[SPEAKER_09]: Coming up on the Pre-Choice Podcast.
[SPEAKER_05]: People who grow up in fundamentalist religions and fundamentalist cultures are much more susceptible to fall prey to other cults.
[SPEAKER_05]: Deconstruction is important because it's important to learn to think for yourself.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, organized religion allows us to kind of offload building our own faith onto someone else.
[SPEAKER_05]: I just want someone to tell me what's right and what's wrong.
[SPEAKER_05]: I want someone to tell me what God says.
[SPEAKER_05]: I want someone to tell me how to get to heaven.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think some people that are getting swept up in the deconstruction resistance, which I think overall, is a great movement.
[SPEAKER_05]: But I do see some people that I worry haven't really broken down those thought processes enough.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so there's a risk of them getting swept up by someone else and taken advantage of.
[SPEAKER_06]: Ain't nobody safe
[SPEAKER_09]: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Prejaboy's podcast where a former fundamentalist sheds light on the dark side of the church from the pulpits to the pews.
[SPEAKER_09]: Today, joining me to do just that is my guest, Monty Mator.
[SPEAKER_09]: I cannot say how many times people in my community have sent me clips of Monty, have told me I need to have Monty on the show.
[SPEAKER_09]: the love for Monty Mator is immense and I think honestly if I said today this is my last episode of the show and she is now stepping in as the permanent host, nobody will be upset.
[SPEAKER_09]: Monty is a fan favorite for sure and I think for good reason she's an amazing communicator a really incredible content creator.
[SPEAKER_05]: there's no absteen list.
[SPEAKER_05]: The DOJ and the FBI are now saying that there's no absteen list and not only that, but that Jeffrey absteen definitely killed himself.
[SPEAKER_09]: She talks about really hot button topics in a way that is digestible, but also incredibly intelligent and I'm so excited to have her on the show today.
[SPEAKER_09]: She's a writer.
[SPEAKER_09]: She's a podcaster.
[SPEAKER_09]: She's even a musician.
[SPEAKER_09]: And she went from growing up on a Wyoming cattle ranch, steeped in Christian fundamentalism and conservative politics to becoming one of the most fearless truth tellers calling out extremism and hypocrisy in American Christianity.
[SPEAKER_09]: On today's episode, we talked about the moment that made her question everything and her journey ever since, and how that journey ties into what we're seeing right now happening in 2025.
[SPEAKER_09]: This includes things like the rise of Christian nationalism and project 2025.
[SPEAKER_09]: the growing divide between Jensie women and Jensie men when it comes to church attendance and conservative political beliefs.
[SPEAKER_09]: And we also just talk about the real human cost of purity culture, patriarchy, and unchecked religious power.
[SPEAKER_09]: This is a fantastic conversation.
[SPEAKER_09]: I'm not going to waste any more of your time talking about it.
[SPEAKER_09]: Let's go ahead and get right into it with my new friend, Monty Mater.
[SPEAKER_09]: Monty, thank you so much for joining me.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you for having me.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm glad we were able
[SPEAKER_09]: I have to admit something, but please don't leave the interview immediately for I say this.
[SPEAKER_09]: For the last like 24 hours, all I keep thinking is madeer like toe madeer from cars that's been in my mind like all day and I was like, how do I squeeze that in?
[SPEAKER_09]: Do I squeeze that into an intro as a joke?
[SPEAKER_09]: Do I just say, hey, please don't hang up and let me just get it out of my system.
[SPEAKER_09]: But I'm assuming you hear that all the time.
[SPEAKER_05]: I do and especially when cars first came out that was just obviously that was the whole thing the go to it's Darth Vader and Tomator with the two That was growing either is super cool and I actually feel like really cool matches your aesthetic more it's on brand.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, you give.
[SPEAKER_05]: I am in fact in the full Sith Lord
[SPEAKER_09]: Some people may not know that.
[SPEAKER_09]: They're hearing that for the first time, but this is the point.
[SPEAKER_09]: We want to get to know you a little bit better.
[SPEAKER_09]: I want to kind of give a 10,000th of view.
[SPEAKER_09]: It's always interesting talking to people who share their story every day, you know, 24 hours a day, where I don't want to send you through the paces of like tell me your whole story.
[SPEAKER_09]: But I do think there's a interesting trajectory from
[SPEAKER_09]: the person that you are now as a public figure, and the version of you strolling onto Liberty University campus with a Confederate flag keychain, gives you context for like young Monti.
[SPEAKER_09]: Like what does that look like?
[SPEAKER_09]: What is your life look like at that time frame?
[SPEAKER_05]: So I grew up very far, alt-right.
[SPEAKER_05]: And kind of in a dual space, and we're seeing this right now where there's this marriage of conservative politics with Christianity or Christian nationalism to be specific, and I grew up very much in that intersection.
[SPEAKER_05]: So my family was all Republican politicians, like I met Dick Cheney when I was 10, my dad was friends with Dick Cheney.
[SPEAKER_05]: Talk about this story.
[SPEAKER_05]: Right?
[SPEAKER_05]: We see who we stockpiled arms against the government, you know, because the government might come try to attack you and, you know, persecute you for being a Christian and I also grew up in like very strict Christian fundamentalism and all that that entails.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I was very committed to it.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was very well trained in it studied a lot independently.
[SPEAKER_05]: I had all the talking points.
[SPEAKER_05]: I could do all the apologetics, all the arguments, all the debates.
[SPEAKER_05]: And obviously, that was, you know, younger Monty.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then that really started to shift when I turned 23 was when the shift happened.
[SPEAKER_09]: What prompted that shift for you?
[SPEAKER_05]: So my big eyes open moment where I realized, hmm.
[SPEAKER_05]: Maybe everything I believe isn't as true as people made me believe it is because one of the things about growing up in fundamentalism, and this is fundamentalism in any religion.
[SPEAKER_05]: There, it's such a high control environment, so they control who you talk to, what you listen to, what you can watch, what media you can use.
[SPEAKER_05]: So you grow up your whole life, especially as a kid, all the adults are telling you the same thing.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so it doesn't occur to you to question it.
[SPEAKER_05]: You're also told if you question it, you're defined God.
[SPEAKER_05]: So you grow up in this kind of, you know, obey at all costs mentality.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I had never thought to question anything until I was 23 when I was engaged at the time and my fiance's half sister got pregnant and she was 12.
[SPEAKER_05]: And we found out that she had been being raped by her mom's boyfriend since she was nine.
[SPEAKER_05]: and of I was in those conversations with his family and I'm sitting there because at the time I was a no exceptions at all, you know, anti-abortion person.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I'm sitting in the corner of the room thinking, man, this is wrong.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like my world view is wrong.
[SPEAKER_05]: How could I possibly look at this child whose already, you know, suffered the consequences of the evil of a grown man and expect
[SPEAKER_05]: And at one point, while they, because I mean, there was like an investigation going on, he was going to trial, like it was this huge event.
[SPEAKER_05]: And while they were waiting, figuring out what the next steps were, they did have me take her to like a pregnancy class.
[SPEAKER_05]: and so I drive her and pregnancy is in my top three fears.
[SPEAKER_05]: I would much rather swim sharks in open water than be pregnant.
[SPEAKER_05]: I find it's so terrifying.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's it's incredible and scary to me.
[SPEAKER_05]: But I take her to this class and it's all these teenage girls.
[SPEAKER_05]: The oldest was 19, there was one 19 year old, and then she was the youngest at 12, and the rest of the girls were
[SPEAKER_05]: all of the other girls in the room the fathers were over 21 and I'm sitting in the back like so angry and questioning everything one because I believe like in her situation I was like this is so wrong I can't ask this of her she's a little girl it's not her fault.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then I realized the flaw in my thinking of, why is the response one knowing that a 21 year old and a 15 year old is statutory rape?
[SPEAKER_05]: And then too, understand, finally seeing that all the arguments I had been fed my whole life, there was no call for paternal responsibility.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm like, where's the accountability for the men?
[SPEAKER_05]: That are supposed to be leaders.
[SPEAKER_05]: I've been told my whole life.
[SPEAKER_05]: They're supposed to have all the power, all the control, all the leadership, because they're God's favorite, you know,
[SPEAKER_05]: And I finally, that night, I couldn't sleep.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so for the first time, I just researched abortions statistics, because I didn't know.
[SPEAKER_05]: I had never thought to ask.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the first one I read was that 93% of abortions happened before 14 weeks, and I was shocked.
[SPEAKER_05]: shocked, and I verified it in all these different resources, all these different like research articles, because I had been told my whole life that women were going out in droves in the second and third trimester and having abortions.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I believed at that time at 23 years of age, I believe that after abortions were real, after birth abortions were real, and that Democrats were promoting this.
[SPEAKER_05]: Find out, uh, that's infant side, bin illegal the whole time.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that was the first moment where the House of Cards cracked and like a lot of people who start to deconstruct from high control groups.
[SPEAKER_05]: When one issue falls, when you can see the truth of one issue or one lie, everything else tends to fall with it.
[SPEAKER_05]: And as I've gone through that change in my world view, I can also now look back and see moments in my life specifically when I was nine
[SPEAKER_05]: where I knew something was wrong, and I could feel my intuition and my sense of right and wrong and my sense of justice pushing back.
[SPEAKER_05]: But I had been able to push it back down and say, no, that's just you being sinful.
[SPEAKER_05]: You're questioning God.
[SPEAKER_05]: Don't do that.
[SPEAKER_05]: But I can see now that it really, my pushback really started when I was nine.
[SPEAKER_09]: What do you think it is?
[SPEAKER_09]: inside of people like yourself or people like myself where we have those moments where there's that bubble burst moment, the house of card falls, there's a crack in the dam, whatever analogy you want to throw in there.
[SPEAKER_09]: Like,
[SPEAKER_09]: I feel like there's tons of people who have that moment where they encounter something that should do that.
[SPEAKER_09]: But for some people, it doesn't seem to disrupt anything.
[SPEAKER_09]: And for others, it leads them out.
[SPEAKER_09]: It makes them want to start podcasts.
[SPEAKER_09]: It makes them want to start talking about how wrong this is.
[SPEAKER_09]: What do you think that differential is?
[SPEAKER_09]: Because I look back at my child and go, you guys saw the same thing I did.
[SPEAKER_09]: And some of us left and some of us stayed.
[SPEAKER_09]: And for the ones who stayed after that moment, I go, well, if it wasn't going to be that, what's going to get you out of this?
[SPEAKER_09]: So what do you think it was within you that made you see something that even the adults in your life weren't saying?
[SPEAKER_05]: I think for me it was two things.
[SPEAKER_05]: So the first thing was curiosity.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think that a lot of people kind of shockingly almost lack curiosity.
[SPEAKER_05]: They don't ask questions.
[SPEAKER_05]: They don't want to pry things open.
[SPEAKER_05]: They're very comfortable with I'm on status quo.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm on the sidewalk.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm going to follow the sidewalk.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I was never really like that.
