Dad Saves America

France’s "Mostly Peaceful Jihad” Threatens the Whole Christian West

John Papola — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 23:50:15 GMT

Hey there friends! Below are some resources I referenced in preparation for this week’s video commentary. Enjoy!

How White Guilt Became the Most Powerful Weapon in Politics - Eli & Shelby Steele

John Papola — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 22:32:59 GMT

I sat down with Shelby Steele, an author and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and his son Eli Steele, the filmmaker behind “What Killed Michael Brown?” Together, they’ve produced a new documentary, “White Guilt,” that brings Shelby’s 2006 book into the present political climate. Shelby has lived the whole story, from segregation to Black Power militancy to now decades as a fearless dissenter on race.

We get into:

What white guilt really is, and why it became a source of black power
How the left used collective guilt to claim moral innocence
Shelby’s journey from black radicalism to conservatism
How American racial politics were grafted onto the Israel-Palestine conflict
Eldridge Cleaver’s transformation from Black Panther to Reagan voter
Why BLM denies the racial progress of the past 60 years
Why courage is the only way past racial identity politics

For free and unbiased Medicare help, dial 971-571-6444 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter, or go to https://askchapter.org/dad - *Paid partnership

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Follow Eli Steele on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/Hebro_Steele?s=20

Watch the trailer for “White Guilt”: https://youtu.be/5Pg_bJJMsAU?si=IEGFrMQgE-eZsKPv

Check out Shelby Steele’s books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B000APMQK2?ingress=0&visitId=79e14454-f6e3-4082-8099-6ced90b8df71&ref_=aufs_ap_ahdr_dsk_ab&ccs_id=6508d6f9-e2e2-438f-a4d0-2a7a00b62cde

Outline:

[0:00] What is white guilt?

[12:59] The symbiosis of black power and white guilt

[16:53] How the third world coopted black activism

[25:59] Race isn’t a black-and-white issue

[33:25] Black radicalism and the breakdown of the family

[48:30] Western man vs anti-Western man

[55:26] Why are black Americans so politically unified?

[1:03:46] BLM pretends there’s been no progress since 1965

[1:11:04] Eldridge Cleaver’s path from Black Panther to conservative

[1;27:13] How YouTube is spreading black conservatism

[1:33:58] Black America vs African perspectives on race

[1:40:06] How do we move past white guilt?

[1:49:18] We need to learn to laugh things off

[1:55:38] Children need a father to wrestle with

Purchase a T-shirt, hoodie, and more over on our merch store:

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Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/8rGYha-Dce4

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Visit our website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.dadsavesamerica.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

AI Doesn't Need Regulators. It Needs Underwriters.

John Papola — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 13:00:48 GMT

Last Tuesday, I wrote about the ideology driving the AI doomers. I tried my best to take their fears seriously, since I share some of them myself. Even if you haven’t read that one yet, you’ll probably be unsurprised to learn that I landed where I usually land: a decentralized, competitive market is the only safe path. Centralized “solutions” lead to tyranny every single time.

To those of you worried about AI, that might sound more like blind optimism than a real solution. It’s one thing to say the market will handle it, and another to actually show how.

Coincidentally, the very day I published that essay, a more fleshed-out answer was being drafted at the White House. The Accord on Super Intelligence, signed by President Trump, the CEOs of Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Nvidia, the president of OpenAI, and Elon Musk, laid out a framework for “self-policing” within the industry.

The Not-So Voluntary Accord

On Friday’s episode of the All-In podcast, former White House AI czar David Sacks broke down what exactly went down during last week’s AI summit. As he reported, Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang proposed the four-part framework that the group ended up voluntarily signing onto.

First, each company will establish “robust internal controls” regarding AI safety. Second, an internal team will oversee the implementation of those controls. Third, an “independent external auditor” will validate their internal control systems. Finally, an “independent committee of the board of directors” will receive and act on reports from the auditors.

Still, this might sound to you like an overly complicated way of saying, “Don’t worry. We promise we won’t do anything bad.” But, as Sacks explained on the show, signing onto an agreement like this comes with real consequences. The FTC and the SEC have “the ability and the responsibility to enforce the public commitments of these companies.” If they don’t follow through on the terms of the agreement, each board risks losing its Directors and Officers liability insurance, opening them up to all sorts of problems when something goes wrong.

President Trump described the Accord as “morally binding” when asked about enforcement, but frankly he was underselling how effective this approach could be. I’m sure there are lots of lawyers ready to pounce if any of these companies drop the ball. The stakes are high for everyone involved.

We’ve Done This Before

If an insurance policy doing the work of a regulator sounds like a clever new idea, it isn’t. It’s how America has kept dangerous new technology in check for more than a century.

The progressive story about safety goes something like this. Left alone, companies race to the bottom and cut every corner for profit until their misdeeds are exposed and the government steps in to save us.

That story ignores the actual history. In 1893, MIT-educated electrical engineer William Henry Merrill was tasked with inspecting the electrical installations at the Chicago World’s Fair for fire risk on behalf of the Chicago Fire Underwriters’ Association. The following year, he opened a lab to test the safety of electrical products and fire protection equipment.

In 1906, the lab started labeling products that passed its tests. You’ve almost certainly seen it. Check your refrigerator or your microwave and you’ll probably find two letters in a circle: UL, for Underwriters Laboratories. The underwriters in question are insurance underwriters. If you’re going to insure against risk, you need to actually know what the risks are. UL provides that information.

Nobody passed a law to make any of this happen. The people who would pay for the fires had every reason to prevent them. Manufacturers wanted the label because customers and insurers trusted it, and insurers trusted it because UL’s entire business depended on never rubber-stamping junk.

It’s not a theory. It’s not wishful thinking. It’s a chain of incentives to not kill your customers or burn down their homes that’s doing the work.

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Problem Solved?

