Read With Me - Anti CN Propaganda Tells the Truth

Today's show is sponsored by Curios Consulting. That is Curios with a Y. K -Y -R -I -O -S.

Real estate investing can be intimidating. That's why you don't do it alone. Curios Consulting gets you from no real estate to your first rental property.

My friend Steve did it right here in New Hampshire, and he wants to help other Christians do the same.

Visit consultingbycurios .com. Again, that's with a Y, consultingbycurios .com.

No more excuses. The world needs more Christians with passive income, not more passive Christians.

Make it happen. The link is in the description. All right, everybody, it is

Friday, and the white pills are flowing like the salmon of Capistrano.

I mean, this is, if you're still black billed going into the weekend about what's going on in the world or whatever,

I don't know what to tell you. I just, I can't, I can't imagine being black billed right now.

I just can't. Mother Jones, leftist publication, has written a,

I mean, I can't say it's an accurate article in general, because, you know, when someone writes an antagonistic article about you, of course, you know, they're going to spin it.

They're going to get some facts wrong. They're gonna play fast and loose with the details.

But overall, I still have to give this article a lot of credit. It is a good article, and I think it properly recognizes the truth that just like in the meme,

I've never seen the movie, but in the meme where the pirates take over the ship and the skinny black guy says, look at me,

I'm the captain now. That's what's basically going on.

Now, I'm going to read this article. I'm going to read the whole thing. I want to spread this article far and wide, and I'll try to keep my commentary to a minimum.

Obviously, I can't promise that. You know how things go. This is how we do it. But I'm going to read the article, and I gotta, you gotta appreciate the picture here with the brown lady at the sporting event in the line of white men looking at her suspiciously, and she's sweating it out.

Very ambiguous. She could be Indian. Maybe she's, maybe she's Puerto Rican like me. Maybe she's

Mexican. You don't really know. She could be Haitian for all I know, but the picture is just, you gotta appreciate it.

I don't know how I'm going to get through this. You gotta appreciate the picture for what it is, and they're at some kind of event.

I mean, this is very strange. This is a very strange picture, but don't let that distract you. Let's read the article because I think it's, the thrust of it is accurate, and of course, they're saying this is very dangerous and scary, but I would say the thrust of it is accurate, and this is just great news.

Great news. So let's read it. It's called, To Understand J .D. Vance, You Need to Meet the

Theo Bros. These extremely online young Christian men want to end the 19th amendment, restore public flogging, and make

America white again by Keira Butler. There's so, there's so much good stuff in here.

I gotta be honest with you. You just have to love this article. Here's how it begins.

On July 15th, when former President Donald Trump first appeared at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, he brought along two new accessories.

One was a large bandage covering his ear, which had been nicked by a would -be assassin's bullet. Let me just stop there.

To understand the point of view of this article, that's all you need. I mean, that really does frame it perfectly, but let's just push.

Let's just push forward. That's how you have to read articles like this. You've gotta, anyway.

The other was Ohio's first term Senator and hillbilly elegy author, J .D. Vance, who was about to debut as the

GOP vice presidential hopeful. Two days later, after paying tribute to his wife,

Usha, the child of immigrants from India, and their three biracial kids, Vance portrayed a vision of America that resonated deeply with Trump voters.

America is not just an idea, he said solemnly. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.

It is, in short, a nation. To many viewers at home, this seemed like the stuff of a boilerplate patriotic stump speech, but the words shared history lit up a far right evangelical corner of social media.

Quote, America is a particular place with particular people, end quote. Joel Webben, a

Texas pastor and pastor and podcaster, wrote on X, quote, this is one of the most important political questions facing

America right now, end quote, posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe, quote, answer it wrong and we will go the way of Europe where the native born populations are being utterly displaced by third world immigrants and Muslims.

Answer it right and we can renew America once more, end quote. You see what

I mean? Like this is why I want to spread this article, because though you see the perspective and this lady is not pleased with this kind of stuff.

This is good stuff. This stuff needs to be spread. So fantastic. Good, good, good on you guys.

I am so proud of Joel. I am so proud of William. I mean, I mean, I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a twinge of jealousy because I mean,

Mother Jones, what am I? Am I a joke to you? I'm a joke. I'm a joke to these people.

That's OK. Let's continue. Vance was embracing one of their most cherished beliefs.

