Based Camp - July 18, 2024


How Online Atheist Communities Birthed the Modern Right

Topics
banning pornography
Hosted by
Malcolm Collins Simone Collins
Mentioned
Simone Trump Richard Dawkins Christopher Hitchens Jordan Peterson Sam Harris NoFap Sarah Hader Ayaan Hirsi Ali Christian Marxists Armored Skeptic Peter Bregan Michael Schmerconish Charles Murray Stellar Blade Jesse Single Katie Herzog Barry Weiss Ben Shapiro Lyman Stone and 11 more
J.D. Vance VP Pick： How Trump's Choice Will Permanently Transform the Republican Party The Authenticity of Fraud： The Yale Hillbilly + The Classless Aristocrat

Episode Stats


Length

54 minutes

Words per minute

179.65

Word count

9,725

Sentence count

724

Harmful content

Misogyny

16

sentences flagged

Toxicity

20

sentences flagged

Hate speech

43

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Simone and I talk about the rise of internet conservatism and how it came about, and why it s so different from the rest of the conservative online base. We also talk about how the atheist movement became so wildly different from each other, and how that led to the formation of the internet conservative movement.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello, Simone. I am excited to be talking to you today. We just got back from NatCon,
00:00:05.260 which is the National Conservative Convention, where all of the high and mighty conservative
00:00:10.280 thought leaders, not real thought leaders, i.e. they don't lead the public's conservative mindset.
00:00:15.020 They actually seem almost completely disconnected from the mainstream conservative movement,
00:00:19.980 which was a real takeaway for me when I was there. So these are all the people who work in the
00:00:23.600 Washington conservative think tanks. I heard tower of people.
00:00:27.180 Yeah. And I heard some thoughts there that really made me be like, wow. At one point,
00:00:31.360 I was like, why are you doing this? The base doesn't want this. And they literally said,
00:00:35.160 fuck the base. And I was like, wow. One person where you got all mad, where he's like, bureaucrats 1.00
00:00:42.080 are good, actually. We just need conservative bureaucrats. We need a larger bureaucracy, 0.80
00:00:46.600 and we need it to be conservative. And then another person was like, don't complain about
00:00:51.040 socialism's okay, so long as it's within our value set. And this is where you get insane things.
00:00:56.660 The Heritage Foundation did Project 2024, where they put out this plan-
00:01:00.720 2025.
00:01:00.840 2025. 2025 for the Trump administration. And in this plan, one of the things that they had
00:01:07.300 was banning pornography. And I was like, that is a leftist position. Are you not familiar
00:01:15.100 with the Stellar Blade controversy?
00:01:16.380 Malcolm, they're coming together. Unity at last. We can finally agree on something.
00:01:20.860 No, it's a bunch of woke bureaucrats with mild conservative overlays.
00:01:26.940 Between NoFap men's rights activists and radical feminists, we finally found common ground. 0.96
00:01:32.420 Porn is bad. Except that you guys know, making porn illegal and making porn something that's
00:01:37.520 shameful is the one number one thing.
00:01:39.160 Hold on. When you're talking about the base, NoFap is about self-control. Even NoFap people
00:01:44.560 are mad about the Stellar Blade controversy. Even NoFap people are mad about the Tracer Butt
00:01:49.720 controversy. Even NoFap people are mad about the Skullgirls controversy. Every time a group
00:01:56.340 has attempted to censor male sexuality, it has been a progressive-leaning group.
00:02:01.940 But I want to talk about how these groups became so wildly different from each other. Why is the
00:02:09.660 conservative online base, which is the group that really got Trump elected, like Trump was the 4chan
00:02:16.880 candidate to begin with. That is the group that made Trump happen. That is where Pepe came from.
00:02:23.760 That is where emperor, god emperor Trump came from, from the Warhammer stuff. That is where basically
00:02:31.100 most of modern conservative internet culture came from. A lot of people would say, okay, a lot of
00:02:36.720 this is downstream of 4chan. And it is. But it's not just downstream of 4chan. A very bizarre thing
00:02:45.940 happened in internet history, which is the atheist movement online became the birthplace of the culture
00:02:58.320 that is now internet conservatism, or internet republicanism, or internet Trump-based, basically.
00:03:06.540 Interesting.
00:03:07.260 And the question is, how did this happen?
00:03:10.060 Would you like to know more?
00:03:11.360 And let's chart the history of this for people who are too young. Now, if you are young and not
00:03:16.020 familiar, like you have not been, like if you are my age and chronically online, I just said something
00:03:21.620 that is completely uncontroversial to you. You're like, oh yeah, I remember when that happened.
00:03:26.200 That was weird. Because everyone who has been actively engaged with online culture for a long
00:03:31.380 time and mildly open to conservative ideas knows that this happened. But if you aren't,
00:03:38.640 then you might think that's a controversial claim. Or if you just haven't been engaged with
00:03:42.260 online culture. Like if I said this at NatCon, they'd be like, that can't be true. They'd say
00:03:46.020 something like that. And then somebody at the table would like lean over and be like, actually,
00:03:49.160 that did happen. So let's talk about how this happened, what happened, and why it happened.
00:03:53.920 So first we need to go back to the early days of the internet. If you are talking about the early
00:04:03.300 days of the internet, the war between the fundies and the atheists was absolutely enormous. It was like 0.90
00:04:13.760 the core show on the internet. It was the core conflict on the internet. It was as big a conflict
00:04:22.460 as something like woke versus anti-woke is today. It is what everyone was talking about. And then,
00:04:29.840 and I should note that people can be like, oh, then the modern conservative movement must have come out
00:04:36.200 of the early online religious movement, right? The people who are fighting the atheists. The problem
00:04:42.620 is those people were always like one to 10 versus the atheist community in the early days of the
00:04:48.800 internet. They were the best minority. They were people that brought on for people to take, 1.00
00:04:53.700 who had no internet illiteracy for other people to take pot shots at. That was basically what was
00:04:57.900 going on. Poor dears. And then even the people who were online were more dedicated to their individual
00:05:08.020 communities, i.e. like promoting Catholicism or promoting some brands of Protestantism than any sort
00:05:16.020 of wider political battle. So those were two of the things that caused that. And partially because
00:05:21.060 of this shift, but partially fueled by this shift is the theocratic portion of the conservative party
00:05:28.340 just lost pretty much all of their power in the shift to the Trumpist movement. But this will also
00:05:34.980 explain how that happened because an alternate version of conservatism began to grow online, which
00:05:40.780 appealed to many more people than the theocratic forum. And we can talk about why this happened.
00:05:45.220 Early atheist community online. You have this early atheist community online. And then they and they
00:05:53.580 were mostly like YouTubers. That was where a lot of this was happening in the early days. And pretty
00:05:58.280 much all of their content was, look at this stupid thing religious people believe. Ha, let's laugh at 1.00
00:06:05.280 the religious people for having these stupid things. Oh, and don't worry, all the subreddits. 1.00
00:06:08.660 Um, there was, oh yeah, really good. The pin core subreddits of the top 10 was our atheism. Yeah. So do you
00:06:16.360 have any thoughts on this period of history or any memories you have of it before I go further?
