TheRedArchive

~ archived since 2018 ~

Transcript of the second podcast.

Dalrock
March 9, 2019

A reader was kind enough to listen to the second Warhorn podcast and transcribe it.  This kind of thing takes a great deal of work, and I very much appreciate the time that clearly went into it.  He said that after listening through a few times he could identify Nathan’s voice from the others, so he noted it in the transcript.  Also, he said he left out the skits.

What strikes me after reading it is how difficult the men of Pastor Bayly’s Clearnote Church find it to state things plainly.  Their natural inclination is clearly a kind of circle talk, where they carefully skirt around an issue.  This is what makes their communication style so painful (beyond the skits and funny voices).  For example, I published the entire original exchange I had with Nathan Alberson to show that he had gone back on his word.  Nathan never acknowledged or directly challenged this, and instead published select excerpts of the exchange as if they were the whole.  The implication here is that I’m lying, that I made up the latter half of our exchange.  But why is he being so careful not to say what he is implying?  It can’t be that he doesn’t want to call me a liar, because that is his and Warhorn’s charge against me (aside from my anonymity).  Clearly he knows calling me a liar in that case wouldn’t stand up to even moderate scrutiny.  So he hopes no one will notice that we did the interview with the revised list of 9 questions Nathan sent me and not his original list of 7.

But this kind of slipperiness takes a great deal of effort, and you can see how hard they had to work to achieve this in the podcast.  It also makes it painful to listen to, or even read.

March 10th Update:  The reader notified me that a section was missing.  This was due to my error, not his.  I’ve added the missing section along with notes indicating where it was added back.  Search for “previously missing section” to see the segment.

—————- Begin Transcript —————-

Nathan – Hey everybody welcome to Sound of Sanity. My name is Nathan Alberson. I’m your humble and obedient host. We’re back. Let me introduce you to our fine crew of panelists. We’ve got Benjamin Sulser, associate producer Benjamin J Sulser over there. How ya doin Ben?

– I’m doing fine Nathan.

Nathan – I’m glad to hear it sir, and of course, Pastor Jacob Mentzel. How are ya doin Jake?

-Little under the weather, but otherwise pretty good.

Nathan – Yeah I’m also a little under the weather Ben?

– Well, me too.

Nathan – Three for three baby.

– Three for three.

Nathan – Guys, we are doing a follow up episode to last weeks episode which was entitled Into the Manosphere. Ben would you like to summarize that episode?

-We wanted to give our listeners a rundown of the manosphere since I had started reading one voice in the manosphere who happened to be the best representative of the Christian manosphere that any of us knows of. I just think it’s an interesting place. It’s interesting to see how men have begun to react to the feminism of our culture, what they say, and what a Christian guy who’s kind of part of a broader reaction against feminism says. Anyway, we tried to give our listeners an overview of things. And then we honed in on the specific guy we interviewed, a man named Dalrock, who is actually not named Dalrock, that’s a pseudonym. And we took apart his arguments, since he’s critical of our pastor.

Nathan – That is a thing that hppened Jake, true or false?

– More or less true, yeah.

Nathan – Yeah more or less true, it’s kind of a hard episode to describe. It was a hard episode to do. We spent alot of time putting it together, and I think it’s probably good to say off the bat the episode ended up being a little dense and maybe a little, uh not dense in the sense of stupid, but dense in the sense of packed with a lot of information without a really clear through line for people who maybe weren’t as familiar with the format of the show. It was our first one back after a little hiatus, or people maybe just not familiar with the manosphere or familiar particularly with the philosophy of one Dalrock. So I apologize if anyone lost their way in that episode, I could see how that could have happened. This week we’re going to come back and hopefully give you a few footholds to think about this a little bit further.
Lets start with a story of, a little bit broader, the story of what happened last week and why. We were going to do an episode on the manosphere. That was our intention right?

-That’s right, we wanted to do an episode on the manosphere and everything that entails, so these terms that you see and that you heard us throw around last week

Nathan – Red pill, MGTOW, MRM, MRA, whatever it is, men’s rights movement yeah MRM…

– Yeah Game.

Nathan – all that wonderful stuff

-And we didn’t want to be the ones defining our own terms. And so we decided the best thing to do would be to interview somebody who’s representative of the manosphere and somebody preferably who’s a Christian and one of the best and most reasonable voices in the manosphere.

Nathan – So we reached out to a pseudonymous blogger who goes by the handle of Dalrock. He writes on Christian manhood, sexuality,

– That sort of thing.

Nathan – that sort of thing. Ben you were familiar with his work, I think you were the one that first brought him to me and Jake’s attention.

-I was and I appreciated the way he took certain things apart like that book Every Man’s Marriage which is really gross and…

-I think maybe that was the first time I had heard of Dalrock was from you positively praising that book, or, not the book but his takedown of the book.

– Praising his takedown of the book, yes.

Nathan – Right, and Dalrock can be fun to read and insightful when he’s eviscerating a target that deserves it, more about that in a minute. Um, If you listen to last week’s episode you know we don’t, I guess its worth saying, we don’t like Dalrock, we don’t support Dalrock, we don’t think people should read Dalrock. But just to get the story done, because we wanted to just kind of get an overview of the manosphere, what was going on there, I sent an email to Dalrock, I got ahold of him. He responded with an email directly to me, and then I emailed him. I’m going to go ahead and read this email, because it’s been the subject of some controversy and some confusion. I’m just going to read this entire email.
Hi, this is an email to Dalrock from me, Nathan Alberson.
Hi, We’re putting together an episode of our podcast Sound of Sanity on Red Pill, Game, MGTOW, all that good stuff. I wanted to see if you would consent to a phone interview sometime in the near future. I’d like to get as clear an articulation of your views as I can, and present it to the world. The questions would be quite simple I prefer simple questions that allow for more elaborate answers, as needed.
And then I listed seven questions. These are the same questions that you can actually see if you read the transcript of our email exchange, who are you, what are the problems facing men today, basic questions about who he was, what he was doing, how his work interacted with the manosphere, and what the manosphere was, which was what the episode was going to be about.

– Yeah, what we were going to be able to do with that hopefully would be to have a couple of audio clips for you guys of someone in the manosphere saying this is what it is, this is what red pill is, this is what mgtow is, this is who I am, this is what I’m concerned about, this is why I do what I do, and then be able to go with that, build off of that, into explaining to you something of this world.

Nathan – Uh, so just to finish the email, I said, after I listed those questions I said full disclosure: as you probably know, we don’t agree on everything. If I’m not mistaken… which, given where we’ve landed on Dalrock now it might sound like I’m being a little soft on him. But I actually didn’t know him that well at the time, and so I was really just wanting to understand his point of views. But I did know that he had said some negative things about my pastor, so here I say quote If I’m not mistaken, you see the work of my pastor and others like him as somehow undercutting the concept of female moral agency. I see your work as needlessly undercutting male responsibility in the name of establishing female moral agency. The podcast may ultimately reflect these differences, but I’d like to give you a fair chance to say your piece. This won’t be “gotcha journalism.” Actually, in that spirit, I’ll warn you about the potential “gotchas” right now: I would like to press you a bit on the misogynists that work like yours seems to attract. I’ve seen more than one commenter in your archives say that a woman needs a good old fashioned spanking. I see in your “comments policy” you ask people to refrain from discussing marital corporal punishment. It seems to me that if you have to ask people to refrain from that topic, you may be attracting the wrong sort of people. I’d like to ask you frankly about that and let you answer however you choose. I hope that sounds amenable to you. Thanks, Nathan

– You could, if you pull that quote out of context, “I want to present your views to the world” you could get the idea that we want to do a whole episode on Dalrock and on promoting his views and giving him a chance to speak and use our platform to promote his views.

