Pastor Doug Wilson joins me to talk about whether or not the "Woke Right" exists, and whether Christians should embrace the terminology used by Neil Shenvey in his recent article, "The Woke Right: Does it Exist?"
00:00:48.740And unfortunately, that is as true with the Christian community as with others.
00:00:53.480One guy who has been central in kind of having this discussion is pastor and author Doug Wilson.
00:00:59.620He recently wrote a piece about whether or not the woke right exists, whether we should be embracing the terminology, how Christians should be thinking about this issue.
00:01:07.660And I wanted to talk to him about that today.
00:01:15.660We're going to dive into the article and expand a little bit on how we might be able to handle this situation.
00:01:21.920But before we do, let's hear from today's sponsor.
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00:02:53.600I do believe that the woke right exists, but the issue with every lexicon and every lexical term is battle for editorial control of what's the primary definition.
00:03:07.620So does the woke right exist the way Neil Shenvey articulates it?
00:03:33.820They show up in my Twitter feed anyway and carry on.
00:03:39.060So I don't think woke right is a helpful term at all for general discourse.
00:03:44.460It's a term of abuse in order for people who are center-left, moderate, squishy evangelicals to be able to attack anybody on the right who's fighting effectively.
00:03:58.240And so consequently, just as the old joke, I refer to this in the post, the old joke is a racist is someone who's winning an argument with a liberal.
00:04:09.780Well, in the same way, someone who's woke right if they're winning an argument with James Lindsay or someone in that category.
00:04:17.420So just as a general term to tar everybody with, it's not helpful at all.
00:04:29.840Yeah, I think as I conclude the article, I think it applies to black-pilled Nietzscheans.
00:04:35.140I think it applies to the Andrew Tates of the world.
00:04:40.140I think it applies to people who are out there and who have adopted the oppressor-oppressed bifurcation, that binary, only they've tried to flip who's the oppressor and who's the oppressed.
00:04:55.220Any Christian who believes in the last judgment or the fundamental antithesis between righteousness and unrighteousness has to recognize that there may be people on my side of the political divide that are bad guys,
00:05:11.380and that there may be guys on the other side who aren't as bad as some of my guys are.
00:05:16.560So, for example, David had Joab on his side, and Joab was a skunk, a very clear-thinking skunk, but a skunk, a murderer and shrewd politician.
00:05:31.420And Abner, a very noble man, was on the other side.
00:05:35.820So, someone who believes in God's sovereignty and God's unbending law knows that God's judgments don't necessarily cut along our partisan factions.
00:05:50.860But when someone doesn't believe in God, there is no fear of God in their categorizations at all.
00:05:58.300And they are just saying, if he's white, I'm on his side no matter what he did, and if he's black, I'm against him no matter what he did, or if he's a Jew no matter what he did.
00:06:07.960That, I would say, the woke right does apply to him.
00:06:12.880But, again, if someone like Neil Shenvey finds that guy, he then wants to apply that term to everybody on the right who's fighting effectively at all, and that just mercs everything up.
00:06:25.740Right. So, as you were saying there, that's how I understood the term originally, as a term of abuse.
00:06:32.900And I understand Neil Shenvey is one of the guys who helped to coin it, but James Lindsay has obviously been the person who has popularized it quite radically.
00:06:40.840And as you point out, the term has been expanded to include everyone, including Yuram Harzoni.
00:06:46.440Obviously, the most woke right, the most Nietzschean, black-pilled, anti-Semite one can find.
00:06:53.340Right. So, the term seems pretty useless.
00:06:56.220And not only is it useless, I have some problems with the attempts to kind of deploy it in the frame, because there's a couple of different problems with it.
00:07:05.560One, again, obviously, it's just inaccurate.
00:07:08.460But, two, wokeness was never some kind of academic term, right?
00:07:13.520It wasn't some ideological – there's not this long chain of history that helps us to understand what wokeness is.
00:07:23.920I think if you were going to give it any proper title, it would be progressive secular humanism.
00:07:28.120That would actually be a term that helps us illuminate what the ideology is.
00:07:34.020And so, when we try to take a term like wokeness and define it, we're doing the exact opposite.
00:07:39.180It's like trying to explain a meme, right?
00:07:40.780The minute you explain the meme, you're losing.
00:07:43.600And the minute you try to turn wokeness into some kind of academic understanding, you've missed the purpose of the term.
00:07:50.780In addition to that, it's pretty clear to me that at least the way that Lindsay has deployed it, this is a dialectical trap, which is ironic because all he does is cry about the dialectic.
