I mean, to the degree that we can respect the founding, you know, look, we have our issues with that.
This is not the place or time to litigate that.
You know, like, I do not, I do not weep at the side of the Constitution and the bald eagle and the flag, you know, believe me.
But, you know, if we are going to respect that, and I think there are respectful things about that.
Like, I mean, look, get me wrong, don't get me wrong.
But, you know, that is not the portrait of that.
Neither of these men has an accurate portrayal in their minds of what this country was for 15 years.
It is that they have their own, and they largely agree that things used to be more Christian and now they are less so.
And therefore, things are bad, you know.
And I think that's where Ross Duthat really falls down the most when he's not like just overtly refusing to engage with, you know, open, open, open anti-Islamic.
Yes.
Right.
All right.
So, all right.
So basically welson is arguing.
Wilson is what he's doing here is he's saying, well, no, no, no, we're not talking about the world as it is today.
We're not talking about the country.
We're talking about my 500 years in the future, you know, when it is in a Christian country again, as he would say again, you know, and not this debauchery.
And so then you would have to be assimilated.
You would have to assimilate into our Christian culture, even if you held private Islamic beliefs.
You would have to be a Christian.
And that's the, that's the Motten Bailey.
That's the slip and slide that he's pressing.
That's what the 500-year thing is meant to do is like, well, I could talk about my ideal and I can pretend.
Oh, so that's this far-off thing that we don't have to really, you know, we're not taking that seriously right now because I'm not, I'm not proposing that for like immediate policy, but you kind of are.
I mean, you kind of are suggesting that.
Yes, that's precisely what they're doing.
They're suggesting that it should be a good policy, you know, nearly suggested that that's a good thing for us to do.
You know, I advocate for changes in this world.
I don't advocate for them.
Well, right now we'll keep the capitalism thing and we'll keep the oppression and everything.
And then like 500 years now, that world I think should be better.
No, no, no, we should do this now.
We should do these things now.
I understand it takes time to do these things, but like, you know, like, I don't, I'm not, I don't pretend to not believe things I believe for that reason.
I don't know.
It's just, it's such, it's such an openly contemptuous of everyone who ever listened to this man.
This idea that we have to take this, this artificial construct seriously.
You're talking about the political changes you want now.
You're just pretending you want it in the future to take the circumlocutions don't fool us.
Even he's at the very start of the world.
Well, they fooled Sam.
They fooled Sam.
Well, I mean, you know, you could, you could fool Sam with one of those red dots that you use to tease kittens.
The redefinition of himself that he offers at the start to sort of what he'd prefer instead of Christian nationalist, he's just saying, I'm a fascist theocrat in too many words.
He's just circumlocuting around that.
And he's doing the same here.
Again, this guy, Pottiger, who has now been installed as Doug's, the guy almost in sole charge of Doug's outpost in DC, his contact with Hegseth, who's like Doug's mini-me inside the Trump administration, he's doing prayers at the Pentagon and Hegseth has a fucking Deus Vault tattoo.
This isn't about in 500 years, we'll have restored America to a Christian country.
And so Muslims will have to adapt to that.
This is, we are aiming in the immediate future to turn a governmentally secular constitutional republic into a Protestant theocracy, which discriminates against people of other religion.
That's what he's saying.
He's just saying it in 100 words when he could just say, yeah, I'm a Christian nationalist.
I mean, I almost wish to say, you know, fuck them queers and just be done with it.
You know, like that would, that would be, that would be the more honest version of this, you know, not just the queers, obviously, but, you know, actually, he would reuse the, he would use a six-letter F-word, but or seven-letter F word.
He's not shy about language of that kind on his blog.
You know, he is not.
It's the F slur.
It's the C word.
It's, you know, lumberjack dikes.
It's all sorts of disc because he's very sure that he's very, you know, outrageous and shocking and funny.
He thinks he's the Calvinist Andrew Dice Clay, if you read that blog of his.
Yeah.
Or if you watch his, if you watch his YouTube channel, I mean, what we're doing here is we're actually trying, you know, it's funny that like, you know, our cold open is like the jalapeno paste.
I'm going to love that quote.
It's like, you put all the spicy jalapenos and you put it on a cracker and you can make it.
It's like, no, no, what I, what I actively try to do here, and I say this in almost every episode now, I don't want you to think I've taken him out of context.
I don't want to play 30 seconds of him and go like, and this is, you know, I want to give you like the full thing and then explain exactly why he believes all these things, even when he's not saying them out loud.
And I think that's what that's what these guys find most frustrating when they do find our find our podcast.
It's like, well, they didn't, they didn't just pull the most incendiary things.
They sounded kind of reasonable there.
Well, you sounded reasonable to yourself, but not to the rest of us, pal.
That's kind of how I feel about it.
So yeah, they want it both ways.
He wants it both ways.
He wants to do this, what is it called, no quarter November thing that he does every year, where he goes into full sort of teenage boy on Twitch, you know, lobbying slurs around the place, you know, tittering behind his hand because he's so convinced that he's hilariously shocking.
And then at the same time, he wants to go on shows like this and sound respectable.
It's the same move that Nick Fuentes does, it's the same move that Richard Spencer has done.
He does less so because he's just less salient now, but you know, it's the same thing.
I mean, all these guys kind of engage in this sort of thing.
It's like, well, once you have a, once you have a big enough microphone, like, you calm that shit down, you know, you get, and then you don't, so you don't say the really overt this.
Um, and I think there's a, you know, there's a logic to that.
But I mean, you know, what I'm saying is I'm taking him at his most like faux reasonable year.
Where we're taking, like, these, both of these men are like, they're, they're saying in an hour what they could have said in 10 minutes.
They'd really just gotten done to brass tacks about it.
But I think buried in it is still all of the toxic stuff that he says when he, when he's using those off of that awful in his more, you know, in his, in his spaces, you know.
Yeah.
And so I thought, so I think it's interesting, A, to compare this with what he did with Sam Harris, where Sam Harris didn't get anywhere.
I mean, for all that we're damning Ross Duthat here, he gets much further on this than Sam Harris ever did.
You know, I mean, this is, it's kind of amazing.
We've painted ourselves into a bad corner.
America is a regular country like other countries, and regular countries have borders.
Discipline And Control00:15:52
And if you assimilate at too rapid a rate any kind of alien worldview, you're going to have trouble.
I believe that Muslims and Hindus could be assimilated in an ideal republic at decent rates of speed.
And that assimilation would be hand in glove with evangelization because people would be coming to fit into this Christian society.
But if they become Protestants, they become one of us.
Exactly.
No, we just, you know, we just they come in as long as you convert to our religion, then you know, we'll treat you as normal people.
You can't, you can't assimilate these people the way we're trying to so quickly and you know, without problems.
What problems have you got, dog?
Oh, I've got one for you.
I kept this in for a reason.
Let's, let's, let's, we're going to get there in about 30 seconds, I promise.
Right now, they're not, they're coming in as in a parasitic way, I believe, to devour a rotting empire.
And this language, by the way, he's he's referring to non-Christians as opposed to explicitly like brown people here.
Um, although he's really kind of mostly talking about brown people who just happen to have the wrong religion in his mind, but this language of like a parasite that's coming to like eat away at the host society, this is straight out of like the more straight on neo-Nazis that we've always covered on this podcast.
It's the exact same language.
In fact, these guys, you'll get, we'll get there in a future clip if we get that far.
These guys will argue back and forth about whether it's the religion or whether it's the race.
