You're listening to Breakpoint This Week, where we're talking about the top stories of the week from a Christian perspective. Today we're going to talk about some high-profile scandals involving immigration and fraud. We're also going to talk about a new expose on so-called transgender medicine. We are so glad you've joined us this week. Stick around.
Welcome to Breakpoint This Week. From the Coulson Center for Christian Worldview, I'm Maria Baer, alongside John Stone Street, president of the Coulson Center. John please extend my thanks to Sarah for filling in for me last week that was fun to listen to I fully and completely lost the ability to make sound with my vocal cords for almost the entire week of Thanksgiving prompting an unnamed man in my house called my husband to frequently make the joke that this was the most peaceful Thanksgiving he's ever experienced and it was such a lovely quiet holiday and he just didn't know why. I hope you're not asking me to weigh in on that. I'm staying as far away from that as possible.
That's smart. That's smart. Honestly, I had to start carrying a notebook around so that I could like converse with normal people in my day. It was very hampering. It was very sobering experience, Sean.
You should really feel bad for me. But I'm back this week. My voice is still not completely back, but I'm getting there.
So thanks to Sarah so much for filling in for me. I want to start this week with a handful of news stories having to do with immigration. Most of our listeners are probably familiar with this scandal that's coming out of Minnesota, where it's been revealed now through indictments and an FBI investigation that a large number of Somali immigrants, and I think Minnesota has the largest number of Somali immigrants to the United States, were running a fraud scheme. A lot of it centered on a nonprofit that was started during the COVID pandemic, it sounds like, that was filing false claims to the government to get grants, supposedly for food assistance programs, and then pocketing that money. There's another scheme involving autism diagnoses and billing Medicaid for treatment and setting up treatment centers.
The fraud exceeds a billion dollars, according to investigators. and this week of speaking about it, President Trump made some awful comments, is understandably upset, but said something like, you know, we need to stop letting garbage into our country and we don't want any more Somalians here and just kind of some shocking things to say about it. But of course the investigation is ongoing and the fraud seems really substantial. There was another case that I'm sure our listeners are familiar with as well. This was a man who was here on refugee status from Afghanistan, who was permitted into the country under the Biden administration and shot two National Guard members over the Thanksgiving week, one of whom passed away, a young woman, and another young man who apparently is still in critical condition.
This has, of course, led to some questions. And I believe the Trump administration has now said they're going to halt this refugee policy while they review its vetting processes. And so there's a lot at play here. I don't so much want to go into the details of these stories, but I do want to talk about illegal immigration and how we respond to it. What are some of the moral questions you see at play here?
Yeah, I mean, this has been kind of the underlying topic of almost all the news stories. And I was asked on the World and Everything In It podcast, which I do each Friday, you know, how Trump's comments kind of became the story when the real story is, you know, you have two National Guardsmen shot, one of them killed. Thankfully, the other one seems to be recovering, but it's horrible. It's awful. And of course, this terrible scheme in Minneapolis and the amount of money that was defrauded from the American people.
And it's an interesting thing because obviously one of the reasons that Trump's comments have taken over the headlines is because it was a story that could take over those headlines. In other words, this was a, you know, there's no question about where the bias of the media stands, much of the media stands.
So this is going to become the issue. That doesn't mean that the comments were acceptable. That doesn't mean that Christians can stomach those comments and say, well, it's no big deal. And my anger justifies the dehumanization of an entire group of people. What it points to is just how insufficient all attempts to ground human dignity are if you don't have some sort of universal category.
And the only worldview that gives you that universal category is Christianity and the idea of the image of God, right?
So Trump is trying to preserve the dignity of the American people who were defrauded and has been in a long time, you know, for a really long time, because of the kind of immigration policy that has created an enormous amount of problems in the United States, not just in the United States, also in the United Kingdom. We could jump the pond and talk about the kind of issues that are happening over there in terms of how it's undermining free speech, undermining, you know, any kind of British nationalism and so on. Trump is essentially trying to preserve the dignity of the American people by compromising the dignity of others. And every math on human dignity does that. It chooses some over and above the others.
The critical theory approach, which allowed this scheme to take place in Minnesota for so long, also does that, right? In other words, because someone is of an oppressed category, in this case, in terms of nationality, ethnicity, and immigration, then they are morally superior. That's the math of critical theory from the very beginning. If someone is oppressed, then they are morally superior. If they are the oppressor, they are morally guilty.
And therefore, if someone is morally superior, you don't need the kind of checks and balances. You don't actually put in kinds of checks on the system.
Now, here's where my theory on this breaks down is the Somali issue in Minneapolis and the amount of money that was defrauded is one of many examples of government failure in the state of Minnesota of defrauding programs and that sort of stuff. And so, you know, look, the temptation here is to say, well, you're just kind of imposing these kind of, you know, Christian categories in this really complicated, you know, political thing. And at one level, yes, that's why I'm not kind of sitting here spouting any kind of, well, here's the policy that would work. That's certainly above my pay grade. But if you do not build your system on the Christian understanding of what it means to be human, which is the thing that's implied in the Constitution.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all are created equal, and so on. It doesn't say image of God, but obviously there's only one source of that kind of philosophy about what it means to be human. You're going to impose either the view that comes out of critical theory. In this case, you're going to impose Trump's view, which Trump has referred to the image of God in an executive order. Ironically, an executive order that did not recognize the image of God in the millions of embryos that are killed by IVF and trying to advance that.
You're going to have some view. You're going to have some vision of what it means to be human because it's one of the ultimate questions, just like what's the meaning of life? Where did everything come from? What's right and wrong? And you're going to superimpose that.
And secularism in all of its forms, whether the critical theory form or kind of the hyper-modernist nationalist form, ends up embracing a doctrine, you might say, of what it means to be human that's not sufficient to protect the dignity of all people.