[Music stops]

But that’s not what the podcast was ever supposed to be about, it was clear from the beginning. And, when Nathan said “I want to present your views to the world” he was talking about his simple perspective on these definitions, what he’s doing and why he’s doing it, in the manosphere at large.

Nathan – He’s presented it as if I came along and said Mr. Dalrock, I’d like to give you a platform to expound your entire philosophy and to have a long form debate with me and my crowd about that. I never said that or…

– No, it was an interview, and it was simply a way for us to have a credible entry point into dealing with the manosphere and what it represents.

Nathan – Right.

– But the point is, it was clearly an interview, and it was meant to be an interview from the top. And why Dalrock, again, because he seemed to us to be the best, maybe not the best representative of the whole of the manosphere but maybe the most Christian, the one that Christian men would be most likely to be attracted to and even helped by.

-Yeah, the one that they’d have the best reason to read, I mean, the voice that would be most useful.

Nathan – Now, I do want to say though before we move forward, just so everything’s out on the table in terms of what was and wasn’t said, I did agree that he could post these things, post our exchange on his blog if he thought it would be helpful. In the back of my mind I kind of thought, well, it’s going to be pretty simple, like simpler maybe than…

– Yeah, I saw that email and I thought well ok he’s going to put up one post and it’s going to be him defining red pill and mgtow for his audience…

Nathan – Right, maybe as long as he’s defining these terms maybe he wants to use them as a primer, as long as he is giving a solid defense of his views on marital corporal punishment for example it might be nice for him to just make that into one post, which is fine, you know, which I said was fine. I did also offer at a certain point to provide written material you know if he needed a more clear articulation of our point of view in order to engage with it, but we never went into this thinking it was going to be a debate or going to be a chance for him to have a full platform.

[Funeral music starts]

– Yeah but then one we got into the email exchange, for one, and saw how he was running with the questions and using them as jumping off points for him talking about his hobby horses… so then we have all… these big long responses to deal with. And then we start looking more deeply into what he actually says, and it’s just deception and lies, all through it.

Nathan – Right.

– Just complete dishonesty. And the way that he hijacks and diverts things, Nathan says I think that rebellious women should be rebuked, and called to repentance, and he says no you don’t, you’re a pastor, and now I’m going to talk about women in the military and the PCA report from 2002 for, you know, three pages…

Nathan – Yeah, he really…

– Of email exchange, and, in that, I’m going to lie about your pastor and about other people. And it’s like what? Come on man. You can’t accept that we think that rebellious women should be called to repentance? Your response to that is to then lie about our pastor, and to do it publicly as if we now have an obligation to deal with all of this garbage that you’re putting out there, it’s like, that was never the intention, it was clear from the beginning, and so ok, now we have a decision to make. Has this gotten out of hand, do we need to deal with Dalrock, or do we need to ignore it, and we decided to lean in, and just go ahead and deal with Dalrock and his dishonesty.

Nathan – And we had this 17 page transcript, 17 single spaced page transcript of our email exchange to deal with, which is what we, basically last episode, just to understand what was going on in our minds if it was a little unclear for you to follow it dear listener, we decided to do some skits and stuff like we normally do, do the devils advocate segment…

-open up the question of the manosphere, and some of the people in it, and there’s no question that some of the things that we did, like we were talking about, were manosphere stuff, these are all, like that conference that we were talking about, the 21 whatever its called, these are the guys, like, Rollo Tomassi is the guy, and he’s kind of a father of the whole thing. And he has Dalrock on his blogroll and Dalrock has him on his blogroll, and [inaudible] these are the guys, this is what they represent, and they have these conferences, and they promote BDSM and all kinds of stuff like that. And, they talk about wife spanking, and all this stuff you can find in the manosphere.

Nathan – You can also find people who, disclaimer, you can find people that don’t like BDSM. You can find people that don’t like wife spanking, you can find all kinds of things in the manosphere.

– It’s a broad broad movement which is why, you know, we talked about the mens rights movement vs the mgtows, right?

Nathan – Right, so just from our point of view if you understand what was happening last episode, just imagine, we barrel through talking about the manosphere, trying to give people some footholds to even understand any of this, and then, we have the 17 page thing from Dalrock which he’s already published on his blog that we have to deal with, so we attempted to deal with… I think we could have been more clear.

– I think we should have been more clear

Nathan – And should have been more clear, as far as what we were doing last episode, and why, so that’s what we’re doing now. Let’s just make sure everybody’s on the same page. Ben, explain everything that I just talked about in the simplest terms possible.

Ben – We wanted to do an episode on the manosphere, and we wanted the help of someone in the manosphere that we thought could give us clear definitions and would be worth quoting, and worth in some measure I suppose referring people to.

Nathan – Or engaging with at the very least.

Ben – Engaging with as an authority on certain definitions and questions.

Nathan – In other words you’ve got Rollo Tomassi who’s a pick up artist, you’ve got texas dom who’s, you know, texas dom, BDSM, you’ve got people that as Christians in good conscience we cannot engage with, and then you have Dalrock, who does at least present himself as the most reasonable, biblical voice that we’re aware of in the movement.

-And he’s been called by other Christians in his comment section like a kind of founding father of the Christian men’s sphere, Christian manosphere.

Nathan – Well and the thing about people who are, look I’m not sure what other word to use, the thing about people who are slimy, is that they don’t actually come like Uriah Heap, wringing their hands and cackling, and being nasty. They present themselves as reasonable, and if they’re good at it,

-On the surface.

Nathan – you know some one who is duplicitous isn’t someone who says, hey, I’ve got something to tell you, that’s what someone who’s bad at being duplicitous because they sound like someone duplicitous. Somebody that’s good at being duplicitous Is somebody that seems normal, stable, reasonable, [soft organ music continues in background] which is how Dalrock presents himself.

– Yeah, and listeners have said, in various places to us, hey I used to think Dalrock was great, until I saw what he said about Doug Wilson and reforming marriage. And I thought, wait, I’ve read that book, I love that book, I know that book, I was helped by that book. What he says about Doug Wilson and reforming marriage is not at all what Doug Wilson and reforming marriage say. And one listener in particular was saying was look, I was prepared to believe all his criticisms of the evangelicals I already didn’t like, that I was prejudiced against, then he picked on Doug in a way that i knew was wrong, and realised suddenly, wait I can’t trust this guy to be honest.
A lot of people have had or been having that experience. We even in our last episode said you know, ok he might be right about Chandler, right, and we’re not going to even bother looking because he probably is right about Chandler.

Nathan – Yeah, i bothered looking, for whatever reason, followed the link…

– Yeah, after you said nothing could compel you…

Nathan – Nothing could compel me. Well, one point for Dalrock, you compelled me sir. Yeah i actually went to Chandler’s sermon. Let me just read a quote, this is from Matt Chandler’s sermon, quote you see women with their words, brutalizing each other, emasculating men, gossiping, slandering, even the Bible will say this is a real issue specifically for how women brutalise men with their words. Men can intimidate and use size. Women will most often use their words. And then he quotes the scripture a wife’s quarreling is a continual dripping of rain, and he says waterboarding. You live with a quarrelsome wife, you might as well put a sheet over your face and then just pour water on you forever.

