Jay Richards: Economics, Gender Ideology and MAHA

Knight & Rose Show — Wintery Knight and Desert Rose

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Jay Richards: Economics, Gender Ideology and MAHA

April 19, 2025

Knight & Rose ShowWintery Knight and Desert Rose

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose welcome Heritage Foundation policy expert Dr. Jay Richards to discuss policy and culture. Jay explains how economic freedom supports religious liberty, and corrects popular myths about economics. He explains how gender ideology is a cultural Marxist attack on truth, and how the stories of detransitioners shape the debate. He also assesses the MAHA movement as a way to combat chronic diseases.

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Show notes and transcript: https://winteryknight.com/2025/04/19/knight-and-rose-show-62-jay-richards-policy-and-culture

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Transcript

Welcome to the Knight and Rose Show, where we discuss practical ways of living out an authentic Christian worldview. I'm Wintery Knight. And I'm Desert Rose.

Welcome, Rose. So today we're delighted to welcome a guest onto the show, Dr. Jay Richards. Dr. Jay Richards holds two positions at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. He is the director of the Richard and Helen Devost Center for Life, Religion, and Family.

And he is also the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in American Principles and Public Policy. Jay is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including the tenth anniversary edition of Money, Greed, and God. His most recent book, co-authored with James Robison, is Fight the Good Fight, How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War.

He's also debated some people that our audience might recognize, atheist Christopher Hitchens, socialist Jim Wallace, and another socialist named Bhaskar Sankara. So welcome to the Knight and Rose Show, Jay. Oh, yeah, great to be with you.

So I was watching your presentation through the Family Research Council recently, in which you talked about the correlation between economic freedom and religious liberty. It was absolutely excellent. I told a few friends about it.

They said, oh, send it to me. I want to see that. So really important topic.

So I wanted to ask you a little bit about that. There's been this push that you mentioned in the talk to reduce freedom of religion to kind of this individual freedom of worship. You can worship in your head, you can have religious thoughts, but it doesn't necessarily extend beyond that into the public square.

So this means that religious organizations like Christian schools, businesses wouldn't be able to have distinctly Christian policies. They wouldn't be able to live out a Christian worldview in the workplace, in the public square. And you mentioned an example of the Affordable Care Act, for example, which put a mandate on Christian organizations to provide baby ending drugs.

So tell us, how is religious freedom related to economic freedom? Well, if you sort of run through this and think about, okay, what needs to happen in order to have genuine religious freedom, which in the American context, I'm just going to define it as the Founders did and as the First Amendment did, that on the one hand, there's not going to be one established religion at the national level, which for the Founders would have been, it would have been some Protestant denomination effectively at the time of the founding and then later in the writing of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But also, a guarantee that the government or Congress shall not restrict the free exercise of religion. That does not mean private belief in your head.

I mean, people have that in North Korea, right? It's like you don't say anything. You can believe whatever crazy thing you want. And so it can't possibly mean that.

And we get a sense of what it means just by watching how this worked itself out in the early American experiment for 100 years in which, okay, there was not an established religion at the federal level. There were actually established sort of, you know, they weren't theocracies, but there were kind of religious establishments and some of the colonies that became states. So they seemed to think that was even perfectly all right.

And so the kind of simplest way to think about it is that the kind of founding ideal was just a widespread freedom, not just for individuals, but for religious institutions to freely exercise their religious beliefs. Now, that doesn't mean, you know, to do absolutely anything if you're, you know, you're a religion that believes in child sacrifice or something like that. That violates another fundamental right.

But, you know, so of course there's nothing like that. But, you know, free exercise is a very strong and robust idea. And the problem is, is that through a combination of kind of a type of distorted individualism and secularism, this has come to be interpreted both in the culture and by the courts for a long time as essentially freedom of worship or freedom of belief, which is a dramatic pruning of what it actually means.

It's also ultimately, I think, destructive because the founders believed, okay, our polity should in so far as possible be based on things that are open to sort of natural reason. So the natural law, you know, everybody, even if you're an atheist, you know, it's wrong to murder people and torture kids for the fun of it, things like that. Right.

But that could not possibly be self-sustaining. So in other words, our capacity for knowing the truth of the natural law are dim and, you know, the level of generality that, you know, it's not enough to kind of build a culture around. And so you need vibrant religious communities that are much thicker and more concrete, that provide the kind of cultural capital that you would need to be able to maintain a polity that's, you know, gives a little wide variety of freedom for people to disagree, but is also still based on kind of founded in a morality and moral truth.

And so that's how it ought to be. And unfortunately, for really a century under the influence of progressivism, all of that religious freedom got squeezed into this much narrower definition. And then what's happened in the last, I don't know, I'll just say the last decade or two decades is that the court, at least the Supreme Court, has started to slowly return, I think, to the founding ideal.

You can see this in the Bladensburg cross case, which is a big granite cross that was put on a little circular roundabout in Bladensburg, Maryland. I drive by it on the way to work every day. And it's a cross and it has names on it.

It's a World War One memorial to and it's the names, I think, of World War One veterans that were killed, you know, from that area. And so some, you know, freedom from religion foundation sued the town, got all the way to the Supreme Court. They said this was an establishment of religion.

The Supreme Court basically said, no, it's not. Give us a break. So I feel like moving back in the right direction.

But the problem is, is that you can always overcorrect. So if like, if for a long time, all the smart people in the culture said, well, the First Amendment guarantees merely private religious belief, right, then Christians and religious people are like, well, that's ridiculous. That's not going to give me free exercise.

