Is “The Woke Right” Even a Real Thing?

then became an evangelical, which is amazing. You and I went to school together way back in the day with our master's program so it's always fun to have you on. Thanks for joining me.

about it. So I'm actually hoping you can help me and my audience think through what this woke right means, why it's growing in popularity, how concerned we should be, and how it's similar and or different from what's called the woke left. But to start with, what interests you in this topic? What's the background that has made you pay so much attention to this?

a faith perspective. Right at the beginning, I'm taking classes on Marxism from a distinguished professor of philosophy there, and I saw my classmates, and I saw where they went, and I had congressmen calling me up asking for character assessments on some of these guys. These were radicals, and I saw, wow, this is really coming. I studied liberation theology many years before in seminary, but I never thought we would actually encounter it much in America when I

got to Purdue, and it wasn't just analytic philosophy. But I'm in continental philosophy now, a place where most evangelical Christians don't, you know, focus their attention. I saw something significant was coming down the pipeline, and my interest began to change, in part because of my new position with Raschio Christi and all of the litigation that we are involved with constantly to be on campus across America, to have freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and so forth.

But you know, with that and my understanding more of cultural Marxism, it started to open up a vista of an almost untapped area in Christian apologetics. And then I ran into a guy who was my sort of doppelganger opposite, and that was an activist Peter Bagoshian, who wrote the book A Manual for Creating Atheists, forward by Richard Dawkins

and endorsed by Michael Shermer, or vice versa. He invites me to his atheism seminar at Portland State University to give a two hour lecture on God's existence and then allows his students to try to take me down. And then we went and had lunch together. It was great, that's awesome. He proposed an alliance, and I thought, okay, this is odd. I wasn't expecting this, but I did know that we both had a similar background and a similar vista in our trajectory. And he said, we need

you and you need us. He said, if we go, you go, and if you go, we go. In fact, you're already gone from the universities. And I remember telling him at that time, I said, Okay, I see the sense of what you're talking about. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. We had to partner with Stalin in the early days of World War two, and then at the same time keeping our eye open on the other person. And he later admitted that, yes, we ruined things.

We him, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and so forth. We always talked and wondered if we destroy the God of the West, some other god or gods are going to replace it. But they had no idea how bad it would become. And so when I walked him to his office, I said, Peter, why is your office the only office in the Portland State Police Department. He said, I think it's for my safety from Antifa, the anti fascists, the Marxists that are doxing him and endangering him and his family.

So a lot of people know the story of him and James Limsay and other people on the Grievance Studies and how they put forth these fake published papers in leftist peer review journals and had half of them accepted by simply overlaying contemporary woke or Marxist or new Left thought on the surface layer. And it passed muster until someone blew the whistle from the Wall Street Journal and

said it's all fake. And so from that time forth he was now running from the new Left, he being a new atheist trying to destroy Christianity being a total liberal himself. Now that liberal atheist and me, a conservative Christian, are now going on a speaking tour together. And we began at Utah State University.

the atheist kind of interlock youateur for this dialogue. And Peter at that point he said, I'm not so interesting in this atheist theist conversation as I was. I'm concerned with something new, and he started talking about cultural Marxism.

So he's the same one who woke up so to speak, for lack of a better term, and shifted the narrative for Justin Bridle to go, wait a minute, maybe times are changing from what you referred to earlier, just to give context to people when you mentioned Sam Harris and

Richard Dawkins and names like Christopher Hitchins. For the first ten years of the twentieth century roughly dominated conversations about God in this group called the New Atheists, and the idea was that religion is false and it's bad, it's ran out of justifications. If we just get rid of it,

we'll have a blissful, wonderful state. But the way you frame that, Corey, is so interesting that Peter would say, I'm not sure if Sam or Richard would agree with this or not, but that he said we actually opened up the door for a lot of this trying to knock down the Christian God, not realizing what worldview would come in and take its place. That is such a fascinating point you made. So you're going on this speaking tour with Peter pick up where we left off.

couple coming together. Our own camps wouldn't show up at the events, and we were just going to be talking about viewpoint diversity and the death of intellectual diversity in the universities. Now he lost his first PhD attempt. I lost my first PhD attempt. I got told I had too much of a faith perspective, and the Marxist professor put a permanent note in my file that I was

delusional in schizophrenic. And then when I went on for the second PhD attempt, I defended before a guy who claims to be the first trans UK philosopher in the entire British Isles. And I talked to Justin Bryerly at that time and said, could you get all three of us, one Bagosian and this guy who is now a gal Right, But anyway, we only made it a weekend. We were going to hit Texas next and hit other states after that.

