#1026: Tucker, The Man And His Utopia

Red alert, red alert, red alert, red alert, red alert, red alert, red alert, red alert, red alert.

Knowledge fight.

Dan and Jordan, I am sweating.

Knowledgefight.com.

It's time to pray.

I have great respect for knowledge fight.

Knowledge fight.

I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys, saying we are the bad guys.

Knowledge my fight.

Dan and Jordan.

Knowledge fight.

I need money.

Andy in Kansas.

Andy and Kansy.

Stop it.

Andy in Kansas.

Andy in Kansas.

It's time to pray.

Andy in Kansas, you're on the air.

Thanks for holding us.

Hello, Alex.

I'm a fifth ten colour.

I'm a huge fan.

I love your room.

Knowledge fight.

Knowledgefight.com.

I love you.

Hey, everybody.

Welcome back to Knowledge Fight.

I'm Dan.

I'm Jordan.

We're a couple dudes.

Like to sit around, worship at the altar of Celine, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones.

Oh, indeed we are, Dan.

Jordan.

Dan.

Jordan.

Quick question for you.

What's up?

What's your bright spot today, buddy?

My bright spot, Jordan, is we were talking off-air the other day about how

I have not felt grabbed by a video game in a bit.

Like, I enjoyed Assassin's Creed for a bit, but then it became a little bit of like, it's a little drudgery.

Sure.

Kind of the same.

A lot of stuff.

Totally get it.

I fucked around and tried out this game called The Blue Prince.

Okay.

And, man, it got its hooks.

It's got its hooks in me, but bad.

What's it do?

I don't even want to explain much because there's a lot of mystery involved in

a lot of exploration and puzzle.

First person?

Yeah.

It's hit me in a way that a game hasn't, like, it's scratched a mist type itch.

Okay.

And, like, that's a deep itch.

That is a deep itch.

That's way down.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That'll get its hooks in you.

Yeah.

And so I really enjoyed it.

Yeah.

It's a lot of fun.

Nice.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

I beat it.

Yeah.

And I still am going to keep playing it because there's still more stuff to uncover.

Of course.

And what have you, and that's, you know, that's great.

That's fantastic.

I enjoy it.

That's fantastic.

What's your bright spot?

My bright spot is actually also video game related.

Okay.

I finished Assassin's Creed.

Congratulations.

Beat it.

I put a lot more time into it than you did.

And I really kind of took my time going through all the nooks and crannies.

Sure.

And then I did what I do with those types of games.

I was like, oh, well, okay, I'll beat the main storyline.

I know there's more stuff, but right now I feel like now's a good time to beat the main storyline.

And then I beat it, and then I just, I'm done.

It was like, it was amazing how, how, like, the ending wasn't that great.

And then I was just like, I never need to open this again.

It happened in an instant.

Yeah, I think

a lot of games like that, you end up, it's just like, I got to clean up some stuff if I want to.

Yeah.

But once, yeah, the main quest's over, it's like,

I did it.

I'm happy for you.

I'm happy to be done with it.

How, without giving away too much, I guess, how was the end?

Was it satisfying?

It was, it was,

I would say that from a story telling standpoint, it was very lazy and terrible.

Oh.

Uh, but it's very satisfying to kill slave owners.

Sure.

It's hard not to argue with that, right?

Yeah.

How much, how much of that unsatisfying end of the story do you think has to do with, like, choice?

Because there, there are some branchingness.

There are.

There's some branched paths and stuff.

Nothing.

None that you cannot influence what I'm talking about.

Specifically.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's a lot of really interesting things that you can influence.

I mean, we've seen some differences.

There's all that stuff.

But yeah, as far as I'm aware, the ending that is

influenced by

storytelling.

Yeah.

Oh, no.

Oh, well.

What are you going to do?

Assassin's Green.

Check out Blue Prince.

Exactly.

It's good.

That's my next plan.

So, Jordan, today we have an episode to go over.

All right.

And I went a little bit off of what my expectations were

on this episode.

I called a little bit of a late Audible, and I have another Tucker episode going on.

Oh, God.

Oh, no.

It's Tucker Week.

Oh, no.

I,

yeah, whatever.

Tucker Hewitt Edward Carlson.

Yes.

D.

Hewitt Everett Carlson.

Yeah, he sucks.

And I just started listening to some more episodes of his show.

Great.

And I'm like,

this is...

We got to talk about this.

Why not?

So we're going to talk about him

hanging out with a Christian nationalist preacher.

Fun.

And we'll get down to that in a minute.

But first, let's say hello to some new wonks.

Ooh, that's a great idea.

So first, my pet rats definitely love it when I shout, rat alert.

Thank you so much.

You're now a policy wonk.

I'm a policy wonk.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Next, if you've been in an accident where the intro to a Wesley Willis song turned out to be the Macarena, you may be entitled to compensation.

Thank you so much.

You're now a policy wonk.

I'm a policy wonk.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

And I'm a policy wonk.

You are now a policy wonk.

I'm a policy wonk.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

And we got a technical credit in the mix, Jordan.

So thank you so much to Buttons Arrived on My Birthday and Overshadowed

My Partner's Lego gift.

Thank you so much, Jordan.

I would talk to Craddock.

I'm a policy wonk.

Four stars.

Go honk your mother and tell her you're brilliant.

Someone sodomite sent me a bucket of poop.

Daddy Sharp.

Jar Jar Binks has a Caribbean black accent.

He's a loser,

little kitty baby.

I don't want to hate black people.

I renounce Jesus Christ.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

Sneaky ass button arrival.

That's brutal.

That's nobody's fault, but I would still be pissed off if I had gotten somebody a really nice Lego set, and then they're like, Look at these buttons.

Fuck you, man.

It's not your fault, but fuck you.

Yeah, those Legos aren't glowing the dark.

No,

no, they're not.

No, no, but you know what?

I went now and I got them for you, and that's why you don't care.

Isn't that it?

Because

I was the one who got them for you.

I spend a lot of time scrolling through Lego sets and staring at them and being like, I don't have anywhere to put that.

I'm not going to get that.

I don't.

Why?

I want to get it.

I want to build it, but I can't.

I feel like that's what some people do with yachts.

Like, they look at yachts that they'll never be able to afford in a million years.

Ah, that one's too small.

For me, it's like, oh, there's a Lego set of the Thanos Infinity Gauntlet.

It's like, I don't know if I've actually even seen that movie.

I don't care, but it looks pretty cool, and I'd like to build it.

Probably will.

So

this guy,

Tucker, Tucker, this fucking guy.

This fucking guy.

Yeah.

He, on April Fool's Day, released an episode like a fucking April Fool.

Right.

Interviewing this guy named Andrew Isker.

Okay.

And he is a Christian nationalist fella

who has some maybe not great opinions about a fair amount of things.

Wow, that'll happen.

And has been in the news a bit recently because he's starting a church in the middle of nowhere.

Okay.

Now I'm listening.

Starting a community,

the church-based community in the middle of nowhere.

I like it.

So, Tucker has him on, I guess, to promote this.

Here's where we start off.

Okay.

So, Andrew, thank you for doing this.

So, you're so controversial.

I love that.

God, I hate that.

Married man with six kids who pays his taxes.

You're so controversial.

Very hard.

Controversial would be not paying your credit card bill and putting the banks out of business, convincing other people to do the same thing.

What are you talking about?

Forcing the U.S.

government to pay attention to its own citizens.

You're doing none of that.

So, So, as far as I'm concerned, you're a non-controversial law-abiding man, but you are doing one thing that's pretty wild, which is participating in the building of a new town.

It sounds almost like a Christian utopian experiment in Tennessee, but I don't really know.

Can you tell me what it is and why you're doing it?

Yeah, so it's

not quite that.

It's not the Oneida community.

Yeah, yeah, we're not building some kind of Anabaptist community.

Okay, you're not the Shakers.

No.

Cold open.

Getting used to that, that's a lot of fun.

So I was listening to this.

I'm like, this is crazy.

As

a premise, an introduction,

I guess if you want to go and start a church in the middle of nowhere.

Good luck.

That's Utah.

That's why we have Utah, so go for it.

It just seems a little strange that this rises to the level of Tucker Carlson Show guests.

I mean,

it really is wild because the first thing I can think of is just being like, all right, we have Joseph Smith, and he's got some really interesting ideas about these tablets he has, and he's moving into the woods.

I don't know why you're so controversial.

Yeah, but it seems crazy.

You found him in the woods.

We're going to move to the woods, and that's it.

I don't know why everybody's mad.

Yeah.

People are just all

these leftists.

What they need to do is pay their taxes.

Or pay their credit card bills.

Or not.

Yeah.

So

Tucker.

Oh, called him Alex.

Tucker plays this game when he introduces guests sometimes, like this guy, Andrew Isker.

I don't know why this guy is so controversial.

What are people even thinking?

He's just a guy trying to create a fundamentalist religious separatist community.

It's not like he didn't pay his credit card bill or something.

Sure.

It's a fun game that he plays where he takes a criticism that someone he's interviewing has received and then he acts incredulous about it before moving on and pretending that that point has been invalidated.

He does this because he knows that if he were to dip into the specific reasons people think Andrew is a bit controversial, it'd be a little harder to defend.

Andrew is an open Christian nationalist and is very opposed to things like universal rights and the democratic system.

Like most religious extremists, Andrew is fully aware that given a choice, very few people would actually want to live in the rigid, religiously doctrinaire world that he wants to create.

He knows that his side would never be able to get their way through popular support, and I'm certain that he knows this because he said exactly that that on an episode of his podcast from 2023.

We don't have political power.

That's the thing.

I saw after Tuesday, there were all sorts of guys who were like, how many elections of Christian nationalists won?

Like, what are they going to win anything?

I don't care about Christian nationalism until they actually accomplish something.

And it's like,

that take

is really stupid.

And

I've seen people say that, and it makes me lose a lot of respect for them and their thinking because it's like the goal is not to like have this electoral majority and try to produce what we want, a Christian America,

through the ballot box.

That's not going to happen.

That's foolish.

And you look at Ohio, right, a red state that overwhelmingly votes to

enshrine.

you know, baby murder in its constitution this last election because America's not there.

They're not ready for it anymore.

They're not ready to baby murder any more than they're ready to have like Sabbath laws.

Right.

So all these things we have to think about in terms of like a conceptual framework.

Right.

Right.

What would it look like when we have political power?

All right.

So you set your eye on the goal and then you backtrack to, okay, how do we get from where we are today, no political power at all, to that?

What steps do you have to take?

What direction do you go?

It's not a question of, oh, here's the blueprint to win elections.

That's stupid.

It's more about

retraining the mind of Christian Americans to

think within this framework rather than think within, well, we're in this secular liberal society, and that's just the way it is.

And

we'll try to have moral Christian candidates in the GOP, and that'll make things better.

Reject that whole kind of thinking and

no,

we want a Christian American one day.

Yeah, so I've listened to a little bit of his show, and I'll say that despite my strong disagreement with Andrew about just about everything, he doesn't really mince words too much, like on the actual show.

Like, that's pretty clear.

Yeah.

He's not making any act about how he wants the U.S.

to be a Christian theocracy, about how people following other religions is heretical, and how this is kind of an ethnic thing.

But he also really doesn't want to talk about that.

Right.

He doesn't want to get into the specifics about the ethnic part.

Odd how that works.

I thought the way that his co-host put it on this same episode of his podcast was pretty cute.

Okay, I agree.

I don't think you can get away from the ethnic aspect of things.

I'm not an ethnic essentialist where someone has to be of a certain ethnicity to have

a full standing in society, so I'm not an essentialist, but I don't think you can get away.

I don't think you can separate it completely.

I think there are relations, coincidences, and correspondences there that we need to talk about.

Okay.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So I felt like that characterized the vibe that I got off these guys.

They're racists and they know it.

Yeah.

They just don't think that being racist is bad.

And they've intellectualized their position enough that I suspect they don't identify their position with bigotry and hatred.

It somehow ascended for them.

I mean What's interesting is that they seem to have weaponized two things.

They've weaponized the slippery slope argument like you can't be like hey it's a slippery slope to listen to this guy because his explicit goal is to slippery slope us into where he wants us to go right so you can't say like it's a slippery slope that's his goal yeah right and then he uh uh i guess

weaponized there are some good ones argument like i'm a i'm an ethnic i'm not an ethnic essentialist which is like see i'm not a racist there are people who only like white people i acknowledge that there's like five or six good black people so there you go i'm not a racist.

It's essential.

They're essentialists.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Listening to their show was that strange kind of experience where it's refreshing on the one hand because they don't hide some of their very objectionable political beliefs, but on the other hand, there is still a similarity to a lot of the other tiptoe bullshit that you hear from these kinds of shows.

I'm not an ethnic essentialist, but there's an ethnic component to my conception of Christian nationalism that you can't escape is a ridiculous statement to make unless you're just doing a half-assed job of trying to cover up the fact that ethnic essentialism is pretty important to you, and you just recognize that most people don't like that.

