Transcript: Andrew Wilson’s Interview on TRIGGERnometry Podcast

And I was saying, isn’t there quite a lot of reasonable people on the center-left who would agree with us that the state is about shaping human behavior and making people do stuff, but what they want is well-motivated and actually based on some rationale that we might agree or disagree with, but is kind of logical?

It’s about a higher level of — I don’t believe in zero taxes and no government redistribution at all personally. So therefore it’s just a matter of degrees. Is it 5% taxes or 20% taxes? But once you start getting into the high 80s, that’s where I’m at. Do you see what I’m getting at?

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So that’s where I think sometimes in these arguments, the existence of the reasonable center-right and the reasonable center-left gets lost because we’re constantly arguing with the extremes of the other side.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, maybe we can dive into semantics a bit. So when you say right or left, you agree with me that’s dialectical?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What do you mean by dialectical? Like they’re opposites of each other, you mean?

ANDREW WILSON: Well, not just that, but when we view politics and the paradigm in the United States, we view it through a dialectic that is dual. It’s left, it’s right. So even you said center-left — that plays within a dialectic, right? Yes, there’s a center, but it’s still left or right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, this is where it gets more difficult — and I don’t mean to be pedantic either — but someone could actually be in the center, meaning they have some center-right opinions and some center-left opinions that don’t neatly align with either party. And I think the existence of those people is probably quite underestimated, even in a country as polarized as this one, just from talking to people.

ANDREW WILSON: Maybe.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. But dialectic — I think I agree with you.

The Philosophical Pillars of Left and Right

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, so there’s a dialectic. So when we say left, what’s the referent? And when we say right, what’s the referent? Like, what are we referencing here?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, the position relative to the center.

ANDREW WILSON: Sure, maybe. But what is left and what is right politically? Is it social issues? Is it taxes? Is it a mixture of both?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Mixture of both.

ANDREW WILSON: Mixture of both, okay. I think that we can break it down further into pillars. So I think that these are philosophical positions and people just don’t realize it when you’re arguing with a guy like Destiny. The reason he’s very frustrating to debate with, the reason that he wanted to bog things down into things like, “That’s unprecedented. Everything’s unprecedented. That’s unprecedented” — and you pointed this out rightly as well — words don’t mean anything, right? We just use “unprecedented” when we mean “new.”

When we get down to the core, the pillar that holds up the belief of Destiny — what is it? What are the pillars that hold up the left? What are the philosophical underpinnings?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t know. In his case, I think the philosophical underpinning is: people who don’t agree with him are bad people and therefore they need to be destroyed by any means necessary. I think that’s it. So it’s about power, really.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, I think the philosophical underpinnings operate from the left-right dialectic. The left-wing pillar is based around anti-realism, anti-moralism. So that’s why you end up with postmodernism and many of these other philosophies which come from left-wing liberalism. Those aren’t coming from right-wingers, those are coming from left-wingers.

Right-wingers are so much more associated with things like traditionalism or religion because they view society as being duty-bound, and progressives view everything through the prism of rights. “I have a right to do this. I have a right to do that.” And the right is saying, “You have a duty to do this. You have a duty to do that.” This is where that dialectic really clashes.

From Destiny’s standpoint, there’s no such thing as a moral fact — none. They don’t exist. Everything is dependent upon stance. So if that’s the case, you can’t actually do anything immoral, which is why he does so many things which are immoral. Because from his perspective, it’s just dependent on stance.

The right is saying there’s universality with morality. It’s not just stance dependent, it’s stance independent. The reason that they get so upset with the left is because they perceive them as doing things which are horrendously immoral. But from the left’s stance, they’re like, “Well, but it’s all stance dependent, so I can’t be doing anything immoral.”

And that’s why the philosophical pillars don’t align and why we’re constantly clashing. The right considers these people complete immoral degenerates. And from their view, they are. The left, on the other hand, sees that as being totalitarian and evil — that they’re there to control, destroy, oppress. Because from their view, what could they be doing that’s immoral if everything which is moral is dependent on their own stance?

How Divided Is America Really?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Which I think is an accurate description of what happens when the right looks at the extremes of the left and the left looks at the extremes of the right.

What I’m trying to get at with you — and it’s interesting to me because our country, hard as it is to believe if you look at social media, is not nearly as divided as the US. The binariness of the US is kind of weird for us coming from the UK. So it’s always weird to me how little people give faith to the other side. And I see this on the left and I see this on the right.

My model for the world is there’s really good people within the 80% middle, and then there’s pretty out-there people on the extremes. And what we see on the internet is those people arguing and pretending they represent the entire movement. And then the other side is incentivized to argue as if they represent the entire movement as well. Does that make sense?

ANDREW WILSON: Of course.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

ANDREW WILSON: Sure. I understand what you’re saying, and that sells, right? It sells to be on that extremist end.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

ANDREW WILSON: That’s what makes it fun. It makes it fun to watch people who come in and say ridiculous over-the-top things and then everyone’s arguing. That’s part of human nature — they want the fun.

However, I do think that people are more divided than you think. I think the way that we operate in public in survival mode, we’ll be pretty nice to each other. “Good morning, how are you?” No one’s going to run you off the road because you’re a Democrat. They might run you off the road if you’re a Trump supporter and you have that sticker. But for the most part, we’ll treat each other fairly well.

But when you start to get to the underpinnings of what people actually believe, there’s a lot more hatred here than you think — on both sides. And it’s even from the center. It becomes apparent once you start to get to the underpinnings of the pillars which hold up people’s beliefs.

The Rise of Communism and the Race for Ideological Power

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Do you think that’s kind of why there used to be a rule that you don’t talk about religion and politics at the table? Because when you start digging, like if you really pursue people’s beliefs to the very ends of the earth, you do find out that people do fundamentally disagree because they have a different philosophical view. But if we don’t constantly talk about this stuff, it’s actually easier to get on with each other.

ANDREW WILSON: It’s true.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, it’s true.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, that used to be a thing in the workplace, and it used to be a thing, like you said, around the dinner table with family. You call your family in and it’s like, hey, we’re all going to have dinner. We’re not talking politics. We’re not talking about sex. We’re not talking, right? These are the divisive issues, right? Love, sex, politics. And of course, that’s what everybody’s talking about all the time now.

But with the internet, this was bound to happen. Now you can have ideologies which are exported and imported, and they can be exported and imported quickly. And so because of that, you can have whole swaths of a population begin to move towards an ideology which they never would have before because there was no way to basically deliver it. But now there is.

And so now it’s a race for power. It’s may the best ideology win. And from my view, if it’s not Christians who win it, then it’s going to be somebody else who wins it. And Christians are going to be ruled by whoever that is, whatever ideology that is.

But if you think that I’m wrong, explain Hasan Piker, explain Vaush, explain the rise of communism in the United States and the brand new communist lens in which many leftist progressives are now looking. These are the most popular streamers. That ideology was all but dead, but now it’s reemergent through the technology of the internet and introduced to a whole new generation as being edgy and countercultural, just like it was the first time.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Do you not think the reason that we have seen this resurgence of communism, as someone who comes from a country who sadly embraced it—

ANDREW WILSON: Britain.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah, exactly. We are embracing it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s not— that’s a profit on my own joke, but it was a good one. Yeah, anyway.

FRANCIS FOSTER: We are embracing it. Which is Venezuela, do you not just simply think that people grasp for anything when things are getting particularly difficult?

ANDREW WILSON: You mean for any type of ideology? Yeah, sure. But what’s difficult here?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Well, the gap between rich and poor is ever widening.

ANDREW WILSON: But you have a problem there, right? That’s true, but people are still getting richer than they’ve ever been. It’s like when I think of a gap between rich people and poor people, if we go back 500 years or 1,000 years, the difference was you lived in a dung heap.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Mm-hmm.

ANDREW WILSON: And this guy lived in a castle. Now the difference is this guy lives in a castle and you live in a 3-bedroom apartment. It is true that the guy living in the castle is richer than the guy in the castle has ever been. But the reason you’re not in a dung heap is because the poor are also richer than they’ve ever been. And so it’s scalable. It’s a matter of scalability. But show me in the fattest country in the world where all the starving people are. Where are they?

FRANCIS FOSTER: But it’s all understood within context, isn’t it, Andrew? It’s comparisons. So people will go online, they will look at their life, they will see that they don’t have a lot of money, somebody else is doing very well. Things like, for instance, a housing crisis, particularly in cities like New York, LA, etc.

Materialism, Communism, and the Myth of Western Poverty

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah. So this is a strict materialist view. I don’t know when this shift happened to strict materialism, but this seems to be part of a new conversation which people want to have. And again, that’s part of what communism is. The lens of communism is strictly materialist. There is no spiritualism. Communists kill anybody who’s religious because that affects a materialist view. It’s an oppressor-oppressed class. So if you’re looking through everything from a materialist view, you can always find an oppressor class. There’ll always be people who have more than other people do. It’s one of the big faults with communism. You can never reach this stateless utopia.

But as far as that goes, when I think historically of the endless suffering that happened to people inside of nation states, inside of city states, inside of places like that, in comparison to what you see in modern Western democracies, if these people had to deal with that in any capacity, they would just fall over dead. It was miserable. It was literally misery. Where is all of that? The West conquered that. Industrialization conquered that. That starvation’s gone. Where is it?

I’ve heard liberals say to me, “There’s people starving right now.” Where? In my nation, where? I’ll go feed them right now. Guarantee you, I’ll have a meal arranged by this afternoon if you could show me a person who’s actually starving in the United States. They can’t because they’re not. We’ve conquered it. These are conquered issues. So what are you bitching about? You’re just bitching that this guy makes way more money than this guy. What’s the complaint? That sort of dream’s achievable now to people. That never used to be possible.

FRANCIS FOSTER: I think it also plays into the fact that this generation, particularly in the UK, is going to be the first generation to not do as well as their parents. And the things that they were promised — you know, you go to college, you get a good job, you’re going to be able to have a house, a family — for a lot of these people, they come out and they’ve graduated college, they’re in enormous amounts of debt, and they’re looking and they’re seeing, well, the life that my parents had, I am not going to have. And I think there’s a great deal of anger, resentment, and frustration because of that. And I think people reach for an ideology such as communism in the desperate hope that it’s going to somehow make everything better. I don’t agree with it, but I think that’s the argument.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, I think it’s more complex than that.

The Appeal of Radical Leftism and the Nazi Label

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Maybe we’re having this conversation the wrong way around. Why do you think there’s been a rise of radical leftism and particularly the appeal of communism now, as you do see with some young audience fans?

