How Online Atheist Communities Birthed the Modern Right

Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they explore the fascinating transformation of online political discourse from the early days of the internet to the present. This in-depth discussion covers the journey from atheist communities to the birth of modern online conservatism, touching on key movements like anti-feminism, GamerGate, and the rise of the "red pill" ideology. The Collins couple offers unique insights into how these shifts have shaped today's political landscape and the disconnect between online conservative culture and traditional conservative think tanks. Key points covered: The evolution of online atheist communities The transition from anti-religious to anti-feminist content The rise of the "red pill" and men's rights movements The disconnect between online conservative culture and traditional think tanks The role of platforms like YouTube and Reddit in shaping political discourse The impact of these shifts on modern conservative politics The potential future of conservative ideology and religious belief Whether you're a political junkie, a student of internet culture, or simply curious about how online communities shape real-world politics, this video offers a thought-provoking look at the unexpected twists and turns of internet-age political evolution.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone! I am excited to be talking to you today. We just got back from NatCon, which is the National Conservative Convention, where all of the high and mighty conservative thought leaders, not real thought leaders, i.

e. they don't lead the public's conservative mindset, they actually seem almost completely disconnected from the mainstream conservative movement which was a real takeaway for me when I was there. So these are all the people who work in the Washington conservative think tanks.

Simone Collins: I heard Tower people.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and I heard some thoughts there that really made me be like, wow at one point I was like, why are you doing this? The base doesn't want this, and they literally said, f**k the base. And I was like, wow, what one person where you got all mad where he's bureaucrats are good. Actually, we just need conservative bureaucrats.

We need a larger bureaucracy and we need it to be conservative. And then another person was like, Don't complain about like socialism's okay. So long as it's within our value set and this is where you get like insane things. Like the heritage foundation did project 2024 where [00:01:00] they put out like this plan 2025 2025 for the trump administration and in this plan one of the things that they had was banning pornography And I was like, that is a leftist position, but what, are you not familiar with the stellar blade?

Malcolm, they're

Simone Collins: coming together. Unity at last. We can finally agree on something.

Malcolm Collins: No, it's a bunch of woke bureaucrats, it was like, Mild conservative overlay. Between

Simone Collins: NOFAP, men's rights activists, and radical feminists, we finally found common ground! Porn is bad! Except that you guys know No, but I mean Making porn illegal, and making porn something that's shameful is the one number one thing no, hold

Malcolm Collins: on.

When you're talking about the base Like, NoFap is about self control. Even NoFap people are mad about the Stellar Blade controversy. Even NoFap people are mad about the Tracer butt controversy. Even NoFap people are mad about the Skullgirls controversy. Every time a group has attempted to censor male sexuality, [00:02:00] it has been a progressive leaning group.

But I want to talk about how these groups became so Wildly different from each other. Why is the conservative online base which is the group that really got Trump elected, like Trump was the 4chan candidate to begin with. That is the group that made Trump happen. That is where Pepe came from. That is where emperor, god emperor Trump came from from the Warhammer stuff.

That is where basically most of modern. Conservative internet culture came from a lot of people would say, okay a lot of this is downstream of 4chan, and it is, but it's not just downstream of 4chan, a very bizarre thing happened in internet history, which is the atheist movement online became the birthplace of the culture That is [00:03:00] now internet conservatism.

Or internet republicanism, or internet Trump base, basically. Interesting. And the question is, how did this happen? you grew up a Muslim.

Like, why did you convert to Christianity? Instead of just being

Simone Collins: atheist,

Malcolm Collins: like, why did you first try Christianity when you started praying to God? And she goes, of all these years, when I was attacking and preaching against religious individuals the Muslims, would send me messages about how they were going to kill me.

The Christians would send me messages about how they hoped they were praying for me and they were praying for me to be saved and they wanted me, and this is actually true of most of the atheist community. When they were attacking the Christians and then when their value system started to align more with the Christians, they were very open to be friends with these people because these people had always been.

Nice to them, even when there was conflict, [00:04:00] whereas the opposite side group had always been very antagonistic. The wokes send us death threats constantly

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: And let's chart the history of this for people who are too young. Now, if you are young and not familiar, like you have not been, like if you are my age and chronically online, I just said something that is completely uncontroversial to you.

You're like, oh, yeah, I remember when that happened. That was weird. Because everyone who has been actively engaged with online culture for a long time and, mildly open to conservative ideas knows that this happened. But if you aren't, then you might think that's a controversial claim.

Or if you just haven't been engaged with online culture, like if I said this NatCon, they'd be like, that can't be true. They'd say something like that. And then Somebody at the table would like lean over and be like, actually that did happen. So let's talk about how this happened, what happened and why it happened.

So first we need to go back to the early days of the internet. If you are talking [00:05:00] about the early days of the internet, the war between the fundies and the atheists was absolutely enormous. It was like the core show on the internet. It was the core conflict on the internet. It was as big a conflict as something like woke vs.

anti woke is today.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: It is what everyone was talking about. And then and I should note that people can be like, oh then the modern conservative movement must have come out of the early online religious movement, right? That's it. The people who are fighting the Atheists. The problem is Those people were always like 1 to 10 versus the Atheist community in the early days of the internet.

They were the vast minority. They were people that brought on for people to take who had no internet illiteracy for other people to take potshots at that was basically what was going on for years and then even the people who [00:06:00] were online were more dedicated to their individual communities i.

e. like promoting Catholicism or promoting some brands of Protestantism than any sort of wider political battle. So those were two of the things that caused that. And partially because of this shift, but partially fueled by this shift is the theocratic portion of the conservative party just lost pretty much all of their power in the shift to the Trumpist movement.

But this will also explain how that happened because Alternate version of conservatism began to grow online which appealed to many more people than the theocratic form, and we can talk about why this happened. Early atheist community online. You have this early atheist community online.

