KFC #4: America Is So Gay, Amen (w/ Molly Conger)

Call zone media.

This is going down like Donkey Kong.

Dan, the good news is humanity is back in the fight. Knowledge fight country. I'm out here in the country.

Jesus Christ said that.

Everybody go. Donkey Kong King Kong Kong. Welcome back to Knowledge Fight Country. I am Dan. I am the guy who is interested in right-wing bullshitters and maybe even some bullshitters who are a little bit outside of the right wing. But I have come to the conclusion and made the observation that a lot of these people say awful, awful things and host terrible, terrible shows and then end up getting some flack for it. People post clips of them saying awful things. And then they'll try and pretend that they have been taken out of context. So my mission that I have set out and embarked upon, much like Donkey Kong, trying to retrieve the banana horde and the giant bananas that the Kremlings have stolen and King K.

Rool has so irresponsibly come. Look, I'm trying to get the bananas back. And in this case, the bananas are context. And that's the whole idea. I think that was perfectly clear. I'm thrilled with this introduction. And I'm excited to introduce my guest. Welcome back. So excited to have her from Weird Little Guys podcast, Molly Conger.

So glad to be back. And yes, Dan, flawless introduction. I've never gamed, but it made perfect sense to me.

Thank you. This is the first episode that we're recording with a new mic that I have. And I think that the fact that I don't have to hold a mic in one hand has freed up both of my hands. And that leads to madness. I, you know.

I find even when I'm recording alone, I still talk with my hands. The gesticulation, I think, is part of the genius. Like, you have to wiggle them around. So I'm glad you freed up.

The brain space. Yeah. Yeah. These words, they encourage emotion. What are words but motions and sounds in our throats?

From the mouth and the heart.

Yeah. So, Molly, today we have a situation where we've been kind of teasing something for a couple of episodes now.

And not just teasing the listener, like teasing me, because I kept my promise. I have not looked this up, and I'm so excited.

If it's possible to build anticipation about something like this, we have certainly done it. By constantly not getting to talking about Joel Webben and his sundry cast of weirdos, much like the Kremlings. They are much like King K. Rool's minions.

His minions are called what?

Kremlings?

Kremlings.

Yeah.

Like the Kremlin, but with a G?

With a G. Yeah, they're lizard guys, usually.

Is that like a Cold War thing?

You know what? I don't think it is, but maybe. They were pirate-themed in the first one. So a lot of Donkey Kong games have to do with colonialism under the surface. There's a lot of industrialization and colonialism fears in the Donkey Kong Country games.

I didn't know that.

Oh, yeah, it's deep.

Like I said, I've never gamed, so I didn't know there was, like, deep lore.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Donkey Kong is strongly opposed to the Dutch East India Company.

Okay, support for Donkey Kong.

Yeah, absolutely. That's why I got the tattoos.

I didn't realize he was a hero.

He is the best. Worst, Joel Webben. I don't know if he's the worst, but today we're going to talk a little Webben. And one of the things that we've teased, and one of the reasons that you're as excited about this, is because you have a familiarity with one of Joel's guides. Right.

So when we first talked about this, it was because Alex Jones was going to be speaking at this event that's coming up.

The Christ is King conference.

Yeah. I hope everyone gets a free exorcism. But I was looking up who else is speaking at this event, and it is a murderer's row of men that I just don't want to hear about Christ from.

We got Fishback. Yes. We got Harrison Smith. We got J.P. Sears, a bunch of weirdos who didn't get you as excited. And then there's a fella that you've run into.

Oh, I just think so. I have a passing familiarity with Father Calvin Robinson because my husband is very interested in this world of these sort of these e-priests, he calls them, right? These like online influencers who are clergy of some variety. And the thing about Calvin Robinson. Is Calvin Robinson is a priest in a different church you've never heard of every nine months, right? Like this man, he's, I think he was ordained, he started out in seminary like in 2020, like during COVID. So he has not been involved in this for very long.

We'll get to the Lord how we get to the Lord. I don't know if we should shame him for COVID. No, sure, of course.

Like, you know, coming to his vocation late in life, you know, that's wonderful.

COVID scared us all, made us realize our mortality.

I think he's like about my age. So, you know... not old. It was not like a late in life thing. But anyway, so he's from England. So he wanted to, you know, be ordained in the Church of England. That's what most people are in England. And they wouldn't have him because his politics are so right wing. And so he chose a different church and that didn't work out.

And he just keeps moving to like progressively more unusual splinter sects of religions. And it's like every couple of months. I think one, he was only ordained for a few months before he did a nazi salute during a speech and they were like hey calvin father calvin church.

That's a problem with nazi salutes see he's only.

Been a priest for like four years and he's been i think ordained in like six different religions entirely i mean.

That's five more than most people get in a lifetime so like he's a go-getter is what i'm hearing Well, I guess.

He was never ordained in the Church of England. But yeah, he's been... Yeah, half a dozen different churches he's tried or been a priest in. And the one most recently, this year, he was ordained as a priest. I guess you stay a priest forever. I don't know if you get reordained. We got to get my husband on here to explain this in more accurate.

Sort of. Flocking is a thing. There's a flock.

World accurate detail. I think he's incarnated or whatever in the English Catholic Church of North America. And I don't want to say that's not a real religion because I respect.

Who's to say?

Everyone's faith. But the thing is, is the English Catholic Church of North America has a Weebly website and it is headed by a man named Bishop Jaden, who is just kind of doing it out of his house.

I mean, Paul would have a Weebly page if he was around now. And you would say that those early churches were just out of someone's house?

The early Christians were in home churches, absolutely. Right. I just, a lot of these splinter sects that he has moved to exist because they broke away from their original faith tradition because it was too woke. You know, they're doing the Bible too woke.

Yeah, it's someone was an asshole and was asked to leave. Now we have a new sect.

And that's kind of what keeps happening to Calvin Robinson. He keeps getting asked to leave the splinter sects who were asked to leave their whole churches.

And now I think he's met his match. I think that this is, I think he's found his fit.

He finally found a home. Yeah.

Yeah.

But it's, you know, not everybody's called to the priesthood, but he is determined to make it work.

Yeah. Well, good on him. Maybe we'll get to covering him at some other time. But today we're going to be talking a little bit about his boss over there at the old NXR studios. So, Molly, stepping back into this space after a time away, I noticed a couple of pretty big changes that have happened in the past couple months. A lot of these things were in progress back in April, like the right-wing media fracturing over Trump and issues around Israel. That process has continued, now to the point where there's a complete disunity in that media space that used to find common ground over memes about liberal tears and all that shit. The world that used to be organized around propping up Trump no longer has

a heroic figurehead, and no one seems to be able to agree on a new guy. The ethos of the patriot shit requires a strongman leader to tell people to fall in line behind, so without that, they're all just kind of treading water in a really depressing way. Past that, Charlie Kirk was killed, and the fight that ensued after that has made Turning Point USA a much less effective tool for big money to be distributed to right-wing media influencers.

For a long time, Turning Point was a huge entity to promote and foster young right-wing talent, and it existed as a very effective thing for dissidents to define themselves as being against, like Nick Fuentes did during the Gruyper War. Tucker doesn't feel all that influential anymore, Joe Rogan is a backpedaling, depressing mess, and everything just looks sad. All of these figures have the vibe that they're pretending that they got out and stopped licking Trump's boots right on time, but they know that everything they've done has been recorded and that all of their rebrands are hollow. All of their complaints about Trump may be valid now, but each one they raise is just something that the left or

other Trump critics said 10 years ago. So it really reveals that they themselves are either gullible enough to fall for Trump's bullshit or they lied to their audience to obscure it. that stuff. In this environment, it hasn't broken down into two camps where one still supports Trump and the other wants something new. It's just chaos. And the walkaway campaign's recent 4v4 debate that was supposed to pit four MAGA hardliners against four America First breakaways, really illustrated that.

None of those ding-dongs were on the same page with anyone on their own side, and all of them would still support Trump if he accepted their particular demands. All of them effectively accept that Trump is leading as a tyrant, and they're totally fine. If he were just tyrannically doing the things that they wanted, there's no problems. The four MAGA white guys all feel like Trump is doing enough of the shit that they like, and the four America First white guys Each had a weird little quirk that they were trying to hide behind pretending that they just don't like Trump supporting Israel. So jumping back into all of this, I don't see two teams, neither in that debate nor in the larger media space. I don't even

know how many teams there are. It really feels like a landscape that's just full of opportunists trying to strike while the iron's hot. There's an open space here and see if we can claim some land. You know, that's how it feels. Right.

These guys need the strong, unifying leader to tell them what to believe, because a lot of them don't have a lot of clear, strongly held beliefs. They don't have positive beliefs, right? They're against a lot of things, but none of them can really agree on what they're for.

And they need a mainstream. They need either, you know, some sort of a liberal consensus in the world, or they need, you know, like Turning Point USA being the sort of weaker version of fringe right-wing stuff for extremists to brand themselves as being against. There's just nothing now.

And I hadn't considered the way that vacuum kind of changed the landscape until you said that. But yeah, it was like an incubator for the careers of aspiring right-wing grifters. And now they kind of don't have that internship program to learn how to do it.

Probably a ton of places where you could learn.

Right.

But it was a very effective sort of way to launch that career, and now sort of the zone is flooded with people doing it badly.

And when Turning Point is there, it's a plausible way for billionaires to fund it. You know, like, it's not plausible for a billionaire to fund, like, I hate Jews 1488 on Twitter, you know, but you could support Turning Point. And, you know, some of their people might have those screen names. So, like, that vacuum is tough.

Yeah, when I was... I just, when I was checking in on Calvin before we started recording, his pinned tweet right now says, it's the Jews. It's always been the Jews. Like, what is going on?

Oh, geez.

This is worse than I thought.

Maybe we should call an audible and do a Calvin Robinson episode. I don't know. Joel's pretty bad. He's pretty bad, too. So reviewing Alex's new Alex Jones live show, it seems pretty clear that his budget's a It appears that the main on-air talents that he has for hosts are like, you know, Harrison's still there and he's got his son Rex.

In the past couple months, he's been trying to pick fights with more popular creators like Sneeko and Tim Pool. And that might have led to some attention, but it seems like diminishing returns.

Oh, that's really sad.

Yeah, it's not good when those are like people you're trying to ride along in their wake. Because those people suck.

Because Tim Pool is kind of falling off, too.

Well, it's at least embarrassing. I think he probably still has a lot of money and a big audience, but.

Well, that oligarch money sort of fell off, didn't it?

Well, at least some of it. I'm sure there's still plenty that went under the radar. So one of the things that's interesting about Alex and InfoWars has always been the way that guests very clearly pay to play. If you watch the show regularly, you know that for a little while, a guest will seemingly be on all the time, and Alex will just be fawning over them and presenting them as the world's greatest expert on whatever, and then they'll kind of disappear, almost like their promotional period ended.

This happens all the time throughout Alex's career, and it's very transparent. And right now, it seems like Alex's most regular guests are his gold guy, Kirk Elliott, international monster and arms dealer with direct connections to the Russian government, Victor Boot, and a pastor named Joel Webben. That's the trio of like, oh, that guy's on a bit. That's interesting.

I mean, gold guy on brand for Alex.

Perfect.

Is it a new gold guy? Is it the gold guy he's always had?

It's a guy he's had for a while. It's not Ted Anderson from the Midas Resources days, but he's been with Kirk Elliot for a while. Okay.

So yeah, consistent gold guy. Solid. You know, the only thing that really... Sticks in my mind about Victor Boot. The only reason I know anything about Victor Boot is that he was briefly cellmates with my former nemesis. He's not even my nemesis anymore because he's just kind of sad now. But it was in a years-long feud with Christopher Cantwell, a crying Nazi. And they were cellmates briefly at Marion.

To be a fly on the wall.

There is a non-zero possibility that Victor Boot has listened to a man complain about me by name in a Long Island accent.

That's amazing. You should get that on a pillow or something.

Phenomenal stuff.

There is a chance Victor Boot has heard someone cry and complain about me. I think he obviously is a monster and a real piece of shit. Yeah, for sure. But Nicolas Cage played him in that movie, so.

They took a lot of liberties. I do love Nick Cage. But, like, what's he doing on Inforce?

I think we know what he's doing on Inforce. Have you seen Spider Noir? The Nicolas Cage Spider-Man series?

We started it, but I can't remember why we didn't finish it. I probably fell asleep. Nothing to do with the movie. I'm sure it's great.

I can tell you why you didn't finish it.

Oh, is it not great?

It's Nicolas Cage plays Spider-Man. It's ridiculous.

See, the thing is, I love Nicolas Cage.

I don't hate him. I think he has a charm.

I've been saying for years that if I woke up a billionaire, if I had fucking around Elon Musk money, one of the things I would do is. Fund a shot-for-shot remake of Con Air.

Ooh. With Nicolas Cage reprising the role?

Yeah, almost everybody the same.

Even though he's considerably older? Mm-hmm. I'd be interested in that. I would chip in. I'd give him the Kickstarter.

Or, like, everybody's a Muppet except Nick Cage and John Malkovich.

That would be amazing. Yeah. I do think we need more Muppets in more places. I've been a longtime advocate of that. The thing with Spider-Man... is that he's a mobility guy.

And Nick's a little old.

Yes. And in the show, he's a little old.

And he's never been very physical. Like, he's not well known for his very, like, physical performances.

The spider noir thing is a great, like, thing in the Spider-Verse and, like, in a comic or, like, a cartoon. You know, it's a cool character, and I'm glad Nicolas Cage plays it, but it's so funny.

I'm going to watch it.

Anyway, I watched the whole show because I couldn't stop myself. But yeah, Joel Webben, along with Victor Booth and the gold guy. Those are the three winners over at InfoWars.

How's Alex looking? How's his health?

You know, far be it for me to judge him too closely, but he looks fine. I don't know. Probably drinking.

What shade of red?

Oh, pale, palish red. Oh, wow. Except when he gets, I mean, if he gets worked up, you get a little red, but I don't know.

Because sometimes he looks a little purple.

Yeah. Well, you know, I think that the stakes are lower. I think that times have gotten to a point where he's pushed into a little bit of an irrelevancy in that media space. So maybe we're not capable of purple anymore. Right.

Maybe there's some relief in becoming irrelevant. I mean, disappointing, sad, tragic, I guess, but maybe some relief.

I think this real tragedy is for his son, who will have to join the irrelevancy at such a young age.

Just go somewhere else. Just like go, go get an office job, Rex.