Yeah.

So, I listened to a bit more of their show, and I got a pretty good sense that they don't like Jewish people much.

Oh, yeah, they use the term, quote, the Jewish question a couple times, which is a bad sign.

I didn't listen to a ton of their episodes, but I did listen to one where they interview a World War II revisionist guy about how great Charles Lindbergh is.

So, that was that's cool stuff.

Great.

But it did seem like they weren't in the stormfront sort of anti-Semitic camp.

But I found an article in Mother Jones that helped me get a better picture of where this guy is at.

Apparently, in 2023, he tweeted, quote, I don't hate Jews.

Their religion is literally blasphemous and anti-Christian.

You cannot be a Christian without recognizing this.

I don't buy the whole not being motivated by hate thing, but having listened to his show, I'm willing to believe that Andrew believes that about himself.

He has a political and social view that's indistinguishable from a neo-Nazi, but he's definitely not one.

It's just a coincidence that his religious beliefs line up that way.

So, like, I think that that's probably the story that's going on internally.

Yeah.

And I think he believes it.

Yep, that sounds true.

This dude sucks, but as far as I'm concerned, we just have a fundamental difference of opinion that debate and reason aren't going to solve.

On a very simple level, he just doesn't believe that some people are as much of humans as he is, and he deserves more rights than them he's a Christian nationalist but it's also not about Christianity yeah and I know that because he says it himself uh-oh well it goes to the question too uh CJ

of

if all 8 billion people or six of the eight billion people on planet earth say Christ is Lord does that mean they can become Americans

right right right no no

Christian nationalism isn't about Christianity clearly because if three-quarters of the world joined together in forming a Christian state, that wouldn't be acceptable to Andrew.

This isn't about Christianity, it's about domination, and Christianity is the vehicle that Andrew and his ilk have chosen to enable that domination.

He knows that the U.S.

wouldn't vote to submit itself to his particular version of cultural dominance, so he's decided to do the thing that so many religious zealots and profiteers have done before him.

He's starting a church/slash planned community in the middle of nowhere, and Tucker Carlson has invited him onto the show to promote it while pretending that he has no idea why anyone would think this guy's controversial.

It's bullshit.

I mean, okay.

I'm actually pro him forming a community in the middle of nowhere so long as it also can't contact anybody or affect anybody else in any way.

I guess if a bunch of racists want to get together and live in a hole, I'm not mad about that.

I did unfortunately learn that the plots of land do have internet connectivity.

So there will be

sick memes coming out of the world.

See, that's the problem.

They They say they want a separatist community, but what they want is a bunch of them together so they can fight people better.

And also water provided by the city and electricity that's

cool.

So

the issue that I have and why I decided to do an episode here is that

this is kind of

wild.

For someone in Tucker Carlson's ostensible

media position to be like whitewashing a dude who's going to start a Christian nationalist church in the middle of nowhere as part of a strategy that is essentially like, well, we can't ever electorally win power.

Of course not.

So we're going to just create these enclaves.

But I honestly didn't know if that would have been all that interesting.

But there's a secondary dynamic to this that I think is

important to keep track of.

This is not all ideological.

Right.

There is an ideological aspect to this.

Right.

But some of it is also

a business thing.

Great, great.

And so the name of this business comes up that's behind all of this.

Good stuff.

So it's a company town and a religious town.

It's really great.

Good stuff.

Good stuff.

It's a company.

Ridge Runner is purchasing land and sort of facilitating

a lot of the things.

Like, you're familiar with the big sort,

where people are leading blue states to go to red states and things like that.

where

it's along those lines where people are leading.

Like I left Minnesota, a very blue state.

Everyone's now familiar with our governor in that state, Tim Walls.

Don't hire him to babysit.

No, I would not.

He would be the last person.

Yes, I think so.

So it feels like it might be time for these guys to give up on their fears about Tim Walls.

I mean, that's past the expiration date.

It feels that way.

In that clip, Andrew is beginning to lay out the structure this plan to form a religious community in rural Tennessee.

A company called Ridge Runner bought a 448-acre plot of land, which they intend to develop into plots that they can sell to people wanting to escape from secular society.

Sure.

Ridge Runner has bought up multiple such plots around the Highland Rim area of Kentucky and Tennessee with the goal of creating a bunch of communities that can be used to create a parallel economy and culture to the evil world outside.

Good stuff.

Ridge Runner was founded by a guy named Josh Abatoy, who's a managing director with an anti-woke venture capital firm called New Founding.

He helped create their capital fund, which aims to invest in businesses that skew far to the right politically, are Christian, and very importantly, are into cryptocurrencies.

Great, good stuff.

According to Forbes, billionaire dipshit and Pas Rogan guest Mark Andreessen signed on as a limited partner and provided them with a nice chunk of change.

And it appears that he isn't the only Silicon Valley type who they're working with.

Good stuff, good stuff.

It's a smart move and a pivot for these type of oligarchs to make since they never really cared about liberal social values to begin with.

Nope.

And they're bringing about a power structure that will have contempt for the idea of regulation and

consumer protections.

It works all to their advantage.

It's always a good idea to have a castle with serfs on it.

Yeah, workers' rights are antithetical to...

Don't even say those words.

Right.

So anyway, this Christian nationalist venture capitalist firm with billionaire Silicon Silicon Valley backing is behind this Ridge Runner company that's going to sell Christian nationalists plots of land that they can create their own compounds on, presumably aligning with each other and using cryptocurrencies.

I would assume so, yeah.

As their website says, quote, we welcome and encourage the adoption of Bitcoin and other disruptive technologies that can, at their best, promote economic sovereignty.

This is a marriage of Christian fundamentalism and tech bro bullshit.

One of their recent projects, the Bend at Cumberland River, which is in Kentucky, it started selling lots at least a year ago, and they currently have six sold out of 50.

Okay.

I'm not a real estate guy, but that doesn't sound very good.

It sounds like there's a bit of a low organic demand to this.

Andrew Isker is a pastor, and he's announced his plan to buy a plot in their Tennessee development to build a church.

It's all good stuff, and he and Tucker definitely don't feel the need to talk about how he's not Randy Weaver within five minutes of this interview starting.

Good stuff.

Definitely not Randy Weaver, buddy.

Great, great.

Cool, not Ruby Ridge.

It's Ridge Runner.

I feel very strongly about this.

For all of the snakey, oily-ness of what's going on right now,

if I was going to talk to somebody who I ideologically despised, who wanted to buy one of these, I would be torn between two things.

One, you are obviously getting scammed.

And I don't like you.

So go get scammed.

Screw you.

I don't give a shit.

You're fucked.

Or two,

I don't care if we disagree on something.

This is a scam.

They're scamming you.

Maybe you believe in God.

More power to you, but you're getting scammed, right?

What do I do here?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, I don't care.

Sure, I don't care either.

I think that it's interesting to understand and see this happening.

Yeah.

But yeah,

I don't have any feelings about telling people to not get involved with this very clear scam.

I mean, if you buy one of these, you're getting scammed.

You're quite rich.

Unless you're quite rich.

Because it's just land.

You have to build a house on it.

So that's on top of

whatever you're paying for the land.

Sure.

And then you also, unless you're buying it outright, you're going to owe a ton of money to the venture capital firm that owns all the land that you're buying outright.

And you're going to be so kind.

Yeah.

And like you get behind in your payments because you're living in the middle of nowhere and there's no jobs in theory.

Oh, do they foreclose?

Yes, they absolutely do.

Maybe.

Yep, yep.

They remove everything and they own it now.

Yeah.

So

I think that there is a little bit of a, ah,

I see what you're doing here.

You're stealing souls.

Is that what you're doing?

You're stealing souls.

For God.

For God.

My bad.

My bad.

Yeah.

Yep.

So, I mean, it's honestly beyond all that stuff, it's perfect because you can just like get your friends together and go live in the woods together.

Of course.

I mean, yeah.

Everybody should do it.

And so it's a platform to be able to draw all of your friends together.

It's like, well, we can kind of live anywhere.

Why don't we all live in the same kind of place and bring our families, bring our businesses and build things together?

So it's

a good way to...

drawing people that are spread out all throughout the the country and and can leave these places that are that are not great you know living in living in large cities or or suburbs where you're just totally disconnected and

really isolated, alienated from normal life, and you can have the American small town experience once again.

So sad to hear you say that about Minnesota.

As a Scandinavian, I always thought of it, was told, you know, it's like where all the Swedes are, and it's kind of, you know, lots of saunas and

red-cheeked children, and it's clean and reasonable.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Not the case case anymore.

Why did you leave there?

You know, for us, it was.

Are you from there?

I'm from there, yeah.

Born and raised in Waseka, Minnesota.

My children were the sixth generation of our family that lived in that town.

Oh, gosh.

And

in the town?

In that town, yeah.

In the town of Waseka.

Are your ancestors buried there?

Yes, there's six generations that are buried there.

Even one of my own children that passed

that, you know, all they're like.

Will you be moving them to Tennessee?

Yeah, a couple blocks away from the cemetery where all of my ancestors were buried.

Oh, gosh.

Oh, that's very heavy to leave a place in the future.

Isn't it?

Yes.

So heavy.

So heavy.

Tucker is going to be seriously focused on this six generations of his family living in the town thing.

Unsurprising.

Which made me realize that in his interview with Alex that we just covered, he said he didn't want to leave the United States because his ancestors are buried here.

I thought that was just kind of an expression, but I think he was being a bit more literal.

My family moved around a bunch when I was growing up, so maybe I just can't relate to this.

Meaning I don't care where bones are.

I absolutely could not give less of a shit where bones are.

Yeah.

This mentality that you and your friends can just up and move to the middle of Tennessee is a little disconnected from most people's reality.

For instance, you can't just do that if you rely on a job that isn't something that you can do remotely.

You can work from home out there because the government they hate so much has set up electricity and internet access to these plots of land.

But if you have to go into a physical workplace, rural Tennessee might be a long commute from where you need to go.

It's rough.

This would be tough for working people to pull off.

And that's kind of because the idea, I think, is to move Silicon Valley type people out into the woods.

Naturally.

And create what you exactly said.

Company towns

in these little pockets

and people who couldn't just work online and shit.

There is no

intention of like building a factory or a mine or something.

Right.

No, I mean,

here's the problem with this, and this is something that I think is distinctly American.

Every few years, somebody comes up with this brand new idea to do exactly this again.

Yeah.

It happens all the time.

Yeah.

And at no point in time does everybody go like, hey, how is it going that?

Nope.

It's always, we're going to do it right this time.

I've not, I've never, I've never heard anybody not go like, yeah, but we're going to do it right this time.

And like, okay well we've got a couple of hundred years it says you're not yeah yeah yeah and i think that's the unfortunate cycle that that we like especially with tech innovation we seem to be trapped in yeah it's like we're recreating network television on streaming shit yep like by uh just walking around

we finally figured it out by standing still we've gone everywhere right yeah and like with ride share stuff we're eventually recreating public transit holy shit how did we not think of this A bus could carry all these people at once.

Right, and it just feels really fucking sad.

Yep.

And that's what this feels like to me.

It feels very sad.

Yeah.

But I do, I mean, I relate to the desire to go to the woods.

I ask you this question.

Has anybody said Tucker's name backwards three times to his face?

Do you think he disappears?

Because I feel like he does.

After I heard that,

yeah, I was like, maybe he died.

Maybe that's what we're missing.

And nobody expects it because nobody's like, oh, fairies are real.

But he is, right?

That's how we get rid of him.

Maybe that was part of the demon attack.

That could have been.

Yeah, maybe someone said his name backwards three times.

Arthur Conan Doyle saw Tucker Carlson, and that's why Houdini hated him.

That's the truth.

So

someone else who's hated.

Yeah.

Tim Walls.

Yeah, but I guess.

For whatever reason.

He was really behind why Andrew had to leave Minnesota.

Is he?

He made it intolerable.

Brutal.

It was

after the 2022 election,

where the Democrats took control of

the state Senate finally, and Tim Walls could do whatever he wanted to do.

The first thing he passed was in the wake of the Dobbs decision,

full, full abortion allowance, even up to birth.

There were the stories during the election about even post-birth abortions that took place in Minnesota.

I went to the state capitol and spoke to

the first committee when that bill was being heard.

And

maybe later you guys can pull up that video.

But

I just went there and said, hey, you think you won an election.

You think you can do this and just murder children.

But God is not mocked.

He's going to come with vengeance about what you are doing.

Do you mean tiny dick God?

Yeah,

like all these

60-year-old liberal ladies, senators are looking at me, scoffing at me, and just staring daggers at me and hating what I'm saying.

How dare he cut this?

Christian nationalist.

Lots of luck to them.

Good luck.

So, this isn't true.

For one thing, it's completely false that Tim Walls made it legal to kill babies after they're born in Minnesota.

It would be very strange 2022.

However, I do have to give Andrew credit, and there is some truth to what he's saying, and that is that the first bill the Minnesota State Senate passed in their 2023 session was SF1, the Protect Reproductive Options Act.

