The Auron MacIntyre Show - June 30, 2025


Have We Hit Peak Pride？ ｜ Guest： Scott Yenor ｜ 6⧸30⧸25

Topics
no-fault divorce
Hosted by
Auron MacIntyre
Guests
Scott Yenor
Mentioned
Tom Hanks Madsen Kirk Glenn Greenwald Scott Wiener Antonio Banderas Donald Trump Ron DeSantis Bud Light Pride Grace Ball Andrew Holoran Fred Meyer Stonewall McIntyre Trojan Oren
Third-World Socialist Takes Over New York City ｜ Guest： J. Burden ｜ 6⧸27⧸25 Will Elon Musk's New Libertarian Party Succeed？ ｜ Guest： The Prudentialist ｜ 7⧸2⧸25

Episode Stats


Length

45 minutes

Words per minute

164.72

Word count

7,559

Sentence count

409

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

9

sentences flagged

Hate speech

29

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In honor of Pride Month, we re talking about how far we ve come in our understanding of the gay rights movement, and whether or not we ve hit peak pride. Guest: Scott Yenner, a professor at Boise State University and contributor to The American Reformer.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:00:30.000 Hey, everybody. How's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon.
00:00:33.320 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
00:00:37.200 We're now wrapping up Pride Month, the American Ramadan. 0.64
00:00:40.920 And as predicted this year, things have really toned down.
00:00:45.340 It really seemed like the momentum had gone out of the sails of the Democrats
00:00:49.120 with the win of Donald Trump and the number of states who seem to start pushing back a little bit
00:00:55.460 against the whole Pride madness, willing to use certain amounts of power.
00:01:00.420 Governors like Ron DeSantis saying that ultimately we're going to start trying to push some of this
00:01:04.540 out of the public square.
00:01:06.560 Also, we've had major events like the immigration riots in L.A.
00:01:10.460 and the war between Iran and Israel that have pushed Pride Month out of the front page,
00:01:15.660 out of the spotlight, really put a damper on what's going on.
00:01:18.800 But have we actually hit peak Pride?
00:01:20.820 Is this just a moment in a recession of kind of the value of Pride?
00:01:25.660 Is it ultimately going to surge back?
00:01:27.540 Or have we moved beyond it?
00:01:28.660 Are we looking at a different paradigm that will kind of enter when it comes to the gender
00:01:33.740 and sexuality wars the left likes to wage? 0.99
00:01:36.860 Joining me today to talk about that is Scott Yenner.
00:01:39.900 He is a professor over at Boise State, and he often contributes to the American Reformer magazine.
00:01:47.420 Scott, thank you so much for coming on.
00:01:49.200 Thanks for having me on, Oren.
00:01:50.180 Appreciate it.
00:01:51.840 Absolutely.
00:01:52.340 So you wrote an interesting piece in the American Reformer here recently talking about
00:01:57.140 how we might be past peak Pride, but we shouldn't really count our ducks
00:02:01.200 because there's still a possibility that a new and different form of the queering of America 0.83
00:02:05.840 might become dominant.
00:02:07.340 Can you lay out for a little bit why you think we might have moved beyond the Pride movement
00:02:11.200 as we currently understand it?
00:02:13.220 Yeah, so I want to spend a little time defining the Pride movement as we talk about this.
00:02:17.880 So I'm in my mid-50s, and I think that my whole life there's been a big gay rights movement,
00:02:24.780 but it's gone through phases.
00:02:26.240 And the first phase of it was basically from when I was born, 1970 to 1990.
00:02:32.760 It's the raunchy gay movement. 1.00
00:02:37.400 And it was defined by, you know, the Pride parades and all that stuff happened during this,
00:02:44.040 but it was like designed to offend the sensibilities of Americans.
00:02:48.820 We're here, we're queer, get used to it. 0.89
00:02:51.680 It was one of the mottos of Queer Nation, which at the end of that time was a big gay rights group.
00:02:59.920 And amazingly, Americans actually supported gay lifestyles less in 1990 than in 1970.
00:03:09.640 And there's not this arc of progress or tolerance.
00:03:14.020 There was like, they so offended the sensibilities of Americans that people had less support for gay rights in 1990 than they did in 1970.
00:03:24.620 And the gay movement did a lot of self-reflection at that point.
00:03:29.140 And the key to that self-reflection, I think, is a book called After the Ball, written by Kirk and Madsen, published in the late 80s,
00:03:35.980 that said, look, the gay revolution has failed, and we need a new strategy to win acceptance for Americans.
00:03:43.720 The subtitle of the book is, I've got to look it up so I don't get it wrong,
00:03:47.260 How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 1990s.
00:03:52.800 And the new strategy was no raunchiness.
00:03:56.180 Take all of the weirdos, put them to the side, and we're going to center and platform a new kind of understanding, the pride understanding. 0.95
00:04:07.580 Never talk about what gays do. 1.00
00:04:10.820 Never show what gays do. 1.00
00:04:13.980 Talk exclusively in terms of abstract concepts like dignity, equality, rights, autonomy, sexual freedom, and tolerance. 0.82
00:04:24.820 And the pride movement has really been to center the normal bourgeois gay man 0.94
00:04:35.820 and to sideline the weirdos that defined it in the 70s and 80s. 0.98
00:04:43.580 Kirk and Madsen even say something like, you know, take all of the butch dykes, all the mustachioed weirdos. 1.00
00:04:51.020 Don't put them out in the parades. 0.77
00:04:53.900 Only put people with collared shirts who look like the boy next door in the parades.
00:04:59.200 Don't touch one another.
00:05:00.960 Don't hold hands.
00:05:02.760 Just like, this is an abstract idea.
00:05:05.300 So the gay rights became more about, you know, visitation rights in the hospital than about the things that gays do. 0.92