America should belong to Christians and more specifically, white ones. The American the

American nation is an actual historical people, says Stephen Wolfe. No relation to William, the author of the 2022 book,

The Case for Christian Nationalism, quote, not just a hodgepodge of various ethnicities, but actually a place of settlement and rootedness, end quote.

For this group of evangelical leaders, Vance, a 40 year old former Marine who waxes rapturous about masculinity and women's revered role as mothers, was the perfect tribune to spread the gospel of patriarchal

Christian nationalism. For years, graying khaki clad evangelists have faithfully made the rounds at conservative events.

However, as Wolfe, a 41 year old former Princeton postdoc, writes in his book, these, quote, men in wrinkled short sleeved golf shirts sitting plump in their seats, end quote, are yesterday's

Christians. Among younger activists, they inspire the rolling of eyes. They are the embodiment of an ineffective boomer approach to taking over the

United States for Jesus. In their place, a group of young pastors hope to spearhead a

Christian nationalist glow up as they eagerly await a

Christian prince to rule America. These often bearded 30, hey, what is that about?

I mean, I do have a beard, but 30 and 40 somethings have suits that actually fit.

They are extremely online, constantly posting on a myriad of platforms, broadcasting their YouTube shows from man caves and convening an endless stream of conferences for like minded followers.

Let's call them, as one scholar I spoke with did, the Theo Bros. For all their youthful modishness, this group is actually more conservative than their older counterparts.

Many Theo Bros, for example, don't think women belong in the pulpit or the voting booth and even want to repeal the 19th amendment.

For some, prison reform would involve replacing incarceration with public flogging. I think slavery would be good to add there too.

I mean, just to be accurate. Back to the article. Unlike mainstream Christian nationalists like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who are obsessed with the

U .S. Constitution, many Theo Bros believe that the Constitution is dead and that we should be governed by the

Ten Commandments. In American Reformer, their unofficial magazine, Hagiographies of Spanish dictator

Francisco Franco appeared alongside full -throated defenses of countries that execute gay people.

On podcasts, the Theo Bros unpack the, quote, perils of multiculturalism, expose, quote, burning man's wicked agenda and peel back the nefarious feminist plot of Taylor Swift.

In Wolf's The Case for Christian Nationalism, one of their seminal texts, he writes that an ideal Christian nation, heretics, could be executed.

The rise of the Theo Bros worries the more mainstream religious conservatives. Janet Mefford is in all her glory right now.

Oh man, she's there in all her glory. Janet Mefford, a former

Christian radio host and journalist who tracks their ascendancy, says her community is alarmed to see an extremist movement gaining traction.

Quote, I'm not sure what the end game is other than they want to advance Christian nationalism, end quote, she says. Quote, but a lot of us find that terrifying, end quote.

Good. Good. Be afraid. That is fine.

I'm like, I don't want you to be afraid, but if you are afraid, so be it. The Theo Bros strategy is bottom up.

They aim to convert small American towns into Christian enclaves, but it is also top down. Some are working to position themselves close to the locus of federal power.

Vance, a Catholic convert married to a Hindu, would seem an unlikely hero for a movement of devout

Protestants who believe in a homogeneous America. But over the last few years, his political orbit has increasingly overlapped with that of the

Theo Bros, so much so that to careful observers, his public echoes of their ideas are beginning to sound a lot less like coincidence and more like dog whistles.

You got that right. Let me just let me just remove the veil for just a second.

It is not a coincidence. I'm just going to tell you, it is not a coincidence.

She goes on, and those dog whistles signal the major theme of this election. Hyper -masculinity, declining birth rates, ethno -nationalism, and no small measure of carefully curated misogyny.

He's got all the buzzwords. That's how you know it's good. If you want to know some of the actors who red -pilled

Vance, or at least those who flocked to him, you need to meet the Theo Bros. She's not wrong.

She's not wrong, my friends. I got news for you. Your minds are about to get blown.

With no meetings, website, or an explicit statement of faith that unifies their beliefs, the Theo Bros are not an official organization.

They identify with 16th century French theologian John Calvin, who spawned a rigid and deterministic form of Protestantism.

Julie Ingersoll, a University of North Florida religion scholar, traces the current back to R .J.

Rushdooney. Wow! Even Rush is getting mentioned here.