– Yeah. Matt Chandler doesn’t believe that…

– Women sin…

– Women sin…

– Have moral agency…

– Or have moral agency…

– It’s only about like if their husbands…

– In the very sermon that Dalrock quotes!

Nathan – right

– It’s just like, come on guys.

– Well, let’s be charitable to Dalrock, maybe he’s not.. as I’m listening to this stuff I wonder what’s the most gracious we can be to Dalrock. Dalrock, maybe you’re not being deceptive in an intentional sense, but guess what, we decieve ourselves and it looks like you’ve definitely deceived yourself. You’ve become willfully obtuse. Like, you are unable to read.

-I mean, this is going to sound edgy. I don’t actually mean for it to be. I think the most charitable reading is that he’s stupid. Honestly. If he just doesn’t know how to read…

-He either is masterfully deceptive or he’s dumb. And those are your two options. And if he were to just respond and say
ok you’ve made a point and I’m dumb, then all could be well and good in the world [laughter] and we could be moved towards something…

-But there’s got to be some more gracious construction, like here, let’s try this: his bitterness at Christian leaders failures has made him stupid. So it’s not a comment on your natural intelligence Dalrock, it’s about how your bitterness leads you to be unable to read at this point in time. And if you repented of your bitterness you could become able to read again and maybe…

– Maybe even useful to the church.

[soft organ music continues]

-And I consider myself qualified to speak on this point since I know what it is to be bitter and unable to deal with someone’s words fairly. I know that for myself, so it’s not like I’m spouting off about what I don’t know.

Nathan – Well the weird thing about this whole thing is that I’ve wanted to believe him. You know know, when somebody says like, I’m trying to be reasonable you want to believe that they are trying to be reasonable. Even if they are not doing a good job you want to believe that’s what they want. And so when Dalrock turned around, published several private emails that I had sent him, emails that he actually calls, quote/ unquote private emails, and was just very spiteful in saying I didn’t listen to the podcast but obviously Warhorn media is incapable of logic, obviously blah blah blah… When he just got nastier with us than I’ve seen him get nasty with anyone maybe, I was a little surprised.

– Well, isn’t that one of the chief things going on here, is his supreme belief in his own reasonableness. Isn’t that what comes out?

Nathan – It’s interesting to contemplate the idea of, he hasn’t listened to our podcasts.

-Mmmhmm

Nathan – If somebody published something like that about me, and then sent me an email like I sent him, saying this is brutal, and you need to repent, and we talked about how you need to repent, I think I’d want to listen to the podcast. What kind of a man doesn’t listen to that podcast? Even if he just thinks it’s a nasty hit piece…

-I’ll tell you what kind of a man, a man who doesn’t want to face up to the possibility that he’s wrong, who doesn’t want to think about the possibility that he’s wrong, who wants to posture himself to his followers as being above that sort of thing.

Nathan – Right.

-And so, you know what, criticism hurts, and it cuts, especially if it’s on the mark.

Nathan – Well, we’ll get back to Dalrock, but I want to talk maybe bigger picture here. Another reason that we actually dealt with this stuff in the first place, that we wanted to talk about the manosphere, that we wanted to ask questions of Dalrock was what Jake?

Jake – Well it’s just increasingly attractive to men in our church who have been hurt by their mothers, by their wives or ex wives, and who are very tempted to go down the rabbit hole into bitterness… and the kids that are affected by this sort of thing. So I meet every week with a couple of boys whose mom left and is strung out on drugs. Dad has custody and they have a stepmom. They are tempted to be bitter and angry with God, with their mom, with everything. And this is something I’m always working with them and talking with them about, helping them try to acknowledge the sinfulness of their mom, and also to understand the forgiveness of God, to deal with their anger and their bitterness in a way that’s healthy, right? This is like, what we talk about, every week. I talk all the time with a man who’s going through a nasty divorce right now, whose wife up and left and took the kids. And the thing is, when you get into these situations it’s not clear and clean. You don’t get to say man good woman bad or woman good man bad when you’re dealing with actual real people. Because it’s complicated. And the responsibility is carried differently. Is a man responsible for his house and what happens in his house, and outside of his house? Yes, he is. Is a woman who leaves her husband or who commits adultery or who gives herself over to drugs, is she responsible before God for her personal behavior? Yeah, she is. And she’s responsible for the consequences. And those consequences have far reaching implications, not just to her husband and not just to her kids but to everybody that she comes into contact with. And we deal with it, exactly the kind of pastor that Dalrock is going to be critical of. The pastor that takes in the woman who has ran off, who has sinned against her house and her husband, and says you know it’s the mans job to love her back and win her heart and pursue her and if he had just done a good job of that then she wouldn’t ever and his job’s to go and to win her back and she’s just free to fly off the handle, fly off the rails until she’s just loved enough. And that’s just like, that’s the kind of garbage that we’re always dealing with.

[Previously missing section]

Nathan – And so you have to rebuke that pastor. You have to rebuke that woman. That woman was excommunicated, I think we can say. At the same time, does the fella in the situation have responsibility? Is it possible that…

-Of course he does!

Nathan – sin has tendrils and is sticky and sticks to all kinds of people in a situation like that?

– Of course he does and that’s, I mean that’s something that we’ve been setting up in our storyline podcasts, right?

Nathan – Oh yeah it’s hilarious in the Ville with Matt and Erica Rosebloom right, our characters, people always…

– Listen, before you say anything, you listener are tempted to do this one way or another and a good test for which side you’re on is how you respond to Matt and Erica Rosebloom.

Nathan – Yeah and people it’s hilarious, nobody ever wants to say it’s complicated, which if theres any moral to our podcast I think the moral is probably something along the lines of it’s complicated.

– it’s complicated.

– Some of our listeners may not have heard any of our story podcasts yet but that’s what we’re talking about is two of our main characters, Matt and Erica Rosebloom and their really really messed up marriage which features in a number of the episodes.

Nathan – Right and so people always want to say it’s the husbands fault, he, if he was just willing to discipline his wife, if he was just strong…

– Or, they want to flip and be on the other side and say Matt’s actually a pretty good guy, he just married a horrible nasty shrew of a woman, an emasculating woman. And so it’s not really Matt’s fault, Matt could’ve been a great guy, Matt could’ve been a great husband and father but Erica won’t let him.

Nathan – And it’s like: they’re both true. Maybe there’s even some external factors that are outside of both of their [inaudible] I mean it’s, sin is complicated. Responsibility is complicated. I mean, there are heroes, there are villains, there are good guys, there are bad guys, there are people that are following the devil and people that are following the Lord, that’s not what I’m saying. But ultimately, parsing these things, you just can’t do it simp… you can do it sometimes simply, you can never do it simplistically.

– I’ll tell you how you can do it simplistically. If the only way that you’re doing it is on the internet, in paper, behind a mask. Then you can be as simplistic as you want to be. And, in your simplisticness, I think that’s right, in your simplisticness you will attract exactly the crowd that is bitter, and that wants to see it as a one sided thing and that doesn’t want to face up to their own responsibilities.

Nathan – About that crowd, people will hear us be pretty sarcastic, some of our skits have been very sarcastic about Dalrock’s followers in particular, and the bitter, nasty, verbally abusive kind of people that they are. We all three of us come from broken homes, right guys?

-Yep.

-It’s true.

Nathan – We are all three children of divorce. Jake, your mom left when you were how old?

Jake – My mom left when I was 5 or 6 years old.

Nathan – And Ben?

Ben – Uh, my parents got divorced in, just as I was starting college.

