The Fundie Snark To Religious Extremist Pipeline

Simone Collins
I like seeing people who have taken hard cultural stances be criticized to see how we might be subject to criticism ourselves and what we may be doing wrong. I really like funny Fridays, and I really like Jen. But, yeah, she's in as much of a cult as the people who she covers. They all come from very strong cultures that have skews and blind spots because of those strong cultures. Not to say that we don't have blind spots either, but still.

Malcolm Collins
Yeah, and they're insane religious cults. They're the good guys. In her insane religious cult, she's the good guy, and she's doing what the cult is telling her to do. Well, even the things that, like she started tongue in cheek, that are frills of the channel now still speak very much, are similar to the small time career preachers that she criticizes. Her followers call themselves Gennanites, and they patronize her.

Simone Collins
And how is that different from being a preacher? In the end, preachers speak to people. They cultivate communities. Would you like to know more? Hello, Simone.

Malcolm Collins
I am so excited to be here with you today. After a tough day today, it is always nice to be able to come back to doing something that we love, which is these conversations. They are so much better. Even meditating with me earlier, like, they're so much better than a date because they're, like, recorded, and we watch them over and over again, each of us do. I actually quite enjoy our own YouTube channel, and what?

I know it's weird, but this is the first time I've ever created something that I really like with our books. I don't read them over and over again, but I'm like, oh, I know. Made a fun joke in this one. And I like the way I constructed it. But what actually got us on today's topic was, Simone has always been a big fan of fundy snark content, and I have always been a big fan of religious content.

And religious content, for me, includes the deconverts and stuff like that. And where are two worlds interlapped recently was classically abby. Being a conservative woman in today's day and age is not easy. So people might not know this, but classically Abby is Ben Shapiro's sister, and she absolutely spammed YouTube with so, so many ads a few years ago. If you're on YouTube now and you've been on YouTube for years, you know what we're talking about.

Unknown
Yeah. You know what this is about. Yeah. You're like, oh, my God. I remember when I had to watch her.

Malcolm Collins
What got me about classically Abby. And this actually has boosted my ego so much. Classically Abby, we produce videos every weekday. Classically Abby produces one video a week but otherwise similar format to us. She gets about 2.2k views on an average video whereas we're generally between the low two ks to seven or eight k views on an average day because we can look at our statistics.

So some of our videos just vastly outperform other ones like the old starship troopers one is a really high number. The bears one is at a high number. But on average, we're getting about 8000 views per day or about 1300 watch hours a day. So we are smoking classically Abby, smoking her for a daily channel doing four or five times as well as her weekly channel, which I love because she must have spent millions building that up. And sorry as to why I love this.

People might not know, but we have a beef with Ben Shapiro. He, the first time we really went viral, he was really derogatory towards us and was like, they're nerds. Why does anyone care what these people have to say? And he has just repeatedly we have tried to get into events that he's doing or has association with and we are always blocked. Like, we are on a blocked do not talk to list was Ben Shapiro.

And everyone who talks to Ben Shapiro, he doesn't block. I can understand why. We're probably pretty threatening to him that we've actually like grassroots beginning to build up. So Ben Shapiro's thing is he often switches between endeavor movement. It happens to be hot in the conservative space right now.

But I think he would have, like when he switched to all the men's rights content and stuff like that. But he doesn't seem to actually have, like, his own perspective on things. It's more just like whatever he thinks will get him in the moment clout. And I think he thought was his sister's audience capture. It's audience capture hopping.

Yeah, audience capture hopping. He is addicted to attention. He tried to help out his sister, which I appreciate, eight to get into the same business, but she's just not very interesting. I tried to watch some of her videos and I'm like, I can see why nobody's watching these. It's just conservative TM.

You know what I mean? Like, just basic takes. Yeah, just the most basic of basic takes. Basic camp. There's no.

Yeah, the most interesting, least interesting takes. But I want to talk about this phenomenon of fundy snark. I want to talk about the very. Fundy snark is people with smart snarky commentary on fundamentalist religions and people who are religious fundamentalists, just in case you're not familiar with it. Yeah, and it's very different from, I think the reason why we would provide an interesting insight into fundy snark is we are people who watch a lot of fundy snark content for different reasons.

Like I'm interested in how different cultures view other cultural groups and talk about other cultural groups. I think you just like to sass. Or I like seeing people who have taken hard cultural stances be criticized to see how we might be subject to criticism ourselves and what we may be doing wrong. Because my favorite content is it turns out that I am wrong about something and I should change course. And Bundy Snarky helps me because it is, it does all of that.

Simone Collins
But yes, it is also snarky gossip. And I don't mind that. On Bridgerton, and I'm like, our audience is like 90% male now. It used to be 50%. It's an interesting pronatalist argument around Bridgerton, though, and we were discussing this with one of the podcast listeners who is in a very progressive part of the Bay Area in Berkeley and knows a lot of people who are very progressively coded at least, but who also love Bridgerton, which is an insanely pronatalist tv show on Netflix that large families, it's all about marrying and having kids.

And if our viewers wanted to do. The Bridgerton episode, let us know. But back to the topic. So we're going to be talking about a few different channels as examples of fundy snark content. And what I find very interesting is the differentiation between the channels in terms of, like, my perspective on whether or nothing they are fundamental goods for the world or fundamental negatives for the world.

Malcolm Collins
Because some of these channels are really just like in a cult, basically. Like the far progressive movement has essentially become a cult. We call it the urban monoculture and our show a lot, stuff like that. But then there's some people who just seem to be genuinely secular. One of the things I find most interesting about fundy snark content is the people who were raised atheist and then turn to fundy snark often seem to be the most in a cult of the communities and cult like, and the people who were raised Mormon and then turned to fundy snark often are the most like kind and open minded and genuinely engaging.