What we really need is an establishment, right? And so that, you know, and then that's those are sort of the only two choices, right? So that's an overcorrection of an error. And so when that happens, you're often just kind of, you're being defined by the error. And so what I think ought to happen is that we return to the founding ideal and do everything we can, and then we're gonna be fine.

We're not going to settle everything. But I just think that's, that's actually the only kind of sustainable model that's also consistent with the American tradition. In other places, look, you know, I'm a pluralist on these things.

And so if a culture that has a religious establishment, as long as it doesn't torment other people, you know, from practicing their freedom, then, you know, look, you know, that's, that's all right. It's not, but I don't think that, you know, let's say the Church of England, for instance, okay, I don't think they're violating the natural law to exist. But if you look at what's happened in the Church of England, it also is an illustration that it doesn't tend to work very well.

The culture gets more secular, the Church itself gets completely corrupted. And so I just think that's kind of, it's a generally a bad arrangement. But look, of course, if 95% of a population are Christians of a particular tradition, it's going to make sense that that country is going to be much more flavored by that than, you know, a kind of more pluralistic country like ours is, which is broadly Christian, but you know, it's just a kind of a different situation.

Yeah, one of my favorite books all time had a huge, huge impact on me when it first came out was Money Greeting God. Love that book. I had been a fiscal conservative prior to that, but you really gave me the language, the words to share that, to express that.

And I did start expressing that and took a lot of flack for it, but it was fun. I also realized, oh, I like arguing when the evidence is on my side. But yeah, one of the things you talk about that comes up a lot in my conversations with socialists is the zero sum fallacy.

Yes. Do you want to just explain what that is really quickly and why it's relevant to how people form their views on economic policy? Yeah, for sure. And so they're actually in the book, I talk about these two related myths.

One's a zero sum fallacy or the zero sum game myth. And the other one I call the materialist myth. And so for the zero sum game fallacy, I sort of use the example of trade with this.

And so it's tempting to think of an economic exchange as if there's a winner and a loser. So that's what a zero sum game is. It just means you know, it's any game you play like chess or checkers where you, okay, you might come to a draw, but if there's a winner, the rules of game are set up so that there has to be a loser.

That's just how it is. And of course, there are zero sum or win-lose games. There are also lose-lose games where everybody that plays ends up worse off.

You know, we don't play those games. So it's hard to think of examples. We don't play more than once, if we can help it.

But there are also win-win games. You know, win-win game is just any game, which the rules are such that people that play it end up better off than they were before. So it doesn't mean everybody ends up equally well off.

It doesn't mean everyone ends up in first place. But it means that if you play the game enough, and often with more and more people, everybody ultimately ends up better off than they would have been if they hadn't played, even though everybody, they didn't mean everybody ends up equally well off. That's the kind of key thing.

And people confuse that. And so they look around and say, well, there's some people that are richer than other people or some people have, you know, sort of oceanfront property and some don't. And so clearly, the reason they're rich people is because they have taken wealth from the poor people.

That's how it is. But you know, this is so clearly false that if you spend any time examining it, you realize it has to be false because then a natural state would be, you know, compared to what Americans are used to, the kind of natural state historically for the average person, would it be desperate poverty? That's, if anything, that's kind of the much more natural state this side of the fall. And so what you have is you have some countries where you solve absolute poverty.

So in other words, absolute poverty is where people don't have enough calories to stay alive. They don't have basic shelter. They don't have access to really cheap medicine, you know, for common illnesses that we've cured.

That's absolute poverty. And so what you have is some cultures that have developed a system of laws and rules and private property rights and things like that so that everyone ends up way better off than they would have been in a sort of state of nature. And so then now what we're doing is we're comparing relative poverty.

So that just means one person's richer than somebody else. And but that's we shouldn't be expect that kind of a normal outcome is going to be that everyone ends up equally well off. What we want is a system that allows people in, you know, in their various capacities to be able to lift themselves out of poverty by serving both themselves and their fellow human beings.

That's the system we want. And we shouldn't be grumpy if everybody and people end up in a different spot. Now, of course, in the book, and actually when I was teaching college students, I described this game called the trading game, which just involved the game.

I played the sixth grade and the teacher gives out toys at random to everyone. And there's a rule where you can trade first with every anyone in your row. And so kids sort of trade and you and you grade the toys at the beginning, how much you like them.

Then you trade with some people in your row, if they're willing to trade, everybody scores their toy again. And then the teacher says, okay, now everybody could trade with you trade with anyone else in the room. So a lot of trades take place.

And then everybody gives a grade to their score at the end. And if you add up the scores, so the kind of total score of how much students like the toys they had at the beginning. And then after the first trading round and the second trading round, which you notice is the total number goes up.

Same toys, same key, same kids, right? Yeah, same words, same value. Yeah, you know, and so that's because people value things differently. Right.

So even without adding anything new to the system, that is without even creating wealth, if you have the right kind of system, people can end up better off than they would have been if they had been sort of this isolated monad in the forest or something like that. And so that's what you want is a system of trade that allows people to engage in what economists call mutually beneficial trades. Nobody trades in the trading game, unless both sides perceive themselves as better off.

I would not pay someone to get a haircut or to cut my hair unless I wanted the haircut more than I wanted the money. And the person who cuts my hair, she, Melissa, in my case, wanted the money more than she wanted the time it took to cut my hair, right? And I do that every four to six weeks because we are both better off. Right.

And so this is just so basic. Everyone experiences this countless times every day in a normal society. And yet when we come to think about economics, we just completely forget this kind of basic reality.

And now I had on top of that, the fact that, you know, under certain conditions, we actually create wealth and value that wasn't there before. Right. Exactly.