Nathan – My parents relationship fell apart in slow motion and I got to watch it all through my childhood, and then I think I was 17 or 18 when they finally divorced but they’d been living apart and things had been terrible for a long long time. And and and I feel the pain, I feel the impotence of a system that wasn’t in place, of a church in some respect that wasn’t in place, of a society that allowed this to happen. I understand that, it’s one of the reasons we do what we do. It’s one of the reasons Sound of Sanity exists or Warhorn media exists is because we care about something besides trying to reform ourselves because there were real ramifications and there are real ramifications and feminism did put my mom in a nasty position and it [inaudible] make it easy for my dad to do the wicked things that he did, and I understand that, I feel…

-It also encouraged my mom to believe a whole lot of lies.

Nathan – Yeah. The kinds of lies…

-And my mom too.

Nathan – Yeah yeah yeah. Um, so we feel that…

-And it’s interesting, the Bible says that women are easily deceived, did you know that?

-Uh, I think I heard that once.

– And that they’re weak, and that they need to be protected by men from false teaching and that’s why women shouldn’t be teachers.

-Hmm, it’s almost like we should come back to that and make more of a point of that later in the podcast.

-I think we should come back to that point later.

Nathan – Yeah, well, we’re also going to come back to the point about our own pasts, but I just wanted to get that out of the way here. We, we get it, right? Even the most angry, nasty, horrible caricature of a Dalrock commenter who’s just being gross…

-I’ve said those things in my heart.

Nathan – I get it. I’ve said those things in my heart, I’ve probably said them out loud.

-And so, the temptation, to be bitter is real and a real one that we’ve all felt. And not just that we have felt but that we have worked with other people, and I’m the pastor in the room, uh I’ve got more experience with that sort of thing but it’s not like you guys don’t either.

-You know, Nathan you’ve got, in your small group, this very issue, that you lead.

Nathan – Yeah yeah yeah, I mean…

– And people that you care for and are actively helping to fight their bitterness and to be there for their kids, because the reality is, man you can be bitter, and then you’re just going to recreate the problem for your kids, or you can [with emphasis:] man up.

-And to be fair to Dalrock, he often talks about not giving into the temptation to bitterness, from what I’ve seen. He’s willing to bring that up and acknowledge it’s a point.

Nathan – You know his words say one thing…

[/Previously missing section]

– But his actions say another.

Nathan – and his actions say another, and his followers…

– Heh, display another.

Nathan – display something completely different. Guys, let’s find out what, uh, you know it occurred to me last time, probably the reason that episode didn’t quite work is because we didn’t bring in the number one manliness experts in sanityville…

-How did we not think of it?

Nathan – I don’t know what we were thinking. The hemanologians of course, they’re going to have good things to say about this.

-Dude. Those guys are awesome.

Nathan – Yeah [laughter] those guys are awesome. So let’s listen to the hemanologians and we’ll be right back after this to get more into the meat of this issue.

[Skit]

Nathan – And we’re back, thank you hemanologians. Alright guys, let’s reiterate what’s wrong with Dalrock. I hope everyone’s been able to follow what we’ve been talking about so far, the reasons we engaged with him, what happened, why. I want to come back though. Last week we tried to really sort of get into the weeds with some specific quotes and things got really dense and I’m just afraid it was a little bit hard for people to follow. So let’s talk more generally about what’s wrong with Dalrock, why people shouldn’t read this guy. Once again just in case anyone’s not tracking Dalrock is a popular Christian manosphere blogger. We are warning people to stay away from him. That’s become the purpose of an episode, of two episodes that initially started to as just an overview of the manosphere. What’s wrong with Dalrock. I think we figured out 3 fallacies right? 3 Dalrock fallacies. So Dalrock fallacy number one, Jake, what is Dalrock fallacy number one?

[Slow serious piano music starts]

Jake – The first fallacy is that he reduces male authority and responsibility. The easiest way to demonstrate that is his lack of understanding about the Fall. Now he thinks he understands the Fall because he thinks that he’s saying something if he says that women are fallen and sinful. He thinks he’s saying something that nobody else is saying and the reason that he thinks that is because the Bible emphasizes male authority and responsibility in every place and at every turn. And there’s something called federal responsibility or covenantal responsibility that comes to just being a man.

Nathan – Yeah we referred to this without quite explaining it last time, so…

– Yeah and so here’s the thing: God places Adam and Eve in the garden. God gives his commands to Adam. Eve listens to the voice of the serpent, is deceived. Adam listens to the voice of his wife and rebels, right? All of that God comes to and calls Adam to account for, and in Adam we’ve all sinned. In Adam we have all fallen. So God comes and He talks to and addresses Adam first! Why? Because Adam was responsible for everything that happened. Responsible. Did Eve sin? Yes. And yeah Adam was responsible for Eve and responsible for himself. Scripture always addresses masculine authority and responsibility. The Scripture says in 1st Timothy 2 that because Adam was made first and then Eve, and because the woman was deceived, the Apostle Paul does not permit a woman to teach. He tells this to a man and it [inaudible] that man’s job to tell women that they’re not to teach and to forbid women to teach or have authority in the church. Why? Because women are easily deceived. And so you can’t have people who are easily deceived teaching. And so women are weak, they’re easily deceived and so the antidote to women being deceived and teaching bad things and believing bad things is for men to stand up and say no and to lead and to exercise authority, preaching and teaching. It’s for fathers to have responsibility over what happens with their wives and their daughters.

– Right. And the irony here is that that’s like what Dalrock’s whole life mission is, to it’s it’s like to, it’s related to this anyway, it’s to tell all the Christian men on the internet that hey, that no one will tell women no. And we’re like, hey, one of our churches purposes is teach men [laughter] to tell women no, and he’s like: Stop it. You’re reducing women’s moral agency. It’s like: dude, like, are you blind? And then we answer our own question, we’re like, yes, you’re blind.

[Laughter]

-Well that’s the, that is the thing, that is how Scripture approaches it. And all throughout Scripture if you look at Numbers 30 where it gives a father the ability to invalidate the vows that his wife or daughter took without his approval… Why? Because he’s responsible for them. He can say no, he has authority to say no. In 1st Corinthians we were talking last week there churches out there to go to. “Well there are no good churches out there.” Well the Church of Corinth was a church, right even though it, the Apostle Paul says a man has his father’s wife.
That struck me after the fact. Hey, that’s interesting, a man has his father’s wife. Huh. It doesn’t say a woman has her husband’s son even though the son is… the son

– and presumably younger than

– younger, right, presumably, at least than the Father. No, a man has his father’s wife.
Well Scripture always approaches sin first, just like God came first to Adam in the garden through the man. And it is a man’s responsibility to step up and to correct and deal with it. Which is why the answer to all of this is not really on the internet but teaching fathers to love and discipline their wives and their daughters…

– Right, which is not to say that Scripture…

– and to therefore protect them from the lies of feminism.

– Which is not to say that Scripture doesn’t ever directly address women, of course it does.

– It does all the time, it directs women, it addresses women. It addresses women’s sin and rebellion. It calls women to repent and it lays out how women are to behave, through the voice of a man. And so, what’s the model? The model is men teaching men and women how to behave and men teaching other men how to be good husbands and fathers and to lead and discipline and love and guide and protect their wives and their daughters. That’s how this problem gets solved, right? Even in the place like in Titus Chapter 2 where Paul’s exhorting the older women to teach the younger women, he’s actually telling Titus to tell the older women what they ought to be teaching to the younger women.

– That’s right.