Simone Collins
So there, which I'm sure you're probably going to agree with, let's list the. Channels we're talking about and then hear your hypothesis. Sounds good. So the channels that we actively watch so people know what we're talking about here is Zelf on the shelf. What was the other Mormon one?

Jordan and McKay. And then Fundy Snark is a big one. And then Rachel Friday. Yes, the subreddit is called funding snark. I would say that like, the groups that I say are like fairly benign or even quite positive.

Malcolm Collins
I think the two mormon couples we mentioned was the highest tier being self on the shelf. I just see Zelf on the shelf as being really compassionate about the people that they are targeting to the extent where recently they've done a number of episodes where they are interacting with the girl defined couple because this couple is open to interacting with them given how open and kind they are towards these individuals. Whereas I put the pedestal of hate content, probably Rachel Oates. And then slightly below her is fundy Fridays, where these people are really just a progressive version of libs of TikTok, but not as entertaining. So I'll explain what I mean by that.

Libs of TikTok. For people who don't know, they take the most extreme people in this urban monoculture cult that we talk about and they showcase their behavior, and then they attempt to spin sort of a narrative or a perspective where this behavior is actually pretty mainstream in the progressive movement. But like most progressive, though, this isn't mainstream. This is some wacky extremist. Whereas you see a similar thing in, for example, Fundy Fridays, where they will say things like, there was in a Duggar video recently where she was saying basically all Republicans are bad and represent a threat to the lgbt community.

And even though more than 50% of republican voters these days support gay marriage, like, it's wild that these positions are taking. We'll get more into the wildness of this and the downstream negative repercussions of the positions the extremists are taking. But yeah, so I want to hear your theory. Why do you think the Mormons are. It's not just ex Mormons.

Simone Collins
So I think that the reason why born fairly atheist and then remained atheist people have the most skewed fundy snark commentary is because they are of the greatest religious fervor. So we've seen that, for example, in polygenic risk scores and generally religiosity appears to be heritable. People seem to have that. But religiosity doesn't mean like, you inherit being a Baptist, it means you inherit a kind of religious fervor or tendency to be quite religious for example, I have family members who used to be a member of the Rajneesh and then went, like, pretty conservative Christian. They just jumped from one harder culture to another harder culture instead of just being in a soft culture.

So it seems like people tend to gravitate towards hard and soft cultures. And I think that people who are very vehement critics of other cultures are demonstrating the personality tendencies, the behavioral tendencies that drive one to religiosity in the first place. They just happen to be bowing down to the cult or religion of progressivism, of woke, of, whatever you want to call it, the urban monoculture. The people who deconvert from hard religions are naturally those whose behavioral and personality characteristics are less hardline on any sort of culture. They don't gravitate toward that very hard culture, and so they let it go.

And they're more likely to spin out of hard religions because they just don't have a very high religiosity kind of profile. So that's why I think those who have deconverted tend to be a little bit more tempered and reasonable, whereas those who never deconverted from their culture and have yet devoted their careers to a great extent to this kind of commentary and criticism are more vehement. What do you think? I disagree on that. I suspect it's most cultural and genetic, because this is something we just see more generally, and it's something that we've talked about on our channel before, is a lot of people think like they have left the culture they were born in, but that one culturally just isn't true.

Malcolm Collins
And you see the downstream effects of being outside of a hard cultural group. Like a religious cultural group doesn't really show up in individual personality until about two or three generations after deconversion. And the Mormons who have deconverted were still raised within mormon culture. I also think that there's genetic effects here. When I engage with both Mormons and ex Mormons, both groups, I find just, and again, that's probably a cross between culture and genetics.

Unusually pleasant people to interact with. They are just ridiculous. Wonderful. Salspark did a good thing on this. They are just uniquely delightful people for.

Unknown
Whoa. Lost your mortgage? Pay $10,000. Oh, no. Hey, it's Gary.

Gary, great to see you. How are you? Oh, boy. Who is the best mom in the world? Well, this is actually an interesting thing where a lot of people see us, you and me, and they're like, you guys look like brother and sister.

Malcolm Collins
You look like no one I've ever seen before. You act so weird and we're like, you look at the puritan spotting checklist that Scott Alexander wrote and we were like, off the charts on this. You look at the old of the cultural group, which both of us come from. I'll put on the screen here pictures of calvinist women. They look all like Simone sisters.

Or you can put up like famous Calvinist as a group that I was at from the group that like, founded the Free State of Jones, the John Brown group. You put like a picture of John Brown and you're like, both behaviorally and physiologically, this looks like Malcolm the crazy. We need to find that painting where there's some concerned people behind him. So it's more just that we're part of an ethno cultural group that had a pretty isolated gene pool for a long time that you're just not as familiar with. But it doesn't mean that we aren't also impacted by that.

So I suspect that's what we're seeing with the Mormon community is one a culture which actually does a pretty good job of creating good action at the end of it. And this is something I've seen. So in our Wikipedia article about us, there is a section on it where it quotes one of my quotes. And I'm actually quite glad they quoted this because they were talking about my relationship with my parents. And I was like, I had a very hard childhood.

I don't know how much of it was their fault. I grew up, troubled teen industry, everything like that, which I was sent to by court order, not by my parents. And. But what I said is, if a parent raises good children, like children who are happy with themselves, happy with their lives, and successful. Bye.