00:06:20.580 I do remember it. I, it was, and this was something that I definitely encountered more
00:06:25.320 in my upbringing, right? As, as a young girl growing up in a very progressive area where basically
00:06:32.060 religious people were seen as, as quite weird and it was, and genuinely quite funny. Like how could 1.00
00:06:39.120 this person possibly have these weird traditions and believe these weird things and yeah, making
00:06:44.660 fun of them seemed. And that's actually the core of what caused the switch. Yeah. And I'll actually
00:06:50.240 mark an interesting anecdote here. So Sarah Hader was in these early days. She's a guest that we've had
00:06:54.840 on the show. She's great. She is an ex-Muslim who was a big figure in this early atheist community.
00:07:03.260 Now she probably was the second most famous Muslim in the community now, or ex-Muslim, I should say in 1.00
00:07:08.040 the community. Yeah. Yeah. Now she's known as an anti-woke podcaster. And I remember actually,
00:07:16.680 because she hadn't contextualized that this had happened. And we were with a group of more like
00:07:22.080 online savvy, like people. And she was thinking about what she was going to do next with her
00:07:25.760 career. Then I was with a bunch of think tank people and I go, you know, you could just go
00:07:29.060 and be like a public face of a conservative think tank. And she was like, Oh no, I wouldn't appeal to
00:07:33.900 the conservative base. I'm just an ex-Muslim anti-woke activist because she hadn't thought of 0.98
00:07:40.100 herself the new base. She was still thinking of these early days of the internet before this switch
00:07:46.260 happened. Maybe. But I think it shows how, but if you said that today, you'd be like,
00:07:51.380 you would be fantastic for being a public face of many of these organizations. But how did this
00:07:56.880 happen? The, I think it was two things happened in the early days and we'll get into specific
00:08:01.300 examples where this happened. But first I'm just talking about like what happened, how did it happen?
00:08:05.160 Okay. Was that these early atheists, the arguments that you can make against the conservative
00:08:12.940 positions get boring after a while because they are consistent? Yeah. And they're not going to
00:08:20.000 change their minds. The argument's not going to evolve and they're also not going to change their
00:08:23.360 policies and ways that give you new things to work with. Yeah. So you're just working with the
00:08:27.760 ha stupid thing. It's a debate you can run 50 times, a hundred times, but you're not going to be able 1.00
00:08:33.360 to run it a million times, which is what you need, right? Yeah. You need something to attack that is
00:08:39.920 constantly evolving, but patently stupid. You need a group of people who is completely 1.00
00:08:48.060 disconnected from reality and is willing to take the bait when you are tolling them. That was the
00:08:54.380 other thing about the Christian community is one, they weren't really online that much. And two,
00:09:00.260 when they were online, they eventually would learn to not take the bait if they were like a prominent
00:09:04.620 figure in the community, right? Yeah. And so it just got boring, but then they found another
00:09:10.020 community that was beginning to evolve at that time as well. And this was the beginnings of wokeism.
00:09:17.740 So it wouldn't, at the time they wouldn't have called it wokeism. They would have called it 0.86
00:09:22.060 anti-feminism or anti sort of Tumblrina culture. And to people who don't remember the Tumblrinas,
00:09:28.220 they were insane. They were like crazier than the modern woke movement in many ways. This is where 0.86
00:09:35.500 they were the female equivalent of 4chan, equally crazy, equally unhinged, just an equally autistic, 1.00
00:09:44.820 just equally crazy and equally unhinged. But unlike 4chan where everything was about attack and the joke 0.99
00:09:50.920 and like being thick skinned, being females, one person would write like a fan fiction or would say
00:09:57.560 that because they were accepting of everything or say, my gender is turtle or my gender is clout.
00:10:02.780 Those were two real genders. I think all of our genders are turtle. Thank you very much. 1.00
00:10:07.280 Yeah. Your community would begin to buy into this because women more than men begin to buy in the 1.00
00:10:14.400 community consensus more. I'm already buying into turtle gender now. You can call me turtle.
00:10:19.000 Yeah. They're also statistically more spiritual. If you look at things, historically, women were seen as 1.00
00:10:24.760 the more religious group, which I think modern people might be pretty surprised about. It's
00:10:28.340 because women buy into these sorts of stories much faster than men do. You know, if somebody writes
00:10:32.920 a fan fiction, women are going to start thinking these characters are real, like a small group of
00:10:37.240 women. Become snape wives. Yeah. Snape wives and stuff like that. You don't get this phenomenon in 1.00
00:10:41.900 men that much. So you begin to have the development of early woke culture. Before it was mainstream,
00:10:48.160 it was just seen as like a crazy thing. And so these early atheists then begin to turn on this new
00:10:56.760 ultra feminist, ultra woke culture, because it was constantly providing new content. People would 1.00
00:11:02.060 always fight. It was just better content to be honest. And the people who they were debating against
00:11:09.280 genuinely hated them. This was another thing that was the difference between these communities and the
00:11:14.000 Christians and the Jews and the Muslims. If they began to build camaraderie, the atheists didn't 0.97
00:11:20.320 really hate the religious community. And the religious community didn't really hate the atheists
00:11:26.400 either. They were abused fundy kids, but it wasn't everyone. The vast majority were like, they would say,
00:11:32.900 look, I'm just trying to convince you that these things are silly and you don't need to follow them.
00:11:36.320 You know, rival football teams, just people who really love their side and love dunking on the other side,
00:11:43.820 but also know that they need the other side in order to have fun. So it's all.
00:11:47.640 Yeah. There was nothing like that was the woke community. The woke community genuinely thought
00:11:52.960 that these people were trying to kill them. And these people genuinely thought that the woke
00:11:57.820 community, when I say trying to kill them, I don't, not specifically, but they bought into this lie
00:12:01.840 that like, if somebody denies that cloud gender is real. That they were causing trauma, that they were
00:12:06.460 causing harm. They'll say they're, you're denying my existence, which is akin to genocide within their
00:12:12.260 violence. Well, and, and that, that offending someone is akin to physical violence that it's,
00:12:16.500 I'm feeling real pain, that kind of thing. Yeah. And in this moment, like nothing happened,
00:12:21.440 like people, and this is how many of these atheists, I think didn't realize that they're a hater,
00:12:26.080 that they were becoming the new Republican bases initiating point, because for them, all of this was
00:12:33.700 just small incremental changes. And if people are wondering some examples of individuals where this
00:12:38.020 happened, Armored Skeptic, or individuals like Peter Bergosen, or Michael Schmer, or individuals
00:12:45.200 like, I'd even say Schuonhead to an extent really started in that community. Now she considers herself 0.98
00:12:50.380 a progressive now, but progressives don't own her because she went anti-woke and you can't disagree 1.00
00:12:54.640 with them on anything. And I think that also the way that this wokest movement worked. Now keep in 0.72
00:12:59.500 mind in these early days, the wokest movement hadn't taken over yet. And we're going to talk about
00:13:04.280 mainstream people as well. So you can look at Sam Harris, right? One of the four horsemen of the
