Seeing Satan on the Move, Part I of II

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Cory J. Moss. Mahler and I'm still woe. This week's Stone Choir is a little different from our standard episodes. Last week we joined Will Spencer from the Renaissance of Men podcast and recorded a wide-ranging discussion. Many of the topics will be familiar to the Stone Choir audience. We discussed the origin of the Stone Choir podcast, why we started the podcast, why we address some of the topics that we do, why it is important to speak the truth and the consequences of doing so, and a number of related topics. Those are covered largely in this first episode. We covered additional topics as well. There will be a second episode released at some point in the

1:26 future. The audio for that is not currently publicly available. This is the first segment, which runs about two and a half hours. The second segment runs about four, four and a half hours, and again, that will be released in the future. That second segment just like this one will be released in the future on the main stone choir stream. I have left in Will Spencer's introductory monologue, which begins now. My guests this week are the hosts of the most popular podcast no one is allowed to admit that they listen to. For part one of an epic six and a half hour conversation, please welcome Corey Mahler and Woe from Stone Choir. You are the Renaissance. First of all, welcome to all my new listeners.

2:20 If this is your first time here, I begin all of my episodes with an extended monologue to set the stage for the conversation and my guests. Please bear with me because I promise that there's a point, and an important one at that. So So, I'd like to tell you a story. I didn't pay any attention at all to the twenty sixteen election. I left the United States for South America in March of that year, so I was far too busy on the road to even think about American politics. Plus at the time, I was still a more or less blue pilled liberal. I knew about Jeffrey Epstein and that whole underworld, but I hadn't yet cracked feminism, the New World Order, or anything like that. So as far as politics was concerned, I knew Hillary Clinton would

3:04 get the nomination. Everyone knew it, and I just assumed that November 2016 would be her coronation, and I didn't think much about it. When Donald Trump got the nomination, I thought that was odd, but from a distance, I just assumed it was part of the American right wing decline into idiocracy. Again, being a blue pilled liberal at the time, I genuinely believed that red state Americans were what was wrong with the nation, and that evangelical Christians, and more specifically Southern Baptists, were driving the whole mess. So you can imagine my shock and comic surprise at God's goodness and sense of humor when years later on Sunday during service I realized that I had ended up as a member of an

3:45 SBC church. But that's another story for another time. Back to 2016. So from July through November 2016, I was finishing my travels in South America and then on my way to Japan, thinking not at all about the election. I did notice two good friends consistently posting on Facebook in support of Trump and getting absolutely dragged over it. I also participated in such a dogpile, though not with my friends, but in a men's group. Another man I didn't know posted his support for Trump. This man was the one guy in a group of hundreds of men who spoke up. Then the entire group, including me, landed on him. And I can't even say why I did. But that was about as much as I thought about or participated

4:28 in the 2016 election. I didn't even vote that year. As I said, I was busy and the outcome seemed obvious until the election happened. I remember watching it on TV and checking my Facebook feed. I, like many, assumed that the outcome was certain, but then one by one, I started watching my hardcore liberal friends in San Francisco begin to freak out. I remember one man wrote something like hold fast, encouraging everyone as if the ship was sinking, and then suddenly it was over. I think I was watching CNN when they called it. I remember being in stunned shock, feeling a note of grief, probably mostly in sympathy with my friends, though also because of the uncertainty Trump's election represented, and then I went to sleep.

5:13 And then a funny thing happened. Rather than joining my friends, doubling down in opposition to Trump, the thought crossed my mind, there must be more going on here than I recognized. I wasn't caught up in the election fervor. I wasn't wearing my team jersey. I was watching my country from afar take a direction I didn't expect. Nor did I question the legitimacy of the election. I believe that Hillary Clinton would win in a landslide. That the outcome apparently was not obvious said nothing to me about objective reality being wrong. Rather the outcome told me that I was wrong regarding something fundamental about my nation, though I didn't know what. Far more people disagreed with me and my friends than I realized.

5:56 They were not living in my world. I was in theirs. That meant there was more for me to understand. So what did I do? I reached out to my two friends on Facebook who had been courageously posting in support of Trump. One was a man, the other was a woman. What I said to them both was that the election outcome was a surprise, and that I didn't understand it. I said to them, I have no preconceived notions, no agenda. I am a blank slate. Please help me understand what just happened. And they did. The rest, as they say, is history. I share that story by way of introduction to how I conduct myself as a man in relation to intellectual inquiry. For things that matter I do not accept as factual or true

6:40 what other people say about an individual, his beliefs, or his words. I go and listen for myself. I do not care about being right. I care about the truth. If the truth makes me wrong, then praise God and hallelujah, I just got a little bit closer to the truth and I didn't need those lies anyway. They were only doing me harm, as all lies do. This perspective carries on to today, and I believe is why I became a Christian. I did not accept the truths of Eastern mysticism and the New Age. I went around the world to experience them for myself, uncritically even. But while on that road, I encountered questions that my fellow believers would not and could not answer. I wanted the truth more than I wanted their acceptance, more than

7:25 I wanted twenty years of my life's pursuits to mean something. And so I stepped across the last border of that land, leaving literally everything behind, wading into the waters of the Spokane River, and finding myself in the forgiving arms of Christ. I sold all I had and bought the field. Four years later, here I am. I look back on my life and can see in the long view that this is not any good inherent in me, but is in the working of the Holy Spirit that I can trace back to being as young as eleven or twelve years old. I suppose if I thought about it or asked my dad, I could go back even further. I want to know for myself, not because anyone tells me, because people can and often do get it wrong.

8:08 I am capable of discerning the truth for myself and thus I do. I must, because if capable men and yes women lack the intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and moral courage to confront their errors, then there's no hope for the lesser men and women, not to mention children either. In today's world, this same attitude I've spent thirty years cultivating is even more desperately needed. Everyone wants to tell us everything, and with all the information and human history available to us with a few taps of our thumb tips, no one wants us investigating anything. And yet we have to. Because the lies are deep and thick and sticky, these webs ensnare many of us, which is why we need men to help us cut our way out with the Word of God, the sword of

8:55 the Spirit, and its courageous truth. Which brings me to my guests this week. Their names are Cory Mauler and Woe, the latter of which is a pseudonym, and they're the hosts of Stone Choir, an informative, enjoyable, and well produced podcast. Okay, sounds good so far. There's just one problem. They tackle ideas that a lot of people invested in the success of the regime, whether consciously or otherwise, don't like. Over seventy-five episodes and counting, they've covered a number of different topics, including headship and submission right down to the level of men's and women's biological design. They've also covered notions of race, its reality, and the significance of those facts on evangelism.

9:36 They've talked about Christianity and the Jews, conspiracy theories and truth, anonymity, slander, IQ, love, Christian nationalism, forgotten doctrines of scripture, and much more. But crucially, one of their most impactful topics is the growing institutional corruption of Christian denominations, in their case, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, or the LCMS. Long regarded as one of America's most conservative Christian denominations, it too has fallen prey to wokeness and corruption at apparently the highest levels. Woe and Corey watched all this happen in 2020 and 2021, as many of us did in our own way, and they decided to do something about it. So they started a podcast called Stone Choir to help clear away

10:19 false teachings and bad ideas, because they saw few others in Christendom, behind the pulpit or otherwise, doing anything at all. Then they applied their considerable intelligence to a recent update of the core doctrinal teachings of Lutheranism, called the larger catechism, and it was as if they had kicked the hornet's nest. This led to a sequence of events, including doxing, threats of violence, and much more. I'll let them share the story. But their story highlights something important that I think should have resonance with every man and woman listening. Truth is expensive. Proverbs chapter twenty three, verse twenty three says Buy the truth and sell it not. Also wisdom and instruction and understanding.

11:01 If truth were cheap or easy, everyone would profess it. If it didn't take courage to share the truth or the intellectual acumen to discern it, we wouldn't value those who speak and write it either. But we do, because the truth is rare. Today we may be more saturated with lies than perhaps any other point in human history since Christ, and so men are needed to stand up, to speak up, to investigate, and to share what they discover no matter the cost, shining light into the darkness as they can. Yes, it's a tall order, and it's a call too many men reject. They either shy away from the truth, backing down from the fight, or they go charging into battle like a berserker, rusty sword swinging wildly. But the truth we need is more like a scalpel, wielded

11:45 with precision by deft hands, and if you ask me, that is the stone choir MO and that's what makes them dangerous, which is why various forces on the internet made them personas non grata, smearing their names across social media. And that's also why, when I first heard about their podcast, I went to listen. Like Trump and my journey to Christ, I didn't accept what I was told as fact simply because I was told it. I wanted to know for myself. My hope with this interview is that you'll learn what I did, that slander as a weapon is no match for the force of truth, and men bold and brilliant enough to wield it. In our conversation we discussed how Cory and Wo met and started Stone Choir, counting the cost for speaking truth, why to investigate where

12:34 Satan is attacking? The turnip stream and conflict with the LCMS, Woe's doxing and its consequences, why there is no political solution to a creational problem, and finally finding a courageous church. As you heard me say at the outset, this is part one of our conversation, just the first two hours or so. You can find the other four and a half hours available for paid subscribers only on my substack. In that episode we discuss the four waves of feminism, the two things Satan wants to subvert, differences between the races, why the enemy can't act without human agents, feminism, racism, the Jews, and Hitler, and finally the responsibility that comes with conspiracy information. Now after my conversation with Cory and Woe, what you'll hear that

13:21 I enjoyed very much. I thought hard about whether to release the second segment separately. I finally decided that for my audience it would be best if you bought a ticket to the show. We discussed topics that for the moment pushed the limits of the Overton window for many, though not all of the participants in the Christian dialogue. A month from now though, who knows? So the episode is opt-in, and I hope it's worth it. I think it is. In fact, I think it's one of my best episodes ever. But even if you're uninterested in listening further, I still believe the Stone Choir story has relevance to my listeners, which is one of the many reasons why I decided to release this segment to the public. Whatever you think of their ideas, whether you agree with them

14:02 or not, or whether you ever put on even a single episode of their podcast, I think you'll hear that their intelligence and faithfulness shines through. They are nothing if not reasoned, rational, and committed men, no matter what you've heard. Plus, if one of my core values is finding the truth for myself, I'd like my listeners to have the same opportunity. Again, once you're done with this first segment, you can find the remainder of the interview on Substack at willspenserpod dot substack dot com. If you enjoy the Renaissance of Men podcast, thank you. Please leave us a five star rating on Spotify and a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. If this is your first time here, welcome.

14:42 I release new episodes about the Christian counterculture, masculine virtue, and the family every week. And one last thing briefly before we begin. We all know how the game is played today. So I encourage everyone listening to embrace the truth that agreeing with one thing Cory and Woe have said does not immediately mean that you agree with everything they've ever said on Stone Choir or anywhere else. The only package deal in history is the Bible. That book, if you don't take it all, you leave it. Fallible men like the rest of us, you get to pick and choose, no matter what the wokesters say, because that is one of their chief tactics of slander. With anything any fallible man says, including and especially me, you can

15:25 take the truth you discern to be accurate and discard the rest without giving it another thought. I have freedom of intellectual inquiry, and so do you, and I believe our right to free speech includes our right to hear. So please welcome this week's guest on the podcast, Cory Mahler and Wo from Stone Choir. Whoa and Cory, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. Thank you for having me. Thank you for having us. I've uh I've been devouring as much of your content as uh time allows and uh and I know that we're gonna have a ton of stuff to talk about today. Uh but first I just wanna say thank you for all the work that you guys have been putting into your podcast because I don't actually listen to a lot of podcasts.

16:10 And I've enjoyed yours an immense amount. So thank you so much for that. You're welcome. Glad it paid off. Excellent. So I think for a start, where we're uh just from my own personal curiosity to is when did you start the Stone Choir podcast and why? And how did you guys meet in the first place? Like what was the what was the inspiration behind Stone Choir? And then we'll get into some of the stuff with the LCMS as well. I'll let you take that one. Corey and I have known each other, I don't know, four or five years at this point. It's a little hard to say. Time's kind of a blur. we met as as in a group of Lutherans. And it's funny initial initially we had a number of mutual friends who should have known to introduce us and it took them like

16:55 year two years to unify the groups. I honestly don't understand. Like one of my one of the things I've always been best at is kind of matchmaking guys who should talk to other guys. Even if I don't particularly have something in common with it, I can still understand like this guy needs to talk to this guy because they're gonna love it. And so like once once Corey and I met, I'm like, why didn't you introduce us? We're like the same guy, just with two kind of weird variations on the same thing. So anyway, once we met, you know, we hit it off and we were mostly thinking and talking about theology and Lutheranism in particular and the state of the world and just privately, um, on top of what we would do publicly on Twitter, et cetera.

17:34 And we're both simultaneously observing all the same things. We notice the same stuff. And Corey has, of course, always been Corey J. Mahler publicly. he's the the least pseudonymous man on the internet. And it's like he catches a rash of crap for things that someone who's pseudonymous or completely anonymous uh doesn't. You know, you're when your name is not known, you're somewhat immunized from certain types of attacks. And I've always been pseudonymous on the internet. We did one of early episodes talking about pseudonymity, like what's the difference between that sort of conduct is there a Christian implication to it in various things. And for my purposes, I just as I said before I was doxed and after I was doxed, there's nothing about my background that

18:20 if you know that, it's going to really tell you anything more about me. Like whatever it is that I have to say is put out there. Like here's what I think. I don't have a credential to back it up. Take it or leave it. And so Corey and I were both observing the same problems in the church, and because I wasn't yet I wasn't public to the point of like using my my voice, and so I knew that that would be the sort of thing that could potentially get me doxxed. And I didn't want it for the aggravation and also for the sake of you know extended family. I don't have I don't have a wife or kids or anything, so like it's not gonna hurt me personally but it's still disruptive to people you know when someone's coming after you the way they

19:04 you know they come after Corey. So there was no upside, there was only downside. And so for that reason, although we knew for a while that we wanted to do a podcast, like I don't know if we wanted to. We knew that it was inevitable we were going to have to. And I was kind of waiting to put that off as long as possible. And towards the end of the middle of 2022, certain things were happening in the LCMS that made it clear that this our hands were gonna be forced. And so we'd start talking a little more seriously about the idea behind starting a podcast and like what will we approach? and we finally decided to pull the trigger and we were gonna begin October 21st, 2022, which was uh you know Reformation Day.

