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.
00:03:11.360And let's chart the history of this for people who are too young. Now, if you are young and not
00:03:16.020familiar, like you have not been, like if you are my age and chronically online, I just said something
00:03:21.620that is completely uncontroversial to you. You're like, oh yeah, I remember when that happened.
00:03:26.200That was weird. Because everyone who has been actively engaged with online culture for a long
00:03:31.380time and mildly open to conservative ideas knows that this happened. But if you aren't,
00:03:38.640then you might think that's a controversial claim. Or if you just haven't been engaged with
00:03:42.260online culture. Like if I said this at NatCon, they'd be like, that can't be true. They'd say
00:03:46.020something like that. And then somebody at the table would like lean over and be like, actually,
00:03:49.160that did happen. So let's talk about how this happened, what happened, and why it happened.
00:03:53.920So first we need to go back to the early days of the internet. If you are talking about the early
00:04:03.300days of the internet, the war between the fundies and the atheists was absolutely enormous. It was like
00:04:13.760the core show on the internet. It was the core conflict on the internet. It was as big a conflict
00:04:22.460as something like woke versus anti-woke is today. It is what everyone was talking about. And then,
00:04:29.840and I should note that people can be like, oh, then the modern conservative movement must have come out
00:04:36.200of the early online religious movement, right? The people who are fighting the atheists. The problem
00:04:42.620is those people were always like one to 10 versus the atheist community in the early days of the
00:04:48.800internet. They were the best minority. They were people that brought on for people to take,
00:04:53.700who had no internet illiteracy for other people to take pot shots at. That was basically what was
00:04:57.900going on. Poor dears. And then even the people who were online were more dedicated to their individual
00:05:08.020communities, i.e. like promoting Catholicism or promoting some brands of Protestantism than any sort
00:05:16.020of wider political battle. So those were two of the things that caused that. And partially because
00:05:21.060of this shift, but partially fueled by this shift is the theocratic portion of the conservative party
00:05:28.340just lost pretty much all of their power in the shift to the Trumpist movement. But this will also
00:05:34.980explain how that happened because an alternate version of conservatism began to grow online, which
00:05:40.780appealed to many more people than the theocratic forum. And we can talk about why this happened.
00:05:45.220Early atheist community online. You have this early atheist community online. And then they and they
00:05:53.580were mostly like YouTubers. That was where a lot of this was happening in the early days. And pretty
00:05:58.280much all of their content was, look at this stupid thing religious people believe. Ha, let's laugh at
00:06:05.280the religious people for having these stupid things. Oh, and don't worry, all the subreddits.
00:06:08.660Um, there was, oh yeah, really good. The pin core subreddits of the top 10 was our atheism. Yeah. So do you
00:06:16.360have any thoughts on this period of history or any memories you have of it before I go further?
00:06:20.580I do remember it. I, it was, and this was something that I definitely encountered more
00:06:25.320in my upbringing, right? As, as a young girl growing up in a very progressive area where basically
00:06:32.060religious people were seen as, as quite weird and it was, and genuinely quite funny. Like how could
00:06:39.120this person possibly have these weird traditions and believe these weird things and yeah, making
00:06:44.660fun of them seemed. And that's actually the core of what caused the switch. Yeah. And I'll actually
00:06:50.240mark an interesting anecdote here. So Sarah Hader was in these early days. She's a guest that we've had
00:06:54.840on the show. She's great. She is an ex-Muslim who was a big figure in this early atheist community.
00:07:03.260Now she probably was the second most famous Muslim in the community now, or ex-Muslim, I should say in
00:07:08.040the community. Yeah. Yeah. Now she's known as an anti-woke podcaster. And I remember actually,
00:07:16.680because she hadn't contextualized that this had happened. And we were with a group of more like
00:07:22.080online savvy, like people. And she was thinking about what she was going to do next with her
00:07:25.760career. Then I was with a bunch of think tank people and I go, you know, you could just go
00:07:29.060and be like a public face of a conservative think tank. And she was like, Oh no, I wouldn't appeal to
00:07:33.900the conservative base. I'm just an ex-Muslim anti-woke activist because she hadn't thought of
00:07:40.100herself the new base. She was still thinking of these early days of the internet before this switch
00:07:46.260happened. Maybe. But I think it shows how, but if you said that today, you'd be like,
00:07:51.380you would be fantastic for being a public face of many of these organizations. But how did this
00:07:56.880happen? The, I think it was two things happened in the early days and we'll get into specific
00:08:01.300examples where this happened. But first I'm just talking about like what happened, how did it happen?
