The Fundie Snark To Religious Extremist Pipeline
Episode Stats
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Summary
Ben Shapiro's sister, Classically Abby, is a conservative pundit who has built a cult-like cult on her YouTube channel, "Classically Abby." How does she do it? And why does she get so much hate mail from people who don't get it?
Transcript
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I like seeing people who have taken hard cultural stances be criticized to see how we might be subject to criticism ourselves and what we may be doing wrong.
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I really like Fundy Fridays and I really like Jen.
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But yeah, she's in as much of a cult as the people who she covers.
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They all come from very strong cultures that have skews and blind spots because of those strong cultures.
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Not to say that we don't have blind spots either, but still.
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They're the good guys in her insane religious cult.
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She's the good guy and she's doing what the cult is telling her to do.
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She'd started tongue-in-cheek that are frills of the channel now still speak very much or similar to the small-time career preachers that she criticizes.
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Her followers call themselves Jenonites and they patronize her.
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And how is that different from being a preacher in the end?
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After a tough day today, it is always nice to be able to come back to doing something that we love, which is these conversations.
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Like, they're so much better than a date because they're, like, recorded and we watch them over and over again.
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I actually quite enjoy our own YouTube channel.
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But this is the first time I've ever created something that I really, like, with our books, I don't read them over and over again.
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But I'm like, oh, I know I made a fun joke in this one.
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But what actually got us on today's topic was Simone has always been a big fan of Fundy Snark content.
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And I have always been a big fan of religious content.
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And religious content for me includes the deconverts and stuff like that.
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And where our two worlds interlapped recently was Classically Abby.
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Being a conservative woman in today's day and age is not easy.
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So people might not know this, but Classically Abby is Ben Shapiro's sister.
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And she absolutely spammed YouTube with so, so many ads a few years ago.
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If you're on YouTube now and you've been on YouTube for years, you know what we're talking about.
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You're like, oh my God, I remember when I had to watch her.
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What got me about Classically Abby, and this actually has boosted my ego so much.
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Classically Abby, we produce videos every weekday.
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Classically Abby produces one video a week, but otherwise similar format to us.
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Whereas we're generally between the low 2Ks to 7 or 8K views.
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On an average day, because we can look at our statistics.
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So some of our videos just vastly outperform other ones.
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Like the old Starship Troopers one is a really high number.
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But on average, we're getting about 8,000 views per day.
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Smoking her for a daily channel doing four or five times as well as her weekly channel, which I love.
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Because she must have spent millions building that up.
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And sorry, as to why I love this, people might not know, but we have a beef with Ben Shapiro.
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He, the first time we really went viral, he was really derogatory towards us and was like, they're nerds.
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Why does anyone care what these people have to say?
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And he has just repeatedly, we have tried to get into events that he's doing or has association with.
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Like we are on a blocked, do not talk to list with Ben Shapiro and everyone who talks to Ben Shapiro.
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That we've actually like grassroots beginning to build up.
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So Ben Shapiro's thing is he often switches between whatever movement happens to be hot in the conservative space right now.
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But I think he would have, like when he switched to all the men's rights content and stuff like that.
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But he doesn't seem to actually have like his own perspective on things.
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It's more just like whatever he thinks will get him in the moment clout.
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So it's not just audience capture, it's audience capture hopping.
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He tried to help out his sister, which I appreciate to get into the same business.
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I tried to watch some of her videos and I'm like, I can see why nobody's watching these.
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There's no, yeah, the most interesting, least interesting takes.
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But I want to talk about this phenomenon of Fundy Snark.
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To be clear, Fundy Snark is people with snarky commentary on fundamentalist religions and people
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who are religious fundamentalists, just in case you're not familiar with it.
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And it's very different from, I think the reason why we would provide an interesting insight
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into Fundy Snark is we are people who watch a lot of Fundy Snark content for different reasons.
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Like I'm interested in how different cultures view other cultural groups and talk about other
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Or I like seeing people who have taken hard cultural stances be criticized to see how we
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might be subject to criticism ourselves and what we may be doing wrong.
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Because my favorite content is, it turns out that I am wrong about something and I should
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And Fundy Snark helps me because it is, it does all of that.
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And I'm like, our audience is like 90% male now.
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This is a very interesting pernagalist argument around Bridgerton though.
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And we were discussing, this is one of the podcast listeners who is in a very progressive
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And there's a lot of people who are very progressively coded at least, but who also love Bridgerton,
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which is an insanely pro-natalist TV show on Netflix that large families, it's all about
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And if our viewers want us to do the Bridgerton episode, let us know.
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So we're going to be talking about a few different channels as examples of Fundy Snark content.
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And what I find very interesting is the differentiation between the channels in terms of like my
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perspective on whether or not they are fundamental goods for the world or fundamental negatives
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Because some of these channels are really just like in a cult, basically.
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Like the far progressive movement has essentially become a cult.
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We call it the urban monoculture in our show a lot, stuff like that.
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But then there's some people who would just seem to be genuinely secular.
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One of the things I find most interesting about Fundy Snark content is the people who were
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raised atheist and then turned to Fundy Snark often seem to be the most in a cult of the
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And the people who were raised Mormon and then turned to Fundy Snark often are the most
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like kind and open-minded and genuinely engaging.
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So just there, which I'm sure you're probably going to agree with.
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Let's list the channels we're talking about and then hear your hypothesis.
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So the channels that we actively watch, so people know what we're talking about here,
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And then Rachel Friday, yes, the subreddit is called Fundy Snark.
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I would say that like the groups that I say are like fairly benign or even quite positive.
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I think the two Mormon couples we mentioned was the highest tier being Zelf on the Shelf.