Now, that is something. There are some internal squabbles over Rush's influence and all of that, but I'm a

Rushdooney respecter. I'll tell you right now, I absolutely am influenced by R .J.

Rushdooney. It's no secret. I'll be open about it. R .J. Rushdooney, man, if you haven't read The Institutes of Biblical Law, you need to read it.

It will blow your mind. Blew my mind, I'll tell you that. R .J.

Rushdooney, an Armenian -American philosopher who popularized the idea of Christian nationalism and homeschooling in the early 1970s.

Rushdooney was super based. I mean, you really got to just understand that. R .J. Rushdooney was a genius.

Out of Rushdooney's movement emerged two camps. The charismatic Christians, now known as the New Apostolic Reformation, and the

Reformed Protestants, which include the Theobroses. I mean, again, you can't just stop and quibble with everything that she says here, but that's how you read an article like this.

You can't get too distracted by the inaccuracies. You got to look at the thrust of an article like this.

They share the goal of creating a Christian nation, says Ingersoll, but differ on a key point of theology. Adherents of the

New Apostolic Reformation believe that God is still speaking directly to people through pastors who have declared themselves apostles and prophets.

The Theobroses, meanwhile, believe that God said all he needed to say in the Bible. Many Theobroses are also proponents of post -millennialism, the idea that believers can hasten

Jesus's return by fighting against the satanic forces of liberal excess.

Theobro Aaron Wren, an Accenture consultant turned

Christian pundit, had described our current era as a negative world where Christians are persecuted for their beliefs.

Andrew Isker, another bro, calls it trash world. Like all self -respecting millennials, the

Theobroses have little tolerance for boomers, with the exception of their patriarch, Doug Wilson, a 71 -year -old pastor in Moscow, Idaho.

When he was younger, Wilson imagined himself going into the family business, Christian bookstores, but after a stint in the military, he moved to Moscow in 1975 to study philosophy at the

University of Idaho, where he became involved with the Jesus people, a kind of mashup of evangelical and hippie culture.

He helped found Christ Church, the congregation over which he still presides, and that regularly draws crowds of 1 ,300.

Wilson has since turned the college town into his own Christian kingdom. He helped found New St.

Andrews College, the Canon Press Publishing House, and Lagas School, one of the nation's first classical Christian schools where students exclusively study from the

Western canon. Wilson embraced Calvinism in 1988 and remade his church from the freewheeling

Jesus people hub into something far more sober and buttoned up, where women couldn't be church leaders and the only music allowed was hymns and psalms.

In the early 1990s, Wilson helped launch the Association of Classical Christian Schools, which had 502 member institutions across the

United States as of March 2023. Let's just take a moment. Let's just take a moment and appreciate the massive, massive impact that Reverend Doug Wilson has had.

I mean, he's just got a mountain of bona fides and Mother Jones is here acknowledging it and I am in full agreement.

You gotta hand it to the man. You got to. A giant.

A giant. Let's continue. His influence over Moscow has not been without controversy.

In a 2001 Vice Exposé, former members of Christchurch allege that ministers have encouraged them to stay in abusive relationships.

That tracks with Wilson's 1999 book, Fidelity, How to Be a One Woman Man, in which he wrote, the quote, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasure party.

A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts, end quote.

Speaking of Jared C. Wilson, speaking of the

VIP Jared C. Wilson, he actually got in trouble once for quoting this positively.

And you gotta give credit where credit is due to quote this positively in his position of effeminacy and purity point scoring was quite a thing to do.

Of course, he apologized and retracted it immediately as soon as he got any pushback.

What a coward. What a, I mean, what a coward. Unbelievable.

Anyway, let's move on. So, for that reason, Wilson wrote, the dynamic of a dominant man and a submissive woman is an erotic necessity.

Wilson called allegations of the church urging women to stay in abusive relationships categorically false. Wilson also promoted another form of dominance.

Let's just take our hats off to Kira for a minute. I mean, obviously, I can't agree with her perspective here, but she is being somewhat fair.

She doesn't quite understand the nuances of everything, but I gotta hand it to her. I don't, you don't expect that kind of parenthetical citation there from a position of someone in Kira's place.

So, I gotta hand it to her. Good on you, Kira. I appreciate that. I really do. Wilson has also promoted another form of dominance.

In the 1996 book, Southern Slavery As It Was, Wilson and his co -author argued that the master -slave dynamic was, quote, a relationship based on mutual affection and confidence, end quote.