You know, and they're like, you know, no, well, we both agree that these people are eating away at our society, but can you convert them or do you have to annihilate them?
That's really the that's really the political question that you get into in some of these spaces.
It's, I mean, it's absolutely viable.
And that's because we don't know who we are.
We don't know what we stand for.
We don't know what we think.
And so consequently, you've got that 90-foot-tall Hindu statue in Texas.
Right.
And that should be illegal in your view.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I think that sort of thing, there shouldn't even have to be a law.
Right.
Right.
There was no law.
If you go back to 1945, America.
There was no law then against building.
And it was unthinkable then.
Okay.
It really is.
Like, it's really, it really is the false idols.
That's the thing that he's, it's straight out of that.
You know, I actually have the Wikipedia page open because I was vaguely aware of this, but not so.
It's a statue called the Statue of Union.
It is a 90-foot statue.
It's built to in the likeness of a Hindu god, Hindu god Hanuman.
I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing that.
And it's located in Houston.
It's the fourth largest statue in the United States.
And it is, I mean, you know, I'm not a sculpture critic.
It looks like a perfectly lovely statue.
I don't follow that faith tradition, but I also don't follow the Christian faith tradition.
And I don't see why there should be any problem of this existing in society if people want to build it on their private property.
It's what seems perfectly reasonable to me, but I'm not a bigot towards, I love Hindus.
You know, he's kind of pronouncing it with the two O's, you know, sort of thing.
It is one of those, you know, when you get this kind of this class of character, you know, he's saying Hindu with a heart R there.
It really is this kind of ridiculous.
He talks like a full-on 19th century Orientalist.
So this is his example of the terrible social problems that are being caused by these sort of parasitic weevil people that are coming in to eat the corpse of the American Empire.
There's a statue.
That's it.
And if anything, and if anything, I mean, you know, just again, from reading the Wikipedia page, the reception is it drew protests from Christian conservatives who gathered outside, prayed against it, and described it as a demon god.
The problems are not coming from the Hindus putting up the statue.
No.
It's coming from the Christian right-wing dipshits who can't accept that there are people of another faith living in their state.
I don't know.
You know, there shouldn't have to be a law back in the 1940s.
It didn't, it was unthinkable.
We didn't need a law to stop it happening.
They're just saying, well, we used to have a completely unchallenged white supremacist racial order.
Why can't we have that again?
It was good for us.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
That's exactly what he's saying.
And well, you know, and that's kind of what they're both saying to a certain degree.
Exactly.
And, you know, I think Duthad would say, I mean, Duthad doesn't seem to have a particular problem with the existence.
I mean, I'll give him some, I'll give him a tie, you know, that bit of credit is that he doesn't seem to be like angry about that in the way that, but I mean, it's not his faith that he doesn't, that it's something, but he sees it as part of living in this kind of multicultural society.
Is that, well, a little bit of that, you're just going to and you know, any one statue in Texas, that's what we're arguing about.
I mean, you know, it's it is like it is like, you know, when we were talking about Charlie Kirk going to London and being like, you can't find a British pub anymore.
It's like, no, no, you, you just, you just don't like the fact that there are kebab places around.
You know, that's the thing you really are.
That's the thing that really upsets you.
It's like, you know, it's kebabs instead of fish and chips.
You have to, you have to see a little bit more Arabic than you were maybe expected to see.
You know, ye old kebab shoppers or whatever.
Yeah.
It's lovely people these can't they?
I mean, it's just it's it's amazing.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
It's so edifying listening to them.
All right.
Household discipline.
Household discipline.
And not yes.
And not that Doug will be very interested in this if I read Doug, if I read my Doug correctly.
Okay.
Okay.
Normally when right-wing Christians talk about household discipline, they talk about, are you allowed to beat your children?
You know, or how badly are you allowed to beat your children?
This, this goes in a slightly different direction.
And I think it's, I, um, this again gets to the, you know, we don't believe you, Doug.
But all right, so, and God, I hate that we laugh about this, the horrifying misogyny.
And, and, you know, yes, I, but you know, it is, I agree.
It is something that, like, we, as I say often, we do not agree with these people.
We are laughing at the ridiculousness.
We're laughing that we still have to deal with this in our society.
And it's important to understand that this exists to this level and to not like be liberals and close our eyes to it.
That's what's important about it.
And we laugh about it.
We make jokes about it in order to get through the material in order to make this palatable for people.
Yeah.
But of course, we take this 100% seriously.
And one thing that I think about in this clip is that Doug Wilson is up there.
Doug Wilson has been a pastor for decades.
Yes.
And this actually, just to interject one thing, because I want to make this point, firstly, about what you were just saying.
I absolutely agree.
We laugh to make this palatable and we laugh also because this is ridiculous.
The things these people say are ridiculous, but lest anybody says that.
And the things and the things that Duthat says are barely less ridiculous than the most of the thing.
Exactly.
Yeah.
But lest anybody should mistake our attitude, I cannot express to you the level of contempt that I feel for Doug Wilson.
This man, and people need to know about him as well, because he is extremely dangerous.
He is gaining influence.
He's gaining power.
His empire is expanding and it's very, very dangerous.
And this is a bad, bad man.
And the other thing is that I really want to hit this.
This man has no qualifications to do what he does.
He's not uneducated.
He has a couple of degrees and he has a postgraduate degree and they're in humanities subjects like philosophy, stuff like that.
That's fine.
I'm a philosophy graduate myself.
That doesn't qualify me to be a fucking pastor.
It doesn't qualify me to be a counselor.
This guy has no qualifications to be dealing with people's personal issues, let alone issues of crime and abuse.
And these are things that he deals with in this totally self-arrogated position that he's carved out.
And he has no qualifications to do this.
He is, you know, the fact that he has taken these responsibilities upon himself without qualification and without the necessary and the proper responsibility, the legal responsibilities that should apply to somebody who takes it upon themselves to be a counselor, that is scandalous.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I mean, that is remarkable.
That's so common in this country is not even spoken about.
But I mean, you know, the fact that he has this national platform and he talks about these kinds of issues with having no background in any of this kind of stuff.
And just in the fact that, again, when you start to hear what he's going to say and like what he believes about these certain things and some of the things that are buried underneath it, the fact that he is, the fact that he is, he holds pastoral roles.
He advises people.
He is seen as a voice of God in these wishes.
Obviously, I cannot make accusations of things I do not, but I can only imagine what the reality of being a spouse, a female spouse, under his care like I will just say it that way.
Anyway, what about discipline in the household?
Do you think that husbands as heads of households should be, again, permitted under the law to use forms of physical coercion?
Absolutely.
Of the wife?
Of the wife.
No, absolutely not.
Okay.
And again, oh, no, the children.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
No, sure.
We agree with that.
That's kind of what he was going for there, right?
No, no, absolutely not.
All right.
Let's let this go another couple of seconds.
No.
Call the cops.
No physical coercion whatsoever.
No.
Okay.
So these, these are.
Call the cops.
And of course, the cops are always perfectly willing to accept the word of a battered spouse that she is, in fact, battered.
That is, that is something that we know about cops, that they're always conversant with these issues and are always very sympathetic to women, particularly in the more patriarchal societies.
Call the cops is basically like, you know, I mean, you know, like any realistic understanding of the way these things are actually handled in this country is it's absurd.
It's absurd to like to think that, oh, yeah, you call the cops and then, of course, they're going to take the woman's side.
And that's kind of where he's going to go with this bit.
But anyway, COVID.