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I just see Zelf on the Shelf as being really compassionate about the people that they are
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targeting to the extent where recently they've done a number of episodes where they are interacting
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was the girl-defined couple because this couple is open to interacting with them given how
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open and kind they are towards these individuals.
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Whereas I put the pedestal of hate content, probably Rachel Oates, and then slightly below
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Where these people are really just a progressive version of Libs of TikTok, but not as entertaining.
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Libs of TikTok, for people who don't know, they take the most extreme people in this urban
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monoculture cult that we talk about and they showcase their behavior and then they attempt
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to spin sort of a narrative or a perspective where this behavior is actually pretty mainstream
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But like most progressive, though, this isn't mainstream.
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Whereas you see a similar thing in, for example, Fundy Fridays, where they will say things like
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there was in a Duggar video recently where she was saying basically all Republicans are bad
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And even though more than 50% of Republican voters these days support gay marriage, like it's wild
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that these positions they're taking, we'll get more into the wildness of this and the
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downstream negative repercussions of the positions the extremists are taking.
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So I think that the reason why born fairly atheist and then remained atheist people have
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the most skewed Fundy Snark commentary is because they are of the greatest religious fervor.
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So we've seen that, for example, in polygenic risk scores and generally, religiosity appears
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But religiosity doesn't mean like you inherit being a Baptist.
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It means you inherit a kind of religious fervor or tendency to be quite religious.
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For example, I have family members who used to be a member of the Raj Nation and went like
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They just jumped from one harder culture to another harder culture instead of just being
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So it seems like people tend to gravitate towards hard and soft cultures.
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And I think that people who are very vehement critics of other cultures are demonstrating
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the personality tendencies, the behavioral tendencies that drive one to religiosity in the first
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They just happen to be bowing down to the cult or religion of progressivism, of woke, of whatever
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And the people who deconvert from hard religions are naturally those whose behavioral and personality
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characteristics are less hardline on any sort of culture.
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They don't gravitate toward that very hard culture.
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And they're more likely to spin out of hard religions because they just don't have a very
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So that's why I think those who have deconverted tend to be a little bit more tempered and reasonable,
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whereas those who never deconverted from their culture and have yet devoted their careers
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to a great extent to this kind of commentary and criticism are more vehement.
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I suspect it's most cultural and genetic because this is something we just see more generally.
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And it's something that we've talked about on our channel before is a lot of people think
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like they have left the culture they were born in.
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And you see the downstream effects of being outside of a hard cultural group, like a religious
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cultural group, doesn't really show up in individual personality until about two or three
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And the Mormons who have deconverted were still raised was in Mormon culture.
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I also think that there's genetic effects here.
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When I engage with both Mormons and ex-Mormons, both groups I find just, and again, this is probably
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a cross between culture and genetics, unusually pleasant people to interact with.
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Well, this is actually an interesting thing where a lot of people see us, you and me,
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and they're like, you guys look like brother and sister.
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And we're like, you look at the Puritan spotting checklist that Scott Alexander wrote, and we
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were like, off the charts on this, you look at the old of the cultural group, which both
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of us come from, and I'll put it on the screen here, pictures of Calvinist women.
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They look all like Simone sisters, or you can put up like famous Calvinists as a group
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that I was in from, the group that like founded the Free State of Jones, the John Brown group.
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You put like a picture of John Brown, and you're like, both behaviorally and physiologically,
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We need to find that painting where there's some concerned people behind him.
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So it's more just that we're part of an ethno-cultural group that had a pretty isolated gene pool for
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a long time that you're just not as familiar with, but it doesn't mean that we aren't also
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So I suspect that's what we're seeing with the Mormon community, is one, a culture which
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actually does a pretty good job of creating good action at the end of it.
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So in our Wikipedia article about us, there is a section on it where it quotes one of my
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quotes, and I'm actually quite glad they quoted this, because they were talking about my relationship
00:14:01.120
I grew up troubled teen industry, everything like that, which I was sent to by court order,
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But what I said is, if a parent raises good children, like children who are happy with
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themselves, happy with their lives, and successful by any secular metric, how can I say that they
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And the Platt family, the Fundy Snark did a series of videos.
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Mentioning that all of their kids seem so healthy and happy and well-adjusted, and yet
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And I'm like, do you see what's coming out of progressive culture?
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These people are coming out like mentally broken individuals.
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Pew found that over half of all white liberal women under the age of 30 have a mental health
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issue, and just across the board, among this ultra-progressive cultural group, as you can
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see here, there's just much higher rates of mental health issues than there is in the
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And this is why I'm so unpersuaded when ultra-progressives are like, why don't you just raise children the
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Because I'm like, anyone can see, whether I'm looking at the data or I'm just looking at
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the people I know, that whatever the thing is that you're doing with your kids, it's leading
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Whereas I just don't see the same thing coming out of conservative households, even when these
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kids grow up in childhoods that progressives claim or love to mentally masturbate about
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mentally breaking these kids or causing them to need therapy when they're adults or causing
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But really, they're just saying, oh, these are hooks we could use to pull them out of their
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Not that they're actually pointing out things that are genuinely damaging to these kids.
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And another really interesting thing I see from a cultural perspective, like the more
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on the cult spectrum they are, these individuals, whenever they see somebody acting non-culturally
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normative, their perspective is always to say, get out there and go to a therapist.
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And as we've talked about, if you look at modern therapy, and you can watch our videos on
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therapy become a cult, this is an industry I was trained in.
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They do a bunch of stuff that we were explicitly warned against doing in the early 2000s.
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They do a bunch of stuff like trauma therapy is what I call it, which is really, they've
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taken the concept of thetans and they've just inserted the word trauma.