So this is where Christians have to call balls and strikes. And the idea that we can have open borders or basically open borders, and then this incredible generosity, as Noah Rothman said on the National Review podcast this past week, those two things don't mix, right? If you're going to have, in fact, the countries we often point to, like look how generous they are to immigrants. They don't have open borders because you have to actually have a stricter vetting process. The Afghan situation to me is a little bit more difficult just because obviously it's awful.
Details are still coming out of this. The murder is clearly wrong. Clearly there's some, I think, anger from this withdrawal from Afghanistan that this individual harbored. He was left but then brought in under the Biden administration. He was granted refugee status under the Trump administration, I think, if I remember the details of the story.
and something went desperately wrong there. A lot of things went desperately wrong in that whole situation from the very beginning.
So I'll wait on the details of that to speak more to it. I guess the frustrating part for me is that there doesn't seem to be a way forward short of backing up and figuring out what we mean by human being and what we mean by human dignity. Like how do you build a system that can recognize reality if it's built on a principle that doesn't recognize reality? Yeah.
Well, in a principle that's applied inconsistently, it's not can't really be called a principle. Right.
So if some you believe there's something called human dignity, but then you don't give it to all humans and you're not really believing human dignity. What I think it's lost sometimes in this discussion, though, is is a longer view of the entire situation at play.
So Trump made these derogatory, stupid comments about Somalia and people from Somalia. And there was, of course, a New York Times story and NPR story about reactions from the prime minister of Somalia and people in Mogadishu and how offended they are and they want to push back against Trump and all this. Not saying that that's, I guess, not worth covering. It seems a little salacious to me and missing the point a bit. But to me, if you're going to talk about the dignity of human beings and caring for vulnerable people, who is asking why so many Somalians are desperate to come here in the first place and have?
And let's just take a quick gander.
Okay, so Somalia is like 95% Muslim. The literacy rate for men is 40%. For women, it's something like 25%. Young women are subject to female genital mutilation in Somalia. The extreme poverty rate in Somalia is extraordinarily high.
It is not a good place. And culture matters. The fact that it is a Muslim country directly correlates to how it's run and how it treats women and children and why so many people want to come here. And then when people come to the United States in large numbers from a country with a very, very different culture, it's reasonable to expect that they will bring aspects of that culture with them. I don't know how that relates to committing fraud.
I mean, I think this, again, was an oversight of the government on our part as well. And, you know, kind of an exploitation of our generosity and those kind of policies here. There are obviously plenty of Americans that commit fraud as well. But if you're going to talk about it, it's too short sighted to say we should welcome the stranger. Therefore, we it's wrong to have expectations or any level of wariness about people coming from a different culture and not then say, why are they coming?
And is there something we could do? I mean, the fact that the prime minister of Somalia feels very comfortable talking about how horrible it is for the United States to say this or to treat his people this way. Why are your people leaving? Get your house in order. Yeah, right.
It's terrible to have a culture in which these things are said. It's not terrible to have a culture with the sort of realities that you just reacted to. Yeah, no, you're exactly right. And so that kind of points to the two things here, the two layers we're talking about. Number one is a layer of reality and number two is a layer of culture.
And the layer of reality is that humans are made in the image of God and have universal dignity.
So to go back on your comment on dignity, we like a world with dignity better than a world without human dignity. But human dignity is relatively recent in human history, right? It's not a category that comes to mind in a Greco-Roman, tribalistic, feudal culture. It emerges out of the Christian dominance of Western culture. That's the only place you've ever gotten it.
And, you know, in the Truth Rising film, you know, a number of the experts that we interviewed pointed to that and said this is the – if you want to boil it down to one distinctive of Western culture, it's human dignity. But human dignity has to hang on something, right? You can't suspend human dignity in midair and expect it then to apply to all people. And that's, you know, critical theory has a vision of reality that eliminates some people, just like ethno-nationalism does, or some other form of, you know, we have dignity and you don't kind of framing.
So dignity has to hang on something.
So in a sense, it's not inconsistent. I mean, yes, it's inconsistent to say I have dignity, but you don't. But the system requires that you have that view of human dignity.
So this is the weird thing of trying to hijack human dignity and tie it to like autonomy or sexuality or ethnicity or, you know, male or female. The culture question, though, is exactly right, which is the culture issue that you brought up is exactly right. Because the vision of the world that those who want to come to the West and specifically to the United States flee to is one that says there is dignity for all people, even if it's not, you know, we haven't always figured out how to apply it and that sort of stuff. Because they're coming from places where that kind of language doesn't even exist. It's not there.
Yeah.
Learning, especially learning for women. that doesn't exist in many other places. Why?
Well, because you don't think that women have the equal amount of dignity or the equal amount of capacity. Very different than saying God made the world knowable, made us knowers, and part of the meaning of life is to know what God wants us to know.
Now, that's built into the fabric of the history of American education. As awry has it's gone, which we've spent, I think, about 70% of the last three months programs talking about education. But that's kind of put into the civilization. That's put into the culture.
So these reflect worldviews as well. And, of course, the difference between reality and culture is this. Reality is what God made. Culture is what humans do with what God made. And God made humans to do things with what God made.
He wanted us to do it, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, the cultural mandate and so forth. And so these things, you know, kind of play into it. And, you know, it kind of goes back to what you believe about the world, you know, really matters. I'm not, you know, here to suggest some sort of immigration policy. It's just you can't get these things right.
And they're hard to get right even if you start with all the right assumptions. But if you start with all the wrong assumptions, you're going to get it wrong, you know, kind of across the board.