Innovative. Add all that up. And it's clear that despite lots and lots and lots of problems with our current system, it's better than all those systems that are genuinely lose-lose or merely win-lose.

People are generally able to benefit if they're willing to work hard, even in this kind of deeply flawed American system in 2025. Absolutely. Free trade is glorious and a wonderful thing.

It is. And it's, of course, it's been getting a lot of attacks lately. And so I should say well, economists can't tell you, you ought to trade with another country.

Right. That's a kind of moral question or normal question. They can say, okay, well, if you trade with countries under this kind of circumstance, here's what's going to happen generally.

And if you decide not to, here's what's going to happen. And so like China, right, which is genuinely an adversary, we're talking about, okay, maybe we don't want to trade as much, nearly as much of China. And but what that means, economics tells us or economists would tell us, okay, that's going to cost us, right? There's going to be a cost and know this if you sort of take the other extreme, like if you decided you were going to provide all the goods and services and food for yourself and get nothing from anyone else, you can you're desperately poor and you're probably going to starve to death in four or six weeks, right? And so that saying general rule applies as you work your way out, there's going to be a cost.

And so maybe you decide I want to trade with China because I don't want them to have certain industry secrets and perfectly reasonable things. And so there's no reason that for purposes of foreign policy or defense, a country might say, okay, we're willing to pay the price of not trading with this bad actor or that bad actor. Fine.

That's a prudential judgment. What you can't do is say, okay, we're going to stop trading with 90 percent of the world and it's going to make us rich. That's just right.

That's not how it's going to go. It's not how it's going to work. Absolutely.

Yeah. Another thing that you mentioned that really stood out to me is this idea of relative poverty. I think we've kind of redefined poverty to mean something that is objective and maybe absolute to something that just means someone else has more than I have.

And when that is our definition or focus, then that's just going to lead to all kinds of problems. When we try to eradicate poverty, that means that necessarily means destroying wealth so that everybody can be equal or destroying incentives to wealth at a minimum. That's right.

That's right. Yeah. And this is the, you know, this is kind of the perennial dilemma.

If you elevate this idea of material equality to kind of political or metaphysical first principle, it's just a disaster. Equality is about that cause everyone's made in the image of God and has equal moral and metaphysical dignity. People should be treated equal.

You know, the courts should not treat people differently based upon the color of their skin or their economic status. That's what equality is about. This idea that you want a system where everyone ends up equally well off, you can't do it.

And if you try to do it, the best you're going to be able to do is to make everybody equally, you know, poor and not well off and not big, you know, you can make everybody desperately poor. And so there's a type of equality in that. And so it's just, it's a kind of a mistake of, of sort of moral priorities, you know, when you're thinking about society.

But yeah, relative poverty just means that I'm a way less rich than Bill Gates. And so compared to that, he is orders of magnitude richer than I am in farm orders of magnitude. So he's far richer than I am, than I am rich compared to say the bottom 10% of the income earners in the United States.

And yet you are richer because of the inventions and creations of Bill Gates. And the fact that we live in a system that allows Bill Gates to be right. Exactly.

That's the kind of, yeah, all that. And so, but it, you know, it's, it's sort of silly because it's like, well, okay, there's a lot, much smaller gap between me and the sort of bottom 10% of the population than there is between me and Bill Gates. But if anything, the one that you want to focus on is the first one, because like what you want is for everyone to be well off enough to live a decent life and have shelter and food.

And so that's, that is a relevant question. Like, okay, if there's still poor people in the country, you want to figure out, okay, what's the best thing that we can do for that? But it's, it's complicated. Poverty in a developed country is not like the poverty of a country that has not been developed because what you have is overwhelming kind of wealth creation and growth.

And yet there's still some people that don't have access to that and see if they can, what causes that? And if you don't look at it carefully, you'll do stupid stuff. So for instance, in Seattle, they have this thing called housing first policy because there's a lot of homeless people in Seattle. And if you don't know how the world works, you look around and say, well, this must be a housing problem, right? There's not enough housing.

And so you provide enough housing and the people that are on the streets don't want to use it. The reason is because it wasn't a housing problem. It was an addiction problem and a mental illness problem.

And you're not treating the problem. Yeah. And so it's that kind of crazy naivete that where you don't understand what you're dealing with.

That doesn't mean you don't care and you don't try to do something. It means, okay, if I want to fix mental illness and drug addiction, work on that. Don't imagine that just the problem is this other silly thing.

And so this is misunderstanding this could actually is really tragic because you end up supporting policies that can make the problem worse. And this has happened over and over again, unfortunately. Yeah, I've got a question that leads directly into this.

One of my favorite things to talk about that you taught me is the index of economic freedom. So I work in I.T. and I bring this out against the, you know, the other software engineers who are more left wing on economic policy. And I'll say, let's compare how free an economy is the ranking of freedom of all the economies in the world with the GDP per capita.

And let's decide, you know, from that whether we should become more left wing. So I'm just going to ask you the question and let you take over here. How do you basically what policies help a country to either rise out of poverty and what policies cause a country to become less wealthy and maybe with an emphasis of application, you know, how would we make that case? Absolutely.

And so this is, yeah, I sort of end the book in Money Greeting God trying to answer this question. It's like, OK, what are the properties? If you look at the index of economic freedom that causes those countries at the top to be at the top and the countries at the bottom to be at the bottom, because one possible answer could be we have no idea, right? It's just this random distribution and we don't know what's causing anything. It's the truth is the opposite.

We know exactly, you know, at a certain level of generality what the differences are. In fact, they're the criteria that are used basically in the index of economic freedom. And so it's basic private property rights, detailed private property rights, rule of law, detailed rule of law applying to property and titling and things like that.