19:48 And that a couple of things happened a few weeks before that, and like, okay, we're gonna push it up a couple of weeks and so we kinda just hit the ground running. So we never wanted to have a podcast. We felt that our hands were forced because there were things were being that were happening in the church and in the world that were that were either being not addressed correctly, were being misaddressed, or were being covered up by people who should have known better. And we both been sitting here listening to some other guys in the same space who should have they certainly do know what's going on, but they either didn't have the aptitude, the courage, or the the ability to speak up and say the things we knew that

20:25 we could say. And so finally we're like, you know what, no one else is gonna do this. We're gonna have to. And so that was really the genesis of Stone Choir. And hence the name of you know the stones crying out. Corey. And that essentially covered it. That we really figured that if there were men currently in this space, if we take the term more generally, so the Christian right, say, who took up the mantle and addressed these issues, then we wouldn't necessarily have to do so. That was not happening with many of the issues. You can tell from some of the topics we've covered on the podcast we're covering things that other men are simply not covering, particularly Christian men. Which is one of One of the problems that we were seeking

21:11 to address is that some of these issues were being discussed on the political right, but they were being discussed from an atheist framework, not from a Christian framework. And It's necessary to address them from a Christian framework for a number of reasons, but two of the most salient reasons to do it from a Christian perspective is so that other Christian men know these are issues about which Christian men can speak in the public sphere. And so that those who look at the church with a little bit of apprehension, perhaps, or disdain in some cases, realize there are actual Christian men who care about these issues and can speak about them truthfully and forcefully, as opposed to what we hear from

21:53 far too many pulpits these days. So when you when you stepped up to do this, um again specifically when you say the church, you're talking about the the Lutheran church as opposed to just Christendom more broadly? When I say the church in this case, I'm talking about the church, uppercase C, the whole church. The Lutheran church specifically we have problems that we are addressing in the Lutheran church, particularly in the American context, although the problems are similar in other parts of the world that have Lutheran churches as well. But But I mean the church more generally. I mean all Christian men. Okay. Yeah, I I think certainly there there are probably a lot of men listening and a lot of men out there today that

22:36 can relate to that feeling of seeing that there's something wrong, more than one thing, saying that there's many things wrong, then no one is speaking about it, especially on the right from in any sort of impactful way, and the ones who are are speaking about it from an atheist or an even pagan perspective and wondering where are the Christian men speaking up on behalf of these things in the world and the church. So I think a lot of men, myself included, actually can relate to that. So but when you s when you started didn't when you started doing it, did you anticipate ahead of time the road that would be ahead? Would and some of the things that we'll get into with the Lutheran church obviously is a big part of that, but did you

23:14 un anticipate running into the headwinds? Like or did you count the cost, I suppose? Absolutely. Yes, we both knew it was coming. Yeah. I w one of the things in the in the episode that I mentioned, it was called Name No Man's Nose, where this we did this, I think, in November of 2022. It was about six months before I was doxxed. It was basically my response to being doxed and I said in that episode, I know at some point I'm gonna get doxed because of this show because I say the same things in person to pastors and other people in the con in the in the church that I was gonna say on Stone Choir. I'm not secretive about this. And so I knew before I had Ben Docks that eventually that would happen in punishment for speaking at these things.

23:57 And the specific topics that we address is that it was actually the subject of this week's show just yesterday, the target selection. How do we pick the things that we want to discuss? And so we knew that we were primarily going to be taught talking we were We were primarily going to touch on hot button issues, not because we want to stir up controversy or or be dramatic or a pain in the butt, but simply because there are things happening in the world. Satan is on the move and everyone sees that. Unbelievers, believers, everyone sees that. And what we have found over the last number of years before we started was that many in the church were doing a worse job of identifying the spiritual undertones to the attacks relative to even

24:44 pagans and unbelievers. Guys who have no basis whatsoever in the church church can see Satan on the move in the things that happened in the summer of 2020 and all the surrounding events. People without any church background are like, this is evil. This stuff that's happening is telling me that there must be a Satan. And if there's a Satan, then there's got to be a God. And so those guys who are not Christians or who you know had left the church are like I see this sort of evil in the world, real spiritual evil, not just mean people, not just bad politics, actual malevolence of a spiritual nature, non materialist. Guys who had been materialists would see that. It was their first introduction in some cases to spiritual ideas of

25:25 anything. I mean their first discovery was there's something that, you know, we call Satan. I know that there's this group of people to talk about Satan, let me go see what they have to say. And what they were seeing in from the church was the same sorts of things are being said in the world about race, about sex, about everything. You know, write down the list where you have, you know, I frequently talk about like the MSMBC talking points of worldly, you know, the the global religion, the things that the DEI programs, the things that HR departments say are the same things that the church is saying. And they're both talking about them in moral terms. And so one of the reasons that we started the show is

26:04 that we have these guys who should like these are the primary objects of the gospel. This is these are the people to whom every church in the country should be reaching out, saying, Hey, you're looking for God. You might not even know it, but you're looking for God right now because you're seeing evil. We know We know the other side and it's infinitely more powerful than things that have you scared enough that you're looking for them. And yet we don't see that in our churches. We see the opposite. We see our own churches all of them, not one particular denomination is I agree completely with Corey, like although we in some cases focus principally on LCMS and general confessional Lutheran questions, fundamentally it's about

26:42 all the conservative denominations was really just is is shorthand for the actual Christian denominations. Because the you know the mainstream churches fundamentally aren't Christian at all. Even though there's some Christians in them, their doctrine is completely antichrist. And it's more aligned with the world even than what the conservative denominations are doing. But as a means of outreach, when we try to reach guys who are who are embracing paganism because it seems trad, it's like, well, I know that white people used to do good stuff and they used to worship trees, so I'm gonna worship trees. And we and we try say that's d no, no, no, let let's start from the beginning. There's a lot more going on that you're missing.

27:21 And there's virtually no one in the church who will talk to those men in ways that don't call them in ways that don't lie about the world. Because there are things in the world, you know, subjects of race, of of sex, of headship that are controversial because believing the right things about them necessarily causes you to have to denounce the state of the world, of politics, of of everything we see around us. You have to say this is bad and there's actually a scriptural basis for why I can say that say that. So our hands were forced because the church was failing. And we saw like the laundry list of all the issues that we would have to tackle. And like, yeah, like this we know we're going to be going

28:02 right downtown, right over target, where all the maximum amount of anti-aircraft is gonna be. We're gonna be flying low and we're gonna be bombing the crap out of the things that are the most important to Satan. So yeah, we knew it was gonna cause trouble. And we did it anyway. It wasn't to cause trouble. It wasn't to be controversial. It was because this is where the fight is. Satan has picked this battle and all we can do is show up and fight it. so then maybe I want to back up a little bit and say, you know, as I as I've listened listened through the episodes, uh I I hear like we started uh in uh I think you said October 22, 2022 when you started Stone Choir and also from twenty twenty when sort of the George Floyd riots happened and

28:45 that was a big awakening for a lot of people. But maybe we can go uh just a little bit further back because Well, I've heard you talk a little bit about your background and sort of your theological evolution, sort of the questions that you didn't ask that you then started asking at one point in time that led you to a place where you had I g in many ways the answers that men have been looking for. What started so maybe let's go back pre your meeting or pre, you know, even pre-2020, what was the what was the path leading for both of you men to the point where you could cross paths in the first place? I think in some ways it started with our engagement with the political and not And not necessarily overtly in Christian terms.

29:25 You know, when I first got on Twitter in twenty seventeen, I wasn't talking about being a Christian. I've always been a Christian, but like it was never it wasn't something I talked to people about. It wasn't something I I was consciously embarrassed of, but it was like that's the Sunday stuff. You know, I I did what everybody does where you sequester your private little Christian personal beliefs and you don't upset anybody by bringing them up. It's like, you know, once in a while stuff will come up. And I I wouldn't embarrass about it. I I remember having lunch with coworkers, you know, 10 years ago, you know, talking ironically, one of the only guys that I worked with that I had agreement with was a Muslim.

30:01 Cause you know, we both we both agreed that there was a God. We agreed that there was a flood. And so I remember one day we were having lunch and like we were the only two that had any any sort of spiritual basis for anything. And everyone else is just completely materialist. Those like it's you sometimes find strange friends in the world. But I was never evangelistic about anything. And so when I got online started talking about politics, it's It took me a year or two of addressing political issues, addressing kind of I began to realize in my in my own own mind that the things that we were seeing in the political sphere ultimately weren't going to have political solutions. I say ultimately, like there there are things that have to be

30:45 done politically. But if you don't understand the spiritual undertones, you're gonna make poor political decisions. There are things that you have to understand about the creator before you can understand creation. And politics is fundamentally about creation. So there's stewardship, there are things we have to do in creation, but absent knowledge of God, we're not gonna do nearly as good of job. And so as I was talking about online with guys about politics, I started realizing more and more that I was having to talk about religion. I was having to say, wait a minute, I remember when I was, you know, a kid when I was being catechized, there was something about, you know, some small aspect of it.

31:25 And so I kind of almost evangelized myself initially just from my catechesis as a teenager. as I was talking politically, I realized no I I need God to answer some of these questions. And that was a for m for me kind of a personal transformation of just realizing I'm wasting my time talking about politics because ultimately it's not going to help any of these people because we can't necessarily win the political battles, but we have to do what's right in God's eyes and then let him take care of the rest. And that's not in any way a we lose down here attitude. It's just let's put the first thing first. And so that was my transition. I I eventually, you know, rebranded online. I I more or less stopped talking about political stuff.

32:06 Not that I don't care, but that I realized until we shore up the spiritual, everything else is going to continue to be in shambles. Because if you just want to debate politics, well then pagans have an equal seat at that table and you know, I'm I'm not necessarily going to win an argument with them from principle principle if I can't talk about the supernatural. So we just I took everything one step back so I could get to the foundational level and then be confident I was going to be on firm ground as I tackled all these other things. And ultimately that's the only place where these answers can be found. Mm-hmm. I think you're you're mirroring a journey that a lot of men have gone on over the past certainly myself, over the past

32:45 four years, but some men less time, some men more, the recognition that there there is no that that the answers the the problems that we're struggling with at this moment in sort of human history, while they appear on the surface to be political or economic or cultural, that they're actually spirit fundamentally spiritual questions. I think a lot of people, men in particular and women as well in their own way, have been pushed, have been pushed to that point, um, looking beyond themselves or beyond material means for answers. Um I can relate to that very much. So Corey, that was it similar for you? I I get the sense that you've been a little bit more openly online for a little bit longer. To some degree, yes, with some of these things, and largely I

33:25 was also focused on politics. I did political science as my main undergraduate degree, so I've been focused on that sort of thing for quite some time. And I worked in politics for a while, not as the front man, but behind the scenes. I did get out the vote efforts and organization and all that stuff in a handful of different states. I guess people can probably guess for which party, as much as I don't like them sometimes. But really, I started taking Christianity, my faith more seriously. Because I've been a Christian my entire life. I was raised in a Christian family. My parents are still married. They're both Christian. I was baptized by my father in a church. He's not a pastor, but that was something they permitted fathers to

34:07 do at that church. I was not, however, raised Lutheran. I've mentioned it before. I was sort of half-not even really half, but half Lutheran, half non-domin non-denominational, which really means Baptist in the U.S. context, because I attended an LCMS school, but I went to a non-denominational church. Then my parents eventually switched churches and we wound up going to a church that technically historically was Lutheran, but it's the Covenant Church, which is now basically non-denominational, thankfully one of the the good ones under that umbrella, not one of the more lefty ones. But I really didn't pay that much attention to theology and doctrine all of these various things, because I was more focused on politics

34:53 and philosophy and those, because those were the things that I was doing in, like I said, undergrad. But I started to take Christianity more seriously again, probably a little while after I graduated law school, so probably right around 2013, and then I read a lot of theology, a lot of the relevant literature in this area. And I didn't actually start with Lutheranism. I started with the Reform, because by and large, we have a fairly largely reformed context here in the United States, if we take the term very broadly, because even the Baptists are sort of at the edge of the Reformed umbrella. And so I read a lot of the Reformed theology first, and I read through a lot of other things as well, not just

35:42 Reformed and Lutheran, but I eventually got around to reading the Lutherans. Perhaps some will think that's odd that I would end with reading the Lutherans because as a German from a Lutheran background you think I'd start there, but I didn't. And so it wasn't until really about twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen when I started to read a lot of the Lutheran materials. And that's when I officially joined an LCMS congregation and started to take Lutheranism more seriously because I was convinced by the Book of Concord, by Luther, by the arguments from the Lutheran divines that this is a correct interpretation, a correct exegesis of scripture. And so that's when I started to take that seriously.