[SPEAKER_05]: I wanted to know more.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was so curious and so hungry for more knowledge in my whole life.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like what I was growing up and I was old enough to understand that people could read like the words on signs meant things to people.
[SPEAKER_05]: I thought that that was like a magical superpower.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm like, wait, what?
[SPEAKER_05]: You can, you know what this means.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I started stealing my siblings' homework because I wasn't in school yet and I taught myself how to read.
[SPEAKER_05]: Because I just, I wanted to know I wanted to have access to the knowledge.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think curiosity is the number one thing.
[SPEAKER_05]: For a lot of people, the fear of losing their communities, the fear of having to face that maybe everything they believe isn't true is too much.
[SPEAKER_05]: It is just that it is so overwhelming to them to have that thought of that loss that they just close it off.
[SPEAKER_05]: They just close the door.
[SPEAKER_05]: They're not willing to consider it because it's so terrifying and it is terrifying.
[SPEAKER_05]: When you lose your whole world view and then you lose all your friends, you lose your church, you lose your family.
[SPEAKER_05]: it is terrifying and that's part of what again, high control systems do.
[SPEAKER_05]: But for me, growing up the way that I did, I grew up in a broken home with a lot of child abuse, a lot of fear.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was so accustomed to fear at that point in my life and I also was already kind of separating from my family because of abuse and because of other reasons like I just didn't even want to deal with
[SPEAKER_05]: Um, that my relationship with fear was different than I think a lot of people's is because I had experienced so much of it.
[SPEAKER_05]: I had been afraid my whole life.
[SPEAKER_05]: It wasn't as daunting to face.
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, I could be wrong here.
[SPEAKER_05]: And if I'm wrong, I want to know what's right.
[SPEAKER_05]: But I think I think curiosity and then people's relationship to fear is a big one.
[SPEAKER_09]: So were you making these moves out of
[SPEAKER_09]: any type of optimism that it could be better on the outside of this or did you feel like more of this nihilistic view of life at this point where it's like, well, I can't get any worse in this, but obviously this isn't the right path.
[SPEAKER_09]: Like, what was going on in the back here, my man?
[SPEAKER_05]: And I definitely approached it kind of from a bit of nihilism, like I had gotten accustomed to the point of, you know, even the some of the teachings I've been taught because even during my early deconstruction, I was still, I would still classify myself as a Christian fundamentalist because I was deconstructing social issues first alongside certain Christian fundamentalism.
[SPEAKER_05]: It just took longer to work through all of that.
[SPEAKER_05]: Um, but for me, I had kind of gotten to the point where I'm like, this may just be how it is.
[SPEAKER_05]: But I had also, again, how I grew up.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was like, I felt like I had already gotten the worst over with.
[SPEAKER_05]: So it's like, it can't be any worse than that.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I got out of that.
[SPEAKER_05]: So, but there was this little, like, this little tiny, like piece of hope that like, well, what if
[SPEAKER_05]: like what if like one of the biggest things when I look back on my life now and when I first started deconstructing one of the things that always stood out to me that I always ran against and like clashed with growing up was I hated how the church treated women because I could see it that was very clear to me that women were second class the treatment wasn't fair it was inequitable and no matter how often people try to sell me like separate but equal doctrine for men women
[SPEAKER_05]: Like I had made the decision at nine, that if it was God's will, that I have to be in a marriage where all I do is submit, I don't get any choices, I don't get to do anything I want.
[SPEAKER_05]: I had made the decision at nine, I wasn't going to get married.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was like, okay, that very well may be God's will.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm not going to do that then.
[SPEAKER_05]: because I always knew intuitively that that was unfair and that it was wrong.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so things like that as I started this huge deconstruction process, I had little moments of hope with things like that of what if this isn't actually the right thing.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like what if this is something people taught me because it was convenient for them?
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, I was my dad was a single dad for a while after my mom left before he remarried my stepmother.
[SPEAKER_05]: It did occur to me during that deconstruction process that, like, huh, this is a really convenient belief system for men, maybe this isn't true, and maybe I don't have to be less than.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I think the overwhelming feeling was, well, I can't get anywhere else.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then there were these moments of little sunshine of, oh, what if it could be better?
[SPEAKER_09]: I was talking to Lindsey Boyle and recently, so if you're listening to this episode, you can go back and hear that.
[SPEAKER_09]: But one of the things that she said that I thought was really interesting is she said, you know, unfortunately, some people hate women and some of those people are women.
[SPEAKER_09]: And it goes back to a question that I think about all the time, which is, as much as it makes sense, you know, I don't think it benefits.
[SPEAKER_09]: I think that's not true.
[SPEAKER_09]: I don't think the patriarchal system benefits men at all but that's another conversation.
[SPEAKER_09]: You know, as much as I can understand logically, like, yeah, it makes sense for men to teach this.
[SPEAKER_09]: One of the most disturbing things to me is that there's no shortage of women within these systems who are upholding it as well.
[SPEAKER_05]: And women often often more vehemently than the men do.
[SPEAKER_09]: Right.
[SPEAKER_09]: I, what's your read on that?
[SPEAKER_05]: In a lot of cases, and we see this happening with the tradwife content trend that those women are hypocrites because they're standing on this stage teaching or making these videos, making money, providing a living for themselves, giving themselves resources if they get divorced or there's abuse and they need to leave, doing all the things that people who are who are feminist, who believe in choice are saying you need to have
[SPEAKER_05]: Not to do that to do something else.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so the first thing is for women Like with many, you know, male quote spiritual leaders.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's profitable.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: It is so profitable because so many people Just want to be told what to do.
[SPEAKER_05]: They want to be told what does God want from me?
[SPEAKER_05]: How do I get into heaven?
[SPEAKER_05]: Where's the the list of boxes that I can check and those women capitalize on that?
[SPEAKER_05]: So it's the first thing is that it's profitable
[SPEAKER_05]: And then I think when you see that going on in the church, so someone who's not monetizing it, but there are these women who are really vicious about strict gender roles, or you have to do this, or you need to submit more.
[SPEAKER_05]: Typically, it's because on a maybe not on a conscious level for them, they gave up what they wanted.
[SPEAKER_05]: they sacrifice their dreams, they jumped into this belief system and so therefore you have to as well.
[SPEAKER_05]: Because when you show up in front of those women as someone who expresses yourself, someone who has freedom of choice and thought, it makes them very insecure.
[SPEAKER_05]: It enrages them.
[SPEAKER_05]: And for many of them, they feel that it is unfair that someone wouldn't have to live the way they thought they had to live.
[SPEAKER_05]: And one of the things that Christian nationalism and fundamentalism does very, very well.
[SPEAKER_05]: In the local church, we see this in the pastor's wife, and we can even see this in the Trump administration, where they strategically plant women.
[SPEAKER_05]: in positions of authority that are still under a man, but it's enough to keep the rest of the women in line, right?
[SPEAKER_05]: If they if and slash when they go full Taliban, that's a different issue, right?
[SPEAKER_05]: Women or women would push back on that, even conservative women.
[SPEAKER_05]: But if you have these models of women who, of course, look a certain way, they talk a certain way.
[SPEAKER_05]: You got to meet this very specific list of parameters, which is why so many of them look so much alike.
[SPEAKER_05]: Um, then women are like, oh, they're not, they're not being prejudiced against women.
[SPEAKER_05]: See, this woman's in this position.
[SPEAKER_05]: And in the local church, you know, the pastor's wife might teach Sunday school or even get up on the stage and teach or talk a little bit on a Sunday.
[SPEAKER_05]: And it gives this message to women of, oh, it is allowed, but for the most part, women's roles are over here.
[SPEAKER_05]: They're not being prejudiced against us.
[SPEAKER_05]: See, God's letting these women lead.
[SPEAKER_05]: And it is an amazing, like, spoonful of sugar to help the poison go down.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think that's the, that's the other part of it is this, they have like this strategic placement of women in kind of pseudo authority.
[SPEAKER_05]: Women who are in the church or who sacrifice their life to these gender norms, feel the need that everybody else needs to choose that path.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then like I said, and then on the top of that, so you're big like your Dana White's and your Trad Wife content creators, they're simply capitalizing off of it and just using it for
[SPEAKER_05]: Um, that's his spiritual advisor, right?
[SPEAKER_05]: Is it?
[SPEAKER_09]: Oh, Paula White, you know what, didn't know why it's UFC.
[SPEAKER_09]: I was going.
[SPEAKER_05]: My bad.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was like, wait, that's what I'm saying.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was like, wait, I'm sorry.
[SPEAKER_05]: Paula White, Paula White, um, that's so funny.
[SPEAKER_05]: Um, but yeah, well, the same thing with her, like, she has made a career of,
[SPEAKER_05]: you know, huge stages, starting churches, making millions of dollars and breaking up several marriages.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the rules don't apply to her, but she's teaching this very Christian fundamental
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, I think another really good example recently is, I mean, I look at the Erica Kirk situation, you know, and one of the things that that I jotted down as you were as you were talking was how fast and loose.
[SPEAKER_09]: The guidelines are, you know, and how people can adjust them to what benefits the system and to me This is one of the pieces that has really chipped away at my faith and any of these systems is that These staunch guidelines disappear when there's benefit and so I think of the Erica Kirk You know, I was watching a clip of Charlie saying, you know, women lose their marketplace value after their turn 30
[SPEAKER_03]: we've basically told a great generation of young women, don't get married, don't have kids, go get a corporate job, and it's created mass political hysteria.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then in their early 30s, they get really upset because they say, the boys don't want to date me anymore because they're not at their prime.
[SPEAKER_03]: And people get mad when I say that was just true.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you're in your early 30s, I'm sorry.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like you're not as attractive in the dating pool as you were in the early 20s.
[SPEAKER_03]: But again, you have your corporate job in cats, so I thought, you know,
[SPEAKER_09]: he married his wife at when she's 31 and older than him.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, you know, he preached this message of women staying home and they should not focus on their education and she's got several degrees.
[SPEAKER_05]: And she was a millionaire before she met him?
[SPEAKER_09]: Right.
[SPEAKER_09]: Was was self-sustaining, you know, with all the talk you gave about, you know,
[SPEAKER_09]: And I don't, to be clear, I don't have an issue with the fact that she had degrees and was self-sustaining and you know, but it's the hypocrisy talking about modesty and not presenting your your physical appearance and she's literally a pageant queen, you know, and and you've got layers of this ultimately to the point where it's like, okay, now she's the CEO of a multimillion dollar company as a mother with children, which again, great for her.
[SPEAKER_09]: but the whole company is built on the antithesis of who she is now.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yep.
[SPEAKER_05]: And telling women, you don't need to go to school.
[SPEAKER_05]: You need to get married younger and have babies as soon as you can.
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
[SPEAKER_05]: Which is one of the top predictors of elder poverty for women.
[SPEAKER_05]: The younger you have kids, the less education you have, the more likely you are to spend your elder years impoverished.
[SPEAKER_09]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_05]: I didn't know that.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, like, and the number one predictor, the top predictor of elder poverty is being a state home mom.
