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Things start out peaceful enough, as I tell Inez about my appearance the other day on the Dennis Prager Show (go to September 27, 1 hour and 10 minutes in here to watch). We got along very well. I reflect on some amazing clips I just saw of Prager, a few hours after we spoke, explaining to young people at ASU that masturbation is not evil, which of all the weird religious views out there is one of those I find most puzzling. I particularly love when he told them that if you believe masturbation is evil, you alienate people from God, and you have a different God than he does. I originally saw that clip on Twitter, but the account that posted it got suspended. I then found it on YouTube, starting at 1 hour and 20 minutes here. See here and here for shortened clips from Twitter, but the entire 12 minutes or so in the original video are glorious, and I love that it’s been driving some of the biggest trad weirdos crazy. We then consider my idea of the pagan nature of Christian support for Trump.

But the main event of this conversation is our chance to finally discuss the famous 2021 Time article, which is a starting point for getting to the heart of what we really disagree about, which is Trump’s actions between the 2020 election and January 6, and how bad they were. Previously, I had a well-known conservative friend bring the Time article to my attention. Then Inez talked about it. And just recently, I was reading a random profile of JD Vance, and it just appears in the context of a discussion about election fraud. So conservatives apparently think about this piece a lot.

From my perspective, Inez acknowledges a lot of facts about what happened but has to engage in some serious mental gymnastics to deny that Trump tried to change the results of the election and this is really a big deal, and liberals are completely correct in freaking out about it. She wants to create an equivalency between that and how Hillary Clinton behaved in 2016, Russiagate, and other things, and I think this is conflating topics that have nothing to do with one another. Her view is that this gets down to “trust in institutions,” while I think that’s way too broad of a perspective to say much of anything when you’re jumping around from what Mark Zuckerberg is doing, to the Democratic Party, to the FBI, to the media, and whoever else. All this strikes me as a kind of moral “get out of jail free” card, the kind played by race hustler types when trying to argue for systemic racism. I have to reference once again my piece on conservatism as an oppositional culture.

This probably got more heated than any other podcast, which is good, as you want to get to the root of serious differences. Many of you will agree with Inez, and she is a good debater, so let us know what you think.