And there's cops and then there's cops and judges in Moscow, Idaho.
Yeah.
Under your theocratic republic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Your nascent Calvin's Geneva.
Yeah.
Things are, things are even worse there.
Go ahead.
So basically, as a pastor, I've seen all kinds of things.
And just listen to that.
I'm sorry.
It's just, this is the.
This is so.
I can, I'm only, I can only imagine this bit in another interview, and so have I, I don't know, just going from what we were saying before and this, this is.
This is about as dark as some of this is just imagining, but this is a man in actual, actual pastoral control over this, is a man who actually does this stuff and what he's saying and what he's not saying it's monstrous to me.
Marital problems can get pretty messy and pretty tangled pretty quickly, but I believe that the husband does not have the authority legally to exercise any kind of corporal discipline of his wife.
No, absolutely not.
Now um, what do you have?
What happens when the cops are called because there's a domestic thing and and he hit her, but she had been hitting him for five minutes?
You know, you've got those sorts of situations, you and the horse you rode in on and the horse that that horse went, fuck you.
That that's just.
It's just, that is.
That is.
That is baseline abusive spouse language.
That is exactly what he's like.
Well, she was hitting him, for she was hitting him for five minutes, and then he hit her once and then and she's the one who's got all the bruises.
Imagine how that worked.
Oh, and then we're gonna say, fuck him again and what he's about to say.
So but um, the Islamic idea of uh, a husband beating his wife and it's okay, you so hard.
Yes, before that really, he does this all the time.
He will.
He, he will take his own disgusting position, state it and then talk as if he denies it, and then he will criticize other people, the people he hates the left, Lgbt people Muslims, whatever for having exactly the same opinions that he's just expressed or being just about to have them, as if he didn't just express them.
Yes, i've heard him do this in several interviews.
Now I just I just said, you know this sort of thing, but no no, it's those other, those brown people over there.
They're the ones who actually believe that.
I don't believe that.
I just believe this other thing.
Yeah no, it's.
Um yeah, all right Rost, do that.
We're gonna give him another half point here.
He's about to he's, he's gonna push back on this.
You know that absolutely horrifying thing that Welcome has just said, you know, there's gonna be some slight pushback to that.
Oh wow, it's just simply not okay.
But it's not only an Islamic idea.
No, it's like if you look at the history of the Christian West, you have situations where one the law has given the husband pretty much total control over the property of his wife for reasons of headship and patriarchal authority, and at least cultures where it is customary to sort of accept or wink at um yeah, sort of the use of physical force by husbands against wives.
Yeah, I would.
So it seems like I can say in our church basically, if any husband and we're patriarch, like you said, we're patriarchal, and I can envision someone moving to Moscow because I think they're patriarchal and that must line up with my idea of patriarchy, and he, if someone like that joined our church And we found out that he was beating his wife, he would be excommunicated.
We would put him under discipline.
Am I allowed to just say I don't believe you?
Or, you know, like, oh, if you're beating a wife of if one of our congregants is, if you're, you're damaging, you're damaging the church property now, because obviously it's a patriarchal society.
And, you know, we stand at the precipice here, but we ultimately you're harming someone who's one of us.
And therefore, like the woman herself seems to have no agency and no rights in this situation.
No, she's a total object.
She's a total object and all of these.
And you notice how Dutha in passing just seeds the idea that there's something sort of inherent or institutional to Islam that is abusive to women.
That is abusive to women.
Yes.
It's not just Muslims who are institutionally misogynistic and violent.
Yeah.
No, I don't believe him either, especially if we take his known attitude towards sexual abuses of children in his congregation as any sort of indication of how he might treat an adult abuser of a wife or a partner.
Yeah, I'm extremely skeptical.
Let's put it that way, based on precedent.
So let me put it to you, and I suspect you'll dispute this, but I'll put it to you that this seems like a situation where a Christian culture can learn something from the experience of the liberal era, more secular era, a more feminist era in terms of what it's willing to accept and what it's not, right?
That there is a way in which it seems like, you know, in saying, no, I wouldn't accept that and no, I wouldn't accept that.
Again, things that many Christians accepted in the past, you are accepting to some degree that if we pass out of this more secular era into a more Christian era, we will look back and say, well, it was bad that we lost the faith and good that we recovered it, but it was also good that in the course of the 20th century, we decided that it was rotten for husbands to beat their wives and maybe a good idea for wives to control some of their own property.
Would that be fair?
Challenging Christian Eras00:14:38
I just love the way that none of these people can use four words for what in 40 will do.
It's just not, it's so, it's so ridiculous.
And there are certain words that they definitely do not want to use, like feminism, for instance.
Well, like unless it's to talk about how terrible it is.
Right, exactly.
Exactly.
Like, you know, like maybe we learned something from the feminists.
I mean, we're not feminists, of course, but maybe they had a little bit of a point, and it's better that we didn't actually do that.
Like, again, as I said in the last episode, Ross Duthat absolutely believes in the sort of small-scale version of everything that Doug Wilson is pushing.
He may not believe in the, you know, 500 years from there, like he believes to some degree that a secular liberalism in terms of government is overall better than like an open theocracy.
But like ideologically, these guys are much closer together than they maybe, you know, than maybe they seem based on this, based on the fact that they're kind of arguing about this.
I just want to be clear.
Ross Duthat is very, very conservative.
Okay.
Wilson's response.
Yeah, I think wives controlling their own property is an ancient custom among Christians, but I love that he always has to go there.
We'll get to this why he just has to go there first, you know, you know, lots of things.
I mean, if you count certain types of Christians, if you pick out like particular groups, I'm sure you could find all kinds of customs among Christians over the course of the last 2,000 years.
Exactly.
But the version of Christianity that you're obviously trying to sell is something like, you know, 16th century Switzerland as a nation state.
And that was not a particularly matriarchal or even-handed society.
All right.
Anyway.
They can never decide if what they want to do.
Apologists are all the same.
They sort of all hover back and forth between no society should have iron age values like in the Bible and no, actually, the Bible has modern and progressive values like us.
They want it both ways.
They just sort of switch back and forth between them.
It all just depends.
It all just depends on what argument makes sense at the time.
They're just sleep-willy.
Exactly.
You know, that is, you know, whatever answer they need to get out of this particular moment.
And they don't have to be held to any standard because the Bible is the ultimate standard.
If it says it in the Bible, and I can interpret that Bible however I choose to get out of it right now, that's all that they have to do.
I mean, it's hilarious, but vile.
You know, it's just anyway.
No, I'm not, and I'm not arguing that all Christians everywhere supported wife meeting or anything remotely like that.
I am saying that there is a particular 20th century shift around these issues.
Yeah.
So that is that is driven by what are seen as liberal and feminist concerns.
Yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't call them liberal and feminist, but I'd say there are certain Western developments that well, I would, I wouldn't use the dirty words to describe them.
No, no, those are good Christian people who, you know, made that.
Yeah.
I like that I like.
Okay.
All right.
And the way I put this same issue is I've been arguing for a mere Christendom or a Christendom 2.0.
I tried.
I promise you, I tried to extract two minutes of audio that would like describe this in any kind of coherent way.
It just does not exist.
He's basically arguing that there's the old Christendom and then we have kind of lost that Christendom in the 20th and 21st centuries.
And he's arguing to kind of come back to a form of Christendom that is informed by sort of that period of unbelief in society, which just basically just looks like all of Doug Wilson's prejudices get to be enshrined in law and the things that he doesn't particularly think are important aren't paid attention to.