And, quote, there has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world, end quote.

As that of the antebellum South, in a 2020 blog post, Wilson said he now allows that while the benevolent masters is not a myth, the idea of the horrific taskmaster is no abolitionist myth either.

When I asked Wilson about his controversial statements, he likened himself to a chef who strategically deploys jalapeno peppers.

Quote, then some of my enemies online have combed through my writings, have gathered up all the jalapenos, and put them on one

Ritz cracker, end quote. That's a pretty good quote. I like that quote. That's basically what happens.

In July, at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D .C., Wilson shared the stage with Senators Josh Hawley, Ron Johnson, and Mike Lee, as well as Vance, who auditioned his, quote,

America as a People bit a week before his star turn at the GOP convention. Wilson agrees with Vance's suggestion that children should be allotted votes managed by their parents.

Quote, I would like to see elections where households vote, he told me. Men as the head of households would actually cast the votes, though he believes women's suffrage was a mistake.

He would allow for a special exception for single mothers. Not bad. Not bad.

I disagree with that, but, hey, that's OK. I'm, you know, do

I disagree? You know what? We'll table that. We'll table that. I think that went through. Wilson offered the crowd a few one -liners.

In fact, I don't agree with that. I just I didn't think it through. But no, I don't agree. Back to the article.

Wilson offered the crowd a few one -liners. Quote, I'm a Presbyterian, not a lesbian. End quote. But mostly he talked about the persecution of Christians.

Quote, it is it used to be that the sexually troubled had to keep their kinks hidden away in the closet. End quote. He mused.

Quote, now it is that conservative Christians who need to keep his virtues hidden in the recesses of the closet. End quote.

After the National Conservatism Conference, Wilson appeared on the Believers Summit, which was headlined by Trump and hosted by the conservative political group

Turning Point USA. But it's not just conferences and interviews with the likes of Tucker Carlson where Wilson promotes his ideas.

He has a blog, a podcast and a YouTube channel, thanks mostly to the urging of his children and younger colleagues.

One example is that every year since 2018, Wilson has been celebrating what he calls No Quarter November, the month where we say out loud what everyone is thinking.

In a 2023 video, which is the brainchild of one of his sons, Wilson since sits sumptuously appointed at a sumptuously appointed

Thanksgiving table surrounded by his children and grandchildren and addresses the camera. Quote, if you think of my blog as a shotgun, he says, this is the month where I saw off all my typical, typical, quick, careful qualifications and blast away with a double -barreled shorty.

His wife, clad in an apron, brings out a turkey and places it in front of him. And then the tranquil scene is interrupted by a blaring alarm and a glowing red perimeter breach sign.

Wilson excuses himself, heads to his garage and straps on a flamethrower. After using it to light a cigar, he aims the fire at a cardboard cutout of Disney princesses

Elsa and Ariel and the logos of Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Netflix. Wilson's willingness to make campy content sets him apart, says

Rachel Tabachink, Tabachnik, Tabachnik, an extremist, extremism researcher who has been studying

Christian nationalism for decades. Instead of a crotchety old guy talking about stoning people, he's like super cool, she says, he's witty.

In subsequent videos, Wilson tackled women's culpability and rape, the dark side of empathy and the virtues of something called the patriarchy, which, that which according to our soy dis, disant and lisping political theorists must be smashed.

Only they say something like smashed. That's not bad. That's not bad. Wilson has used his political, his platforms to anoint the next generation of ultra conservative reform pastors, all of whom who happen to be men.

Mefford, a conservative, Mefford, the conservative Christian journalist told me that whilst the case for Christian nationalism got traction in mainstream

Christian circles, in part because Doug Wilson endorsed. Another Wilson protege is Joel Webbin, a 38 year old pastor who hosts a podcast and YouTube show, which he films from a wingback leather chair in a book lined room.

Webbin wasn't always reformed. He's an alumnus of a Bible school run by new apostolic reformation affiliated outfit, which he now considers a straight up heretical.

In his twenties, he broke from the group and moved to Texas and started his own church. In a video from a few years ago,

Webbin credited Wilson with emboldening him to say whatever he wanted, like telling a guest that the founding fathers weren't responsible for the slave trade because Africans had done the actual kidnapping and enslaving.

For Webbin, it was intensely liberating to watch Wilson speak in public without worrying about being canceled.

