American Empire Is Going GALACTIC, NASA Announces MOON BASE
Tate Brown critiques NASA's $20 billion shift to a lunar base amid China competition and exposes the "Rahab American" mindset where evangelicals shame men by elevating women with sexual histories over lifelong chastity. He argues this "anti-persuasion" rhetoric, exemplified by figures like Ashley Stock, creates a toxic power imbalance that alienates young men seeking purity while undermining traditional marriage values, ultimately suggesting the church has become a feminized space hostile to male standards. [Automatically generated summary]
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There's not much more to say, Tim said at all.
Also, Casprew, get you pool water.
We got like Casprew coffee concentrate.
Go get that.
Just do that.
Anyway, let's get into the first story.
Beautiful, beautiful story here from NBC News.
Things are getting wacky and wild over at NASA.
Take a look at this.
My good, what the crap just happened to my thing?
A lot going on.
Oh no, it just looks like that.
Okay, anyway, I don't even know anymore.
Let's see, stretch that over.
Oh, yeah, look at that.
Oh, look at this from NBC News.
NASA to spend 20 billion buckaroos to build a base on the moon.
This actually has some geopolitical implications.
Believe it or not, this isn't just, you know, NASA going for a joyride up to the moon.
Well, we'll read here.
We'll read what NBC News had to say.
These Yahoos over at NBC.
The agency is canceling plans to deploy a space station in lunar orbit and will instead use its components to construct the base.
NASA chief Jared Isaacman announced Tuesday.
We'll read here from NBC News.
NASA is canceling plans to deploy a space station in lunar orbit and will instead use its components to construct a $20 billion base on the moon's surface over the next seven years.
It's new chief Jared Isaacman said on Tuesday.
Isaacman, who was sworn in at the agency in December, made the announcement at the opening of a day-long event at NASA's Washington headquarters, at which he outlined a raft of changes he is making to the agency's flagship moon program, Artemis.
It should really not surprise anyone that we are pausing Gateway in its current form and focusing on infrastructure that supports sustained operations on the lunar surface.
Isaacman told delegates at the event.
The lunar gateway station, largely already built with contractors Northrop Grumman and Vantor, formerly Maxar, well, that sounds evil, was meant to be a space station parked in lunar orbit.
Boring.
Repurposing the craft for a lunar surface base is not simple.
All right, here comes the complainers, you know, telling you why we can't do something cool.
Let's see what the lab coats had to say.
Despite some of the very real hardware and schedule challenges, we can repurpose equipment and international partner commitments to support surface and other program objectives, Isaacman said.
Lunar Gateway was designed to serve as both a research platform and a transfer station that astronauts would use to board the moon landers before descending to the lunar surface.
The changes imposed by Isaacman on the flagship U.S. moon program in recent weeks are reshaping billions of dollars worth of contracts under the Artemis effort.
That is sending companies scrambling to accommodate the extra urgency as China makes progress towards its own 2030 moon landing.
You can see why there's geopolitical implications here.
So this is real.
This is kind of happening under the nose.
You know, I have some limited connections.
I'm not really into deep with a lot of like the Bay Area, you know, tech bros.
I have a good buddy of mine who's really plugged into those high-level circles.
And he has said that this is really like an obsession of the tech bro sphere, for lack of a better word.
They're obsessed with like AI and population decline.
We talked about it yesterday with Rudyard.
But this is another fixation of theirs is the moon stuff, the space race, so to speak.
And they have said, along with AI, every one of these guys in the tech space has said the same thing is they're saying, we are in a race with China, whether it's AI, whether it's military technology, whether it's space.
We are, at the high level of the U.S. government, they are thinking in terms of competition.
They are thinking in terms of we need to beat China to all of these, you know, all of these milestones.
Granted, China going to the moon is really not a big deal.
We did that like 70 years ago, so who cares?
Been there, done that.
You know, take a good look at our flag while you're up there.
Although I've heard that with all the radiation that the moon, you know, is exposed to, because they don't have a strong force field like the Earth, that our flag is white.
It's not white.
It's just a big white flag.
But, you know, I digress.
Our flag's up there.
Also, an aside, it's the gayest thing.
Sorry to you in the crowd.
I know we have a lot of people who dabble in conspiracy theories.
And I dabble in conspiracy theories.
I mean, hello, I was on forums, you know, like discussing Agartha, you know, 10 years ago before it was in vogue.
I've always been a bit of a schizophrenic.
But the moon landing happened.
I'm sorry, the moon landing happened.
Look, that's going to piss a lot of you guys off in the crowd.
You're probably just infuriated in chat right now.
But I need all the chatter.
I need every chatter, every patriot in chat to hop on their head and kick them out of the stream.