Be good. So Joel Webben, he's the guy who runs the new Christian Right Media Network that hired Harrison Smith. And they're the ones who are putting on that conference in November that Alex is giving a keynote speech at. And Joel was also one of Alex's teammates on that MAGA versus America First debate. So he's kind of popping up all over the place. Getting back on this horse, it struck me how present Joel Webben was and how non-existent he was like six months ago. Anyone who has any familiarity with my work will know that this is exactly the kind of thing that gets my thinking juices flowing and I end up having to learn more. So on a basic level, Joel Webben has set up a perfect hustle. He runs three companies that he pretends are

different because they're legally not supposed to be the same thing. But in reality, they're all one.

No, they're completely different. Completely separate.

Yeah. He runs a literal church in Texas called the Covenant Bible Church. On top of that, he's the main host and content creator for NXR Studios, short for New Christian Right. Then there's an entity that bridges the gap between the two called Right Response Ministries, which I think is actually now just the same thing as NXR. By pretending that these three companies are different, Joel can muddy the waters about what is ministry and what is political activism and entertainment, which allows him to play games with his 501c3 status.

I bet there's no funny business going on in the books. Tax situation completely pristine. Pristine.

Oh, yeah. And like, I mean, he's cool. He's good. Yeah.

Yeah.

So early on, Joel was connected with Doug Wilson, the Christian Nationalist pastor. Yeah, yeah. That guy. You know that guy.

God damn it, Dan. So I've been putting it off. I don't want to read Doug Wilson's book in defense of slavery, but like, I'm going to have to now.

Yeah, I think you do. I think you do have to do that. I'll do it with you if you want.

Okay.

Or at least provide moral support in some way. Like, I will commit to read it if you read it.

Yeah, he's early on in like the early days of the League of the South, like when they were still just like a couple of guys in Tennessee, like meeting at a Shoney's. He would give talks to League of the South members about how the Bible says it's cool to have slaves. So fuck Doug Wilson. So, yeah, OK, I think I see where we're going.

I had convinced myself that that book was called like Slavery Wasn't So Bad. Not it like in defense of slavery is harsh.

I can't remember what it's called, but it's like it's about slavery.

Yeah.

I don't know what it's called. What is it called? Southern slavery as it was. Oh, cool.

Yeah.

He made a big splash with that. And then he would like debate Christopher Hitchens and stuff. And he's a real piece of shit. And then recently he was getting a lot of boosting from Tucker Carlson and a lot of other Trump right wing figures because they were trying to make Christian nationalism not a dirty word. And Doug Wilson was really on the vanguard of that.

So I'm just gagging on Doug Wilson.

That's fine. We won't stay on him for too long. So many of the early videos on the NXR channel include Joel discussing questions of theology with Doug Wilson, which are mostly pretty stupid. One of my favorites is where they break down why smoking weed is unbiblical, even if you just take one puff, whereas wine is totally fine as long as you're celebrating. And they get really into the weeds about like, How much weed would you have to smoke to be one glass of wine? It's crazy.

Oh, my God. That's not really a theological question. That's more of like a biochemistry kind of thing.

But see, here's the thing. I like that they're Renaissance people. You know, it's theology, but also getting into biology, chemistry, science, algebra.

Doug Wilson, famously a science guy. Absolutely. Yeah.

So Joel's content was boring as shit. And it was mostly just angry white male Christian audience kind of targeting. But a bunch of people who think that their church is too woke. That was all he was creating. It's niche stuff. And it's mostly the typical anti-SJW whining and discussions about how women need to be controlled for their own good. And the view counts reflect how bland his shit was. These early videos, like they're five years old and they have view counts, a lot of them under 500.

There's nobody listening to this shit.

At that point, I'm going to delete that and pretend it was never there.

Yeah, it would be a good idea. That's embarrassing. I think you'd have to delete most of his account, though. So Joel's preaching and biblical content continued to languish, but the view count started to spike when he did special episodes with other folks, mostly about clickbait kinds of topics. He got around 10,000 views for an interview he did with a couple guys who host a podcast called Cultish, and then he made it over 100,000 with a video called, quote, hauling out woke preachers by name, exclamation point.

That doesn't sound defamatory.

By name.

I'm going to call my podcast Defamation Per Se.

Look, every preacher is a public figure, so you're going to have to prove actual malice.

And I guess calling them heretics, I guess, is not a legal matter.

Oh, it's debatable.

Unless, I mean, I guess as a Christian nationalist, you are proposing a society where being a heretic would be a crime. So we're back around to defamation, actually.

It does feel defamatory, for sure. Those videos that he did would be nice little blips, but his regular shit was still getting views in the three-digit range. People were just not interested. Things were stagnant for the span of about three years. Then Joel put out two videos that whole time, that next two years, that cracked 100,000 views, but just barely. And then on October 10th, 2023, he put out an interview with the hosts of a show called The Haunted Cosmos, called, quote, Sizes of Biblical Giants and Where They Could Be Hiding Today.

God, yes. Nephilim. Yes, I'm in.

Yeah. Yes.

Was the Kandahar giant a Nephilim? Did we answer this? Does he know?

Yes and no. Who knows?

Who cares?

That video racked up 750,000 views and really drives home the fundamental message of this kind of online content creation, which is that being a dipshit pays off.

I mean, it's a huge reward.

Yeah.

Like, the dumber your shit is.

That's almost ten times the views of anything he'd ever put out. Like, yeah, we want to hear about giants, dum-dum.

Nobody cares how much weed you have to smoke to be one glass of wine drunk, because it's not even a real question. But was the Kandahar giant a biblical Nephilim? Like, now I'm wondering.

And that leads to, like, a series about mermaids and ghosts and whether they're biblical. It's fucking ridiculous, because, of course, you follow what works.

I don't think there's mermaids in the Bible. Eh.

Are there manatee in the Bible?

I don't think so.

I don't know. There we go. There we go.

Wow, I guess we're going to have to check.

So I think that this vibe just is how his content is. No one's drawn to his normal religious stuff, but then he can bring eyeballs in with sensational garbage that he pretends is totally relevant to his religious shit. He enjoys that cheap heat until it dies down and the novelty wears off. Then he finds a new thing to roll around in. In 2023, it was these monsters and mermaids. And then in 2026, it was a 10-part interview series with Nick Fuentes.

No.

Yeah, 10 parts. Crazy.

Okay, I'm known for my series that won't end. I'm guilty of that as well, but that's a lot of Nick Fuentes.

Yeah, especially if you're a religious channel. Essentially, I would say that Without putting too fine a label on it, Joel is like a Calvinist kind of guy, and Nick is a Catholic fascist. Like, they do not even use the same Bible. Shouldn't have a lot.

Of common ground.

No.

Although I bet they have one really important thing in common.

I think two, if you include anti-Semitism and whiteness. They're very big on those things. Oh, and three if you don't like women. Oh, true. Okay.

Yeah. Well, I see it. They got the Trinity.

Yeah. The Holy Three. So this is something that he put out at the beginning of 2026, and now it's grown into Joel hiring Harrison Smith to whitewash the protocols of the Elders of Zion, as we listened to on a recent episode.

Right.

I get that Joel's brand is growing, and he's capitalizing on the schism in the right wing to insert himself as an extremist pundit, moving the Overton window closer to Nazism dressed up as Christianity. But I feel like if I'm going to cover his content, I've got to start with what's supposed to be the thing he's passionate about.

I've got to deal with him in his primary context, which is as a pastor. So, Molly, today we're going to look at a sermon he posted on YouTube in June 2023 with the ever-so-subtle title, quote, The Grace of Shame, How America Became Super Gay. No.

I don't think so.

Do you think we're going to get to the bottom of it?

And you said June? Is that Pride Month? Did he do that?

It is.

Okay.

Solid.

Good, good, good. That's not a coincidence. No, it's not.

No, it's not.

It's opportunism.

What kind of theatrics are we working with here? Like, what's the stage presence?

I will discuss that as we go along, because I think you need to hear it before I describe it, because it's visceral.

Because I need to see what's going on behind him. Do we have a whole set? Do we have props? Pyrotechnics?

There's nothing really to the background. He's just kind of at a pulpit, and it's always a wide shot, so you don't see any of the congregation, as it were. But before we get going, would you like to hear an out-of-context drop?

Oh, you know I would.

Nobody was good at motorboat and titties their first time. But you stuck with it. Yeah, exactly. And you got better.

Yeah.

Hell yeah, brother.

I think Joel would agree with that. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I think he'd be down with that. All right, so let's get to the actual sermon.

I mean, it's not in the Bible, so I assume it's allowed.

Thou shalt not motorboat them titties poorly. Yeah, God was suspicious in his silence about motorboating. We start off here, and you were saying that, you know, A, he's doing this in June, and he addresses that right off the top.

Oh, good.

You guys know that I'm a sucker for seeker-sensitive sermons, and so in light of it being the month of June— You know, I just felt like we got to give the people what they want. So we got a Romans 1 sermon for today. I always want to be, you know, relevant at the, you know, just the cusp of what society is asking for, what they're needing, what they're wanting.

And so in light of it being Pride Month, we're going to look at Romans chapter 1, verses 24 through 32.

What God's word says about pride.

I assume you could make out the babies crying at the background.

You know, if there's no babies crying in your pews, your church is dying. So that's beautiful. But I think if you're making content for the Internet, it's different.

I don't know if it means your church is dying. It could also mean that you can afford a daycare. Well, no, I think.

A lot of churches, they have, you know, child care for children because it's like they do like the children's Bible study, but like infants. stay with their mothers in the church. So, yeah, I think, you know, if there's children crying in the pews, that means you have a lively congregation that is growing and reproducing. That's beautiful. But I think if he is making content, you invest in a sound system that is not picking up the ambient noise of the room. Because that exists.

Yeah. It's a challenge that he could have resolved or could have solved.

Without taking babies and mothers out of the congregation, which would probably be his solution.

I think it would. I mean, he doesn't like ladies to begin with. I know they can't talk in church and stuff, but I guess they can keep their babies there. I don't know. It's very strange. My feeling is that he probably would have a daycare center, but they're just isn't enough people in the church. I think it's a pretty small church.

Oh, is his actual church small? I guess I assume because he's got this like media empire that this is like a megachurch situation, but is it not?

Hell no. Oh. Hell no.

Okay.

I would be surprised if he has a congregation in the hundred, like over a hundred.

Oh, that really changes the calculus here. This is a freak situation.

Oh, it's a freak situation for sure.

So he cannot actually attract a large physical congregation of people who are are interested in his leadership in the real world, but he wants to create a media empire. Intriguing.

That is my general sense of it. And I think that he has enough people that are there in the real world that it empowers him to make this leap into the media space. But it seems very artificial. That's the sense that I get. And one thing, I don't know if I could capture this in the audio, but Joel is struggling during this sermon. He is sweaty from the face. And like, so one of the reasons that I was never able to make it in standup was because I always felt like I was at, in a fight with the audience. Like every time I got on stage, I thought they hated me. And I thought I had to do jokes and get them to like be won over.

And if you're watching Joel, it feels like he's having that kind of energy with the audience. Like he's yelling like, There's babies crying at the background and it just feels like he thinks these babies are screwing up his timing. It sucks. It's a bad, bad set.

That's dark. I think he should work on his stage presence before he moves on to Media Mogul.

Yeah, yeah. He's also like, it seems like he's preemptively making excuses for why he's doing this sermon as if he needs to justify it.

Like, don't you do it every Sunday?

I'm giving the people what they want by doing a homophobic sermon. Like, come on, man, own it. You want to do that. That's fine. You're passionate.

That's, you know, there is a reason that like, you know, the Catholic and Episcopalian churches, you know, you have a you have a missile. The readings are already set. The lectionary is what it is. And you're reading the passage for today. You're not up there freestyling. You're not giving the people what they want and just picking stuff at random because you hate gay people. You read what's in the lectionary.

Yeah, and I think that it's so hard to hear somebody be like, I'm giving the people what they want, and then there not be applause. Like, it'd be punctuated by a.

It's not what they wanted.

There's like a child crying instead of applause. Like, it just feels weird.

That child is giving what the crowd is feeling.

I was, for sure. I was crying inside.

Joel, stop!

So here we have Joel reading the scripture for today's riff, today's hour-long improvised jam session.

One final time, our text for today is Romans chapter 1, verses 24 through 32. The Bible says this, Therefore God gave them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity. to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. For this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature. And the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another. Men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to.

Parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them, but give approval to those who practice them.

This is the word of the Lord.

All right, go ahead and be seated.

As everyone stand during the reading, which I don't think is that weird. That happens.

They stand during this reading?

Yeah.

That's odd.

I've been to a number of churches that do things, you know, in various ways. So like, I don't.

In apostolic churches, you stand during the gospel reading, but this isn't a gospel reading. This is just a reading from the Bible.

Right. I don't know.

I mean, I don't know what they do at Joel's church.

He considers basically everything gospel. Like everything is the word of God.

Only four of the books are the gospel.

Yeah. And like the Pauline letters are explicitly Paul writing letters. But his sort of doctrinal take on it is that it's all God. So there is no difference. Oh, OK. It's it'll get you in some trouble eventually if you take it to the extremes like Joel.

But where did Joel go to seminary?

That's a great question. Jaden, maybe? The school of Jaden? I don't know. I assume he's educated, and that's great. I didn't look into it. I didn't want that to ruin the context of hearing his sermon.

Not a compelling orator, I have to say.

The way that I put it, the way that I thought about it was like, he's doing an impression of a pastor.

Yeah.

It just sounds like, God. Like, there's just a... It's theatrical in a way that just doesn't seem, it doesn't seem sincere.

The pacing was not good. I don't know. I don't know. I'm not moved, but I'm curious how much of this homily are we going to get? What is his exegesis here?

We've reached the end of the actual Bible portion.

Yeah, that's, I'm familiar with the passage.

The rest of it will be quite exegetical and loose. But I think one of the things that's important to recognize about this passage in particular is that, you know, Paul was writing these letters to the churches.

To the Romans.

Well, yes.

I think that's going to become relevant in how he's talking about sexual ethics, because I think Joel and I interpret this passage differently. Yeah.

And it's not all about sex. It's about, you know, a lot of sin and division and A lot of Paul's churches, like the letters to Ephesus and Corinth, those were churches that he started himself. And in Rome, he didn't start that church. So this isn't a church that he is like the father of. So there's a different tone to the letter that he's sending. And it's a church that has like a makeup that is both Christian and Jewish. And so he's writing for a different audience as opposed to like, The letter to the Hebrews is mostly directed to a Jewish audience. And some of his other churches are largely directed towards Christian audiences. So I think that a lot of that isn't being taken into consideration by Joel. But there's other problems, too. So in

this next clip, Joel talks a little bit about sin. Oh, good. And kind of comes to the conclusion that sin is its own punishment, which is nice.