This bill just states that Minnesotans have a fundamental right to use or refuse reproductive health care and that lower government bodies were prohibited from making any more restrictive rules than what the state had set forth.

Andrew is fucking lying about this.

And as I recall, that's a sin.

So he should probably pray about it.

Ah, I feel like you're mocking God, buddy.

No, I'm mocking him.

No,

he's God's representative.

So to mock him is to mock God.

This is like somebody saying that maybe these plots of land are a scam.

How dare you?

How dare you?

Get thee behind me and buy a plot of land over there.

Right.

I did actually look at some of the land.

Yeah.

At the end of the day, we're both like, well, I mean, yeah, but

the taxes are so low.

You can't not live there.

Honestly, there was a small part of me that's like, all right, y'all want this?

I'll come.

Like,

I want to live in the woods.

I'll come be a pain in the ass to you.

You literally cannot refuse to accept because I'm not a Christian.

It's the law.

It's against the law.

It is against the law.

But I was like, that's not worth the fucking headache.

Set up a big Cthulhu statue in the middle of there.

Why are you, Dan Friesen?

Why are you doing this?

Because I'm kind of an asshole.

Yeah, I was bored.

I was bored.

So I was doing this podcast and I did a stray episode.

Shit got out of hand.

That's what's happening here.

This is what happens when things get out of hand.

Yeah.

So

that was the first bill.

Yes.

And then there was a second bill that was like, I really, really got to get out of here.

Amazing.

And this is nuts.

The second bill that they passed, and these are their first two legislative priorities that they had.

The second one was

a

trans rights bill, which allowed the state to take your child out of their custody or your parents' custody.

Sounds true.

If you oppose probably shouldn't ask any more questions.

And my oldest child is 12.

A minor child.

Minor child, yeah.

My oldest son, he's 12 years old.

He has autism.

We homeschool all the rest of our children, but we don't have the resources to be able to educate him with his autism.

And so he goes to.

And I'm well aware, especially if you see the things that happened in 2020, 2021, all of the activism, trans stuff in the schools, all the libs of TikTok kind of stuff.

Yes.

That

the majority of like trans children are on the autism spectrum.

These children are targeted.

And I'm thinking, okay,

he doesn't talk about school.

He doesn't talk about home at school.

He categorizes all of his life.

He just won't do it.

So I would have no way of knowing what is going on.

there.

They could be putting him in a dress and calling him a girl name.

And I would have no idea.

And then, when I find out and I oppose it, right, boom, CPS comes, takes him out of our custody, and he's gone.

There you go.

And they can't go Randy Weaver at that point.

Yeah, for sure.

And you don't want to go Randy Weaver.

Like, it didn't end well for Randy Weaver.

No, just don't.

For anybody.

No.

Take it off the table.

Yeah, I don't want to go down that road.

No, no,

don't make the road exist.

And so it's like we need to get out of here.

There's no room.

You cannot trust

the whole system.

Yeah.

So I have

pulled up the Senate's files from that session where there was the reproductive health care bill.

That was the first bill that got passed.

And the second bill they passed was SF2, which made allocations for the past.

How do you know it was the second bill they passed?

The number two.

Interesting.

All right, all right.

And the date, time stamps, and everything.

All right, okay.

I'm just checking.

I got to ask these questions.

The administrative record.

Okay.

This was a bill that made allocations for the paid family and medical leave insurance program.

So I guess he's sinning again by lying.

Well, I mean, two is a very

subjective number.

Sure.

Yeah.

So there were a number of other bills like child tax credits, price gouging prohibitions, and down payment assistance funds for first-generation homebuyers.

But if you keep going down, SF23 addresses prohibiting conversion therapy with children and vulnerable adults.

Conversion therapy is cruel, and I feel like it's on par with psychological torture, so prohibiting it is a good idea by my count.

However, this bill doesn't even prohibit conversion therapy.

Great.

All it does is prohibit licensed medical practitioners and mental health professionals from engaging in it, and it prohibits payment for conversion therapy to be covered by medical assistance programs.

It's not illegal to subject your kids to this kind of treatment, but Minnesota regulates medical licensing, and the state senate is of the opinion that it's not professionally appropriate for doctors to do that shit.

For the sake of completeness, the bill also prohibits people from advertising conversion therapy services that, quote, use or employ any fraud, false pretense, false promise, false guarantee, misrepresentation, false or misleading statements, or deceptive practice by advertising or otherwise offering conversion therapy services that could be reasonably interpreted or inferred as representing homosexuality as a mental disease, disorder, or illness, or guarantee to change an individual's sexual orientation or gender identity.

This one's really about consumer protections, and it was amending language in a completely separate part of the Minnesota state code that had to do with fraud and advertising.

Yeah.

Nothing about this even comes close to involving child protective services.

But the way Andrew was telling this story is fascinating.

He's terrified of something that he's made up in his head, the possibility that his fears could be true.

And it's giving him so much pain that he needs to flee from society in order to alleviate that fear.

He has no reason to think anyone at his school is is trying to influence his kid at all.

Nope.

He has no reason to think that.

Nothing has happened.

It is all in his head.

Yep.

This also just doesn't make sense.

Like, he has a bunch of kids, and he can afford to homeschool all but one of them, so that one has to go to public school.

How does it become more affordable to homeschool this kid when you pack up your family and take out a mortgage on a plot of land and set out to build a church?

Moving to Tennessee doesn't sound like a solution to any of the problems that Andrew pretends to be struggling with.

Well, if I understand correctly, I believe his point is that because the child has autism, he does not have the resources to educate a child with autism.

So

he takes advantage of the publicly available.

Oh, he probably shouldn't be okay with that at all, right?

Well, he clearly isn't.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Seems like, yeah.

He's not at peace with this.

I mean,

it is like...

It's not like he's made it up by himself.

You know, like these

libs of TikTok stuff

clearly plays an influence.

Even the way you describe that, too, of like, oh, this stuff could happen, you know, the libs of TikTok stuff.

Like, you're describing a thing that you could go to

and talk to the people and listen to the people.

Yeah, you're describing falling into a hysteria.

Right.

But through the lens of somebody who is absolutely nowhere near this place.

Like, you live there.

Yep.

Just go talk to them and be like, hey, are you going to do this?

No?

Cool.

You live in a fairly small town.

How about this?

Ask them to write something, write out,

if I put your kid in a dress, then I won't take them away from you and then sign it.

There's 400 kids that go to the school in his town.

Like, it's not a big school.

Insane.

Yeah.

This is insane behavior.

So I'm not a psychologist, but it feels like Anders' kid going to public school represents a loss of control that he feels over his child, and that feeling was entirely intolerable for him.

His mind was just a swirling mass of dumb shit he saw on social media that he was supposed to be afraid of, and a lot of that has been about demonizing trans people for the last few years.

That's been a huge piece of right-wing media.

Yep.

Libs of TikTok shit.

It kind of feels like Andrew felt that strain of impending individuation that his kid was going to experience out in the real world, and he couldn't handle it.

And what better way to swing the pendulum back the other direction really hard than by taking your family out to the woods to start a Christian nationalist compound that's totally not Randy Weaver-like?

Although it is called Ridge Runner, Ruby Ridge.

Sure.

A little close.

And we've referenced Randy Weaver as being an option.

You don't want to go that.

We don't want to go.

Nobody wants that option.

So we're not going to take it off the table.

Yeah.

That would be crazy.

We always need to be able to go Weaver.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, it's just something that is inevitable at a certain point.

But then just go full Weaver now.

Yeah.

Just go do it.

So

I think that his reasoning for leaving doesn't make sense.

Nope.

Tim Walls did not make baby killing legal.

Probably not.

And

that bill that has to do with state funding and licensing of people who engage in conversion therapy has nothing to do with the CPS coming and taking his kids away.

Yeah.

So that's all kind of dumb.

I mean, the irony of that is that the law that they wrote is explicitly about not being able to kidnap your children and torture them into saying the things you want to hear.

And that is what he interprets as them wanting to kidnap his children.

It all makes sense.

Makes perfect sense to me.

And like, he's just, you know, he's just afraid that they're going to come and snatch his kids.

Of course.

They could steal him from us.

This could happen.

I don't want to be the as opposed to kidnapping him because we paid for it.

I don't want to go through the legal battles and do all those fights.

I want my son.

I don't want to live in a place where that's even conceivable that that could happen to you.

It's insane.

And so it was at that moment.

I'm like,

we need to get out of this state.

This is

not a place where I can raise my children.

And I'm thinking like long term, right?

Yeah, we've been in this place for six generations, but and it's a wonderful town, you know,

amazing place.

I mean, it's home.

I love the people there.

And many of them are going to be watching this.

Well, you must know all of them.

from my youth.

Small town, sixth generation.

Sure, and you see.

A lot of the same last name.

And children hated when I would go to the store because it would take an hour to get a thing of milk because I'd just stop and talk to people I've known my whole life.

Oh, I love that.

And it's a wonderful play.

Like, it's hard to leave that, right?

Because you know it.

You're familiar with everything and all of the people and just the way of life.

Oh, I love that.

So which is it?

Are the teachers at your kids' school secretly trying to turn him trans, or do you know everyone in your town and they're all so wonderful?

Right.

Seems like it's not possible for both of these things to be true.

It would be very difficult for that to be true.

Andrew said that he's from Waseka, which is a town of about 9,200 people with one elementary school that has about 400 students at it.

This can't be a wonderful town that he's so sad to leave and he stops and talks to everybody, but also one where the schools are indoctrinating all the kids.

This is fucking stupid.

This isn't the faculty.

No.

That movie was starring Usher.

I thought Elijah Wood was in that one.

He might be.

I think it was Devin Sawa, maybe.

Might have been around that time.

I think that's a hardnet vehicle.

Josh Jackson, maybe.

Josh Jackson.

We got a lot of names.

All right.

I'm only sure of Usher.

Understood correctly.

What Andrew is saying is that Waseka was a wonderful town, and the people there were really nice.

His family had lived there for six generations, but when he sent his kid to public school, he got so freaked out that he had to start a church in the woods.

What I'm saying is that based on his telling of the the story, I don't think a lot of this has anything to do with his son.

This is all about Andrew.

Yeah.

And now, because it's fun, I looked up the lunch menu at that school in Waseka.

Fine.

And I wanted to get your order.

Do you mean the lunch menu that turns you gay?

It might.

Yeah.

So I actually have to get your order.

Okay.

There's some options.

There are not options.

There are.

What?

When did this happen?

I don't know.

I mean, I assume some of it has to do with like maybe dietary restrictions or something.

Oh, okay.

That's fair.

I didn't have that growing up.

There's no school today.

School is.

Okay, so I can't have anything today.

Yeah, but last Thursday, you could get chicken strips

or hot dog on a bun.

Which way are you going?

School-wise, you always go with the chicken strips.

You can't trust the hot dog on a bun from a school.

Yeah, yeah, I think I'm with you.

And I think I would want two hot dogs if I'm going to have a hot dog as an entree.

I'm on your team there.

Yeah.

One hot dog is not enough.

Not enough.

Not enough.

We're from Chicago, though.

What if you get fucked over, though, and you only get like two chicken strips?

That's not enough either.

Yeah, but two chicken strips is something you can handle.

One hot dog makes you thirst for another hot dog.

They also have sides and stuff, but the sides are all pretty uniform.

All right.

It's just the main is really what you had a choice over.

I got you.

So on Friday, the choices were cheese quesadilla or sloppy joe.

Ooh.

You know what?

There is a nostalgic part of me.

that says sloppy joe but then there's the part of me that has a clear-eyed memory that says avoid the sloppy Joe at all costs.

And so that is what I'm going to do.

I'm going to go with the cheese quesadilla.

Okay.

I'm going to go sloppy Joe.

You're going to go Sloppy Joe?

Yeah.

You're going to make a mistake.

Yep.

Well, it's you, I feel like when you have a chance to do a Hail Mary, you do it.

And if you, you know, the legend lives on if it, if you, if you catch it.

If you catch fire, you catch fire.

Yeah.

So these are all like kind of normal and they make sense.

Yeah.

But then this Tuesday, just a couple days ago, the options.

Okay.

Crazy.

All right.

Shrimp poppers.

What?

Or quote-unquote yogurt basket.

I don't even know what that is.

I am confused as to why not even just name it Mystery Box, right?

Like, I guess yogurt basket is slightly more descriptive, but ultimately, I think it's the same.

I think if you just said yogurts, it would make sense.

That would make sense.

What does the basket have to do with it?

It introduces questions.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

But are we going to take that or shrimp poppers?

I mean, I don't know.

Yogurt by itself is already practically expired, so you can't go super bad with yogurt, right?

Or is that how it works?

I have no idea.

It's not.

Okay.

Well, then I guess I'll go with yogurt anyways.

I'm going to go with yogurt, too.

I think it's going to be an unsatisfying meal, but there's no fucking way I'm trusting shrimp properties from elementary school.

