In this episode, Trent shares his discussion with Lutheran scholar Jordan Cooper about the harms of “red pill” ideology.

Transcription:

Trent:

Hey everyone. In today’s episode, I want to share with you a great discussion I had with Marlon Williams of the Gospel Truth Channel and Dr. Jordan Cooper, who is a Lutheran scholar on the red pill and how it harms young men and how it relates to things like my recent debate with Pearl Davis. So check it out.

Marlon:

So if you don’t mind, Trent, take us through some of the thought process that you were gathering as you were interacting with Pearl on the subject matter.

Trent:

Sure, I’ll do that. And I think it also might be helpful to give our listeners a background on what we mean by red pill, and that kind of can take us into a little bit what happened with Pearl. So the terms red pill and blue pill, go back to the film the Matrix. So in the Matrix, Keanu Reeves plays Neo, just an average guy at the office who learns that his universe is actually just a, it’s just a simulation created by robots that had conquered humanity and use humans as batteries. And they keep the humans in a ified sleep in these cocoons and make them think they’re living in the real world when they’re just little sacks of flesh. And these batteries and their world is a simulation. The universe is a simulation. So in the film, he’s presented a choice by Morpheus, take the blue pill, go back to you, forget all of this.

And you live life thinking that it’s a normal world, but it’s not. The blue pill is ignorance of the truth. Taking the red pill is learning the startling truth, waking up from the simulation and escaping the matrix. So those are the terms. Later in the early two thousands, the blue and red pill were used as political metaphors to the idea of someone escaping a widely accepted comfortable falsehood. One of the earliest uses of it, liberal people argued that democracy is actually bad, even though you’re raised your whole life to think it’s good. Here’s 10 reasons to think that’s not true, be red billed on it. Those are the earliest uses of it. So later on in the 2010s and 20 fifteens, we see this being applied to dating and relationships between men and women. And so what I would say, and there’s actually another pill that’s come into this and I’ll wrap it up quick because I definitely want to get Jordan’s thoughts on a lot of this.

So the idea is that the red pill, well the blue pill would be the idea that men and women, if you are kind and a good guy and a nice guy, you’ll find a nice woman. And if you get married, you’ll be happy. The thing that you’ve been told. And it’s just the standard tale and the red pill says no, that’s actually a lie. Men and women have a naturally exploitative relationship with each other. Women actually cause men more harm than good. And so if you try to be a nice guy and approach women, women, 80% of women are going after the top 20% of men. Women are shallow and exploitative. And so the red pill seeks to try to exploit those who are exploitative and give men different strategies to deal with the startling truth that women are a harsh reality to men. So avoid merit.

And so what Pearl is arguing in the debate is that marriage sets up men for messy divorces, for heartache that men should just approach women cautiously. And red pillars will give advice about basically how to manipulate women because they say women manipulate you through looks, through improving your looks, improving your game, doing all this kind of stuff, and then you can break through where other men can’t. A lot of dating coaches use the red pill. Starting in 2016, there was another pill called the black pill. And the rhetoric is saying, you’re right, there’s an exploitative relationship between men and women, and men have it really hard and women are shallow, but the red pillars are wrong. If you are a below average looking man or even average looking, it doesn’t matter how good your charisma is or your looks or any of that, it’s basically hopeless.

You can’t really improve your situation. And so many of these individuals just kind of shun women and their life becomes very cynical and they complain about women and their life focuses and they become very misogynistic in that regard. Pearl is probably still in the red pill area, but in engaging her and engaging many of these red pillars, a lot of this are, it’s a mixture of common sense advice about men dealing with women that actually is true how you shouldn’t just be a suck up or a Mr. Nice guy, but that’s mixed in with all kinds of falsehoods that assume that all women are just like these stereotypes you see on TikTok. Or it ignores the fact that yes, there are bad exploitative women out there, but there’s also bad exploitative men and they don’t get mentioned either. And so I made sure to bring that into my discussion with Pearl.

Marlon:

Alright. Dr. Joel Cooper, anything to add on to that of your experience as it concerns dealing with red pill, the ideology of red pill, blue pill, or even black pill?

Dr. Cooper:

Yeah, I mean, I don’t know what you want to speak on exactly here, but maybe I’ll just briefly give why this matters to me or why I’ve devoted some time to looking into this issue and that is just that, well, first of all, I’m raising two boys, so it kind of matters to me what world that they were living in. Me. Yeah, there you go. This is very matters a lot is when I look at the worlds around me and I look at the voices of the culture that are speaking to my voice and they’re young at this point, but those voices are not speaking encouraging words to them by and large, I think the way that men are treated in and portrayed in media the talk about men in terms of toxic masculinity, and there are, as I said, a lot of voices from the culture.