But then shortly after that COVID hit, George Floyd died, and all of a sudden, all hell bro clues across the nation and the university we ended our lecture at was Utah Valley University, where Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Wow for giving viewpoint diversity and dialogue right. And so I just talked with Peter this morning. Actually, we were talking about a possible new book on freedom because of where we began and how much things have changed ever since then.

So finding allies in the strangest places now is just it's a really weird thing. You know. We're in a cultural revolution, and that's why you get people like Richard Dawkins claiming to be a cultural Christian and Elon Musk a cultural Christian, and Jordan Peterson an existentialist Christian and Democratic presidential candidates now on the Republican you know platform with Trump and Caitlyn Jenner, Bruce Jenner running for the RNC, you know, the Republican governor in California. I mean, this

is just crazy. Our world is different now, we are in a cultural revolution, and so I wanted to figure out what in the world is going on, what kind of revolution is this And that's where I really set into this trajectory in social political philosophy and thinking from a distinct Christian position, how do we navigate this now? And we understood what the woke left was, and I was trying to spend a lot of time educating our

own people and our own audiences on this. And suddenly this thing after Charlie Kirk died, It's almost like it burst on the scene. It was already there, but now, you know, with people asking questions about whether Charlie Kirk's

tactics were sufficient. Gen Z Boys, for example, I was interviewed by Fox News and they talked about this resurgence of gen Z Boys coming back to church and back to conservatism, and I said, I don't know, are they coming back following Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan who are knocking at the door of the churches, Or is it Andrew Tate with his wife beater shirt, or Nick Fuentes and the Droipers, or is it the late Charlie Kirk who's now deceased and who knows what's going to happen

with that movement. But he was already struggling for what he called the Lost Boys of the West. Where are they going to land? And the jury is still out on that one, because the woke right is now a term, but whether or not we should use that term as another question entirely.

he meant was socialists. So we critique that and made a case for capitalism, not that it's perfect, but a positive case that it works as an economic system because so many people have been taken in by socialism for reasons we don't have to go into here. But what I wanted to do is also have a critique of ideas on the right, or what's called the woke right that also concerned me, and that's why your email was absolutely perfect. Now remind us, maybe briefly, before we come

to the woke right. This will help set us up what do we even mean by woke left? Because this term has changed and also can mean different things to different people. And I know you talk about this in your book, but maybe just remind us some of the key ideas of what we mean by kind of wokeism and how that relates to the wolk left.

Everything moves from campus to culture. It comes from upstream and moves downstream, and so what we're seeing in this cultural revolution has already been embedded in the campuses for a long, long long time. I was talking, though, not about a violent revolution. I was talking about an ideological revolution and primarily focused on the universities, which is the waters that I swim in, and the publisher decided to change it. So it makes me look now a bit

more like my book is about politics. It's not. It's more about ideology and what's happening from the ideas up in the campus are coming down in culture such that today we now live on campus. And so I'm trying to explain to people what is it that this revolution is about, Where did it come from, how did this happen, and what can we do about it? And so I basically show that there were two major ideological revolutions that took over our universities that we Christians started. The first

with scientific naturalism. I won't go into that, a lot of people understand what that is, but that laid the groundwork the apex of the scientific the naturalist experiment after about a century was Richard Dawkins and Peter Bagogian and things like that. And I look at Dawkins as sort of like the Robest Pierre of the French Revolution, who created the guillotine for his enemies, and then he got guillotined by his own guillotine, and now he wants to

be friends. And so what was coming behind them has done the same thing that they did to the founders of the universities to the Christians. And right at the time when the dust was settling in America in the nineteen thirties and we had to go start our new universities like the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, like Calvin