Unreasonable.

Yeah.

I'm not taking seafood.

Unrealistic.

I mean, I guess if you're Minnesota.

No, no, no Midwest seafood at school.

There's no shrimp that you're ice fishing.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

There are no shrimps.

Yeah.

So anyway, that was fun.

Back to these dumb assholes.

Great.

Why do you think so that the three, I mean, I have my own theories, but you've lived it much more personally than I have.

You tell me, why do you think states like Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, California, have gone to a place that I think by any objective global standard, there's no country in the world that would nod and say that's okay, except maybe the UK.

Yeah.

How did they get there?

I think,

I mean, for all of them, the political power was captured by the left, political and cultural power.

I mean, I went to

in Minnesota in the early 2000s, and you could see the seeds of all of these things

beginning to form.

And so all of the institutions were captured.

And especially culturally in Minnesota,

people are very nice, right?

It's not a myth.

Minnesota nice is very real.

And

the ethos is: if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all, which I just swim completely against that tide.

But it's true.

I mean, not to point to genics, but it's real.

It's Germans, it's Scandinavians, Norwegians, Swedes.

Good start.

Good start.

It's like these are gentle, non-confrontational people.

You gentle.

Hey.

Yeah,

they're very kind, very people that are, to a fault,

unwilling to give offense.

Yes.

And very, very tolerant of other people.

Yes.

And have stolen half the land on the earth.

Right.

So you can have.

So they take our best qualities and subvert them against us.

Yes.

Stole the land on the earth.

So it's pretty hard to be more explicit than that.

All of these Nordic groups that Tucker considers white are gentle, inherently decent people who just have that decency used against them.

Stole half the land on the earth.

This is a very old white supremacist talking point.

There's literally zero chance that Tucker doesn't understand exactly what he's doing.

Cannot.

He's slippery sloping whatever audience he has to the much faster slippery slope that Andrew represents.

Ethnic essentialism, if you will.

Yeah, but hey, we don't want to talk about that.

That's not important.

That's slippery slope number four.

Yeah.

All right.

We're explicitly at regular slippery right now.

Right.

And then we'll get down to Sabbath laws.

Ooh, Sabbath Laws is going to be a real bitch.

If you're starting up here at the top of the slope, you're really going to be pissed off.

scandinavians are cool

that quick ride

takes you all the way down to i can't wear what ever

crazy so uh yeah man uh white people are just too cool um i've i've often thought that yeah yeah tolerant some might say to the level of defenselessness you know what here's what i'll say i'll say too cool to have

Period.

Let's get him out of here.

Get out of here.

So Tucker talks here a little bit about the defenselessness of tolerance.

No, it does.

I mean, I come from a family like that.

Some of them have strong views, but they would never impose their views on you under any circumstances.

It's just not in them.

It's a very specific Northern European culture where they just

don't want to get in your face.

No.

Never.

But it leaves them defenseless a little bit, I think.

Yeah, yeah.

And,

you know, I, I mean, maybe I'm, maybe I'm unique.

You know, maybe

my personality type is such that I just, I can't do that.

I can't see like evil stuff happening, taking place, and not say something about it, not say, this is, this is insane.

Like,

how, how could we, I mean, just think 100 years ago, and that's, that's sort of, you know, my book is, right, if you go back a hundred years and you think about your, your great-great-grandfather and you told him, hey, they're going to take little kids and little boys and remove their genitals and turn them into girls, right?

Are you okay with that?

Do you think that's all right?

Like, what would they do if that was even proposed?

Like, they wouldn't have to do that.

I thought eunuchs would have been the Ming dynasty.

That's right.

We have that.

Yeah, we're bringing that back.

They would go insane.

They would fight.

They'd become violent if that were happening.

And we're like, well,

you know, I really want to keep my job, so

I'll put the pronouns in my email signature and on my LinkedIn.

You know, I'll just go online now.

I have some time for

Did you hear that at the end there, Tucker, saying, I have contempt for them?

Yep.

Dark.

Yep, yep, yep.

So I get the point that Andrew's trying to make about culture shock, but this whole go back a hundred years thing is fucking hacky.

Go back to 1925 and explain your love of Elon Musk without referencing space rockets, electric cars, memes, ketamine, or social media.

See how well you can explain all that dumb shit.

So a fun exercise might be to go back to 1925 and see if your definition of white bears any resemblance to your great-grandfathers.

They might have different answers about which groups are included.

No.

Ironically, Tucker brought up the Finns, and this dude is from Minnesota.

So it's worth mentioning the 1907 Finnish immigrant labor strike on the Oliver Iron Mine Company.

About 16,000 workers struck when demands for better working conditions in the mines were ignored, and that went on for about two months before strikebreakers were brought in in order to squash shit.

Sure.

This was one of the early instances of a large-scale organized strike, and it shook the bosses a little bit, a bit in terms of anti-Finn sentiment that began to be disseminated out into the public.

Smart.

Motivated largely from resentment over their involvement in union organizing.

Right.

From a Minnesota Public Radio article, quote, after the 1907 strike, they tried to make the Finns be seen as Asians.

There was an Asian Exclusion Act, and if the Finns could be seen as Asians, they could get kicked out of the country.

The next year, a group of Finnish immigrants were attempting to become naturalized citizens, which was something that was only available to white immigrants.

Sure.

It was argued that the Finns were Mongolians, so they didn't apply.

I like that.

I like that.

But a judge ended up deciding that they were white enough.

I like a judge being able to decide that.

That's all of that is A-plus stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That didn't sway the public, though.

And people from Finland were still routinely called China Swedes in Minnesota after this.

Which is a a real thing.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but sometimes, sometimes, listen, all racism fundamentally is ridiculous.

It's nonsensical and it's childish behavior.

But sometimes, whenever they get too far childish, where you're like, come on, you gotta know that China Swedes doesn't make any goddamn sense.

It makes enough sense.

Come on.

It makes enough sense for, you know,

demonizing and mobilizing the population against these people who are involved in trying to get workers' rights.

You know, it's so strange how regularly you can go back and you can look at rich people who are suddenly fomenting racial violence.

Isn't that crazy?

It's weird.

It's crazy.

So yeah, maybe your great-grandfather might think that trans people are weird, but he might also be really confused by Tucker talking so highly of these dirty Finns.

Time is tricky that way.

Time is a bitch.

Don't go back.

Yeah,

I don't think that you're making any kind of real valid point with, hey, the things of today would confuse the people of the past.

Precisely, yeah.

Nobody should go back.

Nobody.

Even if you think you're going back to meet your progressive hero, don't.

Don't go back.

There's shit that you don't know.

At best, it's going to be confusing.

Yeah.

So, Tucker, Tucker talks a little bit about how maybe all these people who have different opinions than him are into the devil.

That sounds true.

So

my theory is that those are the most secular states.

Yeah.

And Maine is another one of the most secular states, unfortunately.

And those trends are

rising there as well.

So Tennessee.

And there's something about that, you know, there are lots of left-wing ideas that, or liberal ideas or socialist ideas that, like,

well, I don't disagree with all of them, honestly, but some of them I did, a lot of them I really disagree with.

Yeah.

But the transgender thing, the abortion thing, the human sacrifice, and turning your children to eunuchs, those are so clearly expressions of cultish religion, of pagan religion,

that like I can't turn away.

I'm like, the Canaanites did this.

I know what's going on here.

This is not, you claim you're secular.

You're not secular at all.

These are religious rituals.

That's the way it feels to me.

Yes,

absolutely.

So, on one level, this is stupid, but on a deeper level, it's very stupid.

And it's also partially an act.

Tucker knows that no one supports access to reproductive health care because they love sacrificing babies.

He knows that access to birth control and abortion have granted women a giant level of autonomy in their own lives.

And he understands the people who advocate for reproductive health care support that end goal.

He strongly opposes that end goal.

And it's easier to pretend that he's fighting against child sacrificers than it is to argue against women being able to choose if they want to carry through a pregnancy at the expense of their education, career, all sorts of other

variables.

Similarly, he knows that no one is trying to turn your kids trans or gay.

He's against people creating and accepting safe places for LGBTQ youth because he believes that if they're deprived of any validation, they'll be cis and hetero eventually, like God intended them to be.

These are two particular hot-button issues for him right now, and this is where the act part of this comes in.

He's pretending like these two issues are the biggest concerns and obsessions of the leftists, like it's a part of a demonic religion, but he's failing to take into consideration his own part in this.

The right-wing media has chosen these two issues as huge rallying points for their politics, so they're attacking LGBTQ rights and access to reproductive health care super aggressively as a cornerstone of their ideology.

Their attacks are what is prompting people to stand up for these issues, and Tucker understands that dynamic fully well.

He's just pretending not to.

Tucker and his ilk can play this game about almost anything, and it's super easy.

They can advocate for the rounding up and removal of immigrants who are here legally, and then when people are upset about it, he gets to pretend that these people are so weird.

Isn't it suspicious how much they want to keep immigrants here?

They must be up to something.

It's probably because they're secretly using them to win votes illegally.

There's truly only one way to defeat this demonic cultish behavior, and that is to move to a religious work camp in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee.

I think that's the only way to combat Silicon Valley-aligned capital of

venture funding.

Because you don't want, because you hate cultish behavior, Yes.

Because you don't want any kind of cultish bullshit messing up your totally normal, sane, rational choices.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's the only answer.

It's obvious to me.

So

you get to talking about atheists.

Sure.

Those dum-dums.

Yeah.

With their, I don't know what else.

What else are they also guilty of in their world?

They might not exist.

Okay.

I like that.

Tucker does say at one point, like, have you ever even met one?

I love it.

Great.

Good stuff.

But they're talking about

the pillars of the atheist communities, like a Christopher Hitchens.

I'm sorry, they've never met one, but also they know the pillars of the community.

In the past.

Okay.

There used to be atheists.

Not anymore.

Okay.

Because the demons.

Okay.

No, you're right.

You're right.

You're right.

You're right.

But today, like, James Lindsay is one of those types.

Who's James Lindsay?

He's

this

atheist guy that opposed wokeness and and things like that, but

wants just a free liberal society.

Like it's 1995.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm all for a free liberal society.

It's just that

there isn't one.

Either you're moving quickly toward.

I mean, I will never give up my views of, I will never stop being liberal on the most basic level, which is I actually don't want to control you or your beliefs because I don't think you're a slave.

I think you're a human being because God made you.

Absolutely.

That's my view.

Unless you're gay.

So I don't want to

break down people's doors to make sure they're adhering to a lot of people.

Unless you're gay.

I hate that.

However,

you're either moving toward order or you're moving toward chaos.

You're moving toward

a society rooted in some sort of transcendent belief or you're moving toward trannyism, which is another

transcendent belief.

It's like you pick a religion.

It's not whether, but which.

There will be one.

And that's part of it.

Yeah, I don't know if people can hear themselves sometimes.

I'm not convinced by Tucker's non-committal interest in liberalism that I think he very much would like to break down your door and tell you how to live.

I mean, not everybody's door, but if you're doing something that he thinks is evil, he's got to do something or all society is going to be destroyed.

Obviously.

He should have every reason to know that the person he's talking to is not a big fan of ideas like freedom or liberalism.

So he doesn't need to do this wishy-washy bullshit.

No.

But I do think it's fun that he has to qualify every fucking statement that is like, you know, I believe that everybody should be able to live live however they want.

However.

I mean,

I do going backwards or forwards, baby.

I do love a complete negation of any ideology whatsoever.

Like, hey, listen, I believe that people should be allowed to do what they're doing, but you're either moving towards order or away from order.

So on that concept,

I'm going to get rid of all non-white people.

Sorry.

I don't want to tell anybody how to live, but you're moving towards order or away from order and having all of those other people is away from orders.

There's nothing I can do.

I believe that everybody should have the right to live exactly how they want to live.

People have self-determinism and they have a right, a fundamental right as humans in order to choose

their lifestyle.

And also, I think that religious doctrine that I subscribe to should guide all possibilities.

You specifically?

Yeah.

Oh.

But what if I don't?

Good luck.

I feel like you've just negated the first part of your statement.

Oh, did I?

I don't know.

What you going to do?

Squam.

Yep.

How about an ad for some Zen wherever the fuck

tobacco pouches?

Isn't that a good time to smoke Sam?

Yeah.

So, this atheism that happened

had the unfortunate effect of ushering in demons.

That'll happen.

Because Christianity went on a little bit of a decline, and that left us open to demons.

Was that how that works?

I think so.

Huh?

The new atheism, all those things, it broke down

Christian mores and

and Christian just cultural Christianity that was imbued all throughout

American public life.

It takes all of that down, but then there's a vacuum, and that vacuum gets filled up.

And what's it been filled up with?

Insane stuff like this, child sacrifice,

all of that.

Sounds true.

It is a new religion.

It isn't a question of like, well, we're just going to have pluralism.

We're not going to have any dominant religion.

It's, no, there will be one.