And I think that comes down from whether it’s popular media or education or the way that news is reported or the way that women talk about men just because of the time that they have spent on social media and the narrative that they have bought into. There are all of these just kind of negative voices all over the place. So I have the concern for my own boys as they grow up, but I also have a concern for men because a lot of the ministry that I’m involved in is really mentoring young men, and that is through campus ministry that I’m involved in. And my YouTube channel, my audience is like 80 something percent men. I mean it’s pretty much younger males under 40 males almost exclusively. And Trent, I imagine that your demographic is probably somewhat similar to that. So that’s both in my audience and then the people that I’m just doing ministry with on a regular basis and then my boys.

So as I look at, especially those who I’m involved in ministry with in my own boys, I want to protect them. I mean, I want to protect them from the lies that are out there in the culture, but I also want to protect them from those voices that I think are going to exploit what our real issues and lead them in a wrong direction. And that’s what I think the red pill does. So that’s why I started looking into this at all is I just started hearing certain things from men that were coming from really social media platforms and just kind of popular little clips from videos. And I feel like there was this kind of transition at some point from a lot of young men that I was in contact with and doing ministry with were listening to Jordan Peterson and then all of a sudden that became Andrew Tate.

And those are two totally different worlds. They’re two totally different views of what a man is. And I know that when you talk to some of the red pill guys, they’re like, we don’t claim Andrew Tate either. So to be clear, I know that he’s not representative of the entirety of anyone who claims those ideas, but he is the, or at least was at one time, probably more so than now, the introduction of that to a lot of people. So that’s just my background here. I don’t know if you want me to share anything else. Well,

Trent:

I also think it’s important, Jordan’s done a lot of great episodes on his own show about etiquette, about being a gentleman. And one of the disturbing messages among the red pillars is that you shouldn’t focus on those things like the ideal of masculinity they present tends to be very machismo, crude, profane. And this is highlighted as some kind of pinnacle of masculinity when what I want to show, especially young, I see young Christian men and Jordan did a great episode about this on his show, that they will be on Twitter talking about glory to Jesus Christ, Christ is king, and they will just have hateful, vile language, profane language, verbally abusive language to other people thinking that’s what it means to be a Christian man. And I want them to see that when you act like that, that’s not masculine. It reminds me more of when I watch a junior high student smoking cigarettes or swearing, trying to look cool, it’s just masking, I think a very deep insecurity.

Dr. Cooper:

And that’s really been my goal with all of this more than to critique the red pill movement has really been to try to construct a positive vision because I think that’s what men are looking for. They want some guidance, they want someone to look up to, they want mentorship, and they need what is a positive vision. They need some kind of view of what is a man that is not merely a man, is one who needs to be nice by stepping back or not exerting authority or power in any sense so that women can take their place and do anything that maybe traditionally has been relegated to or delegated to the man. But my concern is that the only positive voices I think that you have are those voices that are just kind of telling men that masculinity is coterminous with aggression and just aggression without boundaries, maybe just kind of being aggressive by itself is masculine and therefore being aggressive is something that is good or getting money or getting women, all of those things that are kind of exertions of masculine strength or goods in and of themselves.

But if you look at what I’ve called the gentleman, it’s not like I came up with that term obviously, but the kind of classical model of masculinity that has been prized in much of the West has been something you find even in the middle ages with chivalry, right? That there is this conception that strength also exists within limits and strength. I think first and foremost should be strength and the conquering of your own passions, meaning that the conquering of your own desires to simply hedonistic give into whatever it is that you want to do, your base passions. And that’s really the most difficult thing to do, is to control yourself, to live a life of virtue, to live a life that when you have a desire to go on some sexual exploit, that you have the strength in yourself and control over yourself enough to say, no, I’m not going to do that.

And this is something that’s been talked about at least since the classical Greek philosophers who speak about the relationship between the intellect and the passions. To say that your passions or your desires often can be for things that are good, you have a desire for food because it satiates hunger and that’s a good thing. But those passions, especially for those kind of maybe more animalistic instincts, like the things like food or sex, those things are not ends in themselves. And if they are not relegated properly, they can lead to significant damage. So the intellect or the reason is to be used to put boundaries around that, to control the passions, to guide them, to put guardrails around them to say, okay, I know that I have a desire to do this, but is that going to be good for me? And you use that reason to guide where you lead your passion.