Any secular metric, how can I say that they were a bad parent? And the Platt family, the fundy snark, did a series of videos mentioning that all of their kids seem so healthy and happy and well adjusted, and yet they want to attack this family. And I'm like, do you see what's coming out of progressive culture? Like, it is horrible right now? These people are coming out like mentally broken individuals.

Unknown
Sorry, I should be clear. I don't mean that this objective claim, I mean this objectively, Pew found that over half of all white liberal women under the age of 30 have a mental health issue. And just across the board, among this ultra progressive cultural group, as you can see here, there's just much higher rates of mental health issues than there is in the conservative group. And this is why I'm so unpersuaded when ultra progressives are like, why don't you just raise children the way that we raise children? Because I'm like, anyone can see whether.

Malcolm Collins
I'm looking at the data or I'm. Just looking at the people. I know that whatever the thing is that you're doing with your kids, it's leading them to be mentally tattered as adults. Whereas I just don't see the same thing coming out of conservative households, even when these kids grow up in childhoods that progressives claim or love to mentally masturbate about, mentally breaking these kids or causing them to need therapy when they're adults, or causing etcetera. But really, they're just saying, oh, these are hooks we could use to pull them out of their culture.

Unknown
Not that they're actually pointing out things that are genuinely damaging to these kids. And another really interesting thing I see from a cultural perspective, the more on the cult spectrum they are, these individuals, whenever they see somebody act non culturally normative, their perspective is always to say, get out there and go to a therapist. And after we've talked about, if you look at modern therapy and you can watch our videos on this, therapy become a cult. This is an industry I was trained in. They do a bunch of stuff that we were explicitly warned against doing in the early two thousands.

Malcolm Collins
They do a bunch of stuff like trauma therapy is what I call it, which is really, they've taken the concept of thetans, and they've just inserted the word trauma. And it is much closer to Scientology from the nineties and eighties than it is to what therapy was supposed to be like academic therapy was supposed to be. And this isn't just on fundy snark channels, either. What's really interesting is, across YouTube channels and podcasts, I hear this coming up a lot. Like when someone is in, especially the therapy cult, it shows up, and they talk a lot about their prescriptions, they talk a lot about their I therapists and how it's very important that people get therapy.

Just how important, because therapy is for the urban monoculture. It's like a priest and induction cast. And so when they want to convert somebody, they send them to therapists. Because therapists do two things really well. This.

This cult version of therapy that really is more similar to Scientology from the eighties is they do a very good job of breaking an individual's connections to their birth culture and family and convincing them that all of this stuff, that if it's not culturally normative, that is, if it's not part of the urban monoculture, it is trauma, it is abuse. And they use that to break them from these groups, which cults always do. The first thing a cult always does is try to break you from your family. But they also do a very good job of creating this sort of original sin narrative around the concept of trauma, which historically we would have known. A therapist's job is to help somebody emotionally heal, not to create dependency.

Simone Collins
In theory, the real job is to. Make money, and you can make more money by creating dependency, which is why this model of therapy out competed. So do you want to go further on any of these topics before I get into probably the most offensive part of the video? So, yeah, let's see. I think people watch fundy snark for a bunch of different reasons.

And some it's just cultural reinforcement, some it's just the snark. I think a lot of it, which is important, and it shouldn't be understated, is that people who come from a soft culture and just don't really have a lot of firmly held beliefs or traditions or restraints on their lives, feel, and I felt this a lot when I was a kid, which is why I'm bringing it up, this strange fascination with people who come from weird cultures and have a structured life and have these structured beliefs. And they may say that they hate these people, these like religious fundamentalists, but they will watch fundy snark, they will follow these people on Instagram and across other channels and watch and maybe mock their channels, but I think maybe even subconsciously, there's a lot of watching that goes on just because there's something compelling and comforting about it. It's evil, of course. They've got it wrong, of course, whatever, that's what they're thinking.

But there's something kind of comforting. And they're going through an even parasocially experience that lifestyle without actually living it and without actually feeling like you're condoning it, because these are snark channels. So you're making fun of them, you're not supporting them, you're making fun of them. It's okay. And I think that's what a lot of this is about.

I also really the more vehement and you would say, like unfair channels like fundy Fridays, because they provide such a stark contrast of the cultural extremes that we've arrived at today. Because, as you say, like, you're cherry picking extremes. This is the libs of TikTok, of the flipped version. It's the upside down version, and it really helps you see what the differences are. Like, it lays them bare.

If someone needs to know what the differences between weird conservatism and weird progressivism are watch one of these channels and you'll know where they fall on marriage, on child rearing, on therapy, on trauma, on pets, on how to deal with social media, on jobs, on really anything, because they talk about everything. So I think that's really cool. You can learn a lot. So now we'll get the more offensive stuff. So I'm going to get to two fairly offensive points.

Malcolm Collins
One is Rachel Oates, who I think is the most extreme version of the arab monoculture. Just join us. Is her arguments, because you see this across videos, and I see this across funny snark of high fertility families. And she was actually talking about other Collins family, the more famous Collins family than us, which is this really delightful interracial couple. Carissa using her kids to push her anti choice, pro natalist beliefs.

Unknown
And this is a really sickening video. I, the more I learn about them and see people criticizing them, because I find that you can learn about somebody through the individuals who criticize them really well, because I'm like, okay, if this is the worst, you could err about them. They seem like delightful people and very well reasoned individuals. One of the core complaints they had, very similar to us, was like, it'd be better off to have, quote unquote, higher quality, fewer kids, other than more kids. And she has a full argument about this, and she's just, this is like an obviously true thing.

