Stephen Wolfe Answers His Critics (Audio)

Reception of *The Case for Christian Nationalism* and Why It Drew Backlash

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, with a guest we've had on before, Stephen Wolfe. We're going to talk today again about his book, The Case for Christian Nationalism.

But it's going to be a little different than the last videos that we did on this, where we just went over the book and I asked questions, and we tried to figure out what the book was saying. This is different because the book's now been out for a few months and a number of reviews have come in.

In fact, some of you have sent me some of these reviews. I knew Stephen was going to be working on crafting some rebuttals, and I want to give him the opportunity on this podcast since not all of you are going to go read these reviews or Stephen's rebuttal to let him speak to this and the response, the reception, and some of the people who are against what he's saying.

What is their argument? Why does he disagree? I appreciate you giving me your time, Stephen. Welcome to the podcast once again. Yeah, thanks for having me on. How's it been? How's the reception to your book?

It's one of those strange things where the reception on the official evangelical outlets has been largely negative, except for a couple of people or a few people saying positive things, which they all got beat up for it, to say something positive about the book.

But yeah, it's one of those weird things where I'm not, I mean, usually the evangelical elites go after people who are institutionally connected, who have all these various friends that they can associate his bad ideas with them.

But I'm really not any of that. In one sense, I'm grateful that I'm this outlier who's got a lot of attention. But the downside is it's all been fairly negative. But it's one of those things where you know how you look at Rotten Tomatoes, and the movie has like 99 of the top critics say it's terrible.

But then the popular crowd is like, this is the best movie. So I've gotten a lot of, overall, it's been very positive. But if you just searched my name, you'd think on Google, you'd think it'd be all negative.

But in general, the more, I guess, the non-elite people from lower places, I guess, I've liked in general.

So it's interesting because I published two books on social justice, and I have two graduate level degrees from evangelical institutions nonetheless. And I thought the work, well, people who were kind enough to tell me what they thought, who were in evangelical circles, whether they endorsed it or just privately talked to me about it, were raving about it, thought it was good research in both cases.

And I'm not trying to shoot my own horn. I'm just saying it's weird to me that my books initially, I don't think they went quite as high as yours did in the category, I don't know, Amazon's categories.

But they did shoot up pretty high initially. And I didn't get any of these reviews. They just ignored it. And I'm wondering, and you tell me if you think this is off or not, but I'm wondering if because a lot of what's come out has been, it hasn't been a positive vision.

In fact, I want to write something. I am in the middle of writing something that's more of a positive vision. But most of what conservatives write, if we do write something, it tends to be a critique of whatever the left is doing.

And I'm wondering if that's why you are getting so much opposition, because you did something different. You wrote a very positive vision for what you want to see and steps to get there. And that is a competing, you have competing purposes, I suppose, with the regime evangelicals.

What do you think about that?

Yeah, that's, I think the positive account. Yeah, is I think, but it also not only that, but I think it's because they deemed it as dangerous as well. So they find out that this guy who has a PhD is writing a book defending Christian nationalism.

And some of the people who saw earlier editions of it saw that it was a large book. It quotes everyone from Aristotle to Calvin, and so it's very well, I should say, as I'd say, grounded within the Christian tradition and supported by a lot of these quotes.

And so I think that it was just deemed as, wow, this guy's coming to conclusions that we are not, that are unacceptable. But he's doing it with this large book with a lot of quotations with where he's offering syllogisms and all this sort of thing.

So I think there was like this fear that it was dangerous and that it had to be kind of crushed. And so they brought out some of the bigger guns to do it. I don't think it was a conspiracy, but I think there was this interest that I'm not just some, I mean, I'm kind of an obscure guy.

Not anymore you're not. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, I think there was this sense, and I didn't kind of tout my credibility. I'm not that sort of person, you know, I'm not like that. I think there was that fear that, okay, this Dr. Wolf is writing this book and we have to somehow say it's dangerous and unserious and stupid or something.

So I think that's kind of what.

Yeah, no, it's interesting because you went to Canon Press, it publishes your book. And you would think with the kind of comprehensive academic high level work that you're talking about it, like an academic press would be interested in that kind of thing.

And it's just interesting to me that for people like yourself who are very accomplished, who have thought deeply about these things and done a lot of academically rigorous work to form your conclusions, you're going around the guild, so to speak, to get this out there.