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And it is much closer to Scientology from the 90s and 80s than it is to what therapy was
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And this isn't just on Fundy Snark channels either.
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What's really interesting is across YouTube channels and podcasts, I hear this coming up
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a lot, like when someone is in, especially the therapy cult, it shows up and they talk
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They talk a lot about their therapists and how it's very important that people get therapy.
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And so when they want to convert somebody, they send them to therapists because therapists
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do two things really well, this cult version of therapy that really is more similar to
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Scientology from the 80s, is they do a very good job of breaking an individual's connections
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to their birth culture and family and convincing them that all of this stuff, that if it's not
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culturally normative, i.e. if it's not part of the urban monoculture, it is trauma, it
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And they use that to break them from these groups, which cults always do.
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The first thing a cult always does is try to break you from your family.
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But they also do a very good job of creating this sort of original sin narrative around
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the concept of trauma, which historically we would have known a therapist's job is to
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help somebody emotionally heal, not to create dependency.
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And you can make more money by creating dependency, which is why this model of therapy out-competed.
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So do you want to go further on any of these topics before I get into probably the most
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I think people watch Fundy Snark for a bunch of different reasons, and some it's just cultural
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I think a lot of it, which is important and it shouldn't be understated, is that people
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who come from a soft culture and just don't really have a lot of firmly held beliefs or
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traditions or restraints on their lives feel, and I felt this a lot when I was a kid, which
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is why I'm bringing it up, this strange fascination with people who come from weird cultures and
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have a structured life and have these structured beliefs.
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And they may say that they hate these people, these religious fundamentalists, but they will
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They will follow these people on Instagram and across other channels and watch and maybe
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But I think maybe even subconsciously, there's a lot of watching that goes on just because
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there's something compelling and comforting about it.
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And even Paris socially experienced that lifestyle without actually living it.
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And without actually feeling like you're condoning it because these are snark channels.
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And I think that's what a lot of this is about.
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I also really, the more vehement and you would say like unfair channels like Fundy Fridays,
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because they provide such a stark contrast of the cultural extremes that we've arrived at
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Because as you say, like you're cherry picking extremes.
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This is the libs of TikTok of the flipped version.
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And it really helps you see what the differences are.
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If someone needs to know what the differences between weird conservatism and weird progressivism
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are, watch one of these channels and you'll know where they fall on marriage, on child
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rearing, on therapy, on trauma, on pets, on how to deal with social media, on jobs, on really
00:20:22.440
So I'm going to get to two fairly offensive points.
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One is Rachel Oates, who I think is the most extreme version of the Arab monoculture, just
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join us, is her arguments, because you see this across videos and I see this across Fundy
00:20:36.460
And she was actually talking about the other Collins family, the more famous Collins family
00:20:40.580
than us, which is this really delightful interracial couple.
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Carissa using her kids to push her anti-choice, pro-natalist beliefs.
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I, the more I learn about them and see people criticizing them, because I find that you can
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learn about somebody through the individuals who criticize them really well, because I'm
00:21:01.400
like, okay, if this is the worst you could air about them, they seem like delightful people
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One of the core complaints they had, very similar to us, was like, it'd be better off
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to have, quote unquote, higher quality, fewer kids other than more kids.
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And she's just, this is like an obviously true thing.
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In her next line, she said, don't stop because they can't be in every extracurricular activity
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Are we really going to base the value of our children's lives on how many activities they
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And I know Carissa would disagree with me, but I honestly think it's better to help one
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child really flourish and reach their potential than it is to birth five children who are struggling
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I feel like so many people like Carissa like to use the excuse of, well, we're scraping
00:21:53.300
And I just feel like as someone who grew up like that, it's not enough.
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So what Rachel is saying here is she doesn't want these children to exist because they will
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live childhoods that are equivalent to her own childhood.
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Is she really saying that she would be better off not existing, that her childhood was so
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Because that's what she is denying other people with this argument, a life equivalent to her
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And I really don't think that that's the perspective she's taking.
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She genuinely doesn't consider that she is denying an entire human being who will live
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an entire life the optionality of existence just so another child can get more extracurriculars
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or have marginally more financial security, which to me is obviously unethical.
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But this is the standard moral framework that progressive they're using right now.
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And I'm like, that is like such a like morally horrifying position to me.
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And I think it's why the urban monoculture will ultimately die is this belief that human
00:23:14.820
And it's just so bizarre to me because it's like this weird, like ultra Catholic belief,
00:23:20.000
but also urban monoculture belief, which is to say that, oh yeah, I know my kids, but
00:23:24.940
if I could marginally, marginally is really what it is here, improve the lives of my other
00:23:30.600
kids and adopt parenting practices, they're more normalized for the urban monoculture's
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perspective by raising my kids more in line with their value system, which requires fewer
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kids, really all this no corporal punishment, just you can't, if you have multiple boys,
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There's no corporal punishment system requires you being able to body check a kid, stay on
00:23:53.640
top of them, basically, if they're doing something really bad.
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And if you have other kids, that's not an option, right?
00:24:00.000
And they're like, yeah, then you just shouldn't have more, right?
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And so it's like, why do they take these bizarre perspectives?
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As we've argued, it's because their culture evolved these perspectives because it uses them
00:24:12.200
People in their culture almost never have kids, or at least at above repopulation rate,
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And so for that reason, they don't really need to be good at childbearing themselves.
00:24:22.140
They just need to be good at implanting trauma around the perception of trauma.
00:24:26.820
And as we pointed out on studies of trauma, that the effects of trauma are more correlated
00:24:30.580
with a belief of trauma than actually having trauma.
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There was that great study done that showed when you correlate people who say how much
00:24:38.480
trauma they have, it correlates with their level of psychological dysfunction.