Well, John, let's take a quick break. We'll be right back with more Breakpoint this week. Hey, Breakpoint listeners, Bob Dittmer, producer of Breakpoint here. Recently, one of our listeners, a mom of college-age kids from Colorado Springs, shared how God has used the resources and programs of the Colson Center to impact her life. Here's what she said.
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John, I want to turn now to a few quick headlines relating to the continued kind of cultural changes when it comes to transgenderism, let's say. There was a fascinating piece in the Free Press this week that I highly recommend that was kind of uncovering some video footage and other news out of some of the most recent WPATH conferences.
So there's kind of a background here. There's several legal cases as states, more and more states vote to ban so-called gender affirming, whatever, transgender medicine for minors. Lawsuits have been brought. And as part of discovery, there have been recordings of these meetings. And WPATH, I forget what it exactly stands for.
Do you remember the world? It's kind of a made-up organization that sets the medical standard of care for so-called transgender people. Yeah, the World Professionals Association for Transgender Health. Transgender Health. Yeah, something like that.
And what's been revealed here that the free press wrote about is, I would say, shocking, but not surprising, if that's a distinction I can make.
So it's these doctors basically saying things like, you know, we're this is a direct quote. We're just winging it. We're winging it. I'm winging it. You're winging it.
Let's wing it together. They're saying we're embarking on these medical treatments that are not evidence backed and are not outcome studied. But we know we have to do it. I mean, it reads like the meeting of a cult. and I think it shares a lot of reasonable similarities with that.
This is a fascinating development because it's unavoidable.
So we, you know, us, we who've been doing cultural commentary on this problem for years have been saying that this is what's happening, but the counter has always been, no, there is science and there is data and you just don't know it. And well, more and more is being revealed that that's not the case. And of course we knew it wasn't. Do you think this is going to continue to change minds?
Well, yeah, let me let me put that article, which was, you know, was saying, you know, more and more of what we thought was the case. And it's coming out that more and more it is. It has been the case, just like, you know, questioning of the, you know, the science is settled in the medicine from the cast report. And so you basically have medical scrutiny or scientific scrutiny that's undermining the claims that WPATH knew they were just making up. Right.
So that's that's kind of the math here. You also had a bunch of other things that we were told weren't happening. For example, that kids weren't being ushered through the science super fast by practitioners. And we have more and more cases of that, that parents weren't being left in the dark while professionals like school officials and medical professionals were doing it without their permission. There was a congressional hearing this week in which case after case after case, I don't know, I think we mentioned this, that on X, Kristen Wagner from ADF was challenged, like, oh, this isn't really happening.
You're just making up these stories. And then she's like, here are the receipts, you know, 10 or 15 or 20 stories. And they have many, many clients in which this is happening. And I want to add to those two things.
Okay.
So the congressional hearing and that footage is available online. where ADF lawyers were talking about this. I think it was maybe Matt Sharp and some others. And this article in the free press too, probably the thing we've recommended most or we've talked about more in the last two months is Douthat's podcast.
Now here's what makes Douthat's podcast really interesting. And it's called Interesting Times.
So pun intended. But you should listen to it after you listen to Breakpoint this week. Absolutely you should. Uh, no, he, in the New York times platform to have the conversation he had this week would have been unthinkable two years ago. Absolutely unthinkable.
And he said that in the conversation. I didn't, I didn't catch that word. I mean, akin to that, he was like, you would have accused me of violence two weeks ago. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, even his own, his own employer wouldn't have allowed it to happen.
I don't think. And this wasn't just anyone that he had a conversation with. This was Chase Strangio. And Chase Strangio was the attorney for the ACLU that argued the Scrimetti case, which was the big case having to do with whether or not Tennessee could ban so-called transgender medical treatment, which, of course, remember, we put all that in quotes all the time because we're talking about puberty blockers and hormone treatments and surgical mutilation. whether they could ban that for minors.
And the Supreme Court held up that they could. I was just kind of finishing that out here just a few minutes here before we jumped on to record together. And there's an attempt by Chase Drangio to be very accommodating, compromising. There's an attempt there to say, oh, I think that it shouldn't be illegal to have medical treatments for minors if the doctors are clear, if there is kind of this long struggle with transgenderism from the young person and the parents are informed. That was never the case on any of this.
In other words, we know that the parents were being fleeced. They were being kept in the dark. I don't know that he's being, wait a minute, which way? I don't know that she's being disingenuous with the claim. Maybe this is what she really believes.
But it's a stunning bait and switch. and it just doesn't have the pull on our culture. This is what I keep going back to, that this seemed unassailable just a couple years ago. And listening to the whole thing and the case being made, like, no, there's real science that this really helps. At the same time that we're seeing report after report that A, there wasn't science, B, it wasn't helpful in the long-term, and see all those WPATH people knew it, that they were just making stuff up, right?
The inconsistency is crazy. And it tells you how quickly culture can change. And culture, again, is what is built on reality. And yes, culture can go a long way in the denial of reality direction. But there is a moment where you find yourself headed off a cliff or you hit the wall of reality.
And I think that's really what's happened.
So I don't know if people wanna go on this deep dive or not. Allow us to be on the deep dive for you. That's fine. But I'm just going to tell you, it is a stunning change of direction. How quickly this myth took over reality.
How quickly this reality has been exposed. And this is the best you have to offer. This is the other thing too. We're talking about Chase Strangio. This is the most kind of professional.
This is the person chosen to argue this position in front of the Supreme Court. And you listen to it and it's just like, oh, the emperor has no clothes. There's really no there there. This is bait and switch. This is gaslighting.
This is saying things that aren't true. This is saying things literally this week on the podcast while these other things are being revealed. And again, I felt bad for Chase Strangia listening because you can see that all of this hurt is what's behind this. I mean, it really just emerged. Did you catch that in the story?