And it's laymen who are buying it. Well, I mean, there's obviously pastors and professors who, actually, I'd be curious, do you have people coming to you secretly, kind of like Nicodemus with Jesus by night and saying, Steve, and I really like the book, but don't tell anyone.

Oh, I mean, yeah. One of the things about being like outwardly, openly right wing is that other people who are secretly right wing come up to you and be like, oh, I love your book. And this and that. So I've had dozens of people just and just even randomly.

I was at some school function for with my kids. And someone walks up and says, are you Steven Wolf? And I'm like, yeah, it's like, oh, I love your book. So and they're looking around. But yeah, I mean, there has been that.

That's actually been kind of cool, that people just randomly have come up to me and said, I like your book. Well, I got one for you.

There's a guy in my church in high school who went to a speech class, and they were doing some kind of like a, I don't know, forming a government type of speech. What's your ideal government? Some topic like that.

And he surprised me a little. He told me, oh, yeah, I did this whole Christian nationalist presentation. And I use Steven Wolf's present stuff. And this is in a public high school in New York. And so I'm wondering to what extent your book has reached has gone in these different ways.

But anyway, yeah, it sounds like it's going pretty well. And you're doing pretty well, despite some of the backlash from the more I would I don't know what we want to call them, because I don't want to give them a negative pejorative here.

But the elite evangelicals are the gatekeeper, so to speak. I want to talk about some of these guys. You just wrote an article. Was it yesterday? I think you published it on. Was it Brian? Is it Brian Mattson?

Is that the name? Yeah, Brian Mattson. And you I think I had two or three people send me his review when it came out. And I don't think they read your book, but they thought that this answered your book.

And so you wrote an extensive reply to him. And I know you're planning on doing that with others. Yesterday, I went and tried to just use a search engine. I think I just use Google to see, OK, what are the top reviews of the book?

And of course, the first one you probably guess the first one on the list. If I Google your book and review is you want to guess which one do you think it is?

The Youngs, maybe? Yeah, it's Gospel Coalition. OK, yeah, it's got. I mean, I figure the algorithm pushes Gospel Coalition up. It does. It's interesting.

Yeah. So the Youngs review is lengthy. Some of them are also lengthy. Some of them are shorter. But this one is one of the longer ones. And I pulled some quotes from it that I thought might be helpful for you to respond to.

So I'll just read the first one. And this one came up in a number of reviews, which is why I want to start here. He says this in a footnote, Wolf rejects modern racialist principles and denies that he's making a white nationalist argument.

But if we cannot accept the creedal nation concept and if ethnicities are grouped by cultural similarity, it's an open question how much cooperation and togetherness blacks and whites, not to mention Asians and Hispanics and Native Americans will ever share or if they should even try to live and worship together.

So the question I have is if your rejection of the proposition nation place it places a barrier or I should say, does your rejection place a barrier in the way of working together with other cultures, especially in the church?

Well, one of the problems with the Youngs review is, as I recall, he basically says, yeah, you know, Wolf does have this kind of idiosyncratic view of ethnicity, which I don't think it is. But but but then when he starts talking about ethnicity, it's like he jettisons exactly how I describe it in the book and then starts equating it with race.

So it's that when I say ethnicity in the book, I'm not talking about this, something that ties into blood. That is, I describe it, I use a sort of I call it a vulgar phenomenology, which is how we how we relate to other people and how we can kind of get along and work together in these common projects of life.

And this involves some kind of cultural similarity like language. So if you're going to build a building, you know, if you're going to build a building, you have to work together and you have to speak the same language.

If you didn't speak, you know, like Tower of Babel, you can't speak the same language. You can't actually complete the project you begin on. So there has to be some level of similarity for you to have civil civil fellowship in a common kind of civil civil project.

But that even though I do say there is some sense in which your ancestral connection to land matters and you have to read the book to see how I do this, I don't say it's according to DNA. So it's for him to say that that it's an open question how much cooperation you get between whites and blacks and Asian and Hispanics is actually just racializing what I said was nonracial.

And we've all had, especially as Americans growing up, we've had real friendships with people and who are very similar to us culturally with some differences who are who have different ancestral origins.

Right. So growing up, I had friends who were ancestrally rooted in China and rooted in Mexico and other places growing up. So even though these people are different by DNA, we can still actually really be have what I call like civil fellowship.