00:05:12.820 And that movement, that pride movement, culminated in Obergefell, which is the same-sex marriage decision, in 2015.
00:05:25.920 And it was the public recognition of the autonomy, the dignity of homosexual relationships.
00:05:32.580 And, you know, that was the public, that was the victory.
00:05:39.700 And, but the interesting thing happened is that Kirk and Madsen said that we're going to be able to win acceptance for gays
00:05:50.160 if we follow this strategy of emphasizing abstract concepts of justice and not what gays do. 0.94
00:05:56.420 But once we win, we will bring all of the weirdos back out and see if they can't be covered by the abstract concepts that won approval from the American people in Obergefell, apparently.
00:06:14.660 And so almost immediately, I mean, the ink wasn't dry on Obergefell before what used to be called cross-dressers came out.
00:06:21.280 And now they were people with new identities who needed to be affirmed and dignified in their new identities.
00:06:27.600 And the transgendered became an issue.
00:06:30.060 Out came the drag queens, the ones that Kirk and Madsen explicitly said, keep them out of the pride parades. 1.00
00:06:39.200 Don't let people think that.
00:06:40.900 That defines the movement.
00:06:42.220 And all of these new but old approaches to gay rights were now centered, but they tried to wrap themselves up in the same language that the bourgeois gays were wrapped up in. 0.81
00:07:01.300 And that has proven to be a very difficult thing to manage.
00:07:07.240 That has proven to be a very difficult thing to hold together.
00:07:10.760 And my thesis is, is that when you try to add the T to the LGB, it puts such strain on the dignity and autonomy argument that we are past peak pride because of the internal inconsistencies of the attempt to win public approval for same-sex marriage.
00:07:33.200 It's more difficult to ship, like, say, pedophilia under the dignity autonomy argument that won the day in Obergefell.
00:07:44.080 It's much more difficult to demand that boys, you know, sit on the laps of sexualized men dressed up or men dressed up as sexualized women and tell them to go through drag queen story hour.
00:07:57.580 So the internal inconsistency, which the left thought would help win approval for the transgendered and for the drag queens and for pedophiles, has ended up redounding to less popularity for same-sex marriage and the sexual liberation agenda than it has kind of the other way around.
00:08:22.060 So I think that's kind of what we're living through.
00:08:52.040 Threatening to, and I think to some extent, actually defining the movement.
00:08:56.460 It's a fascinating transition because a lot of people will point to the will and grace revolution, right, where we have these, well, you know, gays are just average people who are living, you know, very fashionable lives.
00:09:09.420 They're very relatable.
00:09:10.620 There's nothing weird or strange about this.
00:09:12.600 They're just entering, you know, the gay marriage becomes the focus because that's what normal bourgeois people do when they're romantically involved.
00:09:20.260 And so we're going to do this too.
00:09:21.680 We even saw conservatives start to get on board with this, accepting a lot of gay marriage in, you know, conservative commentary at spheres or different leaders.
00:09:30.700 Of course, you can buy children.
00:09:31.880 That allows you to be a family like a normal family would be, right?
00:09:35.900 This is kind of the, it's a little bit of a funhouse mirror, but if we look at it just right enough, then it kind of looks like an average American.
00:09:42.900 But as you say, once that victory comes, then all of a sudden you start unspooling the discipline, the actual lifestyles, the fact that gay marriage is almost never monogamous, is almost always an open marriage, is always involving things that are, you know, very off-putting to, I think, the average conservative. 0.93
00:10:01.140 If they looked below the surface, once you start looking at what's involved with surrogacy, once you start seeing the drag queens show up, all of a sudden, this kind of attempt to contain the gay movement and its extremes starts to break apart because they've won the argument. 0.96
00:10:18.540 It's the end of history.
00:10:19.300 You don't need to hide the stuff anymore.
00:10:20.940 Now that you've gotten the Trojan horse in the gate, of course, you can let everything out. 0.95
00:10:24.960 But quickly, people realized that they were sold something much different, and rather than allowing them to kind of justify everything after the fact, what happens is people are turning, not just on the initial, you know, overreaches of pride, but they're even going back, and we're seeing approval for gay marriage plummet among many people, especially conservatives, very rapidly.
00:10:47.100 And so we're seeing that that effect is very prominent and is undoing decades and decades of attempts to influence by the gay movement in just a few years.
00:10:58.600 Yeah, I mean, it was a real pivotal movement or moment in the early 1990s, and it's something that definitely, in retrospect, you can appreciate.
00:11:08.220 Cultural watersheds, like the movie Philadelphia, which starred Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas.
00:11:16.620 Tom Hanks was like a lawyer, and Antonio Banderas was his lover, and he was dying, Tom Hanks was dying of AIDS, and his firm was treating him badly because they knew he had AIDS, and therefore they knew he was gay in some way.
00:11:33.020 And, but they never touch in the movie, and we never see what Tom Hanks does in the movie, and he is just a competent person who ends up being treated badly by a series of homophobes who work in the particular law firm that he was in.
00:11:50.580 And those homophobes end up being portrayed as like the villains of the movie, and Tom Hanks as a cultured bourgeois hero in the movie.