Oh, yeah. And this is someone with supportive parents. In other words, we're not talking here about someone who faced hate, religious discrimination. and then you also had the part too did you catch the part about um oh we didn't start all this they started all this did you catch that craziest part she was like we you know none of this was really up for debate until 2016 that's when everybody got obsessed with defining sex legally and we're like because we never we never had to no nobody was ever challenging it in such an irrational way before. Right.
Yeah.
That's, that's all part of the story as if like the world was completely fine with grown men in dresses going into women's locker rooms at the YMCA, you know, until Trump. I mean, it's just, it's just a bizarre rewriting of the narrative and, and you kind of go back and you go, okay, this is the best, like, this is the best possible case that could be made for this position. And it's vapid and it's misleading and it's not supported by the evidence whatsoever. And the entire world almost bought it. This is the math that I keep going back to.
Things we've talked about, right? About plausibility, about what changes culture, about the power of ideas, but ideas alone can't change culture. They take champions and they take artifacts like laws and NCAA titles given to male swimmers and women's sports and Supreme Court arguments and podcast. And it's just like, oh, this thing really was as vapid and pathetic as many people thought. Yeah.
Well, and so this is a really interesting cautionary tale, I think, for us. Because I imagine most of the people listening to us, John, are probably sitting pretty close to where we are, where it's like this was never rational. This never seemed reasonable. And man, it is a welcome development that more and more people are willing to say that. The cautionary tale here is that we can be swayed into lots of things that we don't imagine, that we can't even imagine right now, that culture changes and shifts and pressures are much more powerful than we tend to imagine.
I talked to a very accomplished surgeon, a friend of mine, a couple weeks ago. We were talking about this, and she is right where we are philosophically and politically on this issue. But she said, in my practice, she treats a lot of cancer patients, and she said, I have to go along with it because, in my view, some of these patients will not seek care for other areas of their health.
So like they won't come in for their cancer treatments or they won't, if we don't use the pronouns that they prefer, if we don't ask them for their pronouns beforehand.
So she was like, my interest is in getting them this medical treatment that they need. And if I have to do this other, you know, kind of distasteful stuff on the side. And I hear that argument. That was a new, I hadn't considered that before. And I hear the tension that she's trying to wrestle through.
But that, if anything, that reiterates to me our responsibility as individual people to constantly challenge irrational cultural norms wherever they are. Because the more patients and the more nurses and administrators who are willing to make it a little less easy or normal, like, hey, this is weird that we ask this. Maybe we shouldn't ask for pronouns when people come in here to get their teeth cleaned from the dentist or whatever it is. Because maybe we're becoming a part of this problem and making it harder for everybody in the long run. And there's a lot of things that it's possible we do that on.
We compromise on what seem to us to be small just ways of keeping the cultural peace that are perpetuating lies that make it much harder to do the bigger, more important things down the road. Does that make sense? And to really help people. I mean, what emerged here is that, you know, there are people that have a deep disconnection with who they are, right? And that takes multiple forms.
And what happened was we took one narrow understanding of that and just imposed it, not just on a whole bunch of children, but on a whole bunch of everybody else. And a lot of the motive behind that was a bunch of grown men who were perverts wanting to justify themselves. And that's what's so hard, because I know we do actually have listeners, and I know you know this as well, that aren't where we are. You know, three or four years ago, one of the things that we talked about here was that I sensed that there was a number of Christians thinking, well, maybe it's me. Maybe I got this one wrong.
you know, maybe I'm on the wrong side of history here, just like we did.
So many believers did on same-sex marriage.
So many believers did to Jack Phillips and said, no, you should bake the cake out of niceness. And then we should buy into all of this out of niceness. And I think that that temptation was real. And one of the reasons to talk about this now is to say it was culture. The cultural plausibility can create a fog that can disconnect you from reality.
But throughout the middle of this, you know, look, there was an epidemic. I think a lot of it created by social media and the identity crisis that was much larger than this one expression of the identity crisis. We talked about, you know, for example, young men dealing with deaths of despair and acts of desperation, right? And that this is a kind of a way of thinking about this disconnect from meaning and purpose. that continues to be there.
But then you had this social media thing, particularly on young girls. We had this incredible shift from the number of people feeling gender dysphoria being middle-aged men who had a sexual dysfunction to pre-pribescent girls, right? That it was just a self-hatred. And then calling this normal and then telling people that this is all the same thing and so many different things. And what's a problem is we created a mental health crisis for a lot of young people.
There still is that number of people who feel disconnected from who they are. They think they're born into the wrong body. And there's all kinds of features that way. And instead of helping them, we fed the narrative. And I go back to, you remember Ryan Anderson and Alexandra DeSantis' book after the Dobbs decision.
And their argument, which I thought was in many ways new, was not just that abortion is wrong and now we're not forcing it on people, but that abortion has poisoned medicine. It's poisoned parenting. In other words it not like this bad idea or this bad law was like a dirty rock in a bucket It was a die right It just and it permeated everything And I think this is one of those things as well And it put parents in a terrible situation. It put, and when Christians weren't willing to stand up, parents were alone. I tell you what, there's some hero stories that are emerging of parents that are like, no, this is- Not my kid.
Yeah.
And it was really hard for them to do that. And a lot of parents, you know, felt hopeless, like there was nowhere to turn. And I just learned of another story over Thanksgiving of parents that I know that walk through this with their daughter. And praise God, they stuck it out. And, you know, the story is the young woman has returned to who she is.
You know, she's come to grips like, oh, yeah, this is who I am. And that's a good thing. I don't know all the details, but there's going to be some hero stories that emerge out of this too, I think.
Well, Don, let's take another quick break. We'll be right back with more Breakpoint this week. Hi, friends and listeners of Breakpoint. This is John Stonestreet. You know, every single Wednesday morning after an entire week of exchanging numerous emails about various stories of things happening in our culture, we get together as an editorial team and wrestle with the stories that we need to talk about.