We can actually be a part full members of the same project. But that's not to say that someone who just arrives from another country, say China or Mexico, can just arrive and be with us and have the full be fully able to fellowship with us in terms of our civil project and our national project.

It simply is just not the case. Now, we can be hospitable to them. We can actually receive them, but it's going to take time, usually generations for these people to kind of integrate and become sort of one people.

But it's not racialized. It's not as if I so what DeYoung does is he actually he essentially says that, well, we know who can get along based upon a DNA test. Like we'll look up a DNA test and Wolf is like a quarter Italian and Harris is not Italian.

Therefore, we can't get together. We can't get along. Or this guy's 100 percent Chinese and this guy is Scottish, and therefore he cannot get along. But that's not at all what I argued. So I think DeYoung just kind of, again, he conflated this racialist idea with my account of ethnicity and it messed things up.

But I think so. So, I mean, let me just address like in the church. We're Protestants, and so we believe that there's a ministry of the word, which means that a minister is going to speak up there and he's going to use the common vernacular language.

He's going to speak in our context, typically English. That means that the people in that church, generally speaking, in order to actually have a sort of spiritual fellowship will have to speak English in that in the event of worship.

And this is often why you had even in like the 16th century, when there was persecution England, English Protestants would flee to Europe and they go to German speaking places or French speaking places, but they don't generally speaking, don't speak to other languages.

So they form their own churches. They'd be called stranger churches. And they'd be actually called strangers in a way because they don't speak the same language. And so they actually have a different church.

And over time, they can integrate if they spoke the same language. But the point being, though, is that when there are dissimilarities on important matters, there is probably a good reason. There is a good reason to divide between different churches simply because how do you minister to people and you can't speak their language.

So in that sense, there is a way since there is a sense in which just because another guy is a Christian is not actually good enough to say we can worship together in the same building because worship involves vernacular language.

So but that's not to say that someone who's Asian and a white guy can't worship in the same same building because they speak the same language. And they can also have fellowship and encourage one another because they understand each other culturally.

They can understand what a guy is struggling in his in his job is to understand how jobs work in our society as opposed to other places. So we can understand other people's struggles because of cultural reasons.

So I, you know, I'm kind of going on long here. But the point is that I'm not talking about a racialist divide. It's far more a matter of kind of on the ground similarity.

What you're talking about, to me, seems common sense. And it's more organic. You can't form. I can't get you a bullet point list to show you all the ways in which, let's say, from my context, we have a Spanish translation at my church.

Right. And so the few people that take advantage of that who come, I can see that there's a barrier, though they can't really talk with other people at the church who don't speak Spanish. So they're not going to be forming relationships as easily.

And there's actually another church nearby that's been just inundated with immigrants coming from, I think, many of them illegal from South America and so forth. And I went to a church picnic recently that they held, and it was just obvious it's no one had to segregate anyone.

Right. No one came in and said, all right, you guys sit over here. You guys sit over here. It naturally happened, though, that the people who could speak to each other tended to sit with each other. And so it was almost like you had two churches and the pastor was trying to hold these groups together through translating the sermon live.

So he would speak in English, then speak in Spanish. And I guess one of the things that you're saying, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, is that this is one example, but there's probably a lot of other examples.

I couldn't give you a bullet point list, but there's a lot of cultural things that people share in common who have grown up with the same experiences, like even social things, what's appropriate in social situations that can be causes for offense or misunderstanding or they're just barriers to fellowship with.

And I don't mean Christian fellowship. I mean, what you meant by civil fellowship with other people. And so they may choose to be in a context with people that are more like them for that reason. And that's naturally just how the world works.

No matter where you go, it's not like a it's not what you just said about like, which is more abstract, like taking a DNA test to see if I can get along with this person.

And part of my point is that this is there's nothing wrong with this. I think that in the modern West, we have these deep anxieties about this cultural separation that somehow if they are over there and we are over here, we have to feel as if we're not being hospitable, we're not being welcome, we're not being Christian enough, which usually, but usually they who group together aren't actually thinking that they are just they just naturally are drawn to similarity and they go over there.

I mean, you speak to people who grew up in rough urban and urban neighborhoods. I just I was just at the cigar bar, actually, of all places. And I was talking to this guy who is in his 50s and he's about to retire from a school district.

He was a teacher and a football coach and a counselor in school. And he was talking about how he would be how he would counsel these these young guys who could easily join gangs at family life that was messed up.