And then they, and they were mostly like YouTubers that was where a lot of this was happening in the early days. And pretty much all of their content was look at this stupid thing religious [00:07:00] people believe. Ha. Let's laugh at the religious people for having these stupid.

Simone Collins: All the subreddits. Oh yeah, really?

One of

Malcolm Collins: The pinned core subreddits of the top ten was rAtheism.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So do you have any thoughts on this period of history or any memories you have of it before I go further?

Simone Collins: I do remember it. It was and this was something that I definitely encountered more in my upbringing, right? As, as a young girl growing up in a very progressive area where basically, Religious people were seen as, as quite weird and it was genuinely quite funny.

Like how could this person possibly have these weird traditions and believe these weird things? And yeah, making fun of them seemed.

Malcolm Collins: And that's actually the core of what caused the switch. And I'll actually mark an interesting anecdote here. So Sarah Hader was in these early days.

She's a guest that we've had on the show. She's great. She is an ex Muslim who was a big figure in this early atheist [00:08:00] community. Now she probably was the second most famous Muslim in the community. Now, or ex Muslim, I should say in the community. Yeah. Yeah. Now she's known as an anti woke podcaster.

And I remember actually, because she hadn't contextualized that this had happened. And we were with a group of more like online savvy, like people. And she was thinking about what she was going to do next with her career. And I was with a bunch of think tank people and I go, you could just go and be like a public face of a conservative think tank.

And she was like, Oh no, I wouldn't appeal to the conservative base. I'm just An ex Muslim anti woke activist because, she hadn't thought of herself the new base. She was still thinking of these early days of the internet before this switch happened. But I think it shows how if you said that today, you'd be like, You would be fantastic for being a public face of many of these organizations.

But how did this happen? The, I think it was two things happened in the early days and we'll get into specific examples where this happened. But [00:09:00] first, I'm just talking about what happened? How did it happen?

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Was that these early atheists the arguments that you can make against the conservative positions get boring after a while because they are consistent.

Yeah, they're not going to

Simone Collins: Change their minds. The argument's not going to evolve and they're also not going to change their policies in ways that give you new things to work with.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So you're just working with the ha stupid thing. It's the debate you can run 50 times, a hundred times, but you're not going to be able to run it, a million times, which is what you need, right?

Yeah. Something to attack that is constantly evolving, but patently stupid. You need a group of people who is completely disconnected from reality and is willing to take the bait when you are trolling them. That was the other thing about the Christian communities, is one, they weren't really online that much and two when they were online, they eventually would [00:10:00] learn to not take the bait if they were like a prominent figure in the community, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And so it just got boring. But then they found another community that was beginning to evolve at that time as well. And this was the beginnings of wokeism. So it wouldn't, at the time they wouldn't have called it wokeism. They would have called it anti feminism or anti sort of tumblerina culture.

And to people who don't remember the tumblerinas, they were insane. They were like crazier than the modern woke movement in many ways. This is where

Simone Collins: They were the female equivalent. of 4chan. Equally crazy, equally unhinged, just, and equally autistic, just female. They were

Malcolm Collins: equally crazy and equally unhinged, but unlike 4chan where everything was about, attack and the joke and like being thick skinned being females one person would write like a fan fiction or would say that because, they were accepting of everything or say, my gender is turtle or my gender is [00:11:00] clout.

Those were two real genders. I think all of our

Simone Collins: genders are turtle. Thank you very much.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah your community would begin to buy into this because women more than men begin to buy in the community consensus more. Yeah, I'm already

Simone Collins: buying into turtle gender now. You can call me a turtle.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah they're also statistically more spiritual.

If you look at things historically women were seen as the more religious group which I think modern people might be pretty surprised about It's because women buy into these sorts of stories much faster than men do You know, if somebody writes a fan fiction women are going to start thinking these characters are real like a small group of women Yeah, yes and stuff like that.

You don't get this phenomenon in men that much. So you begin to have the development of early woke culture before it was mainstream and it was just seen as like a crazy thing.

And so these early atheists then begin to turn on this new ultra feminist, ultra woke culture because it was constantly providing new content.

People would always fight. [00:12:00] It was just better content to be honest.

Simone Collins: And

Malcolm Collins: the people who they were debating against genuinely hated them. This was another thing that was a difference between these communities and the Christians and the Jews and the Muslims. Is they began to build camaraderie! The atheists didn't really hate the religious community, and the religious community didn't really hate the atheists either.

They were a few abused fundie kids, but it wasn't everyone. The vast majority were, like, they wouldn't say, look, I'm just trying to convince you that these things are silly and you don't need to follow them. It's religious I should be

Simone Collins: able to save your soul. They're you know, rival football teams.

Just people who really, love their side. And love dunking on the other side, but also know that they need the other side in order to have fun. So it's all.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah there, what, there was nothing like that was the woke community. The woke community genuinely thought that these people were trying to kill them.

And these people genuinely thought that the woke community, when I say trying to kill them, don't, not specifically, but they bought into this lie that like, if somebody [00:13:00] denies that cloud gender is real, that they were causing

Simone Collins: trauma, that they were causing harm.

Malcolm Collins: They'll say they're, you're denying my existence, which is akin to genocide was in there

Simone Collins: and that offending someone is akin to physical violence that, Oh it's I'm feeling real pain.

That kind of thing. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And in this moment, like nothing happened, like people, and this is how many of these atheists, I think didn't realize was there a hater that they were becoming. The new Republican bases initiating point because for them, all of this was just small incremental changes.

And if people are wondering some examples of individuals where this happened armored skeptic, or individuals like Peter Bergosen, or Michael Schmerer or individuals like, I'd even say Siwan Head, to an extent, really started in that community now she considers herself a progressive now, but progressives don't own her because she was, anti woke and you can't disagree with them on anything.