00:12:01.800 And when you look at it now, it is such a timepiece.
00:12:06.300 It is not something that is going to endure.
00:12:08.260 I mean, it was such a piece of propaganda, but there was a cultural watershed, just like the Will and Grace stuff, and it was, we have to admit, a very successful movement.
00:12:20.820 I mean, the approval for same-sex marriage was almost zero when the movement started in 1990 toward this, and in 1993 when Philadelphia came out, I think the number is 63% of Americans thought that sex between people of the same sex was always wrong.
00:12:39.660 That number is way lower now, and in part that's because, like, we're never going to see it on the screen, and Philadelphia and Will and Grace and all the other things, they are excellent examples of what this propaganda was supposed to do.
00:12:58.560 But the key thing is, is that we're now in the third wave of gay rights, and that third wave of gay rights begins with the, like, the victory for gay marriage in Obergefell, where we take the raunchy reality of the first wave and try to wrap it up with the dignity, autonomy, and affirmation arguments of the second wave.
00:13:25.780 And it's just that those two things end up not going so well together.
00:13:32.060 And the question will be, will conservatives now, like, fight this third wave in the same way they fought the first wave?
00:13:44.940 And there were pretty successful public relations battles against gay rights in the 1970s.
00:13:51.220 And it was done basically by emphasizing what they do, not responding to the dignity argument or the affirmation arguments of the pride movement, but rather just, like, real sociology on what their life expectancy was.
00:14:09.140 And I think something like that is necessary.
00:14:14.840 And what's really interesting, you know, when you read the gay literature of the 1970s, the great gay novels, the number one gay novel, in my opinion, is called Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holoran, written in the late 70s.
00:14:28.700 Like, there's always problems with the gay lifestyle. 1.00
00:14:32.460 They always have psychological problems, physical problems, that in that second wave are totally suppressed and are not allowed to be talked about by anyone, gay or straight.
00:14:45.400 And so what I predict will happen is that it will be intelligent for conservatives to begin to kind of return to what was done in the 70s, both by supporters of gay rights and those who opposed it, and talk about the reality as opposed to the abstract concepts.
00:15:03.260 Well, and I think we saw a lot of that actually recently with Glenn Greenwald.
00:15:08.760 And to be clear, I've had Glenn on the show.
00:15:11.000 I like a lot of the work that Glenn has done.
00:15:13.500 But, you know, he's obviously someone who's very accomplished, very professional, you know, has made a lot of inroads with the right over the last few years of being a relatively principled left winger when it comes to free speech and many of, you know, the press and these type of categories.
00:15:29.360 However, when, you know, that sex tape came out and all of a sudden conservatives were shocked, you know, what's going on here?
00:15:38.200 My professional, well-buttoned-down guy who gay married somebody and adopted a bunch of kids, like, all of a sudden he's dressing up as a woman. 0.97
00:15:47.080 He's doing these degrading things on camera. 0.66
00:15:49.040 He's doing hard drugs, you know, and his argument is, well, this is my private life and you shouldn't be involved in it.
00:15:55.960 It doesn't matter.
00:15:56.700 And it felt like that argument might have worked five years ago, but it wasn't working now.
00:16:03.000 A lot of people were looking at it and say, no, man, like, you've got kids in the house.
00:16:07.320 You know, the things you're doing are degrading.
00:16:10.040 Like, this is not okay.
00:16:11.940 You know, this is not the soft pillow talk between two loving men that I was told was the core of the gay relationship.
00:16:19.040 This is pretty wild stuff.
00:16:20.880 And you get the feeling that this probably has been going on for quite a while.
00:16:23.680 This is something that is a part of the lifestyle in general.
00:16:27.400 And all of a sudden you realize that gay marriage is something very different that has been sold to you. 0.69
00:16:32.200 And now children are being injected into this.
00:16:34.500 And are you as a conservative really going to sit around and pretend like this is just none of your business?
00:16:39.200 You know, this is a guy who a lot of us respect.
00:16:41.700 A lot of us, you know, look at what he's done and appreciate and have built those bridges.
00:16:45.980 But at the same time, can you really turn a blind eye to this?
00:16:48.920 And I think that's something that's probably only going to continue as it's harder and harder to kind of hold this will and grace image together.
00:16:56.820 Yeah.
00:16:56.960 I think there'll be a temptation in this third wave of gay rights that we're in to merely go after the transgender issue. 0.64
00:17:08.420 And which has obvious problems.
00:17:11.220 And there's lots of public support for pushing back against it.
00:17:14.100 And there'll be a temptation merely to say that drag queens should not be, like, teaching our kids in libraries and to have the kids exempt from that kind of stuff. 1.00
00:17:27.660 There'll be a temptation to just continue to say, like, you know, pedophilia is bad and we shouldn't advocate for that.
00:17:37.580 We're not going to call them minor attracted persons, as has been tried.
00:17:42.160 And not to, like, roll back more.
00:17:46.880 And so I think the temptation needs to be resisted.
00:17:51.720 And what that's going to mean in practice, I think, is that conservatives are going to have to, like, stop talking about the dignity argument.