The government competent and strong enough to be able to enforce the rule of law. But a government limited enough not to be constantly violating the rule of law. That's the kind of paradox people have a hard time getting their minds around is that the ideal is not anarchy with no governance or government or a totalitarianism where the coercive power of the state occupies every sphere of social life.

It's this kind of sweet spot where the government is, you know, it has everything it needs to do to do what it's good at doing, but it is limited both by the culture, by other institutions, by the laws so that there's just certain things that's not allowed to do, which is sort of paradoxical. And then other sort of complicated things like space for civil society, space for religious organizations and families, which are the main sources of teaching public virtue. You don't want your national laws or your state laws to violate, you know, or cause people to be vicious, but you need institutions that can train people to be virtuous.

And the government's not good at that. Families are the main place where that happens in religious institutions. And if you add those things and a few sort of other things, you are very likely to be a country that over time, the average person will be much more prosperous than they would have other.

Otherwise, they're big countries that had that for a while and then lost it. And then they sort of went the other way. And then if you just look at the bottom, I haven't, you know, it came out at Heritage here about a month ago, I'm forgetting who's at the top this year and who's at the bottom.

But it's always, you know, it's the ones you would expect countries in Europe or New Zealand or often Scandinavian countries, which can be perplexing to people, but they're not nearly as socialist as you might think. Or if they have big welfare systems, it's also make it really easy to start a business and to be an entrepreneur. And then the countries at the bottom are the ones that just violate the rule of law constantly.

What you'll often have is a government in these countries that manages to be both way too intrusive and also completely incompetent. So, right. So it's not like they're sort of efficient totalitarians.

They're actually terrible. They can't then just arrest the murderers, but they can keep some poor guy from starting a little business for 20 years. Right.

So it's not sort of anarchy or totalitarianism. It's just the worst of both worlds, right? They're both, both pushy and intrusive and also completely incompetent, you know? And so it's like for my more libertarian friends who always say, well, the government is sort of always the enemy. It's like, well, no, I mean, the anarchy is not a good thing.

You actually do need you need vibrant free economies and where people can trade freely. And that's the other thing I didn't mention. I presupposed it is that you need economic freedom inside your country, which just basically means that all things being equal, people find it fairly easy to be able to start businesses, to be able to trade with other peoples, to be able to try to provide and compete with other people to provide sorts of things like that.

And then really, really important. The prices on things generally needs to be able to range freely. So because you need a price needs to be able to communicate underlying economic realities.

And if the prices are able to go up and down based upon changes in supply and demand, then you have a price system that communicates reality to all the members of that economy. If the if politics, you know, if the state or the federal government dictates quotas on production or they dictate the prices of various goods and services, basically what you're saying is we don't want the economy to be able to communicate reality accurately. And so that's why it seems sort of strange.

Why it's like, why does it really matter if you have a price system that's freely flowing? It's just crucial. And it's in some ways it's kind of a sign of whether there's genuine freedom or not and whether that economy is going to work. And then this actually ties back to the question at the beginning about this connection between economic freedom and religious freedom.

It's the same things, right? Like if you have a government that works and enforces the rule of law, but doesn't violate the rule of law, leaves social space for families and churches and voluntary organizations, that's going to be good economically. Those are also the things you need to be able to have religious freedom. And so I did, you know, I remember now that you remind me, I gave a lecture on this at Family Research Council.

I published an article and some years ago just trying to compare basically, it's sort of an overlay to show is this sort of true? If you look at the nations of the world, you take all the countries that are economically free versus the ones that are really unfree. Is there a tight correlation between religious and economic freedom? It turns out there is certainly at the extremes. There's some mix in the middle.

But basically at the extremes, if you're really high on the index of economic freedom, you're very likely to exercise your religious freedom. And it's the opposite down at the bottom. And now you can, I think, have a situation where a country may start constantly violating religious freedom.

And so my prediction would be that that places, even if it has economic freedom, it's going to it's going to lose it before long simply because you need the same institutional preconditions to have both of those goods in a country. Yeah, definitely. You mentioned libertarians and we often hear that or at least I do that the Republican Party should minimize social issues, stop talking about social issues in order to appeal to independence.

A lot of times this will come from libertarians. Other times people tell me, oh, I'm a I'm a fiscal conservative, but I'm a social progressive. Right.

So why should fiscal conservatives care about social issues like marriage and family, for example? Yeah. And the gender ideology fight. Right.

And so I can remember back in 2008, after, you know, the Republicans lost to to to President Obama, everybody, you know, like all the official kind of Wall Street Journal conservatives said, oh, we got to drop all these social issues that are causing us to lose elections. It's just completely wrong. I mean, look what is animated.

Every election since 2016. Look what one Donald Trump, the election this a few months ago, it was over gender ideology is front and center. The immigration debate, too, is it's kind of an economic thing, but it's mainly a kind of cultural and, you know, and social issue.

And so, first of all, it's just wrong, right? I don't think that it's going to the conservatives are going to lose, you know, in general on this. Yeah, sure. Sometimes at the margins, you know, if you don't frame it correctly, it might not be helpful.

But it's just generally untrue. And the other thing is just simply that there are actually very few voters in that quadrant. Everybody's probably seen this diagram is this X, Y, you know, and you've got these four quadrants between between the different positions.

And there are actually lots of social conservatives that are kind of economically more on the left, actually. That's a real thing, right? But if you look at the quadrant that's sort of the fiscal conservative, social liberal, there's just aren't that many people there. You know, it's like the people at the Chamber of Commerce and that are writing for the Wall Street Journal and 48 other people or whatever, right? It's not even an actual constituency.