ANDREW WILSON: Because of the moral loading of the term Nazi, fascist, and other things like this. It’s pure panic mongering. The idea is that you need to move towards this shielding ideology because the Nazis are coming, the stormtroopers are coming.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Oh, so you mean like since 2016, basically? I mean, they did it before as well, but the far left has been calling the right Nazis, and you think people are going for communism because it’s the ideology that can protect you against that?

ANDREW WILSON: That’s communism, socialism. These are the— so it’s a winner takes all. Like I said, it’s a race to power. For which ideology gets power. Is it going to be the Christian nationalists? Is it going to be the socialists? Is it going to be guys in New York like Mamadi? What is his name?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Mamadi.

ANDREW WILSON: Mamadi.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: See, it’s communist Mamadi. Yeah. Who gets it? Which ideology gets it? Right now, the ideology which has been kind of traditionally getting it is the status quo ideology. Well, that’s changing. That’s been changing since Trump. I don’t know who our future presidents are going to be, but they’re not going to have the same ideologies that they held for the last 40 or 50 years. That’s not where we’re heading. So which ideology gets it?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But that doesn’t— I mean, I agree with what you’re saying, except the one thing we started this with, which is the appeal of communism is to push back against the Nazis, right? But why wouldn’t the ideology just be, I don’t know, we’re against Nazism or we are for liberal democracy?

ANDREW WILSON: But that’s exactly how it’s pushed. What do the Antifa anti-fascist people in both our nations say? They say just that. This is about our republic.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But they are communists. This is about our democracy.

ANDREW WILSON: But they are communists. Yes, they are. But this is about our democracy. This is about our freedom of speech, our freedom of assembly. This is about stopping Nazis and stopping fascists. Stopping due process— or allowing for due process. They literally market it that exact way you just said. So when you say, why don’t they say that we’re just anti-Nazi and pro-democracy or pro-republicanism? That’s exactly how they market it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, because I guess the reason I’m saying is, I would say I am anti-Nazi and pro-democracy, right? And I am. I’m also not a communist. So why is communism the appealing version of those statements?

ANDREW WILSON: Well, this is a worldview issue. So do you think that you think a Nazi is the same thing a leftist thinks a Nazi is?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, no, no.

ANDREW WILSON: Because a leftist thinks you’re a Nazi.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, I know what words mean, right? But this is the problem — I know what words mean, right? So I know that Nazis exist. And by the way, there are some Nazis on the right, including in the US, and you can see them, right? But I also know what a Nazi is, and therefore someone who has right-wing or centrist opinions like me is not a Nazi.

Worldview, Language, and the Equivocation Fallacy

ANDREW WILSON: But words do mean different things depending on worldview. They do, actually.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: If you are a postmodernist, they do.

ANDREW WILSON: Not just a postmodernist. So if you look at definitions of words, you agree they have multitudes of definitions, right? Well, those are applying often to the distinctions in worldview. When I say spiritual as a Christian, I’m looking at that from a Christian view, right? If you say spiritual as a Buddhist, are we saying the same thing?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I actually think in a way you probably are, but the structure that underpins that is different. But you are trying to point at the same thing, which is whatever it is that is greater than human beings somewhere. And I’m pointing to the sky because that’s kind of how I view it.

ANDREW WILSON: But the way we view epistemology, ontology, cosmology, everything is going to be completely different. So when we say that word, we may be pointing to a concept which is similar, but we’re actually pointing at something which is different.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But what progressives do — and this is really worth discussing, I think — is if I say the word cabbage, there’s 100 types of cabbage, but you know what I’m talking about, right?

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, sure.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And what a progressive will do in a debate, as you referenced, is they’ll pretend they don’t know what a cabbage is.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, that’s equivocation, right? So the fallacy — debating with progressives, I’ve been doing it for years and years. The number one fallacy you run into with them, the fallacious form of argumentation, is equivocation. They use the ambiguity of a word to switch between its meaning depending on which one serves them best at the time.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: Which is why you have to pin them down on semantics immediately, because if you don’t, they’ll spend an entire debate session or conversation using equivocation to move between meanings in an ambiguous way so that they never really have to give an accounting for the things that they actually think, because those things are abhorrent. I do agree with that. I also understand, though, that meanings of words are going to change with worldview. From the progressive worldview, you are a Nazi. And I wish—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because I don’t agree with them.

The Problem with Stance-Dependent Morality

ANDREW WILSON: I wish more people would accept— well, it’s not just because you don’t agree with them. It’s because from that frame, from that worldview, right, you— they’re going to perceive you as being a white nationalist. You’re a person who thinks that white people are above other people.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Why?

ANDREW WILSON: Because you’re arguing against mass migration. And the only reason you would do that is because you want to see more white people.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But I’m an immigrant myself.

ANDREW WILSON: Doesn’t matter.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, how, but no, it does matter though, because that doesn’t make any logical sense.

ANDREW WILSON: Doesn’t have to. Worldviews don’t have to make logical sense, but they are the prism in which we interpret the world. And so every debate that you have and every conversation you have, I wish more people would go in them understanding this concept.

Worldview is what shapes your interpretation of all of reality around you. It shapes the meaning of words, how you interpret them. What people mean by the things they say and what they don’t mean by the things they say.

The reason I think I got very popular on the right is because one of the things I’ve always done is sit down and make my opposition actually explain what they mean and why they mean it before I will ever even dive into a conversation with them. And the reason for that is because I want to know what their worldview is. What is it that you’re interpreting different here than me. And that’s where you start to actually have a debate about. So debates are about worldviews, conversations are about worldviews, right? If we have completely different understandings of our interpretation, how do we even speak?

FRANCIS FOSTER: But there’s also a level of deception we’re talking about here, because if you take an ideology like Nazism, it’s got tenets to it. And if you then go, well, you’re a Nazi, but then you don’t obey or follow any of the tenets, then that is fundamentally illogical.

Debating Fascism and the Problem of Vibes Over Facts

ANDREW WILSON: I’ve had multiple debates with people on whether or not Donald Trump’s a fascist. From their worldview, it’s simple. All you have to do is you take the historic prism of what fascism is. They’ll admit clearly he doesn’t meet that, but he meets certain tenets which we can say have overlap with fascism enough that they reach like a fascist minimum. Well, what the hell does that mean? Well, it just means that interpretively, from their kind of stance-dependent view, right? Which means I made it up, this arbitrary metric. He meets it, therefore he is it.

Now, unless you have some grounding which is objective, how do you argue with that? Well, you really can’t, because what most political debating is, is it’s taking a fact and then it’s arguing about your feelings over that fact. That’s 90% of what a political debate is. Here’s a fact. And now let’s argue our vibes.

So unless there’s some objective grounding that you have to tell them that they’re wrong, it’s actually very difficult to get the upper hand in a vibes debate, isn’t it? So you really have to bring it back to not just facts, but foundation. They don’t have any.

This is why I hate them, because they’re morally corrupt, ambiguous, no morality having scumbags. And that’s what they want to do. They want to take a fact and then argue their vibes about the fact. But when you get to their foundations, what is their foundation? They don’t have any. Their entire foundation is there are no moral facts. So if that’s the case, how can you do anything immoral if there’s no moral facts? You can’t. You can’t ever do anything immoral if you don’t believe there are no moral facts.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, but they believe that we are, with all our different perspectives — because we have different perspectives on things, you and I certainly — they believe that we are immoral, so they must have some kind of morality.

ANDREW WILSON: It’s just stance-dependent morality.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Meaning what’s the difference between that and your morality? Because you would say your morality comes from God or the Bible or—

Moral Realism vs. Anti-Realism

ANDREW WILSON: Sure. There’s two kinds of foundations for how it is that you can interpret morality. There may be more, but there’s usually going to be two. Is morality real or not. If it’s not real, then you’re an anti-realist, let’s say. If it is real, then you’re not. When I say real here, I’m saying this is a universal fact, that this is a moral fact.

Now, the left and progressives and atheists and secularists, they don’t generally believe in those moral facts. They think that morality is a social construction that we make up and it’s societally dependent. There is no overarching moral facts.

The religious say that there are, that God gave us moral facts, and these are the moral ways in which you have to live your life. And so they’re willing to enforce that. They’re willing to enforce those moral facts because for them not to do that is immoral, right? Allowing my society to run around and do immoral things, obviously I want to curtail that. The other side thinks that that’s totalitarian though, right? That’s the worldview divide.

So the question is, how do you tell a person — how do you tell Destiny that it’s immoral that he sucked 50 dicks? How do you do that if it’s the case that that’s not a moral fact?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: How?

ANDREW WILSON: Well, you can’t. And that’s where they live.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, his sucking of dicks is irrelevant to me personally. He’s perfectly entitled to suck as many dicks as he wants. I encourage him to do more.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, but why? Like, why is it that this idea of like OnlyFans hookers and homosexual marriage and stuff like this. Why is that stuff we have to deal with again? Like, why?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Why isn’t it?

ANDREW WILSON: Well, see what I mean though? Like, even that question, why isn’t it? It’s like, that’s not giving an accounting for a worldview. That’s asking me to give an accounting for a worldview.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It is, yeah. But you’re insisting that there is a worldview that’s correct.

ANDREW WILSON: Sure.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right? And therefore it’s up to you to articulate why it’s correct.

ANDREW WILSON: Sure, but when you say, why isn’t it?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s a genuine question. I’m trying to probe your worldview, that’s all.

ANDREW WILSON: And I’m going to walk you through it. If there are no moral facts, because I said so, that’s why. And that’s the failure of left-wing and progressive anti-realists. If there are no moral facts and you ask me why it is that I should enforce my worldview, because I f*ing want to. And there’s no way for you to ever object against that. Any objection you have which is stance-dependent, which it will be, this is going to be the same objection that I give you, which is stance-dependent. So which one of us is right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, that’s why we have elections so that that is adjudicated and then legislated on, right? Because ultimately there’s philosophy and then there’s politics, right? So you might philosophically believe that homosexuality is wrong.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But at the level of society, we can have a vote and it may turn out that the majority of the country doesn’t agree with you.

Morality Cannot Come from the Majority

ANDREW WILSON: But do you agree with me that your morality cannot come from the majority? Because if it does, all you’re doing is doing the exact same thing. You’re just saying, hey, now the majority says there are no moral facts, or only moral facts come from the majority. If that was the case, then we could have slavery and that would be moral simply because the majority said it was.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And at one point it was, right?