In her next line, she said, don't stop because they can't be in every extracurricular activity and sport. Are we really going to base the value of our children's lives on how many activities they can be in? I know Carissa would disagree with me, but I honestly think it's better to help one child really flourish and reach their potential than it is to birth five children who are struggling and barely getting by, surely. I feel like so many people like Carissa like to use the excuse of, well, we're scraping by, so that's enough, right? And I just feel like, as someone who grew up like that, it's not enough.

So what Rachel is saying here is she doesn't want these children to exist because they will live childhoods that are equivalent to her own childhood. Is she really saying that she would be better off not existing, that her childhood was so bad that her life just shouldn't be here? Because that's what she is denying other people with this argument, a life equivalent to her own life by her own argument. And I really don't think that that's the perspective she's taking. She genuinely doesn't consider that she is denying an entire human being who will live an entire life, the optionality of existence, just so another child can get more extracurriculars or have marginally more financial security, which to me is obviously unethical.

But this is the standard moral framework that progressives are using right now. And I'm like, that is such a morally horrifying position to me. And I think it's why the urban monoculture will ultimately die is this belief that human life doesn't matter until conception. And it's just so bizarre to me because it's like this weird ultra catholic belief, but also urban monoculture belief, which is to say that, oh, yeah, I know my kids, but if I. I could marginally and marginally is really what it is here.

Malcolm Collins
Improve the lives of my other kids and adopt parenting practices. They're more normalized for the urban monocultures perspective by raising my kids more in line with their value system, which requires fewer kids. Really, all this, no corporal punishment, just, you can't, if you have multiple boys, you can't hold them all down. There's no corporal punishment system requires you being able to body check a kid. Stay on top of them, basically, if they're doing something really bad, and if you have other kids, that's not an option, right?

And they're like, well, then you just shouldn't have more, right? And so it's like, why did they take these bizarre perspectives? As we've argued? It's because their culture evolved these perspectives because it uses them not for actual child rearing. People in their culture almost never have kids, or at least at above repopulation rate, they never have kids.

And so for that reason, they don't really need to be good at child rearing themselves. They just need to be good at implanting trauma around the perception of trauma. And as we pointed out on studies of trauma, that effects of trauma are more correlated with a belief of trauma than actually having trauma. There was that great study done that showed when you correlate people who say how much trauma they have, it correlates with their level of psychological dysfunction. However, if you then go back to their childhoods and you look for court records of this and stuff like this, where you can find actual proof of trauma, even in people who say that they're not traumatized, then no effects, and you find proof that there wasn't actually trauma, people who say that they're traumatized, you find big effects.

So implanting trauma is actually really important and creating this dependency on the urban monoculture. But then I think we have the worst case of this, which has been the appropriation of the gay community, which I think we see on Funday Fridays. I'm gonna fundy Fridays, which sees herself. And I don't think that she's doing any of this maliciously. I just think it's part of the cult that she's in, and she doesn't understand the negative repercussions of her actions.

Simone Collins
Yeah, I think we should make it clear. I really like funny Fridays, and I really like Jen, who's the main host of funny Fridays, along with her husband. But, yeah, she's in it. She's in a very different culture, and she has. But you go, she's not just in a different culture.

Malcolm Collins
She's basically in a cult, and the cult has done some really questionable things. She's in as much of a cult as the people who she covers. They all come from very strong cultures that have skews and blind spots because of those strong cultures. Not to say that we don't have blind spots either, but still, yeah, everybody. Has their cultural blind spots, but one that, like, just, oh, it grades my nails when I'm watching her channel.

If she really sees herself as, like, a spokesperson for queer people and queer culture, and I will put a picture on screen of her and her husband, and people might be like, how dare you question this aspect of her identity? And I'm like, look, I'm gonna play a video of her playing race detective with the people she's criticizing. I'm not sure the ethnicity of her mother. And I swear I have a reason to bring this up because I am aware that it is problematic for me, as a white person to ask, where are you from? I'm only bringing it up because kat identifies as Latina.

Unknown
I know a lot of you guys, but I know a lot of you guys don't know that I am myself, a proud Latina. I was born in Mexico, in Monte Morelos, in Nuevo Leon. I know that a lot of people just assume that I'm white because I was not lucky enough to inherit my mom's really beautiful dark skin, but I do have her dark eyes. But I think that it's important, too, that people know that us Latinas come in all different shades of brown, trying. To call her something that she's not.

But I have to report on what I think. And so I'm the same way. I just got to call it like I see it. And given that she is the type of person who, when she is investigating the way somebody else is approaching life, she would say, well, you don't look Latina to me. Therefore, I am going to doubt your latina identity even though you personally identify as Latina.

I'm just saying the same thing. Well, you don't look like this to me. And so while I personally wouldn't doubt somebody's racial heritage or identity just because they didn't look a certain way, I can see the logic in doing it. Because if you don't look sufficiently latina, then you're not going to experience the racism that goes along with being latina, and therefore, it's not good for you to use that identity as a cover for your words and actions. But this all would apply equally well to the accusation I am making here.

To be more specific, there is a big difference between being an oppressed minority and identifying as an oppressed minority. If the thing that grants you inclusion into that minority group is not causing you to be oppressed in the way that other members of that group are being oppressed, the oppressed minority status is nothing but a benefit to you because you get to feel like a victim and identify as a victim without any of the negative consequences of actually being a victim. He doesn't need that. Bob, we don't want to know the gender of the baby. We don't want to know the sex.

Malcolm Collins
And, you know, I don't know your gender. I don't know Candace's, I don't know mine. You don't know my gender? I don't. Do I look like a woman?

I don't know what a woman looks like. What are you? You're. You're a detective? A gender detective?