00:08:05.160Okay. Was that these early atheists, the arguments that you can make against the conservative
00:08:12.940positions get boring after a while because they are consistent? Yeah. And they're not going to
00:08:20.000change their minds. The argument's not going to evolve and they're also not going to change their
00:08:23.360policies and ways that give you new things to work with. Yeah. So you're just working with the
00:08:27.760ha stupid thing. It's a debate you can run 50 times, a hundred times, but you're not going to be able
00:08:33.360to run it a million times, which is what you need, right? Yeah. You need something to attack that is
00:08:39.920constantly evolving, but patently stupid. You need a group of people who is completely
00:08:48.060disconnected from reality and is willing to take the bait when you are tolling them. That was the
00:08:54.380other thing about the Christian community is one, they weren't really online that much. And two,
00:09:00.260when they were online, they eventually would learn to not take the bait if they were like a prominent
00:09:04.620figure in the community, right? Yeah. And so it just got boring, but then they found another
00:09:10.020community that was beginning to evolve at that time as well. And this was the beginnings of wokeism.
00:09:17.740So it wouldn't, at the time they wouldn't have called it wokeism. They would have called it
00:09:22.060anti-feminism or anti sort of Tumblrina culture. And to people who don't remember the Tumblrinas,
00:09:28.220they were insane. They were like crazier than the modern woke movement in many ways. This is where
00:09:35.500they were the female equivalent of 4chan, equally crazy, equally unhinged, just an equally autistic,
00:09:44.820just equally crazy and equally unhinged. But unlike 4chan where everything was about attack and the joke
00:09:50.920and like being thick skinned, being females, one person would write like a fan fiction or would say
00:09:57.560that because they were accepting of everything or say, my gender is turtle or my gender is clout.
00:10:02.780Those were two real genders. I think all of our genders are turtle. Thank you very much.
00:10:07.280Yeah. Your community would begin to buy into this because women more than men begin to buy in the
00:10:14.400community consensus more. I'm already buying into turtle gender now. You can call me turtle.
00:10:19.000Yeah. They're also statistically more spiritual. If you look at things, historically, women were seen as
00:10:24.760the more religious group, which I think modern people might be pretty surprised about. It's
00:10:28.340because women buy into these sorts of stories much faster than men do. You know, if somebody writes
00:10:32.920a fan fiction, women are going to start thinking these characters are real, like a small group of
00:10:37.240women. Become snape wives. Yeah. Snape wives and stuff like that. You don't get this phenomenon in
00:10:41.900men that much. So you begin to have the development of early woke culture. Before it was mainstream,
00:10:48.160it was just seen as like a crazy thing. And so these early atheists then begin to turn on this new
00:10:56.760ultra feminist, ultra woke culture, because it was constantly providing new content. People would
00:11:02.060always fight. It was just better content to be honest. And the people who they were debating against
00:11:09.280genuinely hated them. This was another thing that was the difference between these communities and the
00:11:14.000Christians and the Jews and the Muslims. If they began to build camaraderie, the atheists didn't
00:11:20.320really hate the religious community. And the religious community didn't really hate the atheists
00:11:26.400either. They were abused fundy kids, but it wasn't everyone. The vast majority were like, they would say,
00:11:32.900look, I'm just trying to convince you that these things are silly and you don't need to follow them.
00:11:36.320You know, rival football teams, just people who really love their side and love dunking on the other side,
00:11:43.820but also know that they need the other side in order to have fun. So it's all.
