Father famine has led to a generation of foolish and undisciplined men. The rapid expansion of the Internet exacerbated the problem. Our society was not prepared for an always-on, ever-present information source that could build toxic silos around foolish men, disaffected or otherwise. The fatherly failure to discipline men has thus extended to how men use the Internet. We must ask, how can young men exercise godly discernment about who they’re associating with, especially when men of violence may be hiding their identities and intentions?

“I hope everyone is enjoying the podcast that no one is allowed to admit they listen to.”

When temptation arrives, it rarely announces itself. Instead, it speaks like a familiar friend. It preys on our vanity, arrogance, and curiosity—buttons it knows how to push only too well.

The tweet quoted above was my temptation, posted by an acquaintance early in 2024. As the host of a podcast, I was confident the tweet wasn’t referencing my show. Instead, it referred to a podcast whose name you might not know, though you’ve felt its impact: Stone Choir.

What unfolded over the following months would become one of the most humbling and sanctifying episodes of my life and career. Only by God’s mercy and grace does anyone care what I have to say today.

I have nothing to offer God that can express my gratitude to Him. Only a willingness to share the story in the prayer that it may help fathers and faith leaders rescue other young men from a soul-destroying web of online associations.

Before the Lord has to.

Father Famine: The Root of Vulnerability

For three generations and counting, Western men have experienced a crisis of fatherlessness. According to Wikipedia, the percentage of children living with single parents rose dramatically from 9% in the 1960s to 28% by 2012. A 2019 study from Pew Research revealed that 80% of those homes are led by a single mother.

The consequences of this are too vast to catalogue, though many books have been written about it. Douglas Wilson calls the phenomenon “father hunger,” but I respectfully disagree. Our nation suffers from father famine.

I was one such young man. My parents stayed married until I left home to attend Stanford University. But sadly their union was an unhappy one, in part because my mother was hooked on prescription pills, an addiction that would later claim her life.

I was also raised in a Reformed Jewish family. Reformed Jews are largely liberal, atheist, and ritualistic. So my family did all the Jewish things: Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services at Phoenix Symphony Hall, Passover Seders sung in Hebrew, and I was Bar-Mitzvah’d at age 13.

For all that, I learned precious little about God. We never read the Books of Moses, marveled at the stories of David, read (or sang!) the Psalms, or studied the messianic prophecies of Isaiah. We did Jewish things because, well, that’s what Jews do. Not because they pointed to ultimate reality.

I lacked a close relationship with my earthly father back then, too. Liberal households don’t have much use for male headship. My mother’s moods, misbehaviors, and frequent migraines ruled our home.

While my dad amply provided for my mother, my sister, and I, these factors nonetheless combined to leave me under-fathered. When my parents divorced after I went to college, and my dad subsequently remarried, I was effectively left on my own.

A Digital Substitute for Dads

My story isn’t unique. In fact, it’s comparatively mild. What happened next isn’t unique either: I turned to the Internet.

For the first time in history, men can find substitute fathering on handheld devices. In prior generations, under-fathered men would join street gangs, like my paternal grandfather Martin did. Even in his nineties, my beloved Poppa Marty would lament to me what a streetwise troublemaking teen he was in 1930’s Brooklyn.

For a Jewish kid of my generation growing up in Phoenix, a street gang wasn’t an option. But I could browse forums on social media, watch videos on YouTube, or participate in men’s chat groups.

Collectively, this online world is known as “the Manosphere,” a decentralized network for under-fathered boys to discuss what it means to be a man. If you know who Andrew Tate is, the Manosphere birthed him to public awareness in 2022. The Manosphere wasn’t a Christian space; moral virtue wasn’t part of the equation. Instead, the Nietzschean pursuit of power—physical, financial, and sexual—dominated most conversations.

No subjects were off-limits in our pursuit of material advantage, but two were most popular. The first is called “the Red Pill.”

The Red Pill’s False Promise

In case you’ve been living in a cave since 1999, the term references the film “The Matrix.” In it, the main character Neo (Keanu Reeves) takes a crimson capsule that shows him truths that alter his understanding of reality. These truths wake him from his blinded stupor and open his eyes to grim reality of “the matrix.”

In the Manosphere’s “red pill,” the truths men learn concern the nature of women’s sexual desire. The central lesson is that harmless “nice guys” are destined for heartbreak, because deep-down their girlfriends and wives prefer sexy, reckless “bad boys.”

That might not be a shocking allegation, but the “red pill” takes things a step further. It teaches that men only embody the nice guy archetype because they’ve been manipulated by their feminist mothers and culture. Men who never question their programming end up as “blue-pill betas,” effeminate suckers deprived of their masculine birthright. They’re guys that women settle for and marry but never desire. These are supposedly the predominant type of man today.