And I think that also the way that this wokest movement worked now, keep in mind in these early days, the wokest movement hadn't [00:14:00] taken over yet. And we're going to talk about mainstream people as well. So you can look at Sam Harris, right? One of the four horsemen of the Atheist apocalypse, right?

Or of Atheism, right? So when you look at his policy position he considers himself a libertarian internationalist in approach to foreign policies which includes some interventionist policies. He was, during the Bush era, he supported specifically in regards to attacking Islam in the Middle East and the war of that period.

He was seen as being willing to talk to anyone, even when he disagreed with him. For example, Charles Murray, he talked to, he's a conservative individual, and people were like, oh, how could you do that? And like the Israel Palestine conflict, he's on the Israel side he has, or you can talk about Christopher Hitchens, who in the, even in the early days supported the Iraq war, right?

So you would have these individuals now in the early days, what progressivism was when all of this started, these people wouldn't have been hard removed from the progressive sphere for it's agreeing with [00:15:00] the topics, but That wasn't the case in this new, rocus form of progressives that were beginning to evolve in the online sphere, okay?

I see. You can't disagree on a few issues. You can't, they, they don't allow that. And then the thing that really caused the split was a lot of the trans issues. And this was a really interesting thing, I was watching a Sarah Hayer episode and she was talking about how weird it was.

Basically what happened was, is, was, in this atheist attack community, there was cred for continuing to say anything so long as you believed it was true. Now, this cred actually works in conservative circles. Most conservatives, so long as almost everything you think is true isn't progressives, are going to respect you if you just say what you think is true.

Whereas So this applies

Simone Collins: basically to religious extremism, or what? Can you give me an example of [00:16:00] this?

Malcolm Collins: Oh, they might say that certain ethnic communities cause more crime than other ethnic communities. And as

Simone Collins: long as you're really, you dig into it and you seem to really believe it, people don't look down on you

Malcolm Collins: for that.

So I'll word it this way. Okay. Okay. You might have an individual who supports some level of social redistribution, but also believes crime rates differ between ethnic communities in the United States. All right. A conservative meets that individual and they go, Oh we disagree on one thing.

We agree on one thing. You're a conservative. A progressive meets this individual, and they go, you are a far right extremist who I won't talk to because we disagree on one thing.

Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. Okay. I see what you mean. Yeah. What happened

Malcolm Collins: with shoe on head?

Simone Collins: Yeah. So in other words with progressives it's all or nothing.

With conservatives it's a la carte case by case. Yeah, it's

Malcolm Collins: a la carte, whereas progressives are all or nothing.

Which pushed these individuals further and further into conservative audiences and conservative communities. But then [00:17:00] some big things happened. So Sarah Hader had this story on her podcast and I thought it was very telling.

It was a story. Of, from her perspective, when they were doing an episode on who's black science guy, Neil deGrasse Tyson, right? And he's been just like totally pro, like, all of the insane trans stuff that's happening now that just the science doesn't back.

Simone Collins: I

Malcolm Collins: point out that 2023 study that, now we know that out of 11 year olds who are gender non conforming, By the time they're 23 more than 9 in 10 is completely comfortable with their gender but likely just gay.

And so what that means is that by the data, about 9 in 10 people who we are transitioning, we are basically chemically castrating. 9 out of 10 gay kids, for every one trans person, we're quote unquote saving.

Like that is, yikes, we know this now we live in a post cast report era, things are different now.

But a lot of people are just not up to date with the data, right? Or they willfully ignore the data. And what she said, Was it was [00:18:00] really interesting to see these people who like Neil deGrasse Tyson, she would have considered an ally in the early atheist days. And the community basically split into two groups.

There was one community that just was looking for the truth.

Simone Collins: And

Malcolm Collins: there was another community that just wanted to dunk on conservatives and Republicans. And you realize who these two communities were, pretty quickly, right? Which was the community that just wanted to dunk on conservatives. They are now this, Neil deGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye the Science Guy or, you know who these people are, right?

They are totally detached from reality and the stuff they're seeing now, which is a conservative religion.

Simone Collins: Now people

Malcolm Collins: might be like, yeah, but These early online atheists, they weren't really the core birthing place of the modern conservative movement. Conservative base, like online base. And here I would say one, I just think you're wrong.

You just need to [00:19:00] talk to many online conservatives. That's where a lot of them converted to the mainstream conservative ideology today. But two, You think of these individuals as having static views and they didn't have static views. Many of them became increasingly conservative as time went on. And so we need to talk about why that happened.

So it happened for a few reasons. One, they began to, they would just side with whatever movement was more rational at the time, right? That was their idea, right? The men's right movement was much more justified given the statistics during the time when it was growing than the women's. movement or the feminist movement, right?

And the men's right movement also was a core birthing place of modern conservative culture. So a lot of these individuals, they switched from anti feminist content to men's right adjacent content, which again made them part of this early birthing part of the red pill, the MGTOW, the et cetera communities, right?

So it may not [00:20:00] have been the initial figures in this community, but it was people who were weaned on their content or who were mimicking their type of content. But then, you had the secondary thing that was happening during this period. And I think what's her name? The one who you were talking about, the Muslim who was one of the, original poor horsemen of the of the Atheist movement, who she wasn't actually at the conference.

So she's often called the fifth horseman, but she was supposed to be who converted to Christianity. And she was originally a Muslim, de converted, then converted to Christianity. Is she? Hold

Simone Collins: on. I don't know I just know that on Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a critic of Islam and yeah. Writing in a column in November 2023, Ali announced her conversion to the Christian faith, claiming That in her view, the Judeo Christian tradition is the only answer to the problems of the modern world. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So she said something about why people were like you grew up a Muslim.