Just own them in the chat right now because the moon landing is the single, in my opinion, the greatest moment of the United States.
We've had some good moments, you know, triumphing in the world wars, winning our revolution, winning the revolution, framing the Constitution, the greatest legal document in human history.
You go through it.
I mean, we have a lot of dubs, right?
You know, the miracle on ice.
But to me, the moon landing really says it all because that really just epitomizes what we're all about.
And, you know, the United States accurately understood, really is the conclusion, the ultimate conclusion of this larger story of mankind in a lot of ways.
You know, we could get really nerdy and avant-garde about it.
In my opinion, the United States really is the culmination of like the story of the Anglo, where I believe that when these men came and settled this land, right, this untamed wilderness, that was really, we took the mantle of the Anglo and brought it to the new world.
Thomas Jefferson was keen.
You know, everyone, you know, everyone in colonial America kind of understood this.
What Thomas Jefferson really understood this is that the Norman yoke that was imposed on England following the Norman conquest really stripped away a lot of core components, a lot of these ideas that really define the Anglo-Saxon, that really epitomized Anglo-Saxon society in our history and our lineage and our heritage, et cetera, et cetera.
And that the new world, when we came to America, that was sort of our way of bucking that Norman yoke.
That's exactly what happened.
And a lot of people understood this at the time in colonial America.
Thomas Jefferson was very aware of this.
And that Norman yoke sort of imposed a lot of these, you know, limits on freedom, limits on vitality, limits on just humanity and mankind, et cetera, et cetera.
You know, I'm just saying, you buck the Norman yoke, you start looking towards the stars.
And that really, so all this to say, you know, this long story, I think America's history goes back, you know, thousands of years.
When I read about Anglo-Saxon history, I see that as American history.
It stretches all the way back.
You know, that's just the reality of the situation.
When I go to the British Museum in London and I go to the Anglo-Saxon exhibit and I see, you know, I'm reading about all of these major events, all these kings, you know, these chiefs and that sort of thing.
I see that as my ancestry as an American, as sort of a heritage American, so to speak.
And I know a lot of you in the crowd share the same history.
We all came off these boats.
All this to say, Norman yoke bucked.
We start looking towards the stars.
We look at the moon and we say, why aren't we there?
You know, we went from coast to coast.
You know, the founders, you know, John Jacob Astor, you know, he pludges, he trudges forward into the wilderness and establishes a port on the west coast when it was just mysterious and disturbing and it was just scary, you know, what was out there, what was beyond.
And he just plows through the wilderness and establishes a city on the west coast, Astoria, Oregon.
And then we just settle it.
We settle it.
We win wars, we make some deals, cut some purchases, strike some deals with the British.
Now we're coast to coast.
The wilderness has been tamed, right?
The frontier is no longer a frontier.
We secure Alaska, you know, we secure Hawaii.
We're looking beyond.
We're saying we're really taming everything and we're running out of frontier.
So what do these men do, these great men with this, probably the most fantastic history and heritage in the world?
They look towards the stars and they say, why aren't we out of, you know, we ran out of land to conquer.
We've conquered all our enemies, the world wars, we're top dogs.
If you go back, you know, and you go and read who at the time had the biggest problem with the moon landing, it was mostly like the ancestors of the BLM movement, right?
It was like that civil rights movement.
They had the biggest problem with the moon landing.
They had signs.
They were like, we have all this money to send men to the moon, but we can't like pay black people.
That was their biggest problem.
If you go back, again, the precursor to BLM, that movement, that leftist movement, that was the people that had the biggest problem with the moon landing.
And those were the ones at the time that were saying, this was all fake anyway.
Communist sympathizers, Soviet sympathizers, they had a big problem with it.
They were saying it was fake.
You know who said it wasn't fake?
You know who was like, oh, they got us?
The Soviets.
Soviets were like, that was real.
That happened.
And we got owned, you know, because they were like launching monkeys and dogs in the space.
Who cares?
We went to the moon.
All this to say, we should go back.
I think we should go back.
I think we should go back to the moon.
I think it's a brilliant idea.
And we should take it.
We should just take the moon.
We took Venezuela, Greenland, still up in the air, but we've taken a lot of it.
She was then radically born again, committed to church, evangelized constantly, Puritan books in her bedroom, prayer journals, grief over past sexual sin, etc.
We got to know each other for well over a year, dated for four months, engaged for two and a half, and didn't sin sexually with one another.
Our first kiss was with each other at the altar on our wedding day.
Again, no one knows who this guy is.
No one knows who this guy is.
And he's just, oh, it's getting me like, I'm allergic to this, I think.
No one, he just starts spilling his guts, like right on the timeline for everyone to see.