It's just his, it's pure sophistry on his part.
It's pure sophistry.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So they go on for about 10 minutes, 10, 11 minutes, kind of discuss, kind of waffling on this.
And then eventually they get to something that I think he finally gets to something that I think is a little bit more solid.
And this is part of that.
This is again from about two episodes.
This is about the 45-minute mark in the original clip.
And I will provide a link to the original clip so you can go and listen to this whole thing yourself and prove I have not taken this out of context.
I think we've played enough of it that I could basically cannot be taking it out of context or saying he's not giving a good answer here when he actually is.
I mean, I, you know, I could a lot of this, I was like, I'm supposedly an expert on a lot of this stuff.
I know a lot about this.
I grew up in this kind of environment.
I've been doing this anti-Nazi stuff, but not the anti-Christian nationalist stuff.
This world is a little bit alien to me in some ways.
But like, I know how to, I know how to read the rhetoric.
And like, I, I listened to this like three or four times.
And like, I'm just, I'm, it's just, it's gobbledygook.
It's like anytime you really try to like sink your teeth into it and go, like, okay, what is it?
What are the actual things he's trying to say?
What is he actually suggesting?
What are the, what, what's real and what's not real?
And there's just so little of it here.
Um, we are, we are now going to uh play the next clip.
We're going to play a little bit of this.
And um, this one I've entitled the kind of subtitle I gave to it is not taking flat from modernity.
And okay, this is again about as solid as a statement as Doug Wilson makes on this topic.
And I think, again, uh, this, this gets into some really nasty stuff.
So let's move on.
First, I'm willing to grant in principle that if someone comes to me with an open Bible and an open history book, and he says, Doug, I think you ought to rethink your views on penal uh codes for uh homosexuality or whatever, as let's have a Bible study.
I'd say, I'm open, let's have a Bible study.
I'm really open to that.
I don't want, I don't want to take my uh, any guidance at all from the secular society around us.
That is about as clear a statement of like what Christian nationalists believe as anything that like that's the short little 30-second version of it: is all of my logic has to come from the Bible fundamentally.
I do not study the world around me.
I do not take my edicts from, I do not take knowledge from the real world.
I am not a naturalist.
I am not a scientist.
I am in no way using what I observe in the world, the actual material reality around me to make decisions about what is and what should be.
It all has to come from a particular interpretation of this 2,000-year-old text.
That's just period.
Yeah.
Still, still less do I want to base any of my political ideas upon science or sociology or democracy, heaven, or things that women might say, you know, or people from other religions might have to say.
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah, no.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And as ever with these people, almost everything they say that they're taking from the Bible is not in there.
Yes.
Or it's in there, but it's interpreted.
It can be interpreted in a thousand different ways.
And it has been interpreted in a thousand different ways.
I mean, you know, like it is, it is, it is very worthwhile to note that like many of the people protesting ICE actions in Minneapolis right now and the people perpetuating those actions refer to the same verses of the Bible in terms of justifying their behavior.
Yes.
Yes.
You know.
Doug is Doug is an apologist for the Southern Confederacy.
He famously wrote a book, Southern Slavery, as it was, I think it's called, where he repeats the lost cause myth, especially to do with the ante-bellum South.
And these people, they love to take credit for abolitionism.
And that's true.
A hell of a lot of abolitionism in the Civil War and before the Civil War, leading up to the Civil War, was driven by devout Christians and people of Christian conscience or people who couch their ideas in terms of Christianity.
It's also equally true.
And this isn't, you know, this isn't to damn the entire religion or to praise the entire religion because you just can't do that because religion is more complicated than that.
A lot of the slavery was justified in Christian terms as well.
And as you say, people on both sides were quoting the same passages of the same book to justify their completely opposed positions because religion is that humans do.
It's not a thing by itself.
It's something we do and something we make.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you know, he would argue against that, but I think you and I are secularists.
And, you know, he's enough to say he's wrong.
I think, I think he's wrong.
And I respect the people who interpret those passages in a more humane way.
And I, you know, but I think you, I think if you're listening to this podcast, you're strong enough in your faith to acknowledge that I'm allowed to believe that as well.
Anyway, I am aware that we do have religious listeners and they do message me sometimes.
Yeah.
When I say religion is something we make, I'm not making metaphysical statements.
You know, religion is a social phenomenon here on earth.
It doesn't necessarily mean I'm not necessarily saying anything about anything outside of this plane of reality.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So, okay.
Let's just say Doug Wilson is no, does not belong to the same philosophical and political tradition of John Brown.
All right.
Yeah.
I think that's safe to say.
If it were 1861 or 1858, you know, would Doug Wilson support John Brown?
I think the answer is fuck no.
All right.
So now we're getting to a nasty thing that we already did before, but the thing that he comes back to these things over and over again is very telling in Doug Wilson and the whole evangelical like attitude towards these things.
I don't want to take any guidance from all at all from the secular society around us.
And this is the very next sentence, the very next sentence.
And the reason I don't is they killed 60 million babies.
Yeah.
Okay.
Uh-huh.
Because abortion.
Let's continue.
I don't want to hear any moral lectures from these people about slavery.
You were better off being a black person in Charleston, South Carolina in 1850 when they had an operating slave market than being conceived as a black baby in New York City or Baltimore today.
And so consequently, the thing I don't want to admit.
Just to clarify what you're saying, you're saying you were better off being a slave than being aborted in the womb.
Correct.
Better off being allowed to live as a slave than to be chopped up.
Okay.
First of all, chopped up is a very particular right-wing evangelical.
Yeah.
You know, these things.
It's all about the dilation and distraction procedure, which they call cutting up babies.
This is vile, disgusting stuff.
Sorry, anybody who's been through this, you know, we go into dark places because we have to, because this is very, very standard.
Doug Wilson, it would be a mistake for you to think that Doug Wilson is going out on his skis on this, that he is the only one using this kind of language.
This is absolutely endemic to a particular kind of Christian conservative worldview that Ross Duthat no doubt largely agrees with, although he kind of pushes back here on this, right?
Ross Duthat has seen this.
He's asking this question to clarify for the New York Times audience, who he presumes are not necessarily familiar with this.
Although I think anybody older than like 30 has probably heard this at some point in their lives that, you know, the abortion debates were a much larger conversation like the 90s.
I think they're less salient in 2026, although, of course, it's still incredibly, incredibly important.
I'm not arguing against that, especially since it's largely going away in 2026, which is vile, disgusting stuff.
Anyway, but this is very, very ordinary stuff that he's saying, you know.
And so Duthat does feel like he has to clarify to some degree just to make sure he's sure he's getting Wilson's point properly.
But this is not far into either of them.
And it would be a mistake again to think that this is Doug Wilson's spicy little jalapenos or whatever.
No, this is very, very standard for Doug Wilson and very, very standard in this world.
You would hear this all the time in this debate.
This is constant.
Yes.
Because they think abortion is their great big Trump card.
Exactly.
They think they can just play it to set off against any criticism they get from secular society or whatever it was he said.
And the more offensively you describe it, the better, really, for their purposes.
Yeah.
I mean, the more, the more benign you treat the slavery, the more aggressively you treat abortion.
I mean, that's the whole language.
It's like, well, you're just, you get to work in the sun and you don't like, but, you know, you get Christmas presents from your masters.
Do you get like, you have a, you have a little house.
Do you get to have like your family together?
And, you know, until your son is sold off to the plantation next door, whatever, 100 miles away, of course, you know, that can change.