Romans 1.18 assures us that God has clearly revealed Himself to all people.

Not just Christian people, but to all people.

Both by His creation, and according to Romans 1.18, by what He has made, this reveals His nature, but also the pouring out of His just wrath towards sinners is also likewise a revelation of God's nature. So in Romans chapter 1 verses 24 through 32, our text for today, the Apostle Paul is merely demonstrating precisely how the wrath of God is revealed. One clear demonstration of the wrath of God is God's choice to hand sinners over to their own lust so that they might receive the due penalty for their sin. That is the natural consequences of sin.

In other words, sin is its own punishment. It is not the only or ultimate punishment, but sin is a punishment for sin. Sin itself is a punishment for sin. It's not the exclusive punishment. It's not the ultimate punishment, but it is a punishment.

Very repetitive. That's something that I found difficult while cutting clips. He'll say the same thing repeatedly. I know it's an oratory kind of technique, but it's annoying.

It's not really working as a rhetorical device, but maybe he's what he's going for.

Yeah.

Does he expand at all on what he means by that?

Which part?

That sin itself is a punishment for sin. I mean, that's an interesting thing to say, and it could mean something. But so far, he hasn't offered anything up that indicates that it does.

Well, it's bad for you. You know, the things that are sins are bad for you. So when you sin, you're doing harm upon yourself.

Right.

So I think that's basically the long and short of it.

Yeah, I mean, I guess in the conception of, you know— sin as separation from God, that if you desire unity with God and you have sinned, thus separating yourself, that is its own punishment. But I don't know if that's what he's saying.

It's not. It's not. Because I don't think he thinks it's possible to be separated from God. And we'll get to that down the road. But I think in that clip, we see two basic ideas that are taking shape. The first is that if you see gay people around, that's proof that God has given them over to their wickedness, and therefore God is judging us. Uh-oh.

I see what he means by that. By their mere existence, you can tell that they are being consciously and intentionally punished by God for their wickedness.

And so are you. Uh-oh. Them being around is evidence, like a canary in the coal mine, that God is pissed off and he's judging us.

Oh, that we live in a fallen world and God hates us.

Because we see gay people around.

This seems... Like the sort of thing you would want people to believe if what you want them to do next is eliminate the presence of those people from society.

Yeah, no, and I think he explicitly says that at the end of this, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Okay, I'm just thinking about the theological and political implications of this belief structure, and it's not good.

Yeah, you can almost feel exactly where he's going. Yeah. Because he's not subtle. Mm-mm. So the second point that he's trying to start building here was at the beginning of that clip, which is that Joel believes that it's every person's responsibility to figure out about God and Jesus, and that it's impossible to be truly ignorant. I watched a one-hour-long video of him rambling about whether or not a person living in a remote, uncontacted village would go to hell if they didn't accept Jesus, even though they'd never heard the good word. Joel's argument was that if a person was a truly good person and they wanted to hear about God, God would have sent a missionary.

So it's a moot point. It's impossible for this to happen.

Okay, now I need to know where he went to seminary because this has been addressed. If he received any kind of education, he would have heard of Karl Rahner's Anonymous Christian. A concept exists for this.

And I think it's an interesting hypothetical thing to discuss because But instead of actually engaging with that in a way that deals with faith, whether appealing to, you know, that source or having his own take on it, he just kind of relies on magic. It's like, if that person was good, God would save them. God would have sent a missionary. So it's impossible. Like, this is child shit.

It is.

It's a little, it's juvenile. That's what I'm saying. Like, I'm curious what sort of formal education he has in theology because this is very childish.

Yeah, he went, what was the name of the... The math class that dude was in. He went to the seminary version of remedial math.

Was it like math for everyday life or something?

Yeah, yeah. Religious fundamentalism for everyday. Applied religious fundamentalism.

Don't apply it, please, Joel.

I hated that I watched that video, but it helped me understand this doctrinal point that he has, which is that by default, no one has any excuse for not being a Christian. Because you see the trees and lakes and all that wonderful shit that he created, you know God is good. Because you see the terrible stuff that happens to sinners, you know God is real, even if you've never heard a single religious word in your life.

This is a great position for an extremist to hold because it provides preemptive permission for you to treat everyone who disagrees with you as a heretic. No one can possibly.

If you don't already agree with me, it's because God doesn't want you to because you're evil.

And or maybe both, but also who cares? You are choosing to give God the finger.

God has excluded you.

Because you gave him the finger or something. It's such a like a defining way to look at like outgroups. It makes an entire like it's such a simplistic way of looking at in and out.

And it's a bizarre and impossible position to hold. As a pastor of an evangelical religion, babe, maybe you are the missionary, right? If God wanted you to hear the word, he would have sent a missionary. You're a pastor, Joel. Maybe it's you.

Yeah, maybe you're failing in saving someone by doing this bullshit sermon.

You can't believe all of these things at the same time unless you're just looking, you're picking and choosing reasons to count people out.

I think he might be doing that.

Yeah.

So we get to this next clip and Joel talks a little bit about how that idea that you can't possibly be separated from God. Like it's just not even impossible, even in hell.

Apart from salvation by grace alone, through faith alone and Christ alone, the ultimate punishment.

For sin is hell.

Eternity underneath the just wrath of God. Hell is not hell because it's A place where there's an absence of the presence of God. This is important for us to understand, to have a biblical theology of hell. Hell is not hell because God's not there. Hell is hell because God is there, but he is there in his wrath, in his justice, in his judgment of the sinner.

The crying baby really, really brings this home. It's so good.

Crying baby and the fact that he's yelling over the crying baby like it's a heckler. It's just a bad vibe.

I'm trying to tell you about hell.

God's there and he's pissed.

God hates this baby.

I look, I am very tolerant and I respect people having religious beliefs, even if like, you know, probably some amount of stuff comes down to an irrational belief. I don't think that's a problem. I don't care. But this sucks.

As long as you're not making it other people's problem. You can believe a lot of things as long as you don't make it my problem.

Yeah, I think it's wonderful, but this sucks. Like, this kind of idea, really, I can't get down with because, like, how's God not the devil then? Like, right? He's both. He's everything.

I mean, maybe this is childish to even be hung up on at this point because we know what kind of man this is, but it just bums me out that this man is presenting himself as a Christian pastor, and his core belief here seems to be that God just hates some of you fuckers. God just actually hates some of you guys. And I don't think that's good.

I don't think that's a good representation of what he is purporting to believe.

This is where it comes back to that idea that it's everyone's responsibility to, like, find God and shit. And that, like, yeah, God does hate some of you, but it's your fault. You did it.

That sucks. Yeah.

Yeah, you saw trees and stuff and you didn't decide to, you know, worship God. So therefore he hates you. That's fine. I can't handle it. Cause like, I think that this conception turns life into a pointless game. And there's like someone like Joel and the people in his space and in this, in this world, they love to yell about like, There being a battle between good and evil, but there can't be. If hell is God in his vengeance form and heaven is him super chill, there isn't a battle between good and evil.

No, it seems like God's just kind of picking and choosing and we're not really part of that.

Yeah, the best place in the world and the worst place in the world are like, how does God feel?

It's a one party system.

Yeah, I don't dig that. I don't like it.

And again, what I keep coming back to is if the theology you are preaching to your congregation is that God hates some people, the natural next step is you have to hate them too. And anything you do to them is justified because they exist outside of God's love. That sucks. That's eliminationist. This is pre-genocide.

And their existence and the fact that they're all over the place is proof of God's judgment. So, you know, you let it get worse. We're going to turn into Sodom and Gomorrah.

Wouldn't God be happier if those people all died?

I mean, that's one way. There's multiple solutions to this problem, but yeah, that's one of them.

But this sounds like it leads to violence.

Yep, yep, yep. But it's deserved.

Of course.

And the reason that it's deserved is because everyone who is not a Christian is in a form of moral rebellion.

Bad anthropology, a wrong anthropology, but it's common with people today, and common even in evangelical churches today.

A wrong anthropology says this.

It says that people are intellectually ignorant of the truths of God, and because they're ignorant, they therefore, in their ignorance, choose to rebel.

But that's not what the Bible says.

The Bible doesn't say that the intellectual problem is fundamental. No. And then the corresponding problem, right, that the root problem is intellectual ignorance. And then the fruit problem is moral rebellion. No, the Bible says precisely the opposite. The Bible says that the root problem is not intellectual ignorance, but moral rebellion.

It is that man is rebellious towards God.

And so because he's rebellious towards God, he gives way to progressive degrees of ignorance, right? What Romans says is this, that what man does is that he knows there's a God because God has revealed himself to all people, not just Christian people, but all people. But what those who are not Christians, and that includes you and me before Jesus.

Saved us, by the way, we were no different. We were once enemies of God.

But what non-Christian people do is they take this revelation of God's existence, God's nature, His divine power, His eternal nature, is what Romans 1 says. We take this reality of God, the knowledge of God, and what we do.

Is we suppress it in deeds of unrighteousness.

So it's not that we don't know that there even is a God or that he even exists.

And because we don't know, we can't help but rebel because we're simply acting out of ignorance, right?

We're doing things that, yeah, God considers to be rebellious, but we didn't know he considered those things to be lawless because we didn't even know he had a law. We didn't even know he existed. No, that's not what the Bible teaches. The Bible says, you know there's a God. you know at least some degree, some aspect of his character, his nature, but what the non-Christian does, the unbeliever, what they do with that knowledge is that they suppress it.

Doug Wilson has used the illustration of the non-Christian, it's the equivalent of being in a swimming pool and having a beach ball and trying to hold it underneath the surface.

Of the water.

And what we do as Christians, and we do this in a loving way, but what we do is we just kind of kind of poke their arms a little.

Bit and say, what you got there? What you got there? What you got? And make that ball just pop up to the surface.

Right?

You know there's a beach ball. There is no beach ball.

It's like, really?

Because the vein in your forehead is popping out right now. Your face is red.

Like, it seems like you're giving it everything you got to hold that beach ball underneath the water.

I can't remember what's going on.

Beach balls.

There's multiple children screaming at this point.

Yeah, no, and it's throughout and very distracting.

And he's talking about like the vein in your forehead while you try to keep the beach ball. I could hear the vein in his forehead.

Yeah, you could hear the sweat on his face. And like he's bombing in front of babies. It's just, it's rough.

And who is he preaching to? He's not preaching to the people in front of him. You know what I mean? Like he's not saying anything to these people that is, meaningful to them this sunday morning he's i guess he's preaching to the webcam and you can kind of hear it i.

Think a lot of it is preaching to the webcam but then there is an element of it that is preaching to these people sort of and i think it takes a little while to develop but i think ultimately what we're going to get around to is his servant to them is that they've been way too nice to people they've been too tolerant in the past.

That's exactly what the Bible says.

Yeah, yeah. And he's trying to argue that these other people, like gay people you see in public, they're enemies of God. And so you shouldn't treat these people with compassion. Everyone who's not like us should be seen with hostility. That's the message he wants to get home to the choir that he's preaching to. Not that, like, you know, being faithless is bad. They already know that.

That you should just be meaner to strangers. Yeah, that lesson appears many times in the Bible. When the Samaritan was walking down the street and he saw the traveler beaten by the side of the road, he just gave him a good kick.

Well, you know, yeah, you see the guy. He didn't get kicked out. He's not down there for no reason.

Right. That bad thing wouldn't have happened to him if God didn't hate him. So you should just kick him and keep walking.

What's the safest thing to do? Honestly, in this world, in this economy, are you kidding me? Kick the guy. So I have another theory here though. And that is that I think that Joel just wants a rationalization to metaphorically poke people in the pool. I don't think that there are beach balls that people are holding as evidenced by the fact that it's, he doesn't have a hundred percent batting average with poking people. And then a beach ball appearing like, He just likes being an asshole, and this is the way that he rationalizes it. That's fine, but it seems counterproductive.

The beach ball thing wasn't a great metaphor.

But it was from Doug, your boy Doug.

Oh, right, it was from Doug. Again, you know, these people need to go to a proper institution to receive their theological training because I just, I don't know. I think maybe another semester of homiletics. This is just not good.

I will say Romans about beach balls. Is that in the Bible? Does God ever take on thou shalt inflate?

I mean, the Roman Empire was huge. There was a lot of beach.

But I think it might have been pre-Rub. Oh, but you could have had like animal hide.

Or like a goat bladder you could probably use as a beach ball.

Yep. Yep. That's probably in one of the apocryphal texts. Something about that.

It's in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Yeah.

So in this next clip, you know, I think that you're making a really good point that There's some problem with education, and you start to see a little bit of that here.

What you believe absolutely meticulously dictates what you worship. What you believe, your beliefs, dictate your worship. And that's all, for the record, that's all culture is. Culture, it comes from the Latin word cultus, which is worship.

That's all it is. When we say, man, the culture's bad. What you should think, that's true.

But what you should think when we say that, the culture's bad, is we should say, this is idolatrous, pagan worship.

This people.

This nation, this society, they have pagan worship. The culture's bad? That means the worship is bad. And the worship is bad because the belief system is bad. They believe a lie instead of the truth, and they exchanged it.

Notice, that's willful. It's not just, we were.

Born ignorant, we can't help ourselves, it's not our fault. No, it is a willful, knowledgeable exchanging.

Dumb guys doing etymology tricks like, oh, this comes from this word. Therefore, these things are inextricably linked forever on a deeper, meaningful level. That's my favorite dumb guy trick. I love that shit.

Be really careful whenever anybody tries to whip something like that out because they're usually full of shit.

But even words that are etymologically related, that doesn't mean they have the same concept today. Right.

No, no. There's been a long history of words since the time of, like, Latin. And, like, the meaning of the root word that he's talking about is closer to, like, cultivation in the, like, agricultural sense. It wasn't until the 1800s before the word took the meaning that we understand it today in terms of, like, culture. And it was in the sense of being, like, a cultivation of the interests of a human mind. Like, having culture or being cultured was to have cultivated education and expertise in, like, these high-minded subjects. It's not about worship. But, yeah, I mean, the word cult is close.

That's why they don't believe in the germ theory of disease, because if you have to culture the bacteria to find out what's wrong with you, you're worshiping disease? I don't know.

That seems sketchy to me. But then here's the other thing. The word cult also has more to do with cultivation, too. Like it's a cult leader cultivating a group of people. Like it has more to do with that root of the Latin as opposed to like a worship kind of sense. So I don't know. He sounds dumb.

The dumb guy etymology thing is like it's right up there with fake Thomas Jefferson quotes for me. Like those are just the hallmark of a speech that's going places.