You stay in your little corner, you stay in your little leash because you're like, I don't know what will happen, Webbin said. But when you see some other guy do it and you're like, that's the worst thing that can happen.

Vice writes an article about you. Christianity Today editor Russell Moore won't invite you to his birthday party anymore. Like that's it.

After a recent conference, he registered dismay over immigrants in his community. Quote, it's like full straight up Hindu garb at our neighborhood swimming pool that my daughter is asking about and I'm trying to explain, end quote.

In August, he remarked on a show that, quote, a lot of people are going to be surprised when you're spending eternity worshiping

Christ next to Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Jonathan Edwards, you know, George Whitfield and Martin Luther and, you know,

George and, you know, George Whitfield and Martin Luther King Jr. is in hell. Huh?

Yeah. Anyway, Webbin is so impressed by his own audacity that he maintains an online list of all the controversies in which he's become embroiled.

There he explains why he called Christian men living in California stupid. They could just move to a red state, why he once ordered his wife to stop reading a book on theology.

He didn't want her exposed to beliefs that were different from his own and why he believes in a patriarchal household structure like the

Bible says so. The Bible says so. Webbin, who is planning to host a conference in Texas next spring called

Christ is King, how to defeat Trashworld, maintains that a return to the Constitution is impossible and the only viable alternative is the

Ten Commandments. Some of Wilson's other acolytes are attempting to create their own versions of Moscow, Idaho.

Take Brian Sauve, a 33 -year -old Christian recording artist, podcaster and pastor of Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah.

Like Webbin, Sauve wasn't always reformed. Refuge began as a charismatic Christian church. After the lead pastor resigned in a scandal, the then 24 -year -old

Sauve ascended to his place, immersed himself in Reformed theology and moved the church in a new direction.

Today, he presides over a Moscow -esque ecosystem, a publishing house called New Christendom Press, as well as St.

Brandon's Classical Christian Academy, modeled after those in Wilson's network. Can you feel it in the sails, reads

St. Brandon's website, the stiff breeze out of Moscow, Idaho? We can. Man, you gotta give, man,

I just, this is so good. You know, for the ears that, people that have ears to hear, all the information is here for you to just gorge yourself on good stuff.

Man, this is good stuff. I'm so grateful for this. This is good stuff. On his three podcasts and to his more than 53 ,000 followers on X, Sauve regularly states that women's primary function is to bear children.

You gotta love the lines that they think are so sensationalist and so just like evil and awful.

They put it out there and you read it and it's just like, man, thank you for saying that. Thank you for spreading that.

Oh man. In July, after Vance's comments about childless cat ladies who are miserable began widely circulating, he posted, it's desperately sad to think of all the intentionally barren women who will find themselves totally alone in their fifties, realizing their irreversible mistakes.

They will wish they could trade it all, money, vacations, independence, all of it for children they can now never have.

It is sad. I agree. Every time I read that, I feel a little sad. But unlike more mainstream conservatives,

Sauve doesn't even pretend to champion the idea of a Judeo -Christian nation. He posted in July, our political system is heavily influenced by Jews who reject

Christ and embrace all manners of evil. And even more well -connected Wilson emulator is

Josh Abatoy, executive director of American Reformer and managing partner of a venture capital fund and real estate firm called

New Founding. A former fellow of the right -wing think tank Claremont Institute, Abatoy reported that he recently participated in Project 2025

Presidential Transition strategic planning session hosted by the right -wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation.

Bucks County Beacon reporter Jennifer Cohn revealed venture capitalist Chris Buskirk was listed as the editor and publisher.

In 2022, Buskirk co -founded the Rockbridge Network, a collection of powerful

Trump donors, including Catholic judicial kingmaker, Leonard Leo and Silicon Valley billionaire

Peter Thiel. Another co -founder of the Rockbridge Network, none other than J .D.

Vance. Thiel, Vance's mentor and former employer, is also a major funder of the national conservatism movement, obsessed with global birth rates.

Thiel spent $10 million on his protege's successful 2022 Senate campaign.

In July, shortly after Trump had announced Vance as his running mate, Cohn surfaced a tweet by New Founding's network director

Josh Clemons, a photo of Vance with several New Founding staffers. The caption read,

Our guy. New Founding lists as a partner the

Society for American Civic Renewal, a secretive fraternal order founded by the Indiana shampoo baron

Charles Haywood, who describes himself as an aspiring Christian warlord. According to founder

Nate Fisher, New Founding wants to form the backbone of a renewed American regime and that its members understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful use.