But, you know, like, yeah, no, this is, I mean, it's so, it's so disgusting.
This is awful.
I mean, it's, but it's, it's worth being clear.
His argument has no factual validity, no historical validity, no ethical validity.
No, no, no.
None whatsoever.
It's just a rhetorical way for him to say, I hate women and black people.
Yes, basically.
Yes.
And even in his version of reality, even if we took him at his word, like steelmanning him to the strongest, I still think that's a really arguable position that, yeah, I'd rather be killed as a baby than live my life as a slave.
I think that I think that's a even under the absolute best possible version of that.
I think given that choice, I think I would take that choice.
That's a great reality.
Black slaves risked death to run away from their owners and torturous death at that because they decided that the risk of that was worth trying to get out of that institution, whether they were running to join the northern armies during the Civil War or before that.
It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a morally outrageous statement.
So basically, the thing that I, the thing that just gets my motor running is the idea that we are some sort of moral exemplars that get to judge other societies.
So I want, I do want.
But can't, I mean.
Let me agree on it.
Let me agree on you.
I want to agree with you here because I really do want Christendom 2.0 to have learned the lessons of being criminalizing things that were sins, not crimes, being officious, Cromwell's men prowling the streets of London trying to smell who was banning Christmas danners.
Yeah, that kind of officiousness is not what I want at all.
But neither do I want anything, any of our reforms to be based on the universal rights of man.
I love that he snarls that out, the universal rights of bad.
I Can't Even With Ayn Rand00:04:53
It's so funny how he's, you know, it's like he says it with the hard R.
It's just one of those things.
It's really disgusting.
Also, I love that his example is like, oh, the religious police are coming in, like arresting people for who's celebrating Christmas.
Like, no, the Christians are under assault.
No, it's like even his examples of like the bad officious behavior is like, no, we were being more Christian than the secular, even the right-wing Christian government.
You know, we are, we are, we are worshiping in a different way.
And therefore, you know, we are, we are the good kind.
It's like he can't even use a secular person or, you know, a gay person or even in that example, he can't like, he can't go there.
He just cannot ever have it pass his lips that like, you know, any of that is ever okay.
And that's the real telling factor.
He can think it's a sin and think it's not, it should not be a crime.
He's even said that in so many words previously, but he can't use that as an example.
He can't say, I don't think the secret police should go be going around there and arresting people who are gay, who are performing gay acts.
I think we should shut it.
I think we shouldn't, but I don't think that legally we should do that.
He can never say those words.
And that and like using that as an example of something that would legitimately be not allowed under Christendom 2.0, because ultimately the people that he's, you know, the things that he's really advocating for and the people that are really listening to him and the people who are going to be a part of that, his more hardcore congregation, they want those things.
That's what Christianism means, period.
It's just, it's always meant that it always will mean that.
It's just, it's just vile, you know, it's just like.
And that's what, that's what he wants as well.
He's absolutely very clear about what he actually thinks that the legal system will deal with and how it will deal with things in that Presbyterian utopia of 500.
He means five years hence.
Yes.
So if there are things I read books by feminists and I want to be able to learn from anybody.
I imagine maybe he's like picked up a book by like he's read like the terrible things Andrea Dworkin has said, you know, like the like the most like the most like aggressive second wave stuff, you know, or whatever.
Like he's like, he's, he's seen the billboard.
It's kind of like where I would land on that.
I would bet he's probably because these guys always like they have their the straw feminist, you know, they're like the worst, you know, the most, you know, sneering, you know, man hater that he can imagine in his mind.
He has this, this, and then he will pull quotes from people to like, so he's not reading their books and thinking seriously about what they believe.
He's, you know, but I believe he's been exposed to some of that.
I mean, he's, he's been doing this for 50 years.
I mean, you know, it's, it's pretty clear.
But yeah, no, you're right.
No, he's not actually like reading the second sex and like really like engaging with the material the way he would engage with his Bible.
No, of course not.
That's not this guy isn't pouring over Gender Trouble by Judith Butler.
You know, come on.
Can you imagine this man responding to Judith Butler?
I would pay Patriot money for that.
Come on, Douglas.
My point is I don't want to have anything based on the false doctrines that they're espousing.
I want everything that I teach to be consistent with the Bible and to be derived from the Bible.
I want to be able to make a biblical case for it.
You literally cannot do that.
The Bible is not a book.
It is a compendium of texts written over centuries in different places, in different languages by different people whose ideas radically differed from each other.
It contradicts itself ethically, morally, politically, historically, all over the place.
And that's not a criticism.
I'm not even criticizing it.
It's just a fact.
There is no such thing as a biblically consistent legal or ethical or moral position.
You can't do that.
You might as well stick, I don't know, I don't know, think of, you know, you might as well stick Salem's Lot by Stephen King, Lolita by Nabokov, and, you know, 10 other random books together, and then say, I'm going to base my political opinions or my legal code on this book.
It's nonsense.
I mean, you can't even really do it with like Ayn Rand.
Like Ayn Rand wrote four books, I think.
Is it three or four?
You can't really do it with any one book because that's just not how reality works.
Even individual people are not consistent with themselves in the course of 200 pages.
Exactly.
And I mean, you know, even like Moby Dick, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to base my entire, you know, moral philosophy on Moby Dick because it's the greatest book ever written.
Assume, you know, ultimately, you're still like, because any book of cons of sufficient complexity is by definition going to have shades of meaning.
And like, you know, what, what, what, what does this scene mean?
Is he actually being doing the right thing in this situation?
Polemical Firefights00:05:33
And people bring their own world perspectives, their own outside perspectives.
They say, sorry, this is, this is the 13-year-old like atheist masturbating in the bedroom thing, you know, but you just like, it's so easy to like talk about to like, it's so clear to me how much bullshit this is.
And we just have to like engage with it a little bit.
And like, this is, this is garbage.
This is complete garbage.
There's a reason we don't do these guys more often because it's all just a mirage.
You know, he says gay mirage.
That's a, you know, your Christian theocracy mirage is what was what you're talking about.
It's like, it's just, there's just nothing here.
It's just, it's so much garbage.
But it's so insidious because they have this fictional version of this book, the Bible, in their heads.
And they talk about it as if it's real.
And not only as if it's real, as if it's the ultimate authority.
And of course, that's the point.
That's what they're actually doing.
What they want is an authority that can't be denied, that can't be gainsaid, and that they can use to beat everybody else into submission with their views.
And they can always find license for the, you know, backing for their views in that book, precisely because it is such a varied compendium.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
I'll ask a related, a related question, which is that you aren't the only person who people find appealing because you're seen as sort of speaking forthrightly and saying politically incorrect things and using the words the libs don't want you to use, right?
You share that space with people who also call themselves Christian nationalists, right?
For whom that does mean a white nationalism or an anti-Semitic nationalism, right?
And one of the, I think one of the interesting things that listeners should be aware of is that in addition to your wars against the secular liberals and milquetoast Christians and so on, lately you've also been engaged in this kind of extended conflict with people who want a sort of formally racialized form of Christianity.
And again, Duthat's question here, I mean, it is, it is insightful.
Is saying, but you have enemies to your right, right?
How do you respond to those people?
And now, what he's doing, he's doing the like the Sam Harry thing, the Barry Weiss thing of like, no, you're kind of on our side on this, right?
Like, those are the really bad people.
And now you're going to talk about like the how you differentiate yourself from them and not how you're the exact same person that they are, right?
That's where Ross do that.