There will be a God that you serve.

And the one that we are serving now is some kind of demon.

Well, I think that's so much better put than I could have

formulated that.

But yes, exactly, perfectly put.

Exactly.

You're going to worship something.

Yeah.

And now we're worshiping something really, really dark as a society.

But it's particularly pronounced in the states that have abandoned Christianity the most aggressively and just

come up with this new pagan religion.

It all makes sense, really.

Let me ask you a question.

In this conception of religion and celestiality if you will um

are we doing highlander is that what's going on here um

i how well i mean there can be only one do we have gods fighting each other uh or are we always in a religious battle for dominance is the bible and christianity which yeah yeah yeah all the things it says but who cares is it about winning

see here's how i kind of look at it

I'm making up this metaphor as I go along, so forgive me if this is.

I couldn't put it better than that.

Okay.

I think that the way you look at it is like parents of teenagers.

Okay.

So the parents are God.

All right.

They own the house.

Sure.

They are going to get their way.

Under my house, under my rules.

Right.

Yeah.

But if the parents are away, like Christianity is on the decline,

those kids might have a party in the house.

That makes perfect sense.

That's the demons coming in.

That makes perfect sense.

Right.

The demons taking control of the house.

Right.

Now, they might run amok and destroy a bunch of shit in the house.

Sure.

But the parents still own the house.

Right.

And it's just a question of like how much are they going to mess up?

Right.

Like, how much destruction are these demons going to cause?

They're not other gods or anything.

Right, right, right.

Yeah.

So

I understand,

I understand when metaphors go one way to explain something.

What I don't understand is when metaphors go the opposite direction, you know, where you're like, no, you've made up a whole religion out of the metaphor and not the thing that you're trying to explain.

You know what I'm saying?

Kind of, yeah.

That's no good.

No, it's not.

Backwards thinking.

Yeah.

Also, demons aren't real.

Well, sure.

Yeah.

I'm wondering.

Now, because

I've been, people have been very unhappy with me whenever I said the book is very important.

Well, actually,

that's my question here.

Where is this coming from?

Well, but

when you're talking about people getting mad at you about saying that the book is important, you're talking about people who believe themselves to be Christians

and don't believe certain things that are in the book.

Right.

In the Bible.

Right.

And one of the reasons that this guy stuck out to me as kind of interesting is because he has the same perspective as you.

Yes, except for he puts things in the Bible that are not there,

which I find interesting.

Well, I think some of that could be a matter of interpretation of what he thinks some things in the Bible mean,

which is a form of putting things into it.

Yeah.

I'm interested in which, was it the letter to the Thessalonians where it was like, hey, man, if you aren't constantly on this, demons are wrecking your shit.

And if there's an atheism rise, clearly that means that there's a commensurate demon rise along with it.

Everybody knows that.

That's like that relates to Alex's idea of like the hedge of protection is kept up by prayer warriors or whatever the fuck.

Right, right, right, right.

So I, I, but he talks about that in this next clip where the uh how he is just going from the book.

Sounds true.

And so I felt like maybe this could win win you over.

Might

you know, overall, right, the people, you know, in Minnesota, right, they don't, they're not used to

the kind of preaching that that I do, the kind of um Christianity that I have, where it's like, I know I believe the Bible, like, like God is real, and He has spoken, He's revealed Himself to us in the Bible, and therefore I believe all of it, and I'm not embarrassed by any of it.

I'm not going to like tiptoe around the things that might be controversial.

Um, if anything, I'm going to lean into those things

and

like Jesus said,

and that's that runs totally against the evangelical Christian ethos in America today.

Really?

Yeah.

It's all about, ooh, you need to be nice.

You need to

make Jesus very inoffensive to people.

And that's how you bring people into your church.

So I'll say I'm not an evangelical.

I've always, like the evangelicals, I've always defended them.

I'm very sympathetic as a non-evangelical.

I'm not even exactly sure what an evangelical is.

It seems more like a cultural descriptor, but

I'm completely opposed to abortion.

So that has been, for me, the reason that I've always defended them.

But I always thought that the evangelicals were really forthright about their faith, another thing that I liked.

Yeah.

And

were way more on the kind of fire and brimstone side, which I'm for, by the way.

Yeah.

But you're saying that they're not.

That was certainly, you look at like, you know, the 80s and even in the early 90s, like you have the moral majority where they very much were that kind of fire and brimstone.

And they've been vindicated by everything that has happened.

Oh, I say.

I say that.

That's hilarious.

Lent is here.

God is free for the 40 days.

This is a unique chance to get closer to God.

That's the point of it.

Oh, my God.

No, you're fucking with me.

You're fucking with me.

That is not real.

Oh, that's real.

That is unreal.

That is too real.

That is crazy.

Yeah, there's an app for a prayer.

That is fucking insane.

That is insane on all of the levels that the book has ever spoken about.

To do that, the double, the back, oh, baby.

That's like a but it's also like even like

I agree with all of those motions that you just made and the words.

I feel like I just watched seven I feel like I watched Tony Hawk hit the 720 for the first time all over the 900.

Yes, that's what I was saying.

Yeah, and it's like come on man 720.

Apologies, apologies.

I was I was

this was back before the 900 was a number.

Sure

no, it does feel like you guys hit all of it.

You hit all of it at the same five seconds.

Yeah, and it's somehow elevated even further by how bad the edit into the commercial is.

Like, it's clunky.

It's unsophisticated.

It's lazy.

It doesn't care how on the nose it is.

It feels like Joel Schumacher directed it.

Like, this is Starship Troopers' levels of, like, we're being as obvious as we can about how this is insane.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think that a prayer app, I don't know why you need it, number one.

And number two, it seems like it's a bad idea for the paranoid type of Christian that Tucker seems to have in his audience.

Like, you download this app, and now the devil has a handy little list of all the real Christians.

And, you know, next thing you know, you're going to a FEMA camp.

You know, like, that's, yeah, this is stupid.

Why don't you get an app?

I.

If you were going to like say that

whatever, whomever was proven right, Jerry Falwell, if you will.

I can't imagine rereading the Left Behind novels if they were set, because again, the Left Behind novels are set in the apocalypse, which could happen at any time.

And as we know, did not happen at that time.

No.

So now

we're wrestling with the concept of a biblical apocalypse happening concurrently with prayer apps.

It does not get more obvious

who's getting left behind.

Yeah.

But I got the prayer app.

Well, that was a trap.

Sorry.

Right?

Yeah.

How could that not be a trap?

Hey, you got a prayer app.

I got all your information.

I sold it to my Silicon Valley friends who own this compound in the middle of Kentucky.

The concept of a several thousand-year-old religion being like, well, obviously we need apps.

Yeah.

Amazing.

There's an app for that.

There's an app for it.

For your soul.

You know what?

I think that one of the essential things about the history of religion,

especially in Christianity,

the progression has been about access to the divine.

Right.

Not being kept in the priests.

Right.

You know, the everyone.

The species,

all 90, whatever of them.

Yeah.

That's a huge part of Christian tradition.

Big deal.

And I think the idea of injecting an app into your relationship with God, as opposed to it being a direct one-to-one,

I think that that's actually regressive.

It's about as far away as you can get.

Yes.

But again, it's this melding of the religious fundamentalist ideology with tech bro bullshit.

Yep.

And I think that Tucker is right at this like weird crossroads

of that.

And I think that this episode is so illustrative of a lot of that.

It makes, if it, if that's what we're witnessing, it does make everything make way more sense.

Because if you don't if you don't see that those two because I mean before now, I honestly didn't think it was possible for those two to overlap.

But clearly I am the fool.

I don't think it's possible for them to overlap for long.

That's probably a better yeah.

Yeah.

I think that they're like,

what is it?

Fuck.

Okay, so I was listening to

this guy, Andrew, his podcast.

Yeah.

And one of the terms that really like stuck out to me that gets used a couple times is they refer to groups

that are with them as co-belligerents.

Great.

Yeah.

And so there's this idea of we're in this battle.

And, yeah, I don't like these milquetoast Christians or whatever, but they're co-belligerents against the devil.

And so I think that they can think of Silicon Valley and venture capital firms and stuff like that as co-belligerents.

Wow.

And vice versa.

Yeah.

And I don't think that

that can last long.

You remember when you were growing up and you

and I assume everybody gets there, but maybe I'm wrong.

You know, you're growing up in the church and everybody's talking to you.

And then you get to the question where you're like, okay, but what if you've never heard about Jesus?

Do you still get to go to heaven or not?

And they all go like, bah, you know, whatever made-up answer you want to give.

I like to imagine that 10 years from now, they're like, but what about people who don't have the app?

Do they still get to go to heaven i use an android oh no

the green bubble it's the mark of the beast does god get the green bubble the green bubble is the mark of the beast brutal you have to have blue abs i mean i don't know fine whatever so uh something that i think is also pretty well illustrated by this episode is the way that this guy his presentation is a lot of like evangelicals are soft.

Yeah, they're weak.

Yeah.

They're like

last year's model.

Okay.

I believe is the way that he's trying to sell it.

And I think it's because he wants to

get them insecure.

Right.

He wants people who are like in that evangelical wave that got swept up in Trump fanaticism to feel like, oh, no.

I got to go farther.

I got to go.

Right.

You know,

it's kind of a marketing tactic.

I got to up my subscription to the same quality of belief.

Yeah, because I'm not a real Cutco salesperson unless I have the biggest thing.

Right.

I need Jesus Plus.

That's what we're talking about.

Yeah, so he talks about that a little bit.

Okay.

But throughout the 90s and early 2000s,

they really changed course.

As the cultural trajectory is changing,

they adopted

the very secret-sensitive movement where it's like, well, people.

Sorry, what did you call it?

Seeker-sensitive movement is.

What does that mean?

It was

the big movement in evangelicalism in the 90s and early 2000s where

we're going to make it as easy as possible for people to come into the church and believe in Jesus.

And so we're not going to focus on things that might offend them.

We're not going to focus on sin and repentance and things like that.

We're just come on in and have a good time and know that you're welcome here.

Come as you are.

We'll meet you halfway.

That was more or less the.

Why do you think they did did that?

I think

a friend of mine,

I think I could call him a friend, Aaron Wren, he's written about this

neutral world or negative world, neutral world, positive world, where, you know, in the 70s and 80s, Christianity is generally understood culturally as a positive thing.

Like if you said, oh, I go to church, I'm a Christian, I go to that church, people would think, oh, that's a good guy.

He's an upstanding, decent person.

But

by the mid-90s, it was was sort of neutral, right?

It was sort of,

oh, well, that's just a cool thing that you do, right?

Just like collecting stamps or building model trains or being part of the Lions Club.

But by the

Obama years, by 2015, you're in a negative world, where if you're an evangelical Christian, you are a suspect.

You're probably a Nazi.

You're probably a bigot.

You're probably a white supremacist.

Well, that's the attitude.

I'm going to ask you pause just to state for the one millionth time, the Nazis were not Christians.

No.

So they were not Christians.

But they loved to throw those things around, did they?

Nazis were Christians?

No.

Yeah.

More Christians were killed by the Nazis than any other group, just a fact.

So, anyway, no, the Nazis were not Christians.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Good to see you.

Good to make, you know, because they'll clip this.

Oh, Andrew Isker is saying that the Christians are Nazis.

Yikes.

So I think that the evangelical church took on some of that more accepting attitude for the same reason, like that the Catholic Church eased up a little bit in the 70s.

Attendance was down, so they were willing to make a deal.

There was probably a bit of a burnout in the wake of the satanic panic, apprehending literally zero demons, and the church probably felt the need to be a little more positive and more inclusive, or else people weren't going to show up, and that means no tithes.

It's a good marketing strategy to be a little bit more welcoming.

Like, yeah, Starbucks had had sofas.

Yeah, you know, yeah.

I mean, because during the Inquisition, you know,

you caught just about everybody because you just made it up, right?

But then during the Satanic Panic,

you can't just catch people.

It's not the 1600s anymore.

They did try.

Yeah.

They did try.

And the reason that it wasn't as effective is because you couldn't just

grab people.

It's the wrong stuff and all that.

Like, yeah, it didn't work as well.

It's a lot easier to get confessions out of people when you can torture them.

It just is.

It's crazy.

And I think that that sort of image rehab is something that the church felt the need to go through.

Sure, sure.

And getting with the times, because otherwise people were just going to gravitate away from it.

Isn't it a nice little up and down, further and closer away from the Inquisition?

That's just the story of religion.

Yep.

So it's a little strange how Tucker will scream about how it's wrong for people to say that the Nazis were Christians.

But I wonder if he devotes as much energy to rebutting the claim that Nazis are socialists, which is constant in his world.

When Tucker says that more Christians were killed by Nazis than any other group, he's including people like Soviet soldiers.

Ah yeah, obviously.

This kind of framing is something that you see a lot with crypto-neo-Nazi types because it's meant to dilute the audience's image of what the Holocaust was.

Christians were the real victims, you see?

He knows exactly what he's doing.