From what some have called a vibe shift to AI to IVF to even what's now known as assassination culture, this is a moment that is moving fast. It's hard to make sense of it, much less know how to respond. And that's been the strength of the daily Breakpoint commentaries ever since Chuck Colson founded it over 34 years ago. We offer listeners a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of truth that never changes. The goal has never been about just providing content.
It's about providing clarity. And that's why our Breakpoint team wins, not when we say something clever or deliver some really cool hot take, but it's when something that we say and provide equips a Christian with the clarity, confidence, and courage they need to live out their calling in the cultural moment where God has placed them. If you're one of those who've been impacted by this decades-long ministry of the Colson Center, would you please make a gift to the Colson Center to support this work between now and December 31st. Thanks to a generous $500,000 challenge, every single gift given before December the 31st will be doubled in impact.
So please make your gift today at colsoncenter.org slash December. That's colsoncenter.org slash December. We're back on Breakpoint this week. John, I wanna talk now about a really interesting question that you brought up to me earlier this week.
So I have to confess I am very unfamiliar, generally speaking, with Nick Fuentes, and I intend to keep it that way. He's kind of a social media influencer. I think we'd call him an alt-right or this new term woke-right. Just very, very hard-right. Seems to really trade in controversy and transgression.
He has YouTube and he's speaking to primarily young men, but he says a lot of racist and misogynist and sexist things. It's just kind of a shock jock, I think, in our 2025 version of that. He's very young. We talked about him a couple weeks ago because Tucker Carlson, unfortunately, had him on and interviewed him, and that created a lot of controversy. But you asked a fascinating question this week, which was, is Nick Fuentes feminism for men?
Like second wave hard feminism for young men. And, you know, we know some people, we have a woman who works with us at the Colson Center who has some young sons and reports that Nick Fuentes is, for better or worse, quite popular among young men. And do you think that that's real? Is he causing cultural change, you know, the way and kind of sowing division the way that a lot of second wave feminism did? You know, there are some bad ideas that pop up and you actually do a disservice by pointing them out and bopping them on the head because it actually adds legitimacy to them.
You know, in other words, if you feel necessary to respond and we get a lot of those things. Why don't you talk about this? And it's like, because no one cares and it's not really important. And everybody knows that it's, you know, whatever it's, it's, it's, uh, you know, given it's the season, this is the equivalent, uh, culturally speaking, broadly culturally speaking of the red cup controversy at Starbucks, right? Where somebody who I think was a pastor or something posted years ago about Starbucks not putting Christmas on their cups and it's just being red.
And this was a thing. And he was mad about it. And then everyone piled on about how dumb this complaint was, like, who cares? And then it became a story that Christians were really mad about it. But one Christian was mad about it.
And then a whole bunch of other Christians thought it was irrelevant and was actually mad at the guy that was mad about it. Does that make sense? Yeah.
And it's kind of like, we just made this a thing when it wasn't a thing. I think the legal term for that is nothing burger. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
And I think there was a Costco Bible story, right? That Costco put the Bibles in fiction at one point. And like that, and you know, there, there was just, it was just not a non-issue, but then it became an issue because it was made an issue.
Somebody made an issue. I was really hoping that the woke, right. And by the way, we had somebody write and say, what an interesting term, you know, or I've never heard that before. Did you guys make it up? No.
I mean, a lot of people actually are using the woke right term because they're identifying that there is a segment on the political and cultural right. And I say political and cultural because it's indistinguishable. These are individuals that aren't just talking politics. They're also talking culture. They're talking values.
They're talking, an understanding of it. And it's becoming a force.
Now, I was hoping it was like three people in a basement, but it's not. It's a lot more than that. I don't follow Nick Fuentes. I wasn't super familiar with him at all until the Tucker Carlson thing. And then there's a way that that did, which is what a lot of people were upset about with Tucker Carlson, that it added legitimacy to the movement.
And it was almost like when people attacked Tucker, about this that it raised the profile of Fuentes. And so in the last three weeks, I've been kind of sniffing this out with young men that I know at a local university, with young men within Roman Catholic circles that are culturally connected, and with some other reports out of Washington, D.C. Yeah.
So, you know, Ross, sorry.
So Roger Ayer a couple of weeks ago posted something where he went to D.C. and he said, you know, kind of there's all these young men there and that are in congressional staffing positions on the right. And and, you know, think tanks and so on that buy into this. It's it sounded like an overstatement. And then I asked some other people and I've gotten mixed reviews, but a significant number of people that I trust said, oh, yeah, there is a prominent presence of this.
And if it isn't like full on, you know, Fuentes shock jock sort of, you know, I'm going to say give all these kind of America first and racist and, you know, kind of Nietzschean power struggles. there's an apologist in the middle.
So if you think about kind of the neocons, you know, the conservative movement that emerged in the 80s, the compassionate conservatism, you know, kind of grounded in principle and that sort of stuff. And there's a complaint by many that it wasn't as effective as it should have been, that it lost to the aggressive left. And in many ways it did, not just politically again, but also culturally. And then you've got this other reaction that says, forget principle. The new conservatism isn't really conserving anything.
The new conservatism is burn it all down and offend all sensibilities and be tougher and meaner and so on. And so you get celebrations of Hitler and Stalin from Fuentes. You get promotions of just anti-Semitic views, not just critiques of the state of Israel and how they handle specific things and how they've handled the, you know, responding to Hamas and all that sort of stuff, but just a resurrection of anti-Jewish sentiment where you condemn an entire group of people and you get an anger, a visceral anger, not just at second wave feminism and feminist policies and, you know, equal opportunity sorts of things, but on women to the point where you have joking about raping and harming women and beating women.
