Transcription
This is San Francisco. The same city [music] that was founded by Catholic missionaries was about to host the first public strip club in America.
>> Well, that's what's being said that we're living in a day of the sex revolution.
Now, before we go any further, I need to show you this chart. This is called an Overton window. You've probably heard of it before, but it basically shows you the mechanics of what things any given society considers acceptable. There's a right wing and on the other side there's a left wing. And on each side, you've got things that are unthinkable. Then as the window shifts, those things become radical, then acceptable, then popular. And finally, in the center, policy. Watch what happens when you apply that to sexuality. In the 1940s, things like bikinis, women in the workplace, corn, fornication, and homosexuality sat way outside that window. Unthinkable, immoral, and illegal. Fast forward just a few decades and every single one of those things not only moved inside the window, they became the center of it. And it's not just that we made more room in the window for all these new things, but what used to be considered policy now got squeezed out of that window and became radical, unthinkable, and illegal. The truth is that while we have seen societies change in the past, we have never seen anything turn a full 180° in such a short time frame. So the question is, how did the window move that fast? That's what today's story is about. I've been tasked with investigating the sexual revolution. And for the longest time, I just couldn't seem to fully wrap my head around this topic.
[music] Why did we suddenly abandon Christian morality in society after almost two millennia of it working? A world where I think all of us can admit things just in many ways looked so much better than now. You see happy faces. You hear church bells, echoing hope, something to look forward to. You smell the warm meal your mother cooked you as you walked home from school.
[music] You taste the comfort of stability of belonging somewhere in society and you feel that life has a rhythm and a purpose. The [music] truth that we all have to face ourselves with is that Christianity is the moral foundation of this type of society. Let's talk about the Bible. So, in order to understand the sexual revolution and why we went from women wanting to be stay-at-home moms to them counting partners by the dozens, we first have to understand the foundations of the world that came before it. The old western world relied on two things for its principle. Scripture, which we have right here, and church tradition, which to us Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and some Protestants, is the word of God and the teaching authority that can give us the right interpretation of scripture. Human sexuality was understood as a sacred gift from God, something only to be shared when a man and a woman promised themselves in marriage. There was an unspoken hierarchy, God, family, community, and country in that order. And it wasn't perfect, but it was coherent and people knew who they were, where they belonged, and what they were working towards. Even the culture reflected that order. Music carried hope, and cinema upheld virtue. Advertisements didn't sell rebellion. They simply sold responsibility. And there was a shared understanding that morality wasn't a matter of taste, but of truth. That discipline and restraint weren't oppressive. They were sacred. And for a time, it seemed unshakable. A civilization that had endured wars, built cities, and conquered despair, now resting in peace, confident that the worst was behind it. But it wouldn't stay like this for very long. In fact, a massive coverup is about to take place here, like a deer in the crosshairs of a perfect headshot. This society wouldn't even know what hit them. Except it wasn't a perfect head shot. It was more aimed at between the legs. The year was 1945. On the surface, everything looked perfect. The war was over. The heroes had come home. The factories were running again, and the economy was doing pretty well. And everyone could finally breathe again without exhaling the metallic taste of gunpowder. But that's exactly when things hit. You see, there's an old saying that the corruption of the best is the worst. And that's what makes the sexual revolution so tragic, but also so mysterious. The more I dig into it, the more it feels like the sexual revolution wasn't an accident at all, but in fact was very calculated. Unlike the central intelligence owned journalists that we're going to expose in this video, my journalism is sponsor-free. And that's because I'm committed to the best independent journalism on YouTube from a traditional Catholic and apostolic perspective, diving into topics that most other Catholic journalists are simply afraid to cover. Now, each episode here takes weeks and lots of resources to produce, and it's funded entirely by you, so your engagement matters. Like this video, drop a comment, and share it with someone who needs to see and hear the truth. And hit subscribe. If you want to go further, please support me at buy me a coffee.com/longsofa, or check out the merch store. Also, something new that I'm doing is that if you support with $50 a month or more, you will be credited as a producer on my videos with real input on future episodes. Back to the plot. But on this channel, I don't like to speculate. So, I decided to do what I usually do on this channel, and that's to reverse engineer the entire story and make it clearly understandable to everybody. And after probably about 100 hours plus of research, I finally cracked the code to what, and more importantly, who made the sexual revolution a revolution. This is why the sexual revolution was way worse than you thought.