00:08:01.000But it's very clear that he did not understand what the term meant.
00:08:04.040He said this many times, that he deployed the term without a grasp or understanding of it.
00:08:08.320And the reason you do that, the reason you throw a pejorative out there without a definition, is specifically to capture people who aren't supposed to be inside of it.
00:08:16.320It's to create a shibboleth and then have people fill that with content to go ahead and animate it.
00:08:23.280The more they debate it, the more it becomes real.
00:08:25.960And so, I feel like the deployment of the term in any way just seems like we're taking on the tools of a new atheist.
00:08:32.660And I've specifically seen people who profess to be Christian lie about me to shoehorn me into this term.
00:08:39.280And so, I think that using this term is not only disingenuous and adopting the frame of our enemy, it's specifically encouraging a number of Christians to engage in outright lies so that they can cancel people to their right, which I'm not sure why we would embrace that kind of behavior.
00:08:56.860So, this is an area where I think, as best I can gauge, I think we would agree in principle, but we might wind up disagreeing anyway on this.
00:09:07.520I agree with everything you just said about it being a generic term of abuse, not meant to clarify.
00:09:24.420And there are people on the right who would want to argue that anything goes.
00:09:32.120So, if we can, I think these two areas map onto each other, the whole netter thing, no enemies to the right.
00:09:40.480I understand why people started saying no enemies to the right, because I do agree that we should have no enemies to the right simply because the left demands that we do.
00:09:54.240So, if I'm just minding my own business and someone over on the right says some foolish thing or does some awful thing, and the liberals demand that I do a performative denunciation of this guy,
00:10:09.780if I go denounce him before I know anything about it, and I'm just doing it because the left is demanding that I denounce this person, then I think I'm being steered.
00:10:22.700I think that I'm being manipulated and steered.
00:10:26.340But then if I step out of the saloon brawl that we're currently going on, and then I ask myself dispassionately, does God have any enemies on my right?
00:10:38.360Well, the answer to that would be, yeah.
00:10:41.580God has some enemies to my right, or God has enemies right where I am on the spectrum.
00:10:47.840And if God has enemies there, then I had better have enemies there.
00:10:52.920So, I need to oppose them, but I need to oppose them in a way that does not give way to the leftist demands that I sort of become the policer or the enforcer of what an enemy on the right ought to be according to their lights.
00:11:19.180So, if someone in my neck of the woods starts doing awful, terrible things, I don't want to be in a position where I absolutely refuse to address it because someone on the left or someone on the right might accuse me of going soft or of just doing whatever the liberals want, denouncing whatever the liberals want.
00:11:44.800I'm glad you brought that up because I think it's important.
00:11:48.600But I do think that the way we handle this tactic matters quite a bit, and I think we can do that without betraying any of our Christian principles.
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00:12:40.840So I'd like to say, first off, that obviously there are people with poor behavior on the right, and there are obviously people who are violating God's law on the right, and there is no reason we should not be able to acknowledge that and point that out.
00:13:09.120One of the reasons I have a problem with the term woke right is we already have words for what those people are doing.
00:13:15.160If you're engaging in ethnic hatred, that's sinful, right?
00:13:18.100Like, that's already something, and we can just point that out.
00:13:20.480We don't need empty buzzwords or slanderous words.
00:13:25.720It feels like a lot of what the woke right is, is we're leftists who want to call our opponents Nazis and racists, but we know that Nazis and racists codes us as left.
00:13:34.640And so we have to continue to pretend to be on the right side, so we need different language for that.
00:13:40.120I feel like if we were just being honest and clarifying, we have specific language.
00:13:46.780That is behavior you should walk away from.
00:13:48.720You don't need to be involved in that.
00:13:50.180I feel like that is a much clearer way to speak on that without confusing ourselves and conflating ourselves with kind of the atheist bromides here.
00:13:58.780Also, you know, again, it's very strange because I agree with you that ultimately we have to be aware of the mistakes people on our side are making.
00:14:08.880And, you know, there is a difference between friends, allies, and co-belligerents, and we should probably get into that in a second.
00:14:14.420But I don't see a lot of people turning around and demanding, say, the guys of the Babylon Bee denounce James Lindsay for being an atheist who supports gay marriage.
00:14:21.580In fact, there's zero calls for him to renounce any of those positions or them to be shamed for involving it.
00:14:28.680And while I don't think you should have ethnic hatred in your heart, I don't think that having that is actually any more sinful than, say, supporting gay marriage.
00:14:36.700So I guess I'm confused as to why all the calls seem to be police one style of behavior and one association.