[SPEAKER_09]: Is it specifically single mom's or just any stay home mom really any stay at home.
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, I did not know that because there's and there's so many there's so many levels to it.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's it's the combination of if you do get divorced or your husband passes away and there's no reasonable like inheritance or life insurance policy You have this huge gap in your work career and you're not able to like really join the workforce at a high level or you know if he passes away and she's in her 50s and she's never worked.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, there's like so many levels to how dangerous that can be for women.
[SPEAKER_05]: And sometimes that's one of the things about, you know, because I grew up with like feminism is the devil.
[SPEAKER_05]: But it's like it's really about women having choice.
[SPEAKER_05]: And how do you keep women safe?
[SPEAKER_05]: I have, there is absolutely nothing wrong with someone wanting to be a state homeowner, a state homewife.
[SPEAKER_05]: It makes sense for some families.
[SPEAKER_05]: But still have the conversation of, hey, if something happens, are you protected?
[SPEAKER_05]: Do you have a prenape or a post-nape?
[SPEAKER_05]: Do you have life insurance policies?
[SPEAKER_05]: Has there been a conversation around how you're going to be kept safe?
[SPEAKER_05]: Is there a way that you're going to have your own money?
[SPEAKER_05]: Um, there's a reason that all these mothers like, you know, people kind of clown on the hippie generation, you know, for the, you know, the counterculture revolution, but it was their mothers telling these young girls, hey, make sure you get an education, hey, make sure you always have your own money, hey, make sure you have a separate savings account because the women that were mothers and grandmothers in the 40s and 50s understood what it was like to be trapped.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so it's really about just being having honest conversations and I think that a lot of times women are given this picture, especially again in fundamentalism of, you know, oh my God, you're going to be a mother and it's going to be the best thing ever and you're going to be so happy and you're going to be so fulfilled and you're going to be all these things and pregnancy is going to be wonderful and there is never growing up in this movement and
[SPEAKER_05]: I did, I never received these conversations and neither did anyone that I know personally.
[SPEAKER_05]: No one ever told us about the inherent risks of pregnancy, how dangerous it is.
[SPEAKER_05]: Nobody told us about, no one sat down with us and said, hey, you should know parenting is really hard.
[SPEAKER_05]: Nobody has those conversations.
[SPEAKER_05]: Nobody talks about, hey, if you get married and it doesn't work out, what are you going to do to protect yourself?
[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: nobody taught us how to recognize abuse because these systems foster abuse.
[SPEAKER_05]: So they can't teach you how to recognize it because you're going to start pushing back.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so what it does is it funnels women into this idealistic system that there's only one option and this option is perfect.
[SPEAKER_05]: If you just play your cards right, it's perfect.
[SPEAKER_05]: And if you didn't, well, there's got to be sitting in your life.
[UNKNOWN]: Right.
[SPEAKER_08]: Right.
[SPEAKER_05]: instead of like real life answers and it just sets women up to be in really tough life situations.
[SPEAKER_09]: you're given pictures like the duggers where it's like you're going to have 19 kids and got to provide and look at this incredible home and it's like okay well that's one family of the land at TV show and has TLC money you know that's a best case scenario look around you at your church and go who has the quiver full and is feeling the benefits of that you know
[SPEAKER_09]: do they regret having all these kids?
[SPEAKER_09]: No, with they, you know, with they picked a different way to provide, probably.
[SPEAKER_09]: You know, I think of that in my relationship.
[SPEAKER_09]: I mean, we got married very, very young.
[SPEAKER_09]: And, you know, experience a lot of really hard things at first year that we didn't need to had we, on those conversations, you know, like, experience to miscarriage three or four months into our marriage.
[SPEAKER_09]: Nobody told us that was a common thing to experience, or that it was even possible.
[SPEAKER_09]: You know,
[SPEAKER_09]: on the mission field, you know, and like all those things where it's like, you're hearing from one side, like, God's just going to test you, that's what these things are, or God will provide for you, like, and you're getting all this mixed messaging that's just basically saying, hey, stay where we want you to be, but there's no practical help along the way, and it's it's really frustrating.
[SPEAKER_09]: You mentioned that the counter,
[SPEAKER_09]: response to some of these rigid systems, you know, you mentioned, and it's easy.
[SPEAKER_09]: I think sometimes to poke fun at the extremes of this, you know, where it's like, we're leaving this movement and we're going to do this.
[SPEAKER_09]: I'm wondering in this current moment, there's, there's a large swell of people that are resisting Christian fundamentals, and there's a large swell that are not to the middle of the lead, especially really quickly.
[SPEAKER_09]: But there's a lot of people that are in this
[SPEAKER_09]: what are some things in the intensity of that movement in the energy that's there right now where you think okay yes that's an emotional reaction that makes sense but like let's really focus up here and dial in on this issue so we don't lose what this means and what this is about like what are some of the issues you're seeing and like the quick response to the kind of Christian fundamentalist movement right now.
[SPEAKER_05]: Um, I'm not seeing too many things that are like, I'm like, oh, don't do that.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's more, I think that there's a lack of understanding of if you're truly going to deconstruct, I think there's a lack of understanding of how much work you have to put in, to truly leave these things behind.
[SPEAKER_05]: And one of the things that I'm concerned about is with with any kind of fundamentalism, again, any religion across the world.
[SPEAKER_05]: People who grow up in fundamentalist religions and fundamentalist cultures are much more susceptible to fall prey to other cults.
[SPEAKER_05]: Because you have been raised in the cult mindset, you've been trained, you've been programmed, it's how your motor pathway, your neuron pathways work.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so sometimes the deconstruction movement I see some glimmers of people kind of just falling into another cult mindset.
[SPEAKER_05]: So it's under the brand of deconstruction, but they're still doing I'm going to follow along and I'm checking the boxes and I have these people I listen to and I do what they say versus this kind of understanding of deconstruction is important because it's important to
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, organized religion allows us to kind of offload building our own faith onto someone else.
[SPEAKER_05]: I just want someone to tell me what's right and what's wrong.
[SPEAKER_05]: I want someone to tell me what God says.
[SPEAKER_05]: I want someone to tell me how to get to heaven.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think some people that are getting swept up in the deconstruction resistance, which I think overall is a great movement because we, in this moment in history, have to push back, or we're not going to have an option too.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think overwhelmingly it's great, but I do see some people that I worry haven't really broken down those thought processes enough to recognize that they're getting caught up in another movement and following certain people who are
[SPEAKER_05]: dogmatic.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's just a different dogma.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think that's more my concern is like, you know, I feel like people haven't haven't done the work to change their mindset.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so there's a risk of them getting swept up by someone else and taking advantage of.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, I was just talking to someone about that recently and was was expressing that same concern and one of the layers of that concern is I'm seeing a lot of people have an intense visceral reaction to very thinly veiled bad things that are currently happening, but I'm also seeing a lot of people lose empathy for people that are within these movements and I'm seeing a lot of people who look like
[SPEAKER_09]: look a lot like you strolling onto Liberty University that first semester or who look a lot like myself just, I mean, six, seven years ago, you know, like on uncertain aspects or back in 10 years ago when I was first, you know, getting out of my Christian high school with thinking I knew everything there was to know.
[SPEAKER_09]: And it's like,
[SPEAKER_09]: I guess one of the things that I'm wrestling with and I'm curious to take on this is like, how do you maintain the ability to reach people who are, what I always describe is like, one cheek in the pew, on some of these issues, while also not giving room for,
[SPEAKER_09]: you know, Christian nationalism, also not holding space for really harmful ideas that are taking hold in any space they can.
[SPEAKER_09]: I mean, how do you navigate that, especially as a content creator, like navigating that, like, I'm going to be harsh about this, but also I want to be able to get that message from someone and talk through this.
[SPEAKER_05]: One of the things, and this is something I have to catch myself on.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm someone who is, I've always been very passionate.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm pretty black and white on most things.
[SPEAKER_05]: I either like something or I don't.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm either in or I'm out like my personal motto is, it's either a fuck yes or it's a fuck no.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so especially how I talk when I get riled up about something or I'm really passionate, it sounds like I'm angry.
[SPEAKER_05]: And most of the time I'm not, but sometimes I am.
[SPEAKER_05]: And what I have to constantly re-center in myself, especially right now, I think the most discouraging part for me, is with everything that's going on and has been happening, you know, with, I mean, ice raids, I mean, ice-rated a Chicago apartment building last night, and zip-tied US citizens, no warrants, no Miranda rights, no charges, nothing, just did it to torment them, because, you know, most of the residents were black.
[SPEAKER_05]: And, you know, I see something like that,
[SPEAKER_05]: to the people that are still in this movement, where is the line that it is too far?
[SPEAKER_05]: Because you should across it a while ago, the Epstein files, all of those different things.
[SPEAKER_05]: I keep asking where is the line and I do feel my self-start to get so angry and resentful at people that are still in this movement.
[SPEAKER_05]: And what I have to step back, and I try to, I do this several times a week, step back and say, Monte, you understand indoctrination because that was you once.
[SPEAKER_05]: You were so all in on this movement.
[SPEAKER_05]: You had both feet in.
[SPEAKER_05]: You didn't think you were racist.
[SPEAKER_05]: You didn't think you were homophobic.
[SPEAKER_05]: You didn't think you were transphobic.
[SPEAKER_05]: You didn't think you were all these things.
[SPEAKER_05]: You thought you were doing the right thing.
[SPEAKER_05]: And you were so blind to it until you weren't.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so I have to constantly
[SPEAKER_05]: Just constantly coming back to center and saying, Mont, this you used to be this person and there's, it centers me back on compassion and the way that I choose to address it is having this intensity.
[SPEAKER_05]: against these evil harmful ideas, like attack the idea of racism, attack the idea of, you know, not honoring due process.
[SPEAKER_05]: Focus your anger on those things, not on the people.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's how I try to separate the things like, and that's why a lot of my platform I focus on history.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's a way for me to shine a spotlight on issues, you know, you talk about the Holocaust or you talk about Jim Crow and segregation and all these things.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's a way for me to show that these ideas look at how damaging and how evil and how awful these ideals are without attacking people with it.
[SPEAKER_05]: Because the more I attack these people, especially if they're like one cheekers, like you said, they've got one cheek on the pew, and they are starting to question things.
[SPEAKER_05]: If I start to attack them, I push them both cheeks on the pew.
[SPEAKER_05]: I push them back into the hub if I do that.
[SPEAKER_05]: But if I can present things in a way where it's knowledge, and I can present things in a way where I tell my story, because that's the only full story I feel totally entitled to tell.
[SPEAKER_05]: I can maybe get them to stand up and come over and have a conversation with me.
[SPEAKER_05]: Because beating them with the truth, regardless of how much I want them to see it, is not going to work.
[SPEAKER_05]: Now, I do not reserve any compassion for people who are recklessly hateful.
[SPEAKER_05]: People who just don't care, they're calling themselves fascists.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, fuck you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Those people, I will direct harshness towards.
