Patriarchy and Paternalism: What's Different About the Christian West?

Welcome to Conversations That Matter Podcast. I'm your host John Harris. I want to talk about an article

I wrote for Substack last week called The Patriarchy That Conquered the World, Paternalism in Christian Civilization.

And I think this is an important topic because what's happening right now is a lot of people are going back to the drawing board.

They want to find the blueprint for how society should be arranged, whether that's in the family or if they're

Christians in the church or in any of their civic organizations. They want to know what should politics look like?

What should business look like? What should A, B, or C look like? Because we know that liberalism, that feminism, that a lot of the other isms haven't been working.

And I think there's a suspicion that these things are just artificial innovations that have been foisted upon us out of step with the wisdom of ages past, whether it's even been forgotten or not.

People just sense there's something wrong with it. And they're looking for some kind of a rootedness, some kind of a place to go where they can find answers.

And some of them go to good places. There are faithful pastors out there,

I think especially on local levels, that are faithfully communicating with the Word of God teaches and maybe they know a thing or two about how our society has operated in the good and true and valuable ways.

And they're going to receive wisdom. Some of them have been passed on wisdom already. I think

I was fortunate enough to be raised in a home where I had a pretty strong father figure. I knew what a man was.

I didn't have to question these things. I kind of knew the blueprint. I knew why liberalism and feminism were wrong, but not everyone has that.

And I think some people have tried to find answers in bad places, places that have given them quote unquote solutions that aren't really solutions.

They land them in spots that are just as bad, if not worse than the course they would have taken otherwise.

Or they are just looping back right back into a liberal framework and they say they're saving you from it, but they're not.

And I see these things mostly in the form of posts and comments on social media, but I've noticed a worldly wisdom even in people

I know. Things that I've heard in the last few years, some of them from young men, not exclusive to young men, but I think young men are the most targeted in this way because they're the most skeptical and for good reason about liberalism and feminism and all the other isms.

And some of the things I've heard are just frankly foolishness.

They're not wisdom at all. They're getting them from influencers in the manosphere or quote unquote the red pill movement.

They're trying to go to the pagan right to find answers. And it was in that spirit that I wanted to write this because there's been a few things lately, some of them

I talk about, a lot of them I don't, but that I've noticed, many of them public that have just clued me into the fact that there's a lot of even

Christians who are trying to find answers for how the natural order works, how the world works, and they're finding them not in the pages of scripture and not in the milieu of the

Christian tradition. They're going to other sources to try to find out what does it mean to be a man?

What does it look like to have gender roles that are different than a woman? How should society in general be arranged?

And they may get some truth, but they also may get some things that like I said are harmful. And I think it's hard when you're in a degrassinated age, especially if you're younger and you went through the typical institutions that were supposed to guide you, they probably didn't guide you.

They probably made things a lot worse and confused you more, and they've cut you off from your past. You don't have a past.

As far back as you can remember is when. I mean, I'm talking to specifically guys who might be watching this who are in that state.

They are trying to figure things out, and they're humble about it, right? And certainly I don't know everything, so I'm there with you to some extent.

But I think the typical story is we don't have a memory that goes past two generations before us, maybe three, right?

We're comparing ourselves to the most affluent generation ever to exist in the world history probably, the baby boomers in the

United States, and thinking things should look like that and why don't they? And of course there's been all sorts of changes when it comes to things like technology and now artificial intelligence and how are we supposed to arrange ourselves according to the correct created order, the natural order, the way things have been set up when we have now these things interfering.

And it's like we're trying to come up with answers on the spot. So one of the things that I think is important to do, and not just on patriarchy, but in other matters as well, things like what constitutes a nation?

How should you raise kids? How should kids be educated? That's a discussion right now in some quarters of the Christian right. Is it a sin to send them to public school?

I think we need to have a positive vision. We need to set up guardrails for what kinds of answers are outside the boundaries.

We know that these are wrong. These contradict scripture. They contradict the wisdom that we've inherited through our tradition.