You wouldn't deploy this kind of rhetoric unless you were really

trying to encourage a certain way of thinking.

Yeah, yeah, I'm a big fan of numerical-based genocide arguments.

Like, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah.

I know that he specifically intended to do that one, but the rest of it, that's more people.

So it doesn't count.

The Nazis killed more Christians.

You don't see us complaining about it.

I say as I complain.

Yep, absolutely.

While discussing the JQ,

completely unironically.

You seem cool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Not confused Nazis at all.

Yeah.

I don't think it's confusion.

Well, that's fair.

I mean, I agree with you in the sense that they don't believe they're confused.

Yes.

But I do think that the brain can't process all of this information without

spectacular confusion.

Yeah.

But I think that this, you know, this guy has some

points.

Like, in terms of his understanding of some dynamics of Christianity and the church, like, I don't think he's wrong.

I think that there was a softening of Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity over this time period that he's talking about.

And then I think that the brand became pretty bad through the Iraq War

and into

Tea Party Obama years.

Like, I think that it did become more toxic.

And being a part of the evangelical church went from maybe a positive way back to a neutral to a negative.

People were a little bit sus on it.

So I don't want to, I don't, you know, I listen to a lot of people who are just like, all you're saying is detached from any semblance of reality.

Yeah.

And at least that kind of like, huh,

that thought makes sense.

You know,

I wonder how much that means anything to me.

Probably not.

Not in the sense that I'm saying that.

I mean more like

they softened their image, but the fundament has remained the same, obviously, because here we are.

Right?

Well, like there was a deliberate softening of the image that is identical to his slippery slope plan.

Right.

So

would you describe it as an actual softening or as a bullshittery?

I think that it's like,

well, I don't want to call it like a disease because that, you know, I don't, I don't know if I want to.

It's a disease that went dormant then.

Sure.

You know, like it's like the John Birch Society in conservative politics.

Right.

You know, like it didn't actually go away.

It went dormant and then resurged.

Right.

The softening of the image was on top.

Maybe the whole thing wasn't like

this.

Right.

Like, this wasn't what Christianity was the whole time as the image was softening.

Sure.

But the potential for this to resurge was there.

Is it...

Because here's about...

Because I truly believe this.

It is incumbent upon these people to then admit that they were lying, right?

You'd think, which is a sin.

I mean, it seems like it's one of the things that they should really have to repent for.

Yeah.

Because that's what they believe.

Yeah, but that was before.

That's a good point.

Yep.

God doesn't have continuity.

Time ain't real, baby.

Yeah, that's fair.

So he talks a little bit more about this softening of evangelical Christianity.

Sure.

So Tim Keller is in New York City and

he tries to adapt Christianity to

your

upper middle class

striver people in New York City, or to make it easy for them to come to church.

So he wouldn't ever talk about homosexuality or if he did, it would be, well, that's not so good for human flourishing, but we're not really going to talk about that too much.

The former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, J.D.

Greer, famously said in a sermon, well, the Bible just whispers about sexual sin, but it shouts about

like financial sin or greed, right?

So they want to downplay.

It shouts about both of them.

It does.

And the two are connected, right?

Yeah.

Right.

If you're greedy for money, you're also going to be lusting after the flesh.

Like that, the two go hand in hand.

And so, but it's to downplay things that the culture does not want to hear, right?

Because you'll be branded as a bigot, as intolerant, as a bad person if you're just like, well, this is what the Bible says.

Like, this, you know, fornicators, adulterers, sodomites, they will not inherit the kingdom of God, right?

If you say, yes, I agree with that, well, you're a bad person, right?

You are outside of polite society if you say those things.

And you can reject it.

You can reject Christianity itself.

And you're certainly welcome to in this country and in all countries, actually.

But

it doesn't just say this parenthetically.

No, it's like included in a sidebar.

It says it again and again and again.

And the church I grew up in, they're like, well, there are only four times where, you know, in the scriptures where people, you know, where Christian, where homosexuality is attacked.

And it's like, since no one ever read it in my church,

no one knew, but like I finally read it.

What the hell?

Why not read it?

And I did.

And

I've never been anti-gay or anything like that.

But by the end, I was like, oh, there's a really clear message

from

the Hebrew scriptures all the way through the Christian to the New Testament.

And

again and again.

Is that what you call it?

You know, again, you don't have to believe it, but if you're a believing Christian,

it's not whispered at all.

Yeah, you do.

You do have to believe it if you're a Christian.

Exactly.

You claim that this is the Bible, that God spoke to you.

Yeah, so

yeah, I guess the temperature is

shifting over to this.

I can see that.

I feel like

years ago when we were doing this podcast, it was like, hey, it's very clear that attacks on trans people are going on in an effort to push towards the same sort of treatment being given to

anybody,

any gay person.

No, everybody listened.

Well,

I think a lot of people were very keenly aware of this.

And, you know, you had dipshits like Tucker and Alex being like, no, no, no, it's totally different.

I'm totally cool with gay people.

Right.

Except I'm lying.

Well, I mean,

it is something that I think

I don't think it's unreasonable.

And in fact, I think it was very reasonable for people to behave within that time period as though...

They were talking to people in good faith.

And so if I were talking to them and I said, don't do that, it's a slippery slope towards them being like, we're Nazis now, then they could be like, no, that's unreasonable.

I'm going to take them at face value, right?

But now you can't.

You can't do that.

It's on you now to say that they are a slippery slope machine that makes slippery slopes as argument factories.

Yeah, that's what they do.

Yeah.

Yeah, and that's one of the things that I found most interesting about this fella is that I think he is a little more good faith in some ways than a lot of the people people that I generally listen to.

I agree.

But he is also still deeply manipulative and trying to slippery slope things.

And it's such a different

sort of balance of that.

Tucker is deeply, deeply bad faith in everything that he's doing here.

Absolutely.

And everything that he does on his show in general.

But, yeah, I don't know.

This guy's weird.

It's wild.

Yeah.

I hope he has a good time in the woods.

I mean, I listen, as somebody who grew up in a place of people

doing basically that,

not going to work.

Yeah, it's not.

Not going to work.

Doesn't last.

So, again, this, this, like, I love liberalism,

but it's the same thing he's doing here.

Like, I was never against gay people, but it's very fucking clear from the Bible that in order to be Christian, you must

stamp this out, or else it's part of society going backwards.

Totally.

I'm totally fine with everybody making their own choices, except I get to determine what women wear when they go outside, and they can't be anywhere near another man without me next to them.

That's

reasonable.

Everybody's free.

And Jewish people gotta go.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

I don't even know what that word means.

Yeah.

So they talk a little bit about atheism some more.

Oh, those are.

Tucker tells...

Not any specific stories, but reflects on getting drunk with Christopher Hitchens.

Fun.

That'd be fun.

And then suggests that you can't really be atheist.

Fair.

Just to go back to the atheists for a second,

what do they make of this?

Like, it just, I understand, certainly understand being agnostic.

Like, I don't know.

You know, I get it.

Yeah, I can see why someone would have that viewpoint.

For sure.

Yeah.

I think that's a pretty normal

place to be.

I think it's wrong, but I don't think it's crazy.

But to be an atheist, to have determined.

That there is no God.

Like, what do you make of the things you see around you?

Have you never held someone's hand while he dies?

like what do you think that is yeah you've never felt anything that is clearly outside of what science describes like

how determined are you to ignore

your life yeah yeah that you become an atheist like what is that

it's i think it's important to hear clips like this to have a reminder that tucker has to think he's talking to idiots his big slam dunk on atheists is haven't you ever felt something that seems like it's outside of science One of the reasons this is so dumb is because Tucker isn't a brain scientist and he can't honestly answer the question: Have you ever experienced something that science definitely can't explain?

Because he has no idea.

Have you not seen the lightning?

It comes from the sky and it's made of magic.

What are you talking about?

As long as you know nothing about science, science can't explain anything.

When is this ever not applicable?

At what point in human history have you ever been like, haven't you ever seen the sky?

Yeah.

Like, what are you talking about?

I definitely am 100% on board that there are some things that science can't explain as we understand it.

Yeah.

That doesn't mean that an explanation eventually won't be available.

The things science can explain fuck me up.

I don't like any of that shit.

Because, like, a whole lot of really mystical shit and stuff that feels like entirely otherworldly and shit can be explained by some pretty simple chemicals that we just don't care to learn about.

It's hard that much.

There's a lot.

So

I don't know.

I think this is really stupid.

And Tucker isn't that, I don't think he's that stupid.

I think that reflects a hatred of his audience.

I mean,

it is like using evidence like,

oh, I meant to call my mom the other day.

And as I picked up the phone, she was dialing.

Haven't you ever seen magic?

You know, like, buddy, I don't.

It's fine.

Fine.

Haven't you ever held someone's hand while they're dying?

I've got

I'm working on a riff on Pascal's wager.

All right.

I'm going to call it Holmes' wager.

And that's I will bet you everything that there is no God.

If there is a God, I'll shit in his mouth and go to hell.

That's my wager.

Okay.

Okay, that's interesting.

Yep.

What do I have to do?

Nothing.

Everybody just makes the bet on their own.

Oh.

Okay, I'm out.

Okay, fine.

That's fair.

I don't want to shit in someone's mouth.

I'm going to win.

So

Tucker,

I think he's getting a little heady because he's talking about these invalidations of atheism.

Sure.

And he goes off on a little bit of an ethics

tear.

I think this is just so stupid.

Right.

So there's very few people, very few, especially now,

that are like, oh, no, I'm an atheist.

There definitely is no God.

Okay, well, then why is murder wrong?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Ooh, you got us.

Boom!

Okay, I I think it's wrong.

Boom!

So, how do you know?

What now?

Don't tell me it's wrong.

Yeah, yeah.

Because you feel that way?

That's your authority?

Your emotions?

And you would see this.

I remember.

So, like, the people you were saying who are atheists, like, are they ever, some of them are smart, I assume?

Yeah.

Yeah.

What do they say?

I remember.

I remember watching, you know, a previous guest of yours, actually, the man who trained me in ministry, Doug Wilson,

debate.

Wonderful man, Christopher Hitchens.

Oh, yes.

And they had that discussion, right?

And

it was shocking to watch Hitchens say, well, it's, you know, it's common human experience, you know,

solidarity with mankind.

That's why I think murder is wrong.

And, of course, Doug says to him, well, you know, well, if you saw someone being like murdered on the street, you think that's bad, right?

Well, why?

And he goes into his whole spiel.

And he's like, well, what if, what if it's a pregnant woman and her baby's murdered?

Right.

You would just say, well, no, no, you need to have a medical license for that to kill that person.

Oh!

Double down!

You wouldn't go down that road.

This is some piss-poor ethics talk.

And again, it relies heavily on Tucker being confident that the audience that's listening is very dumb.

Yep.

His reliance on his God saying that murder is wrong is just as valid as me making up a God who says that murder is good.

When you hinge an entire ethical framework on my God said so, you're making your beliefs more arbitrary, not less.

This is like freshman year philosophy stuff.

Like, if your definition of what is right and wrong comes down to what God says, then why did God say X is right and Y is wrong?

Is the thing right or wrong solely based on whether God says it is or not?

If so, then your morality is just based on your belief about a deity's preference.

If not, then there has to be an external code of morality that exists even above God.

And you're following God's rules because you believe that God's a good interpreter of these sets of rules.

Neither of these is a good stopping point, which is why it's generally good to have a sense of morality that takes things at least a step or two deeper than God said so.

Sure.

It's fucking stupid.

This is a dull argument that they're engaged in, and I can see why Hitchens wouldn't really be interested in taking these points seriously.

As for the port about abortion, if I saw someone who wasn't a doctor performing an abortion on an unwitting person on the street, that would be concerning.

I think that in his stupidity, he's not realizing that there are a bunch of variables in these these two situations that make them not analogous at all.

There's a surprising number of things that in his conception could probably just be solved with somebody going like, hey, bud, what are you up to?

You want to explain?

You need a drink.

How's things going?

Going great.

Yeah.

Good luck with the church.

Oh, boy.

So they talk a little bit more about morality here.

And I think that, again, this is just convoluted shit.

It's wrong.

Well, and you can see why.

Okay, why?

Yeah, you can see why it's breaking down, though, today.

Under the weight of its own silliness.

Yeah, yeah.

It's

a vacuum and it's being replaced by something.

So

all of the moralistic energy is still there.

And now it's gone to things like transgenderism, abortion,

you know, Gaza, whatever.

Like it goes, it goes to all of those routes.

It goes to

BLM and rioting.

And so it's

highly religious.

It's in us.

It's in us.

We can't get away from the conviction, the true conviction that some things are right and some things are wrong.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's fundamentally human.

Absolutely.

So, but an atheist would have to, by definition, be utterly non-judgmental about everything.

You would think they should be, but

they're the most judgmental people.

It's unbelievable.

I mean, Christopher at dinner was always lecturing about the Kurds.

And I'm nothing against the Kurds.