[music] It becomes a little bit easier to understand when we wipe the makeup off of this story because this is all a load of crap. The world that seemed pure, stable, and Christian wasn't as innocent as it looked on the surface. Faith still filled the air, but was starting to sound hollow, and church pews were full. Yet, hearts were half empty, and morality had become sort of this trick of puppetry, something that you performed, not something that you really believe deep down inside. If you were faced with the decision of life and death, the post-war dream had given people safety, but also lots of sedation. And for the first time, comfort wasn't a privilege. It was simply expected. The irony is that while America looked like the picture of moral order, it was already drifting. The industrial boom had made fathers absent and mothers exhausted, and suburban life, once a symbol of family unity, became a slow burning isolation chamber. It's not that people stopped believing in God overnight, but they just started believing more in themselves. And when [music] self replaces God, truth becomes preference and virtue becomes something you wear. And this was the perfect setup for a revolution. The question is though, who planted the seeds? And why was society so ready to let them grow? And what were the motivations behind it? Before we begin to peel this onion, we have to understand and get to know the soil that it was originally planted on. So, the United States was built on two very different ideas, and they've been trying to live together ever since. On one side was Protestant moral culture, which by the way is different from Catholic moral culture, and we'll get to that in a bit. But it was [music] serious, disciplined, and built on the belief that freedom only works when people behave. And on the other side was enlightenment liberalism. An idea or I should say a collection of ideas that came [music] from Europe full of talk about reason, rights and liberty but always kept God separate from the conversation. And between those two forces were people called the deists. Men who believed in a distant creator but rejected divine revelation. They liked some of the morals of Christianity just not the church that came with it. And a lot of these people were anti-papacy and [music] anti-bishopric. And the founding fathers read the Bible, but they also read John Locke. And John Locke was basically the guy who taught the founding fathers how to sound smart without mentioning God too much. He was an English philosopher who lived long before America existed. And he said that everyone has natural rights like life, liberty, and prosperity just for being human. And if that sounds familiar, it should. When you hear life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that is basically John Locke's idea. He gave the founding fathers a way to talk about freedom using reason instead of revelation. The problem is that made things kind of awkward because in Christianity, goodness and morality don't really make sense at all without God. So, America ended up mixing faith and philosophy in a way that looked solid on paper but would start to crack later on. Basically, the conversation between the founding fathers went something like this. All men are created equal under God, right? Let's keep it vague. Endowed by their creator. So, we're depending on people to just behave themselves. Yeah, what could possibly go wrong? Well, turns out literally everything. Adams himself even warned, "Our Constitution was made only for immoral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other." But hey, people were moral, right? So, the system should work, right? Well, for a while, it actually did. And America's moral framework, largely Catholic and Protestant, still shaped public life. People didn't just fear God, they feared dishonor. And one of the strongest defenses against moral decay came in the form of law. In 1873, a man named Anthony Comstock convinced Congress to pass the Comstock laws. Federal bans on mailing or distributing obscene materials. That meant no pornographic books, no contraception, no erotic art, nothing that corrupted public virtue. And Comstock was mocked as a prude by some. But he saw something most didn't. That once vice became entertainment, civilization would begin to rot from within. And for decades, America's cultural backbone held firm. Liberty still meant self-mastery and not self-indulgence. And morality wasn't a private opinion, it was still regarded as public duty. But if the first crack in America's foundation was philosophical, born in 1776, the next one came just a century later. And it came dressed as progress. The late 1800s saw the rise of what we now call first-wave feminism. On paper, it was about equality or egalitarianism, the right to vote, to be educated, to participate in public life. But under the surface, it started to erode something far deeper. The moral distinction between men and women that Christianity had built civilization on. Before this, society understood that men and women were equal in dignity, but different in duty. Men were protectors, providers, and spiritual heads of the home. Women were lifegivers, nurturers, and the moral heart of the family. And together, they mirrored the divine order, head and heart, authority and love. But the first wave movement subtly changed that narrative. It reframed the home as not a vocation, but as a prison. It told women that motherhood was bondage and that the workplace was liberation from that. It was the seed of a much deeper deception, that freedom meant sameness, and the consequences of that showed up fast as more women left the home to find themselves. Family cohesion weakened. Child rearing began to shift from mothers to institutions. And the domestic virtues that once anchored communities, modesty, patience, and service, slowly became objects of mockery. And this [music] was the next crack in the wall. The moral groundwork softening just before the cultural storm of the 20th century. A century that would test whether freedom without a purpose could survive at all.