00:14:43.860But there seem to be zero calls to police another association and another type of sin.
00:15:28.160You can't say – well, if someone took me aside and said, you can't say anything about James Lindsay because we invited him to speak at our conference, da, da, da.
00:15:44.460And I'm glad we agree on the essential thing that we should address bad behavior on our side.
00:15:50.080You're wanting to use more specific – it's sort of like Congress wanting to pass a law against something that was already against the law.
00:17:53.080It's almost – it's sort of their counterfeit knockoff of justification by faith alone, the imputation of the righteousness of Christ.
00:18:01.660He's a member of the oppressed class, so he's entirely justified.
00:18:05.540And these white South African refugees that Trump just took in, they are rejected simply and solely because they are members of the oppressor class, because they're white.
00:18:17.740And because of their membership in the oppressor class, nothing whatever can be done to justify them.
00:18:24.940That's the basic critical theory metric.
00:18:28.460Now, when someone on the right flips that and attempts to say you're justified just because you're white, and you are condemned just because you're black or a Jew or whatever, and they're functioning with those categories, it really does look to me like a mirror image of woke, a mirror image of critical theory.
00:18:55.100Now, if I winnow it down and I find out, yeah, those guys exist, but there's only 15 of them, then I can see the advantage of abandoning the term woke, right?
00:19:08.820It wouldn't take a lot to get me to abandon the term woke, right?
00:19:12.160Because I think it applies a lot more narrowly than is being attempted by Lindsay and, you know, Lindsay and Shenvi and those guys want it to apply broadly.
00:19:25.600And I object to that, I would say, violently.
00:19:28.120So, I, of course, agree with that last part.
00:19:32.420And I understand why the oppressor-oppressed narrative is a good way, it feels like a good way to identify an aspect of critical theory.
00:19:43.340And to be fair, when you're mass communicating, you're always doing propaganda.
00:19:47.800And so, while you're doing propaganda and critical theory, that's a reasonably good catchphrase, right?
00:19:53.900But the problem with all propaganda is it's narrow.
00:19:56.460And so, when we're actually trying to understand something, we need something with a higher resolution, right?
00:20:01.880The low-resolution communication of the oppressor-oppressed paradigm, I think, is unhelpful in this scenario.
00:20:08.540Not because there isn't some truth to it, but I've read a fair amount of critical theory.
00:20:23.000I suffer on behalf of my audience, you know, reading it so they don't have to.
00:20:27.960But the case there is far more complex.
00:20:32.440And the problem with reducing it down to oppressor-oppressed is that then what James Lindsay and many of his acolytes who claim to be Christian but continue to embrace him as an ally,
00:20:44.800the deployment of that simple paradigm allows James Lindsay to do a little judo flip that is very fake.
00:20:55.000So he says, well, anytime someone talks about oppressor-oppressed, therefore, it's wokeness, right?
00:21:00.020Like, if this is the only aspect of critical theory that we're understanding, then any discussion of oppressor-oppressed is wokeness.
00:21:07.840And he has specifically said this several times in reference to the South African immigrants, the South African refugees.
00:21:14.440So he has called people who have acknowledged the oppression of white farmers, the literal murder of them and the stealing of their land.
00:21:23.320Calling them oppressed is, I think, entirely factually accurate.
00:21:26.620He has pointed out that people noticing this are woke.
00:21:29.940And so Donald Trump today was in the White House.
00:21:32.560He's in the Oval Office speaking with the president of South Africa, Cyril – I don't remember how to pronounce his last name.
00:21:39.140But the guy says, oh, of course, this is all a lie.
00:21:42.620And so Donald Trump turns on the TV like a boss and starts playing footage of all of these farmers standing there in solidarity with the hundreds of people,
00:21:52.660a thousand, I think, almost people at least who have been killed in this genocide.
00:21:56.760He plays different politicians in South Africa calling for the genocide of white farmers in South Africa, kill the boar, chanting to stadiums full of people.
00:22:07.340Now, you could even look at that and call it a struggle session, right?
00:22:10.840I mean, if you want to frame this, if you want to play with this frame, you can turn anything into wokeness.
00:22:16.520I mean, Chris Ruffo actually confronted James Lindsay on Twitter about this, saying that your frame, your understanding of critical theory would apply to the founding fathers, right?
00:22:25.760Look at you with your list of grievances, saying there's some system that's oppressing you, saying you need to throw off the chains of oppression.
00:22:34.200Like, I guess you could call Thomas Jefferson woke.
00:22:37.240I don't – it just – to me, that seems like a really bad application.