ANDREW WILSON: And so that—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Those people believed in God way more than we do.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, yes, they did. But the thing is, that’s the idea of presentism. The whole world always believed in that. Just like the whole world usually didn’t entertain things like race mixing, though they had no conceptualization of race. They thought of things in a tribal way.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: But they didn’t do that either. Like, that was one of the things the United States always gets shit because in the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, especially heading into World War II, post-World War I, there was a lot of segregation with Black people. Well, that was global though. It was global. Everyone was racist then. Like everybody.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Sure, sure, sure.

ANDREW WILSON: And so you’re looking at this through the prism of presentism and the reason that that’s kind of—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So come back to the Destiny sucking dicks point because it’s important, honestly. Right? Why is it that you think he shouldn’t suck dicks?

ANDREW WILSON: Because I said so. And if you’re an atheist—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But that’s fair enough.

ANDREW WILSON: Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But then the question is, are you seeking to convert your philosophical view into political reality?

ANDREW WILSON: Why shouldn’t I?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I suppose that’s a fair question, actually.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah. Why shouldn’t I?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, I guess it’s a question of what happens when the majority of the public vote for somebody who doesn’t agree with us.

ANDREW WILSON: Now we’re just outsourcing our morality again to the populace?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But see, there’s laws that I don’t agree with.

ANDREW WILSON: Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And there’s laws that don’t exist that I think should exist. But I accept that the majority of the country in which I live doesn’t agree with me. And that is a kind of compromise we all have to make at some level, right?

ANDREW WILSON: Why do we have to make that compromise?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because we want to live in the society of other people who have different views.

The Erosion of Moral Standards

ANDREW WILSON: But now we’re moving into the right reduction. And so I guess maybe this is where I wanted to get to in the conversation. If there aren’t any moral facts and I just say, “because I said so,” and you say, “well, that’s fair enough,” because that’s all we’re just doing — all of us are just doing “because I said so,” I guess.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: All of us are entitled to a view.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, I don’t want democracy because I said so. I want fascism because I said so. I want a new Hitler because I said so, right? Let’s say that. If you can’t point at that and say that that’s wrong, right? There’s some objective appeal to a standard for why that’s really immoral and you shouldn’t do it. Then what happens is erosion. And the reason that erosion happens is because everything becomes permitted.

So an example of this, I was told with gay marriage that it’s no big deal. It’s just like heterosexual people getting married. Well, okay, well, what’s the argument against 3 men or 4 men getting married and then adopting a child? There really isn’t one. You can’t really be consistent and be against that. Like, where’s the consistency issue?

And you can say, well, it’s the outcomes. It’s like, well, can you prove the outcomes will always be bad? No. Or can you prove that if there’s 2 straight people who are heterosexuals who are from vastly different backgrounds, they could have really bad outcomes statistically too? It wouldn’t prevent them from having a kid. It’s like, what’s stopping 10 men from getting married and adopting a kid? Nothing. Nothing’s preventing that.

And by the way, it’s happening now. Now you see men getting married in threes and fours, and you see polygamy coming back in a big way. You see birth rate collapses. Like, these are real issues in society. And they come—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I mean, in fairness, I don’t think birth rate collapses has to do with 10 men getting married to each other, right?

The Moral Erosion of Society

ANDREW WILSON: No, it has to do with another issue, which is women. If you want to get women pregnant, you have a small window and it’s best to do it in their 20s. And what we do is we tell women to defer their best childbearing years to go to college during those years, which is insane. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I don’t know why you would take the opposite sex who has the most limited window for childbirth for healthy babies and tell them to squander all of that, especially because they end up at college running the cock carousel often and things like this. And it’s just not good for society.

But kind of back to what I was saying, we’re getting to the idea of moral facts. This erosion begins, always begins with the idea of, well, you can’t really make a case. Like, I don’t believe in your stupid objective morals. I don’t believe in any of this. And so you can’t really tell me that being a hooker’s wrong. You can’t really tell me doing this is wrong. You can’t really tell me doing that is wrong.

And so if you come to me and you say gays should be allowed to get married, and I just ask you back, why can’t 3 of them get married? What’s your answer to that? What is it?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t have one.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, exactly. So what’s preventing it? Nothing. Nothing. And so then it just— you see society become more and more and more absurd over time.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Why? Why is it important? Why? What happens when 3 guys get married?

ANDREW WILSON: Well, individually, perhaps nothing. Like on an isolated level— what happens when one Muslim gets imported to the UK?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Nothing.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, exactly.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, it depends what he does, but yeah, exactly.

ANDREW WILSON: But what happens when 50,000 of them get imported to the UK? Well, now something. And it’s the same thing when it comes to the moral importance — the importance of moral character inside of a nation is the exact same way. Well, what happens? It doesn’t matter.

The Question of Moral Standards

KONSTANTIN KISIN: To clarify for me, Andrew, we have, I think, 4 million Muslims in the UK. The overall majority are perfectly good people. But when you have a large Muslim population, what we’ve discovered is you have a smaller percentage of extremists and Islamists, right? What happens when gays get married? What is the Islamist version of homosexuality?

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, so what happens is if you’re going to say 3 men can get married, then you need to be able to say 1 man can marry 3 women.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Why?

ANDREW WILSON: Because tell me, what argument could you possibly have against it if you allow one and not the other? What?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I suppose if you start unpicking laws like that, you probably unpick most laws, right?

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: On that basis.

ANDREW WILSON: It would erode the moral character of the very thing you’re trying to preserve, which is your culture. But your whole culture is founded on Christian ethics. And so if you say, when you ask individually, what’s wrong with 3 guys getting married? Maybe I could say, maybe the effect is so minimalistic, who cares, right? But that’s not the point. The point is that if you let 3 men get married, then you have to let 1 man marry 3 women. Why wouldn’t you? What would be the consistent argument between the two?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s a pain in the ass, man.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, having three wives, maybe. But the thing is—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Just kidding.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, how would— how would polygamy—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So what’s your answer to all those questions? Your answer is God said this is right, this is wrong, therefore that’s how we know what’s right and wrong, basically.

Christian Ethics and Outcomes

ANDREW WILSON: Well, I would say something more important, which is that Christian ethics, even if you don’t believe it— let’s say I’m not a Christian, I don’t believe in any of that nonsense. What you should believe though is in outcomes. And the outcomes of Christian ethics, even on secular society, are the best outcomes.

So if that’s the case, that’s the case I would make for why I think Christians should be in charge of basically everything — the outcomes are still going to be best for even the people who aren’t Christians. Now, maybe they don’t like that, but so what? I don’t like their view either. And I think Christians should be in charge and they have no objection because they have no moral facts. So who cares?

It comes down to, like you said at the very beginning of the conversation — we’ll circle it all the way back — it comes down to who has the force. Well, it’s going to be the ideology in charge who has the force. So is it going to be mine or is it going to be yours? Is it going to be the commies? Who’s it going to be? And that’s what I think the state of actual world affairs and politics is now. It’s like a race to the top, who gets the resources.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Kind of depressing.

ANDREW WILSON: I don’t know if it’s depressing. It’s almost like, may the best man win, right? May the best ideology win. I don’t know if it’s depressing.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Do you not think all government is fundamentally, even in dictatorships, about power sharing? What you are talking about is dominance by one group over everybody else, because we’ve got a better view, right? Yeah. That’s what’s depressing to me.

ANDREW WILSON: Why is that depressing?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because in most societies there’s a recognition — it might be tribal societies, there’s the Pashtuns and the blah, blah, blahs, right? The countries that do well are the countries where those different interests are regulated through some kind of peacemaking mechanism at the level of politics. That’s what politics is for really, right? Whereas the country—

ANDREW WILSON: It doesn’t need to be exclusionary though. Just because one particular ideology holds the brackets of most of the power doesn’t mean that it has to be exclusive or that it can’t in some way accommodate other sections of society.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, how are you going to accommodate the population of San Francisco when you’re in charge?

ANDREW WILSON: Well, I mean, tell me, how would San Francisco die off if you stop letting gays get married there? It’s not going to.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I mean, that’s all they do from what I could tell when I’m going to San Francisco.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, they don’t get married there. They just do a lot of gay shit there, right? But they’re not—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I didn’t observe that directly.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, but marriage is not the big thing in San Francisco.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But look, you see what I’m saying, right?

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, but I can point to—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because you would outlaw homosexuality, I’m guessing.

ANDREW WILSON: Sure. Well, I know I would outlaw homosexual marriage.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But no, isn’t homosexuality wrong also?

ANDREW WILSON: Sure, it’s immoral.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So why wouldn’t you outlaw it?

ANDREW WILSON: You don’t need to necessarily always place a law against something which is immoral. It’s not always conducive to the society to do that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s fair.

Governing Morality Without Outlawing It

ANDREW WILSON: So for instance, I would say for homosexuality, you’re not going to jail, right? None of this type of thing. But there doesn’t need to be any glorification, right? You’re not going to get married. No one’s going to bust in your bedroom and tell you what’s what. Right? But there’s not going to be any rainbow flags in the White House either. There’s not going to be any pro-gay government propaganda anywhere.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Does that not go against the First Amendment?

ANDREW WILSON: Well, I think that that would be the most important aspect of the First Amendment, to say that the government’s not going to propagandize towards one ideology or the other. Isn’t that the whole point of secularism? The second they put the rainbow flags up on the White House—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What about Christian?

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, what about it?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Should that be in public communication?

ANDREW WILSON: Well, in this particular case, I do think it should be, yes.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But you just said the First Amendment is about no propaganda.

ANDREW WILSON: Right. Well, his argument to me is, wouldn’t it be against the First Amendment to outlaw rainbow flags? Right. I say no, that wouldn’t be against the First Amendment. That would be more in line.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So wouldn’t it be compliant with the First Amendment to outlaw crucifixes?

ANDREW WILSON: You wouldn’t necessarily need to even promote crosses or crucifixes. But what you could do is you could promote things like value structures. So let me give you an example of this. You’re driving down the street, you look over to the right and there’s billboards. You’ve seen this a million times, right? What if the billboards had things like family, right? Mom — and it showed a mommy and a daddy and the kids, right? And the push was towards the ideas of normalcy. The push was towards the idea of this is what we want to see in society.

What if tax breaks went to married people, right? What if we drastically increased this to the point — like some Eastern European countries have done, which has helped their birth rates — where it’s like, okay, you have 3 kids, you don’t have to pay taxes anymore.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Oh, sign me up for that.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, you don’t have to.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But you don’t have to be Christian to pursue that. You can be a secularist politician and promote all those things.