[SPEAKER_05]: Because I'm like, I will not let you
[SPEAKER_05]: where I am kind of the representative leader here, you are not going to come in and make my people feel unsafe.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like that is not, that's not going to happen.
[SPEAKER_05]: And when it comes to leaders who are particularly hateful or who know exactly what they're doing and they don't care, I'm going to flip those tables over.
[SPEAKER_05]: But when it comes to people who are entrenched in the movement or having a hard time leaving, who are not out here openly hateful, they are not out here trying to beat people up, I'm going to try to get that other cheek off the pew.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's kind of how I balance those conversations, but also still take a hard stance on what especially what's happening right now.
[SPEAKER_05]: and say, nope, that's a line, like that is a line, and the reality of it is it's going to work for some people, and it's not going to work for others.
[SPEAKER_05]: I had someone recently asked me about like, oh, how does it feel like with the size of your platform?
[SPEAKER_05]: And I'm like, I understand that the reality is that for every person who comes up to say hi to me or say thank you for what I'm doing, there's 10 people who recognize me and hate my guts, and there's 10,000 people who don't know who
[SPEAKER_05]: like, that's fine.
[SPEAKER_05]: And it's about keeping perspective on that.
[SPEAKER_05]: And reminding myself, I used to be that person.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like, I used to be a Charlie Kirk.
[SPEAKER_05]: I could debate people back into a corner because I was smart and I knew all the talking points.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I could twist things around.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I did it frequently.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was vicious.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was arrogant in my knowledge and I promoted all of these ideals and that's something else that I have to kind of live with and try to make right in the world that I used to promote this ideal.
[SPEAKER_05]: No.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so when I remind myself of that it's easier for me to step back, take a breath and say, okay, what were the questions that helped me deprogram?
[SPEAKER_05]: How do I present these
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, that kind of a thing.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, and remembering that like the perception of persecution is usually a confirmation that you're right, you know, when you're in those movements, you know, I always think about that like when people would make fun of something in my religious community and the independent fundamental Baptist world, it was like,
[SPEAKER_09]: It just proves that we're a peculiar people, and we're following God in a way that doesn't make sense to the world, and that was like the mindset.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_09]: I think also too, I think you just did a great job delineating between the people who are leading these movements.
[SPEAKER_09]: You know, I think of Stephen Crowder was just back out with the change my mind, you know, science and everything, which I could talk a lot about that video.
[SPEAKER_09]: But people sometimes, I think,
[SPEAKER_09]: take that question at face value and go like well I would change his mind or I would do this and it's like he's not there to change his mind but he's not going to change his mind no matter what you say right but there are some people who consume his content who are open to change in their mind and like that's the bridge you have to learn when to cross and when not to and I think some people get caught on the person the pulpit more than the person the pews or you know whatever the analogy is there
[SPEAKER_09]: I do want to ask this kind of follows that same thread, but one of the things that I I'll say maybe I still wrestle with on some of it and it's one of the reasons I absolutely love your platform is sometimes I feel like so much of responsibility to be an open door for people to find help out of the
[SPEAKER_09]: Not necessarily talk the way I would normally talk, you know, in public platforms, or not necessarily, you know, look the way that I, you know, would normally look where, you know, it's like, I don't want to scare them off, you know, I don't want to scare off someone that wants to have a conversation.
[SPEAKER_09]: I love like the the joy that you just released or like the style that you have in this very like you're just a cool person like you like it like I'm always like okay this is a cool vibe on social media But I know also there's people like I think about people myself 10 years ago would be like put off and go like oh This represents a like she's got a nose ring and dark lipstick right yeah yeah it would be this thing where it's like
[SPEAKER_09]: Well, that looks scary and dangerous to versus like our suits and ties and, you know, church dresses and things.
[SPEAKER_09]: How did you find the freedom to fully express yourself while also just not, you're not doing it as a reaction.
[SPEAKER_09]: It's finding a style and a lifestyle that you like without it purely being controlled, you know, positively or negatively by what you left.
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't know if that question makes sense, but it's your kind of referencing like sometimes people, you know, they come out of a, you know, a fundamentalist movement or Christian movement, whatever, and they, they're just so angry at the movement that they do the farthest opposite.
[SPEAKER_05]: They can find kind of as a rebellion or a, you know, kind of a fuck you to the movement.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, but it's not what they even like.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, so they even like it's not.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then you find like five years later, they kind of like find, they come out of it.
[SPEAKER_09]: They're back in gene skirts because they actually did like those.
[SPEAKER_05]: Because they did like the gene skirts.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, so it's more reactionary.
[SPEAKER_05]: So for me, that was another long process.
[SPEAKER_05]: So my deconstruction really took about a decade of really intense work.
[SPEAKER_05]: One of the personal issue for me and kind of the central theme of the book that I'm working on was the hardest thing for me to overcome was purity culture.
[SPEAKER_05]: And purity culture, in combination with I grew up in the very skinny white women are closer to God, kind of ideal of like you had to look a certain way you had to be attractive to men you had to be thinner it was sinful.
[SPEAKER_05]: In conjunction with this purity culture where anything that happens to you sexually as your fault, you're a stumbling block, you're dirty, you're sinful.
[SPEAKER_05]: The only thing you're good for is your virginity if not no man's going to want you like all these, all these guilt and shame and really horrific.
[SPEAKER_05]: ideals when you when you really think about them um and again contribute to this abusive system that we see in these groups.
[SPEAKER_05]: That was the hardest thing for me to overcome.
[SPEAKER_05]: I had so much I was also overweight as a kid.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I had purity culture and then this uh skinny white lady theology and my dad was extremely vicious with me.
[SPEAKER_05]: Um, particularly about my weight.
[SPEAKER_05]: He would ridicule me, call me ugly, call me plain.
[SPEAKER_05]: Tell me you'll never be as pretty as your sisters.
[SPEAKER_05]: You're going to have to try harder.
[SPEAKER_05]: You can't wear that.
[SPEAKER_05]: It makes you look fat.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like, the first time I remember my dad calling me ugly.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was 10 and I remember exactly what happened.
[SPEAKER_05]: I remember we were in the car.
[SPEAKER_05]: We were coming back from we used to sing in nursing homes together as like a volunteer.
[SPEAKER_05]: thing.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I lost the weight late in high school, lost 90 pounds, and I got taller, and I started playing sports, and but there was still so much body dysmorphia, so much shame.
[SPEAKER_05]: And if you gain a pound, oh, I need to go repent, I need to go make myself throw up.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa because of it.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then after a couple of years of anorexia had about 10 years of
[SPEAKER_05]: And but there was also all this like sexual shame that like will you have to cover up your body because your body is sinful your body is going to cause a man to harm you you know and it's and it's also such a poisonous idea about men that men are these uncontrolled raging sexual beasts like it makes men seem seem like animals.
[SPEAKER_05]: really, it really dehumanizes men too.
[SPEAKER_05]: But growing up in this movement, I had, I was so insecure about my looks and I was so afraid and so ashamed that as I start deconstructing and I'm trying to apply these new beliefs like, I didn't know who I was because my world view was collapsing.
[SPEAKER_05]: I realized that so much of what I'd been taught wasn't true.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I was in this really strange space of knowing nothing and being nothing and when I mentioned earlier I was engaged.
[SPEAKER_05]: I lost my virginity to him two days before I found out that he was seeing five other women.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I was devastated.
[SPEAKER_05]: So not only was I dealing with all the shame of oh my God, I've, and I was 23, but like all this shame of oh my God, like I'm the worst person ever, you know, you're used gum, you're spilt oil.
[SPEAKER_05]: It can't be recovered.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like all these things that they used to dehumanize women.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then having the heartbreak of that relationship immediately falling apart.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the women wasn't the worst part.
[SPEAKER_05]: He had taken my stolen my identity and put $65,000 of debt in my name.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so I was homeless for 10 months.
[SPEAKER_05]: And during that time, I was living illegally in a warehouse where he and I had opened a personal training studio together, and I was running it.
[SPEAKER_05]: He was gone all the time.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I'm sitting in the room that I slept in, and I was just like, I have done everything right.
[SPEAKER_05]: I have lived in my life doing what everyone told me to do.
[SPEAKER_05]: I have checked the boxes.
[SPEAKER_05]: I've wore the right clothes.
[SPEAKER_05]: I went to the right schools.
[SPEAKER_05]: I did.
[SPEAKER_05]: And it was the first time I asked myself, what do you want?
[SPEAKER_05]: What do you want?
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, and at that point, I was like, well, I've lost everything, but my clothes anyway.
[SPEAKER_05]: There's not really anything to lose.
[SPEAKER_05]: And what I really wanted, I knew I wanted to write and I wanted to make music.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I wanted to live in New York.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I borrowed a thousand dollars from my dad and I moved to New York City with my clothes.
[SPEAKER_05]: God of jobs started working within two days and rebuilt my life.
[SPEAKER_05]: And how I came by my personal style was I modeled for a
[SPEAKER_05]: And I can see that now and I started writing music and I started performing music and then I released my first EP and as I'm going through this process of learning what makes music would like what making music looks like learning like what do I actually want to say.
[SPEAKER_05]: fashion became a huge part of that.
[SPEAKER_05]: And it was a huge part of healing for me of wearing things that made me feel good about myself and understanding that loving my body and feeling good about my body wasn't sinful.
[SPEAKER_05]: And during that time I was also in therapy dealing with like a lot of the sexual trauma.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was assaulted when I was 18.
[SPEAKER_05]: And learning all these things and deep programming at the same time, and it started really small.
[SPEAKER_05]: It was with like, oh my gosh, these, you know, these earrings are ridiculous.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm going to buy them and wear them.
[SPEAKER_05]: They're so cool.
[SPEAKER_05]: And it would just be those.
[SPEAKER_05]: And it was one little thing that like, was celebrating these little things about my looks or about my body and really healing that.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the self expression was so much fun and so healing.
[SPEAKER_05]: I kept growing kept healing and I had this moment in my own spiritual journey where I was like, you know what, I've spent a lot of time on my inner child dealing with the abuse and the trauma.
[SPEAKER_05]: I haven't really spent any time with my inner team because in your teenage years, when you're learning and you're exploring and you're kind of figuring out what it means to be adults, what do you like, what do you don't like, what kind of music do you like?
[SPEAKER_05]: I had never gotten to
[SPEAKER_05]: So I decided that I was gonna take a year just for my entertain.
[SPEAKER_05]: It was my new year's resolution.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was like, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna work with my entertain.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I listened to so many albums, you know, front to back, and I watched all these different movies, and I played with so much different fashion.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like some of it was absolutely ridiculous.
[SPEAKER_05]: But some of it was really like,
[SPEAKER_05]: very pop culture kind of alia y2k fashion and some of it was more lady gaga and then I did like professional business and as I was growing during that time my work as an artist was also growing.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was really finding what genre I as an artist loved which is hard rock and heavy metal and so I was working into this space and so things kind of naturally just developed.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm like oh I really you know what I really like how my hands feel when my nails are done.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know what, I really like, I just like black clothing.