Then came the movies and movies changed literally everything. Now this is probably the most important and compelling part of this whole story for me and the moment in my research where I really had that aha moment. That light bulb just turned on because this part really exposes the blueprint in broad daylight. When the film industry started booming in the early 1900s, it wasn't ran by Christians as most other things were at the time. The new moguls of Hollywood, men like Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, and the Warner Brothers were Jewish and secular entrepreneurs, often borrowing from powerful banking families to finance what were then called talking pictures.
[music] And they had a completely different morality than the Christian order here in America, or rather the absence of one. Because basically, these guys said, "Okay, we know that sex sells, but we also know society isn't exactly too friendly to the sexual stuff at the moment, but let's just see what we can get away with here." And it didn't take long for the Catholic Church to notice this and to issue strong warnings to the filmmakers pushing the boundaries because by the 1930s, even with all of these laws in place, you already saw themes of sexuality, crime, and rebellion and clergy mockery creeping into film. Movies where priests or bishops were made to seem silly or hypocritical were no longer rare. So, the Catholic Church, led by then Cardinal Dennis Doherty of Philadelphia, fought back, and they fought back hard. They created what was called the Legion of Decency, a national Catholic movement that organized mass boycotts against immoral films. And it worked. Under pressure from both the church and lawmakers, Hollywood very begrudgingly adopted something called the Hays Code, a moral rubric that governed every movie produced in America from 1934 to 1965. And these immoral filmmakers basically said, "All right, we will accept these restrictions because we owe tons of money to the banks for these movies that we're supposed to produce, and we really have no other choice, but we're not doing this because we agree with the Catholic Church or Christian morality. So, don't get it twisted." For over 30 years, no film could show nudity, adultery, homosexuality, or ridicule of the clergy. And you know what? Those three decades produced some of the most beloved and enduring films in history, such as these. But then, like all things built on shaky ground, it started to crumble. The film producers had a problem. They knew that sexuality sold and that there was so much money to be made and control to be had if they could only get their porn into the everyday lives of American citizens so they could begin to build habits. But the barricade of the Catholic Church and the Hays Code stood in the way and theaters were strictly regulated. So there was no way to cut corners at this time. If only they could short circuit this somehow and find a way to become direct to consumer. And so they did. The invention and spread of the television solved this problem. In the year 1950, only 10 to 15% of Americans had a television in their home. But by 1960, that figure had spiked to 85%. Slowly, families began to buy multiple televisions, one for every floor, even one for the kids to use unsupervised.