Yeah.

To me, it's the hallmark of someone who takes in information probably by memes. You know, like that to me, it's something that they heard and then they just like, oh, yeah, it's cool. I'm not going to check. It's not learning. It's repetition. Yeah. So in order to make the point that he's trying to make in that clip, I think that Joel has basically refined the idea of worship down to something that doesn't mean anything. Believing in God doesn't necessarily translate to a person worshiping God in the same way that believing in evolution doesn't translate to someone becoming a science worshiper. He's engaged in this semantic game that only really works on some people because he's yelling a lot and he repeats himself constantly like an angry hypnosis tape.

But I don't think that he's bridged these gaps conceptually.

It's not a positive message. I'm just not getting a lot out of this. I would not enjoy this sermon. I would probably not return to this church.

I will say it heats up. It does. The back end of it is a little bit more interesting for our purposes.

It just takes a minute to get his stride.

Yeah. And I would have just glossed over a lot of it, but I feel like it's not fair to not present like these are the ideas that he's setting out in advance. Otherwise, I probably would have skipped over a whole lot of this shit. He is a snooze.

You got to slide into the pool where the beach balls are.

Right, right. There's going to be some big old beach balls in a bit. So I think one of the reasons that this, you're saying, what is this for the audience, for the people who are there at the church? And I think this next clip gets into a little bit of that, which is like, you live in the world, and the world is being judged by God. So this is going to be bad for you.

Now you might think the final result of a society that's in rebellion, corporate rebellion against God, that the final result would just be like a high degree of perversion.

And we see some of that.

But can I submit to you, brothers and sisters, for your prayerful consideration, that the worst thing going on right now in our nation is not just that something like Drag Queen Story Hour is taking place. but that there is a large swath of society that thinks it's okay. The final result, the pinnacle of this progression of being handed over by God further and further to deeper and deeper degrees of our own sin, which is its own punishment, The final degree is not just some really.

Warped, terrible form of perversion.

No, the final degree is the general societal approval.

That's the problem.

So that's the problem. You can't live in a world where people are tolerant. You must force intolerance around or else, like, we're tolerant. That's bad.

So many problems would be solved if guys like this just learned to mind their own fucking business. You know, police your own congregation. I guess that's up to you guys. You're free associating with one another.

That's fine.

But just mind your own fucking business, dude. Just calm down.

He can't because God is judging us based on the fact that there are things he doesn't like around.

It just seems like he's trying to exert a lot of control over shit that's just not within his control and he should just give that up to God.

I do think that it's ironic that this is a sermon on pride.

Yeah, just, it seems like if you've already decided that, you know, God has picked and choosed who's going to be a sinner and who's going to be punished, like, what are you going to do about it? It seems like you should just let that go.

Oh, God commands us to be mean.

Where's that in the book? Show me in the book, Joel.

We've read everything we need from the book already. This is all exegesis now. This is all playing around.

Yikes. Oh, yeah, we haven't even gotten to the sexual stuff. I'm excited to see where we're going here.

So obviously, like, he has this sense that he's trying to impart onto the audience and the congregation that they should be meaner and they should judge people more. And He expounds on this by talking about how he believes that shame is good. He misses shame.

And that gets to the title that I've selected for this sermon.

Now, I didn't come up with this. This is actually the title of a book.

It's a great book by Tim Bailey, The Grace of Shame, dealing with the issue of homosexuality. And I wanted to use the title for the sermon because it's great. And the concept is basically this. Shame is a grace. So long as it's the right amount of shame at the right time for the right things.

He should be ashamed.

The right amount of shame, shame in the right degree, at the right time for the right things.

Shame in that instance is good. It's good.

But in the name of a misguided empathy, in the name of a twisting of.

Compassion, Christians... Especially, not.

Just this includes Christians, but I would say even more so in some sense, Christians, they fell hook, line, and sinker for the lie of not wanting to shame people. We have the gospel of grace. We don't want to shame people. That's not what God does. No, that is exactly what God does.

That's what God does. Shames people. Shame!

I'm not a biblical scholar, but my understanding is the first time someone experiences shame in the Bible, it was right after original sin, when Adam and Eve were ashamed of having sinned and they hid from God.

Yeah, he's going to talk about that.

And I just, okay. I just think, I think he's reading it wrong.

You do too. I think the fact that, you know, you bring that up and he does too, but I mean, spoiler alert for a little bit later in the episode, I think he thinks it's good. I think that the shame is good.

No, they were hiding from God and God was looking for them because he wanted to return to unity with them because he did not like that they were ashamed and hiding from him. God didn't like that.

Well, he was also only looking for Adam because Eve is a woman.

Sure.

So there's that. We need to set straight real right off the bat.

When they were hiding in their shame, he came looking for them.

They were only ashamed because he was looking for them. And I think that that's an important point also. Look, he's wrong about all sorts of things, but we're slightly ahead of this.

Yeah, it just breaks my heart that people think that this means anything. This man is just crazy.

Yeah. And it's not about religion. It's about something else entirely. Like the problem that I have with him is the same that I would have about like Pat Robertson. It's not about religion. I don't care about your religion.

Yeah, he has like a political and social and cultural commentary here that he is using a religious framework for, but he is so badly bending that framework to get this message into it.

Yeah.

It sucks.

Yeah, if you wanted to like, have that political and social framework and use different verses, you would. Or, you know, like, it's all very forced. But even if Joel is right about God loving to shame people and this idea that shame is grace, the next verse in Romans 2, right after where he stopped reading, is, quote, you therefore have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you're condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things. Hmm.

Maybe he didn't read the next one.

He's not going to get to that till next week.

He hasn't gotten Paul's second letter yet. It's in the mail.

In psychological circles, there's an important distinction between shame and guilt, where one is an understandable and healthy thing and the other is dangerous. Shame is dangerous because it's a negative feeling about who you are, as opposed to guilt, which is a negative feeling about something you've done. It's healthy and productive to feel bad about bad things you've done because it helps you learn and correct behaviors in the future.

Feeling shame about who you are, on the other hand, is a dead end. For people just trying to live their lives and be better humans, shame is unhelpful because you can't really change who you are all that much. You can change some behaviors and that can have ripple effects on your personality, but to put it bluntly, you can't pray the gay away. Feeling shame about who you are is only going to make you miserable unless you can find someone who promises to be able to help you change who you are, which is where Joel and his ilk make a lot of their money. Joel wants to encourage shame because it's unhealthy and because it leads people to follow extreme religious leaders who promise that if you just do what they say, you'll be changed and

you won't have to feel that shame anymore. It's a trap, and I think everyone understands You know, we'd be better off if this was treated as the trap that it is. It's a scam.

It's a nasty thing.

It's a nasty business. And it's not the religion. That's the part that's so essential, is that, like, the trap of it isn't religion. It's not even believing that, like, humanity is sinful or anything like that. It's not that. It's what he's packing on top of it.

And it's sloppy and a historical interpretation of the passage, too. I don't know if you have this in your framework here, but there is a way of interpreting this particular letter of Paul that he's talking about pederasty and temple prostitution, right? These disgusting sexual acts that Paul is describing in this letter to the Romans. So temple prostitution was the common practice in, you know, in the Greco-Roman world where there were, there were grotesque sexual acts being done in the name of pagan worship in these temples. And that may be what is being described here. And then, you know, in, The Greco-Roman world, there was no– the modern conception of like a homosexual relationship, a homosexual identity, right, someone identifying

as a person who is gay and has a loving gay relationship, that's very modern. And the homosexuality they would be talking about when Paul was alive is pederasty.

Yeah.

And Greeks loved having a little boy they fucked. We're talking about an abusive relationship with a child. And that is wrong. That is bad.

That interpretation of the text is entirely possibly the more accurate way to look at it.

It's more historically grounded.

I was choosing to give him the most benefit of the doubt and pretend that it's actually, like, interpretable the way that he's talking about because I still think the argument fails.

There were not women in first century Rome living in open lesbian relationships. Like, they're talking about temple prostitution.

Yeah, there wasn't civil unions.

No, no. We're talking about, like, sex trafficking and fucking kids. And those things are wrong. And I don't know that he agrees with that.

Hey, I mean, let's, I don't know. I haven't watched enough of his sermons. I've watched enough of his sermons. I think he would definitely at least say he's against it. I don't know.

Sure.

But there's a lot of sexual abuse going on in the tiny theocratic nation Doug Wilson runs in Idaho.

Oh.

Oh, yeah, there is.

No, I don't believe it. So you brought up the Garden of Eden and the idea that original sin was where the first shame was. And I told you that was coming up. And here is our guy discussing that.

When Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they knew. Their eyes in that moment were opened up. They knew that they had sinned. But if you look at the text, what happens? All of a sudden, they hear the footsteps of God. And that's when they hide. And after God calling out for the man as the head of his wife, The one who sinned with his eyes wide open.

The one who should have known better. The one ultimately responsible. When God called out, Adam, where are you? To the man.

And he answered, here I am. And God says, why did you hide? Because we were naked and ashamed. And God doesn't correct him. God doesn't say, oh, sweetheart, you shouldn't have any shame. This is the Garden of Eden. It's a shame-free zone. This is a safe space. There's no shame here. No, look, what I'm saying is this.

The presence of God brought an increase in shame. They ate the fruit. They disobeyed. They rebelled. They sinned. And they knew that they had messed up. But then a second thing happened.

It's not just they ate the fruit and immediately were fully ashamed.

They ate the fruit and then they heard God coming.

And as they heard the presence of God coming, there was a horrid sense of shame. They could do no other but run and hide. And what God does, notice, this is the gospel. What God does for sinners who are ashamed is He does not falsely assure them in their sin and say that they have nothing to be ashamed about. No, what God does is he doesn't say that shame shouldn't exist. He says this shame is good and right. But then he deals with it. And he covers shame. He doesn't insist that shame should be non-existent.

What the gospel does is it doesn't create a shame-free zone. What the gospel does is it provides a place where shame is covered. And it's covered just like it was in the garden by blood. That's the only way that shame can be dealt with. Because shame is real. And we should quit pretending like it's not.

Okay, if he's comparing Adam and Eve becoming clothed in the garden with covering shame in blood... He's saying we've already dealt with it, right? Because this sort of comparison, these Old Testament, New Testament sort of fulfillment rhetorical device. Yeah, he's talking about the blood of Christ. So if that's the case, we're all set, Joel. We're all set. If we've covered our shame in the blood of Christ, we're good.

We're good.

I do think that it appears to be a solved problem.

Yeah.

All right.

Good. So what did you think about the soft bigotry of diminished expectations that he has towards Eve?

Well, that's to be expected.

You got no expectation that she do the right thing. Come on.

I mean, the man is the head of the household. He is responsible for the women's sins.

Sure.

I expect that from Joel. I'm just.

I watched a really long video that he did about whether or not women should cover their head in church. And I'm not sure what his position is. I think it's yes. I think he thinks they should. That women should always cover their heads.

I wish we could get some crowd shots of the congregation. I want to know if the women are veiling in Joel's church. Is that a common practice? What is he, like, non-denominational, like, whatever? Is veiling a common practice outside of Catholicism?

Calvinist? I think that's about what they would describe themselves as. On their website, they, you know, they say that they adhere to the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed. And then they affirm the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession of Faith. So there is a Baptist element.

I don't know that one.

They're all fairly similar. There's just little minutia that they... I don't know.

So he's Baptist. Do Baptists cover their hair? I mean, I've not been to a Baptist church in many years since maybe like a sleepover in childhood at a Baptist friend's house. But like, are they covering their hair? I thought that was more of a Catholic thing. And even there, it's not common. And a Baptist also.

I think that he has a fair amount of interest in some of those like splinter. Like, I think that that second London Baptist confession of faith has more respect or more Like there's a similarity to like pilgrim kind of religions. And so I don't know. I think he does like people to cover their head. That was the sense that I got from the video I watched.

But probably not out of some sort of sincere religious conviction and more like, I just love, I love making women do something. I like making them do it.

What I recall from it is like the man is the head of the woman and the hair is on her head. And so there should be a covering on the head of that.

So you should wear your husband as a hat.

Yes, wear your husband as a hat. Because it's disrespectful to God otherwise. Oh, troubling. So here's the other question that I think I would really like Joel's answer on. And that is, did God want Adam and Eve to eat from the tree or not? I don't know if you'd be able to answer that.

I think Joel is really struggling, as I think as many Protestants do, with biblical literalism.

Yeah, yeah.

You know?

It's tough. Metaphors....

Biblical literalism. Not even once. Not even once, man.

So if we ask him, if we were to pose him this question, like, did God want Adam and Eve to eat from the tree? It opens up a really weird kind of world for us to live in.

Does God want us to sin?

Right. Prior to eating from the tree, shame didn't exist. They were unaware of their nudity and they were the only humans who existed. So there's not like a social taboo towards wearing clothes. The primary and ostensibly perfect state God created for Adam and Eve did not include shame, which was only introduced because they ate from the tree against God's command. But according to Joel, what did God want them to do? If he really didn't want them to eat from that tree, then he could have not had it in the garden. God's not an idiot, so the only real explanation that makes sense is that he knew full well that they were going to eat from that tree. He created humans, so if he wanted to make them perfectly able to resist the serpent's temptations, it

seems like he could have. But instead, he made them weak and corruptible. What I'm saying is that I'd like to ask Joel if he believes that there's a possible reality where Adam and Eve successfully avoided eating from the tree. I want to know if he thinks that could have happened. And here's a little spoiler. Either way, free will is screwed.

We're in a world where not everything is determined either way.

So you're saying his worldview has some holes in it, some logical, some logical holes.

You know how, like, if you break down a box the wrong way and then you try to put it in a trash bag, you'll tear the bag. But if you are more careful, you can get the box into the bag. I think that he has not broken this down well, and it's tearing the back.

He's tearing the trash bag. See, I think of us as like God's dog, right? Like, I wish my dog was obedient. It would be great if my dog always did the right thing that I want him to do. But if I leave a block of cheese on my coffee table, the dog is going to eat the cheese, and that's kind of on me.

And even if the dog understood your words in English and you said, don't eat this cheese, it's still your fault.

He's just a dog. He's just a dog, you know?

You didn't create the dog. You created the dog.

It would be great if the dog always obeyed, but He's not gonna. And I love him anyway.

Yeah. And I think that that love anyway is something that's absent from this, this kind of weird conversation and this weird relationship that Joel has with the divine. And I don't connect with it at all.

It's very adversarial.

Much like me in a stand-up audience. Or Joel and a baby.

Joel and that baby. He's going to fight that baby after church.