– And how they ought to be serving the other women by teaching these specific things. And so yes, it’s so profoundly ignorant of all of Scripture and Scriptures emphasis on fatherhood and the fatherhood of God that is reflected down into all of humanity to simply say that calling men to take responsibility for their wives and daughters and pastor’s to take responsibility for the families in their churches is somehow denying feminine responsibil… It’s not what it’s doing, what it’s doing, yeah what it’s doing is our second fallacy which is Dalrock underestimating feminine weakness and dependence on men.

– Which is not, it’s not the same thing as underestimating feminine moral agency which is what we’re actually not doing.

Nathan – Yeah let me read a Scripture. This is Paul talking to Timothy. Second Timothy 3: But understand that in the last days there will come times of difficulty, for people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness but denying its power. Avoid such people. For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women burdened with sins and led astray by various passions. Now why did the Apostle Paul in talking to Timothy single out women as the ones that would be led astray by these wicked men?

– Because women are weak, just like the Apostle Peter says. Live with your wives in an understanding way as with the weaker vessel. Which isn’t to say that women are weak in all ways, but that they are weak in very specific ways.

– Including a liability to deception.

– Which is just clear Bible.

– And so to say that if we, if we understand feminine weakness, and dependence, that we’re undercutting their moral agency is just…

– Again it’s to have a very narrow, rigid, small minded view of authority, responsibility, strength, weakness, masculinity and femininity. It’s just so small minded.

– And it’s the only kind of small minded that I really truly believe can only happen in a world of ideas where you’re not actually living with and working with real people.

Nathan – Yeah you watch like my, your parents go through a divorce, now Dalrock’s going to come back and say oh well I’ve had real experience, I have a wife, I have a blah blah blah… But, I mean, come on. You watch anyone go through a divorce for example, you’re going to see there’s sins on both sides. You are going to see it’s not that easy always to parce, and there is no simplistic… I keep thinking of, I keep thinking of the Garden of Eden and I keep thinking of Satan saying to Eve has God really said you may not eat of any tree of the garden, and I just think the devil, the real devil, always exaggerates and distorts and makes more rigid and dichotomous than it actually is, the position of God.

– The nature of deception can be seen by examining the deception of the devil.

Nathan – Am I comparing Dalrock to the devil? No, but I am saying deception, duplicity of his sort does take a certain form and it is very often exaggerating and making much more rigid and confining the roles and the things that God has put in place, right? And so Dalrock says you know: has Warhorn Media, has Tim Bayly really said that women have no moral agency? And it’s like, no we just said that men were… responsible, and that fatherhood’s a real thing and that it has ramifications and that maybe in order to reform a culture you start by talking to the fathers, and to the men. It doesn’t mean you don’t talk to the women. It means your emphasis, though, is on the men, because the men will [inaudible]. It’s reaganomics, it’s trickle down theology, right?

– Yeah, which brings us to fallacy number 3 actually, which is that Dalrock doesn’t understand God’s fatherhood and this we infer from what we have said so far.

-Yeah and it is just essentially what follows. God’s printed His fatherhood onto mankind. And it’s everywhere. To pretend, again, like this is just about women, is not just to deny the problem, it’s to deny the way God made the world and the way God governs the world. The world that we live in is patriarchal by nature because it is founded and rooted and grounded in the fatherhood of God. And it’s a good and benevolent patriarchy. But that’s not something, it’s just again, it’s like talking to a brick wall. Like the man really does need to study the Bible and study the authority that men have and responsibility that men have in Scripture, and the way that corporate responsibility is connected to headship. So whether it’s a king being responsible for his people and a king’s and God visiting a people for the sins of his king, or visiting a king for the sins of his people, and holding that King accountable, or a priest, or a father, it’s just all over Scripture. Achan sins and puts the stuff in his tent: his entire family: dead. He’s responsible and everybody under his headship suffers. What if one of his children had taken it and hidden it? Achan is going to be held accountable for that.

Nathan – [Sarcastic voice] But Jake the levitical law also says that a son shall not be held responsible for the sins of his father and a father shall not be held responsible for the sense of his son…

– Yeah…

– Well, I think, I think actually in the, in the Achan passage what you see is that the entire nation of Israel is already held responsible for Achan’s sin. Now they aren’t all put to death, but they are held responsible. They do fail in battle, they [inaudible] suffer.

– They lose 36 men or something like that.

Nathan – Yeah my only point in bringing up that argument or that caveat was just to say it’s not simple, again and we ain’t going to in this podcast solve every question you might have about corporate responsibility in federal headship. That’s not our design. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t good answers to those questions and ways to think them through.

– Yeah, and part of what these, but part of what you have to understand is that people who want to isolate original sin, the salvific work of Christ to just Adam and Jesus and pretend it’s not of a fabric, the idea of corporate responsibility and of federal headship is not of a fabric with the way everything else in the world works? They’ve not begun to understand the Scriptures on sexuality, or on headship, or on covenant. Ya’ll got a lot of Bible to read.

Nathan – You better hope that there’s corporate responsibility because that is the hope, that, that is why you’re stuck with original sin in the first place and that is the hope that comes through Christ. If you want to deny it in every particular and then just magically believe in it when it comes to Jesus because yay, Jesus…

– And see this is, again, this is so ridiculous to have to say: the church is the bride of Christ. And so Christ as its head imputes his righteousness to the church. When God looks at the head, at the church, he sees the head, which is Jesus. That’s just like…

Nathan – You know, maybe it’s not ridiculous to say because, okay, sure, you had to learn it sometime. Maybe some of our listeners are learning it for the first time. I want to have sympathy for them, and I want to…

– We are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. Jesus came to save his bride, his people.

Nathan – If it’s just, if it’s something that you’ve never thought about that’s fine, but start thinking about it now.
Hey guys, those are Dalrock’s fallacies. Why don’t we go to another break and we’ll come back and clean this all up. I understand that old Chip and Lance are up to some kind of an adventure right now.

– They usually are.

Nathan – They usually are. Why don’t we find out what’s going on with them? Okay?

– Sounds good.

Nathan – All right.

[Skit]

Nathan – Ok thank you for that Chip and Lance. That was enlightening.
Guys, what do we want to say? Just to reiterate one more time last episode we attempted to expose Dalrock’s dishonesty. We tried to do it as straightforwardly and honestly as possible. An interesting thing that happened is that Dalrock’s commenters and Dalrock himself really seized on some things. I’d like to just take a minute to talk about this. They really seized on some things I said in last week’s podcast during, I think part of it was in the Devil’s Advocate… and so to be charitable part of it was in the devils advocate segment and if it was your first time hitting the podcast and you don’t understand how that worked I can see how that might have been a little confusing, who was representing what point of view and which ones we actually believed.

– We made it doubly confusing by switching roles.

[Talking over one another]

– Which I think was my idea. I apologize for that. Here’s the way that our show works. Our show is we come out of the gate and we lay something down and then we fight with ourselves about it and somebody plays the role of devil’s advocate and tries to put us in a corner. That devil’s advocate’s not always fair or honest in the characterizations but does try to deal with us the way that we are, we think people might deal with us.