ANDREW WILSON: Sure. But under a secular view, why do we need to have a domestic increased population anyway? They can just import who they want. And that’s what they did in your country. I mean, it’s like they do in my country.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I can give you lots of secular arguments for why having a bigger population is better and having more children.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, but why not import it?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Why not import it? Because you get issues with integration, cultural compatibility.

ANDREW WILSON: Unless you import so many of them that the original culture’s replaced.

American vs. British Conservatism

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, you don’t know who you’re importing. And also, the argument for tradition — it’s actually one of the interesting differences. I mean, we had Dr. David Starkey explain this to— I don’t remember if it was on our show or not. The difference between American conservatism and British conservatism is British conservatism is about tradition and history, whereas American conservatism is about religion and values. So you could argue for the preservation of a society or the multiplication of an existing culture through time from a non-religious point of view, which is like, what we have is good by definition, a priori, because that’s what it is. It’s our country, it’s our society. We want to make more of that.

ANDREW WILSON: So it’s good because it’s good?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s good because we are already here, right? It’s good because where we are is a product of where we’ve come from and where we are, we like ourselves, right?

ANDREW WILSON: But then you can’t argue against mass migration because it’s just — what you’re saying is just a tautology. This is good because it’s good and that’s good.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, this is good because — look, if my dad gives me a watch, right? Passes it on — it’s not necessarily the watch and its unique qualities that make it special. It’s the fact that I got it from my dad. So the culture that we got from our ancestors is worth valuing because we got it from our ancestors, because it’s where we’ve come to as a civilization.

The Tautology of Tradition and the Grounding of Morality

ANDREW WILSON: But that’s again, it’s tautology.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Why?

ANDREW WILSON: Because what you’re saying is, because I got this from my ancestors, it’s good. What makes that good? Because I got that from my ancestors.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s exactly what I’m saying.

ANDREW WILSON: And that’s tautology. So what you’re doing is you’re pointing at the identification of the thing as being the thing, right? Which makes the thing the thing.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I get what you’re saying, but I think you’re missing my point.

ANDREW WILSON: So then I say, well, mass migration is good. Why is it good? Well, because it’s good.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, but I think what I’m saying is, if you take the watch example that I gave you, my dad gave me a watch, right?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: There is a sentimental value to that. Why is that? Well, it’s connected to the passing down from generation to generation. Why is that important? Well, it’s kind of, I mean, you might not agree with this, but from an evolutionary perspective, the point of life is to recreate itself. And you’d probably say that’s tautology if the point of something is to—

ANDREW WILSON: Well, no, that, I mean, from again, so now we’re getting a worldview, right? I totally agree with you. The primary edict from an evolutionary standpoint is reproduction, right? There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So that’s why mass immigration is not good, because you’re not reproducing your culture. You’re bringing in a foreign culture.

ANDREW WILSON: Why can’t you reproduce your culture with mass migration?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because it doesn’t work in practice. Clearly.

ANDREW WILSON: Let me give you—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because people don’t integrate.

ANDREW WILSON: Let me give you the counter.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay.

ANDREW WILSON: Are the people that you’re importing generally more or less traditional than you?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Traditional to that tradition, yes.

ANDREW WILSON: Okay. Do their women get pregnant younger than your women?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes. Well, then that seems like it’s really good for reproduction of their culture, not of ours.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, it’s culture.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: If they don’t integrate into our culture, they’re not reproducing our culture.

ANDREW WILSON: But you want to reproduce your genetics, right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: From an evolutionary perspective, sure.

ANDREW WILSON: Why can’t you do it with them?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because culture matters.

ANDREW WILSON: Okay. Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But in our culture, it’s better.

ANDREW WILSON: But you said the primary edict is reproduction, not reproduction of culture.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, but it’s like saying you said the primary edict is reproduction. So why didn’t you adopt kids? Well, no, I want to have my own kids. That’s what I’m saying.

ANDREW WILSON: But that would be reproduction. You reproducing your genes. Yes. Adopting kids, not you.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Is not reproducing.

ANDREW WILSON: Just like my culture. But culture itself, the idea of it, it’s an externalized, like, philosophical concept, or it’s a concept of the mind.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes.

ANDREW WILSON: Right. You would agree with that?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Sure.

ANDREW WILSON: You’re not reproducing that. You’re reproducing your genes. That would be the evolutionary view. And so what the evolutionist progressives would say is like, this is the best way for you to reproduce your genes because you can bring in a bunch of women who you can breed with younger. So they’re going to have more of your children.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But that isn’t what’s happening. You’re importing people who bring their own culture with their own family structure and they are producing that culture.

Christianity, Immigration, and the Grounds for Morality

ANDREW WILSON: I’m not arguing this. I’m 100,000% with you. If I were in charge, if I was King of the UK tomorrow, monarch tomorrow, yeah, I would close the gates of immigration immediately and give Tommy Robinson a badge and be like, good job, man. You did the best you could with what you had.

But the thing is, what I’m getting at, before we get into too many reductios, I’m just trying to point this out. You see how what we just did, we took a fact and we’re vibing over it, but now I’ve introduced some philosophy to it. And so now I’m asking about the grounding. What is the grounding? What is the thing under the pillow?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I think actually we were both talking about the philosophy.

ANDREW WILSON: Yes.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Your argument is from a secular perspective, or from a perspective that’s not aligned with yours, you can’t argue against mass immigration. I thought I gave you some pretty compelling arguments from a secular perspective against mass immigration.

ANDREW WILSON: You can, look, you can argue it. Okay. What I’m saying to you is that if everything that you’re arguing is just coming from a me perspective, all morality is just dependent on stance, then even if these people are doing something you consider dumb, it’s not immoral. How can it be immoral, or how could it be wrong for them to do that? How?

And this is a question when you reduce to the ethical purview. I realized a long time ago Christians can basically do whatever the f* we want to secular atheist progressives.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Because what happens to treating others as you would like to be treated?

ANDREW WILSON: Well, so that’s— so you’re going to bank on the benevolence of my view?

FRANCIS FOSTER: No, no, no, that’s the follow-up.

ANDREW WILSON: But then—

FRANCIS FOSTER: No, no, but I should because you’re a Christian.

ANDREW WILSON: Right. So if you’re going to bank on the benevolence of my view, are you ceding that my view is the right one? Because if it’s not—

FRANCIS FOSTER: No, but I’m saying benevolence is an inherent part of being a Christian.

ANDREW WILSON: So, but if you have a foundation of just stance dependence for all of your moral claims, right, then even if I violated this and was a complete hypocrite and actually just verbally paid it lip service for the purpose of controlling your mind, you can’t tell me why that’s wrong. You can’t really point to it and be like, that’s immoral, because there are no moral facts.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah, but okay, but that being the case, what we’re talking about is you’re saying that you want your ideology to dominate. Yes, effectively.

ANDREW WILSON: Yes.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Is that a Christian way of doing things?

ANDREW WILSON: Yes.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Why?

ANDREW WILSON: Well, I mean, if we want to look back through human history, we start with the Byzantine Empire, if you want to. Massive Orthodox empire. We can talk about the naming of kings by God himself. We can dive right into the lineage of the King of Kings if you want to.

The thing is, I’m not out here advocating for a monarch. What I’m saying is that society is better off dominated by Christians than dominated by non-Christians. And if you can point to me a society where that’s not true, I’m all ears.

Christian Dominance, Authoritarianism, and the Question of Rights

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah. And what do you mean by dominated? Because a lot of people hear that word and go, whoa, that sounds authoritarian.

ANDREW WILSON: The social, political, well, there is some authoritarianism to it, I suppose. But I just think there’s authoritarianism to each ideology which exists, including liberal ideology. It’s just authoritarianism now by direct democracy.

Now it’s like, I suppose Christians might come in and say some things that are pretty controversial. They might be like, nope, gays can’t get married. Prostitution’s illegal. No more pornography, right? Blasphemy. Ah, let’s be a little more chill on that, right? Maybe they’ll put in some things like that. Tell me how society’s worse. How’s society worse because 18-year-olds can’t show their asshole on OnlyFans? Like, I honestly want to hear, how’s it worse? It seems to me like by every metric it’s way better, right?

And the people who are arguing against it are like, well, we don’t want totalitarianism. That’s totalitarianism? I’ll tell you what I saw as totalitarianism was COVID checkpoints, potential vaccine mandates, communications going through Facebook and the government to identify people who wouldn’t wear their mask. That seems like a lot more of this totalitarianism, fascism thing than like, oh, you know, sorry, you’re 18, you can’t put your asshole all over the internet, sorry.

At some point, maybe we can introduce rationality back into the scheme here, right? It’s like, it’s not you do whatever the f* you want or it’s totalitarianism. That’s not how it works. It works like this. We’re a nation of laws, and laws are governed by ethics. Like it or not, all laws are informed by a person’s ethical worldview. So which ethical worldview do you want to make the laws? The people who want 18-year-old girls to put their assholes on OnlyFans, or the people who don’t? Which ones would you prefer make the laws of your nation?

FRANCIS FOSTER: But isn’t that just quite a simplistic way of looking at it? For instance, if you look at literature, yeah, we had Christians silence, well, saying certain books shouldn’t be published. For instance, Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence, a classic of English literature. They didn’t want that to be published. They were bowdlerizing Shakespeare. But surely you’re a freedom of speech guy, aren’t you?

ANDREW WILSON: I mean, to an extent. There’s no— so here’s my view on rights. What is a right? Let’s start with that. What is it?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You tell us.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, it’s a social construction that we made the f* up. That’s what a right is. If it’s something else other than that, tell me what it is. Where is it? I can’t see it, touch it, taste it, smell it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So it’s the social construction that you have a right not to be forced to wear a mask?

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, why, what else would it be?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay, fine.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, like what?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So where’s this going?

ANDREW WILSON: What’s your argument? Well, the argument is just like, rights are made up. Here’s what’s actually true. What’s actually true is you have a right to do whatever you can do within the purview of force, and that’s it. You have rights because people use force to ensure that you have rights. The second people don’t ensure that there’s force used so that you have rights, you don’t have them anymore.

But the secularist, or in this case, not really the secularist, but the atheist mind or the non-religious mind, they can’t ground rights in anything. They made them up. So they don’t come from God. They just made them up. So what they’re saying is, we just make this shit up and somehow we’re just all going to adhere to it even though there’s no overarching real moral duty to do so. Where does it come from? Nowhere. So rights don’t even exist. You can’t, again, can’t taste them, can’t touch them, can’t smell them, right? They’re just products of the mind.

FRANCIS FOSTER: But come back to me about the D.H. Lawrence bowdlerizing Shakespeare point.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And you clutched your heart as if you were clutching pearls in a kind of mocking way, which is interesting.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Why do you feel that?

