Owen Shenvi and Neil Strachan - A Perfect Couple - Part 1

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Make it happen. The link is in the description. All right, everybody, we are about to embark on a journey. You know how we do it here. We've got the eight-part series plan. You know, this is going to go quite—I mean, this is only part one, I think, of the interview that Owen did with Neil Shenvey.

Is Neil a doctor? Is it Dr. Neil Shenvey? I don't know. I don't know. He says he's a theoretical chemist, I guess. I mean, maybe he's a theoretical chemist. I don't know. I don't know what he does. But is he a doctor?

I don't know. I feel like if you're a theoretical chemist, you should be a doctor. So maybe he's a doctor. So Dr. Neil Shenvey and Dr. Owen Straychan are talking about the woke right, the imaginary woke right.

I mean, this is just too good. I mean, I can't even imagine how stupid this video is, but we're going to get into it because that's just what we do here. Before I do that, though, let me just say this.

I've got some new killer music. Can you hear it? Yeah, yeah, that's good stuff. It just makes you feel good. You know what I mean? It's summertime, and that music just makes you feel euphoric. It's euphoric.

That's what I think anyway. But let's get into it before, you know, I wanted to just give you one quick update here. I went fishing the other day, and I had two bites, and they were both decent sized fish.

I saw them in the water, and both of them, both of them on two separate rods, I forgot to set the drag. It was too loose. And so I was unable to set the hook because the drag was too loose. So my tip to you, if you're out there fishing, make sure before you start, before you start, you check that drag because there's nothing more annoying than having a good bite, seeing the fish.

You can see him. He's right there. You can get him. And then trying to set the hook, but it just doesn't work. Awful, awful feeling. I've missed on two in a row on two separate rods. I had the drag set too low.

I don't know what I was thinking. But in any case, that's my fishing tip for you today. Enough nonsense. Let's just get to it.

Support free speech. It is. When you came to write that pamphlet, I am actually...

I just started this at like eight. I don't know. I just kind of tried to see when it... Oh, hold on. It looks like he's talking here. You know what? We're just going to start at the beginning. Yeah, let's just start at the beginning.

Let's just check it out.

The Claim That the Woke Right Is Being Invented

We've heard a great deal about the woke left. Wokeness is one of the key ideas of the last.

Five to seven years in global... There's nothing more annoying than having just too serious music. You know what I mean? Too serious. Not euphoric, that's for sure.

Realities. But now we are hearing today about the rise of the woke right.

We're actually not hearing about that. That's all been created. It's all AstroTurf. That's the work of Neil Shenvey and Michael Fallon. Now we're hearing about the woke right. Well, we're hearing about it because you're telling us about it.

You made it up. It makes it seem like there's this groundswell of, oh, look, it's the woke right. No, it isn't. You guys invented that. That's like if I made up a new thing, the sniffle piffle left, and then I did a video where I'm like, we're hearing...

All of a sudden, we're hearing about the sniffle piffle left. It's just preposterous. It's all AstroTurf.

Today on Grace and Truth is Neil Shenvey. He is the author of a terrific article entitled What is the Woke Right? on his own website. Neil is the author with Pat Sawyer of Critical Dilemmas and Why I Believe.

He is a very sharp thinker and an important voice in the evangelical community. Neil, this is your debut on Grace and Truth. Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you very much for inviting me, Alan.

Well, it's an honor to have you. You and I've known...

What's wrong with Neil's hair here? He's got like, like maybe too much hair gel or something. That's a little weird. He's got stuff in his hair. I don't know what to do with that. That's just a little strange.

You know, the woke right actually does exist, but it's really woke and then in scare quotes, right, because they're really not on the right. And in fact, what you're seeing before you are two examples of the woke right.

Like Neil Shenvey, he's very concerned about the woke church, but he attends a woke church and he supports it and he says it's not woke. Like he's, he's, he's, he's the woke right. And then Owen over here, like Owen, you know, he was woke five minutes ago and then he, he kind of, you know, he put his finger up in the air, felt the wind.

And then he became, I'm against wokeness, but he never really got rid. It's not, it's not, it doesn't come from his gut. Right. Like, so he says lots of woke stuff all the time. And that was revealed last year in the, in the critical, uh, not critical Christian nationalism controversy.

Like that's all like, that's all from a woke perspective that he's very concerned and terrified about, you know, very basic, uh, you know, principles of, of, of the right. Like these are basic things about the right, but he's very concerned.

It's racist and all this kind of, he's, he's the woke right. That's the woke right. So what we have here are two people that are actually woke telling you that they're very concerned with the woke, but they are woke in the, in the traditional sense.

They're not even woke. Right. They're just traditionally woke.