00:18:01.700 Stop trying to battle same-sex marriage like conservatives did on the basis of trying to figure out what marriage is as opposed to what people actually do and what should be supported by the public.
00:18:14.420 And so, you know, instead of just trimming the edges of the latest role in the sexual revolution, I think this is actually a very unique opportunity to, like, go at the heart of that revolution.
00:18:31.060 And I think the tape that you're talking about helps to do that.
00:18:36.300 But there's also, like, studies that used to be done and commonly known, like, what is the life expectancy of gays as opposed to straights?
00:18:46.500 There was lots of work done on this in the 70s and the 80s.
00:18:49.740 Like, there's some work done on it now, but it's so propagandistic that it's hard to know exactly whether or not it's true.
00:18:56.280 And so, yeah, I think that digging in is the best strategy for helping to roll back some of the gains that have been made by the sexual liberation movement generally and the gay rights movement in particular.
00:19:15.520 Yeah, I guess I'm always a little skeptical that stats prove anything.
00:19:19.420 You know, I've always been promised that, like, IQ research will overturn all these understandings of progressive.
00:19:25.620 And it's like, no, no one cares.
00:19:27.240 They just bury it and move on.
00:19:28.460 You know, the bell curve was many years ago and we're still sitting around pretending like it never got ridden.
00:19:34.240 But I do think that you're right that focusing on what actually happens, the visceral nature of the lifestyle is very impactful.
00:19:41.900 Whether, you know, the left likes it or not, most, especially men, have a disgust reflex that is immediately triggered by this.
00:19:49.740 And I think that does impact them very much.
00:19:51.940 Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, I agree about the importance of statistics, but the question is, like, what's the conservative narrative?
00:19:59.620 Sure.
00:19:59.880 We know what the left's narrative is on this, and they had a very clear one in After the Ball, and they had a strategy, and you can see them trying to expand it.
00:20:08.000 Well, what's the conservative narrative?
00:20:09.640 And the conservative narrative has to be something about this kind of life is a bad life.
00:20:17.480 And this can be depicted, obviously, in art.
00:20:20.740 It would be great if we had art that does that.
00:20:22.800 We do kind of sometimes have art that does this on divorce, or at least we used to.
00:20:28.300 And so any kind of statistic, I think, just has to be part of a broader narrative that we're basically for marriage between man and a woman being normative.
00:20:40.580 And the things that aren't normative are, like, abnormative and lead to less good lives.
00:20:50.000 And so, yeah, I totally agree that stats alone don't do anything, but, like, knowing what the end is and then having a story that helps you get to that end, I think, is not unimportant when it comes to, like, rollback.
00:21:05.020 So a big part of this, obviously, this acceptance for better or for worse in the United States is corporations.
00:21:11.900 You know, they have a large impact on our culture.
00:21:14.540 They have a large impact on what we see, what's celebrated, what media is created, what gets taught, these kind of things.
00:21:20.200 And one of the big victories, I think, ultimately, of the gay movement was to attract corporate sponsorship, to make woke capital part of the narrative.
00:21:29.780 You know, this is something that your employer is celebrating.
00:21:32.780 This is something that gets favored in hiring.
00:21:34.900 This is something that seems a positive on your resume as part of the woke stack as to whether or not you get picked up.
00:21:41.880 Obviously, the pride version of the gay movement was a big win in this area because it cleaned up the image enough to allow the stuff to get inserted into the corporate infrastructure. 0.92
00:21:55.740 As we've watched the pushing of this, you know, you got, as it always happens, the activists come in.
00:22:01.880 They start to change the culture in the corporation.
00:22:03.620 It gets selected for all of a sudden the family friendliness falls away because the activists are in control.
00:22:09.800 And they're pushing ideology over the well-being of the corporation.
00:22:12.880 We're getting classic conquest laws, breakdowns here in complex organizations.
00:22:18.000 But we kind of started hitting a wall with this.
00:22:21.200 The real pushback started.
00:22:23.060 I think Bud Light was the strangest example that I've ever seen because for many, many.
00:22:28.980 I remember my parents boycotting Disney when they approved gay benefits in the 90s. 0.99
00:22:36.380 Right.
00:22:36.540 Like, you know, this has been going on forever.
00:22:38.920 And none of those boycotts ever mattered.
00:22:41.360 They never did anything.
00:22:42.440 None of it stopped it.
00:22:43.400 But for some reason, that one caught hold.
00:22:46.580 And I think it is because the transgender stuff is so egregious. 1.00
00:22:50.360 It was very easy for the social pressure to suddenly flip on Bud Light.
00:22:54.300 And that started to cascade, I think, for corporations to recognize that there is actually a line that's too far in when it comes to gay rights.
00:23:02.120 We can lose money on this.
00:23:03.600 This is not something that we can just push forever with no consequence.
00:23:06.760 And so, obviously, the radicalization is starting to encourage the corporations to dial down.
00:23:13.340 But do you think that's a permanent thing?
00:23:14.780 Do you think corporations will ultimately walk away from this celebration?
00:23:18.700 Will they shift their support, change the names?
00:23:21.260 What do you think will happen with the corporate interaction here?