00:22:41.680So I guess what I'm saying is there's a low-resolution version of this that you can judo flip anybody with.
00:22:50.500But embracing that paradigm just makes it very difficult to have any actual discussions about what's going on in the world.
00:22:56.800So I attempted – I don't know how successfully, but in my piece, I attempted to address this by arguing that there are instances in this fallen world of genuine oppression.
00:23:09.020There are true victims, and there are times when the victim is black, there are times when the victim is a Gentile, times when he's a Jew, and times when he's white.
00:23:20.460And what I wanted to do, and I think the Christian worldview framing means that if a situation blows up and, let's say, a cop in an inner city shoots a guy, and the guy – a teenager – shoots a 17-year-old.
00:23:38.640And if you need to wait until you find out what color everybody was before you know what side you're on, then that's the oppressor-oppressed critical theory metric.
00:23:51.520But just the facts of the case, somebody is being oppressed.
00:24:00.020So George Floyd was either being oppressed or Derek Chauvin was being oppressed.
00:24:06.540And I happen to believe that he was railroaded and wrongly convicted and needs to be pardoned and released.
00:24:13.620But if you have this scenario where I don't know who's guilty, I don't know which side to cheer for, I don't know which side to advocate for, until you tell me their colors.
00:24:25.900Okay, that is oppressor-oppressed based on class, based on the identity that you have.
00:24:35.500And that's why it's called identity politics.
00:24:39.060But if you have genuine oppression that you could prove, you know, genuine murder or mayhem or rape, that you could prove in a court of law, then, of course, you're right.
00:24:51.420Lindsay's argument is absurd because you could flip it on him and say, so you're – if he were doing that, these white Afrikaners are not oppressed.
00:25:01.240And if you say they're oppressed, you're using critical theory category, I would say, so, do you believe that the Holocaust happened?
00:25:19.060Because what you have to do is look at the facts of the case.
00:25:21.820So if I want to welcome Afrikaner refugees, I want to know more than what color they are.
00:25:28.500If I want to convict someone of a crime, I need to know more than what color they are.
00:25:34.940If I want to defend someone on Twitter, I need to know more than what color they are.
00:25:40.880And the inflamed state of affairs that we've gotten into means that there are guys – there are many, many people on the left that I don't want serving on juries because they've proven that they cannot look at the facts of each individual case.
00:26:00.560But I do see people on the right that I don't want on juries either.
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00:26:37.320Sure, and like I said, I think that obviously there are cases of bad behavior on the right, and there's nothing wrong with acknowledging that ultimately.
00:26:47.040It's just that the general discussion here seems to have been to silence people who are noticing that the left has had bad behavior.
00:26:55.040For instance, the United States has had laws on the books for my entire life, making it illegal to hire white people if they're more qualified.
00:27:07.420Ultimately, there is a racial quota system in the United States and has been for many, many decades.
00:27:11.800And, you know, thank God that now the Supreme Court seems to be pushing back against that, and the Trump administration is finally pushing back against that.
00:27:19.780But we've had an entire regime defined by the civil rights revolution that has built in, literally, like in the law.
00:27:26.880We've spent decades uncovering it now with the anti-woke stuff, anti-white legislation and policies in all kinds of government scenarios and all of these corporations.
00:27:38.400And I'm not asking for any kind of preferential treatment for white people.
00:27:42.000I'm not asking for anything except that simply these barriers, these literal legal barriers that have been placed against specifically white young men, white Christian young men in many cases.
00:27:53.180I just ask that those legal barriers be removed, and yet all I'm seeing is that this is an embracing of the oppressor-oppressed narrative.
00:27:59.860And I feel like, no, I'm literally just asking for equal weights and measures.
00:28:04.040But the only way a woke right is getting used primarily is to attack a lot of Christians for just asking for basic treatment in the law.
00:28:13.180Right. So let me join you and give a book recommend.
00:28:17.280You probably recommended these already.
00:28:20.200But if anybody wants a real education in what you just said, I would say Age of Entitlement by Caldwell and The Unprotected Class by Jeremy Carl.
00:28:38.640We have instantiated systemic prejudicial judgments based on membership in a class, you know, based on basically discrimination against whites.
00:28:51.220That's formalized and and it's embedded in our all of our structures.
00:29:10.040Now, the question that I would ask is, how is it possible for someone like me who's been fighting with progressive secularism for decades and would, you know, made Jeremy Carl's book, the book of the month?
00:29:25.600I think I did the same thing for Age of Entitlement.
00:29:27.580And you look at those those two books and my I would rate them both as 10 out of 10.