College and Wheaton and other places. Over in Germany, once again was this nefarious thing happening, And now we know it was critical theory, which was a Freudian Marxist sort of synthesis that eventually their leaders came over and they taught in our brightest universities, and then within about fifteen years the founders of postmodernism began, and that was in France. We hear names like Leotard or Deredaf or Deconstructionism or

fu cot all of these guys. When we think postmodernism, maybe we think relativism, skepticism toward a meta narrative or whatever. But if they're relativists, then it means that their politics ought to be everything from far left to far right. But the surprising fact is that they weren't. They were all uber left. They were called the new left. They were card carrying members of the French Communist Party or

sympathizers with it. And so they were taking off from the scientific naturalism, moving in now to the neo Marxist synthesis, the Freudian Marxists adding to it, this new postmodern witch is brew So we can go into that or not, but it is this new phenomena that eventually came over to our universities and they went into the humanities and social sciences, whereas the First Revolution went into the hard sciences. And these guys, eventually, decades into it, started making their

move and started kicking out the first guard. And by the mid nineteen nineties, you know, the ratio of liberal the conservative professor was two point three to one. In the last twenty five years, it's now twenty three to one or twenty seven to one for the IVY leagues. In some places it's seventy to one, at Yale at seventy eight to one. And so these are not viewpoint

diversity academies at all. So we need to be preparing and understanding what's coming from upstream is coming downstream, and this is what's pushed out the Richard Dawkinses and the Peter Bagosians and the Elon Musks and the RFK and Tulsi Gabbards and everybody else into this cultural revolution. We

are in an ideological revolution. And so rather than just a simple definition of woke, what I like to do is I like to layer it for you and I as trained philosophers helping out everybody else to see that philosophy is. It's kind of simple. It's three branches. It's what is real? How do we know what is real? How should we then live based on what we know about reality? Woke is part of epistemology, it's part of knowledge,

so it fits right in there. But this whole woke worldview part of the critical race theory or the postmodern cultural Marxism. It's got a metaphysic at epistemology and an ethic or what is real? How do I know what is real? How should I then live based on what I know about reality? And so I choose not to

define this popular slogan of DEI in that way. I do it dee because the D fits in metaphysics, what is real in human relations, the I fits in epistemology inclusivity, and the E fits in ethics equity, and it goes in that order. And this will help us understand what woke really is and eventually why I think it's a misnomer to be applied to the right inasmuch as we've

got problems there. We need to use terms accurately and be clear about what we're saying, because we can't provide an adequate prescription if we don't have an adequate diagnosis.

woke right. And I'm totally up for you persuading me and convincing me not to use the term woke right. I've somewhat adopted it because I've heard it used didn't really see the harm in it. So before we talk about what's meant by that, why does it matter? Why is it whether we call something woke left or woke right? Why do you think the terms that we use really matter?

is this both sideism narrative. Right after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, there was a lot of sympathy in the country for about twenty four hours, and then you started seeing some really you know, nasty language coming out from people who thought of him poorly and thought of conservatives poorly, and the the temperature started to raise with all of that.

And it was after that that people started to choose sides and push away from where Charlie Kirk was going, and they wanted to adopt this name that had been given to them, called the woke right. But something required a pause. This both sides ism that was happening was that, you know, assassinations happen on both sides, We have extremists on both sides. Violence is both both sides. In fact, political violence happens more on the right than it happens

on the left. So you started seeing data sets coming out in the social media showing that on the right political violence is far worse. Most people aren't going to look that up. They're just going to wonder about it until you start to open up the hood and see what's under there. They're considering neo Nazis on the right, and you might think Nazism as a kind of socialism, maybe it should be left. They've got the KKK on the right. Well, the Democratic Party invented the KKK. They

have Islamists on the right. They don't account for a lot of the trans shooters in this category and so forth. So you started to see cherry picking happening with the data, and the effect of the both sidesism is that, wow, we've got problems on both sides. Everybody's got extremists. Let's

just all beware of the extremists. So the reality is that people on the right, not everybody, but those that are conservatives, and more deeply, what are they trying to conserve, and that is they're deeply held religious beliefs beginning with Genesis one twenty six. We are made in God's image. That's why black lives matter, That's why all lives matter. That's why liberals, conservatives lives matter, everyone's matters, because God

is the sanctifier of human life. And so you would think it predictable that you're not going to have as much violence on the right. Forget just the abortion question. Is violence even political violence? And you start to look at the left and you start to see most atheists vote left. They feel most comfortable in that camp Republican and Democrat. That's superficial. Below that is conservative and liberal or Marxist now, and below that is secularism or religion. Well,