I ran into them in Iraq.

I can imagine that conversation.

In Iraq, I did notice that.

But he was so, again, I'm not against the Kurds.

I'm not an expert in Kurdishness.

But

he, man, he would like lay down his life for the Kurds.

Yeah.

I remember thinking, what is this?

And it was the need to sort of find a good guy and a bad guy and put yourself in the good guy's side.

Yeah.

Oh, like, God.

So, if I understand the argument correctly, they're saying that humans have an inherent need to judge things and take on the air of moral superiority through that.

People like Tucker and Andrew are good and smart because they've outsourced this task to God.

And because they pretend to follow God's judgments, they get to take on a real air of moral superiority.

Conversely, in the absence of God, people like Christopher Hitchens have to find other things to find moral purpose in, like advocating for the Kurds.

Because they sought out moral actions and didn't just say, I'm doing this because God said so, they don't deserve to feel any air of real moral superiority like Tucker does.

So, while we're on the subject, back in the period of 2006 to 2011, Tucker used to be an occasional guest on Bubba the Love Sponges radio show.

Good stuff.

And in one of those appearances, he said, quote, Iraq is a crappy place filled with a bunch of semi-literate, primitive monkeys.

Whatcha going to do?

So, maybe his take on the Kurds I'm not going to listen to entirely.

So, there's no reason to

conclude that not believing in a god makes you non-judgmental.

non-judgmental?

Like, it's almost such an incoherent argument that I don't even know how you would approach it.

Like, well, I mean,

I suppose you would approach it from the Calvinist direction, right?

And you would simply say that any sin is an equal sin in its affront to God, which is what matters.

So murder, if you like, yeah, absolutely, is bad.

But murder is no better or worse than any other sin because the only thing that matters is the affront to God.

Right, the accounting of those affronts.

Yeah, absolutely.

And even then, because that's already predetermined by

God, it doesn't even really matter whether or not you murder somebody or not.

What matters is what happens at the very end.

Yeah, yeah.

But

I hear what you're saying.

Sure.

But I think that.

Well, I'm not saying that.

That's Calvin.

But I get what you're citing.

Sure.

Gotcha.

Yeah.

But I think that what Tucker is talking about is kind of like judgment in terms of like being rude.

you know, right?

Like atheists are so judgmental, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's not about like this is a greater sin than that, or anything, right?

It's like Christopher Hitchens is on his high horse about the Kurds, right?

And where does he get off?

He doesn't even believe in God.

I mean, I don't think you're wrong.

I just, I don't know, I'm flummoxed by these dumb-dumbs.

They, that for

all the arguments that they make,

they claim to have studied a lot,

right?

But the arguments betray a lack of said study.

Yeah, or

there's some amount of study and a willful rejection of the things you would have learned through that study in order to appeal to people who know very little and are easily distracted by jangling keys.

I mean, it's a disinterest in something that I do think is incredibly interesting and has a large amount of literature, the arguments over all of this stuff just through the Bible alone.

And they bet to ignore all of that and go, well, then what's wrong with murder?

Fuck you.

Right.

And I cannot stress enough how anybody who's had an undergraduate philosophy class would have had these conversations at great length.

And both of these guys said they went to college.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Please don't ever make me go back there.

Yeah.

So

Andrew had a church in Minnesota.

Yep.

And then he decided to go to

Tennessee to do this stuff.

No golden tablets necessary?

No.

And he had to say goodbye to that old congregation and tell them what he was going off to.

And I just told them that,

no,

I have to leave Minnesota.

There's a place for me there in Tennessee.

And

it's ultimately what is best for my family's future.

There's a place where my children can grow up.

Because part of it, too, isn't just the things that we're leaving, the political, cultural things that we're leaving in Minnesota, but it's also

overall the things that have been done to the Midwest, to everywhere, where

my children grow up.

And

if they want to have a career and a life and a family and a success of their own, there just isn't much for them in small-town Midwest.

And so they'll all just fly the coop.

I mean, this is what happened

when I graduate from high school.

Most of the people that I grew up with,

they all left.

They went to the Twin Cities.

They went to other cities for work and for careers.

And

so that same thing was likely going to happen with my children.

And I look at it and I think, well, my family's been here for six generations, and

whether

it's going to end here, right?

And

I want to be in a place where we can continue that, where we can be rooted, where my children have the ability to stay in a place.

And so

so many friends are coming to Tennessee, where we are.

They're bringing businesses.

And once you build things at scale, the more stuff you're able to do, the more businesses you're able to have, the more opportunity is for young people.

And so

if my children want to stay where we are and continue that on generation after generation,

we actually will be able to do that.

It wasn't so much just, okay, we need to leave Minnesota, but it's also we're being drawn.

to a place for a particular reason.

It's a Tennessee dream.

There's a future there.

Yeah.

The hope of refugees from time immemorial.

Yeah.

So earlier the argument was that Andrew had a weird fantasy about what he imagined was going on at the public school, and he didn't want the state to tell him he can't put his kid in conversion therapy, so they had to get out of Minnesota.

Now, I guess this has turned into a gold rush narrative.

It's a little different.

I understand that maybe employment prospects were tough in Waseka, but you have to understand that they aren't going to be better off in the middle of nowhere.

The place that they're ending up in is located a little ways outside of a town that's one-tenth of Waseka's size.

I get that the pitch here is basically that Silicon Valley-type jobs can be relocated to a cheap place in the middle of nowhere and venture capital firms can create little company towns, but it's not going to fly.

You might notice that all of these people who are like relocating to Texas, like Elon and Rogan, they aren't going to the middle of nowhere in Texas.

They're going to Austin because that's a city that has the infrastructure and all the other amenities you need to accommodate large businesses like Tesla or Rogan's media and supplement operation.

Yep.

The story Andrew is telling here is a farce.

He says that he's going to this new place because it's a chance for his children to have roots, but he's leaving a place where they already have deep roots and this history of six generations.

None of the points he's making line up together or make sense, which leads me to a strong suspicion that this really is mostly about control.

And it even makes sense that there would be this obsession with like the roots stuff,

but he wants to control even that.

He wants to break from the roots that he had so he can be in control of the beginning of these roots.

He's creating a new family legacy while mythologizing the one that he has rejected by leaving Minnesota.

And it's pretty fucked up.

I think he's a weird guy.

Yeah.

You know,

I think when I was growing up, because this is what this was, you know, it's always, think about the children.

Oh, think about the children.

What are we going to think about the children, right?

And so the parents in these kinds of communities want to create a world for their kids that kind of

allows them to grow up still believing the same stuff.

Yeah.

With their worldview imposed and non-threatened.

And because if you control the environment, it won't feel like imposition.

It'll just be the way that you grew up.

I feel like that made more sense like 500 years ago, whenever the next hundred years would seem almost identical to the hundred years previous to that,

now the idea of like molding your child's growth five years from now is absurd.

It's just absurd.

You have no idea what it's going to look like.

You have no, I mean, you have no fucking clue.

Yeah.

And then 10 years from that, whenever they're actually making like strong decisions about their own moral character from within, like, what is they even, what is 10 years going to look like with computers?

Yeah, right?

The uh, the level of control you would need to exert over some child in order to maintain that box.

Absurd.

In the modern world, it

seems very crazy.

Yeah.

But God bless them for trying.

I suppose.

I suppose.

I don't think God's doing that, but I suppose we all should hope.

Yeah.

I think

you move your kids out to the middle of nowhere to start a church.

I think you might make them more likely to leave when they can.

That does tend to be the case.

Yeah.

That does tend to be the case.

This one sounds like a dud.

So Tucker is a bit of a racist.

An ethnic essentialist, I think I would call him.

Well, don't use those words.

He's an ethnic city essentialist.

He thinks of towns

by their ethnicity.

Oh, my God.

Christians built your state.

Yes.

And all of it.

And every bit of it.

And it's so telling when you go to the Twin Cities.

I think of them as Protestant and Catholic.

Yeah.

I think of them as Scandinavian in Minneapolis and Irish.

Yeah.

And others.

And others in St.

Paul.

Yeah.

But both of them, especially St.

Paul, just littered with churches and schools.

And it's just like the infrastructure of those cities was built by Christians.

And so it's a little bit crazy that, first of all, it's been taken over by people who have made a point

to

stick a finger in the eye of Christians to make it impossible for them to live there.

It's like you're being driven out of your own homeland six generations.

Yeah, that was true.

That's what happened with my wife is from St.

Paul.

Her

father's side of the family is Polish Catholic.

I went to St.

Casimir's Church.

Exactly.

That's exactly in my mind what I think of it.

In the neighborhood that they were in, it was all Polish people.

But now it's all Hmong, right?

Everywhere.

It's all Hmong and Somali.

And everyone there just left over the last two or three years.

What happened to their churches and parochial schools?

Well, St.

Casmer's church is there, but it's largely empty.

We went there for a funeral a couple of years ago, but there's, I mean, people still attended, but it's not like it, not like it was.

Most of the parishes there have shut down.

The church schools have shut down, and they've moved out to the suburbs.

And so that, I mean, that was a Polish neighborhood.

It was

this ethnic enclave.

If I could just say

showing myself to be an ethnic nationalist,

they're just like some of the greatest people

I've ever met.

I don't think I've ever met them.

I have to say that married one.

Yeah, I just think they're great people.

I don't know.

I've met many I don't like, but just salts of the earth, smart, hardworking, serious about faith and family.

Yeah, great people.

Yeah.

I doubt it was an improvement, the change to St.

Paul.

In fact, it wasn't.

I've been there.

No, it's.

Okay.

I've got a fix.

Yeah.

I fixed it.

Okay.

I figured it out.

All right.

I don't think it's possible for us to talk these people out of thinking segregation is a great idea.

No, no, I don't think so either.

It's not possible.

No.

So, here's what we do.

We solve things the American way.

Reality TV show.

One house, segregation.

The other house, desegregation.

Who lasts, we do it for 100 years, right?

Whoever does best gets the country.

I think it's a bad idea.

We could set up rooting sides.

You know, I think it'd be great.

I think it's a bad idea, but I think that it's a good punt.

Because by the time there's an answer, we'll all be dead.

That's the idea.

But what the point is, it'll keep the segregationist focused on the show instead of trying to make everything so goddamn segregated.

That might.

That might.

Yeah, that's 4D chess, baby.

Yep, that's the idea.

So, yeah, this is some racist shit.

Here's the issue.

Like, I don't think it matters to

say that this is racist shit.

No.

They know.

They're aware of this.

They say ethnic nationalists.

They just don't think it's bad.

No.

Yeah.

We have now reached a point in the conversation where it is

like we just don't believe basic concepts in common.

No, you're just pro-segregation.

Yeah.

I mean.

At very least,

differential levels of rights among different populations.

No, no.

At very least.

No,

because this is the conversation that they're doing again.

It is slippery slope on purpose.

So it is never going to be just that.

It is always going to be the next step on top of that.

I totally agree with you.

I'm sorry for getting very aggressive about that.

No, I totally agree with you.

And it's a good point.

It is just the, like, you know, analytically from what they're saying, that's the least you could expect.

No, no, no, no, totally.

No, you're totally right.

And that's, but that's their trick.

Pretending it's anything more benign than that is absurd you're pro-segregation fine we're done talking i'm anti-segregation i guess that's just how this works but the idea that there is more to talk about is their trick not mine yeah you know yeah yep yeah so uh i think the problem that evangelicals have according to this fella is that they just haven't been taught the bible

Sounds true to me.

And then Tucker reveals that he hasn't, he doesn't have much familiarity.

Ooh.

Many evangelical people have not been taught really any Bible or theology at all.

And you see this in surveys, like the Barna group does surveys and

what people believe about different things.

And they haven't been taught any Bible.

They don't know it.

And so then

when the liberal says, well, the Bible condemns eating shellfish and pork.

And in the same way, it condemns homosexuality.

So what do you have to say about that?

And they have no idea how to explain that, what that is about.

And their faith is shaken.

God didn't destroy two cities with sulfur and fire because people were eating pork.

That's right.

He destroyed them because they tried to

commit gay rape on an angel.

Yeah, that's just

a distinction with

inhospitality.

No, it wasn't.

Well, I mean, I guess.

It was gay rape.

Yeah, I mean, the least hospitable thing is to do it.

I mean, you can just read it if you want.

It's like,

it's pretty out there.

Yeah, it's like, well, yeah, the least hospitable thing you could do to a guest is to anally rape them.

Yeah.

So all the men of the town came out.

They demanded.

Yeah, we need to know these angels.

To have sex with these angels.

And then lots like, I've got some daughters in here.

Take them.

Yeah.

Which kind of takes a lot off my Christmas card list for saying something like that.

But whatever.

He does that.

It's in Genesis.

And then they're like, no, we want to rape the dudes.

So it's like.

These are not euphemisms.

It's pretty straightforward.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I actually, I just read Genesis 19 to my children, and then there were some questions from the kids.

It was funny.

I read that a couple of years ago for the first time.