00:29:34.240But yeah, that this is the this explains it.
00:29:37.960Now, why would someone in my position get routinely harangued from the right?
00:29:44.240As a as a as a compromiser, what's the reason for it?
00:29:49.860Well, I think it's because I'm picking up from some people.
00:29:54.160They want me to simply fight on the basis of skin color.
00:30:15.720I'm just operating in a world full of bigotry.
00:30:18.220Right. So if I know that people are bigoted against white people and want to kill whitey and I take steps to protect myself, that doesn't mean that I'm operating with their categories.
00:30:29.740I'm just budgeting for the for their categories.
00:30:48.920Like that's not so as far as the other side does that for you.
00:30:52.500Right. Right. So as long as far as you can avoid it, you should.
00:30:55.100But, you know, if that's the situation that you're in, then, you know, you have to care about your family.
00:31:00.440You have to care about your community.
00:31:01.620You can't walk around and pretend that people aren't saying that they want to kill you.
00:31:04.940That's just how you get a Holocaust in the first place. Right.
00:31:07.660Right. And if you're trying to avoid and if you're a white Afrikaner and you want to get your family to the United States to save their lives.
00:31:15.520Right. Right. And you and you have a moment of hesitation.
00:31:19.440Man, if I do that, James Lindsay is going to think that I've bought into critical theory.
00:31:25.260It's like, come on. Good, good, good grief.
00:31:28.360Right. All right. Well, I want to dive in because you mentioned you mentioned Netter real quick.
00:31:32.980And I want to dive into that because I think a large part of this is actually about alliances and and how they're formed and what's acceptable in this moment.
00:31:40.960And so since we've kind of, I think, hashed out most of the fact that woke right is not particularly helpful, but maybe we do have people that need to be addressed.
00:31:49.000Then the question is how to address them. And that might be the place to go next.
00:31:52.700So we'll go there as soon as we're done with our last sponsor.
00:31:56.160This episode of the Orrin McIntyre show is proudly sponsored by Consumers Research.
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00:32:51.020So, you know, Charles Haywood had this idea of no enemies to the right.
00:32:55.480And I think that ultimately Charles has refined that idea to no enemies on the right, which I think is actually a far more helpful understanding.
00:33:04.080I think the concern originally for people was that being right wing was like the test of loyalty.
00:33:11.480So the further right you were, the more radical you were, the more correct you were and the less open to attack you were.
00:33:17.340And that was not Charles, that was never his intention, and that was obviously not what he explained when anyone explained it.
00:33:24.160But due to the terminology, I think some people picked it up that way.
00:33:27.140His point was always that the left is far more dangerous.
00:33:31.380And, you know, I think of it this way.
00:33:33.180I hear a lot about how bad Vladimir Putin is or how bad China is, and I'm sure they're very bad.
00:33:39.160They're overall very big geopolitical threats, and I think we have to be ready to address them on some level.
00:33:44.980However, the most dangerous things happening to me and mine in this country are happening because my government is doing them.
00:33:53.460And so in a very serious way, the system of government in the United States as it exists now, which I think is a total perversion and violation of the Constitution and constitutional governments as we understand it, they are far more dangerous than China and Russia to me.
00:34:07.880I know existentially Russia has more nukes or whatever, but in actual day-to-day existence, my government is the one locking up my friends and family.
00:34:16.560My government is the one that is threatening my friends and family.
00:34:19.040My government is the one threatening censorship and bringing false cases and attempting to throw Christians in jail.
00:34:25.020And so while I'm sure that, like, Russia and China are bad, what the enemy I'm focused on is the one that is wielding power over me at the moment, which is the previous administration.
00:34:35.380In the same way, I'm sure that people on the right are a problem.
00:34:42.200I'm sure there's bad behavior on the right at the moment, but the left are the ones who are in power.
00:34:47.840Like, I know there are some guys with racist avatars, like the Groypers, most of which probably aren't even American or white in the first place.
00:34:57.360They're posting a lot of Nazi imagery.
00:35:08.640But I'm going to spend 95% of my time trying to stop the people who are actually actively trying to hurt me and my family and other Christians and these kind of things.
00:35:17.260And so I guess my confusion is just the focus that has now become, you know, that has now switched over.
00:35:25.660I don't mind saying, hey, ultimately, we shouldn't behave that way.
00:35:31.500But it's the amount of energy that has been expended trying to cancel people on the right for having the wrong opinions seems rather disproportionate to, like, making sure that the left does not stay in power.