No, I just. Lifting up skirts and pulling down pants and just getting in there with your magnifying glass. By the way, if you're wondering why Jen identifies as queer, like what specific type of queer she thinks she is, if Simone has watched literally all of her videos are about all of her videos, and she says she can't remember her ever saying, I did some research on the side. And the answer that I seem to pull is that she calls her, she considers herself and her husband, considers himself non binary, and their pronouns are her and they and him and they, I believe, you know, I don't want to ever misgender someone because I don't particularly like, it's not important to me, and it really hurts some people. So, you know, why would I do something that hurts somebody if there's no benefit to me?

Unknown
So that's where I think she comes into the queer community. But the article where I pulled that from, unfortunately, was really confusingly worded. And I'm not sure if those pronouns or that gender identity claim was referring to them or another influencer couple. It was interviewing alongside them. She does the exact same thing.

Malcolm Collins
This is not me acting outside of the rules that she had set for herself. And I haven't done this with anyone else. I'm only doing it because I know that she's okay with playing, like, race detective and stuff like this. But I look at her and her husband, and I'm like, okay, so here's the core problem with this leftist idea. That you shouldn't put any gating on the queer community, and that if you have dyed hair and snogged a girl in college, that you're queer because you don't have to deal with the consequences.

Because you don't. To everyone else in the world, you look like a straight couple. You don't have to deal with the consequences of the shit that you are saying in terms of how that affects the queer community. When you get out there and you as somebody who's really just. And we could identify as queer if we wanted to because we are agender, as I constantly point out by the lgbt community, like, extremist cult standards, not like real gays and lesbians who, depending on the study, you're looking at 45% of gay men voted for Trump, or it might be a third of gay men.

In another study, you're like, okay, you got to go for the smaller study because then people believe it more. But you're looking at a pretty big percentage of these people who actually have to live with this. People are like, why are so many, like, actually gay people have to live with the fact that they're gay, who have to live with the fact that they're trans. Right. And people around them can see this support the republican policies is because what are the anti trans, anti lgbt, quote unquote, republican policies?

There's shit like trans people shouldn't be on sports teams, and trans people shouldn't be using bathrooms that don't conform with their birth gender. And for a lot of people who can't escape this gay and trans identity entity, they support that stuff. And fundy Friday, this is not me, miss misinterpreting the shit that they're saying. They have a full video just on these two topics. It's, first of all, anyone who's, I think, sane and being honest knows that these people shouldn't be on sports teams.

It's blatantly unfair. And the fact that it's blatantly unfair causes blowback to real trans people. If you're a real trans person, you infinitely would prefer not having a society that has a reason to hate you and see you as a cheater over getting to participate in the sports team you want to participate in. Like there are not people out there killing themselves because they're not getting to play on the right swimming team. All right?

Unknown
Lots of kids go through their childhood without any option to play intermural sports, and I don't see any leftists freaking out that these kids are going to end up killing themselves. This is insane. And these are positions that you would only argue if you didn't have to deal with the consequences that are going to come from creating these sorts of carve outs. Because of course, as soon as you create a carve out of this, of course some people are going to abuse it. As soon as you create a carve out around a certain segment of society where it's harder to call them out for things.

Of course some aggressive male cisgender sex pests are going to try to take advantage of it, and it's pretty easy to see that this is happening. A trans person who desperately wants to be seen as a particular gender identity is not going to, when their body looks nothing like that gender identity, go and participate in a sport where everyone is going to be furious in them because it seems that they have some huge advantage over everyone else, which they obviously do, and then walk around the locker room like Leah Thomas, swinging their penis about in front of full view in front of everyone, they're not going to do that. And they would want laws in place that prevent people from doing that while calling themselves trans. And the blowback that that causes the trans community is infinitely worse than any benefit they get from these ridiculous positions. The laws that Republicans are fighting for that prevent people from doing things like this, using a trans identity as a shield, ultimately are most beneficial out of everyone they benefit in society to real trans individuals.

If you go to somebody who isn't just in this far lefty cult and they're like, would you rather live in a world in which you don't get to participate in the sports team you want to participate in, but you don't have to deal with aggressive cis male sex pests walking around naked in women's locker rooms while calling themselves trans and you facing the blowback for that, or one in which you do have to deal with that and your meager reward is getting to participate in the sports teams you want to participate in. Anyone who's actually like, I just want society to see me for my gender is going to be like, obviously the second. And these individuals are okay with holding these sorts of positions because they don't have to personally deal with the blowback, because they don't have to walk around every day looking like a trans person, looking like queer people holding hands with somebody of the same gender as themselves. And this is why these sorts of opt in queer identities. If anything, for them, it's a benefit, because now they look even more like a victim when they're opting into the victim identity that they can just throw off whenever they're in public.

Simone Collins
Wasn't there episode on this? Yeah, there was a south park. And I'll include a clip from it here because they know it does. Oh yeah, I'm ready. David, there are just so many amazing women athletes out here today.

Unknown
Now, this is the first year that a trans woman is in the competition. How do you feel about that? I feel honored to be a part of history. I have a lot of incredible trans friends who are athletes and so we're all inspired. Uh huh.

And, uh, have you actually ever met Heather Swanson? She's not exactly your average trans athlete. Well, what is an average trans athlete? Honestly, I find that kind of bigoted, David. Okay, Miss Swanson, how does it feel to be competing today?

I can't tell you how free I feel now that I've started identifying as a woman. I'm ready to smash the other girls. Good luck, Heather. Luck is for dudes. Or this.