So my fear is that a lot of these red pill movements really aren’t doing that at all. And they are encouraging, at least to some extent. I know that they’re not all the same either to be clear, but at least some of them seem to be encouraging men to just kind of maybe just grab onto or give into those base instincts. And when they talk about discipline, but not always in those kinds of areas, they talk about discipline in terms of exercise or which, not to say that that’s bad, but not really moral discipline. And I think that’s the most difficult and the most important.

Marlon:

And one of the things that really bothered me with the red pill is the hedonistic aspects to it. I had a young man come up to me in church several months ago and he asked me, Hey, Marlon, what do you think about Andrew Tate when you have a young man? And this young man was no more than 19 years old. He’s no more than 19. And he came up to me and asked me, and I’m like, wow, why is he, it’s interesting that he’s asking me that question because that just shows you the way that the culture, an individual like Andrew Tate can infiltrate even the church, you know what I mean? To be able to dispense his ideologies and these young men are grasping onto these ideologies and being a black man and the culture to where the motherless rate in our home is extremely high, 70, 80%. There is this lack of male, I don’t want to say fortitude, but male, what’s the word I’m looking for, guys? Male example, security.

Trent:

Yeah, role models.

Marlon:

Role models. The word was just banging around. But yeah, a male role model. And so these young men, because I lack of male role model, they’re clinging onto these individuals, Andrew Tate Myron, for fresh and Fresh, fresh and fit all these guys. And so it’s concerning from that aspect of how recently, I put out a video yesterday actually critiquing some Red Hill individual by the name of Wes Watson. I don’t know if you’ve seen that guy, but he’s a handful. And so I got guys coming at me, why are you jumping on their case? And I’m like,

Trent:

What? And what’s so hard? Yeah, what’s so hard is you have someone like Andrew Tate who a broken clock is right twice a day with things, probably encourages young men to get in shape to be disciplined. But at the same time, if someone asked me what do I think of Andrew Tate, I would say the same thing that I think of most pimps. And that is what he is. He is a pimp and a pornographer. He ensnares and entraps women and gets them to be produce pornography by being cam girls or cam girls. And then takes a cut of that. And he even for a while, was offering a program for young men called the PhD program, the Pimping Hose degrees program. And he’s a pimp. But here’s the thing, for a man to become a pimp, he tends to be charismatic. He tends to be highly intelligent. You have to be manipulate people to do such degrading things. So I can certainly commend that. Tate is probably a very disciplined and charismatic individual, and he’s used those good things towards very evil ends.

Dr. Cooper:

Yeah, certainly. Yeah. And I know that, I remember when all this kind of came out, and really all of this has actually been very public since Tate came on the scene. I remember finding all of this information about him and his being a pimp. I mean, all of this was very obvious and very public, but it seems like a lot of people weren’t even aware of that until the arrest. And then all of this information came out and he kind of said, none of that is true, but he’s admitted to all of this repeatedly. And so the unfortunate thing is that when Tate started speaking up, the loudest voice speaking against the critiques of toxic masculinity was kind of the greatest example of real toxic masculinity. And in some ways to platform him is to just give into the caricature, to give into this critique the feminist paradigm, which says that masculinity, what men really want is just to kind of conquer and abuse women. And then the man that’s kind of platformed as the arch critic of that really is all of the things that they’re saying that men are.

Marlon:

Yeah. Yeah. It is just one of those concerns that I’m glad that we’re able to get together and address it. And so we have some videos here that I do want to go through that.

Video:

Yeah, you got to do it sparingly though. Cause if you water it too much, it dies. Right.

I like this quote too. They say women just like plumbers, they always bringing up old,

All the

Mistakes you make, they going to always bring, I don’t care how old you get. That’s true, bro. Yeah. So before we let y’all go, y’all say y’all believe in open relationship,

Right? I do. I don’t believe in being monogamous.

Okay, how about you? I don’t know why I believe in man, but you date three women at a time. I’m still trying to figure this out, man. Right, right. Are y’all seeing multiple women or are y’all comfortable in telling me that or I mean, I’m sure if you believe that you tell the women your relationship. Hey,

Yeah, so I’m straight up, man. I mean, y’all know my girl’s here right now talk to Andrew.