They're just not productive. They're pie in the sky ideas that can never be implemented anyways.

Why discuss them, right? We need to have some guardrails up to filter out the foolishness and the worldly wisdom and all of that.

And I'm interested in doing that, which maybe doesn't get me a lot of friends sometimes. And I'm not looking to go after anyone in personal ways or to criticize anyone in ways that are mocking and jeering.

I want constructive solutions is what I'm trying to say. I'm not trying to just platform the opinions that I've always held as the greatest opinions ever.

I'm still figuring out some of these things myself and I'm very open to discussion on many of them. But I do think there are some firm convictions

I know I've had for a long time that I think are part and parcel to who we are as a people and what the scriptures teach.

And one of those is the positive vision that I have for patriarchy, which is not just patriarchy as a broad category and a rejection of feminism, and even some would say complementarianism, but no, actually men should lead.

That's the way God wired us. That can take you in all kinds of different directions.

That can take you in very bad directions too if that's all you have. We need something more fine -tuned, specific, sharpened.

And this is where I would like to insert a discussion about paternalism.

Paternalism being a specific kind of patriarchy, a kind of patriarchy that, as I say, conquered the world, conquered certainly the

Anglo -Protestant sphere of the world. It's a patriarchy that is measured.

It is tempered. It is channeled. And it is channeled through biblical principles that have been mediated through tradition in specific ways in social institutions, the way we arrange ourselves.

I'm going to give you some examples of that. And if we reject paternalism, we want patriarchy without the paternalism, we get the brute.

We get, frankly, it will lead to tyranny. We need limits.

We need an understanding that there is a higher law over us that we are being judged by. And it's not just our might that makes things right.

It's not that anyway. Our might should be channeled into responsible ends that God has put us here as duties to perform.

So with that in mind, let's talk about this. Within the past few years, there has been a renewed interest in traditional roles.

And not only among Christians, there are certainly downsides to the tradwife phenomenon and the red pill movement in their distortions and commodification of traditional roles, but they are clearly fulfilling.

A present hunger for natural order realities that feminist assumptions helped undermine in our social fabric.

To this I say good, and I also wish to present a word of caution. So I should emphasize, blow it up, put it in big letters, that good there.

I think it's very good to reject error and say, we need something else, right?

I think even things that are somewhat fake, like the tradwife movement can be somewhat fake at times.

Some of the manosphere stuff can be somewhat fake at times. You're not going to become an alpha male by just taking some kind of super male vitality supplement.

You're not going to become a tradwife because you have 18th century farm equipment in your kitchen and you make sourdough and do whatever else you do, right?

There's obviously so much more to it. It's not just the aesthetics we're after, but desiring those aesthetics says something.

It clues us into the fact that people are hungering. They're desiring something that I think is actually good if practiced rightly.

So I want to acknowledge that, first of all. I don't buy into the cartoon form of these things.

I don't think it should be boiled down into a style.

It's not a way to, you know, I for some reason thinking about country music now, I'm a country music fan. So country music somewhere around like 2009 or 10, it's like it became a way to party.

It was the way to go to the club, but hear pedal steel guitars and a little twang in the music.

And you might wear cowboy boots, but you're still doing the kind of thing that you would be doing in any club that's playing pop music.

It's just, it's a new veneer. And I don't want skin suits is what I'm trying to say. I want shallowness.

I remember the way country music used to be. It was very raw and rooted and it came, it sprung up out of stories and tradition.

And, and there's still some of that left, I suppose, but it's the same thing with this.

Like I don't want the fake curated image. I want the real tangible thing.

I want what's rooted in the order God set up when it comes to gender roles.

That's what I'm talking about. Patriarchy or the leadership of fathers is the natural state of things because God wired men to rule in unique ways, including their strength, boldness, and aggression.

Technology may provide the illusion that these qualities are unnecessary, but this mirage has dissipated, especially during clashes between advanced

Western societies and Islamic patriarchal societies. Western societies need to reject feminism and nail passivity for their own survival.