And so it's just not right. And Donald Trump, frankly, figured this out, you know? And what we're seeing is a kind of fundamental realignment so that now what I think we have in the United States is a Democratic Party which just completely lost its mind or allowed the most radical sex activists to take over the party. And so they represent that and pretty much nothing else.

And then they basically corporatist. Now it turns out, you know, as the Republicans are actually kind of right now, it's a it's a kind of a coalition party of traditional conservatives sort of populist conservatives, let's say far more working class people that are maybe more kind of list to the left economically, but are kind of intuitively social conservative. And then the Maha people, right, of which I was in that I was in the Maga and the Maha camp, but they were separate camps, right? And now all the people concerned about the vaccines and COVID and stupid USDA food guidelines.

Well, the Democrats could have had those folks, right? They could have. They didn't get to have them because they just know, you know, and that's what basically you've got. That's kind of coalition, right, of people that I think is 60 or 70 percent of the population.

And then you've got the corporatists and the drag queen story. Our directors have another party. You know, it said to me, it's like, well, if you're a Republican, it's like, wow, awesome.

I can't believe they did that to themselves. Yeah, exactly. And all of that stuff is so expensive.

So, I mean, someone tells me, oh, well, I'm a I'm, you know, I'm a social liberal, but a physical conservative who on Earth is going to pay for for that? Like that is very, very expensive to set us. Yeah, I mean, there are all kinds of more important issues. When it comes to, you know, mutilating the bodies of children, for example, and, you know, and some and the mental health issues that go along with it and everything else.

But just from a fiscal standpoint, it's insanely expensive. Oh, wildly. Anyone that's on the, you know, the transition pipeline pipeline, you know, that experiences so-called gender affirming care, that's their lifelong patient.

So if you've got a pharmaceutical company that's providing, you know, testosterone or estrogen or whatever, that's like, OK, this is good. If you're a surgeon, that's not going to just be a one and done surgery. That's going to probably be a lot of follow up, right? So there's a lot of money to be made at this.

It's just that it's evil. Right now, you know, and so but it's very, very expensive if you're going to say have Medicaid or, you know, Affordable Care Act insurance policies paying for this stuff. It's completely unsustainable.

And then you've got because you're a social liberal, you're sort of confused about what virtue is and what's needed. You're confused about the central central importance of families. Right.

And so you can end up with a lot of people that unfortunately end up on the government dole because, you know, they can't take care of themselves. It's just the whole thing is just a formula for disaster. It's unsustainable.

And it's I mean, now, to be fair, the Republicans are just sort of marginally better on some of these things. But that's just life. And people are like, well, how much difference is there? There's enough difference.

But, you know, yeah, the fact that the Republicans aren't as solid as they should be doesn't mean, OK, well, you know, go with the ones that are worse. That doesn't make any sense. Exactly.

So how did this whole transgenderism turn begin? Like, and what is driving it? And what do you think is kind of the next crucial battle in this? Yeah, so I won't start at the Garden of Eden because that would take too long. Get into them. You know, but it really it's I wouldn't say the simplest way to describe gender ideology is it is a particular species of the class that we can call cultural Marxism.

And this is simplifying it because gender ideology has streams from critical theory and which is kind of a type of cultural Marxism. It's got streams from French postmodernism and then good old fashioned American made gender crazies like Dr. John Money and Alfred Kinsey. Yeah, but it's the best way to think of it, I think, is what queer theorists will say.

If you ask them, OK, what is queer theory about? They'll say something like this. Queer theory is about destabilizing the categories of reality. And so just as in Marxism, you destabilize the kind of institutions that that prop up evil capitalism and lead to revolution and then to socialism and onto the, you know, the beautiful communist utopia.

Yes, exactly. So the conflict in that case is between the owners and the workers, you know, where's Rosie and the proletariat? That's classic Marxist theory. Well, cultural Marxism maintains that conflict theory.

That is, where you just flatten out all the complexities of social life into oppressors and oppressed. And so that might be men and women. It might be black people and white people.

It might be darker versus lighter. It might be gays versus straights. Right.

But it's always the same basic story. Everybody's either an oppressor or an oppressed and you need a way to kind of blow up that system so that you can get to the next phase and get onto your utopia. That's what this is about.

But if you think about it, gender ideology is probably the most radical because it takes on a category of reality that is so stable. I mean, if there's anything that's stable, it's the fact it's the belief that there are males and females. Every language has the distinction, right? It's a biological reality.

It's not just humans. Every language, every culture, every time religion has it, right? Moreover, imagine this. Take the two most different countries and cultures in the world, whatever those are, and you'll find not only that they make this distinction, but that they distinguish the same people, right? There's not like, there's this perfect overlap.

Everybody kind of knows who the males and females are. And so to me, that's a sign that these are categories that derive from our observations of reality. They're not quirky social constructs.

And so imagine now that you want to blow that up. How do you do it? Well, you've got to get to children when they're about five years old, when they're still forming this category and get them to think not in terms of boys and girls, but in terms of gender expressions and gender identities and these kinds of things, right? And so that's really kind of what it's about. If you think of it as a kind of philosophical program with intentions, it's about destroying the categories of the sexual binary, which are the, and the sexual binary is the foundation of civilization.

It takes one fertile male and one fertile female to mate, to reproduce. We know children ideally should be raised in the homes of their married mothers and fathers. So that's the kind of fundamental unit of civilization.

John Paul II talked about, said the future passes by way of the family. He would talk about the family as the kind of the fundamental cell of the body of society. And so if you want to blow up the present order, you just blow that up.