36:26 However, I did not immediately launch into teaching or anything like that. I took the admonitions of scripture seriously that if you are a new convert, as it were, you are not supposed to immediately stand up and start speaking publicly. And so in twenty twenty I created a separate Twitter account to discuss theology and Lutheranism and things like that. That's my Mahler LCMS account. My other one is from twenty twelve, I believe, it's much older, but that's when I really started discussing Lutheranism and theology and Christianity publicly. I'd been discussing politics and things like that publicly for a decade at that point, if not longer But that is when I sort of came to the same conclusions

37:12 as Wo. It's not I'm not disagreeing with what Woe said, but I am putting a nuance on it. There is a political solution to all of our problems. But the problem is we both see what kind of political solution that is if it is not a Christian one. And that's not a road that anyone should want to go down. Amen. That's an ug that's an ugly road. And so we need We need to have a Christian political right if we are going to accomplish anything that's worth accomplishing. Because you can achieve victory in a completely materialistic, atheistic way. You can absolutely win like that. It's not a victory that's worth having. And so there are issues with regard to morality, religion, these other things. These tie into politics, but they're absolutely necessary in order to

38:01 have the kind of political movement that actually achieves something worth achieving. And also, as Well was saying, part of it is just helping all of the men in our society who are essentially lost. They're wandering through life with no purpose. They hate everything because it seems like everything hates them, and in fact, in many cases, that's true. But those are the men to whom the church should be reaching out, and the church is not. And so part of what we're doing is reaching out to those men. And yes, of course, if you can get these men who are atomized, who are Separated from everything in their life and from their culture, from their family, from their history. If you can get them into a group they know cares about

38:46 them, you can actually achieve things both with regard to the churches and also with regard to the political sphere. It's not that it's a mercenary attempt to organize things, it's that this is the truth and it matters. Even if you don't wind up with political successes, that's a separate topic perhaps, these things matter because these are ultimate things. These determine where you spend your eternity. And so the politics, the political sphere, the left-hand kingdom is vitally important. We'll never minimize the importance of the left hand kingdom. But you have to get things right in the right hand kingdom as well. And we both started looking around roughly the same time at the right hand kingdom and found that it's in worse shape than the

39:31 left hand kingdom, which is almost impressive considering how bad our politics are these days. And so the churches have we have to clean house because no one has done it for a century and things have just been allowed to rot and decay and fall apart. And that's why we see men leaving the churches in droves and not returning. Except for now, since we finally have some men who are preaching and teaching the truth, we do see other men returning to the churches, which is what is necessary. You can't have a church that is nothing but women. That's not a church. That's a gossip club. Amen. I I appreciate you uh calling out that there's an ugly road ahead that nobody wants. and the reason why I appreciate you saying that is because um

40:14 in fact I was just listening the last episode that I had a chance to really dig into in any depth with s the the slander episode And one of the things, uh, I think I might have gotten about a third of the way through it. So one of the things that um seems to have happened here, at least in the way that I've heard people speak about your podcast, is painting you uh both as men that I uh from listening to the podcast itself that I don't think you are. Um or at least not in so far as I've listened. Uh and and to hear you say things like that, like this is a road that no one wants to take, 'cause what's the first slander that al that always always that always gets thrown at anybody whenever they try, particularly a man whenever he tries to speak

40:53 up for biblical fidelity against what we might call the post-war consensus. Right? He gets he gets tarred with a lot of different names, but one of them implies like violent radical, right? Uh wanting to take up wanting to take up like J6, right? Something like that. And uh go ahead. The term is always Nazi, yes. Yeah, I mean, yes. I mean it uh to the extent that's true, and I think that there's other words that are used to kind of point in that direction, but essentially yes, like not racist is one misogynist. There's a whole universe of terms that Satan uses and abuses to slander men who are just speaking biblical truths. Yes. Yeah. And I and I think the thing that they focus particularly on

41:33 uh culturally today is uh the the physical violence, specifically because the big weapon that's used to silence men is is uh hatred of men's anger. Right. so what they do is they shame men's righteous anger and and hatred, which is one of the episodes I listened to today as well, and by by accusing men preemptively of violence. And so men, you know, aren't they they aren't necessarily inclined to that level of violence so they shut down so they to avoid the slander. So you saying that very at the very start that no one wants that ugly path immediately cuts off any notion that like anyone talking on this call is talking about violent revolution. Because that that's always the first thing. That's what uh January 6th was, one way or another.

42:16 It was like, look at all these horrible people doing this violent thing to our poor sacred capital. Right. And it's like that's not what anyone's necessarily advocating for, though like something like that, you know, from from the outside might be inevitable depending on you know, where we go with the conversation. Like just talking about the threats that America is facing from within coming over the border and from without, but that's another topic. But I think it's important to say that we as men can speak up for theological truth. And though that has a quality of aggressiveness to it, the spiritual aggress aggressiveness does not imply physical aggressiveness. And I think those two get confused very easily.

42:54 We've been very clear that it is the duty of the Christian prince to wield the sword. And that does, of course, include violence, because that is the nature of a sword. A sword solves problems only one way. And Lutherans, we have, of course the Magdeburg Confession when it comes to speaking of things like Rebellion, revolution, resisting a higher authority who is abusing his office. And there are different levels, and there are different things that are permissible depending on what is being done, because the things that are being done ultimately are being done against God, and we see instances of that in scripture and men will stand up and do what is necessary. There is a serious problem in the church when it comes to

43:39 speaking about violence. Part of it is our culture, and part of it is because there's always the looming threat of the FBI knocking down your door or just no knock raiding you. But the reality is that if you are arguing that violence is not at all part of the Christian tradition, then you're no longer a Christian, you're an anabaptist. Yeah. The radical kind of Anabaptist. Which there's some irony there because they were actually so violent that the emperor had to call in the troops to quell a rebellion, basically burn a city to the ground. But that aside, they are the ones who try to argue, particularly we have some of the modern versions of the Mennonites and others. They're basically pacifists.

44:18 You cannot be a Christian and a pacifist. One, it's accusing God of sin. You're trying to be more moral than God, which is always sin, because you cannot be more moral than morality itself. But many of the instances where you have a Theophany or a Christophany, particularly in the Old Testament, God is enacting violence on his enemies. You can think of Sodom and Gomorrah, you can think of the conquest of Canaan, you can think of what God did to the Egyptians. God is not a pacifist. God destroys his enemies. This is one of those things, and this comes perhaps from some of the political background, but it's something that we used to recognize in theology as well. Ultimately, all of this rests on God's infinite ability to bring infinite

45:07 violence against those who oppose him. That is the basis of God's authority. If God could not destroy his enemies, he wouldn't be God. And the way that he destroys them is metaphorically, figuratively with the sword. He has better things at his disposal, certainly. He can send fire and brimstone and locusts and any number of other things on you. But God's power rests upon his infinite power to bring violence against his enemies. And so if we're going to condemn violence in a blanket sense as Christians, we're condemning God. That's sin. We can't do that. Which is this is one of those things that we bring up so many times in the podcast. Modern morality, we could put that in scare quotes, but modern morality

45:54 attempts to argue that there's this list of things that you can't do. Oh, we're so much more enlightened than our ancestors, and these things were wicked and evil. Almost every single thing on the list is something that God has done or told us to do. And so what they're doing is they're accusing God of sin. They're announcing their own apostasy. You cannot believe the things that the modern world tells you to believe and stay a Christian. That's why we have episodes, for instance, on slavery. You can't say that slavery is per se sinful and be a Christian. Because God makes regulations for it. God gives Abraham slaves. God cannot sin. What God does isn't sin. So if God gives someone slaves, slavery cannot be sin.

46:37 These are just things that people ignore. They're right there in Scripture, which is one of the things that Woe and I do. We pay attention when we read. If you just pay attention to Scripture while you're reading, many of these things have answers, explicit answers in scripture, sometimes very slightly implicit. For instance, when it comes to polygyny, you have to read through the full story of David and Bathsheba to realize God offers David more wives. Well that's polygyny. That's God offering a man additional wives. You can't say it's sin because you're accusing God of sin. But you have to pay attention when you read that passage and not just gloss over it. There's a difference between staring at a book and hallucinating and actually

47:23 reading it. And that's why we keep trying to emphasize to men they need to read scripture. You can't just stare at the Bible. You don't get credit for trying. You have to actually read the thing. Because God is speaking to you through his word. But you have to read what he actually wrote, what he had other men write. Yes. Yes, I mean I I talk to uh argue with the polygyny bros on social media all the time, particularly on Instagram. Um I agree with you that I I um in so far as like God does offer David uh multiple wives, and there are biblical characters throughout the Old Testament in particular that uh that have multiple wives. But I what uh the point that I try to make to men is like that's not normative.

48:06 Like to mistake to mistake the behavior of David and Solomon and these other men, you know, throughout scripture, like what I tell the polygyny bros today is like, bro, you can't get one wife. Like let's hold off on the talking about the the multiple wives thing. Right? Yes. Well it's it's the difference between something being morally permissible and something being wise. Sure. Which we've emphasized that many times. It is almost always unwise to have multiple wives. Right. One of the major exceptions, and it's one of the places you see in scripture, is the king. It makes sense for a king to have multiple wives for a number of reasons. One, of course, is the most obvious. Ensuring he has an heir.

48:45 That's an important thing to do. That became a major problem in the Reformation in England. If he had just taken additional wives without killing his previous wives or divorcing them, etc., you would have had fewer problems. But of course the Pope didn't, which was a big part of the problem. It makes sense for certain men to have multiple wives. So the king, it makes sense. For most men, you are just inviting strife into your home. Look at what happens with some of the men in the Bible who engaged in polygyny, it the most obvious example is perhaps Solomon who went way overboard and destroyed himself and his kingdom in the process. Just because something is morally permissible does not mean that you

49:24 should do it in any given situation. What we're arguing when we argue over something like polygyny or slavery isn't that you have to legalize it and we should absolutely engage in this is a good thing. It's the difference between saying you are permitted morally to do this and on the other side saying no, this is sin. Because when you say no, this is sin, again, you're accusing God of sin. So you have to refute that. You have to reject that argument. And many men have trouble drawing that distinction, that difference between permissibility and wisdom. Some of our enemies, of course, are just conflating the truth the two because they're malicious. But there are those who just don't grasp that distinction.

50:07 And it's vitally important because God does not always say you must. Sometimes he says you may. Mm-hmm. Yes. Yes. And I think What this all points to is that speaking the clear truth of scripture, what it says about men and women, and as you guys talk about in the podcast, what it says about race, what it says about all of these subjects that are so deeply confrontational to our modern political era, our modern political uh ethics such as they are, is is the part where that gets very scary to people. It gets very frightening because it truthfully turns our entire wicked age on its head and our wicked age is standing on its head anyway. So it writes thing it writes the ship. But people will look at that and they will feel very deeply

50:57 confronted by those ideas and that confrontation, that feeling of being confronted by the truth leads to fear. And fear puts people in this kind of flight or uh fight or flight state, right? Being confronted with the truth. And their thought immediately goes to the idea of violence. Uh and and this is this is how discuss this is why the FBI gets involved. This is why these no knock raids get involved, is because you have people speaking up for biblical truth. The truth is in a sense violence. The truth is aggressive to lies. And when we live in an era that is built upon a foundation of lies, naturally people are going to draw that conclusion. And I think it's important to speak to that conclusion right away

51:40 in order to set the ground to approach truth at all. Because if you if you think about how dumbed down people have gotten, the inability to see that simple distinction between must and may, that very simple, like must do this set of things. You may do this set of things. People just don't get that. But if we were to rewind the clock, I don't know how far do you want how far back do you want to go? People would understand that distinction. So in this dumbed-down environment where people can't understand these fine distinctions between what scripture says our behavior as humans should be and could be, people don't get that. So they're naturally going to jump immediately to fear and naturally naturally

52:16 to the kind of response that they didn't the people who are trying to tell them the truth. And so that's why it's important to set this ground of rash, we'll call it rationality, to say, look, we're talking about things that will feel very confronting. And that's okay. Whoa, you said uh I think it was in uh it was in one of the episodes today, that you don't give much regard to your emotions. And I really appreciated that 'cause I can relate to it. So maybe maybe you can s you can speak to that point in particular because not giving regard to your emotional response, to our emotional response to a fact is so crucial to navigate through that. So maybe you can maybe you can unpack that a little

52:54 bit. My personal approach has always been just try to get things right. I it's it it's more important to me to be right than pretty much anything else. And it I don't say that in any sort of idolatrous fashion. It's just the truth for me is is the root, the truth of whatever. And then when I look at the truth about whatever, if it I don't like it or if it doesn't make me feel good, okay, whatever. That's the truth too. Sometimes the truth that I read in the Bible is that I'm a poor miserable sinner. I read through passages and like, yep, this is a laundry list of all the crap I was doing and it's disgusting. But I don't look at it and try to find some excuse for how that was contextual to the you know, the the climate

53:40 in that day and it doesn't apply to me and so I'm not actually a sinner. No, I'm absolutely a sinner. And God knew it and He wrote about it and I look at it and so the fact that you know maybe it doesn't make me feel good is is secondary, the fact that it's true. And I think that you know you're talking about people having emotional responses to many of the things that we talk about, a lot of that is fundamentally rooted in just the pure feminization of all of Western culture, where it is terrifying not to be a member of the crowd. And this is particularly acute, I think, in the church, because Christians are already inherently on the outs with the world to some extent because you know there's you kind of have to believe in the

54:23 supernatural to be a Christian, although plenty really don't anymore. But you're already sort of on the edge of the cusp of permissibility in the public sphere. And then if you say things like sodomy is a sin Or, you know, things like maybe girls shouldn't go to college, and maybe you can make a scriptural argument for that. Suddenly, if you're making a moral argument from scripture, so you're talking as a Christian, all the other Christians who are fitting in with MSMBC and with their HR departments five minutes ago, you show up and say, hey, this thing out over here, this is actually a sin too. That is a threat because they are then being forced to choose between a moral principle, a question of truth, and continuing to fit

55:07 in with the herd. And so it's mercenary self-defense that there's this visceral fear and hatred and all these emotions that are brought to bear against whatever guy is speaking up and saying, Hey, this is what God actually says. And you see that everywhere in scripture. The prophets would show up from God and say, Hey, this is what God actually says. And generally they were killed. People got mad, they got offended, they was disruptive to their worlds, and so the easy thing to do is you kill the guy. And Corey and I are not prophets. We don't need to be. We have the Bible. But w to whatever extent there's a difference between us and other men's, it's just like Corey said, I read it and you know,

55:46 sometimes I like I'll read something that I've glossed over fifty times and then for whatever reason on a particular day I read it, I'm like, oh wow, I this I I'm making a connection now to something in my life or to something in the world that's real. Like it's it's not some it's not some wild fantasy version. It's like it slaps you in the face. Sometimes the Holy Spirit slaps you in the face and says, This right here, this is what's important. And you know, as part of the the the episode we did this week where we're talking about target selection, one of the things that Corey and I are good at doing is just listening to what the anime the enemy is upset about when guys start screaming about things that we didn't even think were that interesting.