On each other for a number of years now. And when I was getting my toes dipped into wokeness, I guess now we're going to have to start, uh, qualifying that the woke left, um, probably rightly your work was, we're going to have to start qualifying because we're really.

Desperately trying to make this one stick. I can't imagine like, like I'm not much for strategy. Like I'm not much of a strategic person. Well, that's not really true, but I, but I don't really like to, I'm not a schemer.

You know what I mean? I'm not really much of a schemer. So like when I, when I'm, when I'm participating in like private chat groups, like, you know, Neil and Owen, of course, participated in that kind of stuff on their end.

Um, certain people like to like plan and plot moves on social media and they're scheming all the time. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm just saying that's just what some people do. I don't scheme though.

I'm not much a schemer. I don't like it. I participate very little in these kind of signal chat groups and stuff. And I just usually would just a stupid comment or a funny comment here and there. I'm not much of a schemer, but I will say that I know a stupid brain dead idiotic scheme when I see one.

And this woke right thing strikes me as one of the dumbest I've ever heard. I can't imagine that they would think this could possibly work. Like, like the people that they call woke, right. Are out there saying the least woke things you could possibly imagine the least approved, you know, acceptable, like the least worst woke things you could possibly imagine.

And they're saying, Oh, that's woke. That's actually woke too. You see like, like, like, Oh, did you see, they said white boy summer. That's woke. That's totally woke. They're like, can you see how they're there?

You're separating a presser and a press. And like, it's just, it's also strained. And it's also obviously on the face of it brain dead. I can't imagine that they would think this, this would work. But I think some people have thought to themselves, like, why, why would they think this would be a good idea?

This is really stupid, but why do they think it's smart? Like they're scheming and they came up with this woke, right. Again, it just so brain dead. Why do they think it would work? And I think what people have come up with is, well, they came out against wokeness, wokeness.

Did anyone call it wokeness before Owen Strawn? I like, it's just, I don't know. Anyway, they came, they came out on the right side of the wokeness thing. And so that's like their hammer. And now, so they've got this hammer.

And so everything's a nail. So they got to keep beating that hammer because it's their only tool, but it's the only time they've been right in their entire lives on social issues. So they're right about that.

And so now they're, now they're just going to keep using it. So, it's a woke, right? It's the woke, right? And they know that it's who's going to scare people, but it's just, it doesn't work when the people you're calling woke, right?

Are the least woke people that you could imagine. I know Owen likes to think he's the least woke person ever, which is just so obviously on the face of it, false. If you ever want to check out why I say that, just check out my Owen Strawn playlist.

There's tons of them and I'll explain all about it. But yeah, I think that's what it is. I think that's what it is. First I encountered,.

How Neil Shenvi Got Into Apologetics and Critical Theory

And you wrote a, you wrote really a booklet early on and, and I just love to hear from you. How did you get, before we dive into the woke, right? Which we will. How did you get interested in, in critical theory and critical race theory and wokeness and social justice?

What led you to.

Start engaging these issues some years ago? I became a Christian graduate school at UC Berkeley. So 20, 2001, actually a long time ago. And immediately I got involved in apologetics. So I had a lot of friends, colleagues who were skeptics, atheists, and I wanted to share the gospel with them.

So I got into the standard arguments for God's existence. Is Christianity true? Is the Bible reliable? Those kinds of questions. And that led me to publish my first book, Why Believe, which is just directed towards intellectuals, people like my friends who are struggling with why they should think Christianity is true.

But, and then I was finishing the draft around 2016, around the rise of Black Lives Matter. And I was kind of looking for other research topics. What should I write about? What should I learn about? And I remember watching an interview by Jordan Peterson at the time, because I was trying to figure out too, who is this guy?

He's very popular. So I started listening to his podcast, trying to get a handle on the phenomenon. But he quoted it from a book entitled Race, Class, and Gender. It's an anthology, 500 pages long. It touches on subjects like feminism, critical race theory, queer theory, post-colonial theory.

And he quoted it from that book. And it was so wild, the statement that I was like, I got to read this book. The quote was this, the idea that objectivity is best reached only through rational thought, a specifically Western and masculine idea, one that we will challenge throughout this book.

I've committed that to memory. So I heard him quote that. I was like, that is so insane. This is being taught in our schools. So I got the book, I read it, and I put it down. I was like, this is incredibly important.

It began to show me how many cultural artifacts, these phenomena I was seeing both in the culture and in the I'm a little bored, so I just tried to pull out my phone and.

Pulled up Twitter. And David Harris here has a tweet that says, and it's related to this. It says, I know there are many who could comment on this. The right guy to do so is A .D. Robles Media. Get on it.