But the kind of patriarchy they develop as an alternative does matter. The civilization that conquered the modern world was a monogamous

Christian civilization built upon the idea of self -mastery, accountability, and personal responsibility.

Let me just stop right there and explain a little bit of what I'm talking about here. When I say that the technology doesn't help

Westerners like you might have assumed it would have a hundred years ago in clashes with more, you know, primitive, according to Enlightenment standard civilizations, what

I'm talking about is what's happening now in places like London, where they have a mayor. I believe it's

Hindu, if I'm not mistaken, or maybe he's Muslim. I can't remember which. At one point, they had a prime minister who was,

I think, Hindu and the mayor of London was Islamic. They have immigration from these other places, second world and third world countries, and their technology isn't going to overcome the fact that these people are having more babies.

These people are more aggressive. They are more patriarchal. They are more demanding. They are more willing to use force.

And because of that, they're winning. And the host country, in this particular case,

Great Britain, is diminishing. Now, it doesn't matter how much technology they have.

And I would say the same thing for women who see technology as an evener in their own social life.

There is a natural order. It's true that technology can, for example, let me give you an example of this.

A firearm. A firearm evens out the odds, right, between a man and a woman, right? Isn't there like a marketing campaign that said

God made, I forget how it went, but something to the effect of like God made men stronger, but Smith and Wesson made men and women equal.

I forget. Someone can put in the comments what the tagline was. But the idea is that a female has lethal power that evens the score with someone who's stronger physically because of technology.

Technology has allowed this. That may be true. However, it doesn't change the fact that men actually, on average, are still stronger physically.

And it doesn't change the fact that men and women are wired to desire each other at a certain level.

It doesn't change the fact that in domestic life, you're still going to have, in general, a man who is stronger than the woman in a relationship.

It doesn't change the fact that men have testosterone and they are typically more willing to use deadly force when technology is in their hands.

They are less nurturing and they are more protective in a willingness to use violence.

Doesn't mean women can't do that. Doesn't mean men can't have a good bedside manner at times. But it means there are these general trends and they are reflected in biological differences.

That's all I'm saying. And we see now in the West that civilizations that have strong patriarchy coming from the third and second world are actually conquering without a shot being fired.

Sometimes shots are fired, but in general, they don't need a shot fired. So why is it if we rewind the clock, though, back 150, 200, 250, 300 years, we're going to find a very different state of affairs where this little island off the coast of, well, it's part of Europe, but they don't see themselves as continental at least.

They're not continental Europeans. How come they had an empire that the sun never set on? How come they were able to, in the case of something like the

United States, they were able to colonize and they were successful in ways the

Spanish weren't successful, right? This Protestant country, why was there a difference between them and the

Spanish were tough, right? The conquistadors. Well, the English brought their families along.

They were not just patriarchal. There was a particular kind of spirit they brought that was more paternal.

They brought fathers. It wasn't just men with force conquering. It was families that shared things in common that wanted to build and build they did.

And that's the Anglosphere essentially. The civilization that conquered the world was a monogamous

Christian civilization, as I already said, and they had these limitations, self -mastery, accountability, and personal responsibility.

You needed to be the best version of yourself. You needed to reign it in when you had ambitions that were selfish and wrong and had social implications that were negative.

You needed to be accountable to institutions in society, including the church. In fact, there was a time in New York City that you couldn't even get a loan.

And this is like less than 100 years ago. You couldn't even get a loan if you didn't have a clergy member, at least in some areas.

I think when I'm thinking of Westchester County, you couldn't even get a loan to buy a house unless you had a clergy member sign off.

That's some serious accountability. And then personal responsibility. You were expected to care for your own.

It's not the community's job to do these things. Now, maybe they'll pick up the slack, but it's your job.

In short, the kind of patriarchy that built the West and more specifically inspired the creation of the Anglosphere with its familial settlements and Protestant religious character was a paternalistic form of patriarchy.