And as I was talking to him, I was thinking I for several reasons. But one just culturally would not know how to communicate with these young guys in an effective way to get them not to join the game, not to kind of be delinquents or whatever.

But this guy does like this guy knows how because he's he was raised in that culture. He knows what to say, what to do. And he was the appropriate guy for the job. And so I can understand then in a church context why he why him and like his his culture would want to form a church if the church is interested in ministering to people in this kind of not only in things kind of eternal, but also in earthly things like not going to jail or trying to be successful in your life in some way that it would be make sense that they would actually meet together because they understand each other, common struggles, common just this mutual understanding of what they need to do and overcome.

And I think the same thing could be true of a lot of Asian churches that are deeply embedded in kind of an old age, like an Asian culture, not one not like Asians who have been in the United States for a long time.

Kind of, you know, sure. Similarly, I can understand why there'd be Korean Presbyterian churches, Chinese, because they have unique, not only a unique language, but unique culture, unique expectations amongst each other.

And if church is supposed to serve this, it's supposed to serve all of life. Like if we're not just confined church to just eternal, eternal things, but actually real tangible, like earthly things, then the churches and the people there need to know how to do that.

They need to have a common cultural understanding and expectations for that to happen. And so that's really all I mean, that's actually big. It's, I guess, controversial, but that's all I was trying to say.

And part of the thing is, I think people should just relax. And I think that we should critique our own anxieties for these things, that it's okay to be different. It's okay that they're different. It's okay that you're different than them.

But what I did push back against explicitly was, okay, when I say us and them, I'm not saying we white people, those black people, we white people, those Asian people, I explicitly don't say that. And that's because it doesn't fit with your own experience.

Again, you've had friends who are Asians or Hispanics or blacks that are culturally very similar to you, if not the same. And so to say us versus them, because I'm white and he's Asian, doesn't make any sense actually on the ground in life.

It's throwing out this abstract principle of a racial division that doesn't make any sense as life actually works. So that's what I'm arguing. I think if DeYoung just kind of maintained my own definition of ethnicity, he wouldn't have basically suggested I'm trying to do white segregation, racial segregation.

Well, that may be true, but I want to challenge... Well, I don't know if that's the core thing. Maybe it is. But one of the things he said, and I sensed this throughout a bunch of the reviews I read where they were critiquing you, is he says it clearly, if we cannot accept the creedal nation concept, that to me is key.

Because you reject that, then, well, what's the only other option? I guess it's white supremacy. That seems to be the assumption a lot of these guys have, and it makes them uncomfortable. As soon as you reject proposition nation, then they're like, well, what is it then?

Is it Nazi Germany? I guess that's the only other thing if we don't have the proposition nation. And I'd like to hear you talk about that a little bit.

Yeah, I think Americans just kind of lack the imagination because of their experience to understand how, I guess, a non-creedal nation... I don't think the division is between creedal and non-creedal, because I think in a Christian nation, the statement Jesus is Lord is an essential element of a Christian nation.

But my point is that that's not enough for actual civil fellowship. So, I mean, it seems obvious to me that if we, let's say we just randomly selected a bunch of true Christians from around the world, put them in one location and said, all right, make it work.

You're going to have a Christian nation, Christian society, it would just be utter chaos and it would be ridiculous. But if you went to Idaho and plucked out a bunch of random people who live in Idaho, I'm not just talking Moscow, Idaho, but everywhere in Idaho, if you pulled out a bunch of true Christians and put them in one space, there'd be some conflict like there always is.

But you'd probably be able to make it work. Why? They speak the same language. They're all from the same state, so there's all sorts of cultural similarities of those people. And they would all kind of affirm Jesus is Lord, but the reason why it would work as a civil community, as a civil fellowship, is because they hold these things, these very particular things in common with each other.

And so they can get along, they can understand each other. And I think that that is just the, that's how nations work. And I make arguments for that in the book. And I also, I think that oftentimes the creeds that we assert, they're asserted as universal.

So obviously Jesus is Lord is a universally true statement. It's true for every person, no matter what. And the opposite is false for everyone. But there's things like the West's emphasis on equality, the West's emphasis on a certain conception of liberty, especially in the modern West.

Some of the judicial norms that we have that have developed over time from the Magna Carta through the English Bill of Rights, through our own Bill of Rights, all these. And then the constitutional developments that have arisen from that within the United States, all these things are development within a certain people group, within a certain kind of nation state, if you want to say.