It looks like he wants to. And I wouldn't fault him. That baby was being needlessly disrupted.

He's going to dash the infant on the rocks.

Yeah. So here's the issue. There is going to be shame. We're going to have shame one way or another. It's just about what are we going to feel shame about?

There will be shame.

The question is not, will there be shame at all? The question is, what will this society be ashamed about?

And right now, the shift that we're.

Experiencing is that we're beginning to feel a sense of shame for the truth. Shame for being a Christian. Shame for being a man. Shame for being white. Shame for this. Shame for that. We want to make shame great again.

Fuck you!

We do.

No.

Sorry. What?

What? This is such a hostile reaction to a good Christian man.

Oh, my God.

They want to make you ashamed to be white and, uh, man.

Man? What the fuck, dude?

Absolutely.

No.

No, no, no, no, no.

No.

No?

Isn't this weird? I mean, I know we're only getting clips, but, um, I don't think he's mentioned Jesus Christ, which is weird for a sermon.

I bet he did. I bet he did at some point.

Okay.

It comes up. He has re-brought up Romans a couple times in ways that are kind of just repetitious, so I didn't include all of them.

I'm forgetting sometimes that this is a sermon like in a Christian church because it's a little weird.

It's a lot of beach balls and shame and pain.

Make shame great again? What are you— talking about i guess he's saying like they're trying to make us ashamed to be white we're gonna we're gonna make shame great again we're gonna wear that as a badge of honor we're gonna become negatively polarized like what are you talking about i think.

It's a little worse than that but i also think i disagree strongly with joel's points that there needs to be shame or that there will automatically be i think that's just wrong people should feel guilt about the things that they've done that are bad and seek to process those feelings they should feel responsibility not to carry on in ways that hurt the other people around them, but shame is unnecessary. It does not serve a productive purpose.

I think what's really interesting here is that Joel clearly understands this and gets that shame is a collectively created phenomenon. Without a group, there is no shame. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve didn't feel shame until God showed up. It's by definition a feeling that's imposed on you by external parties or the fear of what external parties will think about you. At the core of Joel's argument, what he's saying is that Christians should weaponize shame and mold secular culture in accordance with their views. Shame is just the negative feeling of not living up to an externally imposed standard, so he thinks that Christians need to get really aggressive about imposing that standard. They need to

get back in control of what people should be ashamed to be or feel. And he has a little bit of a giveaway there with the list of things he feels like people are ashamed about now, like being Christian, white, and male. That list is interesting. He's being persecuted. Well, certainly these are all categories he falls into. That's certainly not a coincidence. But it's interesting also because we definitely know that he thinks people should be ashamed to not be Christians. So the situation he's describing is the inverse of what he wants. We also know that he basically hates women and thinks that they should be ashamed of being women. So that's another inverse. And that kind of makes you think that Joel believes that people should be

ashamed if they're not white. Otherwise, that list is a little bit weird. I don't know why white is included in there unless there is a racial shame that some people should feel. Yeah, yeah.

That's when you put it that way. This is troubling stuff.

There's implications in a lot of this that I don't think is a coincidence. I don't think it's an accident, you know?

I can't, I wish we were getting some crowd shots. I know a lot of these, like when megachurches put their sermons on YouTube, there's like a whole camera crew. You're getting panning out and zooming in, different angles. Like, I want to see the crowd. What do these people look like? Where is his church? Is it in Arizona?

No, it's in Texas. It's outside Austin. That's why Harrison can work there.

Oh, right, because he's got two jobs.

The only shot that I saw of the audience is like when he's reading, the people stand up and there's like three heads in the shot. I don't know if that's indicative of how large the audience is or if it's, you know.

I mean, two of them are screaming babies.

So there's four people there at least because the babies didn't stand up. That's for sure. Anyway, we need shame.

We're going to make it great.

And Joel, he has a plan for a great kind of shame.

The expression, for instance, you know, the closet. That's actually a good thing.

No.

That's a good thing. I believe that doesn't mean that everyone in that society.

Right.

So when the closet was great in America.

It was great.

Which I'd like to see it be great again. When the closet was great in America, not that long ago.

I'm going to shove you in a closet.

That didn't mean.

Everyone in America was a regenerate born again Christian. But that meant that in general, that America in its culture, its general culture, that is culture, cultist worship, in its general worship, because America had.

The right God, there were bugs, but there were features as well.

And the features were that we had the right God, the triune God, and so we had a right worship. Right beliefs, not exchanging the truth for a lie, therefore right worship, not exchanging the creator for the creature. And because we have the right beliefs and the right worship in general, in a general sense, the right culture, then those who were against God were the ones who felt ashamed.

That's a really interesting line of thinking. And I think you are visually very against that line of thinking. You look angry.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm angry. He's like, remember when everyone used to be super homophobic? That shit rocked.

That's when the closet was great.

Okay, then just move to Doug Wilson's little town that he controls, if that's what you like. Like, he does have a tiny, like, weird Christian nationalist fiefdom. You can just move to Moscow, Idaho.

And he'd have to be subservient to Doug, and if he creates his own little town, then he can be the Doug. So, like, everyone's got to make their own little Dugs. Little Doug towns.

We can't all be Hitler, Joel.

It's true.

That's the problem in so many right-wing movements is too many Führers. Everybody wants to be Hitler. Nobody wants to be subservient to Doug.

Well, I think that they create a kind of scenario where there's only one safe place to be, and that is the Führer. And so everyone kind of wants to be him because everyone else is really in jeopardy.

Because even if you're number two, you're purgeable, baby.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. But I also I think that him talking about this, like the closet stuff, it really reveals that he doesn't care at all about what he thinks is sin.

He doesn't want these people to to reunite with God or stop sinning or whatever. Like he doesn't care about the subjective experience of these people he believes to be separated from God, to be sinners. He doesn't want to save them. He just doesn't want to see them. And I think, you know, wanting to save them, I think it would still be sort of a negative worldview. Obviously, I think that's an antisocial worldview to want to save these people to try to convert them. That would be bad.

But he's giving up the game here. He's not even pretending he wants to save their souls. He just doesn't want to fucking look at them.

Wanting to save everyone is kind of antisocial, but with like a tinge of compassion.

You can at least pretend you mean well.

Yeah.

It ends up being harmful, but you can pretend you meant it well.

This is just like, hey, I don't want to see your shit. Get in the closet. We're going to create an inhospitable space because you being in public means God's judging us.

God can see them if they're inside.

No, he can't. No, he can't. If they're in the closet, who cares? We're fine. God will just, like, move along.

What?

How powerful does he think God is or isn't? What does he think God can and cannot do?

Well, because of his reading of Romans, he's saying that, like, these gay people existing, bad. Them being in public, that's a sign that shit's getting a little really bad. But everyone being fine with them being in public, that's the third stage or the fourth stage of this. That's the escalation.

His God sounds weak. His God sounds weak.

Well, if you just hide stuff from God, you know what it feels like? It feels like a parent. You know, like, it feels like if we can just hide our weed from our parents, then we're not going to get in trouble for smoking.

If you think hiding these sinners from God is the correct answer, you need to reread Genesis because I don't think you understood the story.

Probably not. But it reveals an unseriousness that I think he's engaging with all this in.

Right, because he's not actually trying to do biblical exegesis. He just doesn't want gay people to exist in public. And so he's using this framework very poorly because he thinks it is a powerful tool in this argument. And it's just not.

Not. And I think he also accidentally gives up a lot of other games that he's playing, like this one.

And those who are with God, they could have been hypocrites. Many of them were.

Again, I'm not saying everybody was a Christian. But there was a time not that long ago where even if you weren't a Christian, you better be on the roster at some First Baptist church downtown in your city or your business is going to hurt.

Right?

I mean, there are tangible, even economic benefits for at least wearing the label of Christ follower and being in good standing in a local Christ preaching church because that was the general sentiment.

So you're talking about the general belief.

And therefore general worship of America. And what I'm arguing is that that is a net positive. That's a good thing.

I don't think that he should think that.

Basically Christian racketeering that he's kind of advocating for. We got to have a little bit of a cosa nostra, but with God.

Your sincerity is irrelevant. God just wants us all to fake it.

Yeah, fake it if you want, but also let's make it so you can only do business if you're friends with me. It's really weird.

That's crazy, dog. I don't think you should admit that you think that.

No, it's upsetting. And it's also really upsetting to hear the kids crying in the background when he's like, everybody should play pretend so it all fits into my power fantasy.

My grandmother did tell me once that, you know, she's like, well, you know, we're Episcopalian, but that's just so the neighbors wouldn't think we were communists. So, yeah, I mean, he's on to something. That was kind of how it was, but I don't think that's good.

No, I think that anybody who was talking about that state of affairs is usually... talking about, like, a past that is not preferable.

She was talking about McCarthyism.

Yeah, yeah.

That has nothing to do with God.

When you're keeping up appearances and all that kind of shit, it's like, that is a sign that something is disordered or something is out of sync with the way that people are related with each other. If you have to fake things in order to get along with anybody, then there's an underlying problem. If you have to fake being Christian.

If you have to attend Joel's church in order to engage in commerce.

Mm-hmm.

I don't like the way that sounds.

It doesn't sound good. But we could just have, like, a nation full of fake Christians. Wouldn't that be better?

God would like that better.

And so I'd like to see America be Christian again, knowing that many will be Christian in word only, in name only.

That's crazy!

Just like there are Republicans in name only, there will be Christians in name only. But that still says something that is, there are negative effects, but it is a net positive. And one of the net positives, it comes from a general Christian culture. In a society at large, as a whole, one of the positives is this.

Shame, which is powerful, is directed rightly. That's one of the positives.

One of the positives, when a nation embraces Christ, even if only in name, only in word, one of the net positives is that shame, the gun, the weapon of shame, it is powerful, potent.

What?

It is a weapon.

The gun? But the positive is that that shame machine gun is targeting the right group.

He's pretty overt what is going on.

He's gonna point a machine gun at the gay people because they don't run christian businesses what.

Is going on and you women too like yeah sure it's not just one group there's a lot of groups that are gonna get.

Quick question in what way do we create a christian culture if everyone's just pretending to be christian what does he think any of those words mean or what that would functionally look like what is he.

Quick question joel Maybe it's just because of the gun of it all, but it makes me think of, like, Alex talking about how everyone was so polite back in the day because everyone might have a gun. And it's like, that's not real politeness.

When my mom was teaching me to drive, she told me that you should always drive politely because you never know who has a gun. And I think about that all the time, and it's been working for me, but it's not a great way to run a society.

And it's not— it' s not— It's not in connection with something spiritual.

Because I think having a Christian society, I would assume if I heard a Christian pastor say that, that they would be talking about like, we want a society where people are living by the values in the gospel or living by the word of Christ and that guides their thoughts and deeds.

Yeah.

And how they treat others. But if you're just a Christian in name only, so that you're allowed to access the Joel Webben system of commerce, I don't think that the gospels would be guiding your words and deeds. So in what way would that create a Christian society? I just, what is he talking?

You'd be lying, right? I mean, like you.

Would be saying your.

Entire life would be based around sin because lying is a sin.

That all sounds very sinful, Joel.

You have to pretend.

Did he read the book?

You have to pretend because otherwise I'm going to aim this machine gun at you. The machine gun of shame.

Yeah, I don't think threats of violence are how you guide people's behavior towards Christian values. I don't know that that's in there.

Here's an interesting argument that I'm going to make counter yours. Are we or are we not called to be godly?

At gunpoint, yeah, I guess. I guess if you.

Let's just start and say, like, should we aspire to be like God?

I don't... Like, Joel's God. His God sounds mean.

Well, look, I mean, like, God put Jonah in a whale.

Oh, God's mean. God's mean. And we should be godly, so we should be mean. We should punish each other by making hell on earth to punish each other.

I think if you see someone who disagrees with you and isn't doing what you want them to do, you should put them in a whale.

Yeah, you should just do Old Testament punishments to them. Because we should aspire to be godly, and that means enacting God's wrath here on Earth. Just make life a living hell for everyone. Just like God wants.

A to B to C.

It's perfect.

It makes sense.

Be really mean.

And I think we'll get to some specific prescriptions that Joel has here in a second. But he has to also lay into his argument this idea that no matter what, something like this is going to happen.

Every society has a reigning orthodoxy. What they deem as right thinking, right speech, right worship. Every society has orthodoxy. Anything outside of that orthodoxy is heresy. Any speech that's outside of that orthodoxy is blasphemy. The signs and seals and sacraments within that orthodoxy, whether it be abortion, whether it be pride month, it's all worship. It's not whether we will worship. It's which God will we worship. It's not whether we'll have sacraments. It's will it be bread and wine and water? Or will it be drag queen story hour in the blood of babies?

Wow.

It's not whether we have sacraments. Which ones will we have? Not whether there is an orthodoxy. Which one will we have? It's not whether we have blasphemy laws. But which blasphemy laws will we have?

The abortion thing was a good cover there because it makes it sound like he's talking about abortion and not doing blood libel. Nice save, Joel. Nice save.

Yeah, I think he's defensible there for now because who knows?

Who knows?

Could be talking about abortion. Yeah.

I'm going to fill Joel's house with bugs. If we're supposed to be godly, I think he's sinning right now. So I'm going to fill his house with locusts.

I say go for it. I was thinking about that. I don't think he can eat them based on biblical law. I don't think he can eat those bugs.

I don't know what he's going to do with them, but I'm going to put 10,000 of them in his house.

I support this decision. But, like, what he's doing is he's playing this game here where, like, he has an orthodoxy and that everything outside of it is heretical. And in order to justify that extreme position, he has to pretend that everybody else is the same. Like, he projects that onto the other side in a way that doesn't exist. Like, I'm sure you know, like, you have a broad number of friends and acquaintances and, like, I know a ton of people who are, like, you know, in the LGBTQ community and, like, They don't like pride parades. They think the like rainbow flag washing of corporations is bullshit.

You don't want to see the Lockheed Martin rainbow float?

Not really.

No.

Like there isn't a position that everyone is required to have about pride or any of that stuff in the way that he's pretending that there is. And the same thing is true about abortion. Like there's a lot of different positions people have. Right.

I mean, even among people who have had or are currently getting an abortion, you could pull 100 women who got an abortion today and they probably have different opinions about abortion.

Yeah. And there's tons of people who are staunchly like in favor of.

He wouldn't know shit about the differences of opinion within the gay community because he's never spoken to a gay person, at least not one that was out of the closet.

Oh, probably not. I think he's only yelled at one.

He's spoken at them for sure.

Yeah, yeah. I think that that's what creates the idea in his head that there is this orthodoxy is that just he doesn't care or engage at all. I just, I find it dull.