those things should have consequences in the behaviors. And so I think when we have this both sides ism, what happened then is it sort of neutralized the conversation and that there's just bad violence on the left and the right. Well, that's true, but if we can't really diagnose the problem, we can't offer a prescription. And I contend that the violence is predominantly on the left. We have you know this, this notion of what's it called an assassination culture now

came out of the Washington Post. And when Luigi Mangioni assassinated Brian Thomas Thompson of United Healthcare, what was amazing. Wasn't just that he came from University of Pennsylvania as a graduate student and so forth, but how many people in gen Z were lauding him as a heathen? Yeah, and so you started to see and then out of Rutgers came this study that showed that fifty six percent of those who claim to be on the left think

it justifiable to assassinate President Trump. And so you're finding all of these other studies that counterbalance the other side. So that said that both sides is, I think is an effect we want to avoid if it is inaccurate just throwing terms around. The other thing is hang.

something on the woke left. Your concern, just to make sure I understand, is you think if we just call woke left and woke right, it leads to kind of a relativistic or a neutral playing field. Resay, Well, there's just problems on the left and the right, and it's all equal, and we fail to show where the problem really lies. That's your concern. Did I capture that fairly?

statement together, who is a deist? I may disagree with what you say, but I would defend to the death. You're right to say it. But Stalin comes along and says something more like, ideas are more powerful than weapons. We don't allow our enemies to have weapons, so why should we let them have ideas. That's the heart of cancel culture. And it is primarily on the left, not just anecdotally in my experience, but according to data where

the cancel culture is rooted in. And it's not in the old left either, it's in primarily the new Left. So there is something happening over on the left that has been infiltrated by this post modern cultural Marxist zeitgeist. It's a worldview that started outside of America and came into America, and it happened to infiltrate into the Democratic Party more so than into the Republican Party, probably because

it was already leaning toward a secularist base. But now you've got this thing happening on the right which is a reaction to their experienced people's experiences, their lived experiences on the left. So let me explain that lived experience, because that's where rests. Okay, So when we think about this in terms of what is real? How do I know what is real? How should I then live based on what I know about reality? Metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics

the three branches of philosophy. Diversity in academia means you locate all of these and you identify all of these identity politics groups and you formulate them on the two sides of the haves and the have nots. The oppressed and the oppressors, the victims and the victimizers, And you're either in one camp or the other, and you might have multiple intersectional levels of this. You might be black and not white, woman and not man, transgender and not cisgender, whatever.

But everybody belongs to at least one, and most people to multiple of these classes. And what you do with that at this point comes next. But first, this is important. It's not just that you've divided oppressor and oppress e camps. It's the nature the definition of the oppression is not just psychologized, but it's also embedded in an entire worldview. I've heard you say on one of your podcasts, quoting Thomas Soul, Jonathan Height says it a lot too, that

disparate treatment does not entail disparate outcomes. In other words, inequality entails injustice. And they would say, no, it doesn't, but if you're part of the Marxist ideology, you believe absolutely it does. It's not just oppression, and you know someone being oppressed by someone else, And so that claim being true of people on the right, and that claim being true of people every year of every Earth year that we've existed, it's a particular philosophy that inequality entails

in justice always. It's that kind of oppression. And the epistemology then is that those people who are the oppressed, they have special insight once they have emerged with what is called critical consciousness in Marx's thought. It's part of what is called standpoint epistemology. Your standpoint theory started in second wave feminism by people like Sandra Harding, who applied it first in feminism, but she says she got it

from Marx. And so you have a special esoteric knowledge based on your positionality or based on your social location, and you have special insights. So you were once blind, but now you see the other people they could just listen, learn and lament because they're blind. The us they can be is be less white, or be less male, or be less whatever. But you have special insight. And so we should include practice inclusivity only for those who are

part of the oppressed camps. We should exalt them, promote them, give them platforms and d platform or exclude those who are the oppressors. And then what you do next in ethics is, if the problem is social oppression, the solution is social liberation. Liberational consciousness, and it is equity, revenge, reparations, payback for however long. Now, what's going on here is these guys, ultimately, at least this is what they say.