Like, why did you convert to Christianity? Instead of just being

Simone Collins: atheist,

Malcolm Collins: like, [00:21:00] why did you first try Christianity when you started praying to God? Because she had this. depressed period and then she prayed to God and she, she felt that she was saved. So why did you do that? And she goes, of all these years, when I was attacking and preaching against religious individuals the Muslims, would send me messages about how they were going to kill me.

The Christians would send me messages about how they hoped they were praying for me and they were praying for me to be saved and they wanted me, and this is actually true of most of the atheist community. When they were attacking the Christians and then when their value system started to align more with the Christians, they were very open to be friends with these people because these people had always been.

Nice to them, even when there was conflict, whereas the opposite side group had always been very antagonistic. The wokes send us death threats constantly. We say stuff against [00:22:00] conservatives. They never almost never. Occasionally we'll get something because, we're pro IVF and stuff like that.

That's mean, but we don't really get death threats from,

Simone Collins: No, I don't think we've ever. Received really mean comments from anyone aside from people who, if you click through to their profiles, if they have a public one or something associated with their identity are totally progressive. Yeah.

The only thing that maybe sometimes comes up is criticism of our using IVF for genetic testing from religious conservatives, but that criticism is typically not an ad hominem. Attack even so yeah,

Malcolm Collins: no, it's like specific like logical argument. Yeah,

Simone Collins: or this is not the work of the lord You know that kind of thing and it's yeah, it's Do you not?

Yeah, but

Malcolm Collins: they're not relevant here. But what it means is I don't like maybe progressives don't fully understand this or they're just, their culture is so toxic because it's so built into attacking each other [00:23:00] was in their culture. But when you constantly attack somebody who is trying to take a middle ground, you end up pushing them further and further to the other side and they become a more and more open.

To genuinely reconsidering their positions. You might have been an old atheist. You might not have had a strong stance on abortion to begin with, but you knew the approved stance was abortion is fine in pretty much all circumstances. Now you've been attacked over and over again, and we'll do a video on our changing stance on abortion over time.

And you're like, you know what? I should probably go back to the evidence on that. The nice guys seem to be really against this abortion thing. In most of the circumstances that it's being used today. Maybe I should learn more about this. And then they do, and they're like, Oh I agree with that position.

And here is one of the big things that shifted along this period as well. And I think that this is indicative partially of why the new conservative base is so different from the old [00:24:00] conservative base. The old conservative base was primarily a theocratic base. That's what they were interested with, theocratic and sort of plural clutching.

The new conservative base is a mixture of two communities. It is this original I call them caustic atheists, i. e. atheists who are really interested in debating people doing stupid things, who are interested in what is the technically correct answer? And a

Simone Collins: no. To your point, Because they're seeking out people who are doing stupid things.

I want to be technically correct and have an easy win. And I know I can win. I want a guaranteed win with no effort. It's pretty gross. So a mix of this

Malcolm Collins: community no, but they also are interested in technical correctness. This is why, for example, you have problems with people like, Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens or other like mainstream atheists, even Richard Dawkins unfortunately from the perspective of wokeism.

Having wrong policy positions, having wrong [00:25:00] positions about the way the government should be structured because it turns out that if you're just interested in what's rational, you eventually realize actually capitalistic systems seem to work much better for everyone involved in socialist systems.

So let's move to those systems. So there was a mixture of this earlier let's be technically correct. And Not the old fuddy duddy Christians who were afraid of technology and afraid of change, but the theologically alive Christians, I would call them, the people who are having this active theological discussion.

And so you got a melding of these two communities And that produced the type of conservatism that led to Trump, where individuals were like, Hey, we need to stop. It doesn't really make sense for people in this country for us to be focused on so much on what's going on overseas anymore, let's stop that.

Or it's also why the party. In terms of it's if you talk to the Republican base, if you go to these rallies, they are often much more, and I didn't realize how socialist the conservative elite class [00:26:00] was. Oh my gosh, seriously. They are much more libertarian and they're much more libertarian in part because it works.

And now you're having a weird. sort of circle back to the beginning thing. I don't know if you've heard some of the controversy of Richard Dawkins, for example, bemoaning the fall of the church in his country where he has been complaining a lot and saying it's really sad that we don't have, the cathedrals are being turned into mosques in England, and he's but, If you don't have people going anymore, then they're not tithing and they can't afford the buildings anymore.

And this is all in a way downstream of his movement. He hasn't come to the perspective of converting yet, but he has come to the perspective, which most of the original Atheist community has now, which is unavoidable, is our society was better with religion specifically Christianity.

And that It was to some extent a mistake to be attacking these [00:27:00] communities and that a lot of the societal problems that we have right now are downstream of the deconversion of people. However, there is not a version of Christianity that they feel comfortable with. Returning to because they're just like, but I can't believe it.

So for example, when that whatever her name was, Muslim lady was talking with Richard Dawkins about her conversion to Christianity. And, she was talking about how she was depressed and noodle sidle and she wanted to she was looking for something and she finally had a psychologist.

It was like, have you tried praying? And then after this like heartwarming story and the crowd has cheered, he's yeah, but do you really believe that Mary became pregnant when she was a virgin? And it's they, Because they don't have an iteration of Christianity that can conform with this Ultralogical perspective on reality.

They're like, I don't, I want to rejoin. I want to believe And this is really what the tracked series project is about So for anyone who's weird here and doesn't know you go to technopyrithon. com [00:28:00] And see a summary of like our religious beliefs and the tracks that we're putting out, but we are trying to synthesize One, something that I believe is true so it is something that we synthesize through work, but it is also, when I was originally creating it, before I realized, oh my god, I think this is actually true it was a hypothesis in creating the type of religious system that That my kids could continue to believe even in this secular world, even with all of this information out there.

And then only while I was constructing it was, I was like, Oh s**t I can't explain how some of this stuff is true other than the God is real in this system is true. And I don't come at that from like revelation or anything like that. I'm literally coming at that from logic. Like I plausibly can't come up with another explanation for how this worked out this way.