That's Ross Duthat feels on this where even Sam Harris succeeded a little bit better because he doesn't believe in this kind of metaphysics.
He doesn't believe in this society.
And so he avoids, he doesn't go there because he doesn't know enough to go there.
But Ross Duthat does know that.
And he does want to, I kind of defend Doug Wilson a little bit on this.
This, it's just, it's just like, it's, it's really disgusting, but fascinating because if it's like, you know, underneath the rock and you find like that one like slithering, slithering worm that's like the slightly different shade.
It's like, you know, that's kind of what, that's kind of what this is for me.
It's like, it's God.
All right.
Well, Wilson's response.
That was actually my first internet controversy many years ago with the Kinnists, white identitarians.
And I call them skinnists.
Okay.
The Kennest, I know quite a bit.
I've listened to some audio from some Kenneths over the years.
I'm not deeply invested in it, but they are overt white nationalist accelerationist Nazi types.
These are like building a compound in Oregon, building it.
They're deeply embedded in socialists and the nationalist communities.
One of them is a regular co-host of the political cesspool.
So I'm not in detail with them, but these are explicit white nationalist, Christian nationalist types.
It's a very small sect, but it's a long-lasting one.
So that's worth knowing that I know these guys.
I know exactly who they are.
They are overtly racialist, white nationalist, Christian nationalist types.
And Wilson differentiates himself from them because I imagine they were going after some of the same converts back in the day.
Now, Doug Wilson has to has to go, oh, I'm not those guys.
I'm not those guys.
Like, I want actual political power.
You know, like, Ross set it up for him.
He did.
Ross has obviously, you know, seen himself in Doug Wilson and see, you know, exactly the same way people look into books and see themselves reflected.
He's looked into Doug Wilson and seen him, you know, his own flattering self-portrait reflected.
You know, a conservative, yes, but not one of those people, not Nick Fuentes.
So he sets it up for him and off Doug goes.
You know, I'm going to boast now about not being a literal compound building neo-Nazi.
Right.
Yeah.
And I've been in polemical firefights with anti-Semites and people who have massaged actual misogynists, not people who are accused of being that way.
Fuck you.
Fuck you, Doug Wilson.
Fuck you.
Actual misogynists, not just the people the liberals accuse.
They call me a misogist just because I'm a patriarch.
I love women.
I want to take care of women.
Don't you understand?
I'm basically a feminist myself, but I'm the good, I'm the God-fearing kind of, oh my God.
It's so also polemical firefights.
I've been in polemical firefights.
Doug, you absolute wanker.
You've traded barbs in competing newspaper articles or something.
You've preached against them from the pulpit.
Yeah, polemical firefights.
What sort of person says that about themselves?
I've been in polemical firefights.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Tell it to Renee Good, you fucking asshole.
Polemical Firefights00:03:47
Anyway, yeah, that's true.
Do you think you're going to win that fight?
I do.
I don't.
I don't actually.
I don't think he's going to win that fight.
Because One of the things that has tended to happen in the recent past, the 20th century past, right, is that when you have periods of liberal weakness or liberal collapse, there are forms of conservative religion that try and fill that void, but there are also consistently forms of identitarian politics, racist politics, fascist politics that fill that void.
And you can see versions of this, obviously, in 1930s Europe.
And I'm not sure that the record of the 20th century proves that in the battle to define post-liberalism, it's guaranteed that the, you know, the colorblind Calvinists are coming.
Well, I mean, again, we may not win, but we're going to go down fighting.
And that matters because we're Bible people.
In other words, I want to fight against racial vainglory, ethnic vainglory, or ethnic malice because the Bible prohibits it.
As you're saying now, but Duthat is actually correct there, that there were attempts for like moderate religious reformers in 1930s Europe to act as a bulwark against the fascists.
But then what happened when the fascists actually took power?
They all bent the knee.
That's exactly what happens in all these situations.
Yeah.
I mean, where is where is sorry?
We're not talking about, where is Doug Wilson talking about the murder innocent people in Minneapolis?
Where is Doug Wilson on this topic?
What is his, where's, where is he out there?
Shouldn't he be standing with these people that, you know, these are agents of the state out murdering people?
Of course not.
That's, that's not his, that's not his concern.
In the course of a specifically racist conspiracy theory driven program of ethnic cleansing as well.
Exactly.
So many of these people, many of the Somalis who have come to the to America, many of them are Christians.
Many of the, many, many people from Latin America, undocumented immigrants.
And like it is a large, it is a very, very, it's very Catholic, but it is a very religious population.
You know, these are people he should be standing with by the standards of what he's saying right here, that we are Bible people.
We stand up as Christians because our Christian faith demands it.
He should be on that fucking front line.
And there are, again, there are people who stand on that front line who do hold what I consider the good versions of Christianity, right?
Who believe in it, who hold exactly those things and who stand against people like Doug Wilson precisely because they do see that, because they do believe exactly the things that Doug Wilson is saying.
They just don't want to make the fucking law.
You know a person, you know, you know a human being.
I was going to say, you know a man, but of course, you know, you know a person by what they do, by the deeds they do, by what they put out in the world.
And what is Doug Wilson?
By a man's works, shall ye know him.
Yes.
Yes.
If you get it, if you're going to take it from one of those bullshit sources, you know, by the, by the deed, you know, and measure, you measure what Doug Wilson wants to make happen in society.
Whatever is, whatever's going on with him and his God, I mean, I'm not, I don't judge that.
That's fine.
Whatever he has with his God is fine.
I mean, it's not fine, but you know, it is like, I don't care about that.
I care about what he's doing in the real world.
I care about what he's saying and the political impact that he's having.
And somebody like him, were he to choose to do so, could have a genuine, like positive, I would have a much more measured response to Doug Wilson if he were going out there and saying like really overtly, you know, things in this regard.
And I'll have to look and see if he's made any really recent statements.
I haven't checked in the last week or two about what he's been saying.
So I may have to eat my words a bit next week.
I will actually go and look and see if he's looked at this.
Disapproving Of Injustices00:10:40
But, you know, any any church, any Christian church worth its weight and worth its weight and feathers or whatever, you know, worth worth anything has to respond to the current political environment with horror.
If it has any, if it has any justification as a reasonable political force in this world.
It's just the reality of it.
It has to like say things in its full voice and not be mealy mouthed about it.
Because ultimately, again, I've said this, you know, Duthat and Wilson kind of agree that like, yeah, this whole like ICE thing is probably for the best in the long run.
Yeah.
Yes.
All right.
Continuing.
In Christ is neither June nor Greek, slave-free, Scythian and Colossians or barbarian.
And it's one of the centerpieces of the New Testament.
I believe that Christian pastors should fight and they should fight sin.
And it's not just sin on the left.
It's not just the progressive leftism.
It's also, I call it the dank right.
Dank right is a more common term around these people sometimes to refer to this like it's supposedly white nationalist Christian stuff, like the Dick Fuentes and the Richard Spencer's and the, you know, those kind of those kind of guys are kind of considered the dank right among some of these guys.
It's a more common term.
It's not, you know, you know, he's not the only one who calls it that.
Let's just put it that way.
And then there are people who say that they have no enemies to the right, but that's just telling the devil what direction to attack you from.
Well, and this is, but this is also, this will be my last, maybe my last attempt in my crusade to get you to say something nice about liberalism.
Okay.
Right.
But it does seem like some of these forces on the dank right that you're talking about, racists and anti-Semites and so on, that that has been kept at bay in part by the same society that you were condemning in no uncertain terms earlier in the conversation for abortion and other sins.