We've been married for over five years now, and she's been the best and most wonderful and godly wife, mother of three children, and homemaker you could possibly imagine.
Great, that's great.
That's excellent.
I'm so happy for you.
What is going on?
You know, maybe we should bring back the decorum.
Maybe we should bring back the idea that we shouldn't know everything about each other.
This is kind of the worst thing about social media: people just feel like they need to spill their guts all the time for no reason whatsoever.
I'll just keep reading here, and then I'll give you like kind of the Titan thoughts here.
She is more pure than most virgins.
Okay.
A biblical purity has less to do with past sins, though they certainly matter, and more to do with one's current posture of the heart and daily decisions to honor the Lord.
Yes, but that's that's not what that's not what we're discussing.
Like, virgin is just a definition.
Virgin means something.
Virgin is a word with a with a meaning, okay?
You can't just like override that with, um, you know, like I digress.
We'll just keep reading.
We got to power through this.
We're far too quick to forget the story of the woman who was known as a sinner, likely a prostitute in Luke 7, 36 through 50, who was washing Jesus' feet with her tears while kissing them too.
The Pharisees were shocked that Jesus let a public sinner do this.
Jesus responded with a parable about debts being forgiven and ended this with a powerful conclusion.
Her many sins have been forgiven.
That's why she loved much.
But the one who is forgiven little loves little.
Everyone seems to highlight the benefits of virginity, and it certainly is a blessing.
But we forget to highlight the benefits of being forgiven much as well.
My wife knows the depths of Jesus' forgiveness much more than most people, enabling her to easily live out a life of passionate love for her Savior.
A woman's or man's past sexual sin matters, correct?
But what matters far more when it comes to deciding who to marry is if the person is truly born again, if the repentance is real, if they truly have a heart for Christ, if they truly follow Jesus and obey his commands.
And then he reads a Bible, a couple Bible verses here.
Let me just start with this because everyone's missing this point.
I am not questioning her repentance.
Like, it does seem legit.
Like, yeah, that's great.
Like, congratulations.
I mean, that's a lot of people, like, you're not unique in that.
My problem is the post.
My problem is like bragging about all of this.
This is what's so weird.
And this is what I had to say.
And this, you know, people have been, you know, jumping on this, as everyone has, but this is, you know, my post specifically, a lot of people were hopping on and discussing.
I'll just read what I had to say.
Christians have this tendency to post the most humiliating information possible about their spouse completely unprompted and then package it as their testimony and insist it's somehow helping someone.
This is kind of the crux of the issue.
Again, I'm not doubting, you know, her repentance.
And I'm like, congratulations to this guy.
I respect that this man forgives her as well and looks at her accurately as a new creation because I do believe as a Christian, when you become a Christian, when you become born again, you are a new creation.
That's not being disputed.
I guess some people are disputing that.
They're saying like, once a whore, always a whore.
That's ridiculous and wrong.
Like people are able to, again, like turn their life around.
And, you know, there's something to be said about the fact that to his point, you know, some people are downplaying the idea of redemption.
Some people are, you know, dismissing the idea that someone can turn their life around.
And that's wrong.
Like, yes, you can.
That's a great thing.
What everyone has a problem with is this post because it's kind of downstream from this larger idea, which is, it seems like in Christianity, in the Christian church, the society broadly, but it's really penetrated Christianity, is that women are allowed to operate with total impunity and that men continually have like these ridiculous standards.
And that if men, you know, single men expect high standards of a woman, you know, they have standards for a woman, really not even high standards, that they're in the wrong.
So the whole juxtaposition here, and I, look, Trevor hasn't really said much beyond this, but one, we should all know less about each other.
We should all know less.
Like, I don't need all this.
I think I can speak for everyone.
I think we've had enough of people talking about their sex lives on social media.
I think that's true.
Because, look, sorry to Trevor here.
I'm just going to say it.
A promiscuous woman getting saved and then getting married, not a unique testimony at all.
That's actually like probably half of them.
It's probably half of them.
You know what the difference is?
Most people don't talk about it.
Most people show a little humility, most women, as they should, and they leave that in the past.
They say, thank God I was saved.
I mean that.
I'm not using that as like the Lord's name of man.
I'm saying, thank God that I was saved.
That's in the past now.
You know, we don't need to talk about that anymore.
Because this is what I mean.
This is the line I need people to hone in on.
They package it as their testimony and insist that it's somehow helping someone.
Who is this helping?
That's my question.
Is this helping a woman that is in a similar position that had a promiscuous past and has been saved?
I think they know.
I think there's better ways to communicate God's saving grace beyond this.
Because all this really does in practice, all this post really does in practice is demoralize men.