[music] And at this time, there were three main networks that controlled almost every TV channel available. And those are ABC, NBC, and CBS, which were all closely tied to US intelligence agencies that very surprisingly used them as vessels for disseminating whatever information they saw fit. And that's where something called Operation Mockingbird comes in, or at least what's believed to have been its broader influence. Listen, I'm always highly skeptical about absolutist claims about intelligence operations or the CIA. Not because I think that the government is lovely and trustworthy and we should just buy everything they say. No, but because I also know that while the CIA spends a lot of money on running operations, they also spend an equal amount of time and money covering their tracks as any secret intelligence agency would do, you would imagine. So, we ought to treat these documents with a grain of arenic. I mean, [music] salt. So, we know that parts of Operation Mockingbird are declassified and publicly acknowledged through the US Senate's Church Committee investigations in the 1970s. We know that the CIA really did cultivate covert relationships with journalists and media figures during the Cold War. But beyond the facts in printed letters, there's also the pattern. The fallacy that I see most journalists make when discussing this topic is only relying on written word while ignoring phenomenology or the phenomena or how things happen, the domino effects completely or vice versa. Evidence suggests that by the late 1940s and 50s, a network of at least 400 sympathetic editors, columnists, and even Hollywood producers were promoting stories that aligned with approved social and political values. Pro-American, anti-communist, and increasingly secular. Whether every outlet was directly on the CIA's payroll or not, the cultural effect was the same. Dissenting voices were marginalized and compliant ones were amplified. This tactic, giving minority viewpoints massive airtime until they appeared mainstream, is known as astroturfing, a form of psychological and social engineering that is still used in global politics today. It creates an illusion of consensus, convincing traditional majorities that they're alone. By the 1960s, as television overtook print and film, these networks had become deeply intertwined. CBS, NBC, major studios, and even university presses were beginning to be increasingly influenced, if not by direct funding, than by the same worldview shared by these agencies and think tanks that shaped American propaganda overseas. The line between entertainment and information kind of blurred at this point, and that's where the cultural gatekeepers finally began pushing their first major victories against the old moral order. At this point, it's important to note a phenomenon called deculturation. The slow uprooting of people from their moral, cultural, and religious foundations. Even as Hollywood was still bound by the Hays Code, the major studios had already shifted strategy. They knew that they couldn't openly promote sexual immorality yet. So, they took a subtler approach. They started creating idols. Rather than attack Christian morality head-on like they originally intended, the industry began reshaping the imagination of the West, not through politics, but through personalities. Media personalities. People stopped admiring saints and started worshiping celebrities.
[music] The spotlight moved from the sacred to the sensational and soon a new kind of priesthood emerged. The rise of celebrity culture in the 1940s and 50s. Figures like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and especially Elvis Presley turned entertainment into a form of moral education or indoctrination.
[music] Except now that education was teaching the opposite of virtue. Elvis's music wasn't just new. It was rebellious and [music] even erotic. His dance moves were condemned by churches and banned from TV close-ups for being too suggestive. But in a total blow to the existing Hays Code, which banned nudity and immorality, in 1965, the film The Pawnbroker, produced by the same financiers who once helped build Hollywood, became the first mainstream American movie to show female nudity by showing bare breasts. The Catholic Church protested, but they were in the middle of an ecumenical council and busy dealing with other things. And by then, it was too late. The culture had shifted.
[music] The media had secularized. The Legion's influence practically gone on the ground level. And once the moral guardrails were lifted, everything sped downhill and fast. By 1973, hardcore porn wasn't hiding in alleyway theaters anymore. It was responsible for the top three grossing films of that [music] year. Most notably, Deep Throat, The Devil, and Miss Jones, and Behind the Green Door. These all made millions sitting alongside Disney and Coppola. America had become the first nation in history to turn sin into cinema. In 1976, something very symbolic happened.