Malcolm Collins
He repeats, he's oh. It's a complete myth that trans people ever, or really cis males ever use trans bathroom protections to assault women. And it's no. Even the studies that are trying to argue it's a miss say it does happen, they just argue it. I'll put up a statistic on screen, like a study on screen here.

They just say it doesn't happen more when this law is out there. And it's like, you really think you could get a study published that showed that it happened more when this law was out there? Like, if you published that study at any mainstream us university, you would be at risk of being fired. I mean, very obviously. And you would likely be at personal risk walking around campus.

Unknown
Why would somebody take that risk? You know, the benefit would be so potentially low from most individual academic perspectives when considering their own livelihoods. And people who don't understand this type of pressure that academics are under, I think, often willfully don't understand it or ignore it, and ignore just how extreme the college activists often are. Whether it's lesbians who are like, I feel really uncomfortable because a lot of transitioned women who now identify as lesbians, some of these. These are cis men, sis pests, who wanted to get into lesbian dating apps and pester women, and they found a cultural cheat code to do that.

Malcolm Collins
And if you're like, no, a creepy cis male would never do this. Of course they would. We all know that guy. And yet now, when lesbians try to create lesbians who actually have to deal with the fact that they're actually lesbians and only want to date people who present phenotypically female, which this person clearly isn't, they have to deal with this. Like, in Australia, you might not know this.

There's a case recently where the owner of a dating app is being sued because the dating app used AI to determine if the face of the person who is signing up looked more phenotypically female. So this was a dating app that, by the way, let people in if they. As long as you pass. As long as you pass. I think that's.

They were like, no, because this is for people who prefer phenotypical females. That women can find these private spaces. That lesbians can't find these private spaces anymore is actually, actually a problem for individuals who have a phenotypical female preference. And you are saying in the legislation that you're pushing that they shouldn't be allowed. Like, you are dismissing the people who have to actually live with the fact that they are same sex attracted.

Or you get the pushdown of this in school, which happened to us recently. So I'll read a quote here, because this happened just right next door to us, where a Pennsylvania girl spoke out. This is like a 13 year old, by the way, spoke out furiously against teachers and administrators at her school for a transgender student savagely beating her friend using a Stanley cup, the incident took place at Pembroke. I'm sorry. Using a Stanley cup?

Yeah, using a big metal thing. Yeah. You could cut a bitch with it, I'm sure. Yeah. When the 13 year old blindsided a twelve year old female victim in the school cafeteria, using a cup, hitting her on the head and creating an open wound, the unidentified student had to be hospitalized and get staples to close the cuts in her head before undertaking concussion protocol, according to police.

However, as one student said, not only did she warn the teachers the bullying student had a quote unquote hit list, but she added that she was the next one to get assaulted and that the student had to be stopped. You could have stopped it. The girl said it was 5 hours from when I told you it was going to happen. I don't get how you couldn't have stopped that. She added that the girl was bullying her and targeting her every day at lunch.

And you might be wondering, like, how is somebody getting away with this? And it's because they're afraid if they. In this. If they apply any disciplinary measures to people of this protected category in our society, if they say, no, you can't go in the restrooms. No, you can't.

That this is going to cause apoplectic freakout from this extremist cult. Right. Yeah. If they had come in and said, you appear to be bullying, et cetera, that person. Yeah.

We're like, can you. Because I'm trans. Yeah. Who are, like, historically, like, actually born with a different gender presentation. They just want to live their lives like, they're not into all of this.

They understand that they have what is essentially a fairly rare condition and that all of society cannot adopt to their condition. And that, yes, that might mean that they have to use restrooms at home more often or they have to feel uncomfortable sometimes times the same way extremely fat people do on airplanes. Like, I don't love that fat people have to feel uncomfortable or buy two seats on an airplane. But realistically, we can't adopt all airplanes. And that's the truth of trans people as well.

They know that when society begins to bend over backwards in ways. Because, of course, if you create this protected class, if you say any male looking individual who says they identify as a woman can now use women's bathrooms, that some pests are going to take advantage of, that they don't want that happening because that has blowback on them. Who can't hide. But when you're one of these individuals, like fundy Stark, who can just say, oh, I'm gender whatever, but not look in a way where you can't escape the blowback that you are causing for this community that is genuinely bad for society and bad for the real LGBTQ community, and you could look at people like us who could claim to be trans because we are agender, which is genderqueer, which would qualify as janned for. Sorry.

For normal people who don't know what agender is, that basically means I don't feel a strong connection to my gender. If I woke up tomorrow, woman, I wouldn't care. If Simone woke up tomorrow, man, she wouldn't care. We just do not care. And Simone's also fairly asexual.

Would you identify as asexual or. I identify as asexual, but gay for Malcolm? Gay for Malcolm. Yes, we would fall squarely in the queer community, but I don't say I'm in the queer community. I just try to protect them because I view of I am not a gender presentation that causes me to be attacked in my daily life.

It's very much a blackface thing to me. It's a stolen valor thing. It's gross. It's like walking around. Yeah, like, I don't walk around telling people that I have an autism diagnosis because I don't think I need or deserve the extra help.

Simone Collins
I could play that card, probably. Technically, I have a technical diagnosis. I could pull out the paperwork. I could probably get some special services in some cases, but I'm not going to do that because I've learned to cope. And I think that the resources that should be expended on people who need help should be saved for those people.

Malcolm Collins
Yeah. And this is why, when we're looking at statistics on voting records, to find out, like, the way these communities actually are, I look at, like, gay males, for example, instead of general lgbt statistics. Because if you look at general lgbt statistics, 14% vote Republican. Only 14%, not the 45 or one third that you see in other studies of witness, just came in because people like this couple, who to me are a straight heterosexual couple in terms of how they present to society, except for, like, the dyed hair, are just identifying into this queer definition and then polluting the statistics while also causing a blowback on the real queer community, from my perspective. And I think, what blowback do you think they're causing?