UL isn’t just a historical model for free-market AI regulation. It’s already on the case. In 2025, UL Solutions, the for-profit arm of the original lab, launched its first AI safety certification.

Progressives insist that the only way to hold a company accountable is with government force. They dismiss market discipline as “self-regulation.” Of course, President Trump didn’t do himself or AI companies any favors by referring to the Accord as “self-policing,” but that doesn’t change reality.

Mr. President: Next time you host a summit on AI safety, invite UL too. Maybe the left will learn a thing or two about markets.

Trump's Going All-In on AI. Will His Midterm Gamble Pay Off?

John Papola — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 23:38:35 GMT

Hey there friends! Below are some resources I referenced in preparation for this week’s video commentary. Enjoy!

Bad Therapy, Gender, and Lindsay Clancy Psychosis - Andrew Hartz, Ph.D.

John Papola — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 22:35:19 GMT

I sat down with Andrew Hartz, a practicing clinical psychologist and the founder of the Open Therapy Institute. His organization is working to filter out the political bias that has become endemic in mental health care and connect patients with therapists they can trust.

We get into:

The woke insanity inside the American Psychological Association
How to find a therapist who will actually help you
Why disability benefits prove the role of agency in mental health
What the Lindsay Clancy case revealed about the legal system
Mass formation psychosis and social media addiction
Why our culture overlooks male strengths, and what that’s doing to boys
The rush to affirm gender dysphoria without evidence

For free and unbiased Medicare help, dial 971-571-6444 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter, or go to https://askchapter.org/dad - *Paid partnership

Follow Andrew Hartz on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/Hartz_PhD?s=20

Learn more about the Open Therapy Institute:

https://www.opentherapyinstitute.org/

Outline:

[0:00] Therapy went insanely woke

[14:14 14:18] Psychology vs psychiatry vs therapy

[15:48 5:52] How to get the most out of therapy

[25:45 25:49] Can we trust the data behind therapy?

[34:14] What does trauma really mean?

[40:31] Mortality and existential anxiety

[45:24] Agency is central to mental health

[57:56] We’re accommodating bad behavior

[59:44] Unconscious bias and microaggressions

[1:03:06] Did women ruin psychology?

[1:08:58] Lindsay Clancy’s insanity defense

[1:19:32] Has psychosis become a legal loophole?

[1:31:38] Is neuroscience useful for psychology?

[1:33:12] Mass formation psychosis and social media

[1:44:15] Should women worry about postpartum psychosis?

[1:46:03] We’ve lost the ability to talk about men positively

[1:58:23] Why young men turn to Andrew Tate

[2:08:53] The rise in narcissism throughout our culture

[2:11:43] What does it mean to be “mentally healthy”?

[2:15:29] The psychology of homosexuality and gender dysphoria

[2:33:17] Conservatives can’t give up on institutions

[2:47:04] America needs the best of psychology right now

Purchase a T-shirt, hoodie, and more over on our merch store:

https://shop.dadsavesamerica.com/

Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/TEphiy46LSM

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Visit our website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.dadsavesamerica.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Why the People Building AI Think It Might Kill Us All

John Papola — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:02:41 GMT

Three weeks ago, AI researcher Jacob Coxon announced in an X thread that he’d quit his job at Anthropic because he thinks Anthropic and OpenAI, where he’s also worked, might be building the machine that ends humanity. His former Anthropic colleague, Evan Hubinger, backed him up on X, saying that he believes that there’s a greater than 10% chance of the doom scenario becoming reality in the next decade. Two days later, Anthropic put out a 154-page report on the dangerous ways its models are already being used.

Whether or not Coxon is correct, he’s not the first AI-insider to voice these concerns. Elon Musk was saying the same thing over a decade ago, and now he runs one of the major players in the industry. Something very weird is going on in AI, especially at Anthropic, but it might not be about the technology.

Here are the three questions we need to answer:

Do the whistleblowers really believe what they’re saying?
If so, why do they believe this?
Are they right?

Do They Really Believe What They’re Saying?

Jacob Coxon probably means what he says. At just 27 years old, he walked away from a career in the most important industry today, leaving behind not just a job but also his equity stake in Anthropic not long before his shares would have vested.

There are some odd details about how this played out, with the Wall Street Journal dropping an exclusive with him just before he posted his now-viral X thread. This was a thought-out PR strategy, not an impulsive resignation announcement, but none of that changes the basic fact that he seems to have paid a real price to push his AI doom narrative.

While doing damage control in an interview with Anderson Cooper, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei both claimed to mostly agree with what Coxon had said while also distancing himself from his own past reliance on “unconditional probabilities” when discussing the chance of the doom scenario. In other words, he was happy to spread fear with sciencey-sounding but still unscientific predictions when it served his interests, but now that it’s backfired, he’s seen the light.

One plausible explanation for Dario’s past fearmongering is good old regulatory capture. When you’re one of the biggest players in your industry, that’s the perfect time to lock out your future competition. However, now that AI regulation is gaining momentum, Dario may feel that he’s lost control of a monster he helped create. Bernie Sanders is pushing for a complete halt on frontier AI development, which would go further than just locking out competition and could start chipping away at Anthropic’s own bottom line. So now Dario wants to rein in some of the more hyperbolic language around AI safety.

Why Do They Believe This?

Whether or not the fear is justified, the culture at Anthropic was always bound to create a Jacob Coxon. Anthropic was founded by a group of former OpenAI employees who, not unlike Coxon, felt like the company didn’t take safety seriously enough. Caution when dealing with technology whose potential capabilities are still unknown is reasonable enough, but there’s an ideological component as well, and that’s where things get weird.

The AI safety crowd is dominated by a group of people who call themselves “effective altruists.” Their worldview is pretty straightforward: “Figure out how to do the most good, and then do it.”