And he's applying religious framework to just like ways people are living their lives, that, you know, they're doing abortion as a sacrament instead of the blood of Christ. Like, that's not how anyone's approaching that. No one's approaching it that way. That's a crazy thing to say.

And I think that everybody who is interested in reproductive health care access and that being safe for people would look at somebody who was like, yeah, I'm doing this as a blood ritual as a fucking weirdo that you don't want to talk to.

Or like when people say that, like when Alex Jones talks to someone and they go, I'm a demon just to mess with him. And he's like, see, demons are real.

They're fucking with him. And I probably don't want to hang out with that troll either. Like they're not serious.

But it's like if someone did say they were getting an abortion as a sacrament, that's the person on the street telling Alex they're a demon. You know, it's a joke. It's a joke that you took seriously because you're a joke.

100% of the time, it's a joke. And in every other case, it's a person who is really fucked up. And even people who support abortion would think that they were really fucked up. But, like, Joel has to pretend that everyone is as immature about these ideas as him because it's the only way that his position doesn't look like real cuckoo land. And I think that that sucks.

He just can't mind his own business.

It just.

That's the core of all of this. Just mind your business. Mind your business. Let people live. It's not hurting you. I went to a funeral officiated by a witch this year. You know what? You just live and let live. Have a good time.

What fun. I bet it was probably more charismatic and a little bit better than this guy.

It was lovely.

Yeah. So he gets into how, like, you can't have a little bit of sin. Get a little bit, you're going to end up with a lot.

As a treat, just a little treat.

And in the name of compassion, in the name of empathy.

In a twisted sense, nominal Christians, not because of a faithful state, but faithless pastors, faithless preaching, nominal Christians, we went hook, line, and sinker. Say, well, yeah, the gospel is supposed to be a shame-free zone. Shame is inherently bad. We shouldn't have shame. It's not right that certain individuals in our society would feel ashamed. And so we let the L, the G, and the B come out of the closet, not recognizing that tethered to them was the T.

Oh, wow.

And then you can hear, as my friend Chuck Knox said, After the tea comes out, the faint growl, grumbling, growl.

Of that plus. I'm questioning. I'm asexual. It's not whether, but which.

You can't draw a line in the sand and say, we'll have a little.

Sin, God. Just a little.

It's a treat. Can't do it. No, it doesn't work that way. You can't do it.

So he's saying being non-binary is a worse sin than being gay. I mean, I don't know.

I think it's somewhere deeper in the closet, at the very least.

Because he said the LGB came first, but you can't just have a little sin.

And then the T came.

And then the plus.

The plus! The growling of the plus.

He said gror.

Yeah, he probably did. Look, he's dealing with some babies that are heckling the shit out of him, so... I'm going to let him have Gror.

Ooh, the growling rumble of the non-binary.

Yeah, it's a little silly. And I'd like to point out very clearly, Christians like Joel didn't let anyone come out of the closet. Those activists and communities fought and died for their right to live in public and will again if Joel and his ilk try to force people back into the closet. There's a reason that a lot of churches became more progressive and stopped being so uptight about gay people, and it was because if they didn't, people were going to stop coming. As a whole, and particularly the younger generation, the public didn't think someone being gay was a big deal. It felt kind of creepy to go to a church where a pastor was so focused on that. If you're just some straight married parent

going to a church, what use is it for you to the pastor to yell at you about gay people? It doesn't connect to anything that helps your spiritual growth journey and i i think that i think that joel doesn't appreciate the amount to which like it's just a market thing people don't want this this sucks.

Right i mean i guess he should understand the relationship between being a christian and an access to commerce right that run it like a business you can't have an unpopular viewpoint i guess.

You can maybe his ministry is a lost leader I don't know.

I mean, I guess it's like how the Mormons had to backtrack on whether Black people could be received in their temples.

Right. Yeah, we messed up on that one, guys.

You gotta come into the modern era. You gotta let gay people go to church. You gotta admit that Black people are fully human. Took them a while, the Mormons.

It's why religion, like, quite frankly, has existed as long as it has. Because it's adaptable to interpretations. And, like, You can have the absoluteness of the divinity within the changing times that, like, we live in.

That's why you can't get too attached to biblical literalism, because then you're really sort of frozen in time with a real old book.

Yeah. And you're not, actually. You're just pretending you are.

And it's a reflection of the values that we have. Right. Because values have changed. Society has changed. Cultures have changed.

Yeah.

And you can still have an immutable, powerful God and just admit that maybe you, as human beings, had it wrong before. And you can change your interpretation of this thing that you can still believe is immutable.

Yeah, you can believe it's immutable and you can also have the humility and the vulnerability to accept that in the same way that some past interpretation was wrong, some interpretation you have now might be wrong too. And that's okay. It's fine.

No, you should just point the gun of shame at people who disagree with you. That's God intended.

Yeah, or poke them until they give up that beach ball.

I gotta hear the beach ball thing again. I'm not sure I understood it.

You won't. Even if we play it again, it's not gonna help. So this next clip I thought was like, oh my God, this is Alex coded.

Notice, back to the text.

I'm gonna wrap it up.

I'm gonna skip forward here because I'm covering it. I don't always read my notes. Sometimes I just.

I say it, and if you go back and you read it, you'll say, yeah, he basically said that, all right? So I promise I'm covering what I've got in here.

Basically got to all the stories.

Is he new at this? I know that you said this video is a few years old, but how long has he been a pastor? This sounds very, like, he's nervous.

This is years into his YouTube channel. Yeah, he does seem a bit nervous. He's sweaty, and like I said, there's kids yelling. It's a hard stage situation.

No stage presence.

But that moment is so Alex Jones.

I got a thousand white papers.

I got to most of the desk. I got to most of the stories. Yeah. All right. Look, I did my job. It's fine. I love it.

It's sad.

So he gets back to shame and he does make a decent point in this clip, but it's not worth it.

Shame is something that has to be taught and it should be taught. Shame is a grace when it's shame at the right time for the right thing in the right measure.

Shame is a grace.

There should be a general sense in society that certain sin is not acceptable and that people have, they're deterred, right? So even people who love the sin at an individual level will not act it out publicly because there is a shame consequence attached to it. And that's why, just for the record, that's why June has been labeled Pride Month.

That's not a coincidence. Brothers and sisters, don't miss it. The reason why the word pride was selected is because people know innately, in their heart of hearts, because we're created in the image of God.

Because God has revealed.

Himself by the out point of His wrath and by natural revelation, what He has made. God has revealed to us in our consciences That certain things are wrong. Certain things are unnatural. Certain things are sinful. And those things which are sinful are also innately shameful. So what do you do if you're trying to override that sense of shame?

Well, you call it pride.

No. Makes sense.

No.

Mm-mm.

Oh.

Mm-mm. Maybe.

They're not calling it Pride Month to spit in God's face. They're calling it Pride Month to spit in your fucking face because you're the one pointing the gun of shame.

Yeah. Pride was chosen as a name to counter shame, but like not because it's a sin or.

Shame from people like him, not shame like. innate shame from god.

Yeah and to be clear the point that i think that he had that was correct was that shame has to be taught that was the only thing that i was saying that i i agree with because that that is.

True and that's why he's trying so hard to teach it to his congregation.

Yes and exacerbate it and make it worse.

And send them out and go forth and spread the bad news.

Go forth. Here's a machine gun.

Yeah, that sucks.

So earlier, Joel used the example of Adam and Eve in the garden as being shame. That's interesting because now he's saying that shame has to be taught. But I would argue... Right, who taught them? Yeah, they weren't taught, right?

It was kind of spontaneous for them.

They sinned by eating from the tree God told them not to eat from, and that made them aware of their nudity. God didn't teach them shame unless you interpret the act of eating from that tree as a proxy for Adam and Eve learning shame.

Well, I guess if it's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, eating the apple imparted upon them great knowledge, right?

Sure. No, I mean, you can do that, but it's... I mean.

If you're doing that kind of interpretation, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, if he's going all this literal way, then no, you can't do that. You can't learn by eating.

Maybe the snake whispered it to them.

Maybe.

But that's not in the book. That's not in the book.

But it creates a new problem, namely that God directly told them not to eat from that tree, and he created a perfect world for them to live in that didn't include shame. The original sin of eating from that tree is where the shame springs forth, So we either have to believe God didn't want Adam and Eve to experience shame or that he did want that and he was just fucking with them by telling them not to eat from the tree. If God did want humans to experience shame, then the temptation of the serpent was an inside job. And the image of evil was actually doing God's will by getting Eve to eat from the tree, right?

Those are the options here.

It really does open up some questions he's not answering.

You can't really answer. And I don't think you have to.

He ripped a hole in the bag. He ripped the hole in the bag.

You only get into trouble when you try to play games with this stuff in a way that is, I don't know, irresponsible and too literalist.

And he says it has to be taught. And I do agree with that on a societal level. It is, like you said, a reaction to external realities. But then he's also often saying that it is this innate thing. It is a built-in reaction to sin. So which is it?

I think both. He likes to say things are both when asked questions like that. And I think that it's an ingrained reaction that you good people have.

And we have to teach it to them.

Right. Right. Our actions must impose it upon them. I think that might be the way that he gets around that. But basically, I think that if you look at the, like, Adam and Eve thing, you're left with a situation where either God didn't want humans to experience shame, period. That was his intention. We aren't supposed to experience shame. But, like, his plans were foiled. Like, that's one possibility.

So he's not all powerful.

That's one way. And then the other way to look at it is an incoherent moral tale that, like, I just think I just think Joel, he doesn't have a good handle on a lot of this.

He's got to go back to basics. He needs to read some texts.

Yeah.

Because I don't think he's going to figure this out on his own. I think he needs to go read some theology before he tries to explain it to anyone else.

You should go fast.

Go do some penances.

Yeah.

Go into the desert, Joel.

I'm going to skip through a few clips here that I had cut because I think I can kind of just sum them up. And basically... He's saying that the state of evil in the world and the ills of the world is one part God judging the wicked and another part kind of being a nice dad to the church people and being like, hey, get it together. Get it together. The world is bad because he hates these people and because he's trying to get you to behave better.

If that makes sense.

I thought he said he wasn't going to do that anymore.

Nah, he's going to do that. God.

He was, like, pretty sad last time he destroyed the world. He said he was going to stop doing that.

Uh, yeah, sure. But, I mean, come on.

Oh, come on.

You see what's happening to these people who are being gay in public and stuff. And, like, that should be a sign to you that you need to repent because you've been being too nice.

No, a lot of those gay people seem really happy. That's awesome. Meh. They're not suffering God's wrath. They're just kind of chilling.

So they think.

But that's why we need to become the instrument of God's wrath in this world, kind of out of our own accord.

Yeah.

Because we know better than God.

We must put the self in self-fulfilling prophecy here. This is the key.

I think this guy's doing a variety of heresies and blasphemies.

Yeah, yeah, no shit. And there's some more. There's some more coming that are pretty bad. But... So Joel breaks with his Christian nationalist friends in a slight distinction that he has. And that is that he thinks that all of them are too locked in the idea that the power structure will never listen to them. Like they all have this kind of doom idea that they'll reach and there'll be profits and then the government won't listen. But he is like, what if they do?

What if it works for us?

So he wants to be ready just in case.

And so what I'm trying to do in going one step further is I'm saying, yeah, let's preach. Yeah, let's train up our kids in the paideia of the Lord. Let's plant churches. Let's start businesses. But let's also get involved in culture and in politics. And let's cry out to those in positions of civil leadership.

And let's expect.

That God is so merciful that maybe, just maybe, in the mercy of God, they might listen. And that the civil magistrate, after hearing the preaching of the church, might turn.

To us one day and say, I believe. How then should we live? And at that point, I want to have an answer. I want to be able to say, I'm glad you asked. Praise God.

I know how you should live. I know how you should govern. I know how you should legislate. Because the good news is that God wrote a book.

But you obviously haven't fucking read.

Well, I've drafted up some legislation based on things that I think are in there. So, aha, same thing.

He's like, I want to be, I want to be. What do you mean you're not ready? What do you mean you're not ready? You don't, you're not able to help this person?

I love the idea of like, you know, some government official coming over and being like, Joel, listen, you're right. Help me. We need to know. And he'd be like, I don't know what to tell you.

I haven't thought it all the way through yet.

That's stupid. I haven't had these power fantasies for all my life. I don't know exactly what I would say if someone told me how should I live. Crazy.

Yeah, it's in the book.

So let's get to some of the stuff that's in the book. Uh-oh. Right? Here he gets to some of his practical suggestions.

Okay, how are we to live?

And I'm not going to apologize. I'm not going to be ashamed. It all comes back to shame.

I'm not going to be ashamed for what God says is good. Right, that's how they always try to, all the gotcha techniques.

Oh, you're a Bible-believing conservative Christian? So I guess you think that, you know, if you think homosexuality is wrong, I guess you think adultery is wrong too.

Uh-huh, yeah.

That's not a good gotcha.

You think that an adulterer should be punished under laws in nations? Uh-huh, yeah, that'd be great. I guess, well, God's word says this in the Old Testament. And so you're advocating for that too? Uh-huh, yeah, that one too.

Uh-oh, he doesn't have another example?

Well, the Ten.

Commandments is not just how you treat your neighbor. The Ten Commandments talk about a relationship to the Lord. So you're saying there shouldn't be idolatry? That's the first commandment. Have no other gods before me. That there shouldn't be public expressions of idolatry in the nation? That it should not be legal to erect a mosque?

Yep, uh-huh, that one. Uh-oh.

Yeah, that's right.

I liked your instincts there because it was so clear he couldn't come up with another example.

The Old Testament says this. What does it say? Name one more thing that's against the rules in the Bible. Name one more sin.

I don't know if he could in normal life, but in that moment, he couldn't. I definitely get that feeling.

That's rough, dude. But also... He's overextending himself here.

As a Christian pastor, he does.

Not have to agree that he wants all of the laws of the Old Testament in force. He, in fact, does not have to agree to that as a Christian pastor because Christ was the fulfillment of the law. So you actually don't have to. Did he read all of Paul's letters?

Part, yeah. The one part that was really angry. Did he finish those? He didn't get to chapter two based on what I've been able to tell, so no.

Because you actually don't have to agree to all of that.

Yeah, but it's fun. It's fun for him to do this, I'm sure, but it's very, very stupid.

I think he just wants to say that we should stone adulterous women, I guess, is his point, because that's the only example he could come up with.

Not men.

Right.

No.

No. Not men.

No, because they can have more than one wife.