You can actually see it in the statistics, which is support for the queer community has been declining in recent years because of people like this who are saying, you cannot be queer supportive and republican. How are many people going to take that? Oh, shit. And I would actually argue the opposite. I would say, you can't be queer supportive in a Democrat because they're supporting the pests who are blowing back incredible negative feelings towards the real trans individuals, the real just born attracted to the same sex individuals.

And because they are taking this position, they are forcing people on the other side to take the opposite position, and they are causing, identity wise. Oh, being republican means I am anti gay. They are establishing that as a cultural norm, even though by the statistics, it's not true. More than half of Republicans, even when you're talking about older Republicans, you're looking at 65% of you're talking about young Republicans, but even older Republicans, more than half still support same sex marriage. This is just, it's just nonsense at this point.

They're making up a fantasy world that makes them feel like good guys when they are not good guys and they are causing the very harassment that they claim to be fighting against. One thing I wonder is how many people watching all fundy snark channels, including the more moderate ones of deconverted Mormons, for example, come from the enemy's field, as it were, are similar to me, somewhat conservative, not agreeing with everything, all the criticism, but just enjoying it. And similar to those who are super progressive, but who follow the accounts of these conservative influencers because they just kind of find it interesting. Do you think that there's a decent number of conservatives and religious fundamentalists who watch these channels? Or are we unusual?

I don't think so. That would be like asking, are there a decent number of people in this far urban monoculture cult that watch libs of TikTok? I really don't think that many people cross the border that much, but I guess we'll hear from our audience because I imagine our audience is fairly. Audience also loves fundy snark. I don't.

Yeah, we'll see if they like fundy snark as much. And these people will eventually be covering us. We've actually reached out to them because we're open to working with anyone who covers us, even if it's in a negative context. We're always open to interviews, we're always open to talk. I believe that the light of truce destroys evil most effectively.

And I think that when people intentionally don't engage with us and we've reached out to fundy snark, for example, by the way, to do videos, fundy Friday. Jen, you mean fun? Yeah. And some of these other people we've reached out to, we are always open to do videos with people who are ideologically different from us because we think a genuinely ideologically diverse community. Not diverse tm, that is the approved ideologies by the urban monoculture.

But actually diverse community is the strongest community for our country. And I think that Jen of fundy Fridays comes from a good place and genuinely cares for these people. Like sometimes bad things happen to the people that she covers and she. Oh no, absolutely no. I see her very much the way that I see some of the people she covers.

Simone Collins
Yeah. No, from an extremist position in the culture. That's why I hold my stance that my hypothesis is that she is of the same hard culture profile as the religious fundamentalists that she covers. She just happens to be wearing a different team's colors, and so she has to. Yeah, and they're insane religious cults.

Malcolm Collins
They're the good guys in her insane religious cult. She's the good guy, and she's doing what the cult is telling her to do. Well, even the things that, like, she started tongue in cheek, that are frills of the channel now still speak very much, are similar to the small time career preachers that she criticizes. Her followers call themselves gennanites, and they patronize her. And how is that different from being a preacher?

Simone Collins
In the end, preachers speak to people. They cultivate communities. They have some merch. Sometimes there's a. Oh, vomit.

There's just a lot of parallels. And so I just. I think that one thing is fun is it's just like watching a little flame war between preachers. And, yeah, I would just say, like to anyone watching this, don't think we think she's not well meaning. We just.

Malcolm Collins
But I think that most of the people she criticizes are well meaning. Yeah, I agree. And yes, I do agree that the stance of saying that you are, that you stand for a queer community when you aren't necessarily, like, subject to the blackface. Not exactly. And there's no rule saying you can't say you're queer.

Simone Collins
We can say we're queer if we want to, and we have everyone to say that we're queer. We can say we're queer, and we would be right to say we're queer if we wanted to. But I don't believe in this identifying with a community when you are not subject to these struggles in the same way that she would criticize people on her show as, like, the woman where she was doing the, is she really this race thing? She's trying to figure out if she had a right to call herself Latina because she didn't look Latina. And that's exactly what we're saying.

Malcolm Collins
Do you have a right to call yourself queer and claim the struggles of that community when you don't look queer, when you look like you're in a heterosexual marriage? And there's a lot of stuff within the queer community where it used to be, like, when you get married, it doesn't mean you're no longer bi. Yeah, but you're no longer functionally undergoing the struggles that are unique to bi people in our current society. It does mean that you are not a marginalized community member anymore from the perspective of your lived experience in terms of how that community is dealing with struggles. And so you no longer have to deal with the blowback of your extremist actions, like saying, oh yeah, trans people should be allowed on women's sports teams, when that's obviously ridiculous.

Simone Collins
Salavi. I love you, Simone. And I love, I love how you always try to see the best in people. You are a genuinely good person. And I think, as we often say, righteousness isn't determined by an intention to be a good person, because almost everyone intends to be a good person.

Malcolm Collins
It's determined by how realistic, in terms of the actual, like, downstream effects your view of reality is. Like, the more educated you are on what reality actually is, and the less you are part of just one ideological tribe, the better. And we see with her channel, like in one video, she was lauding communism, for example, like, maybe one day there'll be a full communist, she said, as a good thing. And I just personally, as somebody who values pragmatism and like, the way things actually work when tried to be a person who lauds communism, is just to say, I am okay with in exchange for good boy points. That is, thinking of myself as a good person and having other people see me as a good person.