56:28 Like Corey and I have talked a lot about race and we hate the subject. It's dumb, it's boring, it's tedious. I would really like never have to talk about it for the rest of my life. I don't find it interesting. But the enemy gets a vote. And so when the world is saying you can't do this for religious reasons, for moral reasons, that's when we pay attention. And that's where the you know, that's where the truth versus popularity thing comes into. Is it going to stink if you say the opposite of what the world says? Yeah, probably. And I think one of the hard things for a lot of guys who maybe don't have a tremendous amount of aptitude in this space is that there are certain people that just want to be disagreeable

57:11 for its own sake is opposition defiant disorder. You're just going to do the opposite of whatever people are saying. And that's not at all what we're articulating. We try to listen and understand why is race important. And we have an answer for that. We have an answer that's scriptural. We have an answer that's rooted in the entirety of the history of humanity. And we can make the case for why m race is an issue today. We can put that in the context on the timeline and clearly explain to anyone who will listen. You mentioned the the slander episode. There are three types of people in the world. There's the type the people who've never heard of Stone Choir before, which is most of your audience, just virtually everyone on the planet,

57:49 and then there's the small number of people who've just listened 'cause they were recommended by friends and they check it out and some think it's interesting. And then there's a set of people who've never listened to a word that we say, but they've entertained all the slander against us. And that goes back to you were talking about the the words that are used for men who are gonna step outside the boundary of permissible discourse. You get tarred with all those brushes to make you untouchable, which is fundamentally what we are. Corey and I have been rendered untouchable by the slander, not by what we say, but by what is said about us and then what is entertained by those who listen to it.

58:28 And it's part of life. Like it's it's not a complaint. it's shameful for those who've participated because when people actually listen, they enjoy it. And if you've never heard anything about us, a lot of people are gonna enjoy it. And if you don't enjoy it, like it's just because you're bored, you don't find it interesting, but you would never conclude all the terrible things that are said about us by the slanders. And so that that sort of defamation and cutting out of the herd we did an episode on the the uh enemies playbook, that those those are Alinsky's rules. You pick people out who are causing a problem and you cut them off for the hurt so they have no support. That's basically where we're left.

59:04 There is a huge number of people in our audience that I know for a fact listen that we'll like never publicly acknowledge it because it would cost them something. And that's fine. Like I get that. But that those are the stakes. The the that's the message to everyone. We are so far outside of the bounds of what's permissible, not because we say anything that's bad or mean or false, certainly, but we're saying the things that the world says you can't say. And for us, that's just the roadmap. If there's a set of things that the world says you can you can have your your pride parade, you can do all these wicked things, but you can't do this. When someone with a moral compass that not only broken but inverted

59:46 points away from these things, that's where we know we need to go take a look. And that doesn't mean you automatically do the opposite, but you have to look, and what we find is that every one of those things is basically a roadmap for obedience to God. It's because you were slandered that I discovered your podcast in the first place. Uh one of our mutuals uh named Nick, he uh he posted on Twitter, he said uh something, how's everyone enjoying the podcast that none of us are supposed to be listening to something words along those lines. And I was like I d wasn't quite sure what that was. I think I I think I had probably heard something like that. So I messaged him and uh and then he sent me he

1:00:26 sent me the show and uh you know I don't know that I have uh uh maybe you call it opposition defiant disorder, but uh my general response is if if I see all the people who I don't like or that I dislike, you know, dogpiling on some b something, my tendency is like, well, what is it what is this thing that they're all dogpiling on? Because they're so wrong they're so wrong about everything else. Let me go check out what's going on here. So that was ultimately my introduction my introduction to your work because I felt that um I felt that you guys deserted deserved a fair hearing for who you actually were. Um and so I went and I listened with really no preconceived notions. It's just my experience is that uh whenever you know the

1:01:07 the uh the people let's say let's say let's say the people that I dislike uh all start dogpiling on somebody it's almost never as bad as they say it is. It's uh it's actively an attempt to slander, to drive away and uh and I go walking towards that. And um I've I've appreciated listening to the episodes and and also now speaking to you both and getting to hear the background behind it because I can relate very much to the showing up in the in the church, like the I guess the capital C church in a way, and coming from the world and seeing all of these problems that are so out there. Like I came in from the secular world and I was like just getting all the all the dirt off that's out there. And I come walking into the church and I'm like, it's in

1:01:53 here too. What are you guys doing? You guys are supposed to have the truth. What are you doing? And so I can relate very much to the impulse to uh well uh there's no one around here who's saying anything about it. I guess we're the guys. Uh and and I can also relate very much to the counting the cost part of that, um, part of that as well. And so now the it's kind of starting to make kind of starting to make a little bit of sense. Um not that it didn't before, but it's making a lot of sense to understand, you know, the the feeling of this is wrong, this is not scriptural, God has something to say about this. I think you I believe one of you said, um, politics is about creation and start putting all the pieces together and say, Okay,

1:02:35 we're going to we're gonna do this. We're going to lean into this and we're going to push through this in the hopes that maybe you could reach out and connect with the I think you said the young men that you really want to re reach. And so that's that's the next set of questions that I want to ask is because I was just at the new Christendom conference, the Building Christian Boroughs Conference in Ogden, Utah about two weeks ago. And uh one of the things that was very apparent to me uh was first of all, the room was full of mostly young men. And when I say young I say under the age of forty. So maybe peaking between, you know, twenty five and and thirty five, but certainly younger between twenty and twenty five and then older

1:03:11 like quote unquote older from like thirty five to forty with their families and stuff like that. I don't know that I saw many men in the room who were over the age of 40, right? I don't think it's just what it is. And but I think the reason why that particular conference and the speakers there had such appeal is there were so many young so many young men Who are aware of the subjects that you guys talk about, um and seeing pagans talk about these subjects very boldly, being very wrong in their foundations, but speaking about them very boldly and also drawing bad conclusions. Um Um and they see this and they're longing for anyone inside their churches to say these things or to even explore the topics

1:03:52 instead of like shoving it in the closet and tucking it away, which seems to be the approach of basically every church out there, almost every church out there right now. So when you started the podcast, given both of your individual journeys, how you met, et cetera, w did you set out to say, you know, we're trying to reach out to um I guess I'll use the word disaffected men, or was it more like these are the subjects that we're gonna explore because we have the capacity to do so? Like did you know who you wanted to talk to or did you know what you wanted to talk about, or perhaps both? I would say that it's both of those just because the Venn diagram is practically a circle. The topics that need to be covered are going to have an

1:04:34 interest for those men who would be targeting anyway. If we were deliberately targeting them, we'd talk about these subjects. By talking about these subjects, we are targeting them. So it's just sort of a natural consequence of the things that we are addressing. Because the men who have the capacity to deal with these issues are the very men that we need in the church, and also the very men who have, for the last century or so, been driven out of the churches. Which is why the churches are in the state they're in, because again, they're all run by women and effeminate men. That is not a recipe for a successful organization of any kind, particularly not for the church. And that's why again, so many young men despise the churches because

1:05:22 all they have seen is weak pastors who get pushed around by the women in their congregations and then they go and preach lies just to double down on how reprehensible they are. There's no good reason any man would ever join that. You can look, even if you were convinced fully by scripture that God is real, that scripture is true, why would you join one of those churches? The only reason you join one of those churches is if you have someone Have someone giving you the correct information, teaching you correctly with regard to Christianity and what the Christian faith actually holds, and then you view the churches as a battlefield because the churches need to be taken back, the same as the state, the same as

1:06:07 the secular realm. Because Satan has conquered them by and large, particularly the mainline churches. But the conservative churches, so called, aren't safe either. They are also in terrible shape. We have many churches that are supposedly conservative. We just saw this with the Southern Baptist Convention particularly, they're just the most recent example but many supposedly conservative churches are effectively ordaining women. Even the ones who don't permit women to get up behind the pulpit if they have a pulpit and preach, are letting women do things where they are effectively in the office of pastor. They are acting as if they were ordained. They are in some cases doing things where they're basically ordained.

1:06:52 In the LCMS we have the problem with deaconesses, the way that that is connected, it makes it seem like they're ordained. Now the conservatives in the LCMS will deny that up one side and down the other, but the reality is what they are presenting to the world and what they are instilling in these young women and other women by proxy, is that women can do whatever men can do. This is the groundwork for ordaining women. Now they may never get around to actually ordaining women so long as they haven't had a split, that is probably coming if this continues on the current trajectory. But it doesn't matter. If you let women and others who are not supposed to be in that office, do all the things the office does, you've effectively

1:07:38 ordained women. Right. And so there's no reason for men to join those churches because you have an HR department at your work probably. They're obnoxious enough. Why would you elect to have another one in your life? Because that's all most modern churches are. It's a bunch of effeminate men who are going to tell you, well, you can't do that because it's mean instead of defending the truth. It's as if pastors have just completely forgotten that there is a stricter judgment awaiting them. That's right. You don't become pastor because it's comfortable. You become a pastor because you have the aptitude for it and you believe you have been called to it, and then there are certain restrictions, somewhat stringent restrictions on your life going forward, and there

1:08:21 are requirements for what you must do in that office, and if you do not live up to them, the stricter judgment awaits. They should fear, and they don't. And I think a big part of the reason that you see rooms full of guys under forty all invigorated and passionate about facing in the same direction, and in many cases just trying to figure these things out together, is that unfortunately what passes for bold leadership in the conservative churches is being anti sodomy and anti-abortion. And they won't even call it sodomy. They'll say, oh, they're I'm anti-LGBTQ because that's bad for people. But they won't call it sodomy. They won't even call it homosexuality. So they will adopt the frame of the wicked world and then

1:09:08 they'll say, but that's sin. And then you ask, well, what kind of sin is it? And that was part of the controversy with the large catechism last year for the LCMS, was basically taking things like sodomy and raping children and putting it in the same bucket as looking at a girl in a machining if you're not married to her. Yeah. That sort of equivocation is revolting to to younger men and using the same definition as you, like you know, basically m millennials and younger, that's revolting. It's obviously not an actual bold confession. It's an excuse to sort of stand on the street corner and pretend to be a Christian who's actually deeply rooted when you just picked a single point on the battlefield when there's all these other

1:09:51 places where they are in complete agreement with the very same sodomites that they're condemning for that particular sin. But they agree with them politically about everything else. And so it's young men almost exclusively that can clearly see that there are a lot of people in the church in leadership positions who are hoaxes, they're frauds. They can say, Oh, I'm I'm so bold, I'm so politically involved, I'm so passionate because I condemn abortion. Really? Sacrificing babies to Satan you think is a bold confession? That's not even table stakes. That's it it's inhuman for that to even be a question. So you don't get any points for being anti abortion. But that issue for the last fifty years has given a lot

1:10:33 of guys who are complete cowards, complete feminists, cover for all the other things that they're pushing. And as long as once a year they'll go to the pro life rally, they can say, look how bold my stand is. It's garbage. And so when Corey and I come along and we'll point fingers at every single other thing they're lying about Men notice. Like, yeah, they're right. what about all the other stuff in the Bible? you pick this one or two these one or two issues, and that's your confession, and you ignore everything else and let the world burn. They know that that's not real Christianity. And that's the that's the reason that things like that that meeting in Utah and all these other things that are going on, including

1:11:12 Stone Choir itself, are a threat. Because when men get together and start talking about these subjects without being bounded by HR, you can start reading the Bible again. You can start believing it again. And that is the single biggest threat to everything. It's a threat inside the church, it's a threat politically, because it's a threat to Satan. And the fact that he's controlling all these things independently, seemingly not obviously in some cases, but it's it's clear that the influence is there. It's men getting together and seeing, you know what? No holds barred, let's look at everything from scratch and let's be faithful to the teachings that have been consistent with scripture historically and

1:11:52 see where the chips fall. And if it turns out that we have adopted beliefs that are false, we need to repent. We need to repent. It's not just about calling others to repent. It's about saying I got something wrong. I fell for it. I went along with it. I realize now I was an error. I reject my own sin and I repent. And that's a bridge too far for pretty much everybody over forty. Yes. Unfortunately. Um okay, so so um I think I wanna st I want to operationalize this because we're talking about going to war for the truth, we're talking about being confrontational, we're talking about churches chasing out young men, we're chasing talking about churches ordaining female pastors, and you so you mentioned the large the larger catechism, the larger cataclysm I've

1:12:37 heard you refer to it. so uh when you started the stone stone choir, had had this come into being yet, or was that a little bit down the road? So maybe and maybe you can unpack for the listeners who aren't familiar with Luther Lutheranism, who don't know what the large cate catechism is, maybe you can unpack a little bit the structure of your denomination and an And understand how key this document is and some of the figures behind it. Sure, I'll take that one. The Lutheran confessions are technically and properly called the Book of Concord. The Book of Concord was published in fifteen eighty. It is comprised of a number of different documents. The large catechism is one of those, and it's particularly important.