Because it's this specific line here that I really hate.
This is where I think Trevor went off the rails.
She's more pure than most virgins.
No, no, she's not, actually.
Maybe she's more edified, I suppose.
I'm sure there's, no, it's just true.
There are virgins out there that are not Christians.
That's true.
But all this line does is punish people that have done everything correctly.
It punishes women who, and men, by extension, who are obedient to God and they have a fleed from sexual sin.
What's the point?
Why even avoid sex?
This is what the message is to young women.
The message from this post to young women isn't, hey, if you had this rough past, you can be redeemed.
That's not what the message is here.
The message is you can have a rough past.
You can have that phase and you get saved and then it doesn't matter, right?
Because you could be more pure than most virgins.
So you could have your fun and then end up more pure than most virgins.
It's just insulting.
So Brittany Hugoboom, I think that's how you pronounce her last name.
She's the founder of EV Magazine.
She had a long post here.
I just get calls all the time from people that I don't have their phone numbers saved.
I'm not picking up a phone call if I don't have your number saved.
I'm sorry.
Anyway, she was very on point here with her analysis.
And this is the founder of a women's magazine.
So this isn't like right-wing chuds, you know, incels slamming this woman.
This is something beyond.
One second, let me correspond with our guest.
So we do it live.
It's what she had to say.
If you talk to any boy between the ages of 18 to 22, he'll likely tell you that he's frustrated with dating because it seems like every girl is on OnlyFans or sleeping around.
Then he opens a social media app, and the first thing he sees is some guy happy because he waited while his wife slept around, but it's okay because she found Jesus.
So the average young boy is reading it frustrated because it sounds like this guy is a cuck.
And if he follows this path, he too will end up with a reformed hoe.
Marriage needs a better marketing campaign.
Many people have never seen a powerful marriage in real life.
Everyone dreams of love and romance and feels like it's no longer achievable in this age.
Additionally, good girls also feel prodigal-sonned when they see posts like these because when a girl does bad things and quote sees the light, she still keeps all the OnlyFans money and gets speaking engagements, fame, and a guy is simping over her anyway.
Not saying people can't change, but these posts don't inspire the ones who need inspiration.
They just end up pissing off the guys and girls they're trying to date.
And this is the point.
This post isn't helping young women that are like reformed or whatever.
This is just demoralizing young men, primarily, but also young women.
There's a lot of young women out there that are trying to do the right thing, that are trying to stay pure, and they can't seem to find a good man.
I know them personally.
It's very frustrating for them.
And then they see this.
And it really is just, it's, it's, it's just a slap in the face, quite frankly.
Ryan Hurst, PCA, fantastic here, he says, pressuring young adults to view those with a sexually promiscuous past as being on the same level as those who have remained chaste their whole life is a pretty wicked thing to do, actually, I think.
So, absolutely is the case here.
So, I think what we'll do, we'll just go ahead and grab Joshua.
There's a lot of tweets I could get into, but I think we'll go ahead and grab Joshua because he, we're going to discuss this together.
We're going to walk through this together and I'm going to see what his thoughts are because this is just this really is there's a reason why this story has resonated with so many people.
Well, the reason I wanted to bring you on is because the commentary that you're providing on the story, I think, was completely on point.
And you're really kind of getting to the root of it.
Because I think a lot of guys are getting a little sidetracked.
And I'm not going to be like, you know, pearl grabbing over this, but some people are like doubting that, you know, someone can turn their lives around.
And I think that's a bit ridiculous, but that's not really what we're debating.
I think the majority of people here are dialing in on the specific rhetoric here, which is twofold, which is one, the idea that he proposed, which is that she is somehow more pure than virgins.
Because all that does is just exonerate, you know, anybody with the promiscuous past, because what's the point of waiting when you can just get saved and then it's all by the wayside.
It basically, what I'm saying is it dismisses any possible consequences that there could be of sin.
So we're saying it's great that you're forgiven, and that's fantastic.
Praise God.
But there are consequences to sin.
And that's clearly illustrated in the Bible.
That's one.
And then two, the post in and of itself, at least from my calculation, only functionally demoralizes young men and also young women, but primarily young men, because the whole pitch to young men is you need to go to church, you can get your life together, et cetera, et cetera.
But it feels like there's two different sets of standards for young men and young women.
And most of the people that are upset at the response to this post seem to have more of a problem with the young men that would want a wife that is, you know, like following Christ and again doesn't have a lot of baggage.
They have more of a problem with those men than the actual women that are engaging in this promiscuous behavior.
Josh, I was wondering what your take is on all of this.