[SPEAKER_05]: I really like dark lipstick.
[SPEAKER_05]: I like how it looks.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I always drifted towards those kind of characters as I explored more media, like I love morticia atoms.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so it was just a process over time, but when you go through a process like that, so incredibly intentionally, and it heals you so much.
[SPEAKER_05]: I spent so much of my life hating how I looked, making myself small, making myself into something that I wasn't, I will never go back.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like for me, my fashion has become like a display of my own victory.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I was like, you will not take away my self-expression again.
[SPEAKER_05]: I've worked way too hard to get here.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the nose ring was kind of the last thing.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I, I know obviously, I think they've been kind of increasing in popularity over the last few years.
[SPEAKER_05]: I feel like I saw them a lot more than I did before.
[SPEAKER_05]: And every time I would see a woman with a septum piercing, I'm like, God, that looks so cool.
[SPEAKER_05]: God, I really like that.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I finally got one.
[SPEAKER_05]: I had no idea the reaction people would have to it men are really, really touching about a subject of music.
[SPEAKER_05]: But it's great.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, and that's why for me with this platform, I was not going to waver on that.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was not going to compromise who I was not just because I've worked so hard for it, but because especially with like women in the queer community,
[SPEAKER_05]: I wanted to be a bastion of, I wanted to be an example of like, don't make yourself small because people are uncomfortable with how big you are, like with how big your life is or how big your expression is.
[SPEAKER_05]: Don't make yourself bite size for them.
[SPEAKER_05]: Um, and so it felt like it would be very hypocritical for me to, you know, be, like, put myself, you know, only in business suits and take my jewelry off and, um, it felt like it would be hypocritical to tell them, hey, go through this journey, do the work, express yourself, find out who you are, find out your own beliefs, be curious if I wasn't willing to stand in that on my own.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, that's huge.
[SPEAKER_09]: And I appreciate sharing all that.
[SPEAKER_09]: I, it is something like I said that I think is so connected to your brand, like there's so much of your personality in it.
[SPEAKER_09]: And it's something that, you know, for me, I know when I started the show, I'm like, I'm kind of in the true crime space.
[SPEAKER_09]: And so like I listened back to my first episode.
[SPEAKER_09]: And I'm like,
[SPEAKER_09]: doing something weird with my voice to make it sound like what I think it's sound like to communicate it and it's like it's still me and it's still what I need to communicate but I was like what should it sound like or what and throughout the years it's just been okay what do I sound like and like how do I talk about this with people and more and more that is come in to where
[SPEAKER_09]: You know, in the beginning it was like, ah, well, I don't want people to hear me.
[SPEAKER_09]: Like, I remember the first time I accidentally slipped up and cast on a show and I was like, oh, my God.
[SPEAKER_09]: And I was so stressed about like, do I take it out?
[SPEAKER_09]: Because I don't want people to just never listen again because there's important stuff here, or smoking a cigar.
[SPEAKER_09]: It's like, oh, I can post it, but like, I wouldn't mix my content with that.
[SPEAKER_09]: And, you know, it's, or these are the movies I reference, you know, and,
[SPEAKER_09]: Especially lately, like, I've been writing more and more, you know, I don't know what I'll do with all that, but it's like, even in that, there's certain things where I was talking to a wife and I'm like, well, I feel like maybe I shouldn't say that or people wouldn't want me to say that and it's the opposite, where it's like, well, then I need to talk about it if that's the stuff that's going to be like, oh, if I feel that feeling of like, oh, I got to hide this piece of myself in my content, it's not my content at that point.
[SPEAKER_09]: And so I think like people like yourself, you know,
[SPEAKER_09]: It's really inspiring to see that meshing of like, okay, I have a sense of who you are and what you're about and both those things coexist in a really, really cool way and I think one of the things especially as this movement gains steam is that there there's going to be
[SPEAKER_05]: And there needs to be so there's going to be multiple voices and multiple ways that shows up and people are going to drift to what resonates with them like I have a couple friends who are also kind of in the deconstruction space and the political space that are much more they're just clean cut you know business casual and that's just who they are and you can tell that it's authentic to them and you know and then there's people over here like me that I've always got two colors in my hair and my nails are always crazy.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think that all of us, by showing up honestly, we're going to resonate honestly with people that need to hear our voice in particular, because you're going to resonate with a demographic of especially like young white men that I won't resonate with that won't.
[SPEAKER_09]: I wish if I could figure out how to get them to listen to the show.
[SPEAKER_05]: We're getting there.
[SPEAKER_05]: They're coming around.
[SPEAKER_05]: Um, but for, you know, for me, like, there's just, there's a different demographic that I can resonate with.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think that by showing up as honestly as we can, we have the most impact.
[SPEAKER_05]: And it's, you know, you're not going to, you can be the juiciest peach in the world, and you're still going to meet somebody who doesn't like peaches.
[SPEAKER_09]: No.
[SPEAKER_05]: But the point is, is like, who are you show up as the best version of that?
[SPEAKER_05]: Because that's going to resonate with the people that you're supposed to reach.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, I can't, I can't reach the whole world I would like to.
[SPEAKER_05]: But, you know, that's not possible for me.
[SPEAKER_05]: But what I can do is be so certain in who I am and walk that path forward, that the people who need to hear and see that.
[SPEAKER_05]: Even if even if it just plants a seed down the road, then that's my path.
[SPEAKER_05]: Because there's all these different voices who are filling different spaces.
[SPEAKER_05]: Because I can cus all the time on my platform.
[SPEAKER_09]: that is interesting.
[SPEAKER_09]: You mentioned the male audience and it's something that I'm incredibly frustrated.
[SPEAKER_09]: I've never been in tune with the male mind which is weird because I have one and it's really frustrating because my my demographics for my show across platforms is 75 to 80 percent women 30 to 45 is pretty much my demographic and so some platforms vary even into like
[SPEAKER_09]: And it's a pretty big pool of people at this point.
[SPEAKER_09]: And it's like, and I look at some of the platforms like I've had times where like the male audience is under 15%.
[SPEAKER_09]: Like it's it's really, really, really low.
[SPEAKER_09]: And it's frustrating to me because I feel like that is where the, like,
[SPEAKER_09]: If I had to see like an area or demographic that I'm concerned for, it's that group.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_09]: And I really wrestle with like how to reach that demographic in a Joe Rogan era, you know.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: And this is one of those things that what I meant was like based on appearance.
[SPEAKER_05]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_05]: At least give your the least open.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like as soon as as soon as they see me, they're like, nope.
[SPEAKER_05]: Swiping up like get rid of her.
[SPEAKER_09]: They listen to me long enough, and then they drop a comment about my a feminine voice, which I, that was my cross to bear forever.
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, I get called trans all the time as of my jawline.
[SPEAKER_09]: Really?
[SPEAKER_05]: Because I have like a real sharp angular face.
[SPEAKER_09]: The transvestigators love you, huh?
[SPEAKER_05]: I know right.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was like, wow, that's an interesting obsession for you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Tell me more about that.
[SPEAKER_09]: Right.
[SPEAKER_09]: I had, I have a large swath of Baptist pastors that there's one clip in particular.
[SPEAKER_09]: I'll insert in the episode because it's funny.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm concerned for people like Eric because they will suffer judgment, but I'm not going to lie about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's part of me that says he's been given over a reprobate mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if he is not moved to, I believe he has moved, maybe he's not moved.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's always been there.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I believe he's very, very compassionate and accepting to the LGBT crowd.
[SPEAKER_01]: and homosexuality, and I think if he doesn't end up there himself, someone in his family will be, and it's just, that's the direction he's going to go.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's where it goes.
[SPEAKER_09]: And I've had a lot of people like that that share stuff like that.
[SPEAKER_09]: I'm like, tell me more about how you think often about how I'm going to turn gay, you know, and what that means for you.
[SPEAKER_09]: What would that do for you?
[SPEAKER_05]: They turn on the frogs gay.
[SPEAKER_09]: very much appreciate that.
[SPEAKER_09]: I, yes, so I'm trying to reach out and that's honestly one of the reasons like I did a couple posts about like masculinity and Christianity like puffing a cigar.
[SPEAKER_09]: I was like, let me see if I can just play with the aesthetic.
[SPEAKER_09]: It didn't do anything.
[SPEAKER_09]: So if anyone can figure out how to reach them, I would love to love to know.
[SPEAKER_05]: It is, and it's really hard in the, like you said in the Joe Rogan, like Manus fear red pill era, because anger, resentment, no accountability are just so much easier.
[SPEAKER_05]: There's so much easier to step into, right?
[SPEAKER_05]: It's not on my fault.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's everyone else's fault.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's these, you know, liberal women's fault.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like whoever's fault, you want it to be.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's so much easier.
[SPEAKER_05]: That is just so much easier than introspection.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so it is tough.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, yeah, and you've been taught to cut off emotions and empathy and when you've been taught to cut off empathy, it's really hard to have a conversation that the only emotion you're allowed to show is anger.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_09]: You know.
[SPEAKER_09]: I really glad you brought up the manuscript because this is kind of where I wanted to take the conversation.
[SPEAKER_09]: At this point is is.
[SPEAKER_09]: one of the things that's really interesting to me to watch in the past like three to four weeks because a few things have happened over that period of time and things are happening right now and by the time this episode releases more things will have happened so this is going to be evergreen that statement there's a lot of things happening but one of the things that that comes up to me
[SPEAKER_09]: right now is there is a massive decentralization of power within these movements where I was just talking to some of the other day about those who worked in the Christian university world, you know, and I said it's very interesting that
[SPEAKER_09]: There used to be these very strict denominational divides.
[SPEAKER_09]: Like, ecumenicalism was, I can't even say the word, ecumenicalism was like the big boogie man in these denominations.
[SPEAKER_09]: Like, a Baptist hanging out with a Lutheran?
[SPEAKER_09]: No.
[SPEAKER_09]: All right.
[SPEAKER_09]: Like, for us, it was like a fundamental Baptist hanging out with a Southern Baptist, going to Liberty University?
[SPEAKER_09]: No.
[SPEAKER_09]: That's a big, no, no.
[SPEAKER_09]: But you look at, see, the Charlie Kirk Memorial, and you have everybody represented from Greg Locke to Mark Triscoll, to Independent Fundamental Baptist
[SPEAKER_09]: You had to do the more charismatic crowd that's there and they all have dropped these denominational divides to a line for political power and that's concerning.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's what they're coming because that's what this whole thing has been about the whole time is just political power and now that they're getting it, they don't, they're going to do everything they can to put like streamline that process.
[SPEAKER_09]: which I think in the short term is going to work.
[SPEAKER_09]: And this is the question I'm curious your take on is, I foresee they're being some issues in retention of some of the men rolling into these systems because they don't have a clear mission statement.
[SPEAKER_09]: I think one of the things that held me and made me question first along is like, okay, if I am wrong about this might do thing, I'm going to hell.
[SPEAKER_09]: Like that was a big thing in the back of my mind.