It's like if you want to kill somebody, you want to kill somebody, if you can do something that attacks all of the cells of their body, you're going to be dead. That's what it's ultimately about. It's why they do what they do.

But it's not why most people go along. Most people don't understand this. They think still it's just their compassion has been weaponized against them.

They think the gender stuff is about being nice to the awkward kids, sort of. Just because a boy is a feminine or he likes to play with dolls or a girl's a tomboy, they shouldn't get squeezed into narrow stereotypes, which is, of course, true. But that's not what this is about.

That's just what people think it's about. And that's why so many people go along. And so half my job working on this issue for the last four years has been to try to explain to people that no, no, that's not what's happening here.

And I can say the men appearing in women's sports and kids having their their bodies, you know, permanently harmed. That helps illustrate the point. Unfortunately, that seems to be what it has taken to persuade people that this wasn't really about being nice to the awkward kids.

It's just I mean, it's just like one of the most evil ideas that has ever found its way on the surface of the earth. And we just have to destroy. Now, I'm not talking about people.

I'm talking about the ideology. But we have to destroy it. We have to grind it into dust and dissolve it and stick it on the top of an ultra heavy SpaceX rocket and send it into the.

Absolutely. Before we get to the next question, I just want to say you mentioned the the way that it causes recurring treatments and you know, you have to come back and and get treatments with drugs and surgeries and maintaining, you know, the surgeries from before that's causing people to turn away from it. You mentioned the men and women sports that's causing people to turn away from it, but also the detransitioners that you want to talk about? Absolutely.

I mean, you know, I've been working on this really at the state level for the last four years because the federal government was hostile territory. And I can tell you sort of testifying on behalf of bills, say that we're restricting these. So over half of US states now have laws, including Tennessee's, which their law was the subject of the Scrimetti case and the Supreme Court that basically restrict these procedures.

So it's like a puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, gender. It's like sex changing. It's not actually sex changing, but it's sex trait modification surgery.

Think of it as that. For purposes of getting someone to body to try to resemble their supposed internal gender identity away from their bodies, right? And so, you know, unlike abortion, for instance, in which the primary victim of abortion is never around later. So they're voiceless, right? And so we have to, others of us have to defend the unborn.

Detransitioners are people, especially the ones that, this happened as minors, who were kids that were subject to this crazy experiment based on bad data and bad philosophy that then had the presence of mind finally to realize this was a terrible mistake. And so they detransition, which just means insofar as they can, they give up the kind of lie that you can do this and then try to, you know, live healthy, normal lives. And so if I'm testifying as a policy guy from Washington, D.C., okay, that might be somewhat useful, but I'm telling you in a room where the other side is telling us that nobody's harmed by this, having a girl that has had her breasts removed, having a girl that's had her breasts removed in four years of testosterone so she has a really low voice, you know, a guy that's had the revert, you can just sort of imagine this.

This silences the room. And so it's honestly, it was a little tough for me and some of us that are sort of in the policy world initially because part of me felt like, okay, these kids are, many of them, I mean, they got in this because they had so-called comorbidities. In other words, they had struggles.

Maybe they'd been sexually assaulted or the severe depression, whatever. That really still often needs to be mended. And so part of me felt like, do we really want to be trying to, you know, asking these detransitioners to fly to states and keep talking about this? And a bunch of us in the policy arena, we literally could have struggled like, okay, there's a, they're very important in the debate, but we don't want anyone to be exploited.

Well, it turns out it wasn't up to us. It is basically what happens, detransitioners like, we want to be there. We will get there.

And that's over and over what we saw. And so I'm just telling you like rhetorically that has transformed this. And it in some ways makes it different from other issues because the victims are still mostly around they're smart and they're mad.

And they will be the way these clinics and you can record it and put it online. These clinics will close because of lawsuits against them. Awesome.

By detransitioners, you get one or two of those suits settled and the prices for insurance to do these practices or just be astronomical and doctors will have to stop doing it. That's how this is going to go. Good, yeah.

All right, let's transition maybe to a different topic. This is something that's been kind of new to me and I've been reading your articles about it, but it's this new focus on making America healthy that I think got into the limelight because of the Trump administration's nomination of Robert F. Kennedy to lead health and human services. So just what should Christians and maybe even conservatives who are unaware of it, what should we think about this agenda? Yeah, and so I mean, it's an agenda that is still in formation would be the kind of, I think the right way to describe it.

But I think the best way to think of it is really in terms of Robert F. Kennedy Jr's, actually his speech in August when he endorsed Donald Trump. It's online, I just encourage everyone go read the speech and see what he said because it was really a masterpiece, not just rhetorically, but it just focused on the right thing. And so what he talked about is the fact that though America is the richest country in human history, we are compared to other developed countries way, way less healthy.

And we're less healthy in specific ways because you might think, oh wait, if I'm in a rich guy in Saudi Arabia or Columbia, right, or Europe, and I want to have open heart bypass surgery or all these different kinds of things, you want to come to the United States. We're good at that, right? But if you want to be healthy and not have a disease of civilization like type two diabetes and obesity and heart disease and high blood pressure and all sorts of psychological ailments, these are called chronic diseases because it's unlike an infectious disease, right, where you just get sick and it either gets fixed or you die. It's not like rupturing your quad tendon like I did a few years ago where a basic carpentry is involved in reattaching, you know? We're talking about things that they develop over time because of something we do to ourselves or that's in our environment.

And we just have an insane epidemic of this in which you have 40 or 45 diseases, so psychological and physical diseases that are chronic, that have just gone through the roof. The one we've been talking about, gender dysphoria, in the last decade, the referrals and diagnoses of gender dysphoria among girls has gone up 5,000%. So 50 times more kids with this.