00:11:47.640Yeah. There was nothing like that was the woke community. The woke community genuinely thought
00:11:52.960that these people were trying to kill them. And these people genuinely thought that the woke
00:11:57.820community, when I say trying to kill them, I don't, not specifically, but they bought into this lie
00:12:01.840that like, if somebody denies that cloud gender is real. That they were causing trauma, that they were
00:12:06.460causing harm. They'll say they're, you're denying my existence, which is akin to genocide within their
00:12:12.260violence. Well, and, and that, that offending someone is akin to physical violence that it's,
00:12:16.500I'm feeling real pain, that kind of thing. Yeah. And in this moment, like nothing happened,
00:12:21.440like people, and this is how many of these atheists, I think didn't realize that they're a hater,
00:12:26.080that they were becoming the new Republican bases initiating point, because for them, all of this was
00:12:33.700just small incremental changes. And if people are wondering some examples of individuals where this
00:12:38.020happened, Armored Skeptic, or individuals like Peter Bergosen, or Michael Schmer, or individuals
00:12:45.200like, I'd even say Schuonhead to an extent really started in that community. Now she considers herself
00:12:50.380a progressive now, but progressives don't own her because she went anti-woke and you can't disagree
00:12:54.640with them on anything. And I think that also the way that this wokest movement worked. Now keep in
00:12:59.500mind in these early days, the wokest movement hadn't taken over yet. And we're going to talk about
00:13:04.280mainstream people as well. So you can look at Sam Harris, right? One of the four horsemen of the
00:13:08.000atheist apocalypse, right? Or of atheism, right? So he worked at his policy position. He considers
00:13:14.120himself a libertarian internationalist in approach to foreign policies, which includes some interventionist
00:13:20.220policies. He was, during the Bush era, he supported specifically in regards to attacking Islam in the
00:13:26.340Middle East and in the war of that period. He was seen as being willing to talk to anyone, even when he
00:13:32.780disagreed with them. For example, Charles Murray, he talked to, he's a conservative individual and people
00:13:37.080were like, oh, how would you do that? And like the Israel-Palestine conflict, he's on the Israel
00:13:40.780side. He has, or you can talk about Christopher Hitchens, who even in the early days supported the
00:13:47.460Iraq war, right? So you would have these individuals. Now in the early days, what progressivism was when all
00:13:55.140of this started, these people wouldn't have been hard removed from the progressive sphere for
00:14:01.460disagreeing with them on a few topics. But that wasn't the case in this new wokest form of
00:14:09.340progressive that was beginning to evolve in the online sphere, okay? You can't disagree on a few
00:14:16.580issues. You can't, they don't allow that. And then the thing that really caused the split was a lot of
00:14:23.160the trans issues. And this was a really interesting thing. I was watching a Sarah Hare episode and she was
00:14:30.880talking about how weird it was. Basically what happened was, is in this atheist attack community,
00:14:39.460there was cred for continuing to say anything so long as you believed it was true. Now this cred
00:14:46.940actually works in conservative circles. Most conservatives, so long as almost everything
00:14:51.640you think is true isn't progressives, are going to respect you if you just say what you think is true.
00:14:56.940Whereas the- So this applies basically to religious extremism or what? Can you give me an example of
00:15:02.520this? Oh, they might say that certain ethnic communities cause more crime than other ethnic
00:15:07.760communities. And as long as you're really, you dig into it and you seem to really believe it, people
00:15:11.920don't look down to them. Okay, so I'll word it this way, okay? Okay. You might have an individual who
00:15:17.620supports some level of social redistribution, but also believes crime rates differ between ethnic
00:15:23.140communities in the United States, all right? A conservative meets that individual and they go,
00:15:29.400oh, we disagree on one thing. We agree on one thing. You're a conservative. A progressive meets
00:15:34.440this individual and they go, you are a far right extremist who I won't talk to because we disagree on
00:15:39.820one thing. Oh, yeah. Okay. I see what you mean. Yeah. What happened with shoe on head? Yeah. So in other
00:15:44.820words, with progressives, it's all or nothing. With conservatives, it's a la carte, case by case.