And I just tweeted this at you, Dave, but David, but I'm going to say it to you here as well. It's literally happening as we speak. There you go, David. There's your answer. I don't know, I should have started it later, but that's not how I do things.

You know, I like to just take it as it comes. You know what I mean? I like to think of it off the top of my head, but I don't know about you. I am bored out of my mind.

Well, Church, we're related to these ideas that are coming out of the heading of critical

The Rise of Critical Race Theory and Its Core Claims

Wish I had some Googan Bates to say something like that.

On my career of trying to understand wokeness and then helping evangelicals to see why these.

Ideas were so toxic. I was talking to my brother the other day and, you know, he was talking about just a bunch of different, you know, political commentators and stuff. And he kind of just hit on something that I felt myself that he said, you know, it must be hard to like you make all your money talking about wokeness and then you get sick of it because it's been done to death, you know what I mean?

But you make your money doing it, so you just got to keep doing it. And I understand that's probably part of this too, you know, they got their notoriety talking about wokeness and they can't let it go.

They can't let it go. It's been done to death and so they got to figure something else out. So now they got to create a wokeness. They got to create the woke right so they can keep, you know, trying to earn their social capital on wokeness.

As for me, I've kind of given it up. I mean, I don't really talk about wokeness too much anymore because, I mean, every now and then I guess I will, but it's just not interesting to me anymore. I think that a lot of the spells have been broken completely and now we're just waiting for like the final battle kind of thing.

I think a lot of the spells have been broken. I think the people that can be woken up, have been woken up, that the wokeness is out there. So like, you know, I'll still mention it. I'm still anti-wokeness or whatever it is.

I still don't believe any of that stuff and I think it's ridiculous. But at the same time, like, you got to move on, right? You got to eventually stop complaining and eventually start putting forward, you know, options for the future, which is what my Christian Nationalist content is all about.

And obviously, you know that I've been talking about those kinds of things my entire time on YouTube because I've always been interested in God's law and, you know, God and government and things like that.

That's been an interest of mine for, you know, as long as I've been a Christian, basically. So there's probably a little bit of that too. Like, they miss the good old days when they were champions against wokeness and so they got to create a new woke threat and so they've created the most preposterous one ever.

They're trying to get people to see an orange and say, that's an apple. That's an apple and you got to be real concerned with that apple. But the people can see that, no, that's an orange, dude. I can see that's an orange.

That's the level that they're trying to get you to, like, be concerned with them. The least woke people around, they're trying to say to people, oh, that's really wokeness and let me explain to you how it's similar.

By the way, did you know that Hitler owned some dogs and he probably liked milk and cookies too? Did you know that? A lot of parallels. A lot of parallels. Fascinating. And it fits with,.

In a form, how I came to understand these issues. Not Peterson per se, although he's in the mix, but there wasn't a lot of attention given to critical race theory prior to the late 2010s, I would say, at least in the mainstream, that is.

Critical race theory begins in legal studies, basically, which is not a discipline that everybody's reading as they get a haircut at the barber or the salon or something. It's not right there on the table for reading literature.

It's People magazine, not critical legal studies. But with critical race theory, how did you begin to understand that in particular? You're talking about the broad form of critical theory that you discovered through Peterson.

How did you start getting.

Boned up on CRT? Critical theory today is this broad umbrella, like you said, that includes many different sub-disciplines. Critical race theory is one sub-discipline. So is queer theory. So is intersectional feminism, post-colonial theory, and a host of these other critical social theories.

I was just reading everything. My co-author, Dr. Pat Sawyer and I, actually became friends around the same time, 2016. We both attend the same church. He was actually getting a PhD in the critical tradition.

I began telling him, hey, I'm seeing these ideas in the culture and even in the church. Help me understand them. For a while, he was actually incredulous. He did not believe that biblically-minded evangelicals would possibly be taken in these ideas.

He got into his own field because he was trying to bring the gospel to his progressive colleagues. He never thought in a million years that he'd have to do the work to show evangelicals why these obviously unbiblical ideas were actually wrong.

He guided my reading. I think I read the classic Delgado and Stefanczyk's book, CRT and Introduction, probably in 2018, 2019. Then because that sub-discipline became more and prominent in our culture, I began reading a lot more.

On my shelf back there, I probably have 200.

Books related to critical social theory. On my shelf, as you can see, I've got Cortez here. I've got a nice picture of Cortez. It's not really a picture. It's more of a sculpture. I've got a sword. That's where I put my fishing poles, typically.

Some hockey sticks right there. Yeah. Yeah. It's on my shelf. Man, this really stinks. I'm sorry to do this to you guys. Let's see how many views this thing has. 167 views. Yeah. I feel bad for those 167 people.