ANDREW WILSON: Who gives a shit?

FRANCIS FOSTER: I give a shit.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, okay, great. Ground it. Ground why I shouldn’t outlaw that book. Why is it immoral for me to do that?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Because you are American, you believe in the First Amendment, you believe in freedom of speech.

ANDREW WILSON: So you’re going to appeal to my morals? From your view, your view, why is it immoral for me to do that? Why?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Why is it immoral for you to do that? Yeah, because I believe artistic creation is one of the ways that the human being expresses itself.

ANDREW WILSON: Makes sense to me. Notice how you caveat that with “I believe.” Well, I don’t believe that. Now what? Now where are we?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, that’s why we have democracy, so we can adjudicate it, right?

ANDREW WILSON: So again, now we’re just back to outsourcing. So as long as I can democratically convince enough people to outlaw that book, yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, I get— but that’s kind of unavoidable, isn’t it? Like if you live in a society where 99 out of 100 people believe that something should be X and you believe Y, I mean, logically speaking, you are going to end up in a society that outlaws X.

ANDREW WILSON: You would end up in a society which outlawed X, but that doesn’t mean that’s right.

Rights, Force, and the Foundations of Society

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, I agree. Or wrong, right? But then ultimately you have a choice of whether you choose to live in that society or not. Right.

ANDREW WILSON: To an extent. Yeah. I mean, to some extent, maybe you have some control over that. But I guess the point I’m making to you is not that I would outlaw this book. Right. The point that I’m making to you is that you don’t have any justification for me not to. Like, who cares? Oh, you believe that? So I believe different. What now? Now what’s the media? What, you know, like, what is the threshold breaker? Well, now we’re just going to appeal to a majority again. Well, that’s the case. Then if I appeal to the majority to outlaw the book, bye-bye, book.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Andrew, I’m not trying to argue with you for the sake of argument. It’s a great, really enjoyable conversation, actually. I appreciate the way that you stay calm and on the point, but I’m not clear what point you’re trying to make here, particularly with this Shakespeare thing.

ANDREW WILSON: Like, rights or force? That’s my point.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, I agree with you on that. Ultimately, in practice, that is what happens. But what are you trying to say?

ANDREW WILSON: It’s not ultimately in practice what happens, even. It’s even philosophically the case from the non-Christian view. When you say things like, “Don’t you appeal to the First Amendment or this right?” That’s what I’m getting at.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay.

ANDREW WILSON: Don’t you appeal to this right? This right — we need to have the adult conversation — doesn’t even exist. It’s just a social construction that we made up and it was pinned on a piece of paper and we pretend that it’s something we actually adhere to, but it’s really not. We violate it constantly. I do not care.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, you argue about, and that’s why you have a judiciary system to adjudicate whether you’re — what? Right? But I mean, it’s not just some random people wrote it down. It’s the founders of your country wrote it down because they were trying to set a set of rules for this society to operate by in order to fulfill what they thought would be a vision of a new country that would be a good one.

The Founding Compromise and the Nature of Rights

ANDREW WILSON: The founders, what they wrote down was based on a massive compromise because beforehand they had the Articles of Confederation and the Articles of Confederation made each little kind of state — which wasn’t a state even really then — their own nations, and it didn’t work out very well because they couldn’t regulate trade or raise armies or things like this.

So what they did via the compromise was they had a 10th Amendment. Now, the 10th Amendment says that all the rights that are not given to the federal government are given to the states, respectively. And at our founding, almost every single state had a state religion. Almost all of them.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, of course. And they were religious people.

ANDREW WILSON: And they continued to have them. I mean, clear up until there was an interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which was widely viewed as being unconstitutional to this day. States were always allowed to have their own religion and put in their own religious practices. And those practices were to be adhered to if you wanted to hold office, if you wanted to swear oaths, if you wanted to do things like this. That was part and parcel of American society and the way that we did things.

Now that has changed as progressives have kind of demonized this — the whole idea that, “Well, that’s against the First Amendment.” And it’s like, well, no, it ain’t. And it was part of the initial compromise anyway.

When we’re talking about the idea of rights, to get this back to the idea of rights, right? Why is it that states don’t have the right to do that? Well, it’s because there’s an interpretation of an amendment, and then they said, “Well, you no longer have the right to have your own religions inside of these states.” That’s what they did. And who has the force? They do.

So everything really comes down, when you’re talking about rights, to the ideas of force. And the reason that that’s so important to understand is because this republic, when we moved it towards a direct democracy, the reason that that’s going to fail is because people don’t understand this concept that rights only exist as some kind of bizarre social construct if they’re not grounded in God. How does a secular society uphold rights? How?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But how do you uphold your right not to have to wear a mask in the middle of a pandemic through Scripture or God?

ANDREW WILSON: You would still utilize it through force, right? The Scripture doesn’t prevent you from utilizing force. Christian — with this idea of like Christian pacifism and Christians being p*ies, I don’t know where that came from.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Britain, I think.

ANDREW WILSON: Boy, that was never —

Christianity, Pacifism, and the Teachings of Jesus

FRANCIS FOSTER: And so what about the teachings of Jesus Christ?

ANDREW WILSON: Which ones? Which ones do you want to dive into?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Well, I was raised as a racist Catholic, so I’m not as well versed in Scripture as you. When he was on the cross, “Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.”

ANDREW WILSON: Of course. And you should forgive people. I absolutely agree with that. I may forgive a man who attempted to rape my wife, but I’m going to kill him in the attempt, right? Like, what, which thing’s contradictory here? It’s like I can forgive my enemies, but that doesn’t mean I need to let them crush me. I can forgive people who have done me wrong. Doesn’t mean I need to let them do me more wrong. I can forgive people for doing horrible acts against me. It doesn’t mean I need to continue to let them do horrible evil acts against me.

Christian ethics has been widely bastardized by progressive leftists as being some kind of hippie religion. It is definitely not, and never has been, and I don’t know where that came from. Yes, it’s true the teachings of Jesus Christ are very heavy on loving your neighbor and understanding forgiveness and understanding the mode of sin, and that most people are going to engage in sin, so we need the forgiveness of Jesus Christ for that. That’s true. But it’s not a pacifistic religion, and it never has been.

Jesus told one of his disciples to sell a cloak and buy a sword. These were not pacifists. Jesus ran money changers out of a temple with a braided cord that he made out of leather and whipped them out of the temple. I don’t know where the idea of pacifism came from. He called them serpents. He called people serpents, whitewashed tombs. He called them all sorts of names. These were killable offenses in his day.

Creationism, Evolution, and Parental Rights in Education

FRANCIS FOSTER: I don’t know enough about Scripture to challenge you, but it’s interesting what you said. But what I wanted to get back to — so this idea of polarizing Shakespeare, canceling books, etc. I guess for me, now thinking about it, is the reason that it’s not good is that you begin to silence ideas. And what Christianity did, and not solely Christianity but other religions did, is it silenced scientists and people making breakthroughs in the scientific fields.

And I guess the ultimate example is people worrying that essentially in schools we’d be back to teaching creationism. For example, if certain Christians were in charge and presented creationism as fact.

ANDREW WILSON: Why couldn’t you just have a compromise there where you said, “Okay, you can learn either or you can learn neither?” That should be up to the parents, don’t you think? The education standards for their kids. Why should that be up to the state? You think the state should have control over that, or do you think the parents should? So if the parents say, “Yeah, I don’t really want them to learn evolution,” why can’t they opt them out?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Because evolution has been proven to be scientifically correct.

ANDREW WILSON: That’s not your business what people do with their kids’ education. That’s their business, right?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Okay, well then why can’t I raise my child to be a jihadist?

ANDREW WILSON: So you’re going to raise your kid to blow people up?

FRANCIS FOSTER: No, but well, why not? I mean, if you say it’s not your business, then it’s not your business.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, well, I mean, can you stop parents from raising their kids to be a jihadist?

FRANCIS FOSTER: You can.

ANDREW WILSON: How?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Well, you can make sure that within the confines of a school that they’re not learning it. We have had schools in the UK where people have been — there’s Islamist values, and those schools have been closed down.

ANDREW WILSON: Okay, so why is it in school that you’re supposed to learn reading, writing, arithmetic, you’re supposed to learn science as well, right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: Okay, so you’re saying, “Well, this is a scientific fact, so kids need to learn it,” right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: Okay, so parents say, “Well, I dispute this fact, right? I’m not going to teach my kid evolution.” How does that hamstring the kid exactly? What about that is going to hamstring the child?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Well, maybe they want to be a scientist. Maybe the way that they see the world, you’re actually taking out a fundamental part of their understanding of the world and how it works.

ANDREW WILSON: That’s a strictly materialistic view, and it’s silly. What about the ideas of metaphysical accounting? Accounting for metaphysical things like the laws that are immaterial, the laws of logic, things like this.

FRANCIS FOSTER: I think they should be taught in school as well.

ANDREW WILSON: They’re not proven facts. Even though you believe in them, they’re not proven facts, but you still want them taught in school?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: Okay. So the Bible’s not a proven fact. Do you want that taught in school?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah, I believe you should learn the Bible as part of religious studies education.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, that’s fantastic. Great. Okay. Here’s my compromise.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Because now I told you —

ANDREW WILSON: You can teach evolution or you can teach creationism, or you can teach both. The parents can have the kids do both or do neither, which is exactly what I said before. You say the same thing — they should teach both.

FRANCIS FOSTER: No, no, no, no, no, that’s not what I was saying. I was saying that you should teach evolution because it has been scientifically proven, but you should also teach the Bible and say, “This is what Christians believe,” and it’s up to you whether you believe it or not.

ANDREW WILSON: Okay, so then I don’t understand why — so let me ask it a different way. Is it the case that if you’re a religious Christian, that your kids should have to sit through sex education hearing about homosexual sex?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Should they have to hear about homosexual sex? No, they shouldn’t. I believe that.

ANDREW WILSON: Why not?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Why not?

Sex Education and Religious Exemptions

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Hold on, let me finish. I think the point— there’s an important distinction here between different types of sex education. Showing kids porn, as some of your schools do, it shouldn’t happen irrespective of whether it’s sexual, homosexual, whatever, straight, whatever. Yep. So that’s an important distinction.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, you have to show them porn. Like, I remember when I went through sex ed, they showed— they definitely showed the naked human body, walked through, showed you these are what breasts are, these are what ovaries are, this is what this is, this is what this is, this is where babies come from. Didn’t appear overtly it wasn’t pornographic, right? Right. You do the same exact thing with homosexuality, right? But why do you think that religious fundamentalists should be able to opt their kids out of that?