1:13:24 I'll return to that in a minute though. The documents that comprise the Book of Concord, other than obviously it has a preface, it includes the three universal creeds, the Augsburg Confession, the Apology of the Confession, the small cult articles an article, a treatise on the Pope, the small catechism, the large catechism, and then the formula of Concord has both an epitome and a solid declaration. These documents span from fifteen thirty which is when the Augsburg Confession was first introduced. That was incidentally the 494th anniversary, two days ago, of the presentation of that to the emperor at Augsburg. So we'll have a major anniversary coming up here in six years for the Reformation just generally.

1:14:11 But the various documents address various things. The Formula of Concord is very much a technical theological document. It's meant to iron out some squabbles that were in the Lutheran Church and some other things like that. But the catechisms are particularly important for a specific reason. The small catechism is memorized by all Lutheran children. The large catechism is expounding on the small catechism. The large catechism is what fathers are supposed to use to teach their wives and their children the faith, because you have them memorize the small catechism and then you teach them more about the sections of the small catechism from the large catechism. And so if you can subvert the catechism that is used, and

1:15:04 this has been an ongoing problem in the Lutheran church and in other churches as well. But how they subvert it is they'll republish a new small catechism. The text of the small catechism will stay the same, but they'll add a bunch of questions and answers or explanatory notes or things like that. So it's honestly it's very similar to what happened with the Schofield Bible, because the Schofield Bible itself is the King James. Now Now, we aren't particularly fond of the King James in the modern context for reasons we've gone into before. It's not that we don't like the King James. I read the King James, I have no problem with it. I usually read the ESV, but I read that one as well. The issue with the Schofield Bible was the footnotes, because a lot

1:15:51 of the men reading the King James couldn't understand the English of the King James, but the footnotes were in modern English, so they read the footnotes, and then they just preached whatever the footnotes said. The same thing happens when you start adding all of these notes and explanations and questions and answers and all this other crap to the small catechism. That stuff winds up being what is actually taught in your schools and then what is preached in your pulpits and what your people actually believe. And so subverting the small catechism has been an ongoing effort in many Lutheran denominations for a long time, for decades. That's an ongoing problem, largely from the sixties, as is expected, because

1:16:31 that's sort of when Satan really began in earnest his current push to subvert everything in our society and particularly in the churches. But the large catechism with annotations and other crap in it, that one is sort of the first major salvo with regard to subverting the large catechism. And it's still the text of the large catechism, but it has all of these essays along with it. Some of them aren't terrible, but some of them are outright Marxist. It is It's the Frankfurt School being funneled into the LCMS via these essays, via this commentary on the large catechism that is published as a volume and intended for basically everyone in the LCMS to use this thing, and they are currently using it in the seminaries.

1:17:24 They're using this abomination to teach pastors. And so when this thing was first released, we got a hold very early on of an electronic copy of it, and we read through the almost thousand-page document, however many pages it actually is, and then we did with Ryan Turnipseed, a YouTube video just assessing some of the more problematic, the more heinous parts of these essays, some of the things that are put forward in this annotated so-called large catechism. And it became a big issue in the LCMS. But of course, that wasn't addressed. Yes, initially, Harrison pulled it back, halted publication in order to seem like he was doing something because we stopped his vacation, he had to come back from Hawaii.

1:18:18 Which is a uh part of the reason he doesn't like us, I'm sure that plays into it a little bit. But he almost immediately resumed publication of this thing. They just stopped it temporarily to say, we'll look into it. And then they started attacking us. Because of course it's shoot the messenger, not actually deal with the content of the message. And so this thing is still out there. It's still being published. Like I said, it's being used in the seminaries. It is being pushed by CPH. The goal of Satan, the goal of the authors of this abomination, is to make this the official doctrine of the LCMS. And so it won't matter what the Book of Concord says. It's the same sort of game that Rome plays and that other

1:19:02 magisteriums play. It doesn't matter what your confessional document says if no one ever uses it, they only use the explanations of it. Because it matters what the explanation says. And so that's the goal is to subvert the book of Concord, because the things that are wrong, the things that are wicked in the annotations in those essays, by and large are addressed in the book of Concord, and it says the exact opposite. But it doesn't matter because the game Satan is playing is redefining terms, subverting them, explaining them away. It's the same thing that he always does. Just like they tried to say that Sodom and Gomorrah wasn't about sodomy, wasn't about sexual perversion, wasn't that wickedness.

1:19:47 Oh, they were just being inhospitable. Right. That's c that's of course completely ridiculous because if that were the case, God would have wiped ninety percent of humanity off the map ages ago. But this is the same game we see with Satan everywhere. He does this in the political sphere, he does this in the churches, but it is happening in earnest now in the LCMS. This is not the first problem, as I said. They've done this with the small catechism previously, and they've also done this with various essays and opinion pieces published by the CTCR, which is the theological, the doctrinal body in the LCMS. That's the body to which questions are supposed to be posed, and then they give a definitive answer.

1:20:30 They have been publishing wicked things from the nineteen sixties forward. Again, not surprising. The sixties is the decade from hell. And it's just it finally got to the LCMS. Because the LCMS was one of the last standing most conservative denominations in the American context. It's had problems for some time, and part of the reason that it's so insular and isolated is the world war is because the LCMS is largely German. And so there was political and other problems that played into it. But Satan finally got around to actively attempting to subvert the LCMS and Matthew Harrison is playing a key role in that because he is currently the leader of the LCMS. Not for better, but definitely for worse.

1:21:20 When did you guys When did you guys notice this personally start happening? Because I I I've watched some of the turnip stream and and how long into doing the Stone Choir podcast did that did that faithful fateful stream happen? Now I'll be sure to put the link to the the stream in the show notes. Because I guess the question is like, did you go into the podcast knowing, starting Stone Choir, knowing like, okay, we're probably going to speak up to this in this denomination because you guys said that you had met in some uh some met met in some Lutheran groups and then and then you had the the turn up stream and then of course all hell broke loose, perhaps literally. Like or or what was the sequence of events that all these

1:22:02 things kind of took place in? We actually describe this in excruciating detail in the longest episode we'll probably ever do, the timeline of recr recriminations. That is an episode that we began with the suicide of George Floyd. When Floyd killed himself in twenty twenty with a fentanyl overdose, Matt Harrison put out a press release in the name of every church, every pastor and every LCMFs individual in the country saying that basically it was a murder. And he in our name called the police officers who had been involved in that arrest murders. He said that they were guilty of taking his life, and he basically called for their heads. And so independently, Cory and I each sent letters to him in

1:22:51 our own names. I signed my name. I didn't I I dox myself to Harrison in twenty twenty. And if he had bothered to read that letter, he would have been able to personally dox me as soon as we started the show. Because I was saying the same things three years later. What we said to him was that you have defamed these men who have not this he put this out about four weeks after the suicide, which was about two weeks after the the full police video came out. So anyone who'd bothered to pay attention knew that that man had been saying I can't breathe for ten minutes before he was put on the ground. That's right. They and so Harrison didn't care about that because he is a racial agitator. Everything that he does is rooted in tearing down anything that he

1:23:37 sees in opposition to black America. That's one of the crucial things that he has. Both of his sons have married outside of their race, and he's thrilled that one of his own grandchildren has more African DNA than German DNA. He thinks that's just the s most special thing in the world. And so he's personally invested, for mercenary reasons and for false political reasons, to push this crap. And so George Floyd kills himself. He puts out s this demonic press release. Corey and I each independently, not knowing each other at the time, sent him personal letters and said this is crap. It was a couple of pages long. It was very respectful. But that was certainly for me and I think for Corey as well, our first indication that we were dealing with a man who

1:24:18 was not Christian, because some of the the way that he wrote that could not have been written by a Christian. But we didn't make that argument public, we didn't accuse him of that at that time. We certainly condemned and continued to condemn for a year the fact that he had had defamed these men. I I was hoping the Chauvin would win in court so that he would sue them for defamation because it would have been trivial for him to win. We knew that Harrison was bad, we knew that he was evil, we knew he was a liar and that his conscience was seared. So when things started going south in 2022 that caused us to begin Stone Choir. We like you said we began that in October. The large catechism came out about January twentieth, roughly.

1:25:01 We immediately got a copy. Ryan Turnipseed put out his thread with a bunch of screenshots from the large catechism itself and published to the world. Hey, this is really bad. There's a bunch of stuff in here that's not remotely Christian. Never mind not being you know Lutheran. And it got a lot of traction. And that's why and so that fight began on Twitter. You know, that that the the thread was several days, I think close to a week before the turnip stream, if I remember correctly. And then about thirty minutes before we began recording the turnip stream where we were gonna discuss all the same things that were in the in that thread, we got a notice that they were pulling it from sale. And it was pulled from sale for about a week.

1:25:47 And then when it was republished about February 1st, Harrison additionally said, This is wonderful. We stand by everything in it. We roundly condemn the wicked, you know, basically calling us Nazis for opposing pushing pedophilia in the church. And then three weeks after that, Missouri Sen had put out a press release ex explicitly condemning Stone Choir in all but name. It was made very clear that everything that had happened, he tried to frame it as exclusively online rabble rousers who had this political ax to grind that were outside the church were wicked men, and he swore in public, in in writing, that he was going to see every one of those men on the stream excommunicated. And the four men on that stream have subsequently all been driven

1:26:36 out of the LCMS by his hand. Now Ryan has since joined another church, and that's a separate matter of drama. But these top down things are their mercenary self-defense by a wicked man to cover up the fact that he's burning this church down. And I don't care about him personally. I could care less. I don't I don't I'm not interested in personalities. I'm interested in the fact that one of the few Christian denominations that has consistently been on the right side of the most of these things, this guy is now turning it inside out and wearing it as a skin suit, and people don't see it. Because we're all nice Christian guys. We don't want to be disagreeable. The guy who's in charge, who everyone is agreed, let's he's he's

1:27:19 the man man, let's back him, let's back his play. He's consistently nudging things very slowly. Like it all of the the large cataclysm was not particularly slow. That was really an acceleration on his part. But it was still relatively subtle to the point that you can play Talmodic games and and try to read between the lines and say, Oh, he didn't really mean that. Which is the whole point. To introduce doubt and uncertainty and to give the enemy a foothold. Courtney and I are having none of that. We can see through it. We've fought these fights before. We've dealt with men like that before. Men who are wicked, who haven't do not have the Holy Spirit. We've no how they play. And so we just said, yep, here it is.

1:27:57 It w it was not him. It was about the fact their lives were being told about God in God's name. That is always going to cause me to show up and always gonna cause me to cause problems for someone when when I have some place to say something. And because this was in our own house, we went after it. And you know, part of the reason for calling it Stone Choir is that you know we we say that we're the stones crying out. We don't have a vocation A vocation to do this. I don't have credentials to say that I have permission to criticize other guys about theology. All I have is a Bible. And that's not me and my Bible under a tree. It's saying when God gives a man the Holy Spirit and additionally gives him other gifts of reason and intellect and whatever else and

1:28:37 personality, if he doesn't show up, if if Cory and I didn't show up to this fight, we would be wicked because we have been equipped in a way the few men have been to be able to deal with all of this at once, to deal with the complexity, to come deal with the confrontation, to deal with the you know, the personal fallout. We're fine with all of it. It this is easy mode for us. Whereas for most men, it would all like any one of these things would be nearly insurmountable. And so that's why it's it's part of what we started Stone Choir. We saw that no one else was going to show up to the fight. And I think that, you know, personally for me looking back, I I'm not gonna ascribe, you know, miraculous intervention on on God's part

1:29:18 that that's how this played out, but we were up and running three months, four months before this happened. And we hadn't really delved too much into controversial stuff yet. In fact, the most controversial episodes that we did were after the LCMS doxed me. They doxed me and it they'd asked they doxxed me in retaliation for that and then we went to town because they thought that we were afraid and ashamed and blah blah blah. We're not. I'm not ashamed. If I get something wrong, that's what bothers me. It doesn't bother me if someone else doesn't like me. Like if I get something wrong, if I sinned, that that's my concern. And so if someone calls me to repent and they're right, I'm gonna thank 'em.

1:29:56 I'm gonna push back. I mean that's the Christian attitude. But if someone attacks me for saying what God says, then they have they've created a problem for themselves that if they've just left me alone, they wouldn't have had it. And I think this is this is why you've catalyzed so many men and and so many listeners is that they they see what's wrong and they see what's wrong, we'll say acutely in their own churches, like meaning their own the church buildings, or maybe the denominations as well. And they they they see what's wrong and they don't find anyone talking about it, and maybe they themselves don't have the capacity to talk about it. And not only that, they would be dealing at a far lower

1:30:36 uh degree of scale than with an entire denomination, than with the head of the entire denomination. And so I think there's something very inspiring about saying, uh there's no one else here. I guess we're the guys. So we're going to get up and running to talk about the things that no one else is going to, particularly because we we want to talk about it for our own sake, not just for others' sake. So we're going to start talking about it. And then here's this moment where uh this this document comes out and it's sort of like a proof of concept. Like here's all these things that are very wrong and so we've already been up and running. So we're going to talk about it. And you're going to get on the stream and you're going to

1:31:13 have that direct confrontation with the dragon. And the dragon's going to roar and breathe fire and then and then dox you. And we'll talk about that. And then the the response is like, Well that didn't hurt very much. And then you double down and then you lean into it even further. 'Cause whoa, I remember when you and I were talking and it was like, Oh yeah, no, you did you guys did all your all all your your spiciest episodes, let's say after they doxed you. They didn't dox you for the spiciest episodes. And I think that there's something very admirable about that. And I think that there are a lot of men that um they might uh in another life wish to be the men capable of doing that, but certainly they have that fighting spirit within themselves.