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However, if you then go back to their childhoods and you look for court records of this and stuff
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like this, where you can find actual proof of trauma, even in people who say that they're
00:24:52.800
If you find proof that there wasn't actually trauma, and people who say that they're traumatized,
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So implanting trauma is actually really important in creating this dependency on the urban monoculture.
00:25:01.980
But then I think we have the worst case of this, which has been the appropriation of the
00:25:07.640
gay community, which I think we see on Fundy Fridays.
00:25:10.980
I'm going to, Fundy Fridays, which sees herself, and I don't think that she's doing any of this
00:25:16.820
I just think it's part of the cult that she's in, and she doesn't understand the negative
00:25:22.980
I really like Fundy Fridays, and I really like Jen, who's the main host of Fundy Fridays,
00:25:28.400
But yeah, she's in a very different culture, and she has...
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And the cult has done some really questionable things.
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She's in as much of a cult as the people who she covers.
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They all come from very strong cultures that have skews and blind spots because of those
00:25:48.560
Not to say that we don't have blind spots either, but still.
00:25:51.280
Yeah, everybody has their cultural blind spots.
00:25:53.640
But one that just, oh, it grades my nails when I'm watching her channel is she really sees
00:25:57.920
herself as like a spokesperson for queer people and queer culture.
00:26:02.160
And I will put a picture on screen of her and her husband.
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And people might be like, how dare you question this aspect of her identity?
00:26:09.220
And I'm like, look, I'm going to play a video of her playing race detective with the people
00:26:14.680
I'm not sure the ethnicity of her mother, and I swear I have a reason to bring this up
00:26:18.640
because I am aware that it is problematic for me as a white person to ask, where are you from?
00:26:24.660
I'm only bringing it up because Kat identifies as Latina.
00:26:28.820
I know a lot of you guys, but I know a lot of you guys don't know that I am myself a proud Latina.
00:26:34.920
I was born in Mexico, in Monte Morelos, in Nuevo Leon.
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I know that a lot of people just assume that I'm white because I was not lucky enough to
00:26:47.420
But I think that it's important too that people know that us Latinas come in all different
00:26:51.880
I'm trying to call her something that she's not, but I have to report on what I think.
00:27:03.960
And given that she is the type of person who, when she is investigating the way somebody else
00:27:10.700
is approaching life, she would say, well, you don't look Latina to me.
00:27:14.380
Therefore, I am going to doubt your Latina identity, even though you personally identify
00:27:23.760
And so while I personally wouldn't doubt somebody's racial heritage or identity just because they
00:27:30.180
didn't look a certain way, I can see the logic in doing it.
00:27:33.560
Because if you don't look sufficiently Latina, then you're not going to experience the racism
00:27:41.880
And therefore, it's not good for you to use that identity as a cover for your words and actions.
00:27:47.780
But this all would apply equally well to the accusation I am making here.
00:27:53.500
To be more specific, there is a big difference between being an oppressed minority and identifying
00:28:03.180
If the thing that grants you inclusion into that minority group is not causing you to be
00:28:11.900
oppressed in the way that other members of that group are being oppressed, the oppressed
00:28:16.740
minority status is nothing but a benefit to you because you get to feel like a victim and
00:28:21.200
identify as a victim without any of the negative consequences of actually being a victim.
00:28:43.160
Lifting up skirts and pulling down pants and just getting in there with your magnifying
00:28:46.720
By the way, if you're wondering why Jen identifies as queer, like what specific type of queer
00:28:52.600
she thinks she is, Simone has watched literally all of her videos or about all of her videos
00:28:57.840
and she says she can't remember her ever saying.
00:28:59.920
I did some research on the side and the answer that I seem to pull is that she considers herself
00:29:07.000
and her husband considers himself non-binary and their pronouns are her and they and him
00:29:15.220
You know, I don't want to ever misgender someone because I don't particularly, like it's not
00:29:21.280
important to me and it really hurts some people.
00:29:24.700
So, you know, why would I do something that hurts somebody if there's no benefit to me?
00:29:28.160
So, that's where I think she comes into the queer community.
00:29:32.780
But the article where I pulled that from, unfortunately, was really confusingly worded and I'm not sure
00:29:39.780
if those pronouns or that gender identity claim was referring to them or another influencer
00:29:51.800
This is not me acting outside of the rules that she has set for herself.
00:29:56.800
I'm only doing it because I know that she's okay with playing like race detective and stuff like this.
00:30:00.620
But I look at her and her husband and I'm like, okay, so here's the core problem with this leftist idea
00:30:07.000
that you shouldn't put any gating on the queer community and that if you have dyed hair
00:30:11.620
and snogged a girl in college that you're queer because you don't have to deal with the consequences
00:30:18.000
because you don't, to everyone else in the world, you look like a straight couple.
00:30:22.620
You don't have to deal with the consequences of the shit that you are saying
00:30:26.740
in terms of how that affects the queer community.
00:30:30.080
When you get out there and you, as somebody who's really just,
00:30:34.620
and we could identify as queer if we wanted to because we are agender,
00:30:38.160
as I constantly point out, by the LGBT community, like extremist cult standards,
00:30:43.460
not like real gays and lesbians who, depending on the study you're looking at,
00:30:47.680
45% of gay men voted for Trump or it might be a third of gay men in another study.
00:30:52.580
You're like, okay, you got to go for the smaller study because then people believe it more.
00:30:55.360
But you're looking at a pretty big percentage of these people who actually have to live with this.
00:30:58.980
People are like, why are so many like actually gay people have to live with the fact that they're gay?
00:31:03.880
Who have to live with the fact that they're trans, right?
00:31:06.560
And people around them can see this, support the Republican policies.