But its main public facing project appears to be turning tracts of land in Appalachia into Christian communities.

Promotional materials describe the community of unmatched seclusion, where simple country faith protects local culture from rainbow flags and crime.

Potential buyers, he advises, should not delay. Who's going to grab the land? It's going to be good, based people who want to build something inspiring, something authentic to the region's history.

Or is it going to be Bill Gates and Black Rock and hippies from California? One eager customer is 38 -year -old

Theo Bro Andrew Isker, the pastor who interned at Wilson's church, studied divinity at New St.

Andrews and wrote a book on Christian nationalism with Andrew Torba, the openly anti -Semitic CEO of social media platform

Gab. In July, Isker announced on X that he planned to move his family of seven to lead a church in new founding community in Tennessee.

Life in his native Minnesota, he had said, had become untenable because of permissive laws around trans rights and abortion, not to mention how hospitable the state has been to refugees.

Minnesota is one of the top destinations for resettling foreign people hostile to our way of life, he said. That month,

Isker spoke at a Texas conference about the war on white America, along Paul Gottfried, the mentor of prominent white nationalist

Richard Spencer. This conference was hosted by the True Texas Project, a far -right group with ties to Senator Ted Cruz and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Like many Theo Bros, Isker sees much to like in Vance. In early July, before Trump announced his running mate,

Isker referred to him as Senator J .D. Vance, referred to him as Senator J .D.

Vance, Our Heritage America. Oh, I see, I see. In late July, he posted a video of Vance and told his 29 ,000 followers, you need to double down on childless cat lady discourse.

Kamala sees happy large families and hates them. She wants them destroyed. She wants you to never be able to have this. She is nasty, bitter, herodin, who hates all that is true and good and beautiful.

One problem is that there are simply not enough Theo Bros to populate Christian communities like the one Isker plans to move to.

Enter William Wolfe, the founder of the Center for Baptist Leadership with aims to persuade members of the

Southern Baptist Convention that it, the largest of all Protestant denominations in the United States, has fallen prey to the corrupting forces of liberalism.

Baptists are only the beginning. Wolfe wants to win over the entire evangelical mainstream, which he and other

Theo Bros refer to as Big Eva. In August, he posted on X, once you realize that Big Eva thinks it's a bigger sin to desire to preserve the customs, heritage, values, and cultural homogeneity of your own nation than to kill the unborn in the womb, you can better understand their moral framework.

It's true. Very true. Are we almost done here? Let me see how much more we have to go.

Yeah, I can't keep reading. My voice is getting tired. Wolfe served in the

Trump administration, both as a deputy assistant secretary of defense and as director of house affairs at the

Department of State. He's also an alumnus of Heritage Acts at a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, the arch conservative think tank behind Project 2025, whose chief architect

Russell Vaught posted on X that he was proud to work with William Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian nationalism.

A few months later, the Bucks County Beacon uncovered a lengthy online manifesto of the goals of Christian nationalists.

This document, which listed Wolfe and Joel Webbin as contributing editors and Oklahoma Senator Dusty Devers as a co -author, called for civil magistrates to usher in the establishment of the

Ten Commandments as the foundational law of the nation. The manifesto does not specify exactly how

Christian nationalists should achieve these goals. As Tabachink and extremism researcher interprets it, the

Theo bros are imagining a utopia where they are going to be free to be entrepreneurs in all different senses, including the tech world that they're mixing with so freely.

The key, she said, is that authoritarianism is required to have a utopian vision. Last year, the extremism watchdog group

Right Wing Watch posted a video of Wolfe quoting a scripture passage. There are times when, quote, even the god of peace proclaims by providence his two arms, he says.

If we have ever lived in a point of time in American history since then that we could argue that now is the time to arms, again,

I think we are getting close. Yeah, we've been through that one before. William Wolfe's Christian nationalism manifesto made the rounds on social media, but in mainstream conservative outlets, it was

Stephen Wolfe who brought the Theo bros ideas to the wider world. In his book, which was praised by the editors at the

Federalist and American Conservative, the American Conservative, Wolfe paints America as a gynocracy whose government and culture has been feminized by unhappy women leaders.