Yes, so for the uninitiated, if somehow you're unfamiliar with the mega viral post from yesterday, which I think it has almost 30 million views at this point, posted on X, Trevor Sheets posts this long screed about his wife, Ashley.
I think the appropriate word is screed here, in which he, I would say, he almost fetishizes his own virginity prior to being married to the point of not even kissing his wife until literally the altar having said, I do.
And then his wife has this past as basically a yoga teacher, yogini, rave, party chick with dreadlocks and septum piercings and drugs, and having said that she has been with so many men, she doesn't even know what her own count is anymore.
The issue that seems to be in causing so much backlash, and if you're going to allow us to make your marriage a laughing stock, we are going to laugh.
I don't know what else to tell you.
But coming back to Trevor's post, one of the reasons that it was so irksome for so many is that he explicitly said that his wife, who has this illustrious past as man's best friend, that she is more pure than a virgin.
More pure than a virgin.
And then two things happened.
Number one, those of us who are a little bit more street smart on these matters of male-female relations, we sort of feel very, very, very, very bad for this gentleman here who, by his own admission, got literally zero action, okay, whatsoever, marrying this woman who has, let's say, an extremely non-looks-matched past, okay, for him.
So this is a very imbalanced relationship right here.
One who is very, extremely experienced and one who is on the opposite end.
So we have an unequal yoking right there.
That was the first observation that younger gentlemen are observing, such as myself.
And then the other aspect of it is how quickly evangelical and other Christian denominations, pastors, preachers, ministers, counselors, evangelists, and just overall body of Christ, let's say, came to rush to her defense.
Well, Rahab was a prostitute, literally a pagan.
She's an ancestor of Jesus.
And of course, well, Hosea, we meant to marry the prophet Gomer.
Are you saying that he wasn't supposed, are you saying that God's wrong?
And there's this sort of admission when you begin to converse with some of these Christians who are rushing to her defense.
They will say things like, well, I don't remember how many men I slept with either.
You saying I'm not a Christian?
To which we go, why are you telling us that in public?
Why are you airing a dirty laundry?
And others will even say, well, I used to produce literally pornography and I'm born again.
So if you don't think I'm just as perfect and holy and sanctified and redeemed as someone who has literally been a good little church girl her entire life, you must be a porn addict, sir.
And we go, why, again, are you telling us all this?
And then this reveals to us, oh, so many Christian women are rushing to Ashley's defense because they have a past just like hers and they don't want to feel guilty or ashamed about it.
Now, here's the thing: I do not believe in shaming this kind of behavior.
I do believe, however, in shaming those who will say things such as, my wife has slept with way more men than yours, therefore she's holier.
I mean, that's real, it comes off as like bragging almost.
And this is, this is why I made this post.
I think you might have might have seen it where I was basically saying there's this tendency among Christians, and I will concede as a Protestant that it's like almost uniquely evangelical problem, really like in that kind of non-denominational world, where they've kind of conflated testimony with airing dirty laundry.
Because the whole point of a testimony is it's supposed to really illustrate this dramatic redemption, right?
This dramatic, like, this is how I used to be, and this is what I've turned into.
But let's like, let's differentiate this.
One, a testimony is usually prompted.
Usually that's like in a conversation, like we're having a conversation.
I say, Josh, like, you know, how did you come to know Christ?
And then maybe you can explain like, you know, some of the, where you came from and like some of the things that you had to overcome and that Christ delivered you from.
And it's this really beautiful thing.
Typically, it's like in a one-on-one situation or perhaps at a church where like the pretense is, you know, someone gives up, you know, comes up and gives their testimony.
And it can be a quite beautiful thing.
It could be useful.
And then that's the second part of a testimony is it needs to be useful.
It needs to be like make sense practically.
Like it needs to be kind of obvious that this will lead someone that's in that similar situation to say, oh, I could also be redeemed in Christ.
I should, you know, follow this person's example of how to get out of this situation.
This post does neither of those things is one, it's completely unprompted.
Like literally no one had ever heard of this guy.
And then he makes his intro to the world by saying, hey, how you doing?
Soy face, like bulging eyes, mouth wide open, like Trevor is Trevor Sheets is making in this particular wedding photo that he shared.
That together with any type of the woman demonstrating possessiveness or ownership over her man.
In this case, she's got her basically claw-like fingernails out and she's grabbing his face.
Rivolino's joke is something like, if she grabs your face, you're now disgraced.
There's also photos of the two of them where he's leaning towards her in the photo and she's like leaning away from him as if to sort of like telegraph a lack of attraction to him.
And it's sort of like, okay, she's gotten her parachute out of her former life and this poor gentleman is none the wiser.