00:13:08.000 atheist apocalypse, right? Or of atheism, right? So he worked at his policy position. He considers
00:13:14.120 himself a libertarian internationalist in approach to foreign policies, which includes some interventionist
00:13:20.220 policies. He was, during the Bush era, he supported specifically in regards to attacking Islam in the
00:13:26.340 Middle East and in the war of that period. He was seen as being willing to talk to anyone, even when he
00:13:32.780 disagreed with them. For example, Charles Murray, he talked to, he's a conservative individual and people
00:13:37.080 were like, oh, how would you do that? And like the Israel-Palestine conflict, he's on the Israel
00:13:40.780 side. He has, or you can talk about Christopher Hitchens, who even in the early days supported the
00:13:47.460 Iraq war, right? So you would have these individuals. Now in the early days, what progressivism was when all 0.85
00:13:55.140 of this started, these people wouldn't have been hard removed from the progressive sphere for
00:14:01.460 disagreeing with them on a few topics. But that wasn't the case in this new wokest form of
00:14:09.340 progressive that was beginning to evolve in the online sphere, okay? You can't disagree on a few
00:14:16.580 issues. You can't, they don't allow that. And then the thing that really caused the split was a lot of
00:14:23.160 the trans issues. And this was a really interesting thing. I was watching a Sarah Hare episode and she was
00:14:30.880 talking about how weird it was. Basically what happened was, is in this atheist attack community,
00:14:39.460 there was cred for continuing to say anything so long as you believed it was true. Now this cred
00:14:46.940 actually works in conservative circles. Most conservatives, so long as almost everything
00:14:51.640 you think is true isn't progressives, are going to respect you if you just say what you think is true.
00:14:56.940 Whereas the- So this applies basically to religious extremism or what? Can you give me an example of
00:15:02.520 this? Oh, they might say that certain ethnic communities cause more crime than other ethnic
00:15:07.760 communities. And as long as you're really, you dig into it and you seem to really believe it, people
00:15:11.920 don't look down to them. Okay, so I'll word it this way, okay? Okay. You might have an individual who
00:15:17.620 supports some level of social redistribution, but also believes crime rates differ between ethnic
00:15:23.140 communities in the United States, all right? A conservative meets that individual and they go,
00:15:29.400 oh, we disagree on one thing. We agree on one thing. You're a conservative. A progressive meets
00:15:34.440 this individual and they go, you are a far right extremist who I won't talk to because we disagree on
00:15:39.820 one thing. Oh, yeah. Okay. I see what you mean. Yeah. What happened with shoe on head? Yeah. So in other
00:15:44.820 words, with progressives, it's all or nothing. With conservatives, it's a la carte, case by case.
00:15:51.360 Yes. It's a la carte, whereas progressives is all or nothing, which pushed these individuals
00:15:56.160 further and further into conservative audiences and conservative communities. But then some big
00:16:02.840 things happened. So Sarah Hayter had this story on her podcast and I thought it was very telling. It
00:16:07.380 was a story of, from her perspective, when they were doing an episode on who's black science guy,
00:16:12.940 Neil deGrasse Tyson, right? And he's been just like totally pro, like all of the insane trans stuff 1.00
00:16:18.520 that's happening now that just the science doesn't back. I had to point out that 2023 study that now
00:16:23.080 we know that out of 11-year-olds who are gender non-conforming, by the time they're 23, more than
00:16:30.080 nine in 10 is completely comfortable with their gender, but likely just gay. And so what that means 1.00
00:16:36.440 is that by the data, about nine in 10 people who we are transitioning, we are basically chemically
00:16:42.880 castrating nine of 10 gay kids for every one trans person we're quote unquote saving. Like that is, 0.87
00:16:50.100 yikes. We know this now. We live in a post-cast report era. Things are different now. But a lot
00:16:55.700 of people are just not up to date with the data, right? Or they willfully ignore the data. And what
00:17:00.500 she said was it was really interesting to see these people who, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, she would have
00:17:05.760 considered an ally in the early atheist days. And she goes, and the community basically split into
00:17:11.220 two groups. There was one community that just was looking for the truth. And there was another
00:17:18.600 community that just wanted to dunk on conservatives and Republicans. And you realize who these two
00:17:27.160 communities were pretty quick, right? Which was the community that just wanted to dunk on conservatives.
00:17:34.800 They are now this Neil deGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye, the science guy, or you know who these people
00:17:41.280 are, right? They are totally detached from reality and the stuff they're saying now.
00:17:44.680 Now people might be like, yeah, but these early online atheists, they weren't really the core
00:17:55.060 birthing place of the modern conservative movement on conservative base, like online base. And here I
00:18:00.360 would say, one, I just think you're wrong. You just need to talk to many online conservatives where
00:18:04.360 a lot of them converted to the mainstream conservative ideology today. But two, you think
00:18:11.880 of these individuals as having static views, and they didn't have static views. Many of them became
00:18:17.480 increasingly conservative as time went on. And so we need to talk about why that happened.
00:18:24.620 So it happened for a few reasons. One, they began to, they would just side with whatever movement
00:18:30.320 was more rational at the time, right? That was their idea, right? The men's right movement was much
00:18:36.360 more justified, given the statistics during the time when it was growing, than the women's movement,
00:18:42.160 the feminist movement, right? And the men's right movement also was a core birthing place of modern
00:18:47.780 conservative culture. So a lot of these individuals, they switched from anti-feminist content to men's
00:18:53.280 right adjacent content, which again, made them part of this early birthing part of the red pill,
00:18:58.900 the MGTOW, the et cetera communities, right? So it may not have been the initial figures in this
00:19:04.640 community, but it was people who were weaned on their content, or who were mimicking their type of
00:19:10.320 content. But then you had the secondary thing that was happening during this period. And I think,
00:19:15.940 what's her name? The one who you were talking about, the Muslim, who was one of the
00:19:18.780 four horsemen of the atheist movement, who, she wasn't actually at the conference, so she's often
00:19:24.060 called the fifth horseman, but she was supposed to be, who converted to Christianity. And she was
00:19:28.660 originally a Muslim, deconverted, then converted to Christianity. Is she, hold on, I don't know,
00:19:34.020 I just know that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a critic of Islam. And yeah, writing in a column in November,
00:19:43.220 2023, Ali announced her conversion to the Christian faith, claiming that in her view,
00:19:48.060 the Judeo-Christian tradition is the only answer to the problems of the modern world. Okay. 0.97
00:19:52.860 Okay. So she said something about why people were like, when you grew up a Muslim, like,
00:19:57.420 why did you convert to Christianity? Instead of just being atheist.
00:20:02.260 Like, why did you first try Christianity when you started praying to God? Because she had this
00:20:06.600 depressed period, and then she prayed to God, and she felt that she was saved. So why did you do that?
00:20:13.720 And she goes, of all these years, when I was attacking and preaching against religious individuals,