I would say at least half of those are hate views. There's that, of course. Let's try to power through. I may have to do some searching to see where this gets interesting. I don't know, man. Just look at Neil, though.

Just look at Neil. He's just up to something. Neil, what are you up to, man? I know you're up to something. What is it? He's going to subvert the church. He's going to do it any way he can. Any way he can.

He's going to pretend to be your champion. Meanwhile, the most basic thing in his life, what church he attends, is a complete... It's just a refutation of everything that he claims to be. He's very concerned.

Very concerned with the woke church while attending a woke church. And this is the man that's going to convince you that there's a danger on the woke right. On the right, there's a danger of the woke right.

It's wokeness again. Rearing its ugly head. You can trust me. I'm Neil Shenvey. My own, man. My own.

CRT, I think people focus on that term because Donald Trump had that executive order, supposedly anti-CRT, but it was clearly targeted at these ideas. Didn't name CRT per se. After that executive order, and then Chris Ruffo on Twitter announcing he's going to war against CRT.

That became the catch-all phrase for all these woke ideas. But as it turns out, though, people are claiming, well, that's not true at all. It's just a legal theory. It's not involved in any of this woke stuff.

That's not the case. Actually, if you do read the literature, going back to the 80s and 90s, early 90s, the founders were saying things like critical race theory is defined by certain ideas. One of them is the idea that racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism are all interlocking systems of oppression.

As critical race theorists, we stand against all oppression. We are promoting what they call a quote, massive social transformation that's needed to dismantle all these systems of oppression. So Ruffo is not wrong to say, actually, this does go back to the critical race theorists.

It is.

Systemic Oppression and the Difference Between Real and Fake Claims

Interlocking in their own words. What I find so amazing about this, and I'm starting to understand this more every day, and it's this idea that if you talk about systems of oppression or systemic racism or whatever the case may be, that's woke.

That's woke. That's not true. Those are just woke buzzwords. The reality is that they can be, but there also could be a system of oppression. It's just that with woke church and all this kind of stuff, they were all made up.

They were all fake. You know what I mean? It's not that there's no such thing as a system of oppression or systemic oppression. Of course, there is such a thing as systemic oppression, but what they were saying was all false.

It was all fake. It's like saying, yeah, if you require someone to be on time for their job, that's racism. That's a systemic racism. That's systemic oppression. It's really not, but it's not the same thing as to say that there is no such thing as systemic oppression.

And I knew this before, and I used to talk about this. I would say things like, the racism that the woke church talks about is fake. And again, I understand the limitations of the word racism, and the segregation that they talk about is fake.

My church is mostly white. It doesn't mean that it's segregated, though, in the way that they mean, where it's like, hey, blacks, you can't come to my church. It's not like that. But that doesn't mean that that kind of thing doesn't actually happen.

In fact, there was, of course, the famous episode of the Women's Conference of TGC that said, hey, no whites allowed. No whites allowed here. And they're within their rights to do that. That's fine, but it's obviously against what they are claiming to be for.

It just obviously works against it. So this is one of the things I have a feeling is going to come up a lot in this, where it's like, if you talk about these things that the woke talks about, then you're woke, too.

You're just woke, right? You know, you see, you're just doing it in the opposite. It's just that reverse racism, you know, or whatever. And that could be the case, but it's not necessarily the case, right?

So there could be systems that intentionally seek to hold you down. That's definitely possible. But it's just that the ones that the woke was talking about were obvious, obvious fakes. They were obviously phony.

They were obviously just rhetoric that was used to get an agenda pushed through. And so all of that. So if you think that the LGBT movement is plotting and scheming and planning to oppress Christians or to suppress Christianity or whatever it is, and you can, you know, point to evidences of this where they, the documents say, this is what we're trying to do.

Like, that doesn't make you woke, obviously. I thought that was obvious to everybody, because our opposition to wokeness wasn't that there could be no such thing as a system of oppression. I think some people are starting to reveal that that's what they were saying, that there could be no such thing as a system of oppression.

That's not what my opposition was. It was just that the ones that they were talking about were all fake. They were fugazi. They were false. They were invented. But anyway, I'm bored out of my mind. I'm sorry to do this to you.

This first, you know, seven minutes of this were just horrendous. I mean, who watches this stuff? That's what I want to know. Who watches this stuff? Who watches it is like, oh, this is great. Let's take a look at the comment section.

Zero comments. So maybe nobody watches this stuff. Oh man. I don't know if I can do this every day. We'll see. We'll see. I assume this gets better, but man, this really stinks. I gotta go. I hope you found this video something.

God bless.