Allegations of closeted homosexuality, humiliation kink, all of these things are being drummed up and there's absolutely no reason to have done any of this to yourself, Trevor Sheets.
Because that's to the first, it's just completely unprompted.
And then the second point, it's just not useful because, and we'll get into it, is the only practical result of a post like this is it's demoralizing to young men.
It really is just demoralizing to young men.
And also, I'll say it like to young women that are like, you know, obedient to Christ and that are sort of trying to do the right thing, so to speak, is they see this and they go, so if I commit a life to chaste, like I want to be chaste, I want to wait for the right person.
There's no guarantee and then that I'll meet someone that has that same standard.
And if I want that, if I want my wife to also be someone that preserved herself for me, somehow I'm in the wrong.
Somehow I'm an evil person and somehow I'm an inferior Christian who doubts the saving grace of Christ because I say, I also, I don't want a wife that's bringing a lot of baggage into a marriage.
I mean, because we could get into all the data on, you know, why, you know, more sexual partners, you know, put some more tension and more, you know, it makes a marriage less likely to succeed.
We could get into all that, but I don't even think we need to because I think just at its core, a man and also a woman has the right to want a spouse that has the same sort of ethic as them, the same, the same level of standards that they have.
That's what's so mind-blowing to me as a result of this post is if you're a young man seeing that, you're seeing more vicious condemnation and attacks on young men than on women who engage in this promiscuous behavior.
And to Trevor, I mean, to Trevor's credit, I mean, we can get into all the reasons why this was like almost like kind of cuck feeling, but he didn't actually say you don't have the right to want a virgin wife.
He never said that.
That's what these people that are rushing to this woman's defense are like going over the target, so to speak.
And they're like, no, you're actually doubting the saving grace of Christ.
If you, again, want to have a wife that matches your level of experience.
And I think that that's probably, in terms of creating practical advice out of this, having a similarly experienced spouse is probably for the best.
And that likely goes into other categories of life, level of experience in terms of education attainment, your income, as opposed to this sort of imbalance or this unequal yoking.
Perhaps someone has been literally an evangelical their entire life, whereas their spouse has been a Christian for five minutes.
There's going to be an imbalance there outside of bedroom conversation.
And I think that there's not necessarily anything, again, wrong from a practical perspective.
We're not speaking morally or biologically or marriedly, but not necessarily anything wrong with having had the past that you have had and how you've properly integrated that into your life.
What the issue is, is this sort of taking the prodigal son story where you have the man who lived licentiously, wasted his father's inheritance for him, and then he returns home and he's celebrated with a finest coat and you've got the slaughtering of the fatted calf and whatnot celebrating the prodigal son who has returned.
Whereas the righteous son, the older son, who's lived a perfect life, he is the one who is condemned in the story.
And so this is the problem with thinking and metaphors.
Just generally, this is something that I think the right has, the kind of American Christian conservative right often has an issue with is thinking and metaphors.
Oh, well, this is just like that other situation, which is not at all like that other situation.
The purpose of the parable is the celebration of the one who is lost and returning, like the shepherd leaving the 99 to find the one.
It's we thought this man was dead and now he's actually alive.
So we're happy about that.
As opposed to this situation where, oh, she's literally the prodigal son.
So we should celebrate her more.
And all of the good little church girls who have been chased and holy and pure and virgins their entire lives never kissed any boys.
They're basically not to be celebrated.
They're not special.
In fact, you're less holy.
You're less celebration worthy.
And it's that thinking and metaphor that I think the right tends to do across other issues, not just with sexual morality, but with other issues as well.
This situation is just like that.
So we should respond the same way.
And no, it's kind of not.
And here's a semi-offensive metaphor that, again, if we're thinking in metaphor, we can just pick out our own metaphor.
Does one does one buy a car before test driving it?
Are we now then to say, fellas, those of you who are single, the best place for you to find a good wife is at church.
And to reference another story, the men that I'm talking to who are under 30, they were already terrified of the prospect of getting, shall we say, Sarah stalked, where you're waiting for a marriage with someone who's equally yoked in their virginity with you.
Turns out that's literally not what's happening at all.
And you have been this made this massive humiliated fool of yourself.
We already had that concern before.
And now there's this.
Actually, it's public.
And she's with however many men prior.
And you were the one little, you know, little good, good little boy, little virgin, nice provider.
And she refers to her husband, Trevor, actually does as a servant leader, servant like cleanup crew.
So this is what I like to call anti-persuasion, where the more the Rahab Americans promote this sort of behavior, the less and less interested in actually going to church young men are.
And these are the conversations that I'm hearing.
And now the joke is that the girls you meet at the bar across from the sorority house have a lower body count than your average church girl.