And we've been kind of raised into them and to have respect for them. And for the people who, I mean, we may not respect the Warren Court and other 20th century developments, but we do respect the 17th, 18th, and 19th century, especially with regards to religious liberty.

Often we respect these as developments of us, of our country, and explain who we are today. And but those are usually very particular things. And even if they are like, even if it's true that like, you know, take like that double jeopardy, it's not fair to like, you know, the principle of double jeopardy, where if you tried for a crime and you're acquitted, you can't be tried for that same crime again.

That's a development within the legal system that's expressed within the bill, it's in the Bill of Rights, yeah, it's expressed in the Bill of Rights. And but that's an actual development of the Western tradition into this principle that's codified.

And even if we want to say that's a universal true thing that ought to be true in all places that double jeopardy is wrong, it's still a particular development of the West. And so we've adopted it and it's ours.

So the point being is that even like these things we think are universal matters of justice are still these things that we as Westerners have developed and adopted ourselves in a very particular way. And so, you know, I mean, the creedal concept, you can have a creed, but I think we should also recognize that the creed is most often affirmed by people who are actually from the place that holds the creed.

And there's a million things like that. You just gave one example, but you could talk about why is 18 when we can now vote or 16 when we can drive? Or how can we pursue marriage through dating and instead of arranged marriages?

And I mean, all these things we take for granted. Some groups that come over here to the United States and even Christians who form churches, they don't subscribe to all of that. And so it's anyways, it's a fascinating topic.

And I just find it sad that so many of the more the reviewers who are in the more elite, I guess, upper echelons, I should say, are want to focus on this so much that they want to imply that you're sort of adjacent to white supremacists or Nazis or something along those lines.

One more thing from Kevin DeYoung, and then maybe let's move on to another because this I think Kevin DeYoung's thesis, it's in the title. He says, if critical race theory teaches that America has failed, that the existing order is irredeemable, that Western liberalism was a mistake from the beginning, that the current system is rigged against our tribe and that we ought to make ethnic consciousness more important.

It seems to me that Wolf's Project is the right wing version of these same impulses. So he's saying you're woke, but you're right wing woke. What do you make of these parallels that he brings up?

Well, how do you how do you approach this? Again, if he's connecting critical race theory, he's using race again, which which is, again, a conflation of what actually said about ethnicity. Do I think that Western liberalism was a mistake from the beginning?

Well, OK, what beginning are we talking about? Are we talking about post World War Two liberalism? Then, yeah, it was a mistake. But before that, if we're talking about the more classical conception of the 17th century, well, I know I wouldn't say that.

And in fact, in my in my chapters on on on America and the founding that the one chapter I have, if you want to say that America is a sort of liberal establishment or founding, then if that's what you want to call that, then I don't think it was a mistake, because in fact, I'm in part calling us to return in part, not entirely to sort of.

Some of the founding principles. So now is our current system rigged against our tribe? Is he is he denying that there's a sort of negative sentiment towards white males in our country? Is he denying that?

So is he saying that's not true, that it's not true, that there is a sort of district, that there are discriminatory practices within corporations, within schools, and that there's an act of hostility towards the white male?

Is he denying that that's the case? Because that would be pretty, I think, I think it's disputable. And a lot of evidence can be presented that that, in fact, is is the case. And but the thing is, what's strange, though, is that I only mentioned that at the in the epilogue when I bring up this idea of the white male.

But in terms of ethnic consciousness, I actually say that ethnic consciousness is not a racialist principle. I do think there should be a sort of revival of a type of ethnic consciousness, by which I mean not racial consciousness, but a consciousness that we as Americans are a people.

And we ought to be conscious of that. And we ought to have solidarity around that. And we ought to affirm that and seek our own good. And what this means is rejecting some of the universal notions that lead us to go bomb other countries and spend resources and lives trying to recreate democracy in other countries.

So that's yeah, I think we should look inward and and try to have a sort of ethnic solidarity around being an American. And to say this is un-American is actually kind of strange to say that there is no desire to have a sort of ethnogenesis to become ethnic conscious as Americans.

One of the things that held America together initially, right when the United States was founded, was George Washington. He was a sort of prince, to use some of my language, that held the United States together because everyone loved George Washington.

And I think you can read in his farewell address this idea that I'm retiring finally. He didn't want to become president. I want to retire, but he didn't want to serve a second term. But he's like, I'm done.