Effective altruism is a form of extreme utilitarianism that attempts to optimize for not just all living people, but also all future generations. Rather than rely on localized knowledge to decide how to do good in the world, which would lead you to “unfairly” prioritize the people around you, effective altruism aims for maximum universal impact.

The problem is, in order to do that, you’d need to actually know what is going on everywhere right now and have the ability to reliably predict the future. You see how this is starting to sound like communist central planning, just with better branding?

Possibly the most famous, or infamous, effective altruist is none other than convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. That isn’t to say that the movement should be judged guilty by association, but his involvement actually is relevant. He made risky, and illegal, bets with other people’s money because he’d run the numbers and the probabilities were in his favor, or so he thought. Of course, he rationalized his behavior with the effective altruist logic that, if he made more money, he’d have more money to donate to important causes. Maybe he really meant that or maybe it was a lie, but either way, it led him to ruin.

That’s exactly how the effective altruists think about AI safety. If there’s even a small chance of an AI apocalypse, the downside isn’t just the generation that’s wiped out. It’s the potentially infinite generations of future humans that otherwise would have followed. Therefore, they can justify just about any action or policy if it might improve our odds of survival.

These are the waters Jacob Coxon is swimming in. If this results in more caution as frontier AI labs develop the most powerful technology in human history, then that’s not so bad. But if it means that ideologues with no sense of the limits of their own knowledge get to radically change our society “for our own good,” then I have some concerns.

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Are They Right?

Even if effective altruism is a dangerous ideology, that doesn’t prove the AI doomers wrong. Any powerful tool in the wrong hands can be a big problem. The question is, do we have to worry about an AI taking matters into its own hands?

Look at the most recent incident people are pointing to. An OpenAI model breached Hugging Face, a site that hosts open source models. That sure sounds like a machine going rogue. In reality, the model did exactly what it was built and instructed to do: test its own hacking capability. It succeeded.

When people worry about AI creating some kind of super-virus and unleashing it on the world, they should take a step back and remember that humans (probably) already did that. It’s called COVID-19. Again, powerful tools in the wrong hands are extremely dangerous, but that doesn’t make AI some totally unprecedented threat.

So here’s where I land, even granting the potential risks. The only way to protect ourselves is with open-source models that we can run from our local computers, and there’s a precedent for this.

Before the internet, our financial lives relied on cash and checks. Then along came e-commerce. And then immediately after came cyber attacks, with organized mafias all around the world trying to get your bank account. Not just Nigerian princes defrauding your grandmother, but oligarch-backed Russian mobsters trying to rob Bank of America. The solution was to embrace the arms race, with companies protecting themselves from cyber attack using the very same tools as the cyber attackers.

I believe that decentralized competitive power is literally the only path. The centralized government path leads to tyranny every single time.

Big-Government Progressivism Is a Su*cide Pact

John Papola — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 01:07:49 GMT

Hey there friends! Below are some resources I referenced in preparation for this week’s video commentary. Enjoy!

Ben Slivka Predicted the Internet Era. He Doesn't Buy the Hype About AI.

John Papola — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 22:46:05 GMT

I sat down with Ben Slivka, an early Microsoft executive who led the team that built Internet Explorer, served 20 years on Northwestern University’s Board of Trustees, and has spent decades since as an angel investor across biotech, space, and software startups.

We get into:

How cowardice became the norm in university leadership
Why the public school model fails so many students
His 1995 Microsoft memo that correctly predicted the internet revolution
The truth about the Microsoft antitrust case and why “monopoly” is a misleading term
Why he believes that we’re in a massive AI bubble
His investment in Stoke Space, SpaceX’s real competitor for reusable rockets
What he calls the “four horsemen of the woke apocalypse”
America’s historically unprecedented capacity for innovation

For free and unbiased Medicare help, dial 971-571-6444 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter, or go to https://askchapter.org/dad - *Paid partnership

Follow Ben Slivka on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/BenSlivka?s=20

Learn more about Ben’s work: https://benslivka.com/

Outline:

[0:00] What’s going on with universities?

[15:40] Cowards are running the show

[29:27] Flexible vs. rigid approaches to schooling

[39:15] Teachers’ unions want to destroy good schools

[42:52] The “expert class” is anti-human and anti-reality

[58:05] Building Internet Explorer

[1:06:49] The reality of anti-trust law and “monopolies”

[1:13:21] Is AI a miracle, a bubble, or a real threat?

[1:31:18] Space travel is about to get a lot cheaper

[1:39:42] We’ve lost historical perspective in our lives

[1:55:30] Can we afford to have sympathy for the other side?

[2:04:49] Universities have abandoned their purpose

[2:11:47] We know less about biology than we think

[2:14:03] Can Western civilization work without religion?

[2:20:45] Expose your kids to the real world

Purchase a T-shirt, hoodie, and more over on our merch store: https://shop.dadsavesamerica.com/

Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xghaeBHamYs

Make a tax-deductible donation to Dad Saves America: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://secure.anedot.com/emergent-order-foundation/dad-website?⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Visit our website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.dadsavesamerica.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Your Child Just Declared They’re Trans. Ask These Questions First.

Pamela Garfield-Jaeger — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 23:01:23 GMT

When a child says they are transgender, parents can feel as though the ground has shifted beneath them. They may be afraid to ask questions, worried that expressing concern will damage the relationship or drive their child further away. But silence and immediate affirmation are not the only options. Parents can listen, remain compassionate, and keep the lines of communication open without abandoning their questions or their understanding of reality. This article is adapted from my book, A Practical Response to Gender Distress: Tips and Tools for Families, and is based on my experience as a licensed therapist.

Below you will find recommended questions which can spur your own ideas, but please use your judgment as every child and family is different. No one can have a “script” of the perfect thing to say or ask. Don’t expect to be able to ask these questions in one sitting, but in small doses over time. Remember to come from a place of compassion with an open and curious tone. Your child is hurting, and this is how she/he is expressing it. Keep in mind that when a young person takes on a new gender identity, it is rarely about gender but rather other underlying issues. My goal is to help parents look beyond the label, explore what their child may be experiencing, and stay connected through a difficult and confusing time.