00:20:20.060 the Muslims would send me messages about how they were going to kill me. The Christians would send 1.00
00:20:25.520 me messages about how they hoped they were praying for me, and they were praying for me to be saved,
00:20:32.080 and they wanted me. And this is actually true of most of the atheist community. When they were attacking 0.83
00:20:37.740 the Christians, and then when their value system started to align more with the Christians,
00:20:42.260 they were very open to be friends with these people, because these people had always been
00:20:49.380 nice to them, even when there was conflict. Whereas the opposite side group had always been 0.98
00:20:57.080 very antagonistic. But wokes send us death threats constantly. We say stuff against conservatives, 1.00
00:21:02.940 they never, almost never. Occasionally, we'll get something because we're pro-IVF and stuff like
00:21:07.500 that that's mean, but we don't really get death threats from Christians.
00:21:11.060 Oh, no, I don't think we've ever received really mean comments from anyone aside from people who,
00:21:19.000 if you click through to their profiles, if they have a public one or something associated with
00:21:24.400 their identity, are totally progressive. Yeah. The only thing that maybe sometimes comes up is
00:21:31.020 criticism of our using IVF for genetic testing from religious conservatives, but that criticism is
00:21:37.300 typically not an ad hominem attack, even. Yeah, no, it's like specific, like logical argument.
00:21:45.220 Yeah, or this is not the work of the Lord, you know, that kind of thing. And it's like, yeah,
00:21:48.080 it's to you not, based on your beliefs or whatever. Which we can get to debate on,
00:21:51.660 but they're not relevant here. But what it means is I don't like, maybe progressives don't fully
00:21:57.500 understand this, or they're just, their culture is so toxic because it's so built into attacking each
00:22:02.220 other within their culture. But when you constantly attack somebody who is trying to take a middle
00:22:08.100 ground, you end up pushing them further and further to the other side. And they become a more and more
00:22:14.880 open to genuinely reconsidering their positions. You might've been an old atheist. You might not have
00:22:21.180 had a strong stance on abortion to begin with, but you knew the approved stance was abortion is fine
00:22:26.620 in pretty much all circumstances. Now you've been attacked over and over again. And we'll do a video
00:22:30.320 on our changing stance on abortion over time. And you're like, you know what, I should probably go
00:22:35.160 back to the evidence on that. The nice guys seem to be really against this abortion thing in most of
00:22:40.920 the circumstances that it's being used today. Maybe I should learn more about this. And then they do.
00:22:46.900 And they're like, oh, I agree with that position. And here is one of the big things that shifted along
00:22:53.660 this period as well. And I think that this is indicative partially of why the new conservative
00:23:00.300 base is so different from the old conservative base. The old conservative base was primarily
00:23:06.480 a theocratic base. That's what they were interested with, theocratic and sort of pearl clutching.
00:23:12.020 The new conservative base is a mixture of two communities. It is this original, I call them
00:23:21.300 caustic atheists, i.e. atheists who are really interested in debating people doing stupid things, 1.00
00:23:26.280 who are interested in what is the technically correct answer. And a- 0.99
00:23:31.780 Well, no, to your point, because they're seeking out people who are doing stupid things. 0.98
00:23:35.280 I want to be technically correct and have an easy win. And I know I can win. I want a guaranteed win 0.99
00:23:41.200 with no effort. It's a mix of this community. No, but they also are interested in technical
00:23:47.140 correctness. This is why, for example, you have problems with people like Sam Harris or Christopher
00:23:52.680 Hitchens or other mainstream atheists, even Richard Dawkins, unfortunately, from the perspective of
00:23:58.640 wokeism, having wrong policy positions, having wrong positions about the way the government should be
00:24:04.060 structured. Because it turns out that if you're just interested in what's rational, you eventually
00:24:10.180 realize actually capitalistic systems seem to work much better for everyone involved in socialist
00:24:14.300 systems. So let's move to those systems. So it was a mixture of this earlier, let's be technically
00:24:19.300 correct, not the old fuddy-duddy Christians who were afraid of technology and afraid of change,
00:24:26.420 but the theologically alive Christians, I would call them, the people who are having this active
00:24:31.140 theological discussion. And so you got a melding of these two communities. And that produced the type
00:24:38.680 of conservatism that led to Trump, where individuals were like, hey, we need to stop. It doesn't really
00:24:45.040 make sense for people in this country for us to be focused on so much on what's going on overseas
00:24:49.480 anymore. Let's stop that. Or it's also why the party in terms of it's if you talk to the Republican base,
00:24:55.740 if you go to these rallies, they are often much more and I didn't realize how socialist the
00:25:01.600 conservative elite class was. Oh, my gosh, seriously, they are much more libertarian. And
00:25:06.540 they're much more libertarian in part because it works. And now you're having a weird sort of circle
00:25:13.420 back to the beginning thing where I don't know if you've heard some of the controversy of Richard
00:25:17.500 Dawkins, for example, bemoaning the fall of the church in his country, where he has been complaining
00:25:23.280 a lot and saying it's really sad that we don't have the cathedrals are being turned into mosques 0.97
00:25:28.740 in England. And he's like, if you don't have people going anymore, then they're not tithing and they
00:25:33.160 can't afford the buildings anymore. And this is all in a way downstream of his movement. He hasn't come
00:25:38.720 to the perspective of converting yet, but he has come to the perspective, which most of the original
00:25:45.640 atheist community has now, which is unavoidable, is our society was better with religion, specifically 0.86
00:25:55.620 Christianity, and that it was to some extent a mistake to be attacking these communities. And 0.56
00:26:03.500 that a lot of the societal problems that we have right now are downstream of the deconversion of
00:26:09.380 people. However, there is not a version of Christianity that they feel comfortable returning
00:26:16.380 to because they're just like, but I can't believe it. So for example, when that, whatever her name
00:26:21.440 was, Muslim lady was talking was Richard Dawkins about her conversion to Christianity. And she was
00:26:26.960 talking about how she was depressed and noodle-cidal and she wanted to, she was looking for something and
00:26:33.060 she finally had a psychologist. I was like, have you tried praying? And then after this like
00:26:36.580 heartwarming story and the crowd is cheered, he's like, yeah, but do you really believe that Mary became
00:26:41.680 pregnant when she was a virgin? And it's they, because they don't have an iteration of Christianity that 0.98
00:26:47.360 can conform with this ultra logical perspective on reality. They're like, I don't, I want to rejoin. I want
00:26:54.940 to believe. And this is really what the tract series project is about. So for anyone who's weird here and
00:27:00.160 doesn't know, you go to technoparathon.com and see a summary of like our religious beliefs and the
00:27:05.180 tracks that we're putting out, but we are trying to synthesize one, something that I believe is true. So it
00:27:12.560 is something that we synthesize for work, but it is also when I was originally creating it before I realized,
00:27:17.940 oh my God, I think this is actually true. It was a hypothesis in creating the type of religious system that