That is. And if you're looking for the one on this you can go to the episode of why we believe in a techno puritan god Which goes over like why we believe this is stuff that I just found implausible From any other metric. But I do think [00:29:00] that's where we're going to see a lot of this community go is back towards these religious traditions because unfortunately if you're taking this logical contrarian stance Now is in modern wokest society.

It's going to push you back to towards religious systems. But I'm wondering, what are your thoughts on this? Or do you remember this? As it was happening or like thinking of this is it's weird that all these ex atheist people are now like the most popular conservative YouTubers. Do you, Or anti feminist is what it was originally, and then it became conservative.

Simone Collins: Anti feminist? Yeah so what I think it was more, what it feels like to me, at least, is that these were always rebel, anti establishment people online. And they didn't always move in the direction of conservative or anti progressive. In fact, some people who were avid members of the church of the subgenius and who loved being irreverent online [00:30:00] remained in the progressive atheist camp and continue to be progressive online.

I just think that it happens to be that a lot of the anti establishment people who were effective players online also became conservative. So my larger answer isn't that. all of the people who were atheists online originally became conservative influencers. It's instead that both the conservative and progressive influencers online are prolific, active debaters and flame war lovers online who started out as people very likely to engage in anti atheist debates.

Malcolm Collins: I hear what you're saying, but I'm less interested in the specific individuals other than how the communities developed. Because a lot of people will be like, oh there are a few now fringe players in the online conservative movement. They weren't the birthing place of that movement. And so what I'm trying to walk people through, who didn't live through this period of internet [00:31:00] history, is early internet history was Online atheists versus a mostly offline fundee crowd evangelical crowd.

Then it became feminists versus anti feminists. The anti feminist community, most of the leading figures in it were either raised within or got their initial start. in the atheist fights on the atheist side. Then it moved from feminist to anti feminist to the woke community and the red pill MGTOW community, and the pickup artist community. And so this the community that then was the Anti feminist community became that community, but it had originally been seeded and created by this atheist community.

Simone Collins: I think there's another element of this which is the one unifying factor of a lot of the groups that you're describing here, the rebel groups specifically.

So the atheists and then the anti [00:32:00] feminists and then the anti woke people is that they typically started out. Or often started out in the enemy camp and then were cast out for some reason, sometimes for pretty egregious reasons. In the enemy

Malcolm Collins: camp?

Simone Collins: Yeah, in the enemy camp. So for example, people like Jesse Sinkle and Katie Herzog, the whole like Barry Weiss Free Press team.

Oh no, I

Malcolm Collins: strongly disagree with you. They

Simone Collins: started out as very progressive, working in progressive institutions.

Malcolm Collins: You're describing a modern phenomenon, but that wasn't what happened with this community. These individuals were not cancelled. They became conservative before they were cancelled. They became conservative before even the concept of cancellation existed.

They became conservative. So you've also got to remember GamerGate and everything like that. That was led by these former online atheist community. When this thing was happening, okay,

Simone Collins: these

Malcolm Collins: individuals weren't like, Oh, I broke X progressive [00:33:00] norm, which is something that happens, a lot of times you'll have these progressives.

It happens a lot. You then get thrown out from the progressive community. That is not what happened with these individuals. When they made the switch and I would say when they predominant, like the biggest part of the switch over happened was the transition from. Atheist content to anti feminist content.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that's so interesting. I guess I missed it. I wasn't paying attention.

Malcolm Collins: As soon as the transition to the anti feminist content happened the inevitable pipeline of, as the woke community rose, anti woke content. And now if you're an anti woke content producer, you are a conservative. The thing is that the anti woke community online.

Was much bigger than the conservative intellectual community online. In fact, that community online almost didn't really exist. It was also much bigger than any of the individual religious denominations online, because yes, they did exist online and [00:34:00] were advocating for their positions, but they would often advocate within communities that were specific to their religious traditions.

Now, this has changed over time. Recently, there has been the rise of the, I think I call it, pan religious YouTuber. But, i. e., that they just promote conservative religions regardless of what those religions are. But what's interesting is most of those individuals are like us and started in the atheist community.

Which is why they don't really care what religion an individual is because they are coming at religion without a team. And this is what like the only one I can really think of that started with a team is Paul VanderKley. But a lot of them that come at this come like for example, Jordan Peterson.

Jordan Peterson is able to take this pan religious perspective because he doesn't really have a faith himself. He's just I promote all religions. And he's very downstream of this internet atheist thing that was the community that he was appealing to and [00:35:00] it turned out that, and I think that this is another thing, that people who, at the end of the day, were really just promoting their own religious community's value system, always did a very bore job within the granular world of the internet, building audiences outside of their tradition.

Simone Collins: Oh, okay.

Malcolm Collins: If you were like a Catholic YouTuber, you would build the Catholic tradition because what you were trying to do is move towards a more Catholic value system. Or if you were a Lutheran YouTuber, if you were a So

Simone Collins: you're going increasingly niche, like you're Limiting the reach of your message.

Malcolm Collins: And if you try to reach out to be like a pan religious individual, then the other religious individuals you're talking to, they're going to be as interesting as debating you over theology as an atheist would be. Sure, yeah. Because, So that's what prevented these individuals from ever being leading figures.

Actually, it reminds me of a Ben Shapiro's complaint about you and [00:36:00] I becoming leading figures within the, or the leading figures within the pronatalist movement. And I think he was mad that his sister didn't become a leading figure of the pronatalist movement. I think that's what he expected.

They put all this money in. She clearly wants to be like pronatalist in her value system. She's been attacked as a pronatalist. by progressives. Why isn't she being elevated? And it's because ultimately we were not coming at this from a team perspective to begin with. And therefore we were able to speak on this issue in a way that resonated with many more people than the way that they were speaking about this issue.