And I mean, to your point, you know, I had some people pushing back on their posts and they're like, yeah, but what if this helps like a young girl?
And I'm like, the chances of this helping a young girl who's like caught in sort of this lifestyle is far lower than the chances, really, the reality that this is going to demoralize thousands of young men that are seeing this post who, like, to your point, are already kind of down and they're kind of, you know, bearish on this whole church thing.
You know, they're not Christian.
This is really just going to like re-emphasize what their concerns are with church and with the way that the church approaches sexuality and sorts of things.
A broader point is, I think this post really gets at the problem with the evangelical bubble.
And this is why you're seeing some evangelicals responding to the discourse around this, like puzzled.
Why are these people not just accepting her born-again story at face value?
It's like because in the evangelical circles, the norm actually is to wait.
And I'll say, like, I grew up in the Southern Baptist Convention and these sorts of things.
It actually is quite normal.
Like we have the purity culture and that sort of thing.
And I think it's a great thing.
I think it's a beautiful thing, quite frankly.
And I think that is why you do see evangelical performance.
They do perform quite well.
And they do actually have happy marriages, generally speaking.
So that's why they're kind of puzzled at this response because they're so out of touch.
They don't understand what the reality is on the ground for young men.
I mean, the Sarah Stock obviously is a great example.
Is they're downplaying the idea that you should be ashamed of your sin.
It's like, okay, that's great that it's redeemed, but you can still and you should look back and say, I'm so upset that I did this, that I, you know, put stress on our marriage, that, you know, this gentleman's going to have moments of doubt.
Quite frankly, that's just the reality.
I mean, you can speak to men that are in a similar situation.
They do, if they're frank with you, have moments where they doubt themselves and they say, well, she chose hundreds of men, you know, or at least dozens of men before me.
What makes me so special?
That's just the fact.
You don't want to do that to your spouse one day.
That's a really horrible, horrible thing.
And so that's why I think you're seeing so much bewilderment from these evangelicals is they're just in this bubble, in this chastity bubble.
They don't realize that this testimony is actually not unique at all.
This testimony isn't actually exceptional at all.
This is like the vast majority of women.
Again, comparing it to Rahab, Rahab is this exceptional story.
That's why it was outlined in the Bible, you know, of a prostitute being redeemed.
That's a really beautiful thing.
These women aren't prostitutes pulled from the brink.
These are women that literally just did what society expects of women, which is they sleep around a lot.
There's nothing really that remarkable about walking away from that past.
And when you are redeemed, you know, if you are able to get out of that, thank God, show some humility and leave it in the past, right?
Instead of kind of throwing this in men's faces and say, if you don't accept this, if you aren't crying tears of joy at the thought of this story, then you're actually less of a Christian than Trevor and his wife.
And it's just really kind of disturbing and I would say a bit wicked, quite frankly.
And you don't take them off the sex offender registry, too.
That's the problem with the sort of born-again mindset.
You say the sinner's prayer and the consequences go away.
And I pointed out to one of the evangelicals, it was a priest actually in my mentions.
I said, redemption doesn't mean you get off without consequences.
And he said, yes, it does.
That's what the Bible says.
And I'm reminded of another fellow hypnotist named Jason Andrews on X.
He said, women who don't understand this, particularly evangelicals, imagine you have a man who is convicted of beating a woman, multiple women, and then now he's a Christian.
But as human beings, we still have to make calculations based off of data.
That's just the reality of the situation.
And like this, it's quite frankly, it's LARPing.
And this is really what infuriates me about the right, broadly speaking, is LARPing.
That's what's going on here is this is LARPing.
It's like, I am not, neither you nor me, nor most people involved in this discourse are doubting that she is right with Christ.
You know, if we're taking their word at face value, I mean, again, there's, you know, auxiliary information that people are collecting.
But I'm just saying, taking this post at Facebook, not doubting that she's right with Christ, not doubting that that ledger, that cosmic ledger has been cleaned and that she's a new creation, not doubting that.
I'm saying as human beings, when we are approaching a woman that has this promiscuous past, we have the right as men to say, I don't prefer that.
And then we are the ones maybe who are shamed for having any type of doubt.
Hmm, I don't know if you would make the most faithful spouse in the world, given that you demonstrated the lack of that prior.
And there is a rather crass, we'll call it a not safe for work adult meme depicting what looks to be a prostitute with a line of nude men before her who are all kind of in line for her, so to speak, access to her.
And right in the middle is a man in a beautiful blue suit with flowers and chocolates for her.
And what we collectively, men, I'm 34, men under 40, I would say, men under 30, in many cases, even more so, are mortified about being the one idiot in the blue suit with the chocolates.
And everyone who came before her basically got for free.