They imagine for the Beatles song, imagine this utopia, this communist utopia where we're all sharing things in common and there's no more competition, there's no haves and have nots. It requires a little bloodshed, the dictatorship of the proletariat, but after a while they give it back to the people. The state just withers away, and we've got this harmony across the land. Their ultimate goal is utopia and equality.

It's egalitarian. None of those things in d I E. Are what we're seeing on those who are charged with being woke. Right, These people who are say white Christian nationalists, if they are out there, and they are, they're not people who think that inequality entels injustice. They think inequality is the right way to go. But they're supremacists. They need to be on top. Their ultimate goal is not equality egalitarianism. Their ultimate goal is to have themselves on

top and have perpetual inequality. We don't call the Confederate soldiers woke. We don't call the Nazis woke, they're just white supremacists. And so what's going on here with these people on the woke right being charged with, Well, they're involved in identity politics, you know, white supremacy or Christian

supremacy or male patriarchy and imposing their viewpoints on other people. Okay, their tactics are similar, their methods might be similar, but they're metaphysic, they're epistemology, and their ethic they're not the same. And so while there are similarities, there aren't relevant similarities to provide necessary and sufficient conditions to defining what woke really is and what we've tried so hard to do to get people to understand what this revolution is and

where it came from. People on the so called woke right don't believe those things.

it basically just means knowledge. It's the study of how we know things through testimony, through intuition, through science, and when it comes to what's on the what you call cultural Marxism wokeism, the way to know something is through standpoint epistemology. That's the term that's used that if you have certain intersections, so a certain economic status, a certain sexual orientation, a certain approach and understanding of your gender,

if you're able bodied, if you're certain religion. By the way, earlier you said all of us have at least one Corey, I have none of them. I don't think I have a single one. I'm not sure you do either. When I show the chart of intersectionality of my students, I say, I'm actually the face of oppression. Now I'm not rich, but I live in southern Orange County. I'm doing fine, so compared to the rest of the world, I guess on some level I would maybe check that box just

living where I live. But the point being, based on a certain standpoint you have of a category or characteristic you belong to, you have special knowledge and insight because of that because of my sexual orientation, because I'm male or female. Because whatever it is you're saying, that doesn't carry over to the woke right. They don't have the

same kind of epistemology. Then what kind of epistemology does this group that we call the woe right have and how is it different from standpoint epistemology?

social binary metaphysic. They don't adopt the standpoint epistemology when it comes to knowledge, and they don't adopt the egalitarian ultimate goal because they might be supremacist in these ways.

this is the case. So it seems to me, unless I'm missing something, they're kind of adopting the same kind of framework that's given to them from the woke left, but saying instead saying, no, it's not black people, it's not straight people. I'm sorry, it's not gay people, it's not transgender, it's not poor people. It's white male Christians understood a certain way, who are the ones who are being oppressed? So why am I wrong in terms of them adopting the same framework but just switching who who

is actually the oppressed versus the oppressor? When it comes to this, Wolk right.

for some more white sounding name. Likewise, you could find things on the opposite side where the Supreme Court needs to weigh in, because clearly there was racist admissions hiring at Harvard and University of North Carolina and so forth. So we're not saying that these white males haven't been oppressed, or that there isn't oppression among blacks or Hispanics or something like that. There may well be, but that's an empirical matter. We have to go investigate that. We have

to look at the facts. But the facts are our hindsight, those are our second most. If it doesn't fall into the theory, you push it out. The metaphysics simply is inequality entails injustice. If there's an unequal outcome, it's because it's caused by injustice, full stop. And so someone like ib Ibrames Kendy, he's not going to be interested in your stats. He's always just going to say there's an outcome,

whether it's SAT scores or whatever. If blacks are always down here and whites are always up here, there must be It's a must, it's a necessity. Operator there must be some causal link of injustice. Something nefarious go going on. Thomas Sulla comes along in his book on Disparities Right. He shows that no, there's there's awful. There's an awful

lot of possible explanations for inequality. Sometimes it's unjust, and sometimes it's just because of the river systems or the social policies or whatever.

negotiable part. That's not something you have to prove by empirical evidence. That is a starting point its opera. It's an a priori how they know and understand the world. This woke right is flipping it on its head and saying no, actually, we're the ones who are pressed here, but not because they start with the same world views, saying by definition, white Christian males, etc. Are oppressed. They're saying in practice, this is what's happened. So it's reactionary

against it. It's almost parasitic upon it, rather than the same kind of built in ideology from the bottom up. Is that fair?