00:27:24.460 my kids could continue to believe even in this secular world, even with all of this information out there. And then
00:27:31.400 only while I was constructing it was, I was like, oh shit, I can't explain how some of this stuff is 0.96
00:27:36.180 true other than that God is real in this system is true. And I don't come at that from like revelation 0.96
00:27:42.100 or anything like that. I'm literally coming at that from logic. Like I plausibly can't come up with
00:27:46.460 another explanation for how this worked out this way. That is, and if you're looking for the one on
00:27:52.500 this, you can go to the episode of why we believe in a technopuritan God, which goes over like why we
00:27:57.900 believe this is stuff that I just found implausible from any other metric. But I do think that's where
00:28:02.980 we're going to see a lot of this community go is back towards these religious traditions,
00:28:06.980 because unfortunately, if you're taking this logical contrarian stance now is in modern wokist
00:28:13.180 society, it's going to push you back towards religious systems. But I'm wondering what are your
00:28:18.700 thoughts on this? Or do you remember this as it was happening or like thinking of this? It's weird that
00:28:24.520 all these ex-atheist people are now like the most popular conservative YouTubers. Do you,
00:28:30.200 or anti-feminist is what it was originally, and then it became conservative. 0.95
00:28:35.520 Anti-feminist? Yeah. So what I think it was more, what it feels like to me at least,
00:28:40.140 is that these were always rebel anti-establishment people online. And they didn't always move in the
00:28:49.740 direction of conservative or anti-progressive. In fact, some people who were avid members of the
00:28:57.660 Church of the Subgenius and who loved being irreverent online remained in the progressive
00:29:04.020 atheist camp and continue to be progressive online. I just think that it happens to be that a lot of the
00:29:10.820 anti-establishment people who were effective players online also became conservative. So my larger
00:29:17.420 answer isn't that all of the people who were atheists online originally became conservative
00:29:25.800 influencers. It's instead that both the conservative and progressive influencers online are prolific,
00:29:33.500 active debaters and flame war lovers online who started out as people very likely to engage in
00:29:41.280 anti-atheist debates. I hear what you're saying, but I'm less interested in the specific individuals
00:29:46.280 other than how the communities developed. Because a lot of people will be like, oh, there are a few now
00:29:51.680 fringe players in the online conservative movement. They weren't the birthing place of that movement. And so what I'm
00:29:57.680 trying to walk people through who didn't live through this period of internet history is early internet history was
00:30:06.280 online atheist versus a mostly offline fundee crowd, evangelical crowd. Then it became feminist versus anti-feminist. The anti-feminist community, most of the leading figures in it were either raised within or got their initial start in the atheist fights on the atheist side. Then it moved from feminist to anti-feminist to
00:30:35.280 to the woke community and the red pill MIGTOW community and the pickup artist community. And so this, the community that then was the anti-feminist community became that community, but it had originally been seeded and created by this atheist community. 0.66
00:30:51.280 I think there's another element of this, which is the one unifying factor of a lot of the groups that you're describing here, the rebel groups specifically. So the atheists and then the anti-feminists and then the
00:31:03.280 anti-woke people is that they typically started out or often started out in the enemy camp and then were cast out for some reason, sometimes for pretty egregious reasons.
00:31:18.680 In the enemy camp?
00:31:20.680 Yeah, in the enemy camp. So for example, people like Jesse Sinkle and Katie Herzog, the whole like Barry Weiss free press team.
00:31:26.680 Oh no, I strongly disagree with you.
00:31:28.680 They started out as very progressive working in progressive institutions.
00:31:31.680 You're describing a modern phenomenon, but that wasn't what happened with this community. These individuals were not canceled. They became conservative before they were canceled. They became conservative before even the concept of cancellation existed. They became conservative.
00:31:47.680 So you've also got to remember Gamergate and everything like that. That was led by these former online atheist community. Like when this thing was happening, okay, these individuals weren't like, oh, I broke X progressive norm, which is something that happens.
00:32:03.680 Yeah, it happens a lot.
00:32:05.680 We then get thrown out from the progressive community. That is not what happened with these individuals when they made the switch. And I would say when the predominant, like the biggest part of the switch over happened was the transition from atheist content to anti-feminist content.
00:32:22.680 Yeah, that's so interesting. I guess I missed it. I wasn't paying attention.
00:32:25.680 As soon as the transition to the anti-feminist content happened, the inevitable pipeline of, as the woke community rose, anti-woke content. And now if you're an anti-woke content producer, you are a conservative. The thing is that the anti-woke community online was much bigger than the conservative intellectual community online.
00:32:49.680 In fact, that community online almost didn't really exist. It was also much bigger than any of the individual religious denominations online. Because yes, they did exist online and were advocating for their positions, but they would often advocate within communities that were specific to their religious traditions.
00:33:09.680 Now, this has changed over time. Recently, there has been the rise of the, I think I call it pan-religious YouTuber. But, i.e. that they just promote conservative religions regardless of what those religions are. But what's interesting is most of those individuals are like us and started in the atheist community, which is why they don't really care what religion an individual is because they are coming at religion without a team.
00:33:38.840 And this is like the only one I can really think of that started with a team is Paul van der Klee. But a lot of them that come at this come like, for example, Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson is able to take this pan-religious perspective because he doesn't really have a faith himself. He's just, I promote all religions. He's very downstream of this internet atheist thing. That was the community that he was appealing to.
00:34:01.320 And it turned out. And it turned out. And I think that this is another thing that people who at the end of the day were really just promoting their own religious communities value system, always did a very poor job within the granular world of the internet, building audiences outside of their traditions.
00:34:23.680 Ah, okay.
00:34:26.920 If you were like a Catholic YouTuber, you would build the Catholic tradition because what you were trying to do is move towards a more Catholic value system.
00:34:33.680 Or if you were a Lutheran YouTuber, if you were a... 0.54
00:34:36.440 So you're going increasingly niche. Like you're limiting the reach of your message.
00:34:42.000 And if you try to reach out to be like a pan-religious individual, then the other religious individuals you're talking to, they're going to be as interesting as debating you over theology as an atheist would be.
00:34:51.680 Sure. Yeah.
00:34:52.960 Because that's what prevented these individuals from ever being leading figures.
00:34:57.620 Actually, it reminds me of Ben Shapiro's complaint about you and I becoming leading figures within the, or the leading figures within the prenatalist movement.
00:35:07.620 And I think he was mad that his sister didn't become a leading figure of the prenatalist movement.
00:35:11.200 I think that's what he expected. They put all this money in. She clearly wants to be like prenatalist in her value system. 1.00