What does “trans” mean to you?

Being “trans” currently has so many meanings and seems to be open-ended on purpose. It also continues to change. What does your child understand “trans” to mean? This may help you know your child better and help your child recognize that their ideas are incoherent. It is likely your child will not be able to articulate it or say something general like, “I just am.” You are prompting them to think about it more because you really want to understand. The goal would be to better understand your child, while simultaneously helping them realize they aren’t thinking rationally. (Be patient, this is not likely to happen quickly.)

What makes you believe that you are a different gender?

Listen to the answer and ask open-ended follow-up questions without being confrontational. Keep in mind that they may be parroting what they saw online or heard from their friends, so draw from what you know of your child and their history and try to ask specific individual questions. Validate some of the real feelings they express such as not feeling comfortable as a girl or boy, not fitting into stereotypes, hating their body, fear of sex, fear of puberty, or not getting along well with other girls or boys. You can share a story from your adolescence that is relatable. Be open and listen, and help your child not catastrophize the changes around puberty. It’s also possible that this question will shut down the conversation because your child isn’t ready to face the inconsistent ideas this question brings up.

When did you start having these feelings?

Ask them if they can relate their feelings to any specific incidents. It is likely that influence from friends, school, and social media played a part, but see if you can get your child to personalize their reasons. Sometimes learning when the feelings started can help connect “dysphoric” feelings to another distressing event such as a divorce, a sexual assault, a move, a painful loss, or exposure to graphic porn.

What does it mean to be a boy or a girl?

Talk to them about what they may perceive as social pressure and gender roles. Explore the fears they may have of growing up. They may be afraid of sex, or sexual assault after being exposed too early to sexualized images, such as internet pornography. Boys may be afraid of the idea that they aren’t manly enough or good with girls, so becoming a man may come with a lot of pressure. Girls may be afraid of what it means to become a woman. Help them understand that there are different ways to be boys and girls and they can have varying interests. Explore what is most uncomfortable about living in the body they are in and what pressures they may be feeling.

How do you imagine your life living as a new gender?

Teens don’t tend to be great at future-thinking. That’s why your fully developed, adult guidance is needed. This question can help give insight into your child’s fantasy of being trans. It can also shed light on what she/he might feel is missing in their life. When you feel they are ready, you can try to help your child find ways to achieve their goals as the boy or girl they were born as.

Explore possible underlying mental health issues.

Much of “gender dysphoria” is related to a person’s relationship with their body. If that relationship is compromised, it is difficult to know the root causes for distressed feelings without exploration. Provide reflection for those issues and focus less on gender distress. Gender often becomes a way to be seen. If you relate to what is happening with your child, she/he may not need to cling to her gender identity as hard. Think of a new gender identity as a signal that there is another underlying issue or unmet need. Many parents have said they have recognized that when their child came out as trans, it became an opportunity to learn more about their child and strengthen their family.

Or… you can be direct.

Some mothers like Laura Wiley Haynes, who has shared her strategies on X (Twitter), have had success with a more direct approach with questions like, “Did you know that you can never actually become a man? You can look more like a man, but that’s the limit.” Depending on your communication style or relationship, you can state the truth about what happens when taking hormones and from other medical interventions. For example, “Did you know that T [testosterone] can make it painful to talk?” “It causes many health issues like joint pain, cancer, blood clots, and difficulty having sex, why not just be a healthy masculine girl?” “Who gives a sh*t what sex a stranger thinks you are?” “You will always know the truth and strangers don’t matter more than your fertility and health.”

A few things to remember:

Do not let empty threats of suicide manipulate you. This is something young people are being coached to do by online influencers, trans activists, or even trusted adults such as teachers and therapists. If you feel a child is truly in danger of hurting themselves, call 911 or take them to the hospital, but stay actively involved in the process. If you already have a therapist you trust, and you determine the child is not an imminent danger to themselves but at moderate risk, call the therapist.

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Always tell your child how much you love them, even if they are confrontational. Your child may currently feel they have a new family now and don’t need you, but they will eventually learn that their online friends are not real, and they need to know they can turn to you later when they feel lost, alone, and confused. Gently remind your child that you are their true family. If possible, surround your child with extended family who love them as they are. The ‘chosen family’ that they are engaging with is conditional on their trans identity and can never be there for them the same way you can. They will remember you love them when they begin to recognize that superficial “glitter” love isn’t real.

Remember that you are not a “bigot” or “transphobe” if you have questions and concerns about your child. Believe in yourself as a parent. If you were a competent parent before gender came up, you have the intuition you need. Being grounded as a parent will help your child. Many other adults in positions of authority, such as school personnel, therapists, or doctors, may undermine your judgment. However, remember that these people do not love your child and could never love your child the way you do. Simply questioning your developing child’s view of themselves does not make you a bad parent or crazy. Setting limits with teenagers isn’t new. This is just a different spin on an age-old parent-child phase.

Your child may not want to talk at all. Many of these questions can easily backfire depending on how deep your child is into gender ideology. Your goal is to reverse the isolation and disconnected relationship your child developed with their body. You also want to help your child feel less isolated so they do not need the superficial sense of belonging that the trans “community” offers.

You do not have to choose between loving your child and questioning the idea that they are transgender. Your child needs a parent who can listen without panic, ask difficult questions without hostility, and remain grounded when emotions run high. Sometimes, despite your best efforts, the relationship may become strained or even disappear for a time. You may not be able to change your child’s mind or prevent them from pulling away, but you can make sure they know you are still there. If doubts eventually emerge, your child needs to know there is a safe place to turn. Keep the door open, stay grounded, and remember that sometimes the most important thing you can do is simply be there when your child is ready.