00:31:09.580
It's because what are the anti-trans, anti-LGBT, quote unquote, Republican policies?
00:31:15.340
There's shit like trans people shouldn't be on sports teams
00:31:17.960
and trans people shouldn't be using bathrooms that don't confirm with their birth gender.
00:31:22.880
And for a lot of people who can't escape this gay and trans identity,
00:31:28.540
And in Fundy Freddy, this is not me misinterpreting this shit that they're saying.
00:31:33.160
They have a full video just on these two topics.
00:31:36.080
It's first of all, anyone who's, I think, sane and being honest
00:31:39.600
knows that these people shouldn't be on sports teams.
00:31:44.340
And the fact that it's blatantly unfair causes blowback to real trans people.
00:31:49.120
If you're a real trans person, you infinitely would prefer not having a society that has
00:31:56.780
a reason to hate you and see you as a cheater over getting to participate in the sports team
00:32:04.800
Like, there are not people out there killing themselves because they're not getting to play
00:32:12.360
Lots of kids go through their childhood without any option to play inter-moral sports.
00:32:18.600
And I don't see any leftists freaking out that these kids are going to end up killing themselves.
00:32:26.220
And these are positions that you would only argue if you didn't have to deal with the consequences
00:32:33.180
that are going to come from creating these sorts of carve-outs.
00:32:37.260
Because, of course, as soon as you create a carve-out of this,
00:32:41.640
As soon as you create a carve-out around a certain segment of society where it's harder
00:32:47.120
to call them out for things, of course some aggressive male cisgender sex pests are going
00:32:54.460
And it's pretty easy to see that this is happening.
00:32:57.220
A trans person who desperately wants to be seen as a particular gender identity is not
00:33:04.320
going to, when their body looks nothing like that gender identity, go and participate in
00:33:10.800
a sport where everyone is going to be furious in them because it seems that they have some
00:33:15.580
huge advantage over everyone else, which they obviously do, and then walk around the locker
00:33:22.900
room like Leah Thomas swinging their penis about in front of full view in front of everyone.
00:33:29.160
They're not going to do that, and they would want laws in place that prevent people from doing that
00:33:37.500
And the blowback that that causes the trans community is infinitely worse than any benefit
00:33:45.120
The laws that Republicans are fighting for that prevent people from doing things like this, using
00:33:53.840
a trans identity as a shield, ultimately are most beneficial out of everyone they benefit in
00:34:05.020
If you go to somebody who isn't just in this far lefty cult and they're like, would you rather
00:34:10.340
live in a world in which you don't get to participate in the sports team you want to participate in,
00:34:15.700
but you don't have to deal with aggressive cis male sex pests walking around naked in women's
00:34:24.580
locker rooms while calling themselves trans and you facing the blowback for that, or one in which
00:34:29.420
you do have to deal with that and your meager reward is getting to participate in the sports
00:34:37.680
Anyone who's actually like, I just want society to see me for my gender, is going to be like,
00:34:43.620
And these individuals are okay with holding these sorts of positions because they don't
00:34:48.140
have to personally deal with the blowback, because they don't have to walk around every
00:34:52.640
day looking like a trans person, looking like queer people, holding hands with somebody of
00:35:01.260
And this is why these sorts of opt-in queer identities, if anything for them, it's a benefit
00:35:08.180
because now they look even more like a victim when they're opting into the victim identity
00:35:13.100
that they can just throw off whenever they're in public.
00:35:18.960
Yeah, there was a South Park and I'll include a clip from it here because they know it does.
00:35:23.900
There are just so many amazing women athletes out here today.
00:35:27.140
Now, this is the first year that a trans woman is in the competition.
00:35:33.980
I have a lot of incredible trans friends who are athletes, and so we're all inspired.
00:35:38.580
And, uh, have you actually ever met Heather Swanson?
00:35:50.360
Miss Swanson, how does it feel to be competing today?
00:35:53.180
I can't tell you how free I feel now that I've started identifying as a woman.
00:36:07.360
Or this, he repeats, he's, oh, it's a complete myth that trans people ever, or really, cis males
00:36:14.720
ever use trans bathroom protections to assault women.
00:36:19.200
And it's, no, even the studies that are trying to argue it's a myth say it does happen.
00:36:24.340
They just argue it, and I'll put up a statistic on screen here, like a study on screen here.
00:36:28.400
They just say it doesn't happen more when this law is out there.
00:36:32.140
And it's like, do you really think you could get a study published that showed that it
00:36:37.400
Like, if you publish that study at any mainstream U.S. university, you would be at risk of being
00:36:42.420
fired, I mean, very obviously, and you would likely be at personal risk walking around campus,
00:36:51.800
You know, the benefit would be so potentially low from most individual academic perspectives
00:37:00.980
And people who don't understand this type of pressure that academics are under, I think
00:37:04.100
often willfully don't understand it or ignore it, and ignore just how extreme the college
00:37:11.560
Whether it's lesbians who are like, I feel really uncomfortable because a lot of transitioned
00:37:17.160
women who now identify as lesbians, some of these are cis men, six cis pests, who wanted
00:37:24.640
to get into lesbian dating apps and pester women, and they found a cultural cheat code to do that.
00:37:29.460
And if you're like, no, a creepy cis male would never do this, of course they would.
00:37:35.280
And yet, now when lesbians try to create lesbians who actually have to deal with the fact that
00:37:40.180
they're actually lesbians and only want to date people who present phenotypically female,
00:37:44.460
which this person clearly isn't, they have to deal with this.
00:37:47.540
Like in Australia, you might not know this, but there was a case recently where the owner
00:37:51.000
of a dating app is being sued because the dating app used AI to determine if the face of
00:37:57.820
the person who is signing up looked more phenotypically female.