Why should I have to pay for what you gave up to dozens or more for free?
It doesn't make any sense.
It's analogously speaking, paying new car pricing for a used car.
That's what they're quite literally using left-wing talking points.
And beyond that, like when you become a born-again Christian, right?
You know, I'm speaking as a Protestant, you know, you're still going to carry those struggles.
And you're a new creation, but that's just the reality.
Like, ask anybody that's kicked a drug addiction and got saved.
Like, they still carry those struggles into a marriage or into their new life.
If someone is, let's just say a body count of 10, let's just say hypothetically, if they're willing to break that marriage pact 10 times, that's an indication that it's a little more likely that they're going to break it again, right?
If they've broken it zero times, that's a pretty safe bet.
But if they've broken it 10 times, you have the right, again, as a man to say, I'm a little more hesitant to dive all in.
Like, again, it's like, that's fantastic.
And I see them as a sister in Christ.
That's great.
But just, again, making a decision.
This is my life.
I have one life.
I got to get this right.
Marriage is the one thing.
There's no room for error.
There's zero.
Pretty much everything else in life, you can get it wrong and get out of it.
A bad marriage destroys your life.
And so, again, maybe we should show a little grace to the men who are thrusted into this horrible dating situation.
The dating world is a train wreck right now, as a meat grinder.
Maybe we can show a little grace to these men who are a little hesitant to jump all in with two feet on this and also acknowledge the fact that shame is a very real thing and that men do feel shamed.
We shouldn't downplay that.
That's actually a really horrible burden for a man to carry, is the feeling of shame.
Now, that's if she has a certain number, a certain amount of experience, and he was the good little Christian now provider, kind of beta male who has to follow her standards.
And not tonight, honey, I'm tired.
I have a headache.
He's the good little Christian who obeys his wife, let's see.
And she's kind of wearing the pants of the family.
And he effectively is in submission to her.
That's just the reality of the experience.
It's a power imbalance.
It's a power dynamic.
It's inverted.
It's truly a feminist relationship.
I would say a second wave feminist relationship specifically, where women are better at everything than men, but they're also equal to men.
It's a sort of strange slate of hand that happened in the 60s and 70s, kind of the pantsuit generation of baby boomer feminists.
That dynamic has been brought into the church, specifically with this experience dynamic, where it's just okay for the man to be humiliated and he should just suck it up.
And she should just be celebrated for what she is.
And now I'm thinking of the ex-allegedly ex-pornographer, Nala Ray, and how she has been, after having been basically a digital prostitute in many ways, shapes, and forms, was then immediately upon a purported conversion, elevated and became this featured speaker everywhere at all these various conservative Christian conferences and then released courses and consulting and all this sort of grifting,
one might say, from her redemption.
And what does that tell a generation of OnlyFans girls and otherwise those who have literally engaged in the sex trade willingly without any necessity, let's say, in many cases, or have lived this licentious lifestyle?
What does that tell them?
I can go from literally the most anti-Christian behavior to being like a super Christian, and it costs me nothing.
And I mean, I wish we had more than half an hour here because we could get into sort of the longhousing that's happening in the American church right now because it's so feminized that, again, the standards for men are sky high.
I mean, I guess to tighten things, I guess in this situation, I'm using it as a synonym for whipped to some extent where the woman completely dominates the relationship and the man because really the only thing he really desperately needs is like sexual gratification is he's just subservient to this woman because she can cut that off at any time and he has no recourse.
Obviously, there's a whole meaning to like behind Longhouse originated by Bronze Age Pervert, but I guess whipped would have been a more appropriate word to use in this situation.
But it's a grim, grim situation out there.
I wish we had a lot more time to get into this.
We're running out of time here.
But Josh, I wonder if you had any final thoughts and where people could find you.
I am at Joshua Lysik on X and I regularly analyze the news from not just a persuasion lens, but more so through anti-persuasion and seeing how that is getting carried out in business, politics, and life.
I have a show called Daily Persuasion over on YouTube and elsewhere.
But my last thought is what this entire story needs, very simply, is honesty.
Honest about your experiences, honest about your standards, honest about what you're looking for.
And if someone doesn't match what you're looking for, that's okay.
Just move along.
Scarcity mindset in both men and women is devastating.
And that ends in people like Trevor, in my opinion, settling on women like Ashley.
And unfortunately, because of how, like I said, how rough things are getting out there, a lot of people do perceive scarcity.
They do perceive themselves as they should just take what they can get.
And because marriage is so rare now, sadly, and there is good men and good women are having a lot of trouble finding each other, is as soon as they find sort of those components that you would expect to find in a spouse, just a few of them, they jump all in and you're really seeing some disastrous situations.