Autism, again, orders of magnitude over the last several decades. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease for kids. Just massive increase.

That didn't exist for kids before. And so this over and over and over again, we're doing something that's causing this. The whole, the gene pool did not change suddenly in the United States, right? There is something that it's not, it can't be something that has been in our food supply for thousands of years, right? So everybody's worried about stupid stuff.

Oh, don't eat animal fat or don't eat, really? I mean, that's like the main source of sustenance for humans forever. If that was bad for us, natural selection would have taken care of it, right? So you give that the benefit of the doubt, but we have done a bunch of other things, right? And so certainly we've added technology. We have added weird kind of food adders that nobody's paying attention to.

We have massively added to the vaccine and the drugs. There's just countless things, weird food guidelines that have changed the way people eat. We've added seed oils that are industrial byproducts that nobody, it was never in the human food supply until recently.

So you just kind of add up the list of, okay, what's all the things that we've added? Because we know it's something that happened, you know, from say 1900 to 1980 mostly or 1990. We've got this upside down food pyramid. Exactly, the food pyramid is exactly the, that's the thing I was always interested in, right? So you got this list of chronic diseases, list of things we've done.

And then we say, okay, now we're gonna figure out what's causing this. And what you discover is that a lot of the stuff we've done is the result of weird government policy in which the way I describe it, it's the result of the blob. So it's not socialism and it's not liberal, you know, capitalism with limited government.

It is a blob of certain giant corporations and giant regulatory agencies and a legacy media that makes most of its money from advertising the stuff and then fake nonprofits that actually serve those other interests. And you can tie almost a direct line to that thing, right? And all this stuff that, you know, we've added and to the chronic diseases. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. understood this and people shouldn't look at him and just say, okay, well, he's a liberal Democrat and his name's Kennedy.

Yeah, he also was one of the rare people that immediately spoke out against the lockdowns that for years and years has been talking about the fact that we actually don't know what we're doing when it comes to vaccines, right? Costly. So if you think, yeah, but he's rich, he's a Kennedy, no, he had a lot to lose. Imagine his social sphere and his family and all the things that he had that he was willing to lose in order to sort of fight this thing.

And so, you know, I'd say since COVID, I tended to, I used to think more in kind of right-left partisan terms, which I'm still a political conservative, obviously, but really we've had a few social tests. And so COVID and the lockdowns was one, the gender stuff was one in which it's like, okay, if you wanna know who's able to discern the truth when it's costly to say so, those were two really, really good tests. And so for me, Jamie Reed, the whistleblower in the St. Louis Gender Clinic, who's very much on the left and a lesbian, think of the cost to her to be the whistleblower.

RFK, Junior, being willing to talk about vaccines, which is the fastest way to get labeled a crank. Okay, you know, I take this stuff seriously. And so in his case, you know, I heard him speak at a COVID rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 2021, that pun, this is not what I thought.

Everybody told me he was crazy. I should quit listening to everybody because they're wrong about that. Went back and read his book, The Real Anthony Fauci and thought, okay, this is serious stuff.

And actually realized along the way that a lot of the stuff that this kind of maha people, you know, that had gathered around him were talking about were things that needed to be talked about. And a lot of those people maybe were initially on the left but were mostly kind of politically homeless. And to me, I just feel like as a conservative Republican, this is a gift to a kind of fundamental political realignment around a set of issues that actually people are really, really interested in.

Moms are really concerned about the health of their children. And you can find a way to help that and to speak to that. That's not just the right thing to do, but that's kind of an amazing recipe for politics.

And so I myself, you know, you two know is sort of into this avocationally for a long time. I wrote an author a book on COVID in 2020. I have a book on fasting.

I'm really into sort of fitness and health and all that stuff. But now, I mean, just speaking personally, I feel like my vocational and avocational interests come together in this stuff and their thing. And Heritage as an organization has committed to building out this whole policy portfolio that really it's gonna have us involved in things that we weren't talking about before.

And I'm here for it. I'm really excited. I love it, excellent.

I like the way you phrase simply and concisely. You talk about big pharma, big food, big media. Is there another one I'm missing that kind of work together or that kind of had this interaction? Yeah, and the non-profits.

They don't have a big philanthropy, maybe. I don't know. Right, right, yeah.

But that's the thing, yeah, is all of that. That's more complicated than just private, you know, cronyism where you get government and a business. That's still overly simple.

It's kind of all these spheres working together. That's actually the system that we have in the United States, unfortunately. It's a type of corporatism or that China also has.

It's just that China is much more authoritarian. And my worry is that the 21st century is gonna be a choice between the better and the worst corporatist systems. And I don't want that.

And I don't think any of us would really want it if we knew what it was gonna look like. All right, since you mentioned policy, we did, Rose and I did a bunch of shows on election issues, talking to Christians about why they should care about topics more than marriage and baby ending. I think there's a tendency, at least in our friend group, that that tends to be, you know, those are the two most popular issues.

So we talked about things like education policy, immigration policy. We talked about energy policy. We talked about health a bit.

We talked about law enforcement and just different areas. So I just wanted to give you an open question here for our Christian listeners. What are you looking at in the Trump administration? We had a bunch of interesting nominations.

Some people I really like. You know, what's caught your eye? What do you expect to see from the Trump administration going forward? Well, given now that we've had a couple of months to see what's happening, I'm really, really optimistic. I mean, Donald Trump is a unique person.

I mean, you know, state the obvious here. But, you know, the reality is, and look, I was one of the people that was frustrated with the stuff that President Trump was saying about abortion before the election. I was upset about that.