level of behavior, of tactics, of methodology. He's not going to the deeper philosophical issues. One of my other friends that we've mentioned, Neil Shenvy, is also very careful as a scholar, and he gets in many of the essential ingredients, but he misses certain aspects that I've just pointed out that need to be packed in because they're baked into the philosophy of the identity politic on the left that

can't be on the right. Once anyone does accept that they're automatically on the left, it's a Marxist left, it's a new left. And so even Nil Shenvy says, if you don't like the term, I understand, maybe use a different term, like dissident right or the new right. And so I say, okay, so that we don't confuse things, let's do it now. There is another major thinker who's got a book out there called The Case for Christian Nationalism, and that is Stephen Wolfe. He's part of the reformed movement.

Not everybody in that movement likes what he's doing. Some people like theologian Kevin Dejung first challenged him on it and asked, you know, whether his idea of imposing this Christian nationalism, this white Christian nationalism, what does it do with the First Amendment? For example? Was the First Amendment a mistake? You know, what are we going to do with the Muslims, What are we going to do with the Mormons, what do we do with the Baptists? And

what do we do with the Catholics. Nick Fuentes, who's often said to be one of those on the woke right, well he's a Catholic and America's founding was largely Protestant, so there's a lot of messiness there. But even Stephen wolf he's one who actually says explicitly, I'm going to advocate that we take the principles of critical theory and we make them work for us with a different starting

point to give us the wanted, desirable conclusion. The problem is when you start to read his comments on it, he doesn't understand the essential ingredients going into again the metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics either. So we need clarity philosophically from the three branches of philosophy. What do we mean by these social binaries? What is packed in in the woke left is not what the right is appealing to. Stephen Wolf is not going to embrace that view on the reality

of social binaries. He's not going to embrace the next category or the final category either. So we can call it that, as Lindsay says, loosely, we can say we're uncomfortable with it. We can come up with a different term for it. And I lawd that, and I say, I think we do need a different term because it only confuses and already confusing issue.

dissident right. Some still refer to the woke right. We've talked about issues to that. Who'd be some of the key people that you would place in that category.

couple of weeks ago. Because when you're speaking to conservatives and you use the term woke and you stick that on someone like a dirty sock, immediately amongst a conservative audience, there is a visceral effect. And that's the intent is to stick someone like Fuentes right or wrong. You stick them with this notion woke that already has a a negative term, a negative connotation to it, and you get rid of your enemies. And there is a lot going on there with we could get into this the whole

issue of anti Semitism Israel. Israel is actually somewhat central to many of these people that are charged with being on the woke right.

we know, and there's metaphysics what is real? So presumably on the woke side, you would say the woke left, what is real is more materialism with its Marxist ruth. There might be exceptions, but it's more of an atheist materialist worldview. Would you agree with that? Is that what you would argue for wokeism?

against oppression. That's how we should live. Let's shift that to this new dissonent. Right, is it possible to put it in similar categories or is it just so broad and different that we can't simplify it in that same way.

let's say he is really a white supremacist. Well, we don't call the Confederate soldiers woke just because they're white supremacist. They weren't Marxists. They were Theists, at least on paper, and they didn't have this idea of egalitarian utopia in the future. Their idea was that and they would cite as much Darwinian science and Confederate theology as it took

to convince people that they were superior to blacks. Right, So you can have an identity power in this new movement on the right, but it doesn't connote the same thing as the wokeness on the left, which has the necessity operator inequality entails injustice. Disparate outcomes always must entail disparate treatment. They're saying, we we agree that there should be unequal outcomes. That's fully just we're superior. They're they're

not in the same category. And to complicate things even more, you have Fuentes, for example, befriending others that are in the black community that are blacks of premacists, and so talk about the identity politic like say a Lewis Farakahn, or you know, think about anyone who's a member of

the black supremacist movement. It might be smaller than the white supremacist movement, but neither of those supremacist are egalitarian, so they can't technically be classified as woke, falling under the categories of D, I and E once we define the terms in philosophy.

still are okay with the term right. So we've got kind of the woke left, we've got the dissident right, the new right.