00:38:00.260
So this with the dating app that, by the way, let people in if they were trained.
00:38:07.040
If they didn't pass, they were like, no, because this is for people who prefer phenotypical
00:38:11.620
That women cannot find these private spaces, that lesbians can't find these private spaces
00:38:15.540
anymore is actually a problem for individuals who have a phenotypical female preference.
00:38:20.960
And you are saying in the legislation that you're pushing that they shouldn't be allowed.
00:38:25.820
Like you are dismissing the people who have to actually live with the fact that they are
00:38:31.140
same sex attracted or you get the push down of this in school, which happened to us recently.
00:38:35.900
So I'll read a quote here because this happened just right next door to us where a Pennsylvania
00:38:41.420
This was like a 13 year old, by the way, spoke out furiously against teachers and administrators
00:38:45.460
at her school for a transgender student, savagely beating her friend using a Stanley cup.
00:38:59.000
When the 13 year old blindsided a 12 year old female victim in the school cafeteria using
00:39:03.400
a cup, hitting her on the head and creating an open wound, the unidentified student had
00:39:07.700
to be hospitalized and get staples to close the cuts in her head before undertaking concussion
00:39:14.120
However, as one student said, not only did she warn the teachers, the bullying student had
00:39:19.840
a quote unquote hit list, but she added that she was the next one to get assaulted and that
00:39:27.740
The girl said it was five hours from when I told you it was going to happen.
00:39:32.360
I don't get how you couldn't have stopped that.
00:39:35.020
She added that the girl was bullying her and targeting her every day at lunch.
00:39:38.220
And you might be wondering, like, how is somebody getting away with this?
00:39:41.480
And it's because they're afraid if they end this, if they apply any disciplinary measures
00:39:47.340
to people of this protected category in our society, if they say, no, you can't go in the
00:39:52.820
restrooms, no, you can't, that this is going to cause a apoplectic freak out from this extremist
00:40:01.200
If they had come in and said, you appear to be bullying, et cetera, that person could easily
00:40:10.120
Who are like historically, like actually born with a different gender presentation.
00:40:19.220
They understand that they have what is essentially a fairly rare condition and that all of society
00:40:28.000
And that, yes, that might mean that they have to use restrooms at home more often, or they
00:40:32.000
have to feel uncomfortable sometimes the same way extremely fat people do on airplanes.
00:40:36.740
Like I don't love that fat people have to feel uncomfortable or buy two seats on an airplane,
00:40:41.420
but realistically we can't adopt all airplanes.
00:40:48.660
They know that when society begins to bend over backwards in ways, because of course, if you
00:40:53.480
create this protected class, if you say any male looking individual who says they identify
00:40:57.840
as a woman can now use women's bathrooms, then some tests are going to take advantage of that.
00:41:02.120
They don't want that happening because that has blowback on them who can't hide.
00:41:07.540
But when you're one of these individuals like Fundy Stark who can just say, oh, I'm gender
00:41:12.600
whatever, but not look in a way where you can't escape the blowback that you are causing for
00:41:20.860
That is genuinely bad for society and bad for the real LGBTQ community.
00:41:27.300
And you could look at people like us who could claim to be trans because we are agender, which
00:41:31.260
is genderqueer, which would qualify as agender.
00:41:34.980
Sorry, for normal people who don't know what agender is, that basically means I don't feel a strong
00:41:40.200
If I woke up tomorrow, a woman, I wouldn't care.
00:41:42.280
If Simone woke up tomorrow, a man, she wouldn't care.
00:41:55.560
We would fall squarely in the queer community, but I don't say I'm in the queer community.
00:42:03.060
I just try to protect them because I view of I am not a gender presentation that causes
00:42:16.740
Yeah, like I don't walk around telling people that I have an autism diagnosis because I don't
00:42:30.560
I could probably get some special services in some cases, but I'm not going to do that
00:42:37.520
And I think that the resources that should be expended on people who need help should
00:42:44.400
And this is why when we're looking at statistics on voting records to find out like the way
00:42:48.740
these communities actually are, I look at like gay males, for example, instead of general
00:42:54.180
Because if you look at general LGBT statistics, 14% vote Republican, only 14%.
00:42:59.240
It's not the 45% or one third that you see in other studies of when it's just gay men.
00:43:03.520
Because people like this couple, who to me are a straight heterosexual couple in terms
00:43:11.060
of how they present to society, except for like the dyed hair, are just identifying into
00:43:16.780
this queer definition and then polluting the statistics while also causing a blowback on
00:43:29.720
You can actually see it in the statistics, which is support for the queer community has
00:43:34.180
been declining in recent years because of people like this who are saying you cannot be queer
00:43:44.480
I would say you can't be queer supportive and a Democrat because they're supporting the
00:43:47.500
sex pests who are blowing back incredible negative feelings towards the real trans individuals,
00:43:55.400
the real just born attracted to the same sex individuals.
00:44:00.420
And because they are taking this position, they are forcing people on the other side to
00:44:16.480
Even though by the statistics, it's not fucking true.
00:44:21.540
More than half of Republicans, even when you're talking about older Republicans, you're looking
00:44:25.960
at 65% of you're talking about young Republicans, but even older Republicans, more than half
00:44:36.000
They're making up a fantasy world that makes them feel like good guys when they are not good
00:44:41.400
guys and they are causing the very harassment that they claim to be fighting against.