The Anthropic Whistleblower Is Not Who You Think He Is

John Papola — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 01:08:29 GMT

Hey there friends! Below are some resources I referenced in preparation for this week’s video commentary. Enjoy!

Catholic Historian: Here’s Why We Know That the Bible Is True

John Papola — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 22:08:41 GMT

I sat down with historian of early Christianity Matthew Larsen, Ph.D., fresh off his shoot in the Middle East tracing the life of Paul the Apostle, to dig into the evidence for Jesus, the biblical canon, and the Catholic Church.

We get into:

How historians actually know what’s true about the ancient past
Why the “Jesus never existed” theory keeps resurfacing online
Where Wes Huff’s viral apologetics differ from real historical scholarship
Why the idea that “Paul invented Christianity” is a 19th century German myth
How the Apostolic Fathers reveal a strikingly Catholic early church
What actually happened at the Council of Nicaea
Matt’s personal journey from evangelicalism to the Catholic Church

For free and unbiased Medicare help, dial 971-571-6444 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter, or go to https://askchapter.org/dad - *Paid partnership

Learn more about Matthew Larsen’s work: https://www.matthewdclarsen.com/

Check out August Media: https://augustmedia.co/

Outline:

[0:00] How do historians know what’s real?

[12:40] Debunking the “Jesus myth” argument

[20:45] Wes Huff is an apologist, not a historian

[26:50] Who wrote the Gospels?

[32:52] The strongest argument against Christianity

[36:22] Who was the Apostle Paul?

[54:35] What we know about early Christian martyrs

[1:00:27] Scripture and tradition in the early church

[1:08:20] Going from evangelical to Catholic

[1:20:41] Where did Catholic church structure come from?

[1:30:20] Calvinist predestination doesn’t make sense

[1:32:29] Who were the Apostolic Fathers?

[1:38:12] Sacraments and the Jewish Temple system

[1:50:10] The power of physical rituals

[1:53:51] Roman persecution of Christians

[2:03:03] Why did God send Jesus at that moment?

[2:06:52] Modern comfort is a trap

[2:13:35] The Council of Nicaea

[2:30:55] Grappling with Mary and the Book of Revelation

[2:46:15] The development of Catholic doctrine over time

[2:54:14] The history of Marian apparitions

[3:01:04] Why should you consider Catholicism?

[3:09:43] American ideals are worth fighting for

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Some Problems Can’t Be Negotiated Away

John Papola — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 22:01:09 GMT

“This Labor Day, sh*t’s too expensive.” That’s how AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler decided to open her Labor Day message to union members.

“This economy isn’t working for working people, so how do we build a better one? The answer is growing the power workers have, joining together, building our numbers so we can demand more.” What a shock. A union president thinks complex economic problems can be solved by… expanding the union that pays her salary.

The union theory of wage growth is all about bargaining power and negotiation, and at any particular moment in time, it’s not wrong. If my employees unionize and demand my salary be cut to zero and redistributed among them, that could be a successful negotiation.

The problem is that the union approach is a zero-sum game. Negotiation can redistribute a fixed pie, but it can’t make the pie bigger. My newly-unionized employees would still be limited by the income constraint of the firm. The same problem exists at the scale of an economy. A society can’t internally negotiate its way into wealth. Somebody has to actually produce more for there to be more to go around.

The Zero-Sum Debt Spiral

A side effect of this zero-sum thinking is the normalization of transfer payments as go-to public policy. If someone sympathetic is getting help from the government, the money must be coming from someone else who can spare it, right?

Our national debt, recently surpassing $40 trillion, tells a different story. The federal government spent $6.81 trillion so far in fiscal year 2026, up 2% from this time last year. Social Security is the largest line item in the federal budget, with Medicare and interest on the debt battling it out for second place.

The whole premise of old-age entitlement programs is that there will be a lot more people paying into than withdrawing from the system. Social Security was established not long before the Baby Boom, and Medicare came just after its peak years. Population growth was necessary for any of this to work longterm, but fertility rates were rapidly declining through the 60s and 70s and have never recovered since. Now we’re stuck with a growing population of retired and elderly Americans, funded by a shrinking population of working ones.

There’s a striking way to see how this has played out geographically. In 1970, only a small handful of the poorest counties in America relied on government transfers for more than 25% of local personal income. The vast majority of counties were under 15%. By 2022, a majority of counties relied on transfers for a significant share of income. Counties with low transfer dependence have gone from the norm to nearly extinct.

If this were about poverty, you wouldn’t see dependence spread from very specific areas to the whole country. This is the disastrous combination of old-age entitlements and fertility collapse playing out in real time.

The Debt-Based Burrito Economy

There’s a key difference between borrowing to consume and borrowing to invest. Let’s say I borrow $20 to buy a burrito. I eat the burrito. The burrito’s gone. The $20 is with the person who sold me the burrito. How am I going to pay back my debt?

I haven’t gotten better at anything by eating the burrito, so if I had to borrow money to buy the burrito in the first place, I sure don’t have any spare money to pay back my debt, plus interest. I guess I’ll have to borrow more money, at a higher interest rate, to pay back the original lender.

Now imagine that instead, I invent a machine that cuts out 90% of the cost to make a burrito and borrow $20 to build it. I can sell burritos for $3, undercut everyone else, pay the loan back with my profits, and enjoy a cheaper burrito myself as well. I’ve increased my productivity by using technology to increase the overall supply of burritos.

That is what investment looks like, and it is the only mechanism that’s ever made humanity wealthier. Fire, the wheel, the printing press, the tractor, the assembly line. Every leap in living standards came from figuring out how to produce more with less.

The first method of eating a burrito is how our system of debt-funded transfer payments work.

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Is There Any Way Out?