00:35:43.220And that's really, I think, ultimately what Charles was trying to say is that we're spending far too much of our energy attacking minuscule movements that have zero power while we're, you know, infighting there.
00:35:53.280The left is actually winning real battles.
00:36:25.540So if you're talking about, you know, the guy who spends late nights posting images of the little green frog and calling me names, and I check on the profile and it's 17 followers and, you know, three of them are probably his mom and sisters.
00:36:48.580I don't think we should be concerned about that.
00:36:52.720We're a country of 330 million plus, and you're always going to have people like that.
00:37:04.500Having said that, as this, let's just take a catch-all phrase that is not pejorative, not intended to be pejorative.
00:37:16.120Let's say we have, like, the dissident right, or instead of conservative ink, you know, the controlled opposition that you would see under George W. Bush or whatever.
00:37:30.680But let's say the hard right or the dissident right.
00:37:34.780This has taken shape in the last decade, and there's quite a range of characters in this dissident right.
00:37:43.260And I tried to outline, you know, there's the Berkian conservatives, and there are the MAGA conservatives, and there are the reactionary conservatives.
00:37:52.440You know, you've got all these different groups.
00:37:54.440In this big group, the issue, the only reason that I can see for fighting, having a pitched battle with guys on the right, is if someone is making a play to be the leader of this coalition.
00:38:16.780They want to be the head of the parade, okay?
00:38:21.520And at a certain point, if Nick Fuentes becomes the face of Christian nationalism, right, and he makes it on to Time Magazine, maybe I should explain to your viewers that there used to be a magazine called Time.
00:38:38.220Yeah, on this physical parchment, it's like a relic of ancient Egypt or something.
00:38:49.940But if Nick Fuentes becomes the titular leader of this movement, then I believe this task of defeating the great enemy, the progressive left, is going to go down in flames.
00:39:09.180Because I don't think these guys are competent.
00:39:14.180There are people who are positioning themselves to represent the whole movement, and I think that we have to resist them and fight them, not because they are the biggest threat, but they're a secondary threat because they want to represent the whole movement that's taking a stand against the woke left.
00:39:35.760And the woke left, that's a chocolate pie for them.
00:39:42.020So you know the – I forget the name of them.
00:39:44.600You know the FBI guys who put on the masks and the FBI khakis, and they march in Washington periodically.
00:39:55.380Now, when the establishment is trying to discredit the right, and they do these psych ops, and they do these false flag operations, what do they act like?
00:40:15.560So if I look at somebody in my ex-feed, and I can't tell if this guy is a racist or an FBI agent, right?
00:40:25.100If he were FBI, would he be behaving any differently?
00:40:31.140And the answer is no, because there is a – this is a subversive, undermining movement trying to split up and balkanize the coalition that's come together to oppose the progressive, secular left.
00:40:50.300And they've taken some real damage in the last few years, and I want to keep that up.
00:40:58.680I want them to continue to be beaten from the field.
00:41:03.100But in every war, there are the countermeasures that come against you, the troops that come against you, and then there are the subversives, the spies, the people who are trying to foment trouble on the inside.
00:41:19.280We are now big enough that the FBI has infiltrated what we're about doing.
00:41:29.800We know that they try to mimic the extreme elements of the right.
00:41:50.200And the guys on our side who are misbehaving are not the real threat, except insofar as they are undermining our ability to fight the real threat.
00:42:06.100I guess my – so my main concern is that in many ways, of course, again, I have no problem with just, you know, okay, don't act like that.
00:42:15.980That's not something a Christian should be involved in.
00:42:18.860A perfectly fair response to, I think, a lot of that which is going on.
00:42:22.880But it feels like a lot of the time that is being spent is actually turning these guys into leaders more than it is removing their leadership.
00:42:30.340So I'll just throw this example out here.
00:42:32.800I had no idea who Stone Choir was until a bunch of guys who opposed Stone Choir told me.
00:42:38.120I literally did not know who these guys are in.
00:42:40.180I had never heard a single one of their podcasts.
00:42:41.800I still haven't heard any of their podcasts.
00:42:43.740But I know who they are now, and I know a lot of guys who now are paying a lot more attention to them.
00:42:49.140And the only reason that they know who they are or they're paying any attention to these guys or see them of any kind of notoriety is that you guys can't start arguing with them.
00:43:26.080I got more important problems right now.
00:43:27.700I'm sure he has an audience, but that's just not my major concern.
00:43:31.780And by getting in debates with him online, by trying to attack him, I would just be feeding that.
00:43:37.260That's very obviously what he's looking for.