Tell me what you're seeing on college campuses in terms of this dissident right, and what do you think the attraction is for it.

politicize this without violence. And this is the concern of some of those on the right because they are saying and the younger generation, and I'm talking to gen z ers saying this, They say, we thought Charlie Kirk may have been the way, but they killed him. It's not the way. It's ineffective. Not even Trump is the way. The whole thing needs to burn down. Some of them are just anti GOP, so they're right, but it's not necessarily Republican as far as they're concerned. Let the whole

thing burn down and start all over. But their vision tends to be more political. In my estimation, I'm thinking it needs to be more transformational. We need to be thinking about soul saving, but we also need to think

about institutional recapture because the institutions are critical. James Davison Hunter, who wrote the book To Change the World, says that even when you look back at many of the Christian revivals that were substantial or cultural revolutions or movements, they may start out in among the masses, but they never really get traction until they're baptized by the elite. And so my claim is in the original title of the book is the third revolution from the campus to the

culture and a vision forward. As goes the campus, so goes the culture. As goes the US campus, so goes the world. It's that influential. You can't escape it because everything is coming from camp down into the corporate world, into the churches, into the seminaries, into your closets, even you've got your cell phones there. And everybody, even if they're not called to go back on campus, needs to prepare for this false, poisonous ideology coming from the campuses

because you can no longer escape it. So when we look at where the statistics are going right now with the young men and the young women on the campuses, the young the young women are going more progressive, and there is a demographic feminization of academia across the board. More young girls are enrolled in college, more girls in graduate school in PhD programs, more assistant professorships, and within the next decade, more university presidents and full professors. The

whole thing will be demographically feminized. That's not even talking about ideological feminization and all that it entels and implications that it'll have for the church. For example, if you're going to college to get graduate degrees, you're going to want to go get a job for a while, and that's going to put off, you know, baby making. And if the women are getting the higher degrees, and the

higher degrees you have translates into higher paychecks. The woman is going to be the breadwinner going forward, including in Christian traditional homes. What is that going to look like for everybody going forward? The men do happen to have a greater zest for spirituality right now, but who are they going to again? Are they following Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan, who perhaps haven't crossed over quite yet, they're

not yet Christians, but very close. Are they following Andrew Tait, who's advocating red pelling everybody you know, pushing back against feminism in a very unhealthy, non Christian sort of way. Or are they following someone like a Nick Flintests. And even if you exonerate Nick flintests on his real views and not just the performative views or the you know, clips that people take of him. Nonetheless, he's got enough groupers who really are women haters, haters of Jews, haters

of blacks. I've met many of them too, the men. Ironically on college campuses, in our college campuses anyway, are our groups are dominated by men over women. Men flock to engineering programs, women flock to nursing programs. Men flock to apologetics more than the women do. So we have an opportunity for these men who are now reacting to a culture that they are so sick of being battered by as toxic, masculine and mails. The best hope you could ever be is Homer Simpson. And so they are

coming back to some conservative roots. But where they're landing it's competitive right now. We need to go after them. They're open. There's a crisis of belief that Justin Brierly might talk about. Yeah, and it's an opportune moment for us to capture the men. And when the men convert, and when the men have families and they take their families to church, the statistics show the kids come to church more often if the dad comes than if the mom comes. So this is a good thing that these men,

these young men are open right now. But Nick Frentes is after Charlie Kirk's young men, and he says, explative, explative, explative, we ft TPUSA. Your young men are following us, They're going in his direction. How many I don't know yet,

none of us do. The young women we need to in the field of Christian apost pogetics and evangelism, we need to find a better way to reach them, especially on the campuses, and it might be through a new developing field we could talk about as rhetorical apologetics.

you can self educate today. It would make sense in the early part of the twentieth century that the university would be so significant, But now things aren't moving out from the university. They're moving from influencers, and they're moving from podcasters and YouTubers and TikTokers, etc. So what's the big deal about the university. What would you say to that.