We had a chance to build some of that investment logic into Social Security when President Bush tried to reform the program in 2005. Letting workers direct a portion of their contributions into productive assets would have helped dismantle the pay-as-you-go Ponzi scheme and replace it with something that could actually grow in value over time. It did not happen and now seems even more politically implausible in the current landscape.

The only other option, and the one President Trump and Treasury Secretary Bessent have been advocating for a while now, is to outrun the debt through unprecedented economic growth. It will require a large dose of optimism, but it’s not as unrealistic as it may seem.

OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-6 Astra, has jumped from roughly 8% to nearly 100% on a key benchmark for artificial general intelligence. I am not going to pretend I know exactly how this all shakes out, and I understand why people are unsettled by it. But if the fundamental problem is that we are not producing enough to support the fiscal obligations we’ve written into our laws, the smoothest way out is to radically upgrade our technology to allow us to make more with less.

This transition won’t be costless. Every leap in productivity has come with real disruption for real people and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty. But discomfort is baked into our current predicament, one way or another. We can either aggressively cut spending, which is politically impossible, let the inevitable debt crisis play out, which will force those cuts on even worse terms, or brave the AI revolution.

There may yet be some hope for fiscal sanity. Florida has four million more residents than New York and still runs on less than half of New York’s budget, with one of the lowest per capita tax burdens in the country. It has paid down more than half of its state debt and has a smaller government today than when Governor DeSantis took office, proving it can at least be done on the state level. Canada did something similar in the 1990s when its bond market forced the issue, before backsliding under Trudeau.

However, the reality is that our federal government is a different beast, with unmatched bargaining power in the global economy. Let’s hope that innovation will come to the rescue before our bills come due and we lose that privilege.

25 Years After 9/11: How “Never Forget” Became “We Deserved It”

John Papola — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:07:22 GMT

Hey there friends! Below are some resources I referenced in preparation for this week’s video commentary. Enjoy!

I Interviewed the 9/11 Mastermind’s Family. Here’s What I Discovered. - Richard Miniter

John Papola — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 22:17:59 GMT

I sat down with investigative journalist and author Richard Miniter to reflect on the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Richard has spent decades reporting national security and foreign policy issues and has interviewed Islamist radicals, intelligence officials, and others across the globe.

We get into:

Why political radicalism and terrorism attract elites
How Western life radicalized Mohamed Atta and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
Osama Bin Laden’s trajectory from construction tycoon heir to jihadist
How terror cells use hazing intermarriage to lock in commitment
The problem with Ron Paul’s “blowback” theory of Islamic terrorism
How bureaucratic turf wars left America vulnerable on 9/11
The PATRIOT Act and the limits of 4th Amendment rights

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Check out Richard Miniter’s work at Zenger News: https://zenger.news/

Check out Richard’s books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001JOWHF2?ccs_id=dcb9f8b6-c904-4dfb-b199-cc8d15600bca

Outline:

[0:00] Why do people become terrorists?

[7:56] Who was Mohamed Atta?

[17:48] Who was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?

[26:58] Ramzi Yousef and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing

[32:27] 9/11 wasn’t as ideological as we think

[36:00] Who was Osama Bin Laden?

[42:53] Work, terrorism, and a sense of purpose

[47:44] What really motivated Bin Laden?

[49:43] The psychology of terrorism

[1:03:29] The rise of the Red-Green Alliance

[1:11:47] Theology is the center of every civilization

[1:22:14] Terrorism is a political technology

[1:25:40] Living through 9/11 and turning to Ron Paul

[1:34:32] Did our government allow 9/11 to happen?

[1:48:29] The American and Soviet fight over Afghanistan

[1:52:33] America’s longterm conflict with Iran

[2:02:13] Bureaucratic tenure makes bad policy

[2:07:56] Is the PATRIOT Act unconstitutional?

[2:22:01] COVID permanently changed our society

[2:26:52] What did 9/11 mean for American society?

[2:33:03] Do young people really hate the country?

[2:39:39] Pragmatism, ideology, and incentives

[2:46:19] Can we avoid religious war?

[2:50:30] Utilitarianism contradicts human nature

[2:56:19] Can Islam be compatible with America?

[3:07:30] Immigration and assimilation in 2026

[3:12:31] Dad’s job is to tell kids the truth

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America Is Facing A Literacy Crisis. Here’s What Fathers Can Do About It.

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 22:57:49 GMT

The things children see can have a profound impact on them. A single image, even a seemingly banal one, can change a child’s life.

For me, that image was my dad reading a book.

Not any book in particular, and not any particular time. Just the image of my dad quietly sitting in the living room, reading a physical book, sometimes hours into the night.

It’s not a sight many see these days. According to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the number of Americans who read books has been steadily declining. In 2012, 54.6% said they had read at least one book within the past year. By 2022, that number had fallen to 48.5%. Similar trends were seen amongst children and teenagers too, with fewer and fewer reporting that they regularly read for fun.

This decline in habitual reading has gone hand-in-hand with a decline in general reading skills. Exact measurements are difficult to obtain, but most of the data points decisively to a literacy nosedive. In 2017, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development found that about 80% of American adults could accurately paraphrase and make reasonable inferences from a multi-page text. Just seven years later, only 70% could do the same. Of those aged 16-74, just 46% could read above a 6th grade level, while 21% were considered “functionally illiterate,” meaning that while they could technically read very basic sentences, they struggled to read the requirements on job listings or instructions for filling out legal documents.

Not that any of this is surprising. Anyone who grew up in the mid-2000s or later knows just how many things now exist in our homes that relentlessly distract us from focusing on anything, especially reading. Traditional television was distracting enough, but at least there were times when whatever was on simply didn’t interest me. When I was a teenager, I’d sometimes read during commercial breaks. With the advent of streaming, we no longer have even those short lulls anymore. It’s just constant entertainment and immediate gratification.