Nathan – Well its also a good segment to deal with any prejudices or biases we might have and I admitted to some last week. I admitted that I smelled a rat with Dalrock, that I thought this guy’s doing something wrong. I mean I didn’t put it like this but what I was getting at last week was that ever since I first encountered Dalrock I’ve felt instinctually bad about him like as if he’s doing something wrong. And I haven’t always been able to articulate it like I can now thanks to working through it but I always felt bad and I expected or suspected that when I engaged with him he might trip up. He might say something bad, which he in fact did. I think I can admit to those things and I think I should admit to those things. You know, me and Jake sometimes have conversations between the two of us when we’re calibrating on Warhorn Media stuff, trying to decide what to do. I might say for example to Jake, I really don’t, this is actually not a real example but this is the kind of conversation: well Jake, I really don’t think that you should take this interview on this other podcast. I’m not sure though, it might be that I’m jealous of the attention that you’re getting. I’ll actually throw that out. I’ll put that on the table. And then, we can argue about it and we can figure out maybe that that wasn’t my motivation, maybe that it was. But I just think it’s always a hundred percent helpful for me to say: here’s my prejudices, here’s my biases, here’s the bad things that might be influencing. Let’s put those on the table. Let’s be honest about them, so then we can talk. Like it doesn’t do us any good for me to pretend like I’m an unprejudiced, objective guy who is just floating in the, in the world of ideas…

– Yeah, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it. First step to being able to have an honest conversation about anything is to acknowledge that, right? We don’t come to anything unbiased or unprejudiced. So, we like to lay it out. And you laid it out actually in your first email to Dalrock. You said in the same email, I want to represent your views fairly but these are the biases that I’m coming with to this discussion. And, simple-minded people are going to take that and say, you said you did it in good faith and then you said you were biased.

Nathan – I’m going to be a little hard on them here. They seized on that and they roundly mocked it, and they just made me, that was one of the things, places where they painted me the most nastily. Like, well he says, he said he wasn’t, didn’t even have an open mind. No. That’s stupid. That’s just wrongheaded. That’s not what I did. I admitted to where I’m coming from which is a good thing to do…

– And a helpful thing for our listeners to know coming into anything that we’re saying.

Nathan – Hey here’s an idea: maybe, just maybe, it would be easier to get something of value or nutrition from Dalrock if he told you where he was coming from and why, how that might be affecting his point of view…

– [Mocking voice] No, it’s just pure ideas.

Nathan – Here’s why I might feel tense about these guys seeming to take away from female agence… moral agency. Here’s, here’s why I’m so hard on those ideas. Actually knowing those things about Dalrock would go a long way towards making his position palatable and understandable. Here’s why I balk when you Mr. Warhorn Media argue this. Here’s why it’s hard for me to even begin to wrap my head around it. If he just admitted to some of those things… I’m not saying it would solve the problems that we’ve been talking about with him. But I think it would go a long way towards making his point of view understandable and sympathetic. So that’s one thing. We were honest about our biases in the podcast.

– And that’s what the whole devil’s advocate segment is about. Not just being honest about our biases, but honest about our argumentation, right? We are trying to put ourself in the corner, and fight our way back out of it, and prove to ourselves, and to the listener that we have a point to make. But our goal with that is always, as we say over and over and over again, not always even to convince everybody that we’re right, but to help people think Biblically for themselves.

Nathan – Right. It would be completely disingenuous for us, for example, not to say he went after our senior pastor, a man who we love, a man who is like a father to us. Dalrock attacked him.

– And so what do we do when we go, when we are preparing to defend our senior pastor, we say…

Nathan – This time it’s personal.

– This time it’s personal. Right, we’re tipping our hand. We are letting you know, hey, this is a place where, we’re coming at this, and it is in fact personal for us but we also think that we’re right.

– Yeah we, we actually have a loyalty. So you should spit on us [laughter] because that’s, that’s certainly Biblical.

– I just find it so ironic when there’s some anonymous, of course anonymous commentator who came to the Warhorn forum, Sanityville to talk about this issue and he said, uh you guys did a bad job in your conversation about Dalrock. I’m a regular reader of Dalrock. Of course, I don’t have any loyalty to him, but…

Nathan – Dalrock followers as a general rule, I’m generalizing here, Dalrock followers will be very quick we found to disclaim any sort of loyalty to Dalrock…

– As they show up all over the place to defend…

Nathan – To defend Dalrock. Just so you know I’m an objective guy, and you suck because you went after Dalrock!

[laughter]

-I also have a pseudonym.

– I signed up anonymously to be a member of your forum just so I could say this. Not because of any personal…

– Just come on.

Nathan – Any personal animus. It’s like, admit to your personal animus, it’s fine.

– Yeah then we can be honest.

Nathan – You love Dalrock. Dalrock is a father to you. You feel like he helped you understand your marriage or something like that. You feel like things were bad…

– He helped you talk to your kids about a movie you watch.

Nathan – Right, just uh, just uh…

– Ok fine.

Nathan – Great! That helps us, you know?

– Admit it, and now we can have a conversation about it.

Nathan – Now we can talk. A lot of having arguments, good arguments with people, is just simply a…

-Is just self disclosing but the problem is, and the problem has been in this case is that every aspect of self-disclosure has been trotted out as an example of disingenuousness.

Nathan – Not just trotted out but seized upon with extreme rancor and just used to…

– Yeah, well, you know what, again, that, this is exactly the kind of deception that we were talking about. Why we said in last week’s episode if he would simply be honest in his characterization of Tim and that PCA report we could have a conversation about the emphasis placed on male responsibility versus female responsibility in that report.

Nathan – And there’s real criticisms you could make of Tim. There’s real criticisms you could make of Doug Wilson. There’s definitely real criticisms you can make of Matt Chandler.

– Yeah, there, well there is truth to the fact… and we’ve acknowledged all these points in the last episode, but there is all kinds of truth to the fact that evangelical complementarian pivot is to just blame men for everything.

Nathan – Oh sure.

– And to, and to let women off the hook, right? Yeah there’s truth to that. Yeah. Even as, as you move, as you move from the feminist position that has been inculcated in you from your youth, there are steps along the way, and it is easy to jump, once you discover the Biblical doctrine of that is real of male responsibility, to just lay right there because it’s easy, and it is a coward’s move. He’s right about that. But the fact is you can’t talk with him about that because he’s not going to allow you to admit, unless you just lay down and say, you’re right about everything. I’m wrong about everything. I always have been. Please teach me.
He’s not going to allow you to say anything about female moral agency in the context of masculine responsibility. He’s not going to let you do that.

Nathan – It’s just so immature.

– If you insist on male responsibility as a principle, no matter how abused, or misused, then he is not going to let you say female responsibility. He is going to undercut you and he’s going to lie about you, which is what we demonstrated last week he does. He just lies.

– Yeah and that kind of echo chamber way of dealing with things, I mean, it showed up immediately in his response to first blog post on the podcast which was: I didn’t listen to it, but they are stridently against me, and that shows that they can’t handle my arguments. Well, dude, like grow up, no it doesn’t.

– Again, again this is something that Dalrock…

– So I can take your logic, you are stridently opposed to us, that shows that you can’t handle our arguments. You see how easy that was Dalrock, like come on dude.

[laughter]

Nathan – You want to paint someone that way all you’ve got to do is paint them that way.

– Yeah and if you’ve got an army of, of people just ready to swallow everything you say…

Nathan – Disclaimer, are there two or three people in Dalrock’s comment boards that do call the others to be more reasonable? Yes.

– Sure.