00:35:17.040 She's been attacked as a prenatalist by progressives. Why isn't she being elevated?
00:35:21.680 And it's because ultimately, we were not coming at this from a team perspective to begin with.
00:35:28.120 And therefore, we were able to speak on this issue in a way that resonated with many more people than the way that they were speaking about this issue.
00:35:39.020 Their way of speaking about this issue was just, frankly, it was tainted by their own community background.
00:35:43.740 It's why are you having a lot of kids? That's why I'm doing it for these Jewish reasons. 0.51
00:35:47.620 And it's like, what does that have to do with anyone else? What does that have to do with me, Christian person?
00:35:51.040 What does that have to do with me, secular person?
00:35:53.840 Whereas when we were coming at this, we started from a purely secular perspective.
00:35:57.820 And so we were like, these are the ways that make sense for everyone, regardless of your religion or faith system.
00:36:04.040 And then when we went back into a harder religious system and we built that for our family and then ended up believing,
00:36:10.980 that happened to us because we were genuinely like, what's best for our kids?
00:36:14.760 What's the system that's best for our kids? And we built that and we ended up believing it.
00:36:18.020 But when I think a lot of people, they look at us and they're like, you don't really believe, right?
00:36:25.920 And what I've noticed is the only people who say that are the Christians.
00:36:29.920 I'll explain why. Because I think a lot of atheists who are interested in believing in a religious system,
00:36:36.800 when they look at our system in the same way where when Dawkins was talking to the other person,
00:36:42.420 he goes, you don't really believe that Jesus was born to a virgin.
00:36:44.740 He was like, oh, there's this logical inconsistency, which is the type of thing that would hang me up, right?
00:36:49.360 Whereas our system is just completely unfraught with this.
00:36:52.640 And so you're not going to have, I think most atheists who look at it are like, yeah, no, I bet they really believe all of this. 0.72
00:36:58.680 Because it doesn't trigger any of the, I just can't bite that as an atheist problems that many of the other traditions do,
00:37:07.020 which is why we call it a secular religious system, which I think religious people are confused by.
00:37:11.920 But atheists, when they look at it, they go, oh, it's a materialist, monist system that doesn't believe in things like souls, but believes in a God.
00:37:19.340 Okay, that makes perfect sense. Like, I can see why they would believe in that.
00:37:22.780 Whereas religious people, I think, are more like, you can't make something up and then end up believing it's true just because you found evidence that it's true. 1.00
00:37:33.480 Believing something requires faith.
00:37:35.260 And I think that this is actually the difference. Like, we don't really have faith.
00:37:39.540 I believe my system because I believe it explains things that I can't explain using any other world metric or any other, what is it, like metaphysical system for understanding reality.
00:37:50.120 Not because God came to me and talked to me or like it helped me out of this rough time or anything like that.
00:37:56.080 Like, what's weird is we believe in our system.
00:37:59.440 And I think that many of these atheists who are reconverting, they believe in these systems and they follow these systems almost in the way an atheist would.
00:38:07.620 Without, and then after that, they develop the blind passion, which I think the religious community has a trouble model.
00:38:17.000 And I'm wondering why they have trouble modeling that could happen.
00:38:19.900 It might be because for them so much, I can tell you a couple camps that I can understand where they can't believe it.
00:38:27.020 But one is the religious community that's really only persuaded by the awe that these giant things like cathedrals and temples are able to inspire in them.
00:38:39.240 Like, it's a very sort of emotional, like the ceremony and the cathedral and the antiquity.
00:38:44.440 Like, that's what makes these things true in my mind.
00:38:47.980 And so it's really that they were persuaded through emotion rather than through logic.
00:38:54.320 And that is why.
00:38:55.380 The other is the group that was raised in a tradition.
00:38:57.840 And these individuals don't understand how you could convert into a tradition because they've just never done it.
00:39:03.520 So they've never switched traditions.
00:39:05.040 They've never deconverted from a tradition.
00:39:06.580 Just the idea that you could genuinely convert into something and believe it is surprising to them, especially if that thing doesn't have antiquity.
00:39:13.940 They're like, things that are true must have antiquity.
00:39:16.280 And we would argue our system is a derived system, but I would argue it's actually truer to the antiquity of Christianity, which has always been an evolving religion than many of the other forms of Christianity, which I see as lacking that because there's a LARPing, a stasis that didn't really exist.
00:39:31.460 But the other thing that I would point out here is I think that a problem that they have, oh, I would point out here with the antiquity is we even know from the biblical tradition, I always mention this, but it is worth noting whenever the concept of antiquity comes up.
00:39:46.440 Because I know, you know, not everyone watching has seen all their episodes.
00:39:49.300 We know anyone in the Abrahamic tradition from the snake staff of Moses that ended up being put in the temple and worshiped, which was a form of idolatry, not worshiped, but it was prayed to, you know, in the same way people today pray to Rolex.
00:40:01.680 That it then was commanded by God that it was broken after 500, 600 years of being there.
00:40:08.100 And the antiquity of a tradition doesn't mean that God approves of it.
00:40:11.920 He's basically just waiting for you to figure out that what you're doing is idolatry.
00:40:15.640 And some people never figure that out until he's finally, screw it, I'm sending a messenger and people need to know that this is not okay, what you're doing.
00:40:24.140 And I do find that most of the traditions I think have trended towards idolatry.
00:40:27.620 And I actually think what is the problem and what's prevented many atheists from fully returning to the faith is that most of the new faith systems, which are trying to attract them, are ultimately mystic systems and use mystical appeals.
00:40:44.440 And those are never going to be palatable to somebody who left religion for these logical inconsistency reasons.
00:40:53.080 And I'd say who is buying into these mystic systems?
00:40:55.300 I actually think the core group that's buying into these mystic perennialist systems are the, I guess I'd call them crystal worshipers.
00:41:01.700 They're the people who left their original religions for emotional reasons, like they were mean to gays or they didn't treat women well enough or they didn't allow women preachers, which never would have pushed me out of a faith community.
00:41:13.880 Now, again, I was raised in an atheist community, so that wasn't even a thing, but something like my dad's question around the Ark, that would have pushed me out of a community.
00:41:21.600 The thing that deconverted my dad, so I should say like how I ended up becoming a deconverted person, was he got in trouble for trying to figure out the logistics of how Noah's Ark could possibly have worked and kept all the animals alive.
00:41:35.760 And he didn't like the magic answer because he's like, if magic's the answer, then why doesn't it say that there was magic in the story?
00:41:42.580 That seems like a pretty big plot hole.
00:41:44.660 Like why it's giving me like specifics on the sides of the boat, but it doesn't talk about the magic that was making the food.
00:41:50.920 Like it doesn't mention that they were like embryos, like some sort of I'm imagining like a Jurassic Park thing.