Lest I be accused of being an old man yelling at a cloud, keep in mind that I’m a millennial, and a younger one at that! If I am worried about how passive entertainment has destroyed our society’s appetite for reading, it’s because I’ve experienced it myself. Netflix, smartphones, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter all came about when I was a kid. With endless movies, shows, and videos to choose from, I was less tempted to pick up a book that would take me several focused hours to read. A book was a heavier commitment. Reading started to feel like work.

Reading can be real work at times. But that’s part of why literacy is so important. Just like working out makes us stronger and improves our athletic performance, reading engages our brain and strengthens our intellectual muscles. And like your real muscles, your intellectual ones shrink if you don’t use them.

Of course, reading books doesn’t necessarily make you a better person. In fact, reading for the wrong reasons can turn you into an acquisitive philistine. Online finance bros and self-help gurus often frame reading as “extracting value.” Then there are the toxic “Book-Tokers,” creators on TikTok who mainly promote YA fiction and stir up fake controversies, usually by accusing someone of racism, sexism, or one of the various phobias.

So how do we build a healthy society of readers? Readers that can not only understand the books they’re holding, but who also don’t just read them to find clues about how to get rich, get clout, or get some poor sap fired from their job?

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To get kids to read, fathers must lead. The best way to set children up to be life-long mature readers is to provide them with a good example. Kids can learn technical skills almost anywhere, but they learn cultural habits and customs from their families and communities first. The things they’re regularly exposed to become part of their world, for better or worse. If they grow up in a household that values reading, they’ll come to see reading as a normal and even vital part of their lives.

That might seem daunting, but raising up a generation of readers isn’t as difficult as it sounds. Modest time investments, like reading aloud to your kids for a few minutes before bed each night, can have enormous impacts. Studies show that reading aloud improves a child’s story comprehension, widens their vocabulary, and makes it easier for them to learn to read on their own later.

But the easiest thing fathers can do is to read books themselves. Read in the living room, so your kids can see you doing it. Keep books around the house. Just having them around encourages kids to read more. They become part of your family’s culture. Even if they never pick your books off the shelves, seeing them there sends a message: books are important.

That’s what my dad taught me, probably without ever intending to. And hopefully, while I’m lounging on the couch reading my dusty old history books, my kids will see that too and be inspired, just like I was.

Bond Market Breakdown: Are We Headed for Another Fall Financial Crisis?

John Papola — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:38:48 GMT

Hey there friends! Below are some resources I referenced in preparation for this week’s video commentary. Enjoy!

The Sexual Revolution “Liberated” Adults. But What About the Kids? - Katy Faust

John Papola — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 22:00:38 GMT

I sat down with Katy Faust, founder of Them Before Us and author of “Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City,” to talk about what adults are and aren’t willing to sacrifice for the wellbeing of children. Katy has spent her career defending children’s rights to their own mother and father, touching on adoption, gay marriage, surrogacy, and IVF. We also get into how she raised kids who think for themselves even while attending Seattle public schools and her personal experience with the adoption system.

We get into:

Why children are safer with their own married mother and father
What the data actually says about stepparents and abuse
How the sexual revolution reshaped our whole society
Why legalizing gay marriage meant eliminating “mother” and “father” from the law
The truth about IVF and the fertility industry
Why adults’ desires are now put before children’s needs
What Christianity requires of us when defending kids

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Follow Katy Faust on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/Katy_Faust?s=20

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Learn more about Them Before Us: https://thembeforeus.com/

Outline:

[0:00] Raising conservative kids in a woke city

[12:06] The needs of children should come first

[16:23] Why stepparents are more abusive

[27:49] The misplaced empathy for Lindsay Clancy

[33:36] The sexual revolution deranged our culture

[46:56] Traditional values can work for everyone

[51:59] Is gay adoption better than nothing?

[1:04:12] Are people born gay?

[1:14:01] Legalizing gay marriage had crazy side effects

[1:29:07] Does IVF or surrogacy violate the rights of children?

[1:44:00] AOC’s egg-freezing stunt and the denial of tradeoffs

[1:52:19] Should we just ban it all?

[2:04:53] Parenting for future generations

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Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/7ZX38GIbGRA

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Jason Arday and the Ghost of White Guilt

John Papola — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 21:01:42 GMT

Jason Arday made global headlines when appointed as Cambridge University’s youngest black professor in 2023. On August 5, he resigned just hours after Cambridge announced it was investigating accusations of plagiarism and dishonesty about his life story. Nine days later he was found dead at his home. It isn’t confirmed whether he took his own life, but it sure looks that way.

According to Arday, he couldn’t speak until eleven, couldn’t read until 18, earned a PhD by age 30, raised millions for charity, and was such a prolific distance runner that he was basically a world-record contender. As Coleman Hughes put it, “Jason Arday was either the most interesting man in the world or he was a liar. It turned out to be the latter.”

Arday’s fantastical claims about his life have largely been proven outright false or at least highly misleading, but the rubber really meets the road when it comes to his academic career. He recently faced extensive allegations of plagiarism, including in his PhD dissertation. Many of his allies are still clinging to denial, but it’s enough to say the story sold to the public was not the whole story, and Cambridge wanted that story badly.

Whatever else is true about Arday, he seems to have been a sweet person who genuinely struggled with mental disability, and the dead deserve a moment of silence before we start arguing about politics.

Regardless of Arday’s personal failings, we shouldn’t underestimate the intensity of an internet mob. Most normal people can’t be expected to psychologically handle it when they become the target, rightly or wrongly. We live in a really weird time, where any individual’s mistakes can become global news for unpredictable reasons.

Did Jason Arday behave dishonestly in pursuit of success? Yes, he did. Did Cambridge jump at the opportunity to have a token rags-to-riches black professor? Yes, it did. How responsible is he as an individual for the scale of the public praise at first and the intense criticism now? Without Cambridge enthusiastically capitalizing on his clearly suspect story, he wouldn’t have advanced to such heights where his downfall could be this catastrophic.