00:15:51.360Yes. It's a la carte, whereas progressives is all or nothing, which pushed these individuals
00:15:56.160further and further into conservative audiences and conservative communities. But then some big
00:16:02.840things happened. So Sarah Hayter had this story on her podcast and I thought it was very telling. It
00:16:07.380was a story of, from her perspective, when they were doing an episode on who's black science guy,
00:16:12.940Neil deGrasse Tyson, right? And he's been just like totally pro, like all of the insane trans stuff
00:16:18.520that's happening now that just the science doesn't back. I had to point out that 2023 study that now
00:16:23.080we know that out of 11-year-olds who are gender non-conforming, by the time they're 23, more than
00:16:30.080nine in 10 is completely comfortable with their gender, but likely just gay. And so what that means
00:16:36.440is that by the data, about nine in 10 people who we are transitioning, we are basically chemically
00:16:42.880castrating nine of 10 gay kids for every one trans person we're quote unquote saving. Like that is,
00:16:50.100yikes. We know this now. We live in a post-cast report era. Things are different now. But a lot
00:16:55.700of people are just not up to date with the data, right? Or they willfully ignore the data. And what
00:17:00.500she said was it was really interesting to see these people who, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, she would have
00:17:05.760considered an ally in the early atheist days. And she goes, and the community basically split into
00:17:11.220two groups. There was one community that just was looking for the truth. And there was another
00:17:18.600community that just wanted to dunk on conservatives and Republicans. And you realize who these two
00:17:27.160communities were pretty quick, right? Which was the community that just wanted to dunk on conservatives.
00:17:34.800They are now this Neil deGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye, the science guy, or you know who these people
00:17:41.280are, right? They are totally detached from reality and the stuff they're saying now.
00:17:44.680Now people might be like, yeah, but these early online atheists, they weren't really the core
00:17:55.060birthing place of the modern conservative movement on conservative base, like online base. And here I
00:18:00.360would say, one, I just think you're wrong. You just need to talk to many online conservatives where
00:18:04.360a lot of them converted to the mainstream conservative ideology today. But two, you think
00:18:11.880of these individuals as having static views, and they didn't have static views. Many of them became
00:18:17.480increasingly conservative as time went on. And so we need to talk about why that happened.
00:18:24.620So it happened for a few reasons. One, they began to, they would just side with whatever movement
00:18:30.320was more rational at the time, right? That was their idea, right? The men's right movement was much
00:18:36.360more justified, given the statistics during the time when it was growing, than the women's movement,
00:18:42.160the feminist movement, right? And the men's right movement also was a core birthing place of modern
00:18:47.780conservative culture. So a lot of these individuals, they switched from anti-feminist content to men's
00:18:53.280right adjacent content, which again, made them part of this early birthing part of the red pill,
00:18:58.900the MGTOW, the et cetera communities, right? So it may not have been the initial figures in this
00:19:04.640community, but it was people who were weaned on their content, or who were mimicking their type of
00:19:10.320content. But then you had the secondary thing that was happening during this period. And I think,
00:19:15.940what's her name? The one who you were talking about, the Muslim, who was one of the
00:19:18.780four horsemen of the atheist movement, who, she wasn't actually at the conference, so she's often
00:19:24.060called the fifth horseman, but she was supposed to be, who converted to Christianity. And she was
00:19:28.660originally a Muslim, deconverted, then converted to Christianity. Is she, hold on, I don't know,
00:19:34.020I just know that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a critic of Islam. And yeah, writing in a column in November,
00:19:43.2202023, Ali announced her conversion to the Christian faith, claiming that in her view,
00:19:48.060the Judeo-Christian tradition is the only answer to the problems of the modern world. Okay.
00:19:52.860Okay. So she said something about why people were like, when you grew up a Muslim, like,
00:19:57.420why did you convert to Christianity? Instead of just being atheist.
00:20:02.260Like, why did you first try Christianity when you started praying to God? Because she had this
00:20:06.600depressed period, and then she prayed to God, and she felt that she was saved. So why did you do that?