[music] And it's interesting cuz it's exactly 200 years after America was founded [music] in 1776. Woody Allen, a neurotic filmmaker who built his career mocking love, faith, and fidelity, appeared on the cover of Time magazine labeled as America's genius. And just two years later, both John D. Rockefeller III and Nelson Rockefeller, the last of the old Protestant elite, were dead. Their class was called the WASPs or the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who had once tried to preserve a sense of civic virtue was replaced by a new ruling class, secular hedonists and motivated by profit over prudence. From my research, this really seemed to be the moment where everything solidified. The moment that the moral order had officially been dethroned and entertainment had become the new religion that was popularly accepted. So if we look at the Overton window now, you have got hardcore porn going from absolutely unthinkable, skipping over radical and acceptable to becoming popular. All within 8 years of the release of the Pawnbroker movie, which violated the Hays Code, but we're still missing a lot of important details. All the while, we were busy dealing with movies becoming increasingly sexualized and moral degeneracy sneaking into the minds of families. That distraction held the door open for another several radical new ideas to sneak into the popular section along with it. This time, one specifically aimed at women. Let's run back to the year 1946. World War II is over and the world is rebuilding. Soldiers are coming home and women who had spent years working in factories were being told it was time to go back to the kitchen. But something had already changed. First-wave feminism, originally sold as a movement for equality, had quietly shifted the moral compass of the West. It told women that fulfillment didn't come from family or faith, but from independence. And while some of its early goals may have sounded noble, the deeper effect was this. It cracked the idea that men and women had distinct God-given roles. And right on cue, the culture pounced. In Paris, a French automotive engineer named Louis Réard unveiled something that would shock the world. A swimsuit. So small and so scandalous that no professional model would agree to wear it. So he hired a stripper from the casino de Paris to come model it instead. He called it the bikini, named after a nuclear test site in the Pacific because he said it would cause an explosion. And he wasn't wrong. The crazy thing was the moral posturing and the gaslighting that followed to rationalize this radical shift in women's attire. Many men and women, both Christian and otherwise, were deeply uncomfortable with it. But almost overnight, anyone who objected was painted as an oppressor. So-called women's rights became the new slogan to sanctify immodesty. Those who upheld traditional Christian modesty were mocked, labeled as Puritans and prudes, and told that freedom meant flaunting the body. It was the perfect bait and switch. What was once seen as self-respect became repression. What was once shameful became empowerment, a complete inversion. At first, the newspapers called it obscene, and the Vatican condemned it outright. And even Western countries banned it from beaches. But behind the outrage, something deeper was happening. What used to be private became public. And what once was shameful became chic and fashionable. And that Overton window, well, imagine a rubber band that you just take and stretch and stretch and stretch. And eventually it will never return to its original size. And again, here is another example of the phrase, you give an inch, they take a mile. Over the next two decades, that seed would grow into pinup culture, Playboy, and Hollywood's obsession with sex appeal. And by the time the 1970s rolled around, what started as a liberation of women had become the sexualization of everything. And I know all of this so far seems super radical and super infuriating, but this is honestly nothing compared to what the philosophers and psychologists behind the sexual revolution envisioned for society. In fact, I'd argue that if they were still alive today, they would say, "We haven't gone far enough, not sexualized enough, and not radical enough."
>> And now, a page from our Sunday morning almanac, June 23rd, 1894, 125 years ago today, the day sex researcher Alfred Charles Kinsey was born in Hoboken, New Jersey.
>> First, we had Alfred Kinsey, who wasn't a theologian, a doctor, or even a psychologist. He started as a zoologist who studied wasps before receiving Rockefeller funding to study human sexuality. His 1948 book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, claimed that sexual acts once thought as deviant, including adultery, homosexuality, and even adult-minor relations, were far more common than anyone realized. And what did he conclude from all of this? Well, not that society's on a downward slope that needs to be corrected, shockingly, but that morality itself was the problem. Yes, this is the level of scholarship and gaslighting that we are talking about. What he didn't tell the public was that much of his data came from criminal and abusive sources, including convicted child predators.