And it seems to me that that itself should make you think, you know, yes, there are particular sins and particular evils that are, you know, that are part of the liberal moment or the late 20th, early 21st century America, and Christians should condemn them.
But there are, but every society has particular sins.
And it should be possible for even a Christian theocrat to say, maybe liberalism did an okay job suppressing racism and anti-Semitism, even as it was doing some other bad things.
No, I grant the point in principle that I don't believe that classical liberalism gets everything wrong.
And I really don't believe that.
And I enjoyed very much the country I grew up in.
Classical.
Classical, classical liberalism.
Yes.
Classical liberalism.
Not the current kind, not the kind with the blue-haired, you know, the blue-haired feminist with armed pit hair.
You know, not those, not the kind.
Yeah, yeah, I know.
For God's sake, Doug, can you not, you know, I'm a Marxist.
I can say nice things about liberalism.
I can say good things about bourgeois democracy.
Surely you can find something.
But no, of course you can't.
Because to him, gay liberation, trans rights, democracy, probably female suffrage, these things are as bad as neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism, you know, genocidal anti-Semitism.
That's how he looks at it.
Yeah, so he does.
Exactly.
He sees it as two sides of the same coin.
That's the thing that's kind of the rest of this.
I do want to play the rest of this clip, but he does kind of get there.
That's what Ross doesn't seem to get, isn't it?
Ross thinks that there's a center and you have liberalism on one side and you have conservatism on the other.
And then at the extremes, you know, over on the left, you have socialism and communism.
And then on the extremes on the right, you have Nazism.
And he thinks, well, Doug is somewhere near the center, like me, right of center, but he's a bit further right.
But he should be able to look left and look right and like me, see that you have troublesome extremes on the far left and on the far right, but also good stuff on the on the near left.
So, but it's you don't know what kind of animal you're dealing with, Ross.
He's not in the center with you.
He's in a whole different place.
He's not on that map with you.
Yes, indeed.
I mean, Duthat is often, you know, and the degree to which he knows that he's, you know, kind of kind of setting up Doug Wilson to take the easy pitches.
I, you know, I don't know.
I kind of go back and forth on this as to whether he's doing this intentionally or whether he really is that blinkered.
I don't know.
We might get into some of that when we talk when we talk when we listen to Sam and Duthat talk a little bit.
But let's finish this up real quick.
As far as Doug's concerned, he's above the map looking down.
He's got the God's eye view and he can see all of you down there, left, right, center, up, down, as the, as the little bugs you are.
That's Doug's point of view.
Well, I think that's kind of Ross's point of view as well.
I mean, I think that's kind of almost like the, you know, the Christian.
I mean, I wouldn't call Duthat a Christian nationalist or a theocrat in the sense, but he definitely believes that like Christianity should have a lot more influence on our political realities than we have today.
He is taking what he considers to be the God's eye view.
He's just having a slightly more slightly more humble approach, you know?
Okay.
Maybe we should.
No, I agree.
I agree.
Yeah, All right.
I've received many benefits from that era.
So that point's granted.
But on the dank right, I believe that the liberal treatment of young white males has been one of the causes for this recoil and eruption.
So what you had was.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, we're going to play the end of this.
And you're just keep thinking, fuck off, fuck off, fuck off, fuck off for the next 30 seconds or so.
It's a bad, toxic combination of a bad economy, of young men being told repeatedly that they are the cancer of the planet, that their masculinity is toxic, that their skin is the blight of the world.
And their heterosexuality is a hate crime.
And they've been kicked in the head for years and years and years.
And they took it ill.
Ross is getting more and more enthusiastic the more Doug talks.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Do that agrees completely with this that, like, yeah, young men have been tortured by our society.
They're expected to, you know, they call their masculinity as toxic.
God, I have to do this.
And so many, so many more episodes I have to talk about this stuff.
But you notice, like, what, what, what he's saying here, what do that is kind of implicitly or explicitly, however you want to read that, agreeing with, is that the fundamental problem is that the progressive left, that feminists, that secularists, that, you know, race Marxists or whatever you want to call it, have seen the sense of white supremacy in our society, have seen the sense of colonialism, have seen those problems of casualism, and have made critiques, critiques,
and have attempted to shift the world into a more just and worthy place to be a place that we can all share together.
They have made those criticisms.
But those very, very minor, very, very minor changes on the scale of like what we should actually be doing that have actually happened, they make little white men, they make us feel bad.
We just feel we're just, we're just little, we're just little puppies and we've just been kicked in the head for so long.
And so just little small beans, very lonely.
Exactly.
And what the fascists are doing, what he says, the dank right, the dank right is getting to those people and twisting them into this horrible thing instead of a theocrat, a Christian nationalist, which Doug Wilson wants to turn them into.
And so he blames, he blames the problems of the dank right, of the far, of these neo-Nazis, of the anti-Semites, of which, you know, we talk on every episode of this podcast, blaming the existence of those groups and the power of those groups on the progressive left, on the people like you and me.
He's blaming us for them.
So who is the real, who is the real problem here, problem here?
Who do you have to get at?
Because if not for progressives and not for leftists and socialists and communists and Marxists and union members or just liberals, you know, just liberals.
You know, if not for those people telling these white men that maybe they came to their society in a different position than their black colleagues, than their women, than the people, the women around them, that maybe, that maybe, you know, things could be better and more equitable.
Those people, those people are the ones that cause all this horribleness on the right wing.
It's so, it's like, you know, give me the power.
Let me crush the left and, you know, I will make all your problems go away.
And Duthat implicitly agrees with all of that.
Yeah.
I disapprove of the far right, but I, you know, ultimately, the problem of the far right is not of their own making.
And it certainly isn't of my making, despite the fact that I'm far more in ideological sympathy with them than I want to admit.
No, no, no.
It's the fault of the left.
It's the fault of liberalism.
It's the fault of progressives.
And why do they, I mean, you know, yeah, this probably did play pretty well with the New York Times podcast listening audience because this is almost, you know, in slightly different terms, this is almost the editorial line, you know, for U.S. reactionary centrist pundits.
But what are we actually talking about here?
Why is any of this happening?
It's because people are trying to address the fact that there are structural injustices along lines of race and gender and sexuality and stuff like that.
So what you're actually saying is that any adjustment of those structures, the acknowledgement of the existence of those structural inequalities, the acknowledgement of their existence in history is too much.
And why do you feel that way?
It's because you don't want those injustices or inequalities changed.
So it's pointless to me for you to, you know, you, Doug Wilson, and people like you to say, well, I'm, you know, I disapprove of racism.
I disapprove of sexism and so on.
If what, if your entire political project amounts to an angry rejection of the idea that structural injustices that keep women and black people and queer people oppressed and subject to injustices, if your entire political project is furious rejection of any attempt to even acknowledge the existence of the problem, then that's a distinction without a difference.
I don't care if you personally hate them or not.
You want to keep them subject to those injustices.
Why Structural Injustices Matter00:02:19
That's your entire political project.
Absolutely.
100%.
Yeah.
No.
It's, yeah, no.
I mean, and that's why I wanted to include this whole thing because you see how they get there.
You see this process of how this conversation goes.
You see how he gets to this absolutely monstrous conclusion.
And yet it sounds so comfy.
It sounds so easy because it's in the quiet, dulcet tones of the New York Times opinion section.
You know, it's just like very, it's very, it's just massaging the prostate of fascism, of Christian nationalism.
Okay, one more clip.