If building a mosque is an act of worship that violates this first commandment, and all culture is just worship, then I guess it needs to be illegal to make statues to anyone other than God, right? I mean, like, this is where this is going. Otherwise, it's idol worship of Jefferson or Washington.

What is a library if not a book church? We probably shouldn't have those.

Either, Joel.

Yeah, why are we idolizing wisdom or learning? Also, pop stars shouldn't be allowed to perform concerts since that's just like a big idol worship ritual when you really get down to it. So concerts probably should be illegal. That's easy.

It just seems like his understanding of what is or isn't worship is not good in a way that makes all of society illegal.

Loose. It's loose in interpretation.

We can only have stuff that I like.

Yeah, and what he's suggesting is idiotic. Because if he has to abide by all the rules of the Old Testament, then he's in trouble. He can't eat fat, since that's supposed to be saved for the offering to God. No one can own land permanently because God owns all the land. So if he owns a house, that might be an act of heresy. He's absolutely sinning by not trimming his beard.

These aren't gotcha points. They're just clear illustrations of how arbitrary and conditional all the rules are in the Bible, even for people like Joel who like to pretend they follow it all. This kind of messaging is really a hallmark of a bullshitter. So I feel like people would be wise not to fall for Joel's dumb act unless he's severely malnourished and has a crazy beard. If he has a crazy beard and he's unhealthy, maybe.

I'm not taking any advice about Christianity unless you are an ascetic hermit in the desert, okay? I want you wandering around barefoot and emaciated.

I'll take all kinds of perspectives about religion, but I'm not going to take this literalist one unless you're that. Go out into the.

Desert, Joel. I'm going to fill your house with bugs.

You're on YouTube. You're on fucking YouTube. Shut up. Whatever. What an asshole.

He wants to stone women and he can't think of a second sin.

And he doesn't want mosques around. That's true. Yeah. No mosques, stone the ladies, and.

If you're going to do rule of threes, have three things.

Nah. It's better to just say all of the Old Testament. Whatever.

And it says X, Y, Z. Like, come up with a thing.

He does. He eventually gets to a thing. So here's that.

A civil magistrate cannot dictate private worship. But he can dictate public expressions.

No, he can't.

So you're saying there should be Sabbath laws? Uh-huh, Chick-fil-A's doing fine. Now, I'm a little bit disappointed with some of the recent news that's come out about Chick-fil-A. But in six days a week, Chick-fil-A has four times the profit margin than the average fast food chain restaurant.

Those are holy nuggets.

The civil magistrate cannot dictate a day of worship. He can dictate a day of rest.

Ah, good, good, good save. That works, right? I mean, we people who love union labor and stuff, we care about days of rest and stuff. So, I mean, he's basically just saying the same thing, right?

Oh, man.

What Chick-fil-A news is he disappointed about?

I think that they might have equivocated about some, like, abortion causes that they were donating to or something like that. I don't know.

Wow, Chick-fil-A.

Yeah, I think that they did not live up to the standard of refusing to apologize, probably, is what he's talking about.

Incredible to work that into the sermon.

Yeah, I think if I'm hearing a pastor talk about Chick-fil-A, I'm probably thinking I'm in the wrong place.

Wait, like, are you just fighting the culture war here? I just, I don't know that this is the fulfillment of your vocation, Joel.

I think that that is definitely what it becomes, functionally. It's no longer religious and it is more just like social media vibes and shit.

I mean, that's like the Calvin Robinson thing, right? Like constantly changing churches. You continue to do like anti-woke culture war bullshit. Like, are you truly like these aren't just like YouTube guys. These are men who are ordained in a church and are putting themselves out here as clergy with a flock. Like, are you called to serve God or are you called to be a YouTube guy?

I don't see why it has to be one or the other.

It kind of seems like it's just the YouTube guy thing. It kind of just seems like it's the YouTube guy thing.

Well, I know that on YouTube, when he's sitting in his studio alone talking to somebody else, there's no fucking babies crying. So I think I would go that way if I were him.

Yeah, the congregation is really just kind of a hindrance at this point.

Yeah. This clip, that clip, I think is a great representation of Joel's bad thought process. He's saying that the government can mandate a day of rest and make it so no one can work on the Sabbath. The government can't make them pray, but it can make everyone not work on a particular day. Just on a surface level, he's way out of sync with any branch of right-wing politics.

The idea that the government can dictate to businesses when they can and can't operate is communism to them, so this is going to be tough to implement. No allies on this one, probably.

But it's great that Chick-fil-A's closed on Sunday.

Great. Yeah, and the real problem with his brain is revealed when he argues his point using that. Because, like, They're fine being open six days a week, and that's great, but all that establishes is that a particular business has been able to stay profitable being closed one day a week. It doesn't prove that every business could be closed one day a week and have the same outcome, especially not if they're all closed on the same day. Like, this is just fucking stupid. Like, what about people at sea?

And he's positioning it as though Chick-fil-A is profitable because they have chosen this and that they would be less profitable if they were open seven days. They would make more money if they were open more. This is just a choice that they've made.

No, but I think it's an interesting argument actually there because maybe they wouldn't be. Because of the boost that they've got from right-wing people in the culture wars, it's their preferred chicken. I think we've seen it.

Borne out again and again that the spending power associated with these culture wars like little hockey pucks, isn't as big as they like to think it is.

I think that's true generally, but also Chick-fil-A's chicken is pretty good. So I think that Bud Light, you can take it or leave it. No one has strong feelings about Bud Light as a product.

People are going to keep getting the chicken. I know gay people who still eat the chicken because the chicken is good.

Totally. I think that's most people I've ever met.

It's good chicken. I have celiac disease, so I haven't had it in 15 years, but I got to say, I might eat it if I could.

You're missing out. They had a great chicken sandwich. This isn't an ad.

No, fuck them. Fuck them.

If there is a government mandate for one day of rest, like if you're in a container ship that is coming across the Atlantic, that's going to take a week. So just like one day, no one does anything.

Dead in the water.

What about security guards? All security guards get Sunday off. What are we talking about? This is ridiculous. We can't implement this.

Shut society down. Turn off the power grid.

It just doesn't work. The ripple effects of this dumb policy Joel is advocating for are staggering, and the defense of his argument is pointing at Chick-fil-A, which doesn't help make his point.

Chick-fil-A's not infrastructure.

No. His point helps strengthen the argument that an individual business can afford to be closed on the Sabbath, but it's a non sequitur in terms of proving that our economy could handle everything being closed the same day. It's so dumb that, like, The babies should be booing him, not crying.

They are.

You're dumb. You haven't thought through your points.

There's like 18 pacifiers around his feet. They're just chucking them at him.

Yeah, hostily. Not in a way of like people back in the days throwing their underwear on stage.

Not like throwing your panties at Elvis.

No, this is like throwing trash at him. He sucks. We have one last clip of his sermon here. And again, it's just more things that he wants to make illegal.

So yeah, Sabbath laws, blasphemy laws. And yes, when it comes to idolatry, you're not talking.

About the thought police, worship police going into private citizens' homes. But you are saying in society as a whole, there will not be public demonstrations of idolatry.

And I don't want to just pick on Islam. I gave the mosque example.

What's Catholicism?

Pride parades. That is a public demonstration of worship. False worship.

And it is perfectly within the purview of the civil magistrate to say, this is not legal.

It is not allowed. There will be penalties and consequences if this occurs.

And when anyone asks, by what standard? You say, by the first of the Ten Commandments in Exodus chapter 20.

And that's good.

So I know he's an acolyte of Doug Wilson. Doug Wilson has publicly said that the government should outlaw Marian processions. So, you know, like when Catholics march in the street with the Statue of Mary, because he thinks that having statues of the Virgin Mary is idol worship, and these Marian processions are this hideous, blasphemous thing that should be against the law. So that's where I thought he was going.

But no, we're back to pride parades. We're back to pride parades.

But I bet he'd be on board. I think you probably find agreement there. But yeah, he chose to take... Well, it's June. He's doing this in June. He's giving people what they want.

Okay, so I thought that... The phrase, he keeps using the phrase civil magistrate. And I thought that sounded so odd to my ear. And I was like, is that a Texas thing? Like I know in Virginia, we have a very strange magistrate system. So is civil magistrate a tech? No, it is a theological thing. So he's, he's talking about this sort of church-state fusion. He's not talking about an actual currently existing government employee in this example where the government employee comes to him and asks for help. He's talking about this sort of the Presbyterian theological concept of the civil magistrate. I didn't realize that.

I think he is and he isn't.

But he's using that phrase for a reason.

Yeah, but I also think, I think that it's also meant to imply like the mayor. Like the mayor would be the civil magistrate person who's implementing our religious things.

Right, but like civil magistrate is not a role that currently exists in our government. He's talking about making like a Christian nationalist state where there is this role of the civil magistrate that is a religious government authority.

Yes and no. I think he is, and he is also allowing any kind of existing civil authority to stand in for that should they be willing to do the things that he wants them to do. So he's saying that they can't make them go pray or anything. They can't enforce some actual means of faith, but they can say, hey, you can't work on Sunday. The government can do that.

And that's not true.

Right, because he's granting a lot of powers to the civil magistrate that would be unconstitutional.

I don't think he gives a fuck about the Constitution.

I'm getting that.

Unless he's got to argue with someone and it's advantageous for him to.

Unless it's for him.

Yeah. But also, I think that maybe... You know, if you care about the Constitution, then it's idolatry, right? Oh, wow.

Because you should only be reading the Bible.

Right. Fourth of July parades, probably. That's idolatrous.

I think that is idolatrous. I think it's idol worship to put an American flag in a Christian church.

Sure. Especially if it has gold fringe.

Oh, God, the gold fringe.

Feels like a New Year's Day parade would be, like, idolatrous to the passage of time, right?

Mm, yeah.

Probably. Every sporting event, every celebration about, like, a sporting event would be idolatrous to the team. Like, this is just no good. Nothing's legal anymore.

His definition of this is too big. It's too big.

Yeah, just because he doesn't want a pride parade. Good for you, man.

Just make all parades illegal.

It's hard to imagine what public acts could be seen as okay by Joel's standards. You know, he's doing that rally in Dallas in November, and Alex Jones is advertised as the keynote speaker.

Are we worshipping Alex Jones now?

Well, I mean, that's how we're selling tickets, right? I mean, it's Alex Jones' idol worship. Wow. He might as well be throwing a gay pride parade. This guy needs to get his shit straight.

Wow.

Yeah, I'm just looking at the banner again of all these guys, and this looks phenomenal. You should go.

I may go. I don't want to say whether I'm going to go or not or if I will wear a disguise, but I'm going to go and I'm going to wear a disguise. Okay.

Sometimes you gotta wear a disguise, Dan. I get it. I get it. I've been there.

Yeah.

So this was, I mean, the sermon ends with like a prayer and, you know, we've all been there. We don't need to play that. But I listened to sermon and I just think that this is pretty stupid. I think that he's a bad pastor in terms of like having stage presence. And then I also just think these ideas are poorly thought out and pretty fucking dumb. And I feel bad for the people who were going to that church because they could do better.

There's so many churches. Just go anywhere else.

Yeah. But in preparing this episode, I watched a fair amount of things that he put out. And one of the things that I ended up watching was some of this interview that he did with Nick Fuentes. And I think that there's a little something I want to bring up. I don't want to go over like a whole episode of him talking to Nick Fuentes, but there is a point that I think is relevant, especially vis-a-vis this sermon that And we'll get to that here in a second, but first, here he is doing a commercial on his show. Yes. Warning.

This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

That's a sin.

Society, real society, has always stood on three magnificent pillars. Caffeine to kick things off.

What?

Alcohol to smooth the edges. And nicotine... which is the true gentleman's secret weapon.

What?

See, in its glory day, nicotine fueled the greatest minds, the boldest leaders, and the quiet legends who simply got the job done. But somewhere along the way, we lost the plot. Epheminacy began to creep in.

Your secrets are gold.

Men traded their duty for.

Comfort, and now big tobacco sells us nothing but compromise. Knickknack raises the old banner again.

Stop smoking those gay cigarettes.

Or your gay pouch tobacco, your woke pouch. Even Tucker's anti-woke stuff might be too woke. Who knows? We got to go knick-knack.

Society stands on three pillars. And as all substance use, baby, we got a new holy trinity.

What is this? Ethene, booze, and nicotine. Let's go. Let's fucking go.

What is going on?

We're joining a frat. That's what we're doing.

Also, that ad copy was written by A.I., And.

He seems like he's reading it with a passion of AI. Yeah. I thought that was pretty jarring, though, going from his sermon and that ad starting his show.

Are you doing effeminate chewing tobacco? Buy my God pouches.

I feel like cancer is a bigger issue. And addiction. He admitted that it's an addictive chemical at the beginning, but.

I think that's the law. I think you have to.

His problem is effeminacy. Which.

Tobacco products are making you gay. Can we get a list?

Misty menthol 120s.

Virginia Slims.

Virginia Slims. Those came a long way, baby.

Do they still have the Camel Crush? I feel like that's a gay cigarette.

That was my brand. I love Camel Crushes. I think they do still exist. I have stopped smoking cigarettes and I've been trying to get myself addicted again, but I can't do it.

Why?

I smoked like one or two cigarettes in the past like six months because I've been on road trips and I'd be like, I could use a cigarette. I just don't enjoy it. I don't, I want to get back to it, but I can't. It sucks.

Dan, I'm proud of you for quitting. Stay quit. Stay quit.

I know I should, but it's just a weird position to be in where I like, I hope it takes and then it doesn't. I'm grateful after the fact.

It's load bearing for your personality.

Yeah, I guess so.

Yeah, I felt that way for a while.

So here is a little clip of Nick Fuentes and Joel in their interview.

I'm not going to like this.

No. And I think what they advocate for is really shitty.

If we identify ourselves explicitly as opponents of the system, working in that same system, very quickly, those people will be eliminated. They will be isolated. They will be targeted, fired, harassed. uh reputations destroyed things like that and so it's basically a precondition for any any one of us who shares these beliefs to get power from the system to basically conceal their opposition to that system and so for as long as i've been doing this i have been encouraging my followers young guys if you like my show if you agree with my views that's great that's why i do the show but for the most part, people need to keep it to themselves.

Right, because otherwise they'll all get fired and who's going to send in the super chats?

Right.

But in a real sense, like, you know, I told you before we started recording, the only way that someone like you can do what he does is if the vast majority of men don't do what you do.

Right?

Like if everybody set out to be Nick Fuentes, that would be I don't know if there would be a clearer and more effective strategy for losing faster than that. So you always have to kind of have guys in the Overton pushing, and that's like probably a 100 to 1 ratio for the few guys outside the Overton pooling.