1:31:52 So I've I've appreciated learning about the saga, of course, way after the fact, because I think it speaks to what a lot of men wish that they had the capacity to do, or would pray to have the capacity to do, which is to say, Lord give me the strength to speak truth into this situation, whatever the situation is. Maybe it's my household, maybe it's my church, maybe it's my business, maybe it's my whole denomination, maybe it's my entire nation. Give me the strength to do that. And you guys stepped into it reluctantly, which is of course the stories of all the best warriors are the reluctant warriors. So um so let's let's talk now about what specifically was it were some of the things I of course I know this I

1:32:32 just want to make sure that everyone's operating on the same on the same page with the narrative. What were some of the specific things within the larger catechism that were like, that's really bad and there's no place to hide from it? Because I I know what some of these are, so I just want to hear you guys talk about them. Let you start that one off. Uh the principal one, there was there was one particular one. I think it's by far the most egregious and the most effective weapon that we had that they handed to us was a quote on one of the sexuality ones that I made a slide for and spread that far and wide online because it went really rent went directly to the fact that these are not just like subtle theological issues.

1:33:18 Let me read this quote for you. This is from one of the contemporary annotations, one of the essays that was written, in this case incidentally, by a girl. She wrote on behalf of the church However, though some of us are burdened with homosexual lust, pornographic addiction, transgenderism, te pedophilia, and polyamory, more often they're the speck in our neighbor's eye rather than the log in our own. Yeah. And so I made a slide of that with the LCMS logo and I highlighted burdened pedophilia and speck. I think that was the single most devastating thing that came out of all that because mothers noticed. You know, there are things that were guys can argue over fiddly stuff. And like that's guys like arguing over fiddly stuff.

1:34:10 You know, everybody wants to have some strongly held opinion about some ecumenical council and pick a side and use words no one's ever heard before and and fight it out. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about Matt Harrison's LCMS saying that there's some people that are burdened with raping children, but that's just a speck in their eye. And we took exception to that. We thought you know what? They're passages about millstones, about God saying these people are going to be killed for eternity because what they are talking about is far more heinous than the speck in your eye. It's a complete complete misapplication of that verse. It's a complete misapplication of Christian doctrine.

1:34:52 One of the episodes we did was entirely on all sins are not equal. Like I gave the example of a girl in a bikini. It's absolutely sinful and damning for you to lust after someone. But heterosexual lust for a member of the opposite sex who is not your spouse is not the same degree of sin as something that is fundamentally disordered against nature, disordered against creation itself. And so sodomitic lust is disordered against creation. It's completely disordered for a man to desire another man. And scripture makes that clear. And then And then further to separate desires from what is natural, to misdirect them towards children and then to act upon it is it's unspeakable. It should be unthinkable.

1:35:38 And the fact that these people had the temerity to do like this is part of the thing, like the LGBTQIA plus plus, that whole rainbow coalition, that spectrum of sexualities includes pedophilia, peas in some of those acronyms and they all know it because it's how they reproduce. This was the Missouri Synod leaping leapfrogging ahead of most of our other churches to the very cutting edge of this degeneracy to say that wanting to have sex with children is another sexual orientation. That's literally the context that they provided. And so of all the errors in there, I principally focused on this one just because it makes clear Not only can you not have the Holy Spirit and produce this sort of thing, your hard

1:36:23 drive needs to be handed handed over to someone. You're gonna die in prison. No one writes this unless they are demonically wicked. this is so far beyond you know disputes about like you're reformed and we're Lutheran. We disagree to some extent on the sacraments. I don't think you're wicked. I mean I've even asked you about that, but like you know, they're they're basic confessions, they're basic things and we've done episodes about like you're different groups believe this about baptism, about communion. These are disagreements in the church. They're doctrinal disagreements. There's scriptural cases to be made. When you're talking about raping kids, there's no scriptural case to be made. There's nothing except for millstones.

1:37:00 And that's why a lot of this is political. There's there is a political side. There's a fact that until fairly recently it was legal in the United States for pedophiles to be executed by the state. And then the Supreme Court shot that down. It's something that's just being challenged recently, where some states are passing those laws again. They're illegal at a federal level, so that's gonna get battled out. But like this is what we're talking about. If someone's willing to do this in the in the world, and then we have churches running interference and say, Well, that's just a speck in their in their eye. you have a you have you have a child raper next door, but you know, you you cursed at the TV when the football

1:37:37 play didn't go the way you like. You're just as bad as them. Take that spec out first. No. Yeah. That's w we're not dealing with Christians at all. And so that's the most egregious. Some of the others a little more subtle. There were ones about gentrification was was condemned as a sin. Just like like Cory said like it's just w where'd this come from? This is not it's it it it's brazen radical left wing. You know, we call it political. Some people call it woke, and Corey and b I both hate that term because it's it's dismissive. To call something woke is to trivialize it. And this stuff is not trivial. This stuff is rooted in actual spiritual malevolence. And the fact that it seems incoherent, it seems irrational, is part

1:38:21 of how they get away with it. Because you think it's so like there was a headline this week where milk was called racist. And people like, oh, that's so woke. They're so retarded. No. Milk is racist. The ability to metabolize milk to metabolize lactose is racially based. Milk is absolutely racist. Whites can do it and most other races can't. Milk's racist. They're right. They're not woke. They're not stupid. What they're doing is they're attacking white people. And that's the unifying theory behind all of these things. It's part of the reason that the pagan versus Christian stuff is it's one of the reasons we talk about race because there's so many guys that want to be propositional in in their ideas about

1:39:03 nationhood when it that's not what Satan's doing. Satan's not going after the idea of an American. He's specifically going after whites. if every single white in this country were exterminated, that would be a victory condition. They made that very clear. You know, it's like these are controversial things, they upset people. Most people have never thought about 'em and they don't want to. And there's not a lot of church writing about this stuff because when in history has milk ever been attacked? Like that's and so you know, most people see that and they just throw up their hands like that's crazy. we're able to understand is not crazy at all. There's a root behind why they're picking that fight.

1:39:39 The episode we this this week about when these fights are picked, we gotta listen. Why would they go after milk? Why do they go after math? Why do they go after showing up on time and saying those are all racist? It's because certain races can't do those things. Literally. They're physically incapable of doing those things. And when people in the church lie about that, we can't evangelize to pagans because they see that we're foolish, and Satan just keeps moving the ball. Good. If you ever want a reason to hate Justice Kennedy, he is the one who authorized the majority opinion in that case. That's Kennedy v. Louisiana. And I don't actually recommend reading that fact pattern unless you don't already hate those who push this sort of thing, particularly with

1:40:28 regard to pedophilia. You're not going to forget the fact pattern if you read it, so fair warning. One of the reasons that I in particular woe as well though. One of the reasons I'm prepared to deal with some of these problems, and in particular when I read through things like the so-called large catechism with annotations and contemporary applications, that word alone should probably alert most men to potential problems. But one of the things that prepared me for reading it and finding these problems is that I am very familiar with the writings of the Frankfurt School. So I am familiar with cultural Marxism. I've read I won't say most, but actually it might be most. I've read many of their works, particularly of the central thinkers so

1:41:16 called of that school. And so when I read through these essays, I notice thing that uh things that other men are going to miss because I know how Marxists work, I know Satan's playbook, I know the way that he is going to build his arguments, the words he's going to use, the way he's going to shade things. And I see it in these essays. And it almost reminds me of that was, I believe, just as Justice Potter Stewart, who said, I know it when I see it of pornography. It's the same with this. If you know it, you are going to recognize it immediately for what it is. So when I read through these essays, I saw Marxism all over the place in a number of them. And it's incredibly obvious what Satan is attempting to do.

1:42:03 Because he uses the same playbook everywhere. And he uses it because it works. Because ignorant men and also wicked men just let him do it. And we have that happening in the LCMS because very few pastors have done anything in opposition to this wickedness. This is now again being used in the seminary. Probably in both seminaries, I believe, at this point. The LCMS has two seminaries, one in St. Louis and one in Fort Wayne. This is being used to train future pastors. This is going to be pushed by those pastors, the fathers. Fathers are going to use this to teach their children. This alone is enough to undermine any teaching of actual Christian doctrine in the LCMS because it's not just the beginning.

1:42:55 This is another step in what Satan has been doing for a number of decades. It is a major step, but this will be used as the foundation for even more wicked things. If this is permitted to stand, the LCMS may as well be Elka. And for those who are not as familiar with how Lutheranism, although Elka is not really Lutheran, but how Lutheranism works in the US, you have a handful of relatively conservative denominations and then you have Elka. Elke is the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. Unfortunately, they still are allowed to use that name. They're not even Christian. I know the Presbyterians will immediately recognize this because you have the three major groups in Presbyterianism, and they're basically in ranked order of

1:43:38 least to most faithful. We kind of have the same thing going in Lutheranism in America. So when I saw uh when I saw the the bit about pedophilia, whoa, I think you sent it to me and then I listened to it on the tur term stream. I mean, there there really is no way around that. Like you can understand certain denominations, like I'm aware of some stuff that's been happening in the OPC lately with softening of language. I watched a YouTube video about that, a couple guys discussing, you know, well, why are they going to change this provision to essentially something from something clear to something substantially less clear? And these two guys are talking about it on YouTube, like we really just don't understand this.

1:44:22 And it just kind of seems like they are genuinely unaware of what's going on. So there there's there are these subtle shadings of language that open the door, a crack for larger transgressions down the line. But it it seemed to me that just seeing that one line, that likening pedophilia to all these other more more uh normal sins, I guess you'd say, or more everyday sins or properly ordered sins, like it was it was crossing a major, major line and over a massive overplaying of the hand, or perhaps a total uh revelation of what's going on in this absolute Absolutely unmistakable way. And just to put the pieces together, it was because you and Brian on the turnip stream and then one one other man, you

1:45:06 guys got together on this four-way, I think it was like a a YouTube uh Zoom call perhaps and maybe it was live streamed, I'm not sure. That you called these things out, you brought destruction down on yourselves from the top. And not only because of this, but you brought destruction down on yourselves from and I don't mean to put this in your hands, understand. I just mean that like you spoke into this thing and Matthew Harrison publicly declared that you four must be destroyed for speaking into this. And so um I I want to talk I want to move into talking about some of the racial issues that we got to, but before we do that, I just I want to hear a little bit about that moment when it's like you spoke into something

1:45:43 truthfully and openly that needed to be spoken into that I think a lot of men listening listening would would wish they had the the opportunity to have the courage to draw their swords and say we will not stand for this. Like maybe you can talk a little bit about that moment, the stream and the aftermath and then we can get into the milk and all that stuff, which is sort of the meat of the of the Stone Choir podcast as I've listened to it anyway. That moment really wasn't that interesting for us evolutionarily because they that by that point is as we said in the episode that we did on the timeline of recriminations where we go th over all of these events. Corey and I both knew after Floyd's suicide that Harrison was apostate.

1:46:24 So the fact that he went mask off in the large cataclysm, I was kind of surprised at the aggressiveness of how openly he was going to be apostate, but the fact didn't surprise me. the degree of openness did but it wasn't revelation. Stone choir exists because pastors have been faithless. If pastors in the LCMS were addressing these things as they have a duty to God to do, we wouldn't exist. It's another part of the reason we're called Stone Choir. We don't have a vocation to tackle these issues. There's no line item in any charter that says here's the office of the guy that's going to complain about people doing this stuff in the church. Pastors are supposed to police this stuff. That's what they say.

1:47:12 That the the theology of the LCMS pastorate is that they have a duty to the to address these issues. But when push comes to shove, what pastors do is they put their heads down. They pretend it doesn't exist. They say it's not their problem. It's none of their business. And the LCMS's own bylaws expressly forbid them from publicly disagreeing. If there are doctrinal disputes within the LCMS, pastors who are members of the corporation of the LCMS is called the roster. Corey and I were not members of the LCMS, we were members of congregations which were members of the LCMS. So there's a level of indirection there. So laymen so-called are members of the LCMS. We're members of churches. The churches and the pastors themselves are members of the corporation, which

1:48:01 means that the members of the corporation, the pastors and the churches collectively, can be kicked out of the corporation, which means you don't have access to you know, the payroll like the benefits program, you don't have access to receive new pastors. So it's close to a death sentence for a congregation to be kicked out, and it's basically a death sentence for a pastor to be removed from the roster because no one else in the Missouri Synod can call him. As a result, virtually no pastors are willing to stand up to any of this stuff. A remarkable thing happened in the immediate aftermath of Ryan Turnipseed's thread and the turnip stream. For a period of about ten days, there were a whole bunch

1:48:43 of pastors who'd kept their heads down. They hadn't fought back against any of his crap for years. They forgot that they were beholden to the congregation and they actually did their jobs for a couple weeks. And they said, This is bad. This is this is clearly false doctrine. And then the corporation slammed the blast doors on the first when it was re released, the first of February, and then on I think the twenty second, twenty first or twenty second, when the press release was put out that said that there were basically na Nazis running wild in the LCMS and they were going to be excommunicated. That pretty much completely shut down all pastoral objections to these things in public. And one of the things that we said in that stream is

1:49:26 part of the reason that we have been targeted, part of the reason that we're such a threat is we're not beholden to anyone. There's nothing that they can do to us to prevent us from speaking against these things. And you know, that there's it's a wild west sort of scenario that's not good for anyone because you don't want to have men just running around taking shots of things. Like it's it's disruptive. But the fundamental problem is if the church weren't doing this stuff, we wouldn't exist. If the church if the church had small problems, we never would have started talking about it. Like there's every church has had small problems and sometimes big ones. You can even work through some of the big ones.