And this is where we're done with Ross Duthat talking to Doug Wilson.
We're done talking.
We're done.
I'm done playing closer to Doug Wilson.
Here I have, I wanted to come right back around to Sam, to Sam Harris, and talk about the conversation that they had that Ross Duthat and Sam Harris had when Ross went on Sam Harris's podcast.
This is Making Sense episode 449.
If you want to go listen to it yourself, I don't know why you would, but if you do, it's right there for you.
Again, kind of talking about like how Ross is much better at this than Sam Harris is kind of where I land on this.
But I think it's worth it to kind of go through this and kind of see, you know, kind of how their conversation went.
And this is, they had a long, they had like a two-hour conversation and they did not cover just this.
They started talking for 45 minutes about how amazing AI is going to be.
Like, you know, it's funny.
Every time I look at one of these things, I'm like, we could do a whole episode.
It's like we could just, we could do this all day long.
We could be the knowledge fight of Sam Harris.
We could just sit here and just do like Sam Harris, Ross, do that, this kind of content.
We could sit here.
Do three two-hour episodes a week.
If we could do this full-time, it would drive us both up the fucking wall to listen to that by Sam Harris, but we can do it.
If people want to pay me a living wage, you know.
So, when you hear prominent influencers right of center assert their Christian conviction as kind of the moral center of narrative gravity for their politics, and these people, I mean, if anything, like it struck me, like putting these clips together, how Sam Harris is even slower than Duthett and Wilson are.
Like, he has so much difficulty even getting like individual particles of words out as if you can't edit his podcast, as if like you can't like just edit out some of the some of the silences and like clean that up a little bit.
Prominent Influencers and Christian Conviction00:06:36
Like, he's just continually like it's like it's like it's so infuriating.
This is one of the this man makes millions of dollars doing this.
Like, how?
How does this man make millions of dollars doing this?
Why is this not like consigned to the shitter?
I don't understand.
Anyway, okay.
I'm including people like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens.
I mean, people who are who are, I think, doing a tremendous amount of harm to our culture politically and otherwise.
What does what does their explicitly Christian framing of all of that do for you?
I mean, how does that land for you?
Like, let me take it.
Take anyone who's.
Well, let me take people, someone who's actually in the Trump administration as an example, right?
So the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, attends or has attended a church associated with Douglas Wilson.
Notice how Duthet, for all the shit that we give him, actually goes to a real material example.
The thing that Sam Harris is like tiptoeing around, the thing that he can't make himself say that there are material effects of all this on the lives of real people.
Do that gets that immediately.
It's like, let's actually use a real example.
Now, he's going to go to a bullshit place, but I think an interesting bullshit place.
And I think this is – Yep, go ahead.
I also want to say he's also understating the connection there.
Oh, yes.
Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, no, there's a much deeper connection there, but at least he's mentioning it.
He's not just talking about like influencers.
He's not talking about Candace Owens, who is a piece of shit.
Don't get me wrong.
Moving on.
He obviously talks about Christianity a lot, talks about the Bible a lot.
And so has become a kind of poster boy for progressive and secular fears about Christian theocracy.
Right.
GG.
I wonder why.
Yeah.
Imagine those, you know, those secular liberals getting all worked up about nothing.
You know, it's just, it's just the completely unqualified defense secretary with a literal neo-Nazi Christo-fascist tattoo who's intimately linked to the most influential Christian nationalist pastor in the country.
My critique of Hegseth, though, would be that in certain key ways, he's not Christian enough.
That if you look at the way he's approaching foreign policy issues and especially issues related to our war against drug dealers in and around Venezuela, right?
Christianity.
Questionable that they're very questionable, by the way, that they are drug dealers.
And I fuck you rosted with that for putting it that way, but he's getting somewhere.
He's getting somewhere.
He's just using Christian as a synonym for good, though, isn't he?
That's all he's doing.
He's going to a little bit deeper than that.
Not all of Christianity, but certainly important parts of it have this developed, long argued over idea about just war and what the preconditions are for a just war.
How a religion, this has obviously always been a tough question for Christianity, how a religion that preaches peace and turning the other cheek can allow for war and military conflict.
As far as I can tell, well, it all depends on whether you sit at the pinnacle of power or not.
It turns out if you sit at the pinnacle of power, you're pretty much okay with your, you know, using your religion to decimate other places.
And if you're more the victim of those kinds of activities, you tend to think maybe that's not such a great idea.
But he's right that there are like detailed theological arguments covering this stuff.
It's all industrial books, but it's there.
I mean, I've read some of that stuff back in my, back in my misspent youth.
I read some of that stuff.
I'm aware of kind of the broad outlines of some of those arguments.
I get it.
But yeah, so yeah.
Hegseth is untroubled by any of those issues.
And it's very hard to see all that much Christianity actually infusing his policymaking, right?
So there's a form of public Christianity that I think you see it on the left as well as the right, but you see it more on the right because the right is more religious that is all about sort of trying to grab the symbols and optics of religious faith,
but ultimately making it subordinate to fundamentally secular or nationalist or in the case of the left, certain kinds of utopian schemes that aren't actually what the religion itself is all about.
Now, I don't not sure that that applies to all the different right-wing influencers.
Okay.
Okay.
So this is so Ross Dutha.
This is so Ross Duth.
He has to, we're talking it, we're talking about Nick Funtes and Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, people undoubtedly of the right, of the far right at that, you know, and do that.
But he has to go like, well, also, you know, those utopian, you know, socialist Christians, those are also, those are also doing a bad form of Christianity.
You know, they're also not doing the thing.
So he almost gets to something interesting.
And then like, of course, he has to punch left.
He always has to punch left.
And I can promise you, I can promise you this is a point.
I did not play any more audio for lots of reasons.
Sam Harris is 100% on board with this.
There was no question.
Of course.
Sam Harris was on board with it.
No, that is the perfect encapsulation of Ross Dutha.
You know, he's asked a semi-pertinent question about the right in the historical moment of an actual, it seems now very clear, an actual attempt by the fascist right to take over the United States.
And via a brief stop off to ponder St. Augustine's just war theory, we end up back at the problems with the left being utopian.
Exactly, exactly, exactly.
As if the biggest problems with like, you know, Christianity in the public space today are utopian socialist Christians on one side and Pete Hegseth on the other.
I'm pretty sure one of those people has a lot more actual material impact on the world.
Although, although, as we say, the people protesting ICE in Minneapolis and many of the people who marched to Charlesville and all those kinds of things did so because of a pervasive religious faith, and that is very, very powerful.
Sorry, I keep coming back to this, but I think that is the kind of like, that's the way I want to see religion practiced.
And if that's how, if that's what that's what Doug Wilson was doing with his life, he was advocating for his faith to be used in that way to go for a just war theory if he was going if he was, but he's not.
Government Enforce Cruel Laws00:00:49
He's using it to take the levers of power because he doesn't have a theory of change.
He doesn't have anything except for we're going to get control of the government and then enforce our rules on everybody else because that's what we do.
Enforce the cruel, bigoted laws that I've decided are biblical.
Yeah.
No, I mean, Martin Luther King was animated by radical egalitarian Christianity.
Bishop Romero, you know, yeah, absolutely.
So that's all I have for you.
That's all that's all the that's all the clips I have.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Well, that's that was I'm now thoroughly bummed out, and I expect the audience are too.
All right.
We'll come back in a few days and we'll have another episode for you.
And until then, check us out on all our socials, Blue Sky, not Twitter anymore, but download the episodes.
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