Their way about this issue was just frankly, it was tainted by their own community background. If it's why are you having a lot of kids? It's Oh, I'm doing it for these Jewish reasons. And it's what does that have to do with anyone else? What does that have to do with me, Christian person?

What does that have to do with me, secular person? Whereas when we were coming at this we started from a purely secular perspective. And so we were like, these are the ways that make sense for everyone, regardless of your [00:37:00] religion or faith system. And then when we went. Back into a harder religious system and we built that for our family and then ended up believing that happened to us Because we were genuinely like what's best for our kids?

What's the system that's best for our kids and we built that and we ended up believing it. But When I think a lot of people they look at us and they're like you don't you know, really believe right? And what i've noticed is the only people who say that are the christians you know i'll explain why You Because I think a lot of atheists who are interested in believing in a religious system when they look at our system, they're like in the same way where when Dawkins was talking to the other person, he goes, you don't really believe that, Jesus was born to a virgin.

He was like, oh, there's this logical inconsistency, which is the type of thing that would hang me up, right?

.

Whereas our system is just completely un fraught with this. And so you're not going to have, I think most atheists who look at it are like, yeah, no, I bet they really believe all of this.

Because it doesn't trigger any of the. I just [00:38:00] can't bite that as an atheist problems. That many of the other traditions do, which is why we call it a secular religious system. Which I think religious people are confused by, but atheists, when they look at it, they go, Oh, it's a materialist monist system that doesn't believe in things like souls, but believes in a God.

Okay, that's makes perfect sense. Like I can see why they would believe in that. Whereas religious people, I think are more like, you can't make something up and then end up believing it's true just because you found evidence that it's true, believing something requires faith. And I think that this is actually the difference.

Like we don't really have faith. I believe my system because I believe it explains things that I can't explain using any other world metric or any other, what is it? Like metaphysical system for understanding reality. Not because God came to me and talked to me or like it helped me out of this rough time or anything like that.

Like what's weird is we believe in our system and I think that many of these ACS who are reconverting, they believe [00:39:00] in these systems and they follow these systems. Almost in the way an atheist would without, and then after that they develop the blind passion, which I think the religious community has a trouble model. And I'm wondering why they have trouble modeling that could happen. It might be because for them so much. I can tell you a couple camps that I can understand why they can't believe it. One is the religious community. That's really. Only persuaded by the awe that these giant things like cathedrals and temples are able to inspire in them.

Like it's a very sort of emotional, like the ceremony and the cathedral and the antiquity, like that's What makes these things true in my mind and so it's really that they were persuaded through emotion rather than through logic and that is why the other is the group that was raised in a tradition and these individuals don't understand how you could convert into a tradition.

Because [00:40:00] they've just never done it. So they've never switched traditions. They've never deconverted from a tradition. Just the idea that you could can genuinely convert into something and believe it is surprising to them, especially if that thing doesn't have antiquity. They're like things that are true must have antiquity.

And we would argue our system is a derived system, but I would argue it's actually truer to the antiquity of Christianity, which has always been an evolving religion than many of the other forms of Christianity, which I see is. As lacking that because they're LARPing a stasis that didn't really exist.

But the other thing that I would point out here is I think that a problem that they have, oh, I would point out here with the antiquity. Is we even know from the biblical tradition. I always mention this but it is worth noting whenever the concept of antiquity comes up Because I know you know, not everyone watching has seen all their episodes we know anyone in the abrahamic tradition from the snake staff of moses That ended up being put in the temple and worshiped which was a form of idolatry not worshiped But it was prayed to you know in the same way people today pray to rogues [00:41:00] that it then was commanded by god that it was broken.

After 500 600 years of being there and the antiquity of a tradition doesn't mean that God approves of it. He's basically just waiting for you to figure out that what you're doing is idolatry. And some people never figure that out until he's finally screw it.

I'm sending, a messenger and people need to know that this is not okay what you're doing. And I do find that, most of the traditions I think have trended towards idolatry. And I actually think What? is the problem and what's prevented many atheists from fully returning to the faith is that most of the new faith systems which are trying to attract them are ultimately mystic systems and use mystical appeals.

And those are never going to be palatable to somebody who left religion for these logical inconsistency reasons. And I say who is buying into these mystic systems? I actually think the core groups is buying into these mystic perennialist systems are the, I guess I call them crystal worshipers.

They're the people [00:42:00] who left their original religion to For emotional reasons, like they were mean to gays or they didn't treat women well enough or they didn't allow women preachers which never would have pushed me out of a faith community. Now, again, I was raised in an atheist community, so that wasn't even a thing.

But something like my dad's question around the arc that would have pushed me out of a community. The thing that deconverted my dad's, I should say, like how I ended up becoming a deconverted person. Was he got in trouble for trying to figure out the logistics of how Noah's Ark could possibly have worked.

And kept all the animals alive. And he didn't like the magic answer. Because he's if magic's the answer, then why doesn't it say that there was magic in the story? That seems like a pretty big plot hole. Like why it's giving me like specifics on the sides of the boat But it doesn't talk about the magic that was making the food like it doesn't mention that they were in like embryos like some sort of i'm imagining like a jurassic park thing

[00:43:00] But anyway, do you have any final thoughts on this because people love to hear your ideas simone You are the star and I know in the future we're gonna have people who just go to the end for your Summations.

Simone Collins: I just find this really interesting. It's amazing to me how entire movements flourishing online can be totally missed by Me and huge other swaths of the you knew about the anti nudist

Malcolm Collins: movement, or did it just never catch your algorithm?

Simone Collins: It never really caught my algorithm, because why? I'm looking at cooking and fashion and decorating online or, even when I was in the Men's Rights Activist I got really into MGTOW and the Red Pill and Pickup Artistry subreddits back around when things like Gamergate were happening But Gamergate didn't really bleed into them.