So this is Fuentes, all right? I mean, listen, I don't need to sum it up. There's a whole bunch of sum ups of, and it's like the worst locker room talk you can imagine mixed with this kind of, we're gonna basically achieve power again, and I'm going to become popular essentially by being so shock jockey. And then suddenly this gets made, indistinguishable from conservative politics. And then you have in the middle, the apologist.
These aren't people who would say these things, but they say, look, we have to do something different than that. And they fluctuate back and forth between kind of being a little bit offended by this, but also saying, but we, there's a whole lot of middle ground apologists.
So I think the real growth is in that middle ground apologist for this new kind of no holds barred, unmoored from any principle. It's really Nietzschean. It really is a Nietzschean sort of framing, which is we have to win by power and therefore any means necessary. I'll build a platform by becoming the anti-Charlie Kirk. Actually, our colleague there said that one of her sons put it this way, that it's as if Charlie Kirk went over to the dark side.
So think about Anakin Skywalker and then like, okay, maybe they have a lot of the same complaints about liberal and progressives and all that sort of stuff as we do. But you can't win by being nice. You can't win by diplomacy. You can't win by making arguments. You can't win by being winsome.
You can't win by anything.
So you've got to be like, start swinging your bat full on. and this rise of an unprincipled segment, and it's almost an anti-principled. It's almost like if you have principles, you're weak. Anyway, that's the framing of it. And I think it is a big story within that thing because it has to do with who our allies are and how do we think about this as we think as Christians about cultural renewal and what rules do we have to play by?
What rules are we obligated to play by whether we like it or not. And first of all, we're not pragmatist. And this is fully pragmatic and utilitarian. Secondly, we don't compromise human dignity. And that is completely built on that.
If we compromise human dignity, we lose any ground at all of which we stand on. And I started thinking about this. And it's like, you know, this kind of, whatever you call this movement, people again are calling it, you know, the Fuentes followers are Gropers. You have other expressions as well. but you have the woke right, I think is a pretty good phrase, but a pretty good name for it.
But you essentially have, this is kind of like feminism for men, right? Because, you know, second wave feminism turned vices into virtues, you know, sexual promiscuity, abortion on demand, you know, basically the philosophy was- Hatred and suspicion of the opposite sex. Yeah.
And these are the good things. These are how you know you're doing right, right? And that's what this movement has done, you know, for men. The victim complex. I'm a victim of everything.
I'm a victim of everything. I'm a victim of everything. I mean, that comes out of Fuentes's, you know, and it appeals to a whole group of people. And, you know, listen, we've been talking about the war against boys since Christina Hoff Summers wrote that book 30 years ago in terms of how culture has been built up.
So there's legitimate ways in which men have grievances in terms of how feminism is. But then the answer is we're always victims and we have no agency, which isn't true at all. And it's sad and it's not something that Christians can buy into. And then you look for top-down solutions, policy solutions, because you don't have arguments. right you look you have to basically enforce these things and without any sort of cultural change that goes along goes along with it and then as you said it's the war against the sexes the enemy for you know second wave feminism is all things patriarchy the enemy for this is really not just women also other groups like minorities and so on but the but the other groups are always categorized as people who act like women.
It's, it's weak men who act like women and it's, that's true. Weak men who've been feminized. And yeah, exactly. You know, you always, you reference a lot this, the, the framing of Carl, that Carl Truman offered about how it became plausible to people to say that men could become women.
So it's not just where did the idea come from, but how did it become plausible? And he of course lays that out brilliantly in strange new world and, um, rise and triumph of it, you know, his, his books. looking at the cultural movements and the cultural artifacts and the champions of the ideas like you were talking about. I also think, though, that there's like a psychological phenomenon. I mean, I think it's called recency bias, but I think also just repetition, where when you hear an idea for the first time, like a completely outlandish, crazy idea, we have a normal psychological response, which is usually like, no, that's not true.
I don't believe that. That's crazy. The next time you hear it, we're just wired physiologically for it to be slightly less surprising. And that doesn't necessarily mean more plausible, but less shocking for sure. And that's why it is so important, not necessarily how we react publicly.
I don't think it's important for Christians to come out and publicly decry every single thing Nick Fuentes says as if we're responsible for answering for him or everything that Donald Trump says as if we're responsible to answering for him. But it does matter that we are monitoring our own reactions to these things. Because I thought of this because of what you said about those kind of middle ground apologists, where the more salient Nick Fuentes becomes in our cultural conversations, the more people feel like who are maybe in that middle ground apologist camp, the more they feel their responsibility to interact with his crazy assertions. You know, like, well, it is true. Like, we shouldn't say that Israel is all good.
or whatever, as if we were ever saying that. But you feel like you have to because by sheer repetition and the force of the amount of times this person's content or ideas is being shared, the ideas will seem more mainstream and plausible to you. Yeah.
That's just how that works psychologically. I think that's true. I think plausibility goes beyond kind of individual psychology to culture. And I think the cultural factors here to me are pretty pronounced. And because in a certain cultural environment, these ideas are repeated, right?
And why are they repeated? And there's other things that work too. But even the people who are mad at them are repeating them constantly. And things, we just get desensitized. It's true.
Well, yeah. I mean, but at some point you also have to, there comes a point where you have to actually deal with it. And I think right now you have on a political, in terms of the party in terms of the conservative movement they going to have to do an identity check There a disruptive part of what happened in the last you know eight to 12 years that has created space for this to emerge in the movement. And we've got to be able to actually call that out and say, this is not conservatism and this is why, you know, if you're making kind of a political point. But again, it's political slash cultural.
It's making a statement about the nature of reality that's, you know, really, really difficult. But why is it plausible? And I think there's been a couple things that have made it plausible. In other words, right now, we're in a moment where young men are looking for answers. We've talked about them returning to church.