Ratio's off.

Yeah, so the majority of guys have to hide their power levels. They don't need to go and share with everyone everything.

That they think. It's actually the title of the video also, hide your powers.

Oh, I was going to say, they're talking about the hide your power levels meme, but they're not going to. Oh, he said it. The pastor said it. That's crazy.

Nick didn't even say it. That's decent.

What's going on here, Dan?

Well, I think some of it's a little clear. I don't think this guy is hiding that much.

That's the problem is that it's too clear. It's too clear. He's saying all of it. He's stating all of his intentions very explicitly, and I don't think he's supposed to do that.

Yeah, it's weird in a way, and it makes you think that he's hiding something else. Right.

Like, what's underneath? If you're being this honest about this much stuff that sucks, like, what aren't you telling me?

Yeah.

Especially if you are confessing your awareness to the need to hide your power levels. What the fuck are you hiding, Joel?

Right, because you're hiding something even to your congregation. If the game is hide things, you're hiding. I have to. assume that, otherwise I'm a fucking idiot.

And the stuff you're not hiding sucks real bad.

Yeah, maybe he's hiding that he has a generous spirit. Maybe that's what it is.

That'd be nice.

He raises bunnies and is real softy. Gives great gifts. So, On a basic level, Nick and Joel are begging the audience not to espouse the same beliefs they do, because if everyone does it, there's no money in it for them. Right.

If everybody's Nick Fuentes, there's no money for all the Nick Fuenteses.

Yeah, because no one's going to be maintaining respectable jobs, and then there's no money to give the big, brave public bigots, and then the white man loses everything. You see, this is the system we must uphold. There's an element of it that's also just condescending gatekeeping, but if we're as generous as possible to the position they're putting forth, it's basically that if the Matrix sees that you're a threat to the Matrix, you'll never be able to get into a position where you're a threat to the Matrix.

The system is self-protecting.

I need to make a thousand Nazi sleeper agents. That's my goal. That's a crazy thing to admit on your podcast.

Well, it's also, I think, disingenuous in a way, because in reality, the reason they spread this kind of message is because they don't want their audience's friends and loved ones to get worried about them. The number one thing that can discourage someone from falling down one of these dipshit paths is having a network of people around them who care and recognize that their friend is in trouble.

The attraction of Nazi shit or misogynist Christian extremism is almost never because those actual ideas are attractive to you. It's because they help you make sense of some other thing that's hurting in your life. If you have friends around you and you start talking about how women shouldn't vote, they might be able to recognize that that's really about something else you're struggling with, and they might be able to help you resolve that issue. Now there's no money in it for Joel and Nick.

But if you start talking like this in your personal life, people are just going to be like, hey, dude, don't fucking talk like that. That's weird.

Right, and if they care about you, like you have a built-in relationship, they're going to be like, hey man, are you okay? Can we talk? What's up?

Spend some less time online.

Yeah, they'll recognize like, oh no, you're just mad at your mom. So the fantasy about hiding your power level is that it allows you to infiltrate the system. But in the real world, it's about isolating you from social connections that would push back against complete bullshit. That's why Nick and Joel have such a concern about people getting red-pilled and then immediately starting to preach their new beliefs.

It's because their new beliefs are shit, and they won't stand up to any scrutiny from people's peers, especially when they come from a caring place. But as it relates to Joel, I find his position very upsetting. He's hosting Nick, who's saying that everyone should hide their beliefs so they can infiltrate the system, and he's clearly on board with that.

They're advocating people be dishonest, to lie for the greater good.

That's a sin.

And I'm I'm just going to read you here from Romans 3, the book he was just preaching off of, verses 7 and 8. Quote, Someone might argue, if my falsehood enhances God's truthfulness and so increases his glory, why am I still condemned as a sinner? Why not say, as some slanderously claim that we say, let us do evil that good may result? Their condemnation is just. So sorry, Joel, I don't make the rules and I don't even interpret them.

You're going to hell. You, by your standard, are going to hell.

Got him.

You prick.

Fucking got him. Point the gun of shame at Joel.

Be ashamed. Get a haircut. That's what I say to him.

I swear he looks just like Matt Walsh to me. I don't know if they actually look alike or if I just think it's like just the same genre of guy, but I wouldn't be able to tell you which one's which.

I would. Oh, God. I hate this. They do look similar. But I hate this because as soon as you said that and I was responding to it, I realized that I think Matt Walsh has a better beard. And I don't like saying that.

Oh, he does. And a better shaped head, I guess.

Yeah. Yeah. I think the shape of the beard helps.

They're the same like brand of guy.

Yeah.

I think they're fairly similar. They're very religious. Isn't Matt Walsh Catholic, though?

He says he is.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a sticking point eventually for these guys. Like Catholics do not play well with Baptists.

He did 20 hours of content with Nick Puentes.

It's true. That is true. And it's all great. I bet it's.

Did you watch all of it?

I didn't watch all of it, but I didn't watch a fair amount. And then I realized I'm not covering this. I don't need to watch all of this. I get it. I get what you're doing.

There's only so much they can really be saying. Like after the third or fourth conversation, what's going on?

They're getting into the nitty gritty, getting early down into the brass tacks.

I mean, by the time they're 10 hours deep into talking, it's just like the final solution, right? Like, what are they doing?

Eventually, yeah, it's got to be. But it also allows for them to play a bunch of more commercials by doing 10 episodes. So here's another commercial from his show. Yes! Breaking news. You're fat.

And so am I.

Let's just be honest. I'm sitting here recording a commercial practically spilling out of my chair.

We're not energetic.

We're not masculine.

We're not as healthy as.

We should be.

We're men, right?

You're a husband.

You're a father. We should be hard to kill. And let's be honest, we're making it easy on our enemies. So what's the problem? The problem is you're fat because you're hungry. And when you're hungry, you're eating snacks that's a bunch of goy slop.

There's not a lot.

Of good things in snack form in between meals. As a man, we need raw milk, eggs, beef. Those are the things, but it's hard to find them at 9.30 in the morning when I feel like I'm ready like a hobbit for a second breakfast. So here's the deal. After long searching, I have found, I'm serious, I've found a solution. Go to paleovalley.com. Paleovalley.com. I'll be honest. It's the most feminine coded website I've ever seen in my life.

Tell your wife about it. She'll love it. But just skip through all the stuff.

Get to the beef sticks.

Guys, I'm telling you, these beef sticks are wild.

Put that beef stick in your mouth, you masculine man.

This is about beef sticks. She goes through all this, ah, yeah, you're fat, everyone's so feminine, just to get to a beefsteak commercial. What the fuck is wrong with you? Hiding your power levels real well there.

I would say this website doesn't have a gender at all. It looks just kind of, just like a website that sells snack bars, just in kind of a non-gendered way.

But I think that that's neutral and therefore feminine. Uh-huh.

Why are all the products... So masculine. He seems very concerned about his masculinity.

You need beef.

You need to have a bunch of nicotine and raw milk first thing in the morning and then shit your fucking pants all day like a man.

That is what God wants. He wants you to shit.

A nicotine pouch in each cheek and just chug raw milk and shove that beef stick in your mouth.

Yeah. I thought that ad was really overt. It was really weird. I thought that. I would have them do a second take unless I was a really anti-Semitic company. I would say like, no, that's not the ad. You're not saying that shit.

Yeah.

I would assume they approved the ad. Like either you're reading a script or you're allowed to ad lib. And I think when you ad lib an ad, they review it. So I got to assume this company has some values that do not align with mine.

Yeah. This beefsteak is not hiding its power level. Neither is Joel. Yikes. Shameful.

Just a lot of gender, too, going on here.

Yeah. If you go back through his primary career before the Giants and before a lot of this anti-Semitism and strong, trolly Christian nationalism, a lot of it really was just subjugating women. I think that there's an argument to be made. He just kind of really is mad at women.

Yeah.

I mean, these beef sticks, they're not for girls. They're not. The website is, though. You need your wife to order the beef sticks for you. Because as the head of the household, you can delegate things like beef stick acquisition.

Yeah, with permission.

Yeah. Well, yeah. She doesn't have her own credit card. You're going to have to supervise.

And there is a screen. There's a pop-up screen that asks if the man of the house has approved the purchase. And you do have to sign.

It's like, is your husband home?

Yeah. And it's legally binding. I hate this guy. I think he sucks. I think he's boring.

Wild ad read.

Boring's not the right word. He seems... Evil. Desperate. Yeah, evil too. But also seems craven and... I don't know. I don't think he has longevity. I think that this might fall apart at some point.

There's no star power here. Like, I hate what he's doing. I disagree with everything that he's saying. I'm upset now. But there's no star power here.

He hired Harrison Smith, so that's bad.

That's like D-list. Like, if you're taking Alex Jones' cast-offs at this stage of Alex's career, that sucks, dude.

Yeah.

Calvin Robinson has changed churches six times, and he's in a fake church with Bishop Jaden in Omaha. Like, this is Bob of the Barrel stuff.

Well, these are the dregs.

So, yeah, I'm hoping this does not I hope this ride ends for Joel soon.

Yeah I mean who knows how much money he has access to but that seems to be the only question.

Where that money comes from.

Yeah I think as long as he's able like his YouTube account has like a hundred and eighty thousand subscribers and only like A couple thousand views per video. Like, it's not, this isn't attractive, appealing content. It's at a loss, I'm sure.

I'm excited about this conference, though. I'm really intrigued by this lineup. I'm looking at it again. How have we not, I didn't notice this the first time I looked. You should have told me. Buckley Carlson?

I didn't see that on there.

What?

That's crazy.

I'm on newchristianwright.com slash conference, and I'm looking at Buckley Carlson.

I don't know if that's a new ad. Maybe he wasn't announced the last time I looked at it.

Maybe they just got Buckley.

That's insane. Because I also think that there's a fair amount of tension, I think, between his brother's section of the media and some of these other figures. I don't think that James Fishback was a candidate that Tucker was supporting. Right? I'm not sure.

Because Buckley is like 25 or something, right? Tucker's like young adult son.

No, isn't his? Oh, it's not his brother. It is his son. I thought it was his brother. Yeah. No, it's his baby son. Yeah. Yeah. Goddamn.

Like, what? I'm so intrigued. The poster is intriguing, right? It's Alex in the center looking very serious. And there's this weird silhouette of like a hulking Trump kind of leaning over James Fishback.

Like, what's that about?

Because they're trying to figure out what life is like after Trump. And so he must be a hulking figure in the background.

Just this sort of like hunched over in silhouette. Very spooky.

Send slightly mixed messages. And also, I'm not going and I won't be there in disguise. So.

We'll just have to wait till after it's over to find out about it.

Molly, I assure you, I will not tell you all about it after I get back.

So excited.

So, I don't know if this is our final episode in this stretch together or if we're going to do one more. I'm not sure. But either way, Molly, this has been so much fun.

This is incredible. And it's... Honestly, it's been exposure therapy for me for my greatest fear ever.

Which is?

My show is very scripted, right? I script very carefully and I read my script and I retake lines that don't sound good. I fact check my own opinions. I don't like to speak off the cuff. It's very disconcerting to me. And like, you know, after our first episode, I like laying awake at night thinking like, I probably said some stuff that's like not factually correct, right? Because I'm the podcast idiot. It's not my job to be correct.

But so it is forcing me to confront my greatest fear, which is being wrong on mic.

I don't know if you did. I can't prove or confirm that you were wrong at all, but you may have been and it's okay.

Yeah, it's exposure therapy. So this has been really good for me.

Well, I'm glad to be your pit of snakes or spiders.

No, but aside from exposing me to my greatest fears, honestly, a dream come true. Because like I said, I've been listening to you for a decade. And I've spent a lot of that decade sort of talking back to you into my phone and And so now the podcast can hear me and it's answering me. So it's a dream come true.

It's a dream come true for me as well. It's a long time coming that our paths would intersect and I've had a blast. I'm sure we will, whether we do another episode in this stretch or not, I'm sure we will do this again down the road.

I know, I don't want it to end.

I don't either. We're two and a half hours into this and I feel like, oh no, we've got to, I'm putting off wrapping up.

There's so many of these guys whose shows I want to know more about, but I'm not going to watch them, Dan.

All right, fine. I'll do it. We'll do another series on some other shitheads.

Apparently one of these guys is a comedian. Gotta know more about that.

JP fella? I think he's funny. Yeah, he looks... Yeah, he's funny.

You're making a funny face.

He loves jokes. I don't think he's that funny.

I bet he's not.

So people can find your podcast at The Weird Little Guys everywhere.

Anywhere you find a podcast, even maybe some places you don't normally find a podcast. I don't know.

If you're in Dallas in November and you're just walking around outside the convention of weirdo Christians, you might find the podcast sitting on the ground. It might be there.

I mean, there's going to be some weird little guys in there.

It's all weird little guys. I don't know if you have looked at, but I encourage you to do this once we're done. Look at the list of breakout sessions that they have. Some of these are pretty upsetting topics, and I'm going to go to them all. And by that, I mean I'm not going to go to them and I'm not going to be in costume.

You'll just have to wait to see if they put it on YouTube.

Yeah. Oh, wow.

Oh, my God. Wow. So general admission, $ 250. But if you're going for a married couple, this is not a discount for just two tickets. It's only if it's a married couple. It's called the marital pass. You can save $ 150 if you bring your wife and don't let her talk.

I didn't want to reveal this, but I'm getting married just to get that discount. And we're both going to be in disguise.

Like, how are they checking that?

We're going to cosplay. I'm going as a character from an anime. I'm going to stick out like a sore thumb.

Wow, a family pass covers traditional households. This is phenomenal, Dan. I'm so thrilled.

I feel like the pricing is even trolling people. Like, it's meant to... try and piss people off to get attention.

Nobody's bringing their children to this. That's not what's happening.

It's going to be full of crying babies. I'm certain based on everything I know about Joel Webben, it's going to be like the worst plane ride you've ever had in your life. Can't get to the bathroom, crying babies. Oof.

Oh my God. I'm thrilled.

Well, we should wrap this up, but this has been wonderful. And whether it's soon or in a little bit, I'm sure we will cross paths again. And I'll read that Doug Wilson book and text with you about how bad it is.

I'm going to have to cover Doug on my show eventually, and I'm not looking forward to it.

Here's the magic of me now having a mic that isn't like I have both hands free. I can now try to do this as an outro. I don't think it's going to work, but we will see you next time. But until then, did it come through at all? I was pounding my chest.

You got to beat it harder, harder.

I can't. I can't do it. Oh, well, just banana then.

Or wherever.

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KFC #4: America Is So Gay, Amen (w/ Molly Conger)

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