[music] >> Many of Kinsey's findings and techniques remain controversial, including his occasional reliance on the accounts of admitted child abusers. Still, he's widely hailed as a trailblazer in a previously taboo field. But by framing this all as science, Kinsey made vice seem natural and restraint seem like oppression. His Kinsey scale taught Americans that sexuality was fluid. And by the 1950s, he was being hailed as a pioneer instead of a propagandist. Now pay attention because these guys just get worse and worse one after the other. Then came John Money, the psychologist who coined the term gender identity. He became famous for an experiment that should have ended his career. After a botched circumcision, a boy named David Reimer was raised as a girl under Money's supervision. Money claimed that the child could be molded into femininity through conditioning. In reality, he forced David and his twin [music] Brian to perform sexual acts on each other as part of therapy, and both brothers later tragically took their own lives. Yet, Money's writings became the foundation for modern gender theory. The idea that sex is a social construct and identity can be rewritten by willpower. To further illustrate the intellectual sickness that plagued academia across the Atlantic, a group of Marxist intellectuals from the Frankfurt school fled to the US during the rise of Hitler. Amongst them was Theodore Adorno who published The Authoritarian Personality in 1950. His central premise was that people who valued family, religion, and sexual restraint were psychologically predisposed to fascism. Now, it doesn't take a genius to see that that's a bunch of nonsense, but it was a devastating rhetorical trick. Overnight, traditional Christian virtue was pathologized and demonized. Their ideas filtered into psychology, sociology, and education, [music] and the seabed for the critical theory mindset that now undergirds and dominates the humanities. And if all of that wasn't bad enough, then came along Michel Foucault, the French homosexual philosopher who turned perversion into politics. He openly identified as a homosexual and in the late 1970s signed petitions calling for the abolition of France's age of consent laws. His view was simple and deadly. That power defines morality, not God. For him to be free was to transgress, to push every boundary. And though his personal life was deeply disturbed, his ideas went mainstream in universities by the 1990s, giving rise to the postmodern identity studies. But perhaps the most influential of them was Margaret Sanger, founder of what became Planned Parenthood. She preached birth control as empowerment, but behind it lay the ideology of eugenics, the idea that some lives are unfit to reproduce. She collaborated with racial hygienists in both America and [music] Europe, including those later connected to Nazi programs. Yes, the [music] people who engineered the sexual revolution were linked to Nazi programs. For Sanger, contraception wasn't just a medical issue. It was social engineering. By separating sex from procreation, she made pleasure the new purpose of intimacy. And once that separation took hold, abortion naturally followed. In 1960, the FDA approved the birth control pill, [music] the physical incarnation of everything that these academics and psychologists have been preaching and pushing for for decades. And almost immediately, by surprise, the government stepped in to [music] legitimize all of it. Five years later, the Supreme Court handed down Griswold v. Connecticut, striking down state bans on contraception and declaring that privacy, which is a word never found in the Constitution, was now a constitutional right. That single decision cracked open Pandora's box because once the court accepted that the state had no interest in how we used our bodies, every moral boundary built upon so-called natural law began to collapse. And from there, the dominoes fell one by one. No-fault divorce in the 1970s. Marriage redefined as a contract of convenience. Abortion in Roe v. Wade. Life itself made negotiable. Porn stripped of its legal restrictions rebranded as free expression. And finally, gender ideology, the logical endpoint of a system that is defined by absurdity and that denies that the human body hasn't any inherent moral meaning. And it's important to note that the Catholic Church is the only Christian institution that came out against contraception and abortion. Full stop. No exceptions allowed. Anglicanism and different kinds of Protestantism, lots of them actually promoted contraception and were actually behind it and said that it was a good thing and an advancement. And many of them also promoted or accepted abortion.
This is a normal healthy human brain at rest. And here is a brain on heroin. And here's a brain watching porn. The scans look almost identical, showing strikingly similar levels of brain activity between both groups, the ones watching porn and the ones doing heroin. Both light up the same reward centers, the same nucleus accumbens, the same ventral tegmental area and the prefrontal cortex, flooding them with insane amounts of dopamine, which is the chemical of anticipation and reward that motivates [music] us. Now, the shocking thing is that heroin fades after a couple of hours, but [music] sexually deviant material rewires your brain permanently. And every click, every novelty, and every shock of stimulation builds new neural pathways that weaken impulse control and shrink the gray matter in the prefrontal cortex and reduce the brain's ability to experience pleasure naturally. In [music] other words, the very organ that was meant to govern passion becomes enslaved to it. And this isn't a theory, it's measurable. Functional MRI studies from Cambridge and Max Planck Institute show that long-term porn users have the