FRANCIS FOSTER: I don’t believe that we should be teaching. I think sex ed should be about procreate. I think sex ed should primarily be about safety, actually.

ANDREW WILSON: That’s it.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Primary about safety and also about how, also about how the biological functions work when you have children, etc.

ANDREW WILSON: So, but so you don’t want it taught in school at all?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Well, sex ed.

ANDREW WILSON: Yes, you do. Yes. Okay, great. So then why do you want the parents’ ability to tell their teachers, “Hey, I want to opt my kid out of this? If you’re going to be talking about gay sex, you’re going to be talking about this, you’re going to be talking about that. I want to opt them out of that.”

FRANCIS FOSTER: Right. I wouldn’t be talking— I don’t think you should include gay sex in the curriculum.

ANDREW WILSON: Why though?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Why? Yeah, because I believe— why? Because I believe that it actually could offend religious minorities. Oh, okay.

ANDREW WILSON: Just like creationism, right?

FRANCIS FOSTER: No, not like creationism. No, like Darwin. No, but when you have evolutionary— that is a scientific fact. That is a scientific—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I actually wouldn’t go quite that far. It’s a scientific theory that’s currently accepted.

ANDREW WILSON: But look, it’s a distinction between theory and fact.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I mean, well, yeah, this is actually— I mean, it’s interesting because just so you see, all of this will get condensed into clips on the internet where it’s like “this person destroyed that person,” which is really not the angle of conversation for us. Yeah, really trying to explore the arguments. I mean, I would say a stronger version of your argument is should parents be able to opt their children out of being taught that climate change is real, right? Because you can say that because that’s where you’re going to get someone like Francis or me to go, “Yeah, I think they should be able to opt out of that,” right? Even though that’s the scientifically accepted consensus.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, I’m not here for destruction.

FRANCIS FOSTER: No, no, none of us are.

The Jihadi Schools Question

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But let me come back to a point that I think Francis made that you haven’t addressed, which I think is a strong argument. What about the jihadi thing? Like, should devout Muslim families be able to create schools according to this devolvement of religion to the states or whatever, where they teach that particular worldview?

ANDREW WILSON: No.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because—

ANDREW WILSON: Because I believe in Christian ethics as the dominant force in society. And since that’s the case, I would tailor laws towards Christian ethics being the dominant force in society.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So there would be no schools that taught anything except Christian ethics?

ANDREW WILSON: No, it wouldn’t be that they would teach nothing but Christian ethics, but we can definitely tailor laws against jihadist ethics or definitely tailor laws against even importing Muslims at all. The hell are we importing Muslims here for anyway? We don’t need them here. Never needed them here. “Diversity is our strength.” Has not been a strength having Muslims here.

The idea that we can’t tailor or craft legislation and laws around the things that our children learn, or at least what you can opt into and out of— let’s just say for consistency’s sake, sure, you could teach your kid, I guess, theoretically to be a jihadist, and there’s nothing I can do about it. There’s nothing a secular state can do about it either, except not let them come in, and then it’s really hard to train your kid to be a jihadist, right? Because you’re not here.

Christian Populism vs. Christian Nationalism

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, so from a policy level, this kind of ultimately comes back to the final question, I suppose, of what is— do you call yourself a Christian nationalist? Is that your—

ANDREW WILSON: I would say Christian populist.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay.

ANDREW WILSON: Christian nationalism is often conflated with forms of ethnonationalism, and people do use it as a cloak. It is for ethnonationalism. I would fall more in line with what’s called cultural nationalism.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You would—

ANDREW WILSON: You guys, I think from watching your content, would fall more in line with probably civic nationalism. So cultural nationalism is talking about the glue which holds cultures together, and the ethno-nationalists obviously believe that’s your race, right? Obviously I think that race is not enough to hold a nation together. There has to be some kind of cultural glue, and that usually comes from religion. So all the laws that I can see seem to be informed by ethics, and those ethics seem almost universally to be informed by Christianity.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So you would support mass migration from Christian countries?

ANDREW WILSON: No.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Why not?

ANDREW WILSON: Well, I don’t understand. I want my domestic population to grow. So if I want to tailor the best outcomes for my society, then I want my domestic population to grow. I want those families to be very happy. I want them to have the biggest slice of that American dream, right? Because I’m Christian, but also a nationalist. So the idea here is nation first. Me importing a bunch of people from other countries, not putting my nation first, putting their nation first. So my list of priorities would be God, nation, right? Or I’m sorry, God, family, nation. So culture and borders are very important for the nation.

King Wilson’s America: A Hypothetical Vision

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And so you don’t— you’re not a Christian nationalist, cultural nationalist. So describe to me the America that you want. What does it look like? What are the—

ANDREW WILSON: You mean by tomorrow? Well, let’s say I was king tomorrow.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, you seemed very keen on this idea, which I’m sure you’re excited about. What I mean is, ultimately, you want to transform America into something that it used to be, or that you’d like it to be, or whatever. Let’s not argue about that.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, sure.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay, let’s just say you want America to be a certain way. Is that fair?

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay, what does it look like once you’ve got to that destination, once you’ve got to that perfect America which represents your values as someone who’s really interested in Christianity being the dominant force in society? What can you do? How is it different from what we have today?

ANDREW WILSON: So while I would say that there’s— this is a bit of like hypothetical utopianism, of course— as long as you’re granting me that this is a bit of hypothetical utopianism. So let’s say it was King Wilson Tomorrow. I’m King Andrew Wilson and my decrees and edicts go out to all of the land.

First thing, mass migration. That’s gone immediately. Next thing is focusing on domestic birth rates and domestic birth policies and trying to move America back to a one-income family. The best way to do that is to prioritize from the government level down that women do not defer their childbearing years for college, right? But rather you offer massive incentives to families for them to get married younger, right? Stay at home, have babies with their husband. And if you contract them from the workforce, wages are going to necessarily skyrocket. The second you begin contracting women from the workforce, wages are going to shoot through the roof, especially if you’re not filling those roles with migrants. So those would be some of the very first policies that I would put in place.

I’d also ban porn, I’d ban gay marriage, I’d put in some kinds of laws which had dominion over the airwaves when it came to degeneracy, right? Meaning I don’t think you should turn on Fox or Channel 32 and see naked women. I don’t think that that’s good for the public. I don’t think it’s particularly useful. I would probably outlaw smartphones or put age restrictions on smartphones, probably tell you were like 18 years old.

There would be some pretty restrictive things that I would put in place, but they would also maximize human ethical flourishing, right? The idea here is like, why do kids need to be looking at smartphones and training their brain towards smartphones? It’s been terrible for them.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, we just did an episode, recorded an episode on it. We have several actually. So I agree with you on that. And is it important to you that that outcome is arrived at democratically, that you persuade half the country that this is the way to be?

Democracy, Voting Rights, and the Stakeholder Model

ANDREW WILSON: So ultimately, the views of what’s best for the nation, that’s what’s going to be first and foremost in my brain, right? Yes. The religious aspect, that’s— it’s always going to be God first. But from the things that I can do something about, it’s going to be from the national level. The nation that we have is a checks and balances based republic. So obviously I’m going to work within the confines of that, in order to make as many compelling and convincing arguments and as many compelling and convincing things I can possibly do to move people towards this view.

But remember, the problem with democracy, the big hole in it, is you can democratically remove it. So you can vote out democracy. That’s built in right into democracy to be able to do that. And the most American thing you can do is to remove amendments and put in new amendments. We do it all the time.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And is that what you’d prefer? You don’t want America to be a direct democracy?

ANDREW WILSON: No.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What would you like it to be?

ANDREW WILSON: I would like it to be what it used to be at the beginning, which is a stakeholder democracy at the very least.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What does that mean?

ANDREW WILSON: It means you’re either going to have like one household voting, right? So that we’re not dividing husbands and wives because that’s really stupid. Or it means that you’re going to have to have some kind of stake in property or perhaps 4 years of unpaid public service before you can vote. There has to be some skin in the game, in other words. I’d also raise the voting age probably to 25, right? I think—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Would women be allowed to vote?

ANDREW WILSON: I mean, yeah, to at least the degree that men are, but I don’t want men to vote for the most part either. I don’t think it’s a great idea.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But it would be equal between men and women in your view? Really? It doesn’t sound like it. If you want a household— Well, what I mean is it sort of sounds like— forgive me if I’m misunderstanding this genuinely. You’d like people to get married and to vote as a household, which I imagine would kind of mean that the head of the family, which is the husband, would tend to decide that. And if a woman isn’t married, presumably she wouldn’t be getting a vote partly for that reason. Is that fair?

ANDREW WILSON: Sure.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, what’s wrong with that system? Sounds great.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’m just interested in explaining. Well, it sounds great to you. I’m just interested.

ANDREW WILSON: The thing is, it’s really hard. It’s really difficult. Would people think of things like, what’s the argument against this? “This is an immutable character. How could you argue that women shouldn’t be able to vote or that men shouldn’t be able to vote?” It’s like, well, at our founding, they couldn’t. Women could not vote.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, at your founding, as you’ve said yourself, you had slavery, right? So things do change over time.

ANDREW WILSON: Sure. But the thing is, sometimes in a good direction. Sure. And sometimes in a bad direction.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Oh, absolutely.

Women’s Suffrage and the Question of Force

ANDREW WILSON: So the thing is, the idea that they had there was that most men couldn’t vote. There was no universal suffrage for men, including slaves, right? For the most part were men. And women couldn’t vote because most people weren’t allowed to vote.

Now, women, the arguments against women voting are pretty simple. It was the idea of landholdership and force, right? Can women utilize force in order to maintain land? The answer is no. Generally that takes men.

So if you’re looking at feminism, for instance, you had the anti-suffragettes and then the suffragettes. But the anti-suffragettes’ arguments were way better. The argument was pretty simple. It just worked like this: that you cannot erode or get rid of the patriarchy because you always have to appeal to it for your rights. And that’s a fundamental truth.

And since that’s a fundamental truth, I’ve never seen a great reason why women should be able to vote. Because they can vote to send men to war that they themselves do not have to go fight. They are not beholden to the draft. Only men are. And they can say, well, you’re not beholden to the draft perhaps because you’re too old for it, but you were beholden to the draft when you were not too old for it. So your time could have come.

Voting, Force, and Gender Privilege

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Could you not flip this argument the other way around and say men are able to vote on things that affect women that don’t affect men? Like, well, all kinds of things. For example, their right to vote. I mean, among other things. But, things to do with sexual health, abortion, all kinds of things, right?