Really?

A couple of years ago for the first time.

Yeah.

How about that?

That's weird.

That is wild.

I think that in the same way that, like,

you know, I mentioned that, like, sort of some mystical experiences can be easily explained by brain chemicals that you just willingly or unknowingly don't know anything about.

Yeah.

The Bible says a bunch of shit that's mind-blowing if you've never cared to read it.

All kinds of shit in there.

Yeah.

You know what?

It's been around for several thousand years.

Yeah, it's not surprising to me, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

I knew that as a kid.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, I think they mock it, but I think it's bullshit.

Like, you don't expect, like, why do you listen to a fucking PhD in butterflies?

You're not going to read read butterfly shit.

You're like, I trust you.

You have a PhD in butterflies.

If the priest guy says that the Bible says this, the idea is you're supposed to be able to trust him.

That's what the Bible's for, right?

Uh-huh.

You know, you shouldn't have to read it.

Sure.

You shouldn't.

Well, here's.

That was their argument.

But here's where it breaks down.

Sure.

Is that it's such a fundamental, like we talked about earlier, the progression of Christianity is this breaking down of the barriers between the divine

and the individual?

Because you can't trust them.

Clearly.

There's more power in that than butterflies.

Exactly, exactly.

Yeah.

History has shown.

And that's where they miscalculated.

That is the purpose.

Because the true power.

Butterflies.

Mothra.

Always been that way.

We need to call upon Mothra.

Two fairies.

I know they look like children.

We need to take out Tucker.

It's unscientific.

Mothra.

Hear my call.

Do, dude,

so Tucker,

you know, he knows that they're going to go out to the rural areas.

Sure.

And he's like, plant some wood,

get some trees going.

Okay, yeah, sure, sure.

Are you putting in evergreens, please?

Oh, I think everything.

Yeah.

I mean, there's pines.

Yeah, there's.

Please don't neglect the pine.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

I know it's a fast-growing tree, relatively speaking, but it's

beautiful.

It's the answer.

And cedars, if you can, if you have water.

Yeah, I don't know if we'll be able to do it.

Okay, okay.

So now we're going to get into it.

Since you're a preacher an Old Testament scholar, what was the inside of the temple clad with?

Cedar, yeah, from Lebanon.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nailed it.

God himself said cedar.

That's right.

Yeah.

An accident?

He was pretty specific about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It smells great.

So maybe there's a reason Mysana has cedar on the edge.

That's right.

That's right.

I always tell my kids that.

Just things are like the temple.

It's my cedar church.

Yeah.

That's right.

No sacrifices, however.

Well, here's something you may not have known.

This network almost didn't exist.

A trademark issue almost prevented us from launching by blocking blocking us from using the name TCN.

Now, a company called the American Country Network owned the rights to that trademark, and we were not sure if they would give them up.

Looking back, American Country Network could have demanded a lot of money.

They could have held us up at gunpoint in exchange for the name TCN, and a lot of businesses would have done that.

They said, I have to do this ad.

They were incredibly nice.

They were so nice, I have to do this ad.

Free.

Quick.

Right away, I did this ad.

This is not your average company at all.

These are really, really nice people.

And we're glad this happened because it let us get to know the American Country Network.

It turns out it's a great place.

Its leaders are excellent people of the same values that we do and we think that you do.

American Country Network is a family-friendly consumer kitchen group bringing the best country music to millions of households across the country and it's growing fast.

Fuck off with this folksy bullshit.

God will not be mocked, Dan.

I love this presentation that he thinks he's fooling anybody, that it's like, these are such nice people.

I just decided to do this ad read.

I couldn't stop myself from doing this ad read.

I tried.

I looked in the mirror three times and I said, no, and then I just kept saying the ad read.

It's so funny.

It's like,

what world do you think people don't understand that this is a contract?

I mean, I just, I don't know.

I don't know.

I feel like the appropriate response to somebody that blatantly trying to rip me off,

I feel like there's like, that's crazy.

I want to slap you.

Like, no.

Well, like, it's, it just makes me think of the, when I went to the show in Pennsylvania, the sponsors all doing a little bit of time up top.

Of course.

One of them being for like a weird sleep syrup or something like that.

It's like, this is this, that's just what this is.

It's just a syrup that shares our values about sleep.

Right.

And also Christian nationalism.

Yeah.

And they gave me a bunch of money, and so they're going to talk before my thing.

But it was God money.

It's cool.

It's all cool.

And I really just wanted them here because they're good people.

They are great people.

Yeah, now, granted, they sponsored this.

We negotiated things and signed a contract.

Yeah.

So we have one last clip here, and it's because

towards the end of this.

Well, I will say, I probably would have cut out some more clips, but I decided to leave a lot of the theological alone

because I don't really care.

No.

Like,

I don't want to argue with someone about what their religious tenets are.

Sure.

I think it's funny a lot of the times when Alex has his misrepresentations of religion.

They're delightful and weird.

But that's more about it being him.

Yeah.

I don't really care precisely what this guy believes about various scriptures.

Sure.

So

I didn't farm those fields.

Who gives a shit?

And the end is a bit of a plug for the plots of land.

I mean,

it's just so amazing.

It's so amazing how well capitalism has just conquered it and they just let it go.

Yeah.

I mean,

it's genuinely amazing.

Yeah.

Do you think, I don't know.

I mean, I wonder if this is too conspiratorial of a thought.

And that is that, you know, like Mark Andreessen

put money into the company that owned, like the venture capital group that owns the company that has this big plot of land.

Yeah.

This guy is going on Tucker's show.

Tucker knows Mark Andreessen.

Yep.

Like, is this connected?

Do they connect?

Like, I don't think it has to be.

I don't think it's necessary.

No.

But it certainly looks kind of like it could be not above board.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

I mean,

it's a hard world to live in where conspiracy is one thing, thing, but at the same time, when a small group of people set out to accomplish a thing and then accomplish it, I understand that

that is a conspiracy, but it's just like what we would regularly call a small group of people accomplishing a thing.

Yeah.

And then it's also hard for me to think about this outside of its advertising use, in as much as, like, okay, you've got this Christian nationalist guy who said a bunch of really dumb, bad shit in the past,

who announces that he's going to start a church on a plot of land that this Christian nationalist, anti-woke venture capitalist group has bought.

That's courting bad publicity.

I mean.

That's courting coverage in the media about like, oh, look at these Nazis going out to the woods.

And then you get to play victim.

Sure.

You get to be like, oh, look at the system demonizing us.

Sure.

This is why you need to buy a plot of land

out here.

That's how the real Noah's Ark nailed it.

Yeah, it kind of feels a little bit like that, but I can't tell how much of that is me just just like, it would make sense if that's what this is.

Yeah, I mean,

that is kind of the thing.

You know, the guy who set out to build the real Noah's Ark wasn't courting negative publicity, but I mean, I'm assuming that he had to know that people were going to be like, now you can see.

You can't fit everybody in there, you know?

But he wasn't selling berths on the Ark.

He wasn't selling rooms on there.

That's true.

Well, he was selling tours on a fictional boat.

Was he?

That's what the real Noah's Ark was for.

Oh, I thought you meant the real Noah's Ark.

Not the real, real Noah's Ark.

No, that's true.

Noah was not selling.

Frankly, he was giving that shit away.

Yeah, Noah had no capitalist

kind of motivation, whereas this one has deep ones.

Very much so, yeah.

So anyway, here's just a little.

He actually even refers to this as like a real estate venture.

Wow.

and uh so it just talks about that a little bit here uh the people that i that i've i've spoken to the people i've met in the town are

are very you know they're they're like like

very enthusiastic actually that yeah uh especially when they see you know see the things that i do see the podcast i do or various things like oh like you're not at all like the tv man said you are and of course these are people that you know that we've been describing.

Like, they, they don't trust the media.

They don't trust journalists.

So they're already distrusting of that.

I'm like, oh, it just seems like you really like Donald Trump and the United States and Americans and the Constitution and our freedoms.

And like, you seem like a just normal, you know, conservative kind of guy.

And I'm like, yeah, I am.

That's, I'm an open, open book.

Like, there's no,

you know, what you see is what you get.

What I, what I believe

earnestly believe.

Um, until later.

So people are very, uh, have been very, very kind.

But the state legislature hasn't tried to

mess with your zoning permits or anything like that.

No, and and any victimhood.

The thing is, well, the company

itself is not saying, well, this is a community, like that would, you know, violate the Fair Housing Act, right?

To say this is a Christian-only community.

It's just that my church is allowed to build a church there, right?

There's no law against that at all.

And

I can call up friends and say, hey, you want to move here and be part of our thing?

What are the guys?

Oh, the cost of living is extremely low.

It's real good.

So, yeah, they're just selling.

They're trying to sell plots of land in this thing.

It's very overt.

And I think you're a little too aware of,

hey,

this is Christians only, but we can't legally say that.

I found another interview with the guy who runs the venture capital group.

Yeah.

The Ruby Ridge

Rider or whatever the fuck.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What is it called?

Ridge?

Ridge.

Oh, no.

Actually, I can't.

Now I can't.

Ridge Rider.

Ridge Runner.

Ridge Runner.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that guy has a very similar kind of thing of like, you know, I can't say that it's Christians only.

That would be illegal.

But we're building a church there, and I hope that sends the message.

Yeah.

So that's cute.

That's very cute.

And what you see is what you get.

Yeah.

As illustrated by the winking

way that he's expressing this.

Yeah.

I mean the irony of what they're doing and what he's saying is that it's like it's very similar to segregation busing.

Like most schools that were the most segregated, like most areas that were segregated remain so.

Most schools that were segregated remain so because they stopped bussing.

Like the only way to really force desegregation is to force desegregation.

Because otherwise, you can say, hey, you can't explicitly say you can't buy here, but also you can segregate your school as long as everybody's white.

You know, it's fucked up.

Yep,

there are workarounds.

There are workarounds.

And that's clearly a big part of what this is.

Got a bus.

So

I think that if I were a rich Satanist, I would buy a plot.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

100%.

I would challenge them a little bit.

Oh, and I would build a church there too or something like that.

Totally.

And then see what happened.

Just to fuck with them.

I mean,

it's like the people, what was it?

The Ten Commandments.

And then right next to that was a statue of the devil where it's like, well, I'm mad at one of those.

And it's like, yes, but that's the point.

You understand?

Yeah.

You understand the point I'm making is that you can't.

Yeah, if I had money to burn, that would be something that I would probably do just to fuck with them.

Well, you can't do this.

Aha, but that's the point.

Yeah, I'm too busy and can't afford it.

So

I'll pass on this troll operation.

Just decorate Halloween.

It's so fucked up every year.

Yeah.

Oh.

But you know what I would do?

What would you do?

Dark Easter.

Oh, my God.

That would be amazing.

Yeah.

That would be three upside-down crosses on your yard.

Maybe not that.

Maybe not too far.

Yeah, no.

Not that dark Easter.

I was thinking of like

a bunny

scary.

The bunny from Bonnie Python.

Yeah, like that.

You went a little off feed.

I want real Dark Easter.

That's apologies, yeah.

So I think that, look,

hey, it's Tucker Week.

It is.

We're not abandoning Alex or anything like that, but I felt the spirit get in me that I wanted to talk a little more about Tucker.

And I think that this episode was really

helpful in illuminating some of this point that I think is going to be important to keep in mind.

the synergy of really, really bad ideology and

rebranding of Silicon Valley Tech billionaire bullshit.

And it's almost perfectly encapsulated by this guest and the way Tucker is strategically presenting him.

Yeah.

And also, look, I want to say.

I don't think I've seen you laugh as much as when, like, this episode, you've been laughing.

It's been very funny.

I don't know if it's come across on the mic, but there's been a lot of you've been very amused by the bullshit these people are saying.

It's very bullshitty.

I have to admit, it's, I'm, I'm not missing, I feel like maybe we were in,

not we, Alex has been in a fucking rut in his bullshit.

Gene Hackman.

Absolutely.

And I feel like since there haven't been consequences for murdering Gene Hackman, I've felt a little bit of like a, I need to take a break.

And this has been perfect.

Yeah.

This has been a perfect week of not doing Alex.

Yeah.

And we can move on.

My birthday is next week, and I was kind of considering a gift to myself being, I don't even talk about Alex until I'm 41.

Amazing.

I was thinking about that, but then that's all next week, and that might be too long.

I don't know.

We'll see.

We'll play it by ear.

Anything could happen.

Seriously, this Tucker guy, what a dick.

Wild.

We'll be back with another episode to learn about something.

But until then, we have a website.

Indeed, we do.

It's KnowledgeFight.com.

Yep.

We'll be back.

But until then, I'm Neo.

I'm Leo.

I'm DZX Clark.

I am the Mysterious Professor.

Woo, yeah,

and now here comes the sex robots.

Andy in Kansas, you're on the air.

Thanks for holding.

Hello, Alex.

I'm a first-time caller.

I'm a huge fan.

I love your work.

I love you.