same dopamine tolerance and patterns as substance addicts. The brain literally begins [music] to treat lust as a reward and as a survival need such as oxygen, [music] water, food, and sex. And this is where the coup really happens. This is where the engineering really takes place. Not just in Hollywood or in the White House, but in the center of the human mind. When scientists discovered how dopamine works and how pleasure could be triggered and weaponized without virtue, they had found the key to replace religion. Pornography wasn't merely corrupting people's morals. It was reshaping what they worshiped. And that was the point. The old world was ordered around God, and the new one would be ordered around desire. The early psychologists and Marxist thinkers, people like Sigmund Freud and especially his student Wilhelm Reich, saw Christianity and Catholicism in particular as the final obstacle to their dystopian nightmare. In fact, they not only saw it as an obstacle, but they actively hated Catholicism. In his book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, he argued that the Catholic family, chastity, and the confessional, where people go to confess their sins, were the breeding grounds of authoritarianism. So, destroy chastity and [music] you destroy the church. That was the thesis. Make man a slave to his urges and he'll never kneel before God again. Once the mechanisms of pleasure were mapped, the same forces that studied addiction began using it to engineer human obedience. Corporate advertisers, government propagandists, and intelligence-linked psychologists realized that if you could flood a population's dopamine system with images and sounds and fantasies that are all available either on the TV at home or even now on our phones and on our computers, you could control their emotions without laws or armies. Take someone like Edward Bernays, known as the father of public relations. He was Sigmund Freud's nephew and used Freudian psychology to manipulate mass behavior for companies like Lucky Strike and General Motors. Madison Avenue, for example, pioneered emotional branding and sexual suggestion and aspirational marketing to shape consumer identity, where manipulation became the way to people's pockets. Television became the pulpit, advertising the new catechism, and instead of the cross, they gave us the screen. By the time the sexual revolution was in full swing, you'd think conservatives and the self-proclaimed defenders of the faith, family, and freedom would have stood their ground. But they didn't. Sometime between the 1950s and the Reagan era, the right [music] quietly stopped conserving anything. They didn't just lose the culture war, they slowly became the left of the few decades before. They traded moral conviction for economic slogans. They stopped asking [music] what's right and only cared about what's profitable and keeping the government out of people's pockets. They accepted libertarianism, the idea that everybody can do what they want. This hyperindividualistic framework where everybody can do what they want as long as it doesn't affect me. Completely ignoring the societal and communal consequences of personal choices. Freedom became the new gospel. But freedom from what? And freedom for what? The left said free love and the right said free markets. And between the two, both agreed that God should stay out of it. That's how moral relativism became the dominant philosophy without firing a single shot. Corporations learned that sin sells and conservatives, desperate to prove that they weren't authoritarian, looked the other way. They deregulated industries that thrived on moral decay. Hollywood, big pharma, the entertainment machine. They built an economy that commodified temptation and then preached about personal responsibility as if a society hadn't been engineered to destroy it. By the 1980s, the so-called moral majority had become a brand, not a movement. Churches started sounding more like campaign rallies than places of repentance, and the cross was replaced by a flag, and Christianity got rebranded as traditional values. And that's the real tragedy. The left kept pushing further left. The right followed five steps behind and now we have no real right-wing or conservative movement left at all. What used to be called conservative is now called extremist and what used to be called radical is now mainstream. So what happens when the last line of defense starts fighting for the same things that the enemy wanted all along?
So where does all of this leave us today? Well, look around. I mean, it's pretty clear we're still living under the regime of the sexual revolution. And when you judge it by its fruits, it's hard to call it anything but a catastrophe. And we don't just see it, we feel it in our hearts and in our souls. Let's start with the family, the foundation of civilization itself. In 1960, illegitimacy in America was under 10%, still a considerably high number, but today it's over 40% and growing. Illegitimacy has proven to be a main contributing factor to the record high rates of crime, abuse, depression, and anxiety, and other mental illnesses. Divorce is super common, even celebrated by some, and marriage is delayed or avoided entirely. Young women are told to go to college, where statistics show that less than 25% make it out as virgins by the time they graduate, and then they're told to prioritize a career over children. Men are told that chasing sexual pleasure and hedonism are the way to go and that marriage and starting a family are a chore to be avoided. The sexual revolution has also made family sizes a fraction of what they used to be. I mean, prior to the sexual revolution, American families had an average of seven children. But by 1965, that number was just 2.91 children per woman in their lifetime. And by 1980, that