Nathan – Do I feel completely fine making broad generalizations about the rest of the 9,000 people in his comments board? Yes. [laughter] I actually had to learn this lesson and it was really hard for me. Jake remembers this. When I was first working around the church and working with people I really thought that in order to be a man, I needed to box people into a complete corner with every argument, and just destroy their argument and demolish it, and show how they were stupid, and show how, you know the worst possible characterization of them and their argument was true. I just thought that’s what it was to be a man. Guess what, that was just immaturity. It was just something I needed to, it was just something very simple that I needed to grow out of it, and praise Lord, I think I did. And the way that I did was just simply by being around people and interacting with them and being tempered by them. You know, not being pseudonymous on the internet but having friends, and people that I had to have real arguments, and I realized, hey, you know, maybe if I accept a charitable view of this guy’s argument we might get somewhere. Maybe if I don’t mischaracterize him, he’ll like me better. Maybe if I give him an inch, I can take the mile. Maybe, actually a good strategy for winning an argument is give and take.

– Is give and take. But to engage in give and take you have to be capable of living with tension. You have to be capable of living and dealing with nuances, and that’s the problem with, with Dalrock. He doesn’t want any of that work. You see this sort of thing so much in young men what which… what we always see is that a young man discovers masculinity or whatever, right?

And then what does he want to do? Or even reformed theo… whatever it is, right? What does he want to do? Well he wants to pop off on Facebook about it in memes, or he comes alive to the horror of abortion. He wants to go down to Planned Parenthood and yell at the doctors, or at the women that are going in.

Nathan – And if you for example plead with the women, please don’t do this, instead of saying, you are sinning against the Lord! he might judge you.

– That’s right. If you say, you don’t have to do this…

Nathan – They’re about to go kill their baby. How dare you appeal to anything but…

– God’s vengeance.

Nathan – God’s vengeance.

– Yeah, but the reality is what he’s doing is he’s overcompensating for the fact that he’s lived as a coward so it’s another cowards move. And it’s not that you don’t go down to Planned Parenthood or whatever and call people to repent and to not murder their babies. That’s not what I’m saying. And it’s not that you don’t, say, engage with, uh, arguments on social media firmly and directly and it’s not that you don’t do all kinds of things but you have to…

Nathan – It’s not that you don’t bring God’s Wrath into a discussion of guilt and sin.

– No you have to do all of those, there’s a time and place for all of those things. But, if you’re not willing and able to look somebody in the eyes and to have those conversations and to call them to repentance… uh… you’re probably, you’re probably just reacting immaturely and your real goal here is not to be helpful to anybody but to absolve yourself of some guilt that you feel and to have a cathartic moment.

Nathan – Man I’ve been hit with this lesson again and again and again lately. I feel like a cartoon character that keeps getting hit by different buses or trains or something. It’s because… I have a fiance… and I have to be in a relationship with a woman, and it’s complicated. There’s tensions, and there’s places where I have to like, discipline her and then there’s places where I have to be patient, and then there’s places where I have to say that she’s right and I’m wrong. And just like any kind of rigid systematic approach that I have, any kind of moral of the story that I come up with that I think is going to make the relationship work, it doesn’t work. It turns out there’s a million little tensions that I have to live with as a part of loving this person and being, you know, an aspirational, I guess, authority over this person. I have to live in relational tension which is what, I don’t mean that in a bad way like I feel bad, or unsure of myself all the time, I just mean…

– It’s just much more difficult than having clear edicts that you issue from on high.

Nathan – Yeah, it’s much easier to say [inaudible] your job is to be the wife and to obey me. That’s, that’s one way to solve all of our problems and feel really good about myself. Or another way is to say I’m a loving servant leader. We’re just going to do everything her way. There again, problem solved, tension resolved. But actually, the answer is more complicated than that.

– Yeah, of course it is, because people are complicated.

Nathan – Can we talk about Dalrock’s pseudonymity? This was something that we got into quite a bit last time…

– Well you were just in it just now, because you were talking about how not being able to be pseudonymous and remain pseudonymous tempered your style of argument and tempered your understanding of how to engage complex issues.

Nathan – Yeah it did.

– And how that was a blessing to you.

Nathan – Yeah it was. It was a great blessing, I mean thank God. I don’t like myself when I think about myself from from years ago when I was like that, when I was so rigid and so unkind to people and so angry about [inaudible] you know. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t the fruit of the spirit in me. It doesn’t matter what I was… you know the fruit of the spirit is X Y and Z and that wasn’t present in me when I was doing that.

– And so [Inaudible] we think that if, Dalrock if you had accountability you would probably be less rash and you would be more tempered, and know the guys that you talk with on your own forum, or the guys on other manosphere sites who you trade points with, you know, and you appreciate each other’s insights and stuff. That doesn’t count.

– Yeah, no, it’s people who are actually able to look you in the eyes and say, no, you’re wrong about this, no.

Nathan – Well, there again with pseudonymity people tend to prefer the binary so it’s like either we’re arguing that pseudonymity is always wrong or that’s always right. Ehh. Not so much actually. There is good pseudonymity, I think in history that you can point to blah blah blah. We can have that argument. But the point is…

– As we did try to have.

Nathan – As we did try to have. But our point isn’t so much, I don’t think, that dalrock is like sinning, he’s absolutely a hundred percent wrong because he’s pseudonymous, as that, it’s extremely unwise. Our judgment is that it is extremely unwise, and it’s because he doesn’t have the tempering of accountability and authority in his life and…

– And even the fact that he’s admitted that the only person capable of disciplining him, cuz they know about it, is his wife.

Nathan – Someone under his authority.

– Someone under his authority. Someone the Bible has said, is not to be, to teach or exercise authority over a man.

Nathan – Right, that’s the only person capable of teaching or exercising…

– It’s his wife, his wife and his children. And of course our wives and children discipline us all the time. I mean come on. No ok, now you said your wife disciplines you. This is what people do, right, it’s just like, it’s this endless loop.

Nathan – Guess what, your wife can, through being someone that lives with you, and being the awesome woman that she is, she’s going to discipline you all the time. Is that her primary role in your life? Is that her…

– No it’s not, for one, and for two the Bible tells her how to do it. The Bible gives her a prescription in how to discipline her husband. And if you want to read 1st Peter 3 go ahead and there’s a good place to start. We don’t have time for that sort of thing, to endlessly go over everything we say with nuances and caveats is just absurd.

Nathan – But the fact is…

– Come on man, you want to be an authority and that’s what it is to have a public teaching ministry, and I don’t care what you say about just being a blogger trafficking in ideas among peers. What Dalrock does is set himself up as an authority, a teaching authority, and how people look at him is as a teaching authority and that’s why they call him a father.

Nathan – Mmhhmm, they literally call him… father.

– And there it is again, fatherhood, right? To set yourself up in that way while not having that teaching, be under anybody else’s authority, but without other authorities being able to look in and speak into what you say and how you say it and why you say it, you’re just a loose cannon out there.

– A handful of people have said, your fallacy is the fallacy of appeal to authority. Well, you know what? I have this thing in front of me called the Bible.

Nathan – Right. [laughter]

– And every pagan’s going to call me on the fallacy of appeal to authority by appealing to Scripture.

Nathan – And then they’re going to turn around and appeal to the authority of their own reason…

– Exactly.

Nathan – Or to the authority of… their senses and what they percieve, I mean, we all appeal to authority.

– That’s exactly right. What a bogus, bogus, argument. Everybody appeals to authority.

Nathan – You just better appeal to the right one.

– That’s right.

Nathan – And you should be honest about which one you’re appealing to.

– If you want to bow to the god of the Enlightenment, reason, be a part of the destructive fruit that has happened since and because of that, including the entire feminist revolution that you’re railing against, go ahead. Appeal to reason. But we’re going to appeal to Scripture, and the way that we appeal to Scripture is through the authority structures God has put in place to govern how people appeal to Scripture, and how people teach Scripture. And so you know what? I feel pretty safe, because I am within the framework of biblical authority as laid out and defined in Scripture. I am a man who is, who is under authority. What I say is under authority. I have an authority of my own that people out there on the internet ought to have some respect for.