00:43:39.260And so I guess what I'm saying is, while I understand, especially one-on-one, if you see a young man in your church or someone you know personally, you can turn to that guy as someone who has authority in his life as a Christian brother.
00:43:52.520And especially if you're someone who's in a place of authority, you can turn to him and say, these are not people you should be following.
00:43:57.480This is not behavior you should be engaging in.
00:43:59.340And you'll have real authority because that's how actual masculine discipleship works.
00:44:03.920But when you're online, just being like, don't talk to people like that.
00:44:13.540And I think that's the real problem with engaging in this way.
00:44:17.100It's not that what you're saying is wrong.
00:44:18.700It's not that these rebukes don't ultimately hold value or that they shouldn't be engaged in.
00:44:24.240But I think the very model of, like, mass attempts to Hector people into a particular cell, especially when you have no authority over them, like no direct, actual personal authority over them, it just ends up creating this scenario where a lot of people get, you know, they get drawn to these people more than they get pushed away.
00:44:41.440Yeah, I think that, first, your point is, in principle, quite correct.
00:45:00.160And I don't, you know, they're, they're being foolish or moronic and I don't want to make their day because if I give them oxygen, if I give them airtime, I've made their day.
00:45:10.760But if I click on something and they're, and they've got 150,000 followers, they've just made my day.
00:45:19.320Because I don't want to give no nothings.
00:45:22.400I don't want to give mayflies the microphone and make their day.
00:45:27.860And at the same time, I don't mind when bad guys give me the microphone and I've got an opportunity to speak to a big chunk of their audience.
00:45:37.500So I take your point about we don't want to make Stone Choir a thing.
00:46:40.500But at some point you have to say, follow the Pauline admonition to rebuke the gainsayer, to rebuke the person, to debate him and, and shut him down and say, okay, this, this needs to be for one and done.
00:46:56.980And I think that James White's, um, debate with Corey Mahler was quite effective.
00:47:02.380And the blog post that I, uh, did the follow-up blog post on Stone Choir, uh, was took off like a rocket.
00:47:10.680Lots and lots, you know, lots and lots of people read it.
00:47:13.880And I'm hoping that we can spike those guns.
00:48:30.380Uh, the fact that a guy like him can be excommunicated simply for speaking with these people and not immediately like caving to some kind of mob denouncement of them, uh, does, does not speak well of the process.
00:48:43.480It reminds me a lot of the Thomas Acord affair.
00:48:50.480He also was involved in a cancellation that canceled one of my friends.
00:48:54.400Who's a very good guy, not Thomas Acord, but one of the guy, one of the other guys at that school, who's a very good guy with several children who he suddenly couldn't feed because of this witch hunt.
00:49:05.740And so I'm very concerned that several of my personal friends who are good Christian men, family men, people of upstanding character are being slandered and destroyed in this like witch hunt over what seems like a relatively small batch of guys who, again, fair enough, bad behavior is bad behavior.
00:49:23.740I'm willing to call it out and I'm willing to acknowledge it.
00:49:26.140And I think that there's a, obviously there's a role of that, especially if you're a pastor, like, but do we have to turn this into a public struggle session or can we just address bad behavior in our churches?
00:49:38.360Well, I would say you've come to the right person because Rob Dreher has gone after me also.
00:49:45.340So, yeah, I know that there are, not only is there bad behavior on the right that needs to be disciplined, there's bad behavior on the right in doing the, in conducting the discipline.
00:50:00.340Right. So I, I, I know that and acknowledge that I would have to, I don't know the particulars of those cases, but I do know that Rob Dreher very ironically wrote a very good book, Live Not By Lies.
00:50:14.360I really liked the book, but was pretty responsible for, well, it was responsible for circulating a number of lies about us.
00:50:23.920And you can't write a book called Live Not By Lies and then Circulate Lies, right?
00:50:58.480We, guys, we have a lot of super chats stacking up and I don't know if we're going to be able to get to all of them.
00:51:03.960So I will do my best, but I can't keep Pastor Wilson here forever.
00:51:07.580So just letting you know, I'm going to get into our last topic before we go to the questions of the people.
00:51:11.960But if, if, if you're worried about getting your question read, you may want to stop with super chats just because we have so many.
00:51:17.740And I don't know if we're gonna have time to get to all of them.
00:51:19.480And I don't want anyone, you know, putting in a super chat and not getting their chance.
00:51:23.160So, Pastor Wilson, my, my last question is this.
00:51:25.360You mentioned, you know, the Nietzscheans and, and, and don't get me wrong.