The painful and slow deaths of millions of people, starting often with the minority populations and the most disenfranchised in a society, which is what actually happens when communists come into power. But as I learned from Lemon month, our holiday, in which we engage with subjects we find offensive, I have learned that real communism has not been tried. Okay? It is a post singularity Sci-Fi world. That is what communism is.

Simone Collins
That's what it always was. And it. The big problem with communism is that people are trying it now when we literally don't have the technology. We could do a whole episode on this. But I just want to explain the point for people who don't know what she said.

Just defending.

Malcolm Collins
Communism. I don't believe that's what she's arguing for. Said that communism can only be tried once. We're in a post scarcity environment. And so some communists are now arguing, yeah, real communism never been tried, definitionally, because we're not in a post scarcity environment.

But if somebody is fighting for communism today, because we don't have the technology to create. If you're fighting for communism today, you. Are not shut your mouth. Because you should be fighting for AGI and super intelligence that is aligned with human flourishing, because that is what will herald in true communism. Yes.

Simone Collins
So you really have to be like either like a government fascist with like AI department, or you have to be a huge capitalist and raise tons of money to do private AI development. This is actually something I've noticed more broadly between the leftist rightist divide within the current political environment, not the political environment of the nineties, which is what modern leftists often like to pretend that we are still fighting. But in the current environment, what it really is is do you actually care about solving a problem or are you looking for good boy points? So you look at something like the leftist myth that there is a rightist. It's just insane that there's a significant racist base among the right wing.

Unknown
And I will beat this until the clowns come home. 538 polling very mainstream Nate Silver until Obama was elected, more white Democrats than white Republicans said they would not vote for a black president. And even now the difference in racist attitudes between the two parties bases is marginal. And when you look at the actual effects that the two parties policies have on racial disparity, you get more of it from the left. When a left wing government has been in power in the United States, in a region for a period, the IQ scores and incomes of both black and hispanic populations are more distance from the local white population than when republicans have been in power.

And it's because these systems that they put in place, you know, affirmative action, everything like that, they are performative good boy point systems, but they make the underlying problems worse. And I think that that's the core difference between rightists and leftists in the modern sense. It's, will you sacrifice your public image to attempt to actually fix a problem or are you just interested in looking good? And I actually think that this is also what we're seeing with the current Israel Gaza conflict, because there, there are not many real pleasant solutions to the current geopolitical issue in that region. And if you actually implemented most of the left wing solutions, you're going to deal with a scale of death and oppression in the region that is astronomical.

Malcolm Collins
I love you to death. You're amazing. And you are so understanding of other people and cultures, even when they wish that we were dead. I'm for them. It doesn't matter us.

They're gonna be like, oh my God, their children should be dead. Born. But there's no difference. No, they'll, we always know what they say. How can you slap, okay.

Simone Collins
How could they be so cruel to their children that. How could they slap? That's what they say. That's what they say. How could I.

Malcolm Collins
They slept. How could they slept. And how dare she have her baby on the screen? That's going to be a big one. Yeah.

Simone Collins
How could they practice corporal punishment? How could they not make their house incredibly warm during the winter? How could they have so many kids if they can't? I don't know. I really don't know.

I'm running out of things. But it's usually those things. Oh, and they put too much on their kids because they expect things of them and encourage them to. Yeah. How dare they have expectations, intergenerational cultural expectations.

Malcolm Collins
And that's another thing that gets me. And we'll probably do a full episode on this, but I'll just end it with this where people are like, how dare you say that people owe their ancestors anything, right? I'm like, if somebody gave you a, said, you go, what do I owe you for this? And they're like, just pass on the goodwill you'd be. And then you took that money and you spent it on drugs and pornography, right?

Like, just something to. Totally selfish. You are a bad and vile person. I am glad that people like you won't exist in the future. If somebody makes not, doesn't give you $100, they make enormous sacrifices to give you life.

Unknown
Life. And they say. And you say, what do I owe you? And they go all, you owe it forward. Pay it forward.

Malcolm Collins
And you're like, fuck that. I'm gonna spend it on drugs and sex. You're a vile person. And I'm glad that your cultural and genetic descendants won't exist in the future.

So lovely. Do you disagree with that statement, Simone? That was very much a snarky. I just say, actually, there are some times where Jen gets really pissed about things that the other side says. And she takes on a tone that reminds me a lot of you when you get the same level of piss.

Simone Collins
So I'm just like, aw, it's great. It's good. My whole thing is what happens. People who choose not to represent their culture in the future will not inherit the future. We will inherit the future, theoretically, if our kids thrive and flourish.

And I hope that they do. All right. Love you so much. I love you too. Gorgeous versus.

Malcolm Collins
You're not messing up. You're doing a great job. Were you able to get the pocket thing I got you on your belt or have you still not? It doesn't fit under these aprons. And that's the trouble.

Simone Collins
But once I figure out how to deal with it under these aprons, okay. I just want you to be happy. You're the best. You're the best. No, Andy's the best.

Our kids are the best. All of them are the best. The best. Every one of our kids is, like, so amazing in their own way. I'm really excited for them.

True story. I'm crazy about them. Okay, I'm going to go get her, and then I'll be right in.

Oops. I.

The Fundie Snark To Religious Extremist Pipeline

Primary Topic

Episode Summary

Main Takeaways

Episode Chapters

1. Introduction to Fundie Snark

2. Cultural Echo Chambers

3. Psychological and Societal Effects

Actionable Advice

About This Episode

People

Content Warnings:

Transcript