00:23:23.320 Yeah, I mean, I agree with the premise that it was basically corporate America that gave us same-sex marriage.
00:23:31.660 And, you know, the state pitched in.
00:23:34.440 But it was definitely a corporate elite movement.
00:23:37.240 This is very well established.
00:23:39.360 They were always way out ahead of the public on these matters.
00:23:41.960 And I also agree with the analysis that we have now, which is that part of the passing of Peak Pride is that corporate sponsors all over the country have pulled out of Pride parades, Pride Month, Pride Festival.
00:23:57.900 Here in Boise, a lot of events were canceled.
00:24:01.900 The organizer of the Pride Festival complained that there was only three really steady corporate donors for it, Micron, Albertsons, and Fred Meyer.
00:24:13.160 And there's obviously a recognition that not only it might be bad for business, and, of course, the reason it might be bad for business is that there's more people interested in organizing against it.
00:24:27.460 There's more people interested in boycotting it so that the lack of corporate support really reflects some change in public opinion and some radicalization in public opinion,
00:24:38.140 where a few people are organizing against corporations others are following, but it's enough for them to worry about their bad press.
00:24:48.100 And so now many corporations, Target is the one I think about in this.
00:24:52.500 I think they're one of the first.
00:24:53.980 They had, like, the tucked underwear or something like this.
00:24:57.340 And they're now actually worried about their right instead of only being worried about their left.
00:25:02.480 And that is an advance.
00:25:05.180 So how permanent are those changes?
00:25:08.140 Well, to me, that question kind of comes down to is how permanent is the opposition to the third wave?
00:25:21.540 And, you know, and I think in America, the opposition has remained steady at a particular level, much higher than every other country.
00:25:31.800 About a third of Americans are just simply unreconciled to the same-sex marriage regime.
00:25:40.400 And that number has been steady since it happened.
00:25:43.220 I mean, it's gone up and down a little bit, but it's remained very steady.
00:25:47.140 A little more than that number remain opposed to the idea that same-sex, sex between those of the same sex is always moral.
00:25:55.220 So unlike Europe, where those numbers are, like, trending with the arc of history bending toward tolerance, in America, we've hit a point where it doesn't seem to be changing and moving.
00:26:08.780 And there's even some signs of rollback and there's even some signs of rollback in public opinion.
00:26:12.860 So I think, you know, and I think this ends up being very much connected to the whole opposition to the woke regime and DEI and higher education, because people are sick of the propaganda.
00:26:28.940 And they've seen through it, either through COVID or for the BLM riots, thanks to Elon's acquisition of Twitter, there's ways of exposing propaganda and seeing that you're not alone.
00:26:41.940 And so the, and when you look at it as opposition to propaganda, you can look back and see a longer arc of suspicion, you know, dating probably from the beginning of the gay rights movement in the 70s, where people distrust institutions, they distrust the media.
00:27:02.540 And eventually this stuff spills over into everything that government officials and the media and corporate elites say.
00:27:09.580 So I think it looks to be something that is enduring.
00:27:13.800 And I also think that it looks to be something that's spreading to other countries, that is this opposition to propaganda.
00:27:20.780 It seems to me that when you look at that second wave of gay rights, what their goal was, is to end all denunciations of gays and their lifestyles.
00:27:31.080 And if you say something bad, you're like a persona non grata. 0.71
00:27:34.940 And that requires increasingly, especially when you extend it to transgenders or drag queens or pedophiles, it requires like getting a grip on free speech.
00:27:49.440 And the more people recognize that, the more they're going to oppose the censorship and all the causes that it serves.
00:27:59.900 And so what I see happening in the West generally is like rejecting the propaganda regime.
00:28:10.300 And it now, like when it's seen as propaganda, it ends up being, even though I like, you know, may not care about this issue, I'm going to act like I care about it because I'm sick of propaganda.
00:28:21.960 And that to me, it strikes me as sustainable for a while until some sort of alternative propaganda arises, alternative memes that would define a new movement.
00:28:33.240 I think some of that is happening. So I think that that variable, the importance of propaganda is something we cannot we cannot underestimate.
00:28:44.400 And we should see that as really part of the anti the passing of pride is the passing of pride propaganda.
00:28:52.360 Yeah, and you're right that the cancellation of anybody who brings forward any questions was critical and you have to have this basically totalitarian level of control of media and discourse, because honestly, if you let many of these activists talk long enough, even if they're very high in message discipline, they're eventually going to admit that like heterosity is a pretty big part of male homosexuality and always has been.
00:29:16.480 And that that's actually what generates the relationship, which is why you see, despite the attempts for message discipline, there's always this push to kind of lower an age of consent or remove laws between men and boys.
00:29:28.660 And, you know, by certain activists, you look at the lesbian domestic violence rate or the level at which they get pregnant, despite that not being a function of a lesbian relationship.
00:29:38.340 And you really see that a lot of this breaks down pretty quickly.