1:50:05 What we saw for the last few years was that there That there is a tectonic shift that has is going to end Christianity within the LCMS. It's not only ceasing ceasing to be Lutheran and ceasing to exist. The number of members has nearly dropped in half since Harrison took the presidency about two thousand ten. It's dying. And even though it's dying, they're still trying to kill it with false doctrine. That's why the fight has to occur. And so the moment of the stream didn't really tell us anything new. It showed us for a little while like the d the battle lines were drawn a little bit publicly because there were a whole bunch of guys on Twitter and elsewhere on social media who immediately condemned all of us, said, you have no business doing that.

1:50:52 How dare you criticize the Pope in Rome? I mean it was really it was the replay of the Reformation that occurred in that moment is is hard to overstate. I was actually just yesterday, I spent like three hours watching a documentary series on the papacy. And in the episode that they did on Leo X, who is the Pope during the Reformation, at least the early early part of it, over and Over and over, the things that they were saying about the disputes between Luther and Rome and the behavior of both sides, the echoes were unmistakable. You know, one of one of the points that they made was that Luther was a master of social media. the use of the printing press and the popular appeal to the laity to say like, here you go, Christians, this is what's actually

1:51:34 going on. Here's what the Bible says. Here's what the Pope says. You gotta pick one because they don't say the same thing. That was revolutionary and it was hugely disruptive. The exact same thing played out last year because Ryan Turns, he's really good at social media. Corey and I are good at it too. We're good at messaging. And that can either be used to deceive or it can be used to spread truthful messages. You know, you're also very good at you have you know a multimedia empire that you're growing here where you're you're taking things to people in different contexts and just saying like look this is true, but it's not enough to be true. You know, you need good production quality. You need good arguments.

1:52:11 You need them well presented. There's polish has to be a part of it. And so the fact that we're good at kind of all of those things simultaneously, where our opponents are not, they're ham fisted and they're bad at these things was tremendously disruptive. And like I said, that that's potentially a bad thing. I I don't want an environment where a random guys on the internet are just running around taking pot shots. That's not good for anyone, per se. But at the same time, it is the absolute duty of the churches to be faithful to scripture. And the moment that they stop doing that, you're gonna find some stones crying out. And you're gonna find some stones flying. And that's you buy your ticket, you take the ride.

1:52:51 They picked this fight and they didn't realize who was showing up. The men that they chose as their opponents on the turnip stream were the mer the worst men in the universe they could have possibly chosen. We're all very intelligent, were all very good at this. All they had to do was be faithful and we would have still been on their side. It's like this isn't a personality conflict. This is about scripture. It's about obedience to God. That I'm I'm gonna answer to God for all of this. I'm gonna stand before the judgment throne and answer for all of this. And I that's what worries me. The hip pieces and the press and you know, all the other stuff that's happened, not interesting. It's fine.

1:53:30 I care about what God thinks about me. And if men don't like it, well, that tells me more about them than it does about God. I wasn't aware that uh that you that there were all these incentives from various pastors and and members of the roster to to make sure that you were quiet. I didn't I don't I don't don't really understand the denomin I I didn't understand the denominational structure where there's actually more interest in making sure that you guys don't speak up than just at the very tippy top level. Like there's a there like your truth speaking highlights the the um the consent to lies or the act of participation and lies from from everybody else. So I I didn't fully understand that and I think I do

1:54:10 now. Yeah. It's i it's exactly the same point I was making earlier about abortion, there's a subset of guys that are very bold confessors of fights that no one's having anymore. And they hang, they rest their on their laurels and they hang their hat on picking those fights about the liturgy and about some other things. I love the j the liturgy. I care about those things. But that's not the fight that Satan's picking. We're gonna show up wherever Satan picks the fight. And that's that's the problem. Like yeah, you you correctly identified it. We put those men to shame because we went where the puck moved. We don't care about the battle from five years or fifty years ago or five hundred years ago.

1:54:47 We care about this year's battle because this year's battle is destroying souls and no one else was willing to show up. And in the subsequent convention that occurred, there were a bunch of resolutions both supporting the pedochism and condemning it, and they were all basically shot down. And the pastors were basically told behind the scenes, don't do this. In fact, one of the reasons, one of the ways they were able to shut that down was they lied to them then, I think June or maybe July, with the same lies that Harrison was telling back in February, which is what they're terrorist threats. They directly accuse Corey and me of violent terrorist threats in order to shut down discussion that this actually happened.

1:55:29 I have eyewitnesses to the fact that those lies were told. And as a result, they were told, well, there there were threats of violence made. We can't do this. And so nothing happened. Like that's it the the the brazen degree of of deceit and cowardice. Like it's just it's shocking. Like if we're just being jerks on the internet, just cause jerks on the internet. But I wouldn't even necessarily disagree. But that's not that's not the accusation. The accusation is all these things that are complete falsehoods because it's necessary to prevent anyone from actually thinking about the problems, which are the we have a church saying it's raping kids as j is a sexual preference. That's the fight. Corey, did you have something you want to add to

1:56:14 that? Just sort of a tangential comment. I think it's somewhat amusing that this is happening in the Lutheran Church when we have the history of really any of the major figures in Lutheranism, these were not men who were afraid to stand up and bear the brunt of the attack by whomever it happened to be or speak their mind. And particularly the LCMS. The LCMS is largely historically at least, and still today German. There's a fair contingent of Scandinavians as well, but Germans aren't known for being afraid to say the truth somewhat bluntly. Anyone who's travelled in Germany will of course know that to be entirely true. One of the princes at the presentation of the Augsburg Confession, when he was speaking face to face with the Emperor, said Rather than

1:57:07 deny my God and his gospel I would sooner kneel down here before your Imperial Majesty and have my head struck off. I think if we come from a line of men who are willing to say that to the face of the Emperor, who could very well have done that to him right then and there, I think the least we can do is stand up and tell the truth about Marxism being brought into the LCMS and subverting one of the last few standing actual Christian churches in America. Mm-hmm. Yeah. especially it's such a clear-cut issue. Like that there's not a lot of wiggle room when you're talking about pedophilia. Like and that's the one of the odd things that seems to be going on right now. Is it would seem to me that that uh reaping children, right?

1:57:54 Just call it what it is. that would be the clearest cut example of something that every normal human being would find so revolting and repulsive as to as to not just tickle the conscience or prick the conscience, but to you know, outrage the conscience of of almost every normal human being. pretty clear. And that that idea is being snuck into a denomination like the LCMS. And when you s like I don't have any experience with the denomination, but I trust you guys when you say that it's one of the faithful ones. So to that idea, it's it's uh beyond offensive to that that they would try, that they would do that. And it was done by, I think you said it was written by a woman as well. Like it's it's like a double, it's like a double offense.

1:58:40 And I can understand being in a we'll say a metaphorical room, whether it be social media or you just imagine you're in a giant auditorium full of all the members of this denomination, including pastors and and people inside the you know executive staff, and the and like looking around, like, is anyone going to say anything about this? Does anyone have anything to say? And then the the resonating silence. And I I think well you did mention that some mothers did notice that. So I I don't mean to say that no one said anything, but the ability to build a platform to say something from you and Ryan, like you guys and Ryan is so crucially important and it's very telling that you would speak up and you would say

1:59:23 these things and then the immediate response would be con like executive level condemnation from fr like we got we gotcha. Cause the reaction kind of says it all. If you speak truth into something that is objectively morally wrong, being spoken by a woman nonetheless, you know, to a to uh in in the in Lutheranism, I wonder what Luther would have to say about that. That the response came was so swift and so aggressive and so personal. It means that you you hit the thing. You put your finger on the thing. So well done with that. That particular aspect, that particular issue, at the time we thought that it was, as most people would assume, it was just you know Just, you know, theoretical. Uh I have subsequently learned that numerous men who were involved in

2:00:10 the things have happened to us, their defense of that false doctrine was more than theoretical. Oh no. No, you go beyond that, but I yeah, it's it the the mercenary self-dealing of the things that have occurred to us in punishment for this, uh just off the charts. We don't miss. Even we don't even know the shot that we're taking. So okay, so you talked about I think it was Matthew Harrison, has uh his his children married outside their race, and so the there's a personal aspect to the racial issues that you guys have brought up. So it sounds to me like you're saying there's perhaps some personal advocacy on on behalf of uh on behalf of pedophilia that's coming from within the same executive body without getting too specific about it?

2:00:59 Yeah, the the cadre of men who were involved in my doxing have direct connections to that question. Going back 15 years that I know of for a fact. And so you know I learned about that afterwards. You know, it's again like the it for us principally the problem is theological, but we can never lose sight of the fact that when we're talking about sin We're talking about sin in the real world. Sin is not theoretical. People are hurt by sin. And so that's one of the reasons that it's so crucial for any church body to hold the line on these very basic things. And you know, although we we principally here have highlighted that particular thing, the other things that were done in there were were not

2:01:43 that egregious. They were lesser sins, but they were still still wildly impermissible aspect of false doctrine. And that was one of the things that the pushback occurred was that, well, you guys have just overplayed your hand. You you're you're making a mountain out of a hole a molehill here. Sure, maybe things could have been phrased a little bit better, but and as Corey said, that's the game they play. It's a Mott and Bailey play where they'll they'll advance the ball and then they'll pull it back just a little bit and say, why are you overreacting? This is it's not that big a deal. the point that Corey made was that we clearly saw as we were reading through the essays, the additions to this thing, that it

2:02:21 was all coming from outside of Christianity. And one of the regular points that we make on Stone Choir is that unfortunately the modern Christian has this inherent tendency to want to take things from outside the church, just drag a bag of dog crap off the street and try to baptize it and try to find a proof text to say, yeah, this thing that I found from my HR department, this new morality, let's find a Bible verse that says that I can hold the same thing that HR believes and that the DEI program believes. That's not how Christianity works. That's your your moral compass must be rooted in scripture. You don't find morality outside of God's word. That's really one of the fundamental aspects of all of this.

2:03:03 And so often in all of our church bodies, we see people finding new sins and they're not finding them in scripture, but then what will happen? Someone they'll hear somewhere that someone says something is really bad and really mean and really hateful, really dangerous, and they'll say, Well, I need to find where that is in the Bible. That's completely backwards. You read your Bible and you discover your own sins. That's how Christianity works when you have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. These people are playing it in reverse because Satan plays it in reverse. He says, I got all these other teachings for you, and you can go find a proof text if you want. Non-Christians don't care for as far as they're concerned, all these things

2:03:40 are moral dicta without any Bible. They don't need the Bible and though these things are evil. And then Christians like, oh, I need to agree with the new morality of the world. I gotta find Bible verses. And they'll twist some verse that to say something. You know, we did an entire episode on Galatians 3.28 and how it's complete in version is fundamentally the roadmap for most of what's happening. No. It's the the church is so averse to fighting in defense of scripture that they're the Christians so called are willing to take wicked things from outside of the church and then try to insert them into the Bible and then pretend that they got it from God. That's it's it's not Christian. And these and that's the problem.

2:04:19 These things are not just matters of doctrinal dispute among, you know, post-Reformation sects. We're talking about very basic stuff. Where do you get your right and wrong? And today almost no one gets their right and wrong from the Bible. They're getting it from whatever the new morality is in the last last six months I uh I hear I hear all of that and um I guess because I I deal with it in in my own way not in not in like trying to baptize specific like cultural or theological or political errors, but I deal with it, for example, with with yoga. When I tried to explain to you know, because I came in from the new age, when I tried to explain to Christians that like, no, you can't just like baptize yoga because you decide that

2:05:06 you're gonna say some prayers or read scripture verses while you're doing it. That doesn't magically make it okay. And in fact there was a there was a guy I'm I'm in a little bit of a conflict with right now on Instagram, popular, popular creator, uh, Christian content for men. And uh he posted a a video of uh it's this heavy metal rock band that's producing like Christian kind of metal, Christian rock. And the thing with it is like if you were to turn off if you were to turn off the audio and just look at it, it would look like any modern rock performance in terms of the imagery. And if you were to just turn off the imagery and just listen to the music, it just it sounds worldly, except for some

2:05:47 of the lyrics. And I was saying like I, you know, I'll hard pass on that. And a lot of guys got really upset and I'm like, look, you can't just baptize these things from the world and bring them into the Christian church. That's not how this works. And people get very upset when you try and tell that to them. And I did a stream a live stream last night with with uh uh a young man, uh, you know, uh Connor from Forge and Anvil who explained to me, 'cause I bump into this dynamic all the time coming in from the world and just trying to get rid of as much of the world as I possibly can. And there were been moments where I couldn't do it fast enough. And so I come into the church and I meet so many people that are so attached to their things of the world

2:06:23 and when you try and challenge it, they get really touchy about it. Um and so he helped me understand some of why that is. But I can definitely understand and and relate to the idea that when you're dealing with the political dynam dynamics of a denomination, that there is this temptation, uh, and I and I do mean that, you know, not just in the neutral, like we're all tempted by things, but like the the actual satanic temptation to corrupt doctrine to fit in better with the world. Like I s I s I see that and I I have a I just look at a little tiny piece of it. Like I don't mean to compare my little talking about yoga or anything like to to what you guys have experienced. But I I see that temptation.