[SPEAKER_09]: Now those lines are so blurred.
[SPEAKER_09]: Like, do you see over the next 10 years,
[SPEAKER_09]: the Gen Z guys are getting swept into this, who are binging Andrew Tate on the weekdays, and then going to Mark Triskel's church on Sunday, like, is there enough denominational clarity to keep them within the system?
[SPEAKER_09]: Or do you think there's gonna be too much cognitive dissonance where they're gonna start hemorrhaging?
[SPEAKER_09]: Because I'm very doom and gloom right now to be really honest.
[SPEAKER_09]: I'm very cynical about the direction things are going.
[SPEAKER_09]: I think we'll,
[SPEAKER_09]: I think it only gets worse from here, but also I think there's going to be a swell of people like myself who are going to be on the reactionary like, okay, they promise this and then give us any of this and I'm out.
[SPEAKER_09]: I don't know what what what's your.
[SPEAKER_05]: I kind of have a split bag opinion on that.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think there is going to be a group of young men that become disillusioned pretty quick.
[SPEAKER_05]: But I think there's going to be a group that are going to become very, very militant and very loyal because they're drifting into this movement coming into this movement angry, resentful, and it gives them permission.
[SPEAKER_05]: to do the things they want to do like you know we there's a huge movement in like Christian fun and we see this with like the obscene files like to protect abusers justify people like Andrew who has at this point not only trafficked women but assaulted multiple women and you steal your young men saying well he he says some great things
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't care, he's a rapist and has a salt like no, but you still you see these these justifications because they just want to be able to live how he lives and they want to do what he says they should be able to do.
[SPEAKER_05]: So there's this kind of power lust that comes with that when you feel entitled to an act rage and violence on groups you resent or women you resent.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think a lot of men are going to get swept up in that for a very long time because it's addictive.
[SPEAKER_05]: it doesn't require any effort from them.
[SPEAKER_05]: And this whole movement is justifying all these beliefs and telling them, yeah, bro, it's not you.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's these stupid women's fault.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, and they're not going to get any more women doing this.
[SPEAKER_05]: No, because I mean, as as this is happening, because we're watching all these young men fall into conservativeism and all the young women are leaving.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_09]: For obvious reasons and quite literally like I want to specify this and I'm sorry to interrupt but like this is something I keep shouting to people is like literally the demographics right now is Gen Z women are leaving churches at a rate higher than ever before and Gen Z men are returning at a rate higher than ever before and so like this is this isn't just like rhetoric like this is literally what's happening you can look at the charts and I want
[SPEAKER_05]: that a generation of women are becoming less religious than men, because women have always been the more religious group, the more actively practicing religion group, and we're seeing that reverse for the first time in American history.
[SPEAKER_05]: And we're also seeing the rise of the 4B movement is getting stronger and stronger, and especially as with what abortion bands and the Trump administration is doing, the birth rates dropping.
[SPEAKER_05]: And women are completely opting out.
[SPEAKER_05]: They're like, I'm not getting married.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm not dating.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm not having sex.
[SPEAKER_05]: I like, I know so many women who are just intentionally sell a bit.
[SPEAKER_05]: like not they're just not women are not having it because you know women we we're in the first time in American history where we have two generations of women who have been able to have a credit card and able to go to college and able to get a job and able to have their own resources able to buy a house and in the span of this that from the 70s until now when women could get a credit card federally and nationally we have seen women wear dominating education
[SPEAKER_05]: We own more single women own more homes than single men.
[SPEAKER_05]: We are over half the workforce.
[SPEAKER_05]: We're 45% of small businesses.
[SPEAKER_05]: Women have become an integral part of wealth generation and the economy.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so women are no longer...
[SPEAKER_05]: In this space where they you have to get married in order to survive for you have to rely It which is part of what the man is for your soul upset about is like I can't force a woman to be with me Just because I have a paycheck.
[SPEAKER_05]: I have to be a good person.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, I don't love it Yeah, I don't have you know and so It's it's interesting to see that because there's this you know quote male loneliness epidemic and We see the increase of the four B movement
[SPEAKER_05]: And the conservative ideals and Christian nationalism are only going to increase that divide.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then the question is, is how does it resolve itself?
[SPEAKER_05]: Unfortunately, I think we're going to see a rise in violence against women, especially online.
[SPEAKER_05]: We're already seeing that with AI in particular, especially in states where it's not regulated at all.
[SPEAKER_05]: But it'll be interesting to see, like, I don't see women.
[SPEAKER_05]: like falling into the movement, I don't see women just carte blanche stopping submitting, falling back into these 1950s housewife.
[SPEAKER_05]: Trends like obviously there are groups of young women who are kind of falling into the trade wife thing and obviously there's large groups of conservative women.
[SPEAKER_05]: But I think the larger group is pulling back and saying no, we're not we're not doing this.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think women even young young women see, see it for what it is now.
[SPEAKER_05]: And they want
[SPEAKER_05]: They want to be able to have options, but it's I think it's one of the biggest generational divides we've ever seen as far as being done completely different sides of the spectrum.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think that that's why, you know, the Doug Wilson's and the Pete Heggsets are pushing this idea around more of taking away women's right to vote.
[SPEAKER_00]: When women were granted the right to vote, the nation had already accepted the lie that the nation has stopped the more than a collection of individuals.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the matter was framed this way, men as individuals can vote, so why cannot individual women do the same?
[SPEAKER_00]: We were so muddled, we thought we were giving the franchise to women when we were in fact taking it away from families.
[SPEAKER_05]: they recognize that women at large are on the opposite side of the political and religious spectrum of them.
[SPEAKER_05]: And now they see them as the enemy and that's opposition.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so in order to maintain this power in the long term, how do you negate that vote?
[SPEAKER_05]: It's kind of a big question.
[SPEAKER_05]: Now in the 90s growing up in fundamentalism, they were teaching then that women really shouldn't be able to vote.
[SPEAKER_05]: It really should be the man who votes for you.
[SPEAKER_05]: But it's just become, it was a lot more fringe at the time.
[SPEAKER_05]: And now it's become a lot more mainstream.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then you have people like Pearl, who, um, gets online and she'll give it, yeah, I would give it my right to vote.
[SPEAKER_05]: These liberal women are ruining everything.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm like, okay, cool.
[SPEAKER_05]: When was the last time we had a few liberal women president?
[SPEAKER_09]: Right.
[SPEAKER_05]: Or when was the last time liberal women controlled either Congress or any state legislator?
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
[SPEAKER_05]: Ever.
[SPEAKER_05]: Never.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's never happened.
[SPEAKER_05]: So if you don't like the results of what we're seeing, men have dominated leadership the entire history of this country.
[SPEAKER_05]: So either their great leaders and they should have all the control, which means you should love where we're at.
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
[SPEAKER_05]: Or it's an example of poor leadership in a broken system.
[SPEAKER_09]: Right.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, all the programming is so hard to shed, you know, and hard to get out of, especially the, you know, I'm reading right now for the love of men by Liz Plank and one of the things that she said that has stuck with me is, you know, men.
[SPEAKER_09]: She said if you surveyed a bunch of men, they would all agree that men should pay for dinner, but a shocking small amount with think that you need to ask questions during the dinner.
[SPEAKER_09]: You know, like it's just kind of pointing out the fact that like money isn't the primary currency that's driving relationships at this point.
[SPEAKER_09]: It's like empathy.
[SPEAKER_09]: And the way that I was showing my drawings.
[SPEAKER_09]: So I just that kind of mind is who are as you were mentioning that.
[SPEAKER_09]: What's the 4B movement you mentioned that?
[SPEAKER_09]: And I haven't heard that.
[SPEAKER_05]: So the 4B movement originated in Korea.
[SPEAKER_05]: which is experiencing so much like so much like sexual harassment, discrimination against women, and so what the Korean women did, and I don't remember what each one stands for.
[SPEAKER_05]: There's four different bees, but essentially women,
[SPEAKER_05]: Collectively, and it's a large movement agreed that they were not going to date men.
[SPEAKER_05]: They were not going to sleep with men.
[SPEAKER_05]: They were not going to get married to men.
[SPEAKER_05]: They were not going to have children with men until the laws changed.
[SPEAKER_05]: And it became a very, very big movement over there, which is why Korea's South Korea's birth rate is so low.
[SPEAKER_05]: Because women simply said, no, we're not going to do that.
[SPEAKER_05]: If you're going to continue to perpetrate the system, perpetuate the system, we're not going to participate in it.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, I just pulled up.
[SPEAKER_09]: It's no marriage, no childbirth, no dating, and no sex.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_09]: I was like, why is that for bees, and then I realize it's in Korean.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's in Korean.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's why.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's in Korean.
[SPEAKER_09]: It doesn't translate as for bees.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then there's also a 5B movement, but I'm not super familiar with that.
[SPEAKER_05]: But that's been gaining traction.
[SPEAKER_05]: The 4B movement has been gaining traction since 2023 in the U.S. Because of a lot of these issues.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think we're going to see that increase.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I'm what I'm hopeful for.
[SPEAKER_05]: is that at some point women in the U.S. do what the women in Iceland did.
[SPEAKER_05]: When they were experiencing like paid disparities, there wasn't equality in the system.
[SPEAKER_05]: The women in Iceland like collectively just one like had protested where they refused to go to work for three days.
[SPEAKER_05]: They gave their husbands the kid said, you're you're taking care of them.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm not cooking.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm not cleaning.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm not doing any of this.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the women of the nation protested and within three days they were
[SPEAKER_05]: passing legislation to give women equal rights equal pay and that's all like within a week changes were being made and by the following year women had like complete Equal status in the law like both with pay equal rights equal representation all of that stuff and it It really it just took a week of protest.
[SPEAKER_05]: They just said nope, and if the women in the U.S. did that Just didn't because we're 51% of the workforce
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm hoping that at some point we get large-scale protests like that until we can start to address some of these issues.
[SPEAKER_05]: Because until these issues affect pockets, like we've seen this with the target, we've seen it with Disney, like until it affects their money, nothing's going to change.
[SPEAKER_05]: Legislation will change when you affect their money.
[SPEAKER_05]: Money boycotts are extremely effective.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_09]: And if you don't notice, you don't notice the value told it's gone, you know, sort of thing.
[SPEAKER_09]: Like, if you, if that did happen on the white scale, it would have significant impact for sure.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_09]: Well, I'm curious here as we as we get near the end.
[SPEAKER_09]: you know, looking toward the next couple of months, really.
[SPEAKER_09]: I mean, what do you feel is the most pressing thing for people to be talking about?
[SPEAKER_09]: I mean, obviously there's the beauty of
[SPEAKER_09]: the internet and the beauty of being able to get behind a microphone is like you can talk about a lot of things.
[SPEAKER_09]: But if you had to say like okay, if we could only talk about one thing for the next couple of months, I think this is the most pressing thing that fellow content creators and individuals who are just sharing their opinions online, this is what we need to be focusing on.
[SPEAKER_09]: What would that be for you?