00:44:46.380
One thing I wonder is how many people watching all Fundy Snark channels, including the more
00:44:54.380
moderate ones of deconverted Mormons, for example, come from the enemy's field, as it were, are
00:45:01.860
similar to me, somewhat conservative, not agreeing with everything, all the criticism, but just
00:45:09.500
enjoying it. And similar to those who are super progressive, but who follow the accounts of
00:45:15.980
these conservative influencers because they just kind of find it interesting. Do you think that
00:45:20.400
there's a decent number of conservatives and religious fundamentalists who watch these channels
00:45:27.400
I don't think so. That would be like asking, are there a decent number of people in this far
00:45:30.700
urban monoculture cult that watch lives of TikTok? I really don't think that many people
00:45:35.820
cross the border that much, but I guess we'll hear from our audience because I imagine our
00:45:42.600
Yeah, we'll see if they like Fundy Snark as much. And these people will eventually be covering
00:45:47.060
us. We've actually reached out to them because we're open to working with anyone who covers
00:45:50.260
us, even if it's in a negative context. We're always open to interviews. We're always open
00:45:53.980
to talk. I believe that the light of truce destroys evil most effectively. And I think that
00:46:01.060
when people intentionally don't engage with us, and we've reached out to Fundy Snark, for
00:46:06.080
example, by the way, to do videos together and stuff like that.
00:46:09.120
Fundy Fridays, yeah. And some of the other people we've reached out to, we are always
00:46:12.680
open to do videos with people who are ideologically different from us because we think a genuinely
00:46:18.200
ideologically diverse community, not diverse TM, i.e. the approved ideologies by the urban
00:46:23.400
monoculture, but actually diverse community is the strongest community for our country.
00:46:28.700
And I think that Jen of Fundy Fridays comes from a good place and genuinely cares for these
00:46:33.580
people. Like, sometimes bad things happen to the people that she covers, and she...
00:46:37.800
Oh, no, absolutely. No, I see her very much the way that I see some of the people she covers.
00:46:43.880
Yeah, no, from an extremist position in the culture. That's why I hold my stance,
00:46:48.100
that my hypothesis is that she is of the same hard culture profile as the religious fundamentalists
00:46:56.360
that she covers. She just happens to be wearing a different team's colors, and so she has to...
00:47:01.400
Yeah, and they're insane religious cults. They're the good guys in her insane religious cult. She's
00:47:06.940
the good guy, and she's doing what the cult is telling her to do. She's just never stepping back.
00:47:11.620
She'd started tongue-in-cheek that are frills of the channel now, still speak very much,
00:47:16.780
are similar to the small-time career preachers that she criticizes. Her followers call themselves
00:47:23.160
Jenna Knights, and they patronize her. And how is that different from being a preacher? In the end,
00:47:28.940
preachers speak to people. They cultivate communities. They have some merch sometimes.
00:47:34.020
There's a... Ooh, vomit. There's just a lot of parallels. And so I just... I think that
00:47:38.940
one thing is fun is it's just like watching a little flame war between preachers. And yeah,
00:47:44.900
I would just say to anyone watching this, don't think we think she's not well-meaning. We just...
00:47:48.480
But I think that most of the people she criticizes are well-meaning.
00:47:51.500
Yeah, I agree. And yes, I do agree that the stance of saying that you are... that you stand for
00:47:58.080
a queer community when you aren't necessarily like subject to the...
00:48:07.060
Not exactly. There's no rule saying you can't say you're queer. We can say we're queer if we want
00:48:11.280
to, and we have every right to say that we're queer. We just...
00:48:13.080
Well, no, we can say we're queer, and we would be right to say we're queer if we wanted to. But I don't
00:48:17.180
believe in this identifying with a community when you are not subject to these struggles. In the
00:48:23.960
same way that she would criticize people on her show as like the woman where she was doing the
00:48:28.360
is she really this race thing? She's trying to figure out if she had a right to call herself Latina
00:48:33.060
because she didn't look Latina. And that's exactly what we're saying. Do you have a right to call
00:48:38.120
yourself queer and claim the struggles of that community when you don't look queer, when you look
00:48:43.220
like you're in a heterosexual marriage? And there's a lot of stuff within the queer community where
00:48:47.000
it used to be like, when you get married, it doesn't mean you're no longer bi. It's like, yeah,
00:48:51.020
but you're no longer functionally undergoing the struggles that are unique to bi people in our
00:48:57.260
current society. It does mean that you are not a marginalized community member anymore from the
00:49:04.920
perspective of your lived experience in terms of how that community is dealing with struggles.
00:49:10.480
And so you no longer have to deal with the blowback of your extremist actions, like saying, oh, yeah,
00:49:18.460
trans people should be allowed on women's sports teams, when that's obviously ridiculous.
00:49:30.620
And I love how you always try to see the best in people. You are a genuinely good person.
00:49:36.480
person. And I think that as we often say, righteousness isn't determined by an intention
00:49:42.820
to be a good person, because almost everyone intends to be a good person. It's determined by
00:49:47.380
how realistic in terms of the actual downstream effects your view of reality is. The more educated
00:49:56.660
you are on what reality actually is, and the less you are part of just one ideological tribe,
00:50:01.680
the better. And we see with her channel, like in one video, she was lauding communism, for example,
00:50:07.940
like maybe one day there'll be a full communist, she said is a good thing. And I just personally,
00:50:12.340
as somebody who values pragmatism and like the way things actually work when tried to be a person who
00:50:19.100
lauds communism is just to say, I am okay with in exchange for good boy points, i.e. thinking of
00:50:27.580
myself as a good person and having other people see me as a good person, the painful and slow deaths
00:50:32.800
of millions of people, starting often with the minority populations and the most disenfranchised
00:50:39.060
in a society, which is what actually happens when communists come into power.
00:50:42.720
But as I learned from Lemon Month, our holiday in which we engage with subjects we find offensive,
00:50:48.480
I have learned that real communism has not been tried, okay? It is a post-singularity sci-fi world.