00:20:13.720And she goes, of all these years, when I was attacking and preaching against religious individuals,
00:20:20.060the Muslims would send me messages about how they were going to kill me. The Christians would send
00:20:25.520me messages about how they hoped they were praying for me, and they were praying for me to be saved,
00:20:32.080and they wanted me. And this is actually true of most of the atheist community. When they were attacking
00:20:37.740the Christians, and then when their value system started to align more with the Christians,
00:20:42.260they were very open to be friends with these people, because these people had always been
00:20:49.380nice to them, even when there was conflict. Whereas the opposite side group had always been
00:20:57.080very antagonistic. But wokes send us death threats constantly. We say stuff against conservatives,
00:21:02.940they never, almost never. Occasionally, we'll get something because we're pro-IVF and stuff like
00:21:07.500that that's mean, but we don't really get death threats from Christians.
00:21:11.060Oh, no, I don't think we've ever received really mean comments from anyone aside from people who,
00:21:19.000if you click through to their profiles, if they have a public one or something associated with
00:21:24.400their identity, are totally progressive. Yeah. The only thing that maybe sometimes comes up is
00:21:31.020criticism of our using IVF for genetic testing from religious conservatives, but that criticism is
00:21:37.300typically not an ad hominem attack, even. Yeah, no, it's like specific, like logical argument.
00:21:45.220Yeah, or this is not the work of the Lord, you know, that kind of thing. And it's like, yeah,
00:21:48.080it's to you not, based on your beliefs or whatever. Which we can get to debate on,
00:21:51.660but they're not relevant here. But what it means is I don't like, maybe progressives don't fully
00:21:57.500understand this, or they're just, their culture is so toxic because it's so built into attacking each
00:22:02.220other within their culture. But when you constantly attack somebody who is trying to take a middle
00:22:08.100ground, you end up pushing them further and further to the other side. And they become a more and more
00:22:14.880open to genuinely reconsidering their positions. You might've been an old atheist. You might not have
00:22:21.180had a strong stance on abortion to begin with, but you knew the approved stance was abortion is fine
00:22:26.620in pretty much all circumstances. Now you've been attacked over and over again. And we'll do a video
00:22:30.320on our changing stance on abortion over time. And you're like, you know what, I should probably go
00:22:35.160back to the evidence on that. The nice guys seem to be really against this abortion thing in most of
00:22:40.920the circumstances that it's being used today. Maybe I should learn more about this. And then they do.
00:22:46.900And they're like, oh, I agree with that position. And here is one of the big things that shifted along
00:22:53.660this period as well. And I think that this is indicative partially of why the new conservative
00:23:00.300base is so different from the old conservative base. The old conservative base was primarily
00:23:06.480a theocratic base. That's what they were interested with, theocratic and sort of pearl clutching.
00:23:12.020The new conservative base is a mixture of two communities. It is this original, I call them
00:23:21.300caustic atheists, i.e. atheists who are really interested in debating people doing stupid things,
00:23:26.280who are interested in what is the technically correct answer. And a-
00:23:31.780Well, no, to your point, because they're seeking out people who are doing stupid things.
00:23:35.280I want to be technically correct and have an easy win. And I know I can win. I want a guaranteed win
00:23:41.200with no effort. It's a mix of this community. No, but they also are interested in technical
00:23:47.140correctness. This is why, for example, you have problems with people like Sam Harris or Christopher
00:23:52.680Hitchens or other mainstream atheists, even Richard Dawkins, unfortunately, from the perspective of
00:23:58.640wokeism, having wrong policy positions, having wrong positions about the way the government should be
00:24:04.060structured. Because it turns out that if you're just interested in what's rational, you eventually
00:24:10.180realize actually capitalistic systems seem to work much better for everyone involved in socialist
00:24:14.300systems. So let's move to those systems. So it was a mixture of this earlier, let's be technically
00:24:19.300correct, not the old fuddy-duddy Christians who were afraid of technology and afraid of change,