Nathan – They should, and they don’t, and it’s…

– We’re all égalité, liberté, fraternité, here, you know, in this, in the wild west of the manosphere where we deny the fatherhood of God, and the authority that he is written into all of creation, and think that somehow by denying the fatherhood of God, and denying how it is written over all of creation, and written into the authority structures that God has placed in the world, we’re somehow going to undermine the feminist rebellion. Oh please! You just don’t know the first thing. And this is why we said last week: just go to a church.

– There are no good churches.

– Well the church of Corinth was still a church, for one, and for two, you listen to Dalrock, so shut up.

[laughter]

Nathan – Before we wrap things up, I just want to talk the women. Women might be listening to this podcast, and some of them might be thinking, well where exactly does this, all this stuff that you’ve been talking about, about responsibility and authority, where does that leave me? Do I just have to sit around and wait for a man to take responsibility? Is that what the non Dalrockian point of view is, that, that I just, you know, it’s just like, well, I hope I have a good husband that cultivates me and is responsible for me.

– Eh no, no, God’s commands to you are clear, and they’re direct, and they are not contingent on the men in your life. If you’re a woman you are called to submit to the authorities that God has placed over you and to honor them and to respect them insofar as they honor and respect God. To adorn yourself with a gentle and quiet spirit and all kinds of other commands like that that really ultimately are not contingent upon the men in your life. They are God’s commands to you, and they are commands that you will answer for being obedient to or rebellious to.

Nathan – The final thing to say about all this is, it’s clear, to me at least and probably I’m guessing to our listeners, that this issue is personal, and and and painful for us, right? As we talked about, and not Dalrock and his responses but the whole…

– Oh I don’t care about Dalrock and his responses. But the issue of masculinity and fatherhood, teaching men how to be godly men who take responsibility for themselves and others in their lives and who love and protect their wives and their daughters, who refuse to be bitter, yeah that’s personal. That’s really personal. The day after the episode dropped I finished dropping my kids off from school and I had just been reading some of the comments and commenters out there and just being overwhelmed by just the bitterness, that is so evident in them. I have to admit, I got pretty emotional. And it wasn’t because I care about Dalrock or what they were saying about me. It was because I was thinking about my dad and how he had every reason and opportunity to become a bitter, nasty man when my mom left.

Nathan – To become a Dalrock commenter…

– Yeah, to become that. The farther and farther away I get from it, the more I’m amazed by the fact that he refused to do that, because he decided he was going to be a man and take responsibility for us and protect us and so he fought, and he won custody, and he worked his tail off to provide for us, and he found a good woman to marry, and he refused to allow bitterness to define his life. And that’s what I want for any man who has gone through that sort of thing.

Nathan – You know, I have a dad who I trusted and looked to to hold my parents marriage together. That dad’s name is not my earthly father actually. It’s pastor Tim Bayly. He was my parents counselor, through many many many, I want to say 20 years, he counseled them. The hilarious irony of all this, Dalrock accusing Bayly, as he calls him, of not holding women to account… where Pastor Bayly happened to make a mistake in that counseling, I don’t think he’d mind me saying this… There was a day where Pastor Bayly came up to me in the parking lot. This was after my parents were divorced. I think I was about 20, and I was sitting in the church parking lot. Tim comes running out, and he says, Nathan, I hear that you’re angry with me. And he said you’re angry because I failed your parents. I said, yeah. And he said, I’m sorry. I made a mistake I misread the situation. I didn’t get it. I’m sorry.
Now how did Tim misread the situation? He blamed my mom, actually. He put a lot of the blame on her. So anyway all of that to say not that Tim failed, but that Tim tried. He was there for me and at a certain point I had a choice to be bitter about the ways that he’d failed and the ways that the system had failed me and the ways that my earthly father and my earthly mother had failed me. It all sort of snowballed into me being angry at Tim. And I had to decide to let that go. I had to decide, I love this man. This man bled for me, this man pleaded with my parents. This man exhorted, rebuked, with tears, with literal tears. He was there for me. He was a father to me. He is a father to me. And I may not be bitter.

Nathan – Alright guys, so to sum it all up and bring it all back around, here’s Dalrock’s narrative as I understand it, narrative, quote unquote as I understand it.

– We agreed to a fair exchange of ideas where it was us and Dalrock, where we agreed to disseminate his ideas across our platform for all of our listeners. And then we’ve stabbed him in the back and went on a character assassination mission. The reality is, a lot of our listeners have been introduced to the manosphere because they’re interested in the topic of masculinity. We had Aaron Renn on the show who has a email newsletter called the Masculinist. Michael Foster, who once upon a time had a podcast with Warhorn Media called Practical Ecclesiology has gotten into the manosphere with his, It’s Good to be a Man .com, or whatever it’s called. And so they are getting introduced to these ideas and terminologies and we wanted to introduce people to them from a Biblical perspective and give them the tools they need to deal with it. We wanted to allow somebody from the manosphere who is well-established to define the terms Iraq and said hey let’s have an interview about yourself they need to deal with it we wanted to allow somebody from them in a sphere whose well-established to define the terms. We went to Dalrock and said, hey let’s have an interview. Tell us about yourself, what you do, why you do it, how long you’ve been doing it. Define red pill. Define, a couple other things.

Nathan – Address these basic concerns people might have about your work.

– And then we were going to lean on his answers for that, in a podcast that was much, much bigger in intent and scope than Dalrock.

Nathan – As we directly told him in our initial email…

– Which we quoted at the top of the podcast. He’s made it out to be as though we were supposed to just always do something that was about him, and it was always going to be about him. It was never going to be about him. In his answers he promoted lies about our senior pastor and put them on the Internet and also said and look, [inaudible] they don’t even have answers for what I have to say.

Nathan – Well so here’s the million dollar question, for you as a listener, and I’ll leave this question in your hands. One of us hijacked the conversation and made it about himself. One of us is duplicitous. Both sides are saying that the other side is duplicitous. You have to choose who you trust and who you see the fruits of the spirit in. I mean, Dalrock says that we are liars and he says that our senior pastor is a liar. He says that our spiritual father…

-He also says that Doug Wilson’s a liar…

Nathan – Doug’s another spiritual father, in a sense, I mean. He says that they’re… liars. And we’ve spent two podcasts now saying that Dalrock’s a liar. So it’s just to make things really clear, one of us is right. One of us is wrong.

– One of us is fundamentally untrustworthy.

Nathan – One of us is fundamentally untrustworthy. You need to look at the fruit and you need to decide for yourself.

– Yeah, the goal of this show is that you be a more discerning christian when you walk away from an episode. So here we are at the end of the episode. Be discerning.

Nathan – Thanks for listening, everybody.

[Skit]

Nathan – Sound of Sanity was associate produced by Benjamin Sulser, produced by Nathan Alberson, executive produced like all fine Warhorn products by Jacob Mentzel and Nathan Alberson. Again, you can go to Patreon.com/soundofsanity to support this work, and until next time…

– Stay sane.

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Post Information
Title Transcript of the second podcast.
Author Dalrock
Date March 9, 2019 11:57 PM UTC (5 years ago)
Blog Dalrock
Archive Link https://theredarchive.com/blog/Dalrock/transcript-of-the-secondpodcast.6834
https://theredarchive.com/blog/6834
Original Link https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2019/03/09/transcript-of-the-second-podcast/
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