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, as we very quickly slide into lawlessness on the federal level, I think the most important thing is to focus on how to put a stop to that, to the movement as a whole.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like, we're already having mass law enforcement.
[SPEAKER_05]: no warrants.
[SPEAKER_05]: People are disappearing.
[SPEAKER_05]: And my personal belief is I really think that the blue states need to be having conversations about how they're going to protect citizens.
[SPEAKER_05]: I know there's already been whispers of like, is there a point where we succeed?
[SPEAKER_05]: Can they withhold federal taxes?
[SPEAKER_05]: Is there a way that they can refuse to participate in what's going on?
[SPEAKER_05]: Because I mean even so we're as of this recording we're in the middle of the government shutdown.
[SPEAKER_05]: And if you call the White House comment line, it's Caroline Levitt's voice saying, Hello, America.
[SPEAKER_04]: This is White House press secretary Caroline Levitt.
[SPEAKER_04]: Democrats and Congress have shut down the federal government because they care more about funding health care for illegal immigrants than they care about serving you, the American people.
[SPEAKER_04]: Until Democrats vote for the clean, Republican-bast continuing resolution to reopen the government, the White House is unable to answer your call or respond to your questions.
[SPEAKER_04]: We look forward to hearing from you again very soon.
[SPEAKER_04]: And in the meantime, please know President Trump will never stop fighting for you.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you and God bless you.
[SPEAKER_05]: And it's a clear violation of the Hatch Act.
[SPEAKER_05]: And but we've gotten to a place where they will break any law and they don't care.
[SPEAKER_05]: And for me, it's really about this conversation of how do we stop this, because if we don't stop this and laws are already in the place where they don't matter, the Constitution doesn't matter.
[SPEAKER_05]: It doesn't matter if you can't or won't enforce it.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I have no idea what that answer is.
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't have a thing of, this is what we need to be doing.
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, there's a lot of things.
[SPEAKER_05]: And still calling a representative's protests all of these things.
[SPEAKER_05]: But I think the number one, like central focal point is, how do we stop this administration?
[SPEAKER_09]: No.
[SPEAKER_05]: How do we stop them?
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_09]: Do you think this outlasts this administration?
[SPEAKER_09]: One of the things, and I just want to profess why I changed my tune on this.
[SPEAKER_09]: I was pretty convinced like, okay, Trump.
[SPEAKER_09]: leaving office is there's nobody with the charisma he has in the current administration.
[SPEAKER_09]: I don't think J.D.
[SPEAKER_09]: Vance has the poll that Trump does.
[SPEAKER_09]: I don't think that none of them have the culture personality.
[SPEAKER_09]: Like they tried to float Ron to scientists, which is like, yeah, I mean, people Ron, nickname, he's got the charisma of a meatball.
[SPEAKER_09]: You know, there's nothing there.
[SPEAKER_09]: But the thing that terrified me, the minute that I saw literally within an hour of seeing the
[SPEAKER_09]: assassination.
[SPEAKER_09]: I thought I know how much fundamentalists love a good martyr and how well they can choose those situations.
[SPEAKER_09]: And I immediately was texting some people going like this just locked in another president like Trump.
[SPEAKER_09]: I don't know who's going to be.
[SPEAKER_09]: I agree.
[SPEAKER_09]: But I think this is going to be the ammunition in the next election cycle.
[SPEAKER_09]: It's going to be, look at the radical left.
[SPEAKER_09]: Look at the violence.
[SPEAKER_09]: You don't want violence taken.
[SPEAKER_05]: How the Department of Justice took down their own study, showing that political violence on the far right, far exceeds the far left for at least the last 30 years.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, it's amazing that people suddenly care about shootings.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, look at that, convenient.
[SPEAKER_09]: That was a liberal thing for a while.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's the only school shooting they actually care to talk about.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, I agree.
[SPEAKER_05]: I felt the same way until that happened.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I was like, oh no.
[SPEAKER_05]: And there's there's two levels to this.
[SPEAKER_05]: One is I don't put the administration.
[SPEAKER_05]: If he lives that long of just not leaving office, like they're breaking every other law.
[SPEAKER_05]: Why wouldn't they break that one?
[SPEAKER_05]: and granted some of it's a grift, right?
[SPEAKER_05]: They're selling 2028 merch because people will buy it and it's all about- And they know how many people mad and yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yep, it's about as much money as they can pull from people who are, you know, about to lose their healthcare.
[SPEAKER_05]: But I also think that, you know, because even watching Charlie Kirk's funeral like that, that was a white Christian nationalist rally was what that was.
[SPEAKER_05]: That was not a funeral.
[SPEAKER_05]: They were selling Trump 2028 merch there.
[SPEAKER_05]: It followed the formula if you've watched the documentary on the WWE.
[SPEAKER_05]: It followed like the formula that they style their shows after.
[SPEAKER_05]: exactly.
[SPEAKER_05]: And, you know, pyrotechnics and all this stuff.
[SPEAKER_05]: That was a white Christian nationalist movement and what they've done is they've been able to take that.
[SPEAKER_05]: and militarize it, you know, even with the extremely questionable circumstances, but they were starting the rhetoric before Tyler Robinson was even arrested.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_09]: And, um, which is that when a Bill Mars best owns, you know, I've, I've lost my fandom of Bill Mars in recent years, but him, him reading off to Ben Shapiro, all the things that we thought this was.
[SPEAKER_10]: It is very likely to be a,
[SPEAKER_10]: trans antifa marches.
[SPEAKER_10]: That is just not is it that you don't know we don't know what this is it is we we do you know that's kid was of the left we do know that we do know what that this kid was of the political left that is according to contemporaneous reporting from the Guardian as walls tablet magazine today it's two days out we don't know shit but here's we don't know shit they never do the internet is undefeated and getting it wrong to begin with.
[SPEAKER_10]: It's a sound about the internet, that's about the actual reporting by mainstream exception.
[SPEAKER_10]: The Guardian is not a right wing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Here's what we heard.
[SPEAKER_02]: Here's what I was told so far and I'll tell you what was right.
[SPEAKER_02]: First I heard he's a registered Republican, not true.
[SPEAKER_02]: Not true.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, then he was a donor to Trump, not true.
[SPEAKER_02]: His father works in the sheriff's office.
[SPEAKER_02]: Not true.
[SPEAKER_02]: Uh, there was a picture of wearing a pro-Trump shirt.
[SPEAKER_02]: Not true.
[SPEAKER_02]: Remember the Democratic Socialist of America?
[SPEAKER_02]: Not true.
[SPEAKER_02]: We don't know what he is.
[SPEAKER_02]: Uh, well, how are you so sure he's of the left?
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, I agree when you write on a bullet, uh,
[SPEAKER_02]: What did he run on the bullet?
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, I catch this.
[SPEAKER_10]: Catch this fascist, which is also a gamer thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: OK, but now I'm hearing he may have been part of that group.
[SPEAKER_02]: For whom Charlie Kirk was not right when... You mean the grippers, yes.
[SPEAKER_10]: I mean, so that would...
[SPEAKER_02]: They're sure he's not that.
[SPEAKER_10]: I'm not sure that he's not that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, I didn't know you were sure.
[SPEAKER_10]: Oh, no, hold on.
[SPEAKER_10]: No, hold on.
[SPEAKER_10]: OK, because I've been... You were.
[SPEAKER_05]: I tell people that the facts no matter if you can control the narrative, you know, it's a right-steg fire is what it is.
[SPEAKER_05]: So you get to claim it's your enemy and then you use that claim to escalate violence, break the law, change the constitution to spend civil liberties all of those things.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so I have a, the assassination of Charlie Kirk was the best thing that could have happened for the administration.
[SPEAKER_05]: Maggo was fracturing over the upstream files, people were getting disillusioned, people are scared of losing their health care.
[SPEAKER_05]: His death rallies them all together.
[SPEAKER_05]: They're so angry.
[SPEAKER_05]: They don't care.
[SPEAKER_05]: They're so angry.
[SPEAKER_05]: They don't see that they're being robbed right in front of their face.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think that the,
[SPEAKER_05]: And as J.D.
[SPEAKER_05]: Vance leans a lot more into the uncouthness, I think they'll just take him right like he doesn't have the cult of personality that Trump has but I think after this They'll just be like, I don't care.
[SPEAKER_09]: Well, like whatever to the vulgarity he's leaning into like the you know the dipshit tweet and like the things where people go like, oh, this is our vice president, you know, like yeah.
[SPEAKER_09]: It is WWE.
[SPEAKER_09]: I'm glad you do that comparison.
[SPEAKER_09]: That's very much that
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, it's very, so it's, I find it very discouraging, but that's why I think that that is the big question of how do we stop them, you know, and I do think, I do think there's a lot of indications that Trump's health is failing, but I think he's going to keep pushing this until he can't anymore.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, I'm sorry to keep squeezing in a question.
[SPEAKER_09]: Oh, it's fine.
[SPEAKER_09]: I'm reading a book.
[SPEAKER_09]: You know what?
[SPEAKER_09]: I'm going to address this right now.
[SPEAKER_09]: I'm reading a book right now.
[SPEAKER_09]: That's not it.
[SPEAKER_09]: Hold on.
[SPEAKER_09]: I read lots of books.
[SPEAKER_09]: I'm very smart.
[SPEAKER_05]: My apartment is taken over by books.
[SPEAKER_05]: I need to move into a bigger house.
[SPEAKER_05]: I have space.
[SPEAKER_09]: I'm reading a book on fonding right now.
[SPEAKER_09]: And
[SPEAKER_09]: talk about feeling called out because I'm always going like if it's okay with you yeah more question please don't be mad at me for this interview that you agree to but I um one of the things that I don't know that I'm thrilled about is I think there's something to the you know they go low we go high there's something there's something to that I like there's something to that where I think
[SPEAKER_09]: Okay, when someone's not playing politics, you can't win by just playing politics.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, you can't follow the rules with someone who wants to cut your throat.
[SPEAKER_09]: Right, and I want to be clear, that's not me in sighting violence.
[SPEAKER_09]: Someone's gonna clip them to like, you're seeing you can't do it by politics.
[SPEAKER_09]: Someone's saying, but I do see people like say Gavin Newsom, who's basically mimicking all of Trump's style and throwing it back at him, which on one hand, I like, on the other hand,
[SPEAKER_09]: I don't know if I like the fighting fire with fire, where it's like, okay, we're gonna act on professional and we're gonna go as low as possible to go after this.
[SPEAKER_09]: Because what concerns me is like, what we're talking about earlier with leaving fundamentals is like, you're working out of reaction versus a better plan forward.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_09]: And I don't know, like, what's your thought on, like, the people, like, in this could be Jasmine Crocket, this could be, you know, Gavin Newsom, the people that are going above and beyond to, like, take all the vitro on sling it right back at them.
[SPEAKER_09]: Do you think that's effective?
[SPEAKER_09]: Do you think it's not?
[SPEAKER_09]: Do you think it paints a really dangerous place where politics to keep going?