ANDREW WILSON: Well, I don’t understand. Abortion does have to do with men.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay, fine. I mean, it does, but it has more to do with women because it affects them more directly. But lots of other things. I mean, men could pass a law that women have to wear a headscarf, for example, right? So our votes affect each other. That’s not an argument to deny the other sex the vote.

ANDREW WILSON: I don’t understand.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Like, your argument is women can vote to send men to war.

ANDREW WILSON: No, my argument is — it’s called force doctrine. My argument reduces to this. If you always have to appeal to one sex for your rights, right, then why are you being imbued with the responsibility of that at all? Because women have to appeal to men for their rights, and anytime men want to take rights away from women, they can like that, and there’s not a damn thing women can do about it. And if you want proof of that, let me show you half the world. Anytime collectively men say women have no rights, they don’t have any, and that’s that. And there’s not a damn thing that they can do about it.

So the idea that they can erode the patriarchy or remove the patriarchy or in some way get away from the patriarchy to be strong, independent women is nonsense. They’re just always appealing to the benevolence of men, always. And so I don’t even understand what the purpose is of the vote for women. What is it? We can literally, via force, take it whenever we want anyway. What is the point here?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, I would imagine the point is to include the voice of half the population, which is naturally set on different priorities to those of men. And since we live in a society which is half female, it would be worthwhile to include their perspective in how we make decisions.

ANDREW WILSON: Why does voting—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because it affects them as much as it affects us.

Prohibition, Influence, and the Draft

ANDREW WILSON: Let me ask you a question. Are you aware that in the United States we abolished alcohol?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: For a period of time. I’ve seen some movies about how that went.

ANDREW WILSON: Who got that amendment passed?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t know.

ANDREW WILSON: Women.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay. Oh, no, no, no. If you want to have an argument about our disagreements with how women choose to vote—

ANDREW WILSON: No, no, no, no, no. They couldn’t vote.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Oh, I see. That’s what you’re saying. Okay.

ANDREW WILSON: They couldn’t vote.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But?

ANDREW WILSON: But they still got that amendment passed.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay.

ANDREW WILSON: The idea that women did not have influence or do not have influence or don’t have moral influence on society because they can’t vote is stupid.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So what’s wrong with formalizing that in the form of a vote?

ANDREW WILSON: Well, I just told you the very idea that women — well, let’s start with this. Do you want women to be able to get drafted in the military?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I personally don’t know why. Because I’ve never really thought about it, but it’s just an instinctive reaction, actually. I’d have to think about the exact reason, but I just think combat is what men do, I guess. It’s a very simplistic way of saying it. And there’ll be women who, “Oh, I can kick your ass.” And there are women like that, right? Agreed.

ANDREW WILSON: But not generally.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I am not against women serving in the military if that’s what they choose to do.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, but what about the draft though?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But I don’t think they should be compelled to, no.

ANDREW WILSON: But men should?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: In some circumstances, yes. Like when the survival of the country is at stake.

ANDREW WILSON: So women get a privilege men don’t get?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Sure.

ANDREW WILSON: Why?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Men get certain privileges too.

ANDREW WILSON: But so why do they have equal rights? No. What privileges? Name a single privilege men get that women don’t have access to.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What you mean legislative?

ANDREW WILSON: Anything — literally anything in life. Any aspect, whether it be governmental, social — women have all the privilege.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: All the privilege.

ANDREW WILSON: Oh yeah. Hey, when the Titanic goes down, who gets on the lifeboat?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, yeah. But that’s a very narrow context. Well, who dies in childbirth, right? Like, I mean, come on — we’re different.

ANDREW WILSON: And almost no women die in childbirth anymore.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Some still do, sure.

ANDREW WILSON: But I mean, some people die.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: There’s probably more women that die in childbirth in America than people who die on the Titanic in the modern—

ANDREW WILSON: Is childbirth avoidable? You just — don’t have sex, right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, but what I’m saying is there are outcomes that are better for men in life than for women, and that’s a fundamental difference between men and women.

Privilege, Equality, and the Vote

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, I understand, but I’m talking about privilege. Can you give me any privilege at all that men have that women don’t? Whereas I can give you tons of privileges that women have that men don’t. That’s what I’m asking.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Privilege. Well, I mean, the privilege concept outside the legislative framework is a difficult one.

ANDREW WILSON: Even inside of it? I’m asking for both, either, any, in fact.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t have the data on all this stuff, but I would assume there are contexts in which men are more likely to be employed for a certain thing because they’re more likely to be perceived as authoritative, as leaders, things like that. Although that has changed with the kind of work agenda over the last 10 years.

ANDREW WILSON: And it works both ways. Like, for instance, preschool teachers. I would assume that people would vastly prefer that their kid go to a woman, right?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Right.

ANDREW WILSON: So it seems like that privilege is striped across the board. So what is the — why is it that women get all of the equality, right? But also get all the privilege? That doesn’t seem right to me. That seems like it’s backwards.

So I’m still waiting to hear from anybody ever — what are these privileges men have over women versus what women have over men? So if you can go and you can be drafted, you can be sent off to war, right? And women can’t, but they can vote to send you off to war. How is that not something which fundamentally needs to be addressed immediately? That seems to me like it’s completely lopsided and it’s giving one class of people a significant privilege over another.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So if we allowed women to be drafted, you’d be happy with them having the vote?

Women in Combat Roles

ANDREW WILSON: Well, see, now we come into pragmatic problems though. The reason that you said earlier you’re against women being drafted is because they can’t really serve in combat roles, only in support roles, as draftees of men would have to serve in combat roles. The reason women don’t do well in combat roles is because, well, driving tanks is hard work. It takes muscles and you have to run the shells and you have to carry hundreds of pounds of equipment with you and you have to do all of this type of thing. And generally speaking, women aren’t equipped for it, which is why we’ve never had a female Navy SEAL to date. Even though they’ve been trying for like 25 years. We still haven’t had a single one. They can’t do the job.

Now, what people always do is point to outliers, right? Well, some women can do it. That’s true. Some can, but in general they can’t.

FRANCIS FOSTER: I guess, but when you vote for a government, you don’t vote whether to go to war or not. It’s the government that makes the decision. There’s plenty of people who voted for Donald Trump and are absolutely disgusted that he’s started a war with Iran.

ANDREW WILSON: I thought government was force. We all agreed on that, right? Government’s force. Like, ultimately, that’s what it reduces to. So you say you’re voting, you’re voting for force, and you’re voting for force use. Why does the United States have a massive military? Well, because we’re going to use it. That’s why we’re going to use it. Why do we have a draft? Well, because we’re going to use that too, and have used it.

And so the thing is, a lot of what we’re voting on is force. We want to protect our nation from all foreign threats, right? That’s why we have this massive military. That’s why we have a draft. That’s why we have the potential for mass combat. That’s why we entered into World War II, right? That’s why we entered and there was a draft then. And we’re going to institute a draft at some point again, likely. It’s more likely than not at some point.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: We’re going to do it. So the thing is, why do women get exempt from that? And if it’s the case that you don’t want them exempt from that, why is it that they don’t go right to the front lines then and battle it out, like draftees have the at least potential to? Well, that’s a fundamental privilege that is not being addressed, right? And yet women have the vote. Doesn’t seem like they care too much about men’s rights, even though we’re supposed to care about theirs. Seems like they have a lot of privilege in society.

The Draft, Childbearing, and the Question of Duty

FRANCIS FOSTER: Is that fair, Andrew? I think a lot of women care about men’s rights, actually. Look, there’s a vocal minority which say that they don’t and they hate men. And look, we know those type of women. Let’s be honest, a lot of women care about men’s rights. They do.

ANDREW WILSON: Give us — give me like 3 of the most prominent ones you can think of who care about men’s rights.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, I’m trying to think now, but I mean, we’ve had feminists on the show who are feminists, like Louise Perry, for example. They’re a different type of feminists to the idiots that you’d be spending your time arguing with, but the people who have a very sensible view of these things. Yeah, lots of people like that.

By the way, coming back — not to change subject, but coming back to your point, I mean, one of the things that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me is, for example, yes, it’s true, men serve in combat roles and women don’t, but women bear children and men don’t. And there’s a huge disadvantage in all sorts of societal outcomes from a materialistic career perspective to spending the time to bear the child and then to nurture that child, right? So we —

ANDREW WILSON: What? Like what? Well, that’s backwards.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, no, hold on. Yeah. The gender pay gap discussion, which is kind of stupid in a lot of areas, is actually a reflection of the fact that there is a motherhood gap in lifetime earnings, which is if you’re a woman who bears children and you take more time off, you take time off, then over the course of your life, less overtime, you will earn less. So that would be one disadvantage that I could give you where women contribute a different thing. So you might say, well, men get drafted, women carry children.

ANDREW WILSON: So it’s not a disadvantage? What do you mean? Oh no, they have to stay at home and raise their kids. Oh, ah, where’s the disadvantage again? The man’s in the war.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Oh no, the men get drafted. Where’s the disadvantage?

ANDREW WILSON: They die.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay.

ANDREW WILSON: They get shot in the face.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And women earn less money over the course of their lives and have to carry a thing that is a risk to their life potentially.

ANDREW WILSON: What they have instead is they now don’t have to pay for daycare and they can depend on somebody else’s income, which is taking care of them. Oh, that’s terrible. Oh my God, you get to stay at home and you don’t have to do anything except raise your kid. Wow. And by the way, they’re putting their kids on a bus almost every morning to go to a public school. They don’t even have them for 8 hours out of the day most of the time. So like, how is this the most incredibly difficult job ever? Or in some way requires them to have that? That’s — they’re the ones who are privileged. You know, there’s an old comedian who made this joke and I agree with — any job you can do in your pajamas can’t be that hard.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Bill Burr.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Favorite comedian of ours. But okay. It can’t be that hard.

ANDREW WILSON: He was joking.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Interesting though, knowing Bill, and now that he’s married with kids, I think his perspective’s changed somewhat. But I guess, you know —

ANDREW WILSON: I’m married with kids.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right. I mean, you watched your wife carry the baby or babies inside her for 9 months. Like, that’s a big deal.

ANDREW WILSON: Sure.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So I guess that to me would be one example versus the hypothetical risk of once every 50 years you get drafted.

ANDREW WILSON: In a two-income household, it’s a privilege that women get to stay at home. It’s a privilege.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But we’re not talking about staying at home. We’re talking about carrying the child.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, but carrying — and then the child has to be raised.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And most women in America then go back to work. Yeah. At a disadvantage, as we just saw.