We've talked about them, you know, listening to Jordan Peterson tell them to make their beds. We've talked about, you know, all of these other things. And there is a sense in which there is a pushback to the cultural realities of the last 20, 30, 40 years. And, you know, being told that toxic masculinity is always bad and toxic masculinity, meaning all of masculinity. And of course, the answer is, is that, yes, there are ways fallen men have toxic masculinity.
They do things that are bad. Fuentes' answer is all masculinity is toxic. That's the only real masculine. We should embrace it, not reject it. And that's what happens, again, when you have an unprincipled movement.
But this unprincipled idea now is seeping into all these other areas of life in the world. And it's kind of becoming a theory of everything that's convincing a lot of young men. But I also think that there is a reality here of living in the wake of the culture of adolescence, the death of the grownup that Diane West wrote about after 9-11, that we have become a cult of adolescence where we have very, very low expectations of young men and we have tolerated among young men. And by young men, I mean 12 and 13 and 14 year olds, right? It's weird to even call them young men in our culture, but you know what?
Every culture through the history of the world called them young men in some form or another. There were high expectations. They were expected to be men. They were expected to grow up. They were expected to take responsibility in war or farming or family or something like that by 15, 16, 18, 19 years old.
Now we say boys will be boys, right? You remember when the text leaked from the young Republicans just a couple weeks ago, And there were apologists like J.D. Vance saying, you know, boys will be boys. He wasn't talking about 14-year-olds. He was talking about 28-year-olds, right, 24-year-olds.
In other times and in other places, you know, they would be, you know, running the culture. They would be farming and fighting and so on. You remember the, you know, Captain Phillips, I think was the title of the movie, about the Somali pirate ship and had Tom Hanks in it and that sort of stuff. It was a movie 20 years ago about a real life occurrence that happened like 25 years ago. The captain of the Somali pirates that took over this tanker or this cargo ship was 16 years old.
Are you joking? No, no, no. Of course, I'm not saying that the answer is to make people pirates, but apparently that's Fuentes' answer. That is crazy. No, no, of course.
Yeah, I mean, listen, this is normal in other places. You become a warlord. I mean, now that's a problem, but it's a way different vision of life in the world than staying at home playing video games when you're 30. And you know what? This is what we've talked about, the compromise of marriage, the sexual imbalance, the economics of sex, where young men basically are not expected to behave.
And because young women and young men are still made the way they are, young women still want that security, and it creates this relational dynamic. It's undermined the culture of marriage. I think all this is connected where you have a reaction against this culture of adolescence while still the low expectations of adolescence. And now, why would we think it wouldn't impact our spokespersons and our influencers? Think about the systemically low expectations we have of young women.
We think, oh, you can have a career by being an influencer. An influencer means almost nothing, right?
Now there, I think, are some redeemed and wonderful examples of influencers who are using their voice for very important and powerful things, but you can also be a Kardashian or, you know, Kardashian adjacent. Is that a phrase? And then you have these kind of lower expectations.
Well, the same thing has happened in the realm of men.
So think about, I'm reading right now about the history of a movement in Anglicanism called the Oxford Movement. And you have these three young men who emerged, and one of them says one was at Oxford and he was a rising star. What did it mean to be a rising star in the late 19th century at Oxford? It meant brilliance. It meant hard work.
It means seriousness. Compare that look to what it means to be a rising star in the American political scene. You do have some great examples. I think J.D. Vance is a great example of a rising star, right?
And he wrestled with some of this. He's gonna have to, by the way, deal with this movement, this rising part in the movement. But I don't think it's just them. I think it's kind of anyone who presents a conservative view of culture that's grounded in any sort of first principles, right? This is, it doesn't affect us because we need to save the Republican Party.
I could care less about that. It doesn't affect us because we need to save this or that or the other, or the legacy of MAGO. No, none of that. But it does affect us. because to be political is to be cultural today, and to be cultural is to be political today.
These are inseparable. This is the moment we're in, and this is, we have to, Christians don't have the luxury of not having principles. That's a good word. Thanks, John.
Well, John, before we call it for the week, I do want to reference a few questions that we've gotten. Both of these are related to people with disabilities. Although in very different ways. Very, very, very different ways. Very, very different ways.
Okay, so this first one is written by a listener from Canada. And he says, Here in Canada, people expect our government to help the poor, the needy, the disadvantaged, and the disabled. This is responding to something that you've quoted in a breakpoint commentary that I've heard before, which is the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, I'm from the government and I'm here to help. I think that was a Reagan quote.
So our listener says, Here in Canada, we do help the disabled. We don't make fun of them. Trump makes fun of them and the mega crowd cheers.
So in my opinion, those nine words are actually full of hope and help. I don't see what's terrifying about it. You want to respond?
Well, it was a joke. It was put into a commentary as a joke. And Reagan said it as a joke. It wasn't meant to be like an authentic statement of, you know, look under the bed for the boogeyman and the boogeyman is going to be the government. Like that doesn't even make any sense.
But anyway, so maybe there was just a cross-cultural loss in terms of our sense of humor or Reagan's sense of humor that was lost by the questioner. But what raised my spidey sense in the question wasn't so much about the role and place of government, although we could talk about that. And I could say, no, the role of the government is not to do all the charity work. That's the role of local community. That's the role of voluntary associations.
Certainly the government needs to provide help in disaster relief. Certainly the government needs to provide defense. There are appropriate roles of the government caring for the disabled and the poor to the extent that this questioner is proposing is not true. And let me just say this. It ain't true in Canada.
I did a quick Google search and found four articles from people on the progressive left or in the center politically and culturally who were worried about the Canadian, how the Canadian government was dealing with the disabled and the poor. Because right now, how the Canadian government is increasingly dealing with the disabled is by pushing MAID and by MAID. And the poor.