This may seem redundant. After all, patriarchy implies fatherhood, not simply maleness. The Muslim world with its high birth rates understands this.

The neo -pagan flavor taking root in some quarters of the right does not. And that's what I want to focus on right now. And I'm going to focus on a popular figure.

It was more popular a few years ago, but Bronze Age Pervert. Bronze Age Pervert wrote a book called

Bronze Age Mindset. And if you want to understand the dissident right, it's basically a book you have to read. One of the most prominent modern voices for Nietzschean vitalism with its emphasis on the conquering male rather than the domestic male, sees glorious dominion as an end in itself, rather than a means to preserve civilization and attain heavenly reward.

From this perspective, starting a family is optional and contains potential disadvantages to the point that usually a family is the end of a man, says

Bronze Age Pervert, because of the emotional and financial demands that bind him to anything higher.

If men do marry, they should not treat their wife as a best friend, and best friends are more important than wives. And you'll see, it's hinted at in Bronze Age Mindset, but if you actually follow

BAP, to shorten his name, on X, you'll find posts that even suggest homosexuality is perfectly permissible.

That a man has sexual urges, a man can, as a man, express himself in these ways, and it's not for the longhouse to limit you, right?

And the longhouse meaning the control that women have over you, and it references, supposedly, the longhouse that used to exist in various cultures,

I think particularly Native American tribes and so forth, where a matriarch would, or matriarchs, as the case may be, they may meet to discuss the issues of the village, and basically govern what's going to happen, how they're going to rule over the men, and so forth.

And this is sort of short form for what's going on in the modern West, and men shouldn't be ruled by that.

And one of the things that they try to do is to constrain your sexual appetite. So BAP says you don't need to do that. BAP even talks about things like polygamy, and seems to hint at it being a positive thing, that it's like a very masculine thing.

So all that to say, what he and now many others who see Christianity as weak or fungible, lack in their pursuit of maleness, is the paternal quality that made our civilization great.

And for BAP, it's more fungible. He thinks Christianity is just a tool, basically.

It can, it adapts to whatever atmosphere it's in. The West's rejection of polygamy allowed men to channel their energy into one unique wife and set of children, secured through loyalty and lacking, the conflict of the

Cinderella effect, which produces as houses are divided according to separate lineages. Produces conflict, that is.

So the Cinderella effect, if you know the story of Cinderella, obviously, is when you have these separate interests that are represented, and the one wife, and Cinderella is not about wives, but it's, you know, you have the stepsister who's going to get the shaft, essentially.

But if it's a situation where there's wives, you have a wife who's going to be given the shaft.

And this is the biblical examples, right? You go back and you look at the examples of polygamy, this is constantly what happens. You have the favorite wife, and then the other wife or wives are jealous, and it creates all this animosity.

And I mean, look, look at the story of the Middle East conflict today. It roots back into polygamous relationship where you have the one son and another son fighting it out, and they've been fighting ever since.

Strong families make strong civilizations. Strong paternalistic societies were able to handle social dysfunction by absorbing it into the domain of family, church, and local community, where natural connections were formed through charity and stand -in moms and dads.

So we see this today to some extent, but it's been lessening. The government in an impersonal way is now, on a mass level, has looked to solve these problems.

But there was a time you had local charities, you had people in the community who were involved in those charities. If it was a more urban setting, you had the fact that families would engage in things like adoption, and you had churches that would also pick up the slack and sponsor things like orphanages to try to help meet a need if there aren't dads around for kids and so forth.

Eugene Genovese, perhaps the greatest historian on antebellum southern slavery, observed that Christians in the

Old South saw themselves as inheriting a social duty to Christianize their slaves and treat them with general kindness in contrast to emerging northern industrialism, which treated men more as cogs in machines.

Genovese does not whitewash the abuses connected with slavery or wish its return, but he does show how a

Christian devotion to what as the ideal Abrahamic household, minus the polygamy of course, tempered the institution as Christian fathers saw their responsibility to provide, guide, and protect their community in personal ways that modern statists have trouble understanding.