00:29:41.440 And so I guess that means does ultimately the movement shift to embrace the weird, because as you point out, this was always a defining lifestyle and you can always feel that undercurrent, you know, that's, oh, we're well buttoned up gay married gays.
00:29:53.820 But remember that, you know, the Stonewall riots, right?
00:29:56.860 Like there's always this desire to go back to the recognition of this as some underground deviant lifestyle, because that's the reason they're in it in the first place.
00:30:05.700 That's the, you know, that's the actual allure of it, not your ability to be a buttoned up member contributing to society.
00:30:11.200 There are a few people who ultimately bought that propaganda, I think, and tried to force themselves into that box, but it only lasts so long.
00:30:19.040 And so now we see that a lot of people, even those who are supposed to be like somewhat involved in Islamic culture, like the new guy who's supposed to be, you know, probably the shoe in for mayor in New York, talking about how like violence against trans people calls for the end of, you know, policing and these kind of things, that rhetoric just becomes unavoidable.
00:30:40.440 And do you think ultimately that will be what they embrace, that they're going to go all in on the more radical version of this, because they simply can't get back to the controlled pride narrative that used to be central to its advancement?
00:30:52.400 Yeah.
00:30:52.780 So let's talk about that for a second, because I look at that as a great way of illustrating these three waves of gay rights.
00:31:00.780 Um, so the, the first wave of gay rights, um, was, I will say like open and honest about what, uh, what gay rights would mean.
00:31:13.560 And even to the point where they established a group, it was called NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association, in response to like school districts, not hiring gay teachers.
00:31:27.360 Like they were out in the open about what they were going to try to accomplish.
00:31:33.340 And when Kirk and Madsen wrote their book, they're like, well, like we have problems here.
00:31:38.720 We don't want to like NAMBLA is no longer invited to the gay pride parades.
00:31:44.620 Like, but this is part of the overall lifestyle.
00:31:49.480 And we, we think that there should be some moral reform here.
00:31:52.920 We like, we wish that you'd go after boys less than you do now.
00:31:56.540 Um, our PR problem will be solved if you like fix the underlying problem and, uh, at least don't present it in public, uh, and don't celebrate it in public, but maybe do it less often.
00:32:12.160 And, uh, and that was the second wave.
00:32:14.520 And then once they win, I mean, what happens?
00:32:18.140 The raunch comes back, but it's relabeled as minor attracted persons, people who have inclinations that need to be affirmed or at least identified.
00:32:31.920 And, uh, and so it's, it's very difficult to, uh, to kind of win people over with that argument.
00:32:40.300 And, uh, just like NAMBLA, um, turned people off in the seventies and eighties, trying to wrap up minor attracted persons with the language of pride and affirmation ends up redounding to the discredit of pride affirmation.
00:33:01.680 And, uh, and, uh, and to the mockery of those who call themselves minor attracted persons.
00:33:09.300 So I do think that, um, it's a, it's a nice way of illustrating how each of the waves, uh, proceeds and why there's a kind of incoherence or instability in that third wave.
00:33:23.260 Do you think ultimately there is a will inside conservatism to shift on this?
00:33:29.880 Because I do feel, you know, the very sad truth is that for many conservatives, once the left wins a battle, it's just not worth going back and touching that third rail once it's been, you know, electrocuted basically.
00:33:42.040 Uh, and so you have this, uh, again, it was very clear that for a while the conservative movement said, okay, gay marriage is legalized and that's just going to be the law of the land.
00:33:51.900 And so the question is not, you know, do we push back, but how do we integrate this into our larger movement and the, you know, it's Trump waving the LGBT flag.
00:34:00.320 It's putting, uh, you know, uh, well-polished gay men and, you know, high level cabinet positions, uh, these kinds of things we're going to find, you know, we, we want the, we want the gays who are having families and well, well-spoken and cleaning up their act.
00:34:16.040 Uh, but that seems to have started to fall apart a little bit and that's giving some, I've seen some panic in what do we say are the, um, more moderate, uh, conservatives, those that tend to be more mainstream or, uh, maybe our refugees from the left, many of the IDW types, uh, the, the, uh, I didn't leave the left, the left, left me types.
00:34:35.560 They were comfortable moving over to the conservative side of things because they thought this issue was solved, right?
00:34:41.500 It's a, we've already got gay marriage.
00:34:43.220 It's already happening.
00:34:44.020 The conservatives are never rolling this back.
00:34:45.920 So it's okay for some of us to move a little bit to the right because ultimately they're never going to touch our core issue again.
00:34:51.860 And so we can go for less taxes or, you know, being less, uh, radical on college admissions for race or something, but ultimately like we know gay marriage is safe and that's never going to get moved.
00:35:02.080 And this is never going to bite us for moving back over.
00:35:04.860 Now they're seeing that pushback a little bit and they're getting pretty uncomfortable.
00:35:09.140 You can also see many, many of the mainstream outlets like Fox news seem to want to kind of dial back any discussion about whether we should be addressing that issue or not.
00:35:17.260 Do you think conservatives are ready to revisit that?