Well, I'll get to that. Medical assistance and dying. which is not medical, it's not assistance, and it's not helping people in the process of dying, it's helping people to die.
So it's the worst nomenclature ever. But the expansion of MAID as a solution to the social problems and the shrinking social safety net in Canada is well documented. And it ain't documented by me.
So I just don't buy this at all. I don't buy the fact that the government is best suited to do this. The government has a role. The government is best suited to do an awful lot of things. The government has a chainsaw.
Do not ask it to perform surgery because you don't want to perform surgery with a chainsaw. And that's really kind of what happens. It's why, you know, it's interesting when you see kind of a disaster relief situation that the state shows up usually about 72 hours after Samaritan's Purse has already been on the ground there for a long time. It's when you're dealing with the real problems of a particular impoverished city that you have to actually do things in that city to rebuild it. And that doesn't usually come best from D.C.
Maybe some federal aid does, but the work on the ground has to be done by those on the ground. And it's just, so I just think the questioner is wrong about sphere sovereignty. I think the question is wrong about the role of government. I think the questioner is absolutely wrong about Canada doing a good job on this.
Now you literally have in the UK this past week, the argument of course, continued to advance there for their form of euthanasia. And actually a British MP admitted, we need to give the poor the right to die just like everyone else. And the thought that giving the poor the right to die will not become pressure socially or personally. It already is. It is already.
So this is where it plays out in Canada with the poor, is that these are the articles that have been covered. And I mean the Atlantic. I mean the Telegraph. I mean all kinds of different people raising alarm about the treatment, particularly of those with disability and those with the poor. How?
Well, because in Canada, they will pay for medication, quote unquote, which is a wrong word for that too, isn't it? That will kill you. Where they won't pay for another condition. And so you have financial pressure that's put on, not to mention social pressure, not to mention encouragement, not to mention, here are the options that we're giving you, we'll fully pay for it and so on and so on. And so I was just stunned by the claim in the question, That Canada is a great job caring.
It is an assertion based on vibes. Our president doesn't make the same off-color comments as your president. Therefore, we care for the poor and needy more than we do. This is not a defense of Trump at all. I mean, I condemned his statements earlier about this.
This is a condemnation of making your decisions based on vibes. That's what I'm saying. Like, look at the record. And, you know, if you look at where those with disability want to be, there's a lot more options, you know, here. And this is a big concern of ours as, you know, we have acknowledged and recognized the incredible work of Johnny Erickson Tata, Johnny and Friends, Wheelchairs for the World.
In fact, if you want, and many Christians have and they do, support this sort of work. This is an organization. I'll raise money for them right now. If you want effectiveness in expanding the care for the disabled around the world, you could do no better than not to move to Canada. Don't do that.
But support the work of Johnny and Friends. The disabled community around the world, I'm thinking New Zealand, I'm thinking here in the US, they oppose doctor-assisted suicide because they know the pressure that it will come. And these aren't people that are Christians. These aren't people that are coming from the same view. There's a unity in that community because they know the pressure that will be psychological, cultural, familial, and everything else.
So anyway, that's the second question. The second question we got, John, is kind of along these lines, And it is about what Christian schools can and should do to make sure we have space and room for kids with intellectual disabilities. We got a sweet message from a mom of it sounds like an adult child with special needs who really desired to have that Christian education that we talk about all the time, but couldn't seem to find a place or a school that could accommodate her child's needs. And so she's asking, what would you say to parents in a similar situation?
Well, it is an issue. And I think the access to Christian education or educational alternatives has been an issue for both those with disability and those who are impoverished. You know, we always get hate mail when we talk about not saying everyone should pull their kid from public school. And there was actually a big debate on X in a particular segment of X about this this week. I would love for that option to be available to all parents.
But, you know, a single mom in the inner city doesn't always have that access to transportation to be able to pay for it and all that sort of stuff.
Now, I will say there are some incredible Christian schools right now that are addressing these problems in certain areas. I remember a couple years ago hearing for the first time, and not that it just started a couple years ago, but is when I first heard somebody say, I couldn't find the help that my child needed for their disability in a public school, but I found it in a Christian school. And I thought that's the reputation that the church should have. we should be able to solve these problems in new ways. And listen, one of the things we've got to deal with is that public schools, those with some disability, I'm thinking autism in particular, they're getting fast-tracked in many ways down gender ideology.
So the quote-unquote programs aren't actually helping. The quote-unquote programs are actually making it worse. We need Christian school solutions. We need Christian alternative solutions, both to providing schools. I can think of two regions, South Florida, Dallas, Texas, where Christian schools have actually made their education affordable and possible and so on for those families who don't have the financial means for many other private education options.
We need to solve these problems. and that's gonna be a big disruption, a big, big, big disruption in the status quo when it comes to public education, which is happening and it needs to be increased.
So that's, I agree with the question. I don't know where this question is coming from or if I can recommend a particular school or not, but there are some options out there. And if you are a Christian school without that option, I think we can figure it out. Let's figure out how to figure it out.
Well, advocate for school choice and you will see more and more options popping up. That's absolutely true. Yeah, and that solves some of the financial issues.
Well, that is gonna do it for our show this week. Thank you so much for listening to Breakpoint this week from the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. I'm Maria Baer alongside John Stone Street. We will include links to, for example, the Ross Douthat podcast we mentioned and other stories we mentioned in the notes for today's show. You can consider that our recommendations for the week.
Otherwise, we'd love to hear from you by going to breakpoint.org and clicking on contact us if you have a question or feedback that you'd like us to possibly engage with on next week's show. Otherwise, have a wonderful week, and we'll see you all back here soon. God bless.