Sound familiar? He has stated on X that women should not have the right to vote and that inter -ethnic marriage can be sinful.

Wolfe grew up on in Napa, California, and his father was an admirer of right -wing pundit and erstwhile

GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. My dad was too, actually. After attending West Point and serving in the army,

Wolfe had earned advanced degrees before leaving academia to do the Wendell Berry thing in North Carolina with his wife and four kids.

Over the summer, we're talking about Stephen Wolfe here, by the way. Over the summer, Wolfe, 41, agreed to speak with me on the condition that I refer to him as Dr.

Wolfe and call him an expert on Christian nationalism.

The Dr. Wolfe I spoke with was a more muted version of the firebrand I'd watched online. He said his ideal version of American nationalism.

I'll only speak to you if you refer to me as Dr. Wolfe, say I'm an expert on Christian nationalism, and say

I'm the greatest guy around. That's what I need. I'm going to start doing that.

I'm going to start making conditions to talk to people. If I'm going to talk to you, you're going to call me

A .D. the Great. I mean, that's it. A .D. the Great, and I'll tell you anything you want to know. He said his ideal version of America would be led by a

Caesar figure. Gay marriage would be strictly prohibited. Women would not be allowed to vote. Instead, men would vote for their households.

When I brought up the bit from his book about heretics being killed, he grew annoyed. I do think it's permissible in principle for a state to suppress theological heresy, but that doesn't mean it's prudent or proper, suitable in every circumstance or every tradition or way of life.

The Founding Fathers, he added, had encouraged religious liberty, so killing heretics would not be appropriate in the United States that we inhabit.

We turn to remarks he had made at a recent conference convened by Brian Sauve. I think we need to reflect on this idea of Judeo Christianity or Judeo -Christian worldview or Judeo -Christian whatever, and really eradicate that from our thinking, because if we say that America is a

Judeo -Christian country, then it can't be a Christian country. Okay? What role, I asked him, would Jews play?

After a deep sigh, he told me they would be allowed to exercise their religion freely. Yeah, that's my position, too.

You know, that's my position, too. Every religion, not just Judaism, but every religion in my ideal

Christian society, this is 80 Robles talking, they would be allowed to practice their religion so long as it doesn't break the law, but they would have no influence, none, on what we do as a nation.

None at all. Just like I would have no influence in a Muslim nation on what they do if I lived in a

Muslim nation. Anyway, we spoke a week before Vance's RNC speech, and Wolf's remarks helped me understand what the

Theobros heard in Vance's phrase about America as a people. The founders, Wolf noted, intended for their country to be

Anglo -Protestant with an American inflection. America, he continued, is a place of settlement and rootedness, but it's an open ethnicity in which people can become one of us, which is to say, like some others,

Wolf is not necessarily opposed to the idea of non -white people in America as long as they agree to assimilate to the

Anglo -Protestant dominant culture. In this telling, America is not a pluralistic society at all, but rather one in which there exists an uneasy truth between Christians and those they reluctantly tolerate.

That's a good way of putting it, actually. That's a good way of putting it. It's not really an uneasy truth, truce.

You know, we'd be fine with it so long as you're fine with it. And if you're not fine with it, you could, of course, live somewhere else.

Towards the end of our conversation, I asked Wolf what motivated him. He said, quote, I want

Christians to be more assertive and to recognize the Christian heritage of the American way of life and seek to restore that.

He said, this is a Christian country and we've got work to do to restore it to what it once was. In his keynote address at Sovey's conference titled

Why Multiculturalism and Pluralism Fails and What to Build Instead, Wolf called the concept of America as a melting pot, an early 20th century idea cooked up by a

Jew in New York who despised the confident Anglo -Protestant establishment. Wasps were the distinct ethnicity of America, he insisted, and America should only welcome those who aspire to assimilate.

As he put it, this is our homeland and we welcome you on the condition of conformity. Or in the words of J .D.

Vance, America is a group of people. Yeah. You see what

I mean? You see what I mean? Like, the thrust of this article is accurate.

Now, there's lots to quibble with here, and there's a lot of inaccuracies in here, and there's lots of obvious slant.

But you gotta accept the good for what it is. I mean, this, again, with people with the right kind of eyes, the right kind of ears, this is a treasure trove.

A treasure trove. And I, for one, am grateful for it.