They were talking about dating strategy. They were talking about building a better independent life and becoming better people. But they weren't really talking about the wider world. [00:44:00] And I just find it so fascinating how so many of these things can happen with only a small number of people really being aware of what's going on.

And I see that happen so much in other realms. Like you started out talking about NatCon. And going to this conference was so bizarre to me because these people were living in an extremely bounded world where everyone knew each other. Everyone kind of played with their own internal languages and internal networks and they read each other's stuff and they didn't really interact with the world outside of that.

And we see something similar with effective altruism and rationalism. And there are these worlds and they all are in different ways, definitely impacting the larger world and changing the way that society unfurls. But we don't, they don't really understand larger society. Larger society doesn't understand them.

And a lot of people are being affected by these various groups, by the political elite, by [00:45:00] rationalists and effective altruists, by men's right, or by, anti feminists or by atheists.

without understanding that they are being affected by them by not understanding who they are or by not understanding how they work. So it's like the blind leading the blind in a really interesting subcultural way. And I love that you are one of those few people that seems to be able to look from a higher level, down into the terrarium, that all of these different ecosystems And get a picture of how they're affecting each other and their blind spots while not necessarily being lost in any in particular.

I don't really consider you a member of any of these communities, but you are watching very carefully how they're interacting with each other, or really not. How they're affecting each other, how they interact within their own groups and it's just, it's fascinating.

Malcolm Collins: I love it when you talk because you always give me so many ideas.

So there was two things I wanted to mention. One that I thought was really interesting here is I was talking to a group of people at NatCon. So this was supposed to be like [00:46:00] the conservative intellectuals who are writing our bills. And I mentioned GamerGate 2, not only were they unaware of the Sweet Baby Inc controversy.

No surprise to me

Simone Collins: again, just exactly my point, right?

Malcolm Collins: Unaware of GamerGate 1. They were unaware. They are making national policy decisions And they are unaware of the core conservative progressive battles that have happened in the past decade. Not at all surprised. It was shocking to me personally. I was like,

Simone Collins: like you, you are in a different world.

I guess you're aware of what these distinct groups are doing, but you weren't aware before of the extent to which they didn't even know of each other's existence or norms or effect on broader society.

Malcolm Collins: Absolutely. Yeah. Like you thought they

Simone Collins: knew about each other.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I, yeah, that's that.

I thought that at least they were broadly aware that these other groups existed. And now that we are. Didn't we learn

Simone Collins: this though? Like when we first went into private equity and we started exploring other industries and we told them [00:47:00] things like, oh, I used to work in VC and now I'm in PE and they're like what's that?

They did not know what. VC was, or even if we called Adventure Capital, they wouldn't know what it was.

Malcolm Collins: Here's, here is something I wouldn't know. I went into the conference expecting this is what I say, I had a misunderstanding of the various groups, due to the Heritage Foundation, like they have the weird anti porn thing in the 20, Project 2024.

Heritage Foundation I went in expecting them to be one of the most gatekeepy and they were not at all. They are actually interested. I've been talking to them about putting on a conference for them to meet with online conservative influencers and build some connection there. And Heritage Foundation was like the most gung ho about this.

The people at the Heritage Foundation. They seem

Simone Collins: like really willing to play ball, which is surprising for an organization that's take away porn.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The people at the Heritage Foundation were out of all of the groups. I talked to by far the most willing to

Simone Collins: Learn from the outside

Malcolm Collins: world.

Learn from the outside world and learn how the Republican base had [00:48:00] moved to new ideas and passed where they are now. The other groups, and I'm not going to call it specific groups because I don't want to damage our ability to work with any of them in the future. But some of the other groups.

We're just like, when I pitched this idea, they go, why would we care what the base thinks? Like we are going to staff the white house. We are going to control policy. And it doesn't matter what the people who are voting for Trump want him to do. Our plan is a socialist Christian state. That was basically what they were pushing for.

Simone Collins: Wish you were. I'm not lying about this, but

Malcolm Collins: I

Simone Collins: was

Malcolm Collins: there too. I saw this.

Simone Collins: It

Malcolm Collins: happened. I wish it didn't happen. You even see this within the pronatalist movement. So like Lyman Stone, he wrote this manifesto that we'll do a full piece on. Where he's everyone needs to stop. listening to the Collinses because their form of pronatalism doesn't involve socialism, just because socialism doesn't work.

And he, he lies through the moon to say it works, but we've gone over the stats. It just doesn't work. It was so funny. Even at the conference, like we were at a table with a bunch of Heritage Foundation guys, they're like, [00:49:00] why would he write that? He does know it doesn't work, right?

And I'm like, yeah, but he is just a, when I say it doesn't work, like cash handouts just do not seem to work. He will not stand any form of perinatalism that is not first and foremost socialist in its nature. And he'll even

Simone Collins: point to data that indicates that cash handouts don't work and be like, Don't you see?

This proves that cash handouts work, which is

Malcolm Collins: Yeah it's almost interesting. He is a socialist before he's even a Christian. It is wild. I don't understand but what I've learned is that there's a lot of people like him in the conservative movement. They are Christian. Yeah, we thought it was,

Simone Collins: we thought it was him being weird and it's not him being weird.

Malcolm Collins: No, yeah they're in this conservative intellectual group. There are eight. And when I say socialist, I mean bordering on Marxist. And I say he borders on a Marxist who are just happen to also be Christians. And so they think the way that they create their Marxist Christian utopia. is through the Republican Party.

But if you're wondering how these people gain so much power, this is another thing I've realized, the reason they gain so much power is I think that they're the only conservatives. There's a lot of reasons a person may be a conservative. But [00:50:00] one is, you held very strict religious values, but you're also a Marxist, and so the Democrats just won't talk to you, basically.