Marlon:

So I think we get the gist of what’s going on here. I’m not going to continue to play that. And this is Myron once again, he’s a red pillar, and if you listen to his content, he speaks very open, his type of relationship, and he discouraged the idea of marriage of a man committing to one woman in marriage. He absolutely discouraged it. And I’ve even heard him instances where he says that you’re basically a fool for getting married because of the circumstances behind the possibility of someone getting divorced, that the system, once you get divorced or something like that, the system is categorically against the man. And so he’s in the mindset of it’s not advantageous for a man to be married because of those different situations. So I just want to get you guys’ ideas as that concerns something of what Myron White might say in that capacity.

Dr. Cooper:

Yeah, yeah. I mean there’s a lot that I guess you could say about that particular clip. I am a little bit struck by the fact that you referred to this particular podcast as conservative before you started this, because when I think of conservatism, I would say that first of all, conservatism I think first defines the way in which we govern ourselves in our own lives. And nothing about what I’ve seen there looks like anything like that. I don’t see any talk of any kind of restraint at all. But I would also say that conservatism is rooted and grounded in the family structure more than anything else. But that’s not just being conservative, that’s the Christian faith. It says that the family unit is the primary unit of society and everything else basically in society flows out of that.

But I just talking about open relationships and not getting married, and this has kind of become a major talking point. I feel like this wasn’t as much of a talking point until more recently, at least in terms of what I’ve seen along with moral or theological objections, which are certainly primary, it’s just demonstrably false that your life is going to be better if you are not married. So I mean, there is overwhelming evidence that both men and women describe a greater fulfillment in their lives when they’re married than when they’re unmarried. And you can look at a number of studies that have done this. The Gallup poll most recently just had another study like this, which showed a very significant increase in wellbeing when somebody is married versus being unmarried. And those who show the least amount of happiness, at least that they report are those who have children, but no marriage. And I think that’s what is happening in a lot of these people that I see that are promoting this kind of lifestyle is that they’re pushing people towards essentially that I hear some of these guys talk about the kids that they have with multiple women as if that’s a good thing, and that not only is going to harm them and going to harm the children and the women, this is just not good for anybody. This is demonstrably the case.

Trent:

Yeah, I would agree that when you look at long-term studies, men and women, what makes them happy, people who are ever married, which also includes people who are divorced. When you look at that entire group, they are on average, happier than people who never marry that. Even people who divorced, they tend to go back to the level of happiness that they had before they got married. But when you’re never married, Myron is, I feel like he’s just maybe not selling in this clip, but modeling a lifestyle that is something for people who are privileged, that many other young men who might think, oh, this is great. I would say, you’re never going to have anything like that. You’re just going to come off as creepy and weird if you try to do this. And for those who do do it, I do think it comes from a deep place of cynicism and hurt.

And I’ll just share from personal experience that when I was in college, there was a young woman that I was attracted to. We were very good friends, but we had a disordered relationship. She was only romantically interested in me when she couldn’t have me when she was dating someone or when I was dating someone. And it just did a number on me. So this is in my early twenties, and eventually I got my heart broken and I just felt very broken from that, and I felt like I’m not going to let some other woman mess up my heart like that again. So I started dating multiple people. Like my recommend, there was one point where I was dating three different women at the same time, but I was honest with all of them. I said, yeah, I go out with different girls, but I don’t want to have a girlfriend right now.

And I go out on dates with different girls and they were okay with that. And I just remember one of them kind of being miffed, hearing. I was going out with someone else the next weekend and I said, well, I didn’t lie to you about this. Why do you care? She said, I just felt if I stuck with it, you would pick me in the end. And I just felt so bad, and I put that life away because I felt like, well, these women are letting me use them for some kind of hint of happiness, and that’s not what I’m meant to be as a man to do. And so when he’s talking about this, it’s pursuing short-term, hedonistic joys that ultimately are not going to be satisfying. And what do you do when you’re going to be older, when you’re 40, when you’re 50, you’re just going to get creepier and creepier from people seeing you trying to act this way, and it’s not going to lead to all fulfillment.

And also it’s really chasing these short-term pleasures, carnal pleasures, really without seeing that, yeah, maybe you’ve been hurt before, maybe you haven’t met the right woman. But I can tell you with my wife who I’m married to, the deep joy that comes from being married to someone, sharing a life with them physically, emotionally, spiritually, there is no other kind of carnal pleasure that can rival that. And to tell men who are in the red pill, black pill community, it is not some kind of pipe dream. It is something that if you practice discipline and you have realistic expectations, which I find very ... Read more on Catholic.com