And so in his farewell address, he says that, look, we need to not, we need to stop having these highly local attachments, by which he meant kind of this identification with the state, which he didn't say that you shouldn't have any identification with your kind of state.

But he said that we should have this sense of being Americans, that we have this common project. And he says we have a similar language, we have a similar religion, we have created a common struggle. And he's essentially saying that I'm leaving.

I'm not going to hold things together. You have to think of yourselves as a people. And that's how we're going to proceed forward. And so I think the idea, the very idea that we ought to have an ethnic consciousness as I define it, is precisely very American.

And it describes exactly what happened in the early, kind of in, you say, the early Republican, was the appeal of George Washington and others, not only George Washington, but even earlier with John Jay and Federalist Two, that we would identify as one people, not as Virginians, not as mass, you know, Connecticutans or whatever it is that, but of course, not extinguishing the identification, you know, so multi layers of identification, but having that more general one, which would be American.

And so that's really all I'm saying is that that's why we ought to, in America, stop importing thousands and thousands of people who are very different than us so that we can sort out as Americans who we are as a people.

And you can't do that when you're constantly injecting foreign people who don't speak the language, who have no actual common interest in the place of the land, besides maybe economic opportunities, who have not born here, who are not born here and have that sort of native connection to the place.

And that's why, you know, and so that's why I was a critical of immigration as well. But yeah, to say that it's like, I mean, I mean, in terms of like critical, like critical theory, I obviously disagree with a lot of the conclusions of critical race theory.

But it does seem to me that there are that there are systems in place and being in place that are going to be used to actively discriminate against not only not only white men, but just males in general.

And and so I think that the I do think that the the the impulse for conservatives to outright reject anything that would be that would look like a critical theory, I think, is is a bad move, because we're literally in if we are in the midst of if we're in the middle of liberal totalitarianism right now, that there is a sort of totalitarianism that has this crushing liberal, secular, liberal.

Like the elements of that pervade all of all of our life, then that ought to be critiqued. It would be something that we actually would not see well. It would be something that we have to think and reflect on and uncover and disclose through a sort of method that may not.

Yeah, so that would be called a sort of critical theory. So I do think there can be a kind of right wing critical theory, and I think that should develop a little more. But in saying that, that doesn't mean I'm buying into everything they conclude or even their methods themselves.

But so well, there is a I just think it would be very dangerous. It'd be very dangerous for us to not have a certain method of approaching questions that is just very surface level and not trying to uncover the ways kind of these powers work.

So, I mean, the epilogue I talk about, I talk about gynocracy, which people kind of laugh at and all that. But it's this idea that like there is a sort of feminine dominance in the workplace that that is operate subtly through kind of gendered relations.

And but it's also concealed behind a sort of liberal equality like, oh, we're all equals. But then the actual rhetoric employed in gender relations will actually then is actually incredibly gendered. And so what I'm saying is that instead of saying, oh, we're all equal in the workplace and look at that very surface level element of it that we had to see, no, there's actually subtle ways in which kind of more of kind of a feminine centric power actually is wielded to suppress masculinity or men in the workplace.

And so I think that that's the sort of method that if we just say, oh, we're all equal and just the surface, we're actually going to miss the dynamics that are actually in that play in these various spheres of life.

I mean, we talked about how like the idea that the church is feminine, like that there's a feminine aspect to the church. I'm sure you've heard this before that people critique like the church is not just feminist as in there's a woman preacher.

The idea that a church can be feminine can actually also be complementarian. We know these people who are say they're complementarian, but then we also know that the power is actually in the hands of the non-pastor who's the women.

Right. What are we doing when we say that? That is a kind of critical theory. We're saying that the surface is actually an illusion. But what's actually happening underneath the more subtleties is actually an exercise of feminine power over masculine power, whatever.

So anyway, going on and on. But that's like the that's why I think that we should not wholesale reject. Kind of the kind of critical approach of uncovering the actual dynamics.

Yeah, well, I mean, people have always critiqued their leaders. That's as old as the first government. So, you know, I remember James Lindsay a few years ago told me it was in 2020 that he said if you say taxation is theft, he said you could call that critical state theory that libertarians are engaged in this.

And so, you know, this notion of being critical is we were critical of everything as humans. But I think on a pop level, I've heard this argument that Kevin Young's bringing up because what they're saying is that you're just flipping the script.