And right now, even with the lower numbers, perhaps going to the university and maybe maybe the boys are looking at trades more and so forth. Nonetheless, the average of church going attendance today is about thirty percent weekly. If you say almost weekly, it's thirty I think thirty nine percent, thirty seven or thirty nine percent, but exactly thirty seven to thirty nine percent of people that are age eighteen

to twenty four are enrolled in college. If you go to church every week, you get fifty two sermons a year. You get sixty sermons in your first month as a freshman. So who has the ear of the future. And so last month I was with doctor James Torr, one of the top ten chemists in the world, top fifty most influential scientists. And on the podcast that I did with him, and then in the Sunday school teaching class we did,

he said it both times. This guy was crazy. I mean, he came from Purdue, he did his PhD under a Nobel Prize winning Japanese chemist here and he went to the same church that I go to now. And so we had a great conversation about this. He knocked on every single apartment door and did door knocking evangelism when he was here. That's the kind of guy he is. When he had kids, he used to wake up every morning at five point thirty am and wake his kids

up and do family devotionals. That's the kind of father he is. And he's a super scientist. But he said this in the podcast. He says, I used to tell people train your child in the way they should go and when they get older, they won't depart from it. I will not tell people that proverb anymore. When all four of my kids went off to college, two of the four had their worldviews rocked, and one has not returned yet. The philosophical subtlety that's going on in the university.

When the ratio is twenty three to one, twenty seventy, twenty seven to one, seventy to one, or seventy eight to one, no one can compete with that unless we adequately train them. And this is why I say in the end of the book, it's all hands on deck. It's the university stupid. It's still the paper of record, it's still the place of prestige and whatever comes in the future with AI, with technology, wherever the education source

is located, that's where we want to be. So you're right in terms of podcasting or whatever, because we want to be upstream where the ideas come downstream and have consequences. Good ideas. Bad ideas have consequences that make victims. Good ideas have the kind of consequences that transform lives for good and civilizations as well. So wherever that sources, we want to be there. But right now it's still at the university, and so Peter Bagosian, for example, he joined

and he said, let all the universities burned down. And I said, I don't think so, and he said he you know, he started with Steven Pinker and a number of other people, groups of people, the University of Austin that was modeled after Grove City and Patrick Henry College in Hillsdale where they don't accept any government funding. And now certain ones of them have left. It's still pursuing accreditation.

But think about it. You start over all over again, and what are you going to have a ten thousand dollars endowment with an Atari computer? You're behind two hundred and fifty years from Harvard. So I'm saying, yes, let's throw multiple socks against the walls. Let's do what you're doing social media presence, Let's do what I'm doing the campus. But I'm also doing something else that I'm trying to build a coalition around, and that is the MALEIK Academic Fellowship.

We are trying to learn from the Marxists about the long March through the institutions, and we're pumping PhD students getting into top one hundred institutes. Their whole job is to land a credible, sustainable, durable PhD student only chapter that after forty or fifty years, we will be reclaiming through institutional recapture ground at the universities. Al Muller I interviewed him. He took over a liberal university, it's now

conservative al planning. He went into philosophy and behind him was a beachhead and awake that transformed the entire discipline and philosophy of religion. The fact that this ideological revolution number one and number two have happened two times shows that it can happen again. So is it uphill it is? Do we have our work cut out for us? We do.

But regardless, everybody must either go back into the universities for institutional recapture or prepare for the poisonous ideology coming out of it because you can no longer escape it.

woke right. I'd love to know what, Folks listening, what do you think? Do you agree with the assessment here about the woke right? Would you different say? No, the worldview doesn't matter. If the tactics and the strategy are the same, we should call it the woke right. I'd love to know what people think about this, so comment put your two cents below would be interesting to know you help me think this through, Corey. It's not often that I bring somebody on and I'm kind of live

processing these ideas. But I think I'm compelled to not use the term woke right, at least in the same way or without serious qualification as to some of the differences I said. Folks watching, make sure you have subscribed. We've got some other conversations coming up you will not

want to miss. And if you thought about studying apologetics, we are doing cultural apologetics, which is a lot of what you heard here, and also classical apologetics in our program about the Bible, Science and Faith, philosophical evidences, etc. Information is that is down below. Corey as always enjoyed it, my friend.

review helps. Thanks for listening to The Sean McDowell Show, brought to you by Talbot School of Theology at Biola University, where we have on campus and online programs and apologetic spiritual formation, marriage and family, Bible and so much more. We would love to train you to more effectively live, teach, and defend the Christian faith today and we will see you when the next episode drops.