In other words, John Mark Comer is wrong when he says America had the worst form of slavery imaginable.

Essentially, actually it's more the opposite. America had abuses, and a slave system is going to have abuses in it, but America had this

Protestant paternalistic ethos, and this ethos actually prevented things like normalized sex slavery.

I mean, there are instances where slaves could take their masters to court for things like abuse. This actually did happen in some places.

There were limitations. They were expected from the church to Christianize their slaves.

They were expected to allow their slaves to go to church and these kinds of things. And what did that do?

What did it do when you have the slaves living in the house, and the master caring for them when they're sick, and them caring for the master when he's sick, and all this?

There was a relationship that developed, and Eugene Genovese traces this, of paternal care.

Now, this isn't a call to bring it back or to say that everything was good about it or anything.

All it is, is trying to state even those things that we look back on and we think, well, that wasn't good.

There's this paternalism running in the background that made it not as bad as it could have been.

And that's important because not every civilization has this. Recently, I witnessed Pastor Alex Kochman get excoriated on X for a picture he posted of himself and his adopted 13 year old son, who happens to be black.

Many of the responses were predictable. Kochman was weak for extending love to a child from another background.

Some even blamed his Christianity. Speaking of the antebellum South, I thought of James Limber, whom

Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, treated as a son for over a year until Union troops took him at the end of the war.

The story goes that Limber was a free black, around five to seven years old, beaten and left in the streets where Verena Davis found him crying.

The question I have for those implying that Kochman was weak is whether they are more based, right -wing, or masculine than the president of the to nurture them to gain points with his wife or a broader liberal society.

Would any of them be willing to stand in the gap left by Kochman's son's biological father to keep the boy from growing up the way many under such circumstances do and becoming a social drain in the process?

What Kochman did is an example of more than patriarchy. It is a particular kind that is paternal.

I recently read Cass Sunstein's book, Why Nudge? The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism, which argues for a social architecture that simultaneously allows us to make free choices while directing us toward healthier ends.

For example, a school cafeteria could prominently display fruit while putting fries to the side.

This is a substitute for the kind of paternalism that built the West though. It is more of a soft nanny state marketed as paternalism.

In a paternal setting, fathers are still in charge, they take responsibility for those within their domain, and they raise up mature adults capable of decision -making themselves.

So what I'm saying is, first of all, those who are against Alex Kochman, they are by and large claiming to be patriarchal or masculine at least.

And they think Alex Kochman's falling. He's soft. He's falling short of this because he's helping in their minds a foreign group, a foreign people.

This isn't his family he's advancing, this is someone else's family. But really what it is, is

Alex Kochman recognizes what would happen if a son like that became a ward of the state because his father was negligent and left him.

And he decided to pick up the slack. And in so doing, the whole community is benefited. Regardless of the kid's cultural, racial, ethnic background, that's just a net positive for the community that your kids are going to be living in.

Because Alex's kids and my kids are sharing a community with this particular child.

And so Alex has adopted him, he's legitimately a child in the family. And he has the rights, the full rights of being a child in the family.

And this is actually a net good for the community when this happens. Think of the alternative.

And it takes incredible amount of strength, sacrifice, devotion, and love for someone to actually do that, which

I fear is what so many are lacking. You see, patriarchy should not be a means by which we exercise our selfish ends because we're strong.

We can have nice cars. And we can make lots of money. We can have sexual relationship with anyone we want.

And we can have various kids through multiple mothers. And that's the sign that you're really a man because look how vital you are.

Look at your vitality. Look at the capacity you have to reproduce yourself.

And these are not the things, in some societies, this is exactly what being a man is in their minds.

And sure enough, it does take sperm cells, it does take some hormones to do some of these things.

Especially if you're having to conquer someone else's in warfare, someone else's land and valuables, and then you're going to make your mark, like Vikings did or something, and you're going to go and rape the whole town or something, right?