00:24:26.420but the theologically alive Christians, I would call them, the people who are having this active
00:24:31.140theological discussion. And so you got a melding of these two communities. And that produced the type
00:24:38.680of conservatism that led to Trump, where individuals were like, hey, we need to stop. It doesn't really
00:24:45.040make sense for people in this country for us to be focused on so much on what's going on overseas
00:24:49.480anymore. Let's stop that. Or it's also why the party in terms of it's if you talk to the Republican base,
00:24:55.740if you go to these rallies, they are often much more and I didn't realize how socialist the
00:25:01.600conservative elite class was. Oh, my gosh, seriously, they are much more libertarian. And
00:25:06.540they're much more libertarian in part because it works. And now you're having a weird sort of circle
00:25:13.420back to the beginning thing where I don't know if you've heard some of the controversy of Richard
00:25:17.500Dawkins, for example, bemoaning the fall of the church in his country, where he has been complaining
00:25:23.280a lot and saying it's really sad that we don't have the cathedrals are being turned into mosques
00:25:28.740in England. And he's like, if you don't have people going anymore, then they're not tithing and they
00:25:33.160can't afford the buildings anymore. And this is all in a way downstream of his movement. He hasn't come
00:25:38.720to the perspective of converting yet, but he has come to the perspective, which most of the original
00:25:45.640atheist community has now, which is unavoidable, is our society was better with religion, specifically
00:25:55.620Christianity, and that it was to some extent a mistake to be attacking these communities. And
00:26:03.500that a lot of the societal problems that we have right now are downstream of the deconversion of
00:26:09.380people. However, there is not a version of Christianity that they feel comfortable returning
00:26:16.380to because they're just like, but I can't believe it. So for example, when that, whatever her name
00:26:21.440was, Muslim lady was talking was Richard Dawkins about her conversion to Christianity. And she was
00:26:26.960talking about how she was depressed and noodle-cidal and she wanted to, she was looking for something and
00:26:33.060she finally had a psychologist. I was like, have you tried praying? And then after this like
00:26:36.580heartwarming story and the crowd is cheered, he's like, yeah, but do you really believe that Mary became
00:26:41.680pregnant when she was a virgin? And it's they, because they don't have an iteration of Christianity that
00:26:47.360can conform with this ultra logical perspective on reality. They're like, I don't, I want to rejoin. I want
00:26:54.940to believe. And this is really what the tract series project is about. So for anyone who's weird here and
00:27:00.160doesn't know, you go to technoparathon.com and see a summary of like our religious beliefs and the
00:27:05.180tracks that we're putting out, but we are trying to synthesize one, something that I believe is true. So it
00:27:12.560is something that we synthesize for work, but it is also when I was originally creating it before I realized,
00:27:17.940oh my God, I think this is actually true. It was a hypothesis in creating the type of religious system that
00:27:24.460my kids could continue to believe even in this secular world, even with all of this information out there. And then
00:27:31.400only while I was constructing it was, I was like, oh shit, I can't explain how some of this stuff is
00:27:36.180true other than that God is real in this system is true. And I don't come at that from like revelation
00:27:42.100or anything like that. I'm literally coming at that from logic. Like I plausibly can't come up with
00:27:46.460another explanation for how this worked out this way. That is, and if you're looking for the one on
00:27:52.500this, you can go to the episode of why we believe in a technopuritan God, which goes over like why we
00:27:57.900believe this is stuff that I just found implausible from any other metric. But I do think that's where
00:28:02.980we're going to see a lot of this community go is back towards these religious traditions,
00:28:06.980because unfortunately, if you're taking this logical contrarian stance now is in modern wokist
00:28:13.180society, it's going to push you back towards religious systems. But I'm wondering what are your
00:28:18.700thoughts on this? Or do you remember this as it was happening or like thinking of this? It's weird that
00:28:24.520all these ex-atheist people are now like the most popular conservative YouTubers. Do you,
00:28:30.200or anti-feminist is what it was originally, and then it became conservative.