Is that, These individuals are the only ones who can stand bureaucracies and work their way up through bureaucracies because other conservatives who actually, understand the damage that bureaucracies and large government does just don't stay in those departments long enough. And so these departments in this sort of upper conservative bureaucratic class are actually, christian Marxist. And they keep trying to infiltrate the departments. And I think that Trump needs to be incredibly watchful of this. This form of Christian Marxism will destroy his presidency. The public does not want banned pornography. Okay. They don't want banning IVF which was part of the thing for project 2025.

I was like, why would you do that? Why would you, that's not like the conservative position. What? That's 10 percent of the conservative base wants that. Like what? Why are you trying to obviously this is going to damage Trump. But I think that they can update and they can get better.

And I'm really excited about that. [00:51:00] Specifically the heritage foundation. So you can update more with what the conservative base actually wants. Now the final thing I was going to note, which I hadn't noted until you were talking and I was like, Oh my God, like great idea here is I had mentioned that women are much more spiritual than men on a historic basis.

Like you see this in much more religious. When women deconvert, they much more likely are going to become some form of spiritualist. They're going to become a Wiccan, they're going to become a spiritualist, they're going to do little spells, they're going to become pop culture spiritualists. There's lots of types of spiritualists they're going to become.

They are very unlikely to become hardline atheists. Whereas when men deconvert, they're much more likely to become hardline atheists. And so the atheist movement was always overwhelmingly male, which also meant that as the internet became more of a fight of women versus men the witches the deconverts who went to the women community all just went to the progressive sphere.

But then the hardcore atheists. Were mostly [00:52:00] autistic women and men. And they then intrinsically identified more with the men's rights movement and reg pill and mgtow and stuff like that. And then the modern online conservative movement is very much, I call it the mig the red pill diaspora, because those movements basically died, split up, spread out, and that created the seed bed of what is now the online conservative culture, which is also I think the culture of.

The active part of the conservative base, like the intellectually active part of the conservative base where the, where conversation is still happening. Yeah.

Simone Collins: That makes sense.

Here's actually a second part of this weird phenomenon that I didn't get to in this video, but I want to cover briefly. , women when contrast it was men have historically. That you considered the much more religious gender. , and , they just seem hard coded to be more spiritual in the way that they relate to reality. When men relieve their traditional religious structures, they often become atheist. Whereas [00:53:00] when women leave their traditional religious structures. They often become Wickens that were pagans or some other form of spiritualist tradition. Well, this created a very interesting phenomenon that meant that the online atheist community wasn't disproportionately male.

So when you begin to have the battle between men and women in the anti-feminist, , birth feminist debate, , the atheist community was already predispositioned to fall into sort of the red pill side of that debate. In addition, because the atheist presumably is looking for what is true. We're as the, , you know, Wiccan or pagan is just using spirituality to, , for themselves and sort of self masturbate. , there isn't any reason for the Wiccan pagan to go back to religion, but there is a reason for the online atheist to go back to religion.

If they can find a logical structure for doing that. , which is, I think, why you've seen a lot of reconversion on that side, but [00:54:00] not on the other side. , another really interesting thing that I noted when I was talking with some people is if you look at the four Hertz men of the atheist movement, all except for Sam. , have since basically said this was a bad idea and religion is good and it was wrong to roll religion back.

Malcolm Collins: I love you to death, Simone. You are amazing. Any final thoughts?

Simone Collins: No, let's go get the kids.

Malcolm Collins: I will go get them. Don't you worry.

What do you want to eat tonight? Or what are you thinking of cooking? Do

Simone Collins: you want to do hot dogs?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I'd love to do hot dogs. Or do you want to do ravioli?

Simone Collins: Or pizza? Or potstickers?

Malcolm Collins: What I'm gonna do is hot dogs and some tomato soup if I could do that. And I've got the cut up shallots, so I can use those for sprinkles and Oh, but the one thing I don't have is, we don't have any sauces for the hot dogs.

Simone Collins: We have a billion sauces.

Malcolm Collins: No, they're all like cooking sauces now. Like the last time I checked the fridge, somebody had dumped like all the

Simone Collins: Somebody? I don't dump your sauces. That's [00:55:00] sacrilegious. I do not. Regardless of expiration date.

Malcolm Collins: You are so sweet to me. You know my things. I would never. I would never.

I dumped them, but I just haven't thought to re get them yet. I might go pick up the kids and then swing by Redner's and get like a sauce.

Simone Collins: Okay. How many hot dogs do you want? Two? Two. How many buns do you want?

Malcolm Collins: Three. Wow. Because I also want some tomato soup.

Simone Collins: So you're going to dip the bun in the soup?

Malcolm Collins: I'm going to toast it. Or you're going to toast it. Toast it with butter. Toasted bread goes really well with tomato soup.

Simone Collins: Oh, okay. There we go then. I'll get a bunch of bread out. Please do not forget the yoto player. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Get in the kitchen and cook me some food, you disgusting animal of a woman.

And you get the yoto player?

Simone Collins: Yes. Okay, I love you. I love you. I'm gonna take a little while to get down because she has a major

Malcolm Collins: Great section here. [00:56:00]

Simone Collins: Thanks for doing all this prep. You rock for that. It's so much work. And I just show up with a gassy baby.

Malcolm Collins: You are amazing and fans want to hear more from you. I've got to remember at the end of episodes to have you do a little spiel. Like I did that one time because fans really like that.

Simone Collins: Oh my diatribe. Simone's corner where she. I get angry about something because she has PMS again. Ha. People are

Malcolm Collins: like, oh, Simone's spitting truth. That's what they always say.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: spitting. Everybody loves you, Simone. You're the hero of the show. You're the smart one. That's been confirmed.

Again,

Simone Collins: because. I keep my mouth shut. Okay. Do you want me to

Malcolm Collins: introduce myself? Like, all good women should. Anyway, hold on. Alright. Get started here.

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