00:41:57.980 But anyway, do you have any final thoughts on this? Because you would love to hear your ideas, Simone.
00:42:11.380 You are the star. And I know in the future, we're going to have people who just go to the end for your summations.
00:42:17.980 Isolations. I just find this really interesting. It's amazing to me how entire movements flourishing online can be totally missed by me and huge other swaths of the-
00:42:31.040 You knew about the antagonist movement or did it just never catch your algorithm?
00:42:34.420 It never really caught my algorithm because why? I'm looking at cooking and fashion and decorating online.
00:42:41.020 Or even when I was in the Men's Rights Activist, I got really into MGTOW and the Red Pill and Pickup Artistry subreddits back around when things like Gamergate were happening.
00:42:51.840 But Gamergate didn't really bleed into them. They were talking about dating strategy.
00:42:55.960 They were talking about building a better independent life and becoming better people, but they weren't really talking about the wider world.
00:43:02.140 And I just find it so fascinating how so many of these things can happen with only a small number of people really being aware of what's going on.
00:43:09.900 And I see that happen so much in other realms. Like you started out talking about NatCon and going to this conference was so bizarre to me because these people were living in an extremely bounded world where everyone knew each other.
00:43:26.400 Everyone kind of played with their own internal languages and internal networks and they read each other's stuff and they didn't really interact with the world outside of that.
00:43:37.560 And we see something similar with effective altruism and rationalism and that there are these worlds and they all are in different rays, definitely impacting the larger world and changing the way that society unfurls.
00:43:49.760 But we don't, they don't really understand larger society. Larger society doesn't understand them.
00:43:57.300 And a lot of people are being affected by these various groups, by the political elite, by rationalists and effective altruists, by men's right or by anti-feminists or by atheists or by, you know, the new right.
00:44:09.420 Without understanding that they are being affected by them, by not understanding who they are or by not understanding how they work.
00:44:16.220 So it's like the blind leading the blind in a really interesting subcultural way.
00:44:21.560 And I love that you are one of those few people that seems to be able to look from a higher level down into the terrarium at all these different ecosystems and get a picture of how they're affecting each other and their blind spots while not necessarily being lost in any in particular.
00:44:40.240 I don't really consider you a member of any of these communities, but you are watching very carefully how they're interacting with each other or really not how they're affecting each other, how they interact within their own groups.
00:44:51.780 And it's just, it's fascinating.
00:44:53.960 I love it when you talk because you always give me so many ideas.
00:44:56.800 So there was two things I wanted to mention.
00:44:58.380 One that I thought was really interesting here is I was talking to a group of people at NatCon.
00:45:01.700 So this is supposed to be like the conservative intellectuals who are writing our bills.
00:45:04.920 And I mentioned GamerGate too.
00:45:06.340 So not only were they unaware of the Sweet Baby Inc. controversy.
00:45:10.220 No surprise to me.
00:45:11.360 Again, just exactly my point, right?
00:45:13.100 They were unaware of GamerGate 1.
00:45:15.480 They were unaware.
00:45:16.700 They are making national policy decisions and they are unaware of the core conservative progressive battles that have happened in the past decade.
00:45:26.860 Not at all surprised.
00:45:28.780 It was shocking to me personally.
00:45:30.380 I was like, like you.
00:45:33.380 Well, I guess you're aware of what these distinct groups are doing, but you weren't aware before of the extent to which they didn't even know of each other's existence or norms or effect on broader society.
00:45:46.020 Absolutely.
00:45:46.600 Yeah.
00:45:46.800 Like you thought they knew about each other.
00:45:49.180 Yeah.
00:45:49.680 Yeah.
00:45:50.100 I thought that at least they were broadly aware that these other groups existed.
00:45:55.020 And now that we are-
00:45:55.640 Didn't you learn this though?
00:45:56.440 Like when we first went into private equity and we started exploring other industries and we told them things like, oh, I used to work in VC and now I'm in PE.
00:46:05.340 And they're like, what's that?
00:46:06.500 They did not know what VC was.
00:46:09.140 Or even if we called it venture capital, they wouldn't know what it was.
00:46:11.240 Here is something I would note.
00:46:13.040 I went into the conference expecting, this is what I say.
00:46:16.820 I had a misunderstanding of the various groups.
00:46:18.780 Due to the Heritage Foundation, like they have the weird anti-porn thing in the Project 2024.
00:46:24.740 The Heritage Foundation, I went in expecting them to be one of the most gatekeepy and they were not at all.
00:46:29.100 They are actually interested.
00:46:30.340 I've been talking to them about putting on a conference for them to meet with online conservative influencers and build some connection there.
00:46:36.740 And Heritage Foundation was like the most gung-ho about this.
00:46:40.180 The people at the Heritage Foundation- 0.67
00:46:41.440 Yeah, they seemed like really willing to play ball, which is surprising for an organization that's takeaway porn. 0.59
00:46:47.480 Yeah, the people at the Heritage Foundation were, out of all of the groups I talked to, by far the most willing to-
00:46:57.140 Learn from the outside world.
00:46:58.440 Learn from the outside world and learn how the Republican base had moved to new ideas and passed where they are now.
00:47:05.700 The other groups, and I'm not going to call it specific groups because I don't want to damage our ability to work with any of them,
00:47:10.180 But some of the other groups were just like, when I pitched this idea, they go, why would we care what the base thinks?
00:47:16.660 Like, we are going to staff the White House, we are going to control policy, and it doesn't matter what the people who are voting for Trump want him to do.
00:47:24.600 Our plan is a socialist Christian state.
00:47:28.680 That was basically what they were pushing for.
00:47:30.740 I wish you were lying about this, but I was there too.
00:47:35.820 I saw this.
00:47:36.860 It happened.
00:47:37.900 I wish it didn't happen.
00:47:39.440 You even see this within the pronatalist movement.
00:47:41.720 So like Lyman Stone, he wrote this manifesto that we'll do a full piece on, where he's like, everyone needs to stop listening to the Collinses because their form of pronatalism doesn't involve socialism just because socialism doesn't work.
00:47:54.060 And he's like, it lies through the moon to say it works.
00:47:56.180 But we've gone over the stats.
00:47:57.120 It just doesn't work.
00:47:58.680 It's so funny.
00:47:59.260 Even at the conference, like we were at a table with a bunch of Heritage Foundation guys, they're like, why would he write that?
00:48:03.260 He does know it doesn't work, right?
00:48:04.700 And I'm like, yeah, but he is just, when I say it doesn't work, like cash handouts just do not seem to work.
00:48:09.640 He will not stand any form of pronatalism that is not first and foremost socialist in its nature.
00:48:15.360 And you'll even point to data that indicates that cash handouts don't work and be like, don't you see?
00:48:20.140 This proves that cash handouts work, which is...
00:48:23.540 Yeah, it's almost interesting.
00:48:24.580 He is a socialist before he's even a Christian. 0.98
00:48:26.720 It is wild.
00:48:27.460 I don't understand.
00:48:28.780 But what I've learned is that there's a lot of people like him in the conservative movement.
00:48:32.620 They are Christians.