00:35:19.260 We've talked about their tactics, but ultimately do you think the will exists there or do you think it's too deeply seeded for them to really push back at this point?
00:35:26.540 Yeah.
00:35:26.820 And that's why I think the third wave, uh, insight is an important insight.
00:35:30.800 So let, let me do the three waves in a different way and try to answer that question.
00:35:34.500 So what is the first wave about?
00:35:36.060 The first wave is about liberation from social constraints.
00:35:39.780 Like the first wave is against the family, like the gay rights movement, the founding documents. 1.00
00:35:46.240 They say things like heterosexuality is effed up and, uh, especially when it points toward marriage and, and, and it's, you know, informed by the sexual liberation theories of Marcuse and all these other guys.
00:35:59.500 And so the, the analysis that they had was, we're going to try to deconstruct the restraints of society so that we have genuine sexual liberation, which is why it wasn't just gays who had to be liberated, but also all of the weirdos. 0.93
00:36:18.580 And so they centered the weirdos because the goal was to say no constraints.
00:36:24.640 Well, the second wave said, well, that didn't work.
00:36:27.420 Like we didn't actually get rid of the constraints.
00:36:30.320 What we need to do is remake those constraints and we're going to remake them so that they include a select few among this coalition, um, uh, that used to be all raunchy.
00:36:42.980 And we're going to, it's going to culminate in same sex marriage in the first wave.
00:36:47.660 No one wanted to serve in the military because the military was a fascistic institution in the second wave gays in the military. 1.00
00:36:55.120 Like we want to remake the bonds, uh, of the nation and redefine patriotism so that it includes gays. 0.98
00:37:03.200 So now what do we have in this third wave where we have the get rid of all constraints crowd, trying to wrap themselves up in the language of affirmation.
00:37:14.540 And I don't think that a civilization can be built on that basis.
00:37:21.260 I don't think that, I mean, what it's doing is putting the, the, the lie to the contention that it had modest ambition, the goal, the movement had modest ambitions.
00:37:33.260 And now it's showing that the, the ambitions are actually endless and, uh, and aiming at the heart of civilized institutions.
00:37:42.100 So my hope is that, uh, that the necessity will be the mother of invention here that conservatives actually can't fight this stuff without revisiting some of the things that happened in the past.
00:37:55.400 Some of the, uh, parts of the seeming consensus that existed because the consensus itself has been exposed as entirely unstable and unsuitable for a civilized country.
00:38:07.300 And so whether the, the, the, the need, um, uh, I think the need is there, whether there'll be like politicians who rise to the occasion is actually starting to happen to some extent.
00:38:19.720 Um, you know, I live in Idaho and our legislature at least has put forward a letter asking the Supreme Court to revisit Obergefell.
00:38:28.200 I think other states have followed suit, but I can't, uh, name them off the top of my head.
00:38:33.640 And, and, uh, so I think things like that are going to like, uh, you know, five years ago, there was no appetite for any of that stuff.
00:38:42.100 And in fact, people who supported it would have been like laughed out of public life.
00:38:46.480 And now like people who didn't support it are going to have problems in primaries, at least in this particular state.
00:38:53.600 And I think it'll, it could be true of other states as well.
00:38:56.100 So, so yeah, I think, uh, uh, it's entirely possible that there will be pushback and rollback, uh, designs, uh, on the right because of what's at stake in this particular wave.
00:39:10.440 Well, there's also a sense in which victory begets victory.
00:39:14.960 A lot of people would look at something like Roe versus Wade.
00:39:17.920 It was untouchable.
00:39:19.140 It's the law of the land.
00:39:20.460 It's this monolith that just will always be the case.
00:39:23.100 And you have to plan your politics around it because it's just untouchable.
00:39:26.860 And in any attempt to actually reach it is going to destroy your coalition, destroy your political movement.
00:39:31.560 And it turns out actually, no, uh, it, it, you can, the Supreme court can revisit it.
00:39:36.520 They can successfully, uh, repeal it, the, or overturn it.
00:39:40.240 Uh, and actually a Republican president can turn around and still win an election.
00:39:44.280 We were told over and over again that the overturning of Roe versus Wade was going to be the death knell for the Trump campaign.
00:39:51.680 It's going to be impossible for Trump to win given, you know, the, these political realities.
00:39:56.520 And yet that's not the case.
00:39:58.260 Not only does he win, uh, he gets this landslide victory.
00:40:01.120 Both houses of Congress, you know, all of these things fall in his, in his lap.
00:40:06.340 And so those arguments start to fall apart.
00:40:08.700 When you see the Bud Light victory, when you see the Roe victory, these things are not just done questions.
00:40:14.900 And so you keep that argument of, well, we just can't touch gay marriage.
00:40:18.640 We just can't address it.
00:40:19.920 Uh, this is something that can never be overcome.
00:40:21.420 Political reality, move on and start talking about low taxes or something that doesn't fly anymore because conservatives have tasted victories in these areas.
00:40:28.740 They recognize that there is a winning formula.
00:40:30.680 There is a way to address this.
00:40:32.380 And so they're going to start demanding their politicians take those actions because the, the idea that this is just an untouchable issue or unwinnable issue simply does not sell to the base anymore.