2:07:02 And I think a lot of other young men do as well. and they want to be able to say to the people around them, whether it be you know the the men and women around them who are in upside down marriages or daughters going to college, right, is a is another one. And we'll get into all of this and say that's not scriptural in direct contradiction to to the prevailing the po prevailing political climate. And so being able to speak into all of these issues at the post where we are as men. so there are three guys talking here that have built you know, platforms, podcasts, et cetera. Like we we've done that. But my my hope is for the men and in in their own ways, the women who are listening to this to recognize that

2:07:49 this exists in your life somewhere and you've seen it. You probably wouldn't be listening to any of us talk if you hadn't seen it. And so I just want to encourage everyone listening to take from uh what Woe and Corey are talking about and apply it to the way that you can speak truth in your own life in support of scripture because these modern aspects of whether it be politics or culture can't simply just be brought into the church and be baptized. You can't just like we're gonna sprinkle some water on it and we're gonna call it Christian. that's not how it works. And so what you guys sort of uh you know, you built the platform, you were ready uh when the moment came. You didn't know necessarily that that you were building it in preparation

2:08:32 for the for the for this moment, but you had built this and you took it to speak into this pattern that we're all watching. Like where are we supposed to go to find refuge from the world? Where are we supposed to go to find refuge from from uh Satanism essentially masquerading in all of its various forms if we can't find it in the church and if we can't speak up about it in in the form of these little these they're not little, they're just words on a page, but they're they're as you said very rightly, they're symptoms of a deeper illness in people's lives that if you're if you're advocating on behalf of this pedophilia issue, like you're not just doing it uh because you did this in-depth study

2:09:15 of it for years and you understand this and you really do think there's a scriptural case, it's like you're trying to cover for your own sin. And I think that's the part that gets so difficult for people to do, which is to say, I know that if I speak truth into this moment, I'm going to convict this person of their sin that they don't want to be convicted of. And the result for me is there are going to be consequences. And people are afraid to do that for their churches, their families, and their businesses. And so just I before we start getting into some into some of the more specific topics around race and sex, et cetera, which I think are really important to get into. Like maybe you guys can talk a little bit about, we talked

2:09:56 about counting the cost. How like what what has been the cost for you guys for those for those who don't know to the extent that you want to share? Because what you've done is essentially convicted an entire denomination or certainly the executive leadership of a denomination of sin and you've convicted probably also a lot of pastors of the sin of uh uh sin of silence, if we can say that such a sin as such a sin exists, which I think we can probably scripturally support that. so what has been the cost to you guys individually to the extent that you want to share for speaking up and doing this? Did you want to take that one first? I think the most obvious one then any man on the political right who has been doxxed is going Is going to understand this.

2:10:42 If you speak certain truths in the public square in this day and age, and that becomes associated with your actual name, in my case, obviously, I put my name out there. In Wo's case, he was doxxed. But if that happens, one, you are essentially unemployable. You are not going to be hired most places because of that. So for instance, I am not going to be hired by any large firm at this point. If I put in an application, they wouldn't even respond to me. Despite the fact that I am an actual expert in a relatively important area of the law. I am now unemployable with regard to that. I still do some legal work, but certainly not as much as I would be doing. Another example, one thing that is related to this, it's not entirely

2:11:36 one hundred percent this. During the COVID pandemic, I was offered a teaching position at a German university. However, because of the restrictions at the time, I would not have been able to accept that position without being vaccinated. Subsequently, and not that long after, actually, maybe two months after that, they lifted some of those restrictions so I could have taken that job, but because of this public activity, there's no chance I would be hired for something like that now. And so that was something that I had to forego in order to do this. But that is one of the the major considerations, obviously. But of course, there's also the fact I have been supposedly excommunicated. That matter is ongoing.

2:12:20 I can't really comment further on it because of the fact that it's ongoing. Woe was driven out of his church. It's all of the things that you would expect to happen because what you've done is taken a stand against the devil and the world, and the world is going to attack you back. And the supposed Christians who are on the other side, all they've proven is that they are not actually Christians. That doesn't mean that every single member of First Lutheran, all of whom failed to veto, as far as I know, the excommunication vote, because they didn't make any of that stuff public as they were supposed to. But all of them, I'm not saying that every last one of them is not a Christian. What they did was anti-Christian.

2:13:06 What they did was sin. They need to repent of that. And hopefully they do that. The leadership in particular are particularly guilty of heinous crimes. Because what they have done is willfully and maliciously act in an anti Christian manner at the behest of synod. And so of course that wound up being the personal cost of it makes it difficult to find a church because most pastors, again, are not going to be very comfortable standing up under the sort of pressure they are going to receive if I were a member of their church or if Woe were a member of their church. Because we have those who are trying to track what we are doing, and they will harass a church if we join that church. They will harass the pastor.

2:13:53 They will harass the congregants. That's a very real thing because Antifa and others have an interest in us in a particular way. And so, yes, there are very real costs associated with doing this, but as Well mentioned earlier, one of the benefits that we have is that neither one of us is married. So there are some considerations other men have that we do not have. You could consider that a cost as well, because if I were to get married, they would attack my wife. That's a given. The left does that. We know that. So there are very real personal consequences that come along with a willingness to speak the truth. Thankfully, we are Dispositionally inclined to speak the truth regardless of consequences,

2:14:37 which is probably partly why the we're the ones who wound up doing this. But that's not to say the consequences don't exist. Yeah, I was doxxed by one of my elders. I Antifa did not dox me. My elder at my local congregation doxed me to Synod. Synod doxed me to a number of other men around the country. They They in turn doxed me to Antifa, which made it public. And then a hit piece was run against me in the local media calling me a neo-Nazi podcaster. And my congregation, I was never placed under church discipline. I've never been under church discipline a moment of my life. I would have welcomed it if they had done that so that I could have made a scriptural defense for what I believe. Instead, what happened when I was doxxed by the Missouri Synod by

2:15:29 Matt Harrison through the Antifa cutout and then the the hit piece was run in the local media. The members of my congregation in effect said if we ever see your face again, we're not gonna come to church anymore. So they they effectively said we're gonna burn down the church if you ever show up again. Not excommunication, nothing. If we see you again, we will this church will cease to exist. That's wild which is which is something that I anticipated in the name a no man knows episode six months prior. I said that in the event that all this stuff happens, I may well be excommunicated. I like I said at the time, the only thing they can do is get a restraining order to keep me from coming. I didn't actually anticipate that they would metaphorically threaten to burn down

2:16:14 the church, but I did say that at that time that I would not have it on my conscience if other people would not come to church because they hated me so much. And that was ultimately what did it. It was made clear to me that the members of my congregation hated me so much that they would apostatize rather than be in the same building with me. So I I withdrew my membership voluntarily for their sake, for the sake of their souls, because although they're unrepentant for the wickedness they did to me, at least hopefully they're still going to church. You know, maybe at some point God will get through to them and they'll repent of those sins. After I was doxxed I laid low for about a month and then I contacted the local OPC congregation and spoke for about ninety

2:16:59 minutes with the pastor. I I told him everything that happened, and I said point blank, You have no right as a Christian to tell me that I can't come to your congregation. However, with all this is coming that's going on, I know that p people would potentially be scandalized if they learn my name when I stick start coming. Do I have your permission to come? And he said I need to talk to the elders, I'll get back to you. They ghosted me. So that was my answer. So I don't have a church home. I would go to church. You know, it's and the thing is the people some people said, Well, you can just drive an hour or two hours away. It's gonna be the same treatment. And so this isn't this isn't butthurt on my part.

2:17:39 It's like, well, you don't like me, I'm gonna take my marbles and go home. It's bad for me not to be able to attend church. That's harmful. That's what Satan was once. However, I bear no guilt for it whatsoever. I would be going to church every Sunday and every midweek service available if I were permitted. So I am not violating the third commandment, the way Lutherans count them, by not attending church. I I do what I can with study and I pray for the day when these people will repent. But you know, that's certainly a cost. Additionally, when I was doxxed, uh I had an outstanding business debt of around $300,000 potentially that would have come back to me at some point that effectively went to zero the day I was doxxed.

2:18:23 So I have very real personal financial, you know, just across the board. Like what you would expect when when you were then rendered unemployable. And in my case I had uh I worked for Apple for fifteen years and had some savings. I poured most of that savings into that business that I ended up selling and closing. And then that kind of put me in a position to do this. And you know, I was counting on that 300 grand to come back at some point. So but as I've said on the uh we've done We've done episodes on fear of the Lord and trusting in God. I trust that God will take care of me. So I don't worry about any of this and I never have, because I know that there's nothing that these people can do, there's

2:19:03 nothing that Satan can do that can harm me that God won't permit. And if I end up like Job, I'm not gonna say curse God and die. I'm just gonna take the good with the bad. I think that and this is this is one of the things we I talked about in the episode on Fear of the Lord. One of the reasons that I I share some of these stories with people on Stone Choir and elsewhere is not to point to myself or anything, but to say this specific example of faith, not my faith, not that I'm so great, but that when God gives us the confidence in his benevolence, in his love and his care, such that we don't have to worry about what happens in the world. It's the peace which passes all human understanding.

2:19:49 I don't worry about any of these things, not because I have any confidence in myself, because I trust in God. And if I die tomorrow, if somebody hurts me, whatever, I still belong to God no matter no matter what happens. And that's the kind of faith that we want to share with everyone. Because when you actually believe and fear and love and trust in God like that, nothing else can hurt you. Even if you have a family and they come after your family, if they kill your wife and your kids, if the very worst things imaginable happen, you're still in God's hands. And a lot of what all of these attacks rely on is people not believing that. All the pastors who refuse to acknowledge us, all the men who

2:20:28 refuse to acknowledge us in public because they're afraid of the blowback, at some level that's fundamentally a confession, I don't trust that God will take care of me if I'm faithful. And I'm not calling those men out. I'm not saying they're cowards or anything. I'm saying that these are the stakes for these questions. When you have men who are used in the Alinsky model as objects of wrath, and that entire playbook plays out, it's a lesson for everyone. for you know, for us to say, here's all the bad things that happened to us That tells everyone else in the world, don't say these things, don't say that. Looks look what's gonna happen to you. That's the whole point of it. And so that's the point of us standing our ground.

2:21:12 Because it's not our ground, it's God's ground. We're standing on God's ground, which is why we haven't gone anywhere. If this were us just us being stubborn or whatever, I I wouldn't have fared as well. But because none of this is rooted in me, it's rooted in confidence in God, there's nothing anybody can do. And so we will do this as long as we're able and we're going to go after whatever sacred cows there are because it's our duty to God. You know, we said earlier like we're kind of reluctant about starting Stone Choir in my case because I didn't want to cause problems for others as I knew would come, not for my own sake. I'm not I don't care about the consequences for my sake because I trust in God.

2:21:50 But I don't want to make things harder for other people. But we knew that the gifts and abilities that we had were such that when the time came when we did join forces and start doing something, it was going to be efficacious and God has blessed it. And you know, we the the the blessing from what Stone Choir has done is that we have probably about in the on the order of around 10,000 listeners a week, plus or minus. We we don't have creepy stats, We don't really know specifics, but it's a sizable audience for a podcast with no budget and like no curb appeal, like we just sit and talk for two hours. That's not it's not a sexy production. But people have gravitated towards it because we're saying things that no

2:22:31 one else will say and we're saying it well. And one of the amazing fruits has been that there are quite literally hundreds of people who have joined churches, many cases for the first time. There are a lot of adults who've been baptized, a lot of families who've been babies who've been baptized, specifically because they started listening to Stone Choir. And whatever they heard, it wouldn't wherever the catalog was along the way. And we don't do a lot of we don't do a lot of straight theology. We're not preaching. There's not a law gospel. Here's a sermon for you. We specifically talk about believing and obeying God, and then here's a a modern current context where it matters. Here's a contemporary application.

2:23:10 We can do that correctly, unlike the Lutherans. The fruit of that has been that people are joining churches and droves. And that's frankly probably the one thing that keeps me going is knowing that the fruit that has been born by what we're doing is godly. And if we vanish tomorrow, those people are going to be Christians the rest of their lives. And that trajectory of them in their lives and their families' lives and all the lives that they touch, because they're Christians now, that's that's how the gospel works. That's how Christianity works. That's how it's always spread. And so it's a blessing for us to have an opportunity to be God's instrument for that sort of fruit. And the pap the fact that people are screaming and saying mean

2:23:53 things frankly just tells us over target. It's like you said, you discovered us because terrible people said that we were terrible. That's pretty much how it works. Terrible people know what the threat is, and good people sometimes don't. It's one of the things we tell people, listen, listen to the bad people. They know better than you do what the threats are. And one of those is is Corey and myself. We're a threat. Not to Christianity, we're a threat to people who are a threat to Christianity. And I we do it to encourage other people to become a threat. We every listener is now a threat to the things that are harmful to Christianity. And it's emboldened men to be faithful and to speak out more

2:24:31 faithfully. You know, the the trajectory even before Stone Choir, Cory and myself denouncing Michael King, you know, Martin Luther King Jr., that wicked demonic liar. He's an evil man. And when we started saying that a few years ago, almost nobody said that. There was a highly revisionist view that, like, it was basically outside of the church. And every year around MLK Day, we see more and more Christians saying exactly the same things we've always said. That guy is evil, he's bad, he's terrible, his theology is wicked, there's nothing redeeming whatsoever about the man. That sort of sea change occurs quietly and no one remembers where they got it from. And that's fine. the whole point of us spreading these ideas is so that they

2:25:14 take on a life of their own. No one remembers that they, you know, got something from Stone Choir. I don't care. I don't want credit. I want so many men to be saying these things that there's no longer any reason for us to do it. As mentioned in my brief introduction to this episode, this is part one of two. The second part will be released in the future and will be included in the main stone choir stream.