00:48:33.580 Yeah, we thought it was him being weird.
00:48:35.880 And it's not him being weird.
00:48:37.260 Yeah, they're in this conservative intellectual group.
00:48:39.300 There are...
00:48:40.080 And when I say socialist, I mean bordering on Marxists.
00:48:42.360 And I say he borders on a Marxist who are just happen to also be Christians.
00:48:46.280 And so they think the way that they create their Marxist Christian utopia is through the
00:48:51.520 Republican Party.
00:48:52.680 But if you're wondering how these people gain so much power, this is another thing I've
00:48:55.920 realized, the reason they gain so much power is I think that they're the only conservatives.
00:48:59.800 There's a lot of reasons a person may be a conservative.
00:49:02.240 But one is you held very strict religious values, but you're also a Marxist.
00:49:06.140 And so the Democrats just won't talk to you, basically.
00:49:08.840 Is that these individuals are the only ones who can stand bureaucracies and work their way
00:49:13.360 up through bureaucracies?
00:49:14.620 Because other conservatives who actually understand the damage that bureaucracies and large
00:49:18.380 government does just don't stay in those departments long enough.
00:49:21.360 And so these departments in this sort of upper conservative bureaucratic class are actually
00:49:26.360 Christian Marxists. 0.60
00:49:27.900 And they keep trying to infiltrate the departments.
00:49:31.600 And I think that Trump needs to be incredibly watchful of this.
00:49:34.680 This form of Christian Marxism will destroy his presidency. 0.94
00:49:39.360 The public does not want banned pornography, okay?
00:49:43.360 They don't want banning IVF, which was part of the thing for Project 2025.
00:49:48.060 I was like, why would you do that?
00:49:48.840 Why would you?
00:49:49.400 It's not like the conservative position.
00:49:51.140 What?
00:49:51.680 That's like 10% of the conservative base wants that.
00:49:53.900 Like, why are you trying to?
00:49:56.380 Obviously, this is going to damage Trump.
00:49:58.320 But I think that they can update and they can get better.
00:50:01.280 And I'm really excited about that.
00:50:02.620 Specifically, the Heritage Foundation.
00:50:04.440 So you can update more with what the conservative base actually wants.
00:50:07.460 Now, the final thing I was going to note, which I hadn't noted until you were talking
00:50:10.900 and I was like, oh my God, great idea here, is I had mentioned that women are much more 1.00
00:50:15.680 spiritual than men on a historic basis.
00:50:17.820 Like, you see, they're so much more religious.
00:50:20.160 When women deconvert, they much more likely are going to become some form of spiritualist. 1.00
00:50:28.360 They're going to become a Wiccan. 1.00
00:50:29.640 They're going to become a spiritualist.
00:50:30.880 They're going to do little spells.
00:50:32.140 They're going to become pop culture spiritualists.
00:50:34.600 There's lots of types of spiritualists they're going to become.
00:50:37.040 They are very unlikely to become hardline atheists.
00:50:40.820 Whereas when men deconvert, they're much more likely to become hardline atheists.
00:50:44.960 And so the atheist movement was always overwhelmingly male, which also meant that as the internet
00:50:52.800 became more of a fight of women versus men, the witches, the converts who went to the 0.92
00:50:57.680 women community, all just went to the progressosphere. 1.00
00:51:00.000 But then the hardcore atheists were mostly autistic women and men.
00:51:04.160 And they then intrinsically identified more with the men's rights movement and reg pill 0.96
00:51:10.680 and MGTOW and stuff like that.
00:51:12.340 And then the modern online conservative movement is very much, I call it the red pill diaspora 0.93
00:51:17.940 because those movements basically died, split up, spread out.
00:51:20.880 And that created the seedbed of what is now the online conservative culture, which is also,
00:51:25.420 I think, the culture of the active part of the conservative base, like the intellectually
00:51:30.300 active part of the conservative base where the conversation is still happening.
00:51:33.340 Yeah, that makes sense.
00:51:35.260 Anyway, I love you to death, Simone.
00:51:37.820 You are amazing.
00:51:39.560 Any final thoughts?
00:51:41.560 No, let's go get the kids. 0.99
00:51:43.800 Okay.
00:51:44.560 I will go get them.
00:51:45.660 Don't you worry.
00:51:46.240 What do you want to eat tonight?
00:51:47.200 Or what are you thinking of cooking?
00:51:48.620 Do you want to do hot dogs?
00:51:50.540 Yeah, I'd love to do hot dogs.
00:51:51.800 Or do you want to do ravioli or pizza or potstickers?
00:51:57.320 What I'm going to do is hot dogs and some tomato soup, if I can do that.
00:52:02.500 And I've got the cut up shallots so I can use those for sprinkles.
00:52:05.840 Oh, but the one thing I don't have is we don't have any sauces for the hot dogs.
00:52:10.100 You have a billion sauces.
00:52:12.160 No, they're all like cooking sauces now.
00:52:14.040 Like the last time I checked the fridge, somebody had dumped like all the...
00:52:17.340 Somebody.
00:52:18.120 I don't dump your sauces.
00:52:19.800 That's sacrilegious.
00:52:21.320 I do not.
00:52:22.440 Regardless of expiration date.
00:52:25.020 You are so sweet to me.
00:52:26.200 You know my things.
00:52:27.440 I would never.
00:52:28.400 I would never.
00:52:29.340 I dump them, but I just haven't thought to re-get them yet.
00:52:32.580 I might go pick up the kids and then swing by Redner's and get like a sauce.
00:52:36.360 Okay.
00:52:36.800 How many hot dogs do you want?
00:52:37.860 Two?
00:52:38.600 Two.
00:52:39.000 How many buns do you want?
00:52:41.120 Two?
00:52:41.920 Three.
00:52:43.960 Wow.
00:52:44.360 Because I also want some tomato soup.
00:52:46.760 So you're going to dip the bun in the soup?
00:52:48.440 And I'm going to toast it or you're going to toast it.
00:52:50.880 Toast it with butter.
00:52:52.160 Toasted bread goes really well with tomato soup.
00:52:54.360 Okay.
00:52:54.800 There we go then.
00:52:55.600 I will get a bunch of bread out.
00:52:57.000 Please do not forget the Yoto player.
00:52:59.600 Yeah? 1.00
00:53:00.500 Get in the kitchen and cook me some food, you disgusting animal of a woman. 1.00
00:53:07.140 And you get the Yoto player? 1.00
00:53:08.880 Yes.
00:53:09.700 Okay.
00:53:10.180 I love you.
00:53:10.460 I love you.
00:53:13.380 I'm going to take a little while to get down because she has a major... 1.00
00:53:16.440 Great section here.
00:53:20.840 Thanks for doing all this prep.
00:53:22.100 You rock for that.
00:53:23.540 You put so much work in there.
00:53:26.160 And I just show her the gassy baby.
00:53:30.380 You are amazing.
00:53:31.480 And fans want to hear more from you.
00:53:32.440 I've got to remember at the end of episodes to have you do a little spiel like I did that
00:53:35.720 one time because fans really like that.
00:53:37.520 Oh, my diatribe.
00:53:39.900 Simone's corner where she gets angry about something because she has PMS to get off. 0.56
00:53:44.720 People are like, oh, Simone's spitting truth.
00:53:47.180 That's what they always say.
00:53:48.600 Yeah.
00:53:49.340 Spitting.
00:53:50.120 Everybody loves you, Simone.
00:53:51.260 You're the hero of the show.
00:53:52.480 You're the smart one.
00:53:53.440 That's been confirmed.
00:53:54.180 Again, because I keep my mouth shut.
00:53:56.700 Okay.
00:53:57.520 Do you want me to introduce us again?
00:53:58.280 Like all good women should. 0.98
00:54:01.760 Anyway, hold on.
00:54:03.060 Get started here.
00:54:03.600 Thank you.
00:54:03.660 Thank you.
00:54:03.720 Thank you.
00:54:03.780 Thank you.
00:54:03.820 Thank you.
00:54:03.840 Thank you.
00:54:03.860 Thank you.
00:54:03.900 Thank you.
00:54:03.920 Thank you.
00:54:03.940 Thank you.
00:54:04.080 Thank you.
00:54:04.120 Thank you.
00:54:04.260 Thank you.
00:54:04.380 Thank you.
00:54:04.440 Thank you.
00:54:05.000 Thank you.
00:54:05.780 Thank you.
00:54:05.940 Thank you.
00:54:06.220 Thank you.
00:54:06.840 Thank you.
00:54:07.840 Thank you.