Cambridge wanted a mascot to prove how progressive it was. Whenever you hear of a “historic first…” or “historic youngest insert identity and job title,” you’re looking at a manufactured milestone that only matters because the institution has arbitrarily declared that it matters. That’s the actual scandal.

When an institution puts identity and victimhood narratives above proven merit, it invites grifters like Arday. It also undermines the members of “protected classes” who’ve earned their positions honestly. Reasonable people will inevitably view their legitimacy with at least a degree of default skepticism.

This is just one symptom of the phenomenon Thomas Sowell calls “mismatch.” Place a student not at the school that matches his level of preparation, but at the most prestigious school that will admit him under a lowered bar, and you’ve set him up to fail. More than 30 years ago, Sowell pointed out that, “At MIT, the average black student is at the top 10% nationwide in mathematics and in the bottom 10% at MIT,“ and a quarter of them didn’t make it to graduation. After the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in 2023, black admissions at MIT fell from 13% to 5%. A student capable of a first rate education at a good college was instead handed a third rate education at an elite college, because the point was never his success. The point was the institution’s optics.

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There is a proven solution to racial disparities in education, and it comes from one of the poorest states in the country. Mississippi, the state with the highest percentage of black residents, was 49th in the nation in reading in 2013. It is now ninth, with fourth grade black students ranking third in the country in both math and reading. They didn’t invent anything new. They just threw out the failing teaching methods introduced in the late 90s and went back to what had worked for decades. That’s the whole miracle. It’s just what works, applied honestly, for over a decade now.

Following the “cutting-edge” teaching methods has failed, but that’s no problem for ideologues. If the goal were outcomes, Mississippi already handed everyone a blueprint. Cambridge clearly wasn’t interested in outcomes. It didn’t need Jason Arday to produce high-quality work. It needed him to exist, as proof the institution had reckoned with its past. The people running Cambridge, MIT, and every DEI office in between are not, for the most part, driven by malice. They’re driven by so-called “white guilt.”

Shelby Steele’s analysis, and I think it’s correct, is that white guilt isn’t really guilt at all. It’s the loss of moral authority that follows an institution admitting it was wrong, and the desperate effort to buy that authority back. Once white America reckoned with the wrong of segregation, it lost the standing to simply assert its own legitimacy.

The problem with perpetually trying to prove that you’re not racist is that you’re trying to prove a negative, which is impossible. If a university or company doesn’t visibly have enough of the right kind of diversity, it risks being branded illegitimate, and once branded, everything else it does can be waved away.

In Steele’s words, the Great Society actually was, “designed not to solve racial problems but to dissociate our institutions and our government from its racist past.“ It obviously failed to end poverty, with the perverse side effect of hollowing out the black family in the process.

So here is where I land, as a white American who is done with all of it. I don’t feel white guilt. I don’t acknowledge it as legitimate. It has no place in a Christian or an American understanding of the individual. Thomas Aquinas defined love as willing the good of the other. That’s the standard I try to hold myself to, and it applies to every person regardless of what they look like. It’s the standard Cambridge failed when it turned a troubled man into a mascot instead of asking the hard questions that might have set him on a better path.

Jason Arday’s death is a tragedy. But it should also be the last straw for institutions that have been performing virtue instead of practicing it.

The Lindsay Clancy Trial Has Exposed a Moral Psychosis in America

John Papola — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 22:28:43 GMT

The Lindsay Clancy trial has exploded into the latest social media gender war over postpartum mental health, the role of mothers in society, and the nature of moral responsibility. The defense says postpartum psychosis is to blame and that she shouldn’t be held criminally responsible in the deaths of her three children. Now the jury is deciding whether they buy her story.

Videos of women excusing Clancy’s actions or promoting conspiracy theories implicating her ex-husband have spread like wildfire on TikTok. Hundreds of women showed up to her trial wearing pink in solidarity and her family has now raised over $1,000,000 on GoFundMe. Meanwhile, Massachusetts lawmakers just legalized abortion up until the moment of birth to great fanfare.

Both reflect the same moral drift: a culture that has grown increasingly comfortable letting mothers decide when they are, and aren’t, responsible for the lives of their children.

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How Elite Consensus Botched COVID, Climate, and the Economy - Dr. Steven Koonin

John Papola — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 22:00:09 GMT

I sat down with theoretical physicist Dr. Steven Koonin, author of “Unsettled” and former Under Secretary of Energy for Science under President Obama, to discuss what he calls the “consensus trap.” He argues that the 2008 financial crisis, COVID policies, and climate alarmism all followed the same template, and the people who got it wrong faced no accountability while the costs fell on the poor. Institutions built policy on flawed models, manufactured an elite consensus, and punished the scientists who dissented.

We get into:

Why Fauci saying “I represent science” was a betrayal of science
How the RCP 8.5 climate scenario was used for propaganda
Working as BP’s chief scientist and inside the Department of Energy
Why the global energy transition hasn’t moved the needle on fossil fuel use
Why wind and solar can’t be the backbone of the electric grid
The real risks of EMP attacks and solar storms
The state of nuclear power and small modular reactors
How AI is reshaping energy reliability, affordability, and emissions

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Outline:

[0:00] Can science be “settled”?

[12:39] What is a scientific model?

[20:25] Human behavior is hard to predict

[25:36] Cause and effect in complex systems

[28:33] Why are scientists swayed by “consensus”?

[33:47] Working in the Obama administration

[42:59] Insane climate models were treated as sane

[53:41] Fossil fuels and power grids are life-saving

[1:03:38] The risk of an EMP attack

[1:12:38] AI data centers and energy reliability

[1:18:05] “But we need climate action!”

[1:26:53] The incentives inside scientific institutions

[1:31:56] How the military drives scientific research

[1:39:25] Should we worry about the Skynet timeline?

[1:51:27] Always check your opinions against real data

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