00:28:35.520Anti-feminist? Yeah. So what I think it was more, what it feels like to me at least,
00:28:40.140is that these were always rebel anti-establishment people online. And they didn't always move in the
00:28:49.740direction of conservative or anti-progressive. In fact, some people who were avid members of the
00:28:57.660Church of the Subgenius and who loved being irreverent online remained in the progressive
00:29:04.020atheist camp and continue to be progressive online. I just think that it happens to be that a lot of the
00:29:10.820anti-establishment people who were effective players online also became conservative. So my larger
00:29:17.420answer isn't that all of the people who were atheists online originally became conservative
00:29:25.800influencers. It's instead that both the conservative and progressive influencers online are prolific,
00:29:33.500active debaters and flame war lovers online who started out as people very likely to engage in
00:29:41.280anti-atheist debates. I hear what you're saying, but I'm less interested in the specific individuals
00:29:46.280other than how the communities developed. Because a lot of people will be like, oh, there are a few now
00:29:51.680fringe players in the online conservative movement. They weren't the birthing place of that movement. And so what I'm
00:29:57.680trying to walk people through who didn't live through this period of internet history is early internet history was
00:30:06.280online 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
00:30:35.280to 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.
00:30:51.280I 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
00:31:03.280anti-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.
00:31:28.680They started out as very progressive working in progressive institutions.
00:31:31.680You'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.
00:31:47.680So 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.
00:32:05.680We 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.
00:32:22.680Yeah, that's so interesting. I guess I missed it. I wasn't paying attention.
00:32:25.680As 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.
00:32:49.680In 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.
00:33:09.680Now, 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.
00:33:38.840And 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.
00:34:01.320And 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.
00:34:26.920If 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.
00:34:33.680Or if you were a Lutheran YouTuber, if you were a...
00:34:36.440So you're going increasingly niche. Like you're limiting the reach of your message.
00:34:42.000And 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.
00:34:52.960Because that's what prevented these individuals from ever being leading figures.
00:34:57.620Actually, 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.
00:35:07.620And I think he was mad that his sister didn't become a leading figure of the prenatalist movement.
00:35:11.200I think that's what he expected. They put all this money in. She clearly wants to be like prenatalist in her value system.
00:35:17.040She's been attacked as a prenatalist by progressives. Why isn't she being elevated?
00:35:21.680And it's because ultimately, we were not coming at this from a team perspective to begin with.
00:35:28.120And 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.
00:35:39.020Their way of speaking about this issue was just, frankly, it was tainted by their own community background.
00:35:43.740It's why are you having a lot of kids? That's why I'm doing it for these Jewish reasons.
00:35:47.620And it's like, what does that have to do with anyone else? What does that have to do with me, Christian person?
00:35:51.040What does that have to do with me, secular person?
00:35:53.840Whereas when we were coming at this, we started from a purely secular perspective.
00:35:57.820And so we were like, these are the ways that make sense for everyone, regardless of your religion or faith system.
00:36:04.040And then when we went back into a harder religious system and we built that for our family and then ended up believing,
00:36:10.980that happened to us because we were genuinely like, what's best for our kids?
00:36:14.760What's the system that's best for our kids? And we built that and we ended up believing it.
00:36:18.020But when I think a lot of people, they look at us and they're like, you don't really believe, right?
00:36:25.920And what I've noticed is the only people who say that are the Christians.
00:36:29.920I'll explain why. Because I think a lot of atheists who are interested in believing in a religious system,
00:36:36.800when they look at our system in the same way where when Dawkins was talking to the other person,
00:36:42.420he goes, you don't really believe that Jesus was born to a virgin.
00:36:44.740He was like, oh, there's this logical inconsistency, which is the type of thing that would hang me up, right?
00:36:49.360Whereas our system is just completely unfraught with this.
00:36:52.640And 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.
00:36:58.680Because it doesn't trigger any of the, I just can't bite that as an atheist problems that many of the other traditions do,
00:37:07.020which is why we call it a secular religious system, which I think religious people are confused by.
00:37:11.920But 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.
00:37:19.340Okay, that makes perfect sense. Like, I can see why they would believe in that.
00:37:22.780Whereas 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.
00:37:35.260And I think that this is actually the difference. Like, we don't really have faith.
00:37:39.540I 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.
00:37:50.120Not because God came to me and talked to me or like it helped me out of this rough time or anything like that.
00:37:56.080Like, what's weird is we believe in our system.
00:37:59.440And 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.
00:38:07.620Without, and then after that, they develop the blind passion, which I think the religious community has a trouble model.
00:38:17.000And I'm wondering why they have trouble modeling that could happen.