That's not something women do. I mean, that's really more of an Amazon instinct when you think of it.

Now, I understand women are very violent in the sense that, and this is going to maybe shock some of you, but when you think about it, you'll know that I'm right.

Women are very violent in the sense that so many of them will make a decision to terminate a pregnancy and kill a baby.

Even if they're getting assistance from a male doctor or something, they're still making these decisions.

And of course, there's forgiveness in Christ for that, just like there is for men who commit murder and that kind of thing.

So I'm not saying that neither has the capacity for this, but men have the ability, right?

You can kill a baby very easily. Conquering a village, fighting other men that match your strength, picking on people your own size, well, that's pretty tough.

Having sort of a natural aggression, which testosterone does give you, a natural drive to conquer and to produce and to have dominion, that's something that's more so a masculine trait.

And so anyway, there were these guidelines, these borders, this sense of responsibility that the

West had around that. Not every culture has it. And so this idea that Cass Sunstein has, that we're going to have paternalism, but it's going to be this mechanism from the government whereby they're going to use manipulative or persuasive techniques in marketing and messaging to get you to make good decisions.

That's just manipulation. That's just the nanny state, right? He makes a distinction between,

I think he calls it like soft paternalism and hard paternalism, something like that.

Whereas like an example of hard paternalism is you're not given the option to have the large biggie drink anymore in New York City.

You have to buy the small ones. Whereas what he advocates, more of a libertarian perspective is, well, we're going to mandate or adjust the market choices in front of you.

So you can still go buy the drink that's bad for you, that has a lot of sugar in it, but we're going to present in front of you first and try to inform you that the better option is to pick the smaller drink with less sugar.

You can call that patriarchy or paternalism is what he calls it, but that's not paternalistic.

That's because there's nothing personal about it. You don't even need men for this.

This is actually something that you would cook up in some kind of an HR department or something.

This is something women could very easily and most often do figure out. Patriarchy and paternalism is giving a person a fishing pole and teaching them how to fish.

It requires actual investment and that's why it is best when it works on the familial level.

To solve a problem like inner city crime, for example, it is necessary to disincentivize fatherless homes through welfare reforms.

You need dads in the home. Welfare reform is necessary for this. Increasing policing where fathers are absent.

So if fathers aren't going to limit their children, the police have to do it and maybe a police officer on his beat or whatever could develop a paternalistic relationship.

That's not what they're there for necessarily. They're there to keep law and order, but they're going to pick up the slack on that one particular issue that's left by negligent dads.

Foster conditions. We should foster conditions where employers and pastors are able to take on paternal roles without threatening their own families.

If it's not the dad, who often takes on those roles? It's another dad who adopts.

It's an employer who becomes a mentor. It's someone in a voluntary association like the

Boys and Girls Club or the Boy Scouts or something like that. It's what used to be the

Boy Scouts or it is a member of the clergy that generally is going to take on the role that is left open from dads who are either gone or have rejected it.

Now all of these things would have to be done to solve that problem of delinquency. It would take many moving parts, the first of which would involve the government doing its job, which is not likely to happen under democratic mechanisms in these regions.

All that seems to happen over time is the can gets kicked down the road as money is thrown at managing the problem through things like education and social services, but never actually solving the problem.

And I bring this example up because it is often associated with a white savior complex. Paternalistic Western societies have created where in more dysfunctional populations are reliant on them.

So you hear this a lot in academia that this is the problem with the West. This is a problem with colonialism, right?

It's white man's burden stuff. And what I'm trying to say is, if you think about it, the whole idea that we should, instead of going into a country and wiping everyone out and taking their resources, maybe you just wipe out the men and take the women, make them janissaries, right?

Or take the women and make them your concubines or whatever.

Instead of doing that, there is this situation where men would go in and they'd actually start drilling wells and building churches and universities.

And what is that? That's not the way that it happens most of the time in human civilization.