00:40:41.400 And they're going to desire more action, especially again, when we see politicians like Ron DeSantis act more aggressively in this area.
00:40:47.920 So it's not even always at the federal level.
00:40:49.940 Like there are things that my state legislature can do.
00:40:52.480 There are things my governor can do.
00:40:53.600 There are things that even my mayor can do to change the way that we're addressing this.
00:40:57.580 And so your excuse of, oh, well, this is just the way politics is at this point.
00:41:01.000 It starts to come apart.
00:41:02.080 Yeah.
00:41:02.520 Yeah.
00:41:03.640 I mean, I, I look at, uh, you know, several things that are seem to be untouchable, uh, like no fault divorce.
00:41:10.540 I mean, it's very difficult to imagine, uh, growing any kind of sustainable marriage culture when you have no fault divorce at will divorce as the basic law of the land.
00:41:23.420 I know states set the law, but almost every state has the same kind of thing.
00:41:27.460 So that really just inherently at the heart of the institution takes away its enduring character, or at least qualifies its enduring character.
00:41:36.160 And so, you know, that happened in the early seventies.
00:41:39.600 It's like, as I say, impossible to see a victory for a pro-family culture that doesn't on some level revisit that decision.
00:41:48.520 And, uh, and the consequences of not revisiting it are, uh, becoming more manifest as time goes on, I think.
00:41:59.440 And I put same-sex marriage, I think same-sex marriage is a lesser, uh, issue than, uh, no fault divorce in, uh, in total.
00:42:10.320 Um, but that doesn't mean it's unimportant.
00:42:12.440 I think no fault divorce is a 10 on the Richter scale when it comes to, uh, um, how it affects family life and same-sex marriage is just less than 10. 0.84
00:42:21.360 Yeah.
00:42:21.840 I mean, by definition, it's going to affect more people and specifically more families than gay marriage ever would. 0.99
00:42:27.480 Yes, I think that's right.
00:42:28.700 And I mean, gay marriage does end up, you know, changing the nature of procreation and the law and, you know, has a kind of creeping effect too. 0.98
00:42:38.240 But, you know, uh, so I think, like, these things are going to ultimately have to be revisited.
00:42:44.920 And, uh, and I think there's more of an appetite every year among at least conservative think tanks to go after these things than there was certainly in 2015-16 when I worked in D.C.
00:42:57.580 Um, you know, talking about, uh, rolling back no fault divorce or even proposing something against that would have been definitely off the table at any kind of conventional think tank.
00:43:08.660 These things are on the table because the situation is worse.
00:43:12.020 And, uh, so putting them on the table is going to be actually part of it.
00:43:16.480 That's what I mean.
00:43:17.120 Necessity is the mother of invention in this matter.
00:43:19.300 And, uh, the needs of this time really are calling us forth to revisit our first principles and more of that is happening.
00:43:27.160 Yeah.
00:43:27.640 As you get pushed closer to the edge of the cliff, the necessity of figuring out how to avoid it, uh, opens up all kinds of new possibilities.
00:43:35.660 Yeah.
00:43:35.920 No doubt.
00:43:37.000 No doubt.
00:43:37.860 And I do think that, you know, the, the, the interesting thing about how this affects churches, if I could just maybe conclude with this,
00:43:44.300 is that it seems that many churches are about 10 years behind on this.
00:43:50.060 Um, they're still living in the pride universe and are trying to speak the language of welcoming and affirmation that came along with the pride agenda.
00:44:01.380 And, uh, and so I think the political movement is actually in front of the religious movement, even though that's more important religiously, uh, to oppose these things than it is politically.
00:44:14.300 I think, because it's so close to the heart of the institutions.
00:44:17.520 And so, uh, my hope is that the, the churches will catch up and, uh, recognize what is going on culturally and, uh, become leaders in this area again.
00:44:30.500 Yeah.
00:44:31.060 Very sad that, uh, even as the, uh, kind of pushback, I think, against the radical progressive revolution has suddenly cut on culturally.
00:44:37.840 Um, the American church has, in so many cases is lagging behind quite desperately and could, could really do with a very quick, uh, return to reality here.
00:44:47.880 And I hope you're ultimately right that that accelerates, but, uh, guys, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up.
00:44:52.960 Uh, of course, uh, want to thank Scott for coming on.
00:44:56.140 Uh, sorry, this is a, I should have said this at the beginning, but this is a pre-taped episode.
00:44:59.600 So we won't be able to take any audience questions.
00:45:01.460 I'll make sure to throw that at the beginning of the episode when it goes live, uh, but it's been great speaking with you, Scott.
00:45:07.000 Is there anything that you want to direct people towards your writing books, anything you want people to know about?
00:45:12.140 Well, I wrote a book in 2020 called the recovery of family life.
00:45:15.280 I don't, I'm not that active on Twitter personally, but I usually put everything I write up on my Twitter account.
00:45:20.720 So if you're interested in things I write, I'll have more, uh, articles in this vein and a bunch of more on feminism coming out. 1.00
00:45:27.660 Uh, you know, you might take a look at my Twitter feed.
00:45:31.840 Excellent.
00:45:32.240 Well, like I said, make sure to check out Scott's work.
00:45:34.180 And if it's your first time on this channel, make sure to click subscribe on YouTube, the bell notification.
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00:45:49.660 Thank you everybody for watching.
00:45:50.920 And as always, I will talk to you next time.