I also know that he has ordered an investigation of Planned Parenthood and that they have frozen funding of Planned Parenthood over DEI, right? Wow, that's nice. And then I just say, in Washington, people that work in government will tell you personnel is policy. And so if you appoint someone like Marty McCarrie, who's a good guy, Jay Bhattacharya, who, you know, all the people that could possibly have been nominated for the NIH, it's just, I get choked up thinking about it, considering he was one of the brave people, right, in 2020.

Yes, he was excellent. A turn of, I mean, that Francis Collins, right, who tried to destroy him, that was partly responsible for the lie that it couldn't have been a lab leak, the virus. And then they tried to basically destroy Jay Bhattacharya.

He's now in charge of the NIH, right? And so it's absolutely amazing. And so, you know, the things that Heritage has been talking about for decades, like, no, abolish the Department of Education. Republicans have been talking about that for decades, since President Reagan.

Absolutely, since Reagan, yeah. No one ever even tried to do it. Everyone that looks, as numerate, knows that we are on a crazy, unsustainable path in terms of spending and the massively ballooning debt.

No one's ever really, you know, President Clinton's the only one in my memory that really actually ever has balanced the budget, right, in decades, and that was because I think of the tech boom, that, you know, with Elon Musk and Doge, they're actually serious about trying to cut down the size of government. An announcement just, you know, very recently that 20,000 people at HHS are gonna be let go. This is what Musk did to Twitter.

All the officially smart people said, oh, he's gutting it, he's gonna destroy it. They were all wrong. They have no idea what they're talking about, and that's what they're saying now.

Trust me, you downsize the government by 20%, that's a good start because, and they will do better and be more efficient than they would have been otherwise. And so, I just think, you know, if Christians say, well, okay, marriage and life and say the gender stuff, those are metaphysically huge and important, absolutely. I put those at the top of the list.

But don't think that if you just focus on those, you're gonna get to have those because if other things undermine your civilization, you're not gonna get to have any of those goods. If the currency collapses, right, people are gonna be desperately poor. They're not gonna be interested in other things.

And so, you know, if we're serious, thoughtful Christians, we need to be thinking about all these issues. And so, I'm really looking, I wanna see success on this downsizing, on taming the administrative state, which is a vast, a profound threat to our wellbeing, and especially turning things around on that sort of maw agenda so that we actually get to the bottom of what is causing all of this massive increase in chronic diseases. I mean, the idea that we'd focus on, say, an infectious disease that might kill two or three people, and not one that's killing scores of people every single day, it just doesn't make any sense.

And so at least now we're asking the right questions and it's gonna be up to us, I think, depressed to make sure that we get some answers. Absolutely, yeah. We both appreciate your work so much.

We talk a lot on the show about how Christianity is a comprehensive worldview. It is not something that you do on Sunday morning. And we love how you are out in the public sphere advocating for loving our neighbors well through policy, through economic policy, social issues, and all of these different really important matters that affect people's lives in serious, serious ways.

So I know you have an incredibly impressive rest of me background, but just tell us some of the books that you've written, where people can find them, what they're about, where to find you online, where you'd like people to look to find what you're doing. Probably the easiest way is just on X. And so that is my sort of main social media outlet. I'm at Dr. J. Richards, formerly known as Twitter, on X. All of my books are available on Amazon in the kind of usual places, honestly.

And so I actually started with kind of technical philosophy and philosophical theology. I wrote a book called The Privilege Planet 21 years ago now. Yes, love it.

You interviewed your co-author. Yes, and he and I, yeah, because we have the other 20th year anniversary edition came out last year. And so, you know, you might agree to God, of course, and I think you mentioned the most recent book, Fight the Good Fight, which is an attempt to try to kind of re-summarize what the kind of conservative vision is.

And then my book, Eat Fast Feast, for Christians that are interested in fasting were still in Lent right now. I can tell you that's the book that if somebody comes up to me at the airport and they happen to recognize me from a book cover, people would say, oh, I've read your book and it was, you know, I was like, change my life or whatever. I used to say, oh, which one? Maybe my science book or my economics book? No, no, no, no, the fasting book, that's it.

And so, nah, I don't even ask, that's the book. And so that one is in some ways out and just kind of a labor of love because it was so important to me. And I really think that Christians have given up a major tool in our spiritual arsenal that's good for us spiritually and physically.

And I think we need to recover it. So, you know, honestly, at this point, I almost feel like if people are going to read one of my books, probably that one, start there, which might be a surprising answer for you, but I know it's the one that just based on, based on audience feedback, that seems to be the one that's, you know, changed the most people's lives. So, you know, you never know until the kingdom exactly what the details are.

That's what I've heard as well. In fact, I was telling some family members and some friends over the past week or so that I was really looking forward to this time with you. And they're like, oh, what has he written? And I was like, oh, great book, Money Greeting God.

And it's about, you know, economics and such and great, amazing science book, Privileged Planet and, you know, blank stares and okay, that's good. And then I'm like, oh, and then some book about, I don't know, feasting and fasting and eating or something, and they're like, oh my goodness, is he going to talk about that? Okay, well, can you send me the link of the recording? And I'm like, okay, sure. Exactly, I know, I know.

You guys are like, you know, if you're an apologetics geek, it's like, really? That's what, you know, it is what it is. Right? Well, I think that's a good place for us to stop for today. Jay, I just want to thank you again for coming on the show.

And I hope that we convey just how much we appreciate the broad scope of all your writings and thinking. You're the one who got me into economics. I messaged you because I heard a Stand to Reason show where you talked about economics at the end and you said, read Hayek, read Seoul.

And I'd just kick me off on this, you know, 10 year track of policy. So thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing with us today. My pleasure.

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