By contrast, men who enter the Manosphere “take the red pill,” which awakens them to these hidden truths. Imbued with secret knowledge, men of the Manosphere then train to grow in physical, financial, and sexual power. The promise is that by shedding “beta” programming and becoming “alphas,” the men will transform into objects of women’s sexual desire. This will activate dormant feminine submission, empowering men to triumph over the feminist spirit of the age.

The Manosphere and Red Pill prey on men’s insecurities, teaching them that their diminished state in life is the fault of deceitful women. For men raised in homes with single mothers who no-fault divorced their fathers—often taking half his assets and future earnings with her—it’s a potent message.

A Breeding Ground for Extremism

The second popular topic in the Manosphere answers, “How did we get here as a society?” with “here” being our women-dominated dystopia of crumbling family, church, and state. This is often referred to online as “trashworld” or “the longhouse.”

The first neologism, promoted by many Christians, is a critical term that describes our consumer-driven society of waste, propaganda, and corruption. The second, which has achieved common currency among conservatives, refers to a type of primitive residence. “Longhouses” were communal, multi-family dwellings for matrilineal tribes. An individual, organization, or society that’s “in the longhouse” bows to feminine social norms over patriarchal patterns.

For an answer about how the West “got longhoused” and decayed into trashworld, the Manosphere appeals to its subterranean Internet neighbor, 4chan. Think of 4chan like a stripped-down version of X. Anonymous accounts post images and blocks of text that cascade at high speed. The site is largely unmoderated, so anything goes, including extreme adult content and depictions of real-world gore and violence.

4chan has a magnetic attraction for young men, many of whom lack discernment and are resentful of authority. They’re alienated, rebellious, combative. The end product is akin to thousands of Holden Caulfields leading an online version of the novel The Lord of the Flies.^[1] (4chan users would consider this a good thing.)

The Lord of the Flies is the 1954 classic novel by William Golding. It tells the story of a group of British schoolboys stranded on an uninhabited tropical island after a plane crash. The boys’ attempt to self-govern goes disastrously wrong, culminating in violence, chaos, and savagery.

What results from this digital stew is an ideological gladiator’s arena that produces championship-caliber memes.

For example, perhaps you’ve been sent a blind web link by a friend. You click it, only to be surprised by the 80’s music video for the pop song “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley.

That harmless gag is called “Rickrolling,” and it was invented on 4chan in 2006. The meme became so popular so quickly, Astley’s career was resurrected. Within a year he was performing at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, being announced by Sesame Street characters. The music video has since amassed more than 1.6 billion views on YouTube.

If you’ve also seen abundant cartoon images of smirking, smiling, and smug green frogs, that amphibian’s name is Pepe. He’s another child of 4chan with a long story of his own. He became their unofficial mascot during the 2016 election.

4chan catalyzed Trump’s support from young men in 2016, but not because of his policy proposals. They did it for “the lulz”—a trollish derivative of LOL, or “laugh out loud.’ They thought electing him would be a fine joke to pull on the establishment. If you ever want to travel down a spooky rabbit hole, research how 4chan users are convinced—with some evidence—that Pepe’s “meme magic” might have helped usher Trump 45 into the White House.

4chan thus might be the most powerful online phenomenon that most have never heard of. It’s attracted successive generations of young men with its taboo-shattering, chronically-online approach to culture.

According to 4chan, the villains that led the West “here” in the grand narrative of history are familiar culprits and scapegoats: The Jews.

The Grand Deception

It’s no great revelation to say that Reformed Jewish families like mine are ultra-liberal. But what many don’t know is that “the post-war consensus” (PWC)—the collection of progressive values imposed by elites in the wake of World War 2—is the Jewish equivalent of a homeschool curriculum.

I saw firsthand how following the so-called “PWC” devastated my family as a microcosm of the wider culture. So as an under-fathered man seeking answers for myself, I too found the Manosphere, the Red Pill, and 4chan.

Here’s how I’d summarize what they had to say about how we got here. Please note, this is their narrative, not mine. Make sure you’re sitting down:

The Jews who killed Christ didn’t accept defeat at His resurrection. They spent centuries plotting to overthrow His reign and establish a global seat of power in Jerusalem. This scheme surfaced in a pseudo-historical nineteenth century document called “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.”

Adolf Hitler read the Protocols and became the sole Christian world leader brave enough to challenge the Jews, which he determined to do for the good of his superior Aryan race. Jewish capitalist forces in the West, led by Roosevelt and Churchill, and Jewish Bolshevik forces in the East, led by Stalin, then conspired to destroy Hitler and the defiant National Socialists of Germany.