ANDREW WILSON: That’s not a disadvantage though, right? They don’t have to have children. You have to go out for a draft.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, women do have to have children for our society to reproduce.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, they’re not.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So, well, I mean, they are.

ANDREW WILSON: I mean, they’re definitely —

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Your wife is, my wife is.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, but what’s the birth rate? We’re under replacement levels.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I know, but what you’re talking about is a side argument. What I’m saying is, in a society that wants to reproduce, men have to go to war and women have to bear the children.

ANDREW WILSON: That’s true.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And so why isn’t — why don’t we just say, well, the men go to war, the women have children, that’s why they both —

ANDREW WILSON: When are they going to start having the children part of this?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I mean, my wife’s doing it. Yeah, but you are doing it, so shouldn’t they have the right to vote? Men, you’re not — you’re not f*ing fighting a war, are you?

ANDREW WILSON: Men — well, here’s — but nor am I. Is there the potential for that through the draft?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, like just the potential for them to have children. You say they’re not. Well, I could say you’re not being drafted. Same thing.

ANDREW WILSON: No, you can’t. It’s not — there is no equivalency. And I can point out the distinction.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, the compulsion thing.

ANDREW WILSON: The compulsion. Yes.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But for a society to work, men have to go to war and women have to have kids.

ANDREW WILSON: I agree. But you need to get to the they’re having kids part before you can tell me that there’s some equivalency to men being drafted. Drafted because they’re not having kids.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And you’re not being drafted.

ANDREW WILSON: But I can be compelled because I’ve signed up for the draft. Where have they signed up to have kids?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I think this is splitting hairs, aren’t you?

Compulsion, Duty, and the Right to Vote

ANDREW WILSON: I think it’s not. I think that the idea that my children can be drafted or I could be drafted even at my age because perhaps I have knowledge which would be useful to the United States military — they could do it in 5 seconds. They could bring me on. In Ukraine, they draft 60-year-old men. Okay. If they need you, they’re going to take you and you can peel potatoes or whatever it is they need. Right.

Women do not have to do that. They do not have to sign up for selective service. They’re not compelled and will never be compelled in that way. They can avoid pregnancy, though. Right. And if you’re saying that they have a duty to have children — I’m not saying they have a duty, but you have a duty to go fight a war if you get drafted.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Correct.

ANDREW WILSON: Okay. And this is fair. How? That’s where we get to the fairness.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, not everything has to look exactly symmetrical, but your argument initially was, where’s a privilege that men enjoy and women don’t? Well, I would argue in a function in society where women, where we want to reproduce, women end up with the burden of childbearing and child rearing in a way that men don’t. I think it’s a fairly simple and obvious argument.

ANDREW WILSON: And yet they’re privileged when it comes to custody and divorces. They’re privileged when it comes to child support. They’re privileged when it comes to alimony. They’re privileged when it comes to all of these things. They have every advantage when it comes to having the child. And so it’s like, no.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s a different argument though. What I’m saying is the burden of bearing the child is uniquely with women in the same way that the burden of fighting in war is uniquely with men.

ANDREW WILSON: So it’s an ontological argument. The nature of woman is to have children, nature of men is to go to war.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right, and so —

ANDREW WILSON: Then the woman needs to be fulfilling her nature then, right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, my woman is and so is yours, right? Yes, for most women. So I would insist for my woman to have the right to vote on that basis, that she’s contributing, frankly, at this point, way more than I am.

ANDREW WILSON: Drafting’s collective, right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: So then the duty’s collective.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: Then why isn’t childbirth?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t understand. You’re saying for women to have the right to vote, they must have a duty to bear children?

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah. Well, if you’re saying that there’s a duty for men to go to war and you’re saying that the reason that they do is because that’s their ontological nature and the ontological nature of women is to have children, okay, I can concede that argument. But we just ran into a problem then, because if one is collective and then the other is collective, why do I have to fulfill my duty but they don’t have to fulfill theirs?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, I never said that I thought it was a collective duty for women to have children. It’s —

ANDREW WILSON: But it’s a collective duty for men to go.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. Yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, then again, that sounds like privilege.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. Well, in the same way that fire safety in your own house is a personal thing that you do. But if there’s a fire in the neighborhood, it’s the collective duty of the neighbors to get together and try and put it out.

ANDREW WILSON: Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: There’s a difference.

ANDREW WILSON: Some think you go to jail if you don’t do that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, look, I agree with you. The compulsion element is different, but not everything is exactly the same.

ANDREW WILSON: I’m not even asking — like, I agree with you, getting drafted and having babies is different. We can agree with that, right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Both important, though, right?

ANDREW WILSON: Both important. But the idea here that we are talking about, which should be equal, is the idea of duty. If we’re talking about the compellence of you — if your country drafted you, even if you’re in terrible shape, and they told you, “Look, we’re in a collective war effort and we need you, and you’re going to come in here and just cook food because our soldiers need food,” right? Are you going to go do it?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’d do it voluntarily, to be honest.

ANDREW WILSON: But yeah, you would do it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I wouldn’t be very useful, but yeah. Terrible cook.

ANDREW WILSON: Now you’re compelled to do that, right? And part of your duty and honor is that you have to go do it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Sure.

ANDREW WILSON: I agree with this. Okay. But if we have a compelling duty that men have an ontological function, only men can do this, therefore they should — why is that duty not applied the other way? That to me is inconsistent, and it’s a hole in the worldview. It makes no sense to me.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I agree with you, it’s inconsistent, but that’s because the acts are not equivalent. Like, not everything is the same. I don’t — I think in order for the defense of the realm, so to speak, you have to compel all the men to fight in certain very rare circumstances.

ANDREW WILSON: Where do those men come from?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Women, right?

ANDREW WILSON: So then one duty is being fulfilled.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’m all with you in terms of we need a high birth rate. I just don’t think duty is the way to get there. Anyway, we’ve —

ANDREW WILSON: Couldn’t you just — I’ll just wrap.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: It’s just a time thing. When you say duty, yeah, can’t you instill the ideas of duty and honor even absent legislation through propaganda, things like that? Those are the routes that I would be more apt to move towards.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, yeah, to be honest with you, man, this is the thing — actually a lot of this discourse I think is misguided because the vast majority of women actually do want to have kids, but there are circumstances in their life which make them less likely to do so.

ANDREW WILSON: I agree.

Closing Thoughts and the Importance of Good Faith Debate

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And so if we— I mean, you made this point yourself, there are countries, it’s not— they’re not having as many results as people would like to think, unfortunately, places like Hungary. I think the way to get people to have more kids is to get obstacles out of their way. Not to compel them through the draft system. Like, here’s your ticket, have 2 kids. I don’t think that’s going to work, but it seems we agree on that. Anyway, Andrew, it’s been great having you on.

ANDREW WILSON: You too, guys. I really appreciate the convo.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And it’s actually interesting because obviously there are areas of disagreement, but it’s just fascinating to me that it’s so much easier to have a conversation from a place of complete disagreement with someone on the right than with someone who’s progressive.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, that’s because I think that this comes down a lot of times to being good faith, right? I want to know your view.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: And I truly believe that you want to know mine.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah, we do.

ANDREW WILSON: And so the reason that— what we just did right now, I guarantee you much of it’s going to go viral. And this type of thing isn’t just because you have a huge channel and we both have big audiences, but it’s also because people just saw a discussion that seemed real. Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, it was real.

ANDREW WILSON: And it seemed like we were trying to get at each other’s views.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: Try to understand them. And we’re not killing each other.

FRANCIS FOSTER: No.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

ANDREW WILSON: So it’s like, maybe we can start there.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. I think that’s a great place to start.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah.

Where Is the Sensible Center-Left Champion?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And it just frustrates me because I would love— I raised this right at the beginning with you— isn’t there a center-left sensible part of society? And I truly, this may be an article of faith on my part, but I truly believe lots of people like that exist. But where is their champion? Where is their champion?

Because what we see now is people who can’t have the conversation— there will be lots of people who watch your views on this, particularly outside the US where a more Christian ethics-based worldview is more common, who will be horrified by what you said, right? They will be completely horrified. But we explored that and we got to the bottom of what you believe, right? And you’re entitled to believe what you believe. Other people are entitled to not agree. But if there was a progressive sitting in our seat, or even in your seat, we’d never even get to what the views were. And that to me is so frustrating.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, yeah, it’s a fundamental dishonesty. Like I said at the very beginning, I hate the left. And there is a fundamental dishonesty that comes with their anti-realism views on morality that makes me sick to my stomach. And the thing is, it’s like, look, maybe I don’t get everything I want. Maybe I get 30% or 20% of what I want. Maybe you get 80%, right? At least we’re getting to something.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: We’re getting to something. We’re addressing something. These people, you can’t even address it. Well, because why? Well, because it’s unprecedented, says meth jaw. Oh, it’s unprecedented. But everything’s unprecedented, right? Destiné is meth jaw. These people live in ambiguity. So that’s why you can’t ever get to anything. Everything’s equivocation, ambiguity. They never want to pin down their actual positions. And then when you get to their actual positions, they know that they’re untenable. So they just obfuscate away from them and they move on to other things.

You can disagree with everything I just said here, but you can’t say that it’s not reasoned out. You can’t say there’s no logic to it. You can’t say that I didn’t really sit and have a good think before I came to these views. You can say that about progressives though.

Final Question: What Are We Not Talking About?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Andrew, thank you for the discussion. What is the one thing we’re not talking about as a society that we should be?

ANDREW WILSON: We’re not talking about the birth rate enough. That’s the critical viewing component which keeps all of humanity and society going. And if you look at projections for humanity in the next 200 years, it doesn’t look good. And ultimately, as a Christian first and foremost, I am the ultimate humanist. I want to see human beings and more of them all over this planet having more babies and families and all that good wonderful stuff. So I think that that’s the thing we should focus on more than anything else.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: All right, head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where Andrew is going to answer your questions. After years of speaking with and debating people of opposing beliefs and values, what’s something you’ve changed your mind on regarding your own beliefs and values as a result of these discussions.

Related Posts

• DEBRIEFED # 83: w/ Former Area 51 Employee Bob Lazar (Transcript)
• COL. Douglas Macgregor: The Pentagon’s Terrible War Planning (Transcript)
• Transcript: Trump Is the Greatest At One Law Of Power — And It Could Destroy Him w/ Robert Greene
• Transcript: Evil People Don’t Go To Hell w/ Suzanne Giesemann @ Bialik’s Breakdown
• Transcript of Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Is the War Over?