00:50:55.560
That is what communism is. That's what it always was. And the big problem with communism is that
00:51:00.880
people are trying it now when we literally don't have the technology for it.
00:51:03.640
We could do a whole episode on this, but I just want to explain the point for people who don't
00:51:07.940
know what she said here. I'm just defending Jen here. She's arguing that in the early days,
00:51:12.500
communism, I don't believe that's what she's arguing for, said that communism can only be tried
00:51:17.000
once we're in a post-scarcity environment. And so some communists are now arguing, yeah,
00:51:21.400
real communism has never been tried definitionally because we're not in a post-scarcity environment.
00:51:25.040
But if somebody is fighting for communism today, because we don't have the technology to create
00:51:30.320
a genuine- If you're fighting for communism today, you should shut your mouth because
00:51:34.120
you should be fighting for AGI and superintelligence that is aligned with human flourishing. Because
00:51:41.060
that is what will herald in true communism. Yes. So you really have to be either a government fascist
00:51:49.020
with an AI department, or you have to be a huge capitalist and raise tons of money to do
00:51:54.920
private AI development. This is actually something I've noticed more broadly between
00:52:00.260
the leftist-rightist divide within the current political environment, not the political environment
00:52:05.240
of the 90s, which is what modern leftists often like to pretend that we are still fighting. But in
00:52:11.060
the current environment, what it really is, is do you actually care about solving a problem?
00:52:15.900
Are you looking for good boy points? So you look at something like the leftist myth that there is a
00:52:21.540
rightist- It's just insane that there's a significant racist base among the right wing. And I will beat
00:52:29.520
this until the clowns come home. 538 polling, very mainstream, Nate Silver. Until Obama was elected,
00:52:36.240
more white Democrats than white Republicans said they would not vote for a black president. And even now,
00:52:41.780
the difference in racist attitudes between the two parties' bases is marginal. And when you look at
00:52:48.260
the actual effects that the two parties' policies have on racial disparity, you get more of it from
00:52:56.560
the left. When a left-wing government has been in power in the United States in a region for a period,
00:53:02.200
the IQ scores and incomes of both black and Hispanic populations are more distanced from the local
00:53:10.300
white population than when Republicans have been in power. And it's because these systems that they
00:53:16.200
put in place, you know, affirmative action, everything like that, they are performative good boy point
00:53:22.540
systems, but they make the underlying problems worse. And I think that that's the core difference
00:53:27.760
between rightists and leftists in the modern sense. It's will you sacrifice your public image to
00:53:32.900
attempt to actually fix a problem? Or are you just interested in looking good? And I actually think that
00:53:41.540
this is also what we're seeing with the current Israel-Gaza conflict, because there are not many real
00:53:49.060
pleasant solutions to the current geopolitical issue in that region. And if you actually implemented most of
00:53:56.500
the left-wing solutions, you're going to deal with a scale of death and oppression in the region that is
00:54:04.260
astronomical. I love you to death. You're amazing. And you are so understanding of other people and cultures.
00:54:13.040
If they bring Snark, I'm for them. It doesn't matter.
00:54:15.840
If the Snark candles cover us, they're going to be like, oh my god, their children should be dead!
00:54:20.500
I'm going to say they should have never been born, but there's no difference.
00:54:27.540
How can you slap? How can you slap? How can you slap? How can you slap me?
00:54:36.320
How can they slap? That's what they say. That's what they say. How can they slap?
00:54:39.520
How could they slap? And how dare she have her baby on the screen? That's going to be a big one.
00:54:44.400
Yeah. How could they practice corporal punishment? How could they not make their house incredibly warm
00:54:48.460
during the winter? How could they have so many kids if they can't? I don't know. I really don't know.
00:54:55.080
I'm running out of things, but it's usually those things.
00:54:57.860
Oh, and they put too much on their kids because they expect things of them and encourage them to.
00:55:03.100
Yeah. How dare they have expectations? Intergenerational cultural expectations.
00:55:07.040
And that's another thing that gets me. And we'll probably do a full episode on this, but I'll just end it with this.
00:55:11.140
Where people are like, how dare you say that people owe their ancestors anything, right?
00:55:17.140
I'm like, if somebody gave you $100 and said, you go, what do I owe you for this?
00:55:24.380
And then you took that money and you spent it on drugs and pornography, right?
00:55:28.580
Like just something totally selfish. You are a bad and vile person.
00:55:33.180
And I am glad that people like you won't exist in the future.
00:55:35.420
If somebody makes, not, doesn't give you $100, they make enormous sacrifices to give you life, life.
00:55:43.960
And they say, and you say, what do I owe you? And they go, all you owe me is to pass the phone, pay it forward.
00:55:49.200
And you're like, fuck that. I'm going to spend it on drugs and sex.
00:55:52.760
You're a vile person. And I'm glad that your cultural and genetic descendants won't exist in the future.
00:55:58.680
So lovely. Do you disagree with that statement, Simone?
00:56:08.740
I just say, actually, there are some times where Jen gets really pissed about things that the other side says.
00:56:13.840
And she takes on a tone that reminds me a lot of you when you get the same level of piss.
00:56:23.360
My whole thing is when it happens, people who choose not to represent their culture in the future will not inherit the future.
00:56:31.200
We will inherit the future, theoretically, if our kids thrive and flourish.
00:56:43.780
Versus, you're not messing up. You're doing a great job.
00:56:46.640
Were you able to get the pocket thing I got you on your belt?
00:56:52.540
I think I can sit under these aprons. And that's the trouble.
00:56:56.220
But once I figure out how to deal with it under these aprons.
00:57:15.960
Every one of our kids is, like, so amazing in their own way.