In 1945, the Allies were victorious. Shortly after, the Holocaust was fabricated. This ersatz atrocity served as the keystone for the “Never again!” ethos of the post-war consensus. Horrific tales of mass murder in the death camps stabbed like a knife into the heart of the West. Movies and TV shows slandered “masculine Christian patriarchy” as the foundations of fascism and genocide.

In the moral vacuum left behind after patriarchy’s demise, Jewish liberal-progressive values ascended without resistance. The Jews chose feminism as the chief instrument to mobilize those values. Playing on the feminine sympathy for “the disadvantaged,” a weaponized-empathy campaign began in the 1960’s to enlist marginalized populations in the democratic process:

• Deviant homosexuals
• Promiscuous single women
• Unassimilated immigrants
• Violent inner-city minorities

Led in secret by the Jews, these groups are now foot soldiers in a war of cultural genocide against straight white Christian men and families. According to the plan laid out in the “Protocols,” the Jews use these groups to suppress white birth rates via abortion and birth control, flood cities with minorities, mass-produce pornography, normalize the homosexual lifestyle, and more. All these have led to the moral and civilizational decline of the West, paving the way for a global socialist new world order.

The Jews aren’t stupid. They know they can’t kill Christ. Instead they’re using cultural, political, and economic institutions—including the usurious Federal Reserve—to decimate the population of their enemy: white Western Christians. This will effectively accomplish the same goal.

The Jews’ victory will usher in the final Talmudic end-times triumph over Christ’s name on Earth. In their dark eschaton, Jews will rule with an iron fist of Noahide Law over a globalized world of half-wit mulattos.

At last, the Jews would have their revenge against God!

… But not if the awakening spirit of white Christian men can stop them first. What proud Adolf Hitler and the slandered National Socialists did must be attempted again. A Nazi revival might be the only way to save the West, and therefore the world.

Or so the argument goes.

Wolves in Shepherds’ Clothing

If this sounds like a staggeringly anti-Semitic and revisionist fever dream that you can’t imagine anyone would believe, it is indeed that. But it also means you’ve underestimated three critical factors:

First, the magnitude of the bitterness towards devouring feminist mothers and abdicating Boomer fathers that’s lived in the hearts of young men for decades. Second, how far the “Everything we’ve been told is a lie” idea has traveled after the scandal of COVID. Third, how sophisticated historical revisionism has grown in the bottomless pit of the Internet.

As a high-speed internet user since 1996, I can testify to the reality of the above. As serious a problem as Internet pornography is today—and it is a problem—the viral ideologies that spread amongst extremely-online men pose a far more pernicious threat. Especially now that these ideas have surfaced in veiled form on censorship-free platforms like X and especially Gab, where they thrive in the open.

But don’t take my word for it. This cartoon depicts the narrative I just described.

Note the rogue’s gallery of degenerate interest groups: screeching feminists, inner city and MS13 gang members, homosexuals, and pedophiles. Note the massive Jewish spider towering like a puppet-master behind them, complete with bulbous nose, lustful eyes, and Star of David crown. Whether the artist was aware or not, the drawing echoes Nazi-era German propaganda that used spider symbolism to portray Jews as the source of all evil.

Extremist Christian-professing groups have adapted this cartoon to present themselves and potential “traditionalist” allies as sentinels against the darkness. In one version, a Christian Crusade knight is standing next to a Norse barbarian.

In another version, the Crusader is standing with a Muslim Saracen.

Finally, in case you missed it, the Neo Nazi “black sun” symbol is hiding in the sunlight, in the upper right-hand corner of the image with the barbarian and the Crusader. Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer of the murderous Nazi SS and an infamous occultist, had this mysterious symbol depicted in marble on the floor of his Westphalian castle, Wewelsburg.

If you want to know what’s gotten into young men—including many Christians and even pastors—this is it. It’s a form of gnostic “secret knowledge” that such groups operate with. It can be likened to what left-wing academia calls “critical consciousness” in that they believe the worldview allows its adherents to see reality “as it truly is.” If you don’t know or agree with their narrative, you’ve got “Boomer brain.” Therefore, you fall on the wrong side of the “friend/enemy distinction.”

In other words, “If you’re not one of us, you’re one of them.”

The narrative is disseminated virally in both written and video content. First, anyone can read the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” for themselves. The FBI released the uncensored document on their website as part of a 2020 FOIA request. It’s now available to the world on the first page of Google’s search results.

The infamous 1978 novel The Turner Diaries by William Luther Pierce (writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald) transposes the narrative into fiction. In the plot of Pierce’s book, an American white nationalist movement known as “The Organization” wages an apocalyptic race war against the “System”—a network of corrupt institutions run by Jews.

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