[SPEAKER_09]: What's your view on that?
[SPEAKER_05]: I think there's, I think, honestly, it's a little bit of both, like, right, because right now we have, you know, whatever I'm sad and I feel like the world is collapsing, I go to Zoron Mom Donnie's page or James Talereco or Bernie Sanders and the work that they're doing.
[SPEAKER_05]: But at the same time, right, and those men are doing such incredible jobs of approaching these issues with real solutions and keeping it classy and cheeky, you know, because Zoron has some great great, like his campaign needs to be studied for the future.
[SPEAKER_05]: But he's always so classy, but he definitely faces off on the issue and he definitely claps back when he needs to.
[SPEAKER_05]: But at the same time, is again, you have people who are willing to break the law, they're willing to violate human rights, they're willing to violate the Constitution.
[SPEAKER_05]: You can't bring your fists to a gunfight.
[SPEAKER_05]: You can't, so it has to be this balance of how do we stop this movement that is willing to violate any law, harm people, kidnap people?
[SPEAKER_05]: How do we stop them when their lust for power is so great that they have no respect for the loss?
[SPEAKER_05]: So I think there's a little bit of both, right?
[SPEAKER_05]: I think there is this movement of people giving us this vision of a new future.
[SPEAKER_05]: And also the blue state governors need to be watching these redistricting efforts and saying we're not going to let you do that.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like we don't want to, we would prefer to use our independent districting company that's been doing it for 20 years.
[SPEAKER_05]: But we are going to offset you cheating if we have to.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think it's a little bit of both.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, because it's definitely not like, I mean, as recline's op-ed that's gotten rightfully gone a lot.
[SPEAKER_09]: If he, I don't think it's like, well, they're doing politics the right way, you know?
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, that was such garbage and I typically really like as recline.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was really disappointed in that piece.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was like, no.
[SPEAKER_05]: Because again, it's the same thing as the guy with the table would change my mind.
[SPEAKER_05]: Is it's not about discourse.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's about rhetoric.
[SPEAKER_09]: right and I think he missed the boat on that is like this is not what it's you're just taking what he says it is and allowing it to be that and it's not and I think like so it's not that but I also look at like I said Gavin Newsom stuff some of it's been concerning me where I'm like I hope you have a plan beyond just winning.
[SPEAKER_09]: Like I hope there's something here and I think what you mentioned was Zoron is a great example.
[SPEAKER_09]: It's it's being cheeky.
[SPEAKER_09]: It's pointing out the stuff.
[SPEAKER_09]: You just recently, a journalist asked him to say something nice about Eric Adams and he said, he's sat for a second and then he said, I think he was correct in calling Andrew Cuomo a snake.
[SPEAKER_09]: You know, and I was like, that's a great answer to this.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, it's like perfect.
[SPEAKER_09]: Um, and so I think that's supposed to be viable, but there's a clear path forward.
[SPEAKER_09]: A clear disagree with all of the path, it's like, here's a plan.
[SPEAKER_09]: And that's as tough as it is.
[SPEAKER_05]: And here's exactly how I'm going to do it.
[SPEAKER_09]: Is like, I'm just not Trump.
[SPEAKER_09]: And I don't think that's enough.
[SPEAKER_09]: We clearly wasn't enough to, to win.
[SPEAKER_09]: Um, I'm sorry if we ended up in a place so different than where we started, but I think, um,
[SPEAKER_05]: I think it's important.
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, we're in a unique place in history.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I will say that I'm extremely hopeful because I do believe that this is an extinction burst, right?
[SPEAKER_05]: We're, you know, Christian fundamentalists and nationalists have really messed up because they let their power hunger expose them too much too quickly.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like people see this movement for what it is now.
[SPEAKER_05]: Some people still align with it, but they align with it knowing exactly what it is.
[SPEAKER_05]: There's no
[SPEAKER_05]: is kind of disturbing, which is extremely disturbing, but you have this large group in the middle because statistics dictate everything operates on a bell curve.
[SPEAKER_05]: This large group in the middle is like, hey, I didn't sign up for this.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like for the last four years or five years, whatever, I've been saying that we're not racist and we're not this and now you guys are claiming to be Nazis.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, so you have this whole group of people that have to make a decision
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't know how long the process will be, right?
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't know how long this phase is.
[SPEAKER_05]: I do think we're going to end up in a great depression because one of the two times since 1900 that Republicans controlled the house, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the presidency was throughout the 1920s.
[SPEAKER_05]: And all of the legislation that they're passing now, they passed in the 1920s, which led to the great depression.
[SPEAKER_05]: including high tariffs, deregulation, tax benefits for corporations.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's almost the same playbook and it didn't work the first time.
[SPEAKER_05]: They tried to do the same thing when they had dominant control in Bush's administration and it led to the great recession.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I think we're going to head there.
[SPEAKER_05]: But I do think that this is kind of the last dying burst.
[SPEAKER_05]: of this movement.
[SPEAKER_05]: This ideology that's really been building since the 1930s.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's been about 100 years of this and they've been planning it for a long time.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's just a matter of how long does it take?
[SPEAKER_05]: And what's the damage in the aftermath in its wake?
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, it's exactly my thoughts.
[SPEAKER_05]: But I think I think that shit's going to collapse and things are going to burn, but I also believe
[SPEAKER_05]: that at the end of it, we get a chance to build something much better.
[SPEAKER_05]: We get a chance to build something that is what America always claimed it was.
[SPEAKER_05]: And we're also seeing a global shift in power, you know, several countries in Africa just declared independence from France.
[SPEAKER_05]: And we're seeing
[SPEAKER_05]: global shifts where after this the United States, I don't think is going to be the super power anymore.
[SPEAKER_05]: And this is this is just you look at history around every 250 years.
[SPEAKER_05]: The empire kind of changes over and each empire goes through what we're going through now.
[SPEAKER_05]: And it moves on to the next empire.
[SPEAKER_05]: And we don't we don't know who that's going to be.
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, it could very well be China.
[SPEAKER_05]: It could be
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, maybe Africa is a continent really comes up and becomes the next global power.
[SPEAKER_05]: We don't know, but I do think this is an extinction burst.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's just a matter of outlasting it.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, how much damage can't do and it's dying breaths, you know, is a big piece.
[SPEAKER_09]: I don't know if this is an optimistic or cynical close to the show, but I mean, it's just one of those things, I guess we don't know and I think the best way to wrap this is
[SPEAKER_09]: being a voice for this and a place where people who are, you know, trying to figure out now who feel politically unhoused or feel, you know, religiously unhoused, usually both of those things in tandem to have a place to ask these questions.
[SPEAKER_09]: And, you know, as someone who's doing what you're doing on a much, much smaller scale and focused
[SPEAKER_05]: I think that all these different voices that are coming up are so exciting, you know, and I'm I love seeing And the independent journalism, right, and like all of these things that are coming up, I think is a really positive shift And for anyone who's listening to this, who like what I just said it, they're like, oh my god, I'm so depressed, I don't want to do.
[SPEAKER_05]: What I will say is even in this moment, and I have days where I'm so overwhelmed and like I'll have so much anxiety, I can't sleep about the future, you know,
[SPEAKER_05]: What I will say is that I've never been more motivated and inspired than I am now.
[SPEAKER_05]: And part of the reason for that is because I have such clarity.
[SPEAKER_05]: When things are so bad, the answer to the question is so much easier.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's like, well, of course, I'm going to fight against this movement because it's so extreme.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's so wrong.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like, of course, I'm going to push back.
[SPEAKER_05]: And what helps me stay motivated, and I'm a huge Lord of the Rings fan.
[SPEAKER_05]: I talk about Lord of the Rings all the time.
[SPEAKER_05]: But the quote for me that really helps is when they're in the minds of Morian Frodo talking to Gandalf, and he says, I wish this had never happened, I wish the ring never came to me.
[SPEAKER_05]: And Gandalf says, so do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide.
[SPEAKER_05]: All you have to do is decide what to do and the time that is given to you.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that for me makes it so easy.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's like, yeah, I wish I didn't have to live through this.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, I wish I didn't have to, you know, deal with this.
[SPEAKER_05]: But at the same time, I'm here, which means I was meant to be here, which means I get to decide to do the next right thing.
[SPEAKER_05]: And it makes things so much easier.
[SPEAKER_05]: Because all day, every day, especially when I'm overwhelmed, I just ask myself, what's the next right thing?
[SPEAKER_05]: What's the next right thing?
[SPEAKER_05]: And the next right thing could be, you know what?
[SPEAKER_05]: I really need to wash my laundry.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, or I rescued a kitten out of a parking garage yesterday, what is the next right thing, and it makes it so much simpler.
[SPEAKER_05]: Because for me, Javing to this movement is not an option.
[SPEAKER_05]: So then, okay, my decision is simple.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's forward no matter what.
[SPEAKER_05]: And there's something about that that I find incredibly comforting.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, I love that.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, I had a guest on recent said like just get small, you know, in these moments like what are those little acts that you can do to bring your community together to bring your platform together to bring your family together like and, you know, moving forward no matter what just getting small like I think that's that's so huge because it does feel overwhelming and it's like, you know, I look at myself and I look at the federal government and it's like,
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, let me take this on, you know, so that's that's so helpful.
[SPEAKER_09]: As we're wrapping up here, what's the best place for people to connect with you and, you know, buy merch from you, go check out your stuff, like what's what's the best route to do that?
[SPEAKER_05]: So, merch and kind of if you want like a summary of everything I'm doing is my website Montemator.com.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's M-O-N-T-E-M-A-D-E-R.com.
[SPEAKER_05]: Instagram is my big baby.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's where I spend the most time.
[SPEAKER_05]: But I am working on building out my YouTube and my sub stack.
[SPEAKER_05]: And all of the user names are Montemator.
[SPEAKER_05]: Um, and I also have my own Patreon, which is where I really hang out one on one with my my community.
[SPEAKER_05]: I have chats over there.
[SPEAKER_05]: We're going to start doing like exclusive live streams.
[SPEAKER_05]: And also it's just my way of protecting myself if my account were ever to get banned by meta.
[SPEAKER_05]: So that's those are my main places.
[SPEAKER_09]: Well thank you so much for doing this.
[SPEAKER_09]: I hope it's on the last time we chat.
[SPEAKER_09]: I feel like there's so many people that I'm like now kind of recurring, bringing in and talking about these issues.
[SPEAKER_09]: And I definitely feel like there'll be plenty more to talk about in the next couple of years.
[SPEAKER_05]: I agree.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think we'll have plenty.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_09]: So thank you so much again for doing this.
[SPEAKER_09]: And for everybody listening, I will see you in a feature episode.
[SPEAKER_09]: You've been listening to the Prejabois podcast hosted by Eric Swarzinski.
[SPEAKER_09]: The intro music, Bible Belt, was performed by
[SPEAKER_06]: Come on, we are gathered here today To praise the Holy Father, fill the glory of His name Anyone can worship here so long as you act straight Pay your ties and follow rules even the ones God didn't make Kill the Bible