00:51:28.820I was dunking on a neo-pagan on Twitter, you know, today.
00:51:32.420So I'm more than, I'm more than fine to, to make support of these people when they're saying ridiculous things about Christianity.
00:51:38.220That said, you know, you look at something like the Spanish Civil War and the, the right Republicans and the Carlos and the Phalanges, they have very big differences, right?
00:51:49.100Like they have, they have pretty big ideological differences, but they know they don't want to get murdered by the Bolsheviks.
00:51:54.040And so even though maybe the Phalanges aren't the best guys, they still get to march in their uniforms and they still kill an awful lot of the bad guys, right?
00:52:02.740And then you don't end up with a communist revolution in, in, in Spain.
00:52:06.660Right. And so, um, I, I understand that ultimately like me and like bronze age pervert are going to have some pretty big differences at the end of the day on, on a number of issues.
00:52:15.880And I think it's entirely reasonable to acknowledge those.
00:52:20.200Like I said, I got no problem, you know, going after a pagan when they're attacking Christianity, do it all the time.
00:52:24.640That said, at the end of the day, coalitions are coalitions and, uh, co-belligerents are co-belligerents.
00:52:30.760And the point I think ultimately of no enemies on the right is we have, I mean, I'll put it pretty bluntly.
00:52:37.860We're on the edge of what could be a complete systemic failure, failure of American government.
00:52:43.500Like we're, we're, we got pretty close.
00:52:45.920If Kamala Harris had been able to eke out that victory, I don't know which of us would not be in jail at this moment.
00:52:51.900Like I, I, I say that without, I think any level of hyperbole, they literally tried to murder the president on live television.
00:52:57.580So I think I'm pretty safe in saying this, um, when we're at that level, I feel like, um, we'll win and then figure it out is actually a pretty reasonable response to a lot of what's going on right now.
00:53:09.380Not to say that any of this behavior is acceptable, not to say that personally, you can't deal with it as you should.
00:53:14.100Obviously, again, if you're a pastor or someone in a position of leadership, you should be speaking truth, especially Christ's truth into the lives of all the people.
00:53:21.900Who are under you, including, including truths about hatred, but ultimately like the winning is the most important part at this point, because if we don't win, then we don't get another chance to actually speak God's truth, at least not without going to jail or getting shot.
00:53:34.660And so I think there, well, again, I'm, you're not going to find me being the best buds at the end of the day with some of these guys.
00:53:41.880I feel like sometimes you, you got to make the coalition to win and, and, uh, I guess I'll just kind of hang that out there for your response.
00:53:53.000So for example, uh, if we took, if we gathered up all the people on the right that we've been talking about this whole time, I would venture to say that 90% of all of us voted the same way in this, in this last election.
00:54:08.860Um, I, basically I am, uh, more than willing to be in a generic cultural movement that includes wildly disparate types of people.
00:54:21.740And I have, um, I have a blog post I wrote a year or two ago, uh, uh, on, uh, the Jesus mobs with the mobs in Jerusalem at the time of the Lord.
00:54:32.540There were people who were baptized by John the Baptist.
00:54:35.460They, but notice how the bad guys, the establishment bad guys have to tiptoe around Jerusalem.
00:54:44.900And when the apostles are arrested and detained in the book of Acts, they, they were afraid of being stoned.
00:54:50.540So they were very, very polite when they took the apostles in.
00:54:53.960Well, it was very clear from that, that the mobs, the crowds out there had not really internalized the sermon on the Mount yet.
00:55:00.900You know, they were, uh, they were, um, they were on, on Jesus side, but they had all kinds of raggedy, uh, opinions.
00:55:10.660And Jesus calls, uh, for his disciples, he, he calls, um, uh, one of them is Levi, the tax collector, a collaborator with the Roman government.
00:55:21.240And he also calls Simon, the zealot, you know, a, a hard, a hard right guy in our, in our terms.
00:55:27.420And he calls them to be his disciples, uh, to be among his disciples.
00:55:31.520So I agree that, um, basically Franco winning, uh, this is the, someone mentioned an American Franco.
00:55:42.420Uh, what people don't understand is we're not sitting in a seminar room, uh, wishing what's, what's the ideal form of government.
00:55:49.760Maybe God would send us a Franco from heaven and we could live under that kind of government.
00:55:54.880You have to, you have to realize that you're dealing with the options that are on the table.
00:56:00.500And in Spain, it was the commies or it was this, you know, hard bitten right-wing coalition.
00:56:08.820And it was a blessing that Franco won, but that doesn't mean I sit back and think that Franco's the ideal.