00:38:19.900It might be because for them so much, I can tell you a couple camps that I can understand where they can't believe it.
00:38:27.020But 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.
00:38:39.240Like, it's a very sort of emotional, like the ceremony and the cathedral and the antiquity.
00:38:44.440Like, that's what makes these things true in my mind.
00:38:47.980And so it's really that they were persuaded through emotion rather than through logic.
00:39:05.040They've never deconverted from a tradition.
00:39:06.580Just the idea that you could genuinely convert into something and believe it is surprising to them, especially if that thing doesn't have antiquity.
00:39:13.940They're like, things that are true must have antiquity.
00:39:16.280And 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.
00:39:31.460But 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.
00:39:46.440Because I know, you know, not everyone watching has seen all their episodes.
00:39:49.300We 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.
00:40:01.680That it then was commanded by God that it was broken after 500, 600 years of being there.
00:40:08.100And the antiquity of a tradition doesn't mean that God approves of it.
00:40:11.920He's basically just waiting for you to figure out that what you're doing is idolatry.
00:40:15.640And 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.
00:40:24.140And I do find that most of the traditions I think have trended towards idolatry.
00:40:27.620And 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.
00:40:44.440And those are never going to be palatable to somebody who left religion for these logical inconsistency reasons.
00:40:53.080And I'd say who is buying into these mystic systems?
00:40:55.300I actually think the core group that's buying into these mystic perennialist systems are the, I guess I'd call them crystal worshipers.
00:41:01.700They'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.
00:41:13.880Now, 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.
00:41:21.600The 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.
00:41:35.760And 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?
00:41:42.580That seems like a pretty big plot hole.
00:41:44.660Like 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.
00:41:50.920Like it doesn't mention that they were like embryos, like some sort of I'm imagining like a Jurassic Park thing.
00:41:57.980But anyway, do you have any final thoughts on this? Because you would love to hear your ideas, Simone.
00:42:11.380You are the star. And I know in the future, we're going to have people who just go to the end for your summations.
00:42:17.980Isolations. 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-
00:42:31.040You knew about the antagonist movement or did it just never catch your algorithm?
00:42:34.420It never really caught my algorithm because why? I'm looking at cooking and fashion and decorating online.
00:42:41.020Or 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.
00:42:51.840But Gamergate didn't really bleed into them. They were talking about dating strategy.
00:42:55.960They were talking about building a better independent life and becoming better people, but they weren't really talking about the wider world.
00:43:02.140And 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.
00:43:09.900And 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.
00:43:26.400Everyone 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.
00:43:37.560And 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.
00:43:49.760But we don't, they don't really understand larger society. Larger society doesn't understand them.
00:43:57.300And 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.
00:44:09.420Without understanding that they are being affected by them, by not understanding who they are or by not understanding how they work.
00:44:16.220So it's like the blind leading the blind in a really interesting subcultural way.
00:44:21.560And 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.
00:44:40.240I 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.
00:45:16.700They are making national policy decisions and they are unaware of the core conservative progressive battles that have happened in the past decade.
00:45:33.380Well, 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.
00:45:56.440Like 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.
00:46:30.340I've been talking to them about putting on a conference for them to meet with online conservative influencers and build some connection there.
00:46:36.740And Heritage Foundation was like the most gung-ho about this.
00:46:40.180The people at the Heritage Foundation-
00:46:41.440Yeah, they seemed like really willing to play ball, which is surprising for an organization that's takeaway porn.
00:46:47.480Yeah, the people at the Heritage Foundation were, out of all of the groups I talked to, by far the most willing to-
00:46:58.440Learn from the outside world and learn how the Republican base had moved to new ideas and passed where they are now.
00:47:05.700The 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,
00:47:10.180But some of the other groups were just like, when I pitched this idea, they go, why would we care what the base thinks?
00:47:16.660Like, 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.
00:47:24.600Our plan is a socialist Christian state.
00:47:28.680That was basically what they were pushing for.
00:47:30.740I wish you were lying about this, but I was there too.
00:47:39.440You even see this within the pronatalist movement.
00:47:41.720So 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.
00:47:54.060And he's like, it lies through the moon to say it works.