I mean, even the standard that we're bringing to bear on Israel right now, right? Like Israel can't fight the war in Gaza, that just happened, with Hamas, the way they're fighting it.

Because look at the civilian casualties, look at the difficulty in getting food there and their starvation going on.

All of these things that Israel is excoriated for in most of human history, in that region in particular, this wouldn't even have been a discussion.

It would have been, you attack us, we're going Liam Neeson on you. Your whole entire society is gone because we have the power to do it.

And if we're going to be magnanimous, it's going to be, you pay us tribute, you're our slaves now.

We are going to deport you to our kingdom where we're going to treat you like Daniel, for example.

And then we're going to replace your population in the land with another population to destabilize it so you had no hope of ever coming back.

That's like best case scenario, right? And then Christianity brings about this whole new dynamic and this new dynamic conquers more of the known world than any previous empire, at least when it comes to the connections via economy and the range of places that the

British empire was able to gain access. So I say, the question is worth asking, what other civilizations sense a duty to help those who are different and leave them better than they found them?

If anything, this is an anomaly in the history of the world as conquering peoples destroy and plunder those they were able to subdue.

There is something special in the West where Christianity has been allowed to cultivate a sense of duty to a higher law that tells men to consider others as more important than themselves, where they attempt to follow the role model of Jesus, who exercised meekness instead of brute power, though he was stronger than any man before him or since his ascension, where husbands live with their wives in understanding ways without harshness and invest in them the way they do their own bodies, where children are not to be exasperated, but cultivated under patient teaching.

That's not the story of all of human history, guys. And it may not be the

James Bond style existence that occupy the dreams of adolescent boys, though I will give

Daniel Craig this because he did break the mold of James Bond showing that even

James Bond was incomplete without a family, which is why I actually kind of have a,

I'm not of course endorsing all things James Bond or saying you should go watch these, but I do the plots of the newer

James Bonds and where it leads up to with actually James Bond, I think he gets married and has a family.

It's like, wow, that's not, so anyway, not to get off on a James Bond tangent, but James Bond isn't the model here.

It is not Andrew Tate, right, who is an example of self -gratification.

There's this video from a year ago where he's lifting weights on Christmas Eve alone. Just that's how he's going to spend his

Christmas Eve, while paternalistic fathers are enjoying their wives and children. It is what built the

West, not just patriarchy, paternalism. And it is what conquered the world.

And it is what will be our downfall if we lose it. We are not simply patriarchal.

We are paternal. I plan to do some more articles along these lines, casting a positive vision, a

Christian American vision for what lies ahead in specificity. The next article

I'll probably write along these lines is a blueprint for how we should approach the dysfunction that accompanies

Generation Z. Things like civil service programs and ending predatory lending, and I have a whole long list of things.

But I am committed to not just rebuking and refuting liberalism.

I am committed to forming, and we actually already I don't have to invent it from scratch.

I'm committed to rediscovering and applying a positive vision for what we should be doing and how things should be arranged and how we should operate.

And if you're interested in helping me in that endeavor, I don't often ask for this, but I am letting you know in case you're interested.

I could definitely use your help. You could become a partner on Patreon where I will give you exclusive content at times.

I try give exclusive content once a month or once every two months that is unique to you.

Actually, there's more than that because you'll get slideshows that are from my presentations on other publicly available episodes.

You can also access me through Patreon. You can also be part of our Signal Chat group through Patreon. You can also partner with me on Substack if you want to do that.

The links are in the info section to this video, and that will help you see not just the articles that I write publicly, but things that I'll make privately available to you.

I'll try to mirror what I do on Patreon there as much as I can. But obviously, if you can't do any of that, that is perfectly fine.

I just appreciate even right now, maybe say a prayer for me because this is something that means a lot to me.

I don't want to see us jumping into ditches where we are rejecting a bad thing but embracing a new bad thing.

And I'm afraid that some of that is happening. And I'm going to use whatever influence I have to try to encourage a better direction when it seems merited.