number had halved again to 1.81 children per woman. Now, the reason this is a problem is because think about this. In a big family, what do you think the odds are that a woman would get to the age of, say, 18 without significant practice with babies and being around lots of small children, learning how to take care of them, learning how to run a household? Probably near zero. Now, what do you think the odds are that a man or a woman would get to the age of 18 without being significantly well socialized with the opposite sex and having a good understanding of them without having to sleep with them or to learn about them through material on the internet? Basically, 100%. You had the perfect recipe for well-socialized men and women who understood that the sexes are different yet complimentary. But now you have men and women who practically hate each other and resent each other and simply treat each other like disposable objects that can be used and discarded. You have women who are so radicalized by feminism that they exert masculine traits and try to dominate men. And men do not like that. And then you have men who expect women to act like their guy friends and expect them to be interested in all the same things they are. And true non-feminist women don't like that either. And so at that point, the genders just reduce each other to sexual utility, which is a massive sin against human dignity. And you end up with high divorce rates all because men and women don't understand the vocation of marriage and how to love one another and family formation. The one thing every civilization depends on is collapsing. Aristotle over 2,000 years ago said that the family is the first society, the oikos, the seed from which all others grow. So when the home breaks apart, everything built on top of that eventually does too. Culture, law, morality, and even freedom itself. And that's why the sexual revolution was so much more evil than people think because it broke apart the household and it turned wife against husband and children against parents and it's the most ancient law of civilization. Destroy the family and the city and the polis will follow. And that fallout shows up everywhere. Youth mental illness, young people taking their own lives and drug addiction are at record highs. And focusing more on the point of men taking their own lives. That rate has skyrocketed because the role of men has practically been erased from society and from cultural memory. And basically the idea and concept of a male leader has become moot. And men have become in a sense domesticated by the obsession with sex and the objectified pursuit of sexual pleasure. Instead of focusing on rebuilding civilization and taking over culture and reestablishing moral order, which is what men are literally built by God and designed by God to be and to do, men are instead maimed by the much easier and quicker dopamine hits and pleasures of hedonism. And in a portrait of irony, women aren't thriving either. In fact, they're doing the worst they probably ever have in the history of mankind. The same freedom that promised empowerment brought record levels of depression, loneliness, and trauma. Anti-depressant use among women has soared. Women were told patriarchy was oppressive. Yet, the so-called liberation led to more abuse, more exploitation, and more despair than ever before. And it's never been more dangerous to be a woman than now. The record levels of rapes and kidnappings and beatings in public, have skyrocketed, and have never been so high. Since Roe v. Wade, over 60 million children have been aborted. Roughly 15% of the entire US population. And yet, with all this sexual freedom, birth rates have plummeted. The only people who benefited from this were all those who wanted to see Christianity and the family destroyed because a nation of isolated, pleasure-addicted individuals is much easier to control than one of virtuous faithful households. And what's left to replace morality? Not truth, not repentance, just slogans. Inclusion, tolerance, diversity, hollow words that are used to simply silence disagreement and to assert power. America's founding ideals cracked under the weight of its own contradictions. Freedom without virtue always ends in slavery. Only now the chains are invisible.
Now, there's a huge philosophical problem with the sexual revolution and the atheism that comes joined to its hip. The biggest problem with this conversation today and why it always goes in circles is that everyone keeps shifting the goalposts. Words have been simply hijacked. Freedom now means indulgence and authority now means oppression. Restraint is called repression. And sin. That word doesn't even exist anymore because it's all been rebranded as self-expression. That's problem number one. But problem number two cuts even deeper. How do we even define right and wrong? What does good actually mean and by what standard? Remember earlier when we talked about the founding fathers building freedom on the sand of enlightenment rationalism? Well, that wasn't just a political flaw. It was an epistemic one. Because the moment you remove God from the equation, reason itself loses its foundation. You can't appeal to logic, order, or morality without first assuming a transcendental order that makes those things even remotely possible or intelligible. So when the modern secularist tells you that this is the right thing to do or we ought to live this way, you have to ask, says who? Nature, random chance, neurons, a bunch of stardust colliding in space? Well, if everything is just atoms and impulses, then no moral ought can ever logically follow from merely what is. That's the contradiction at the heart of modernity. And they want the fruits of the Christian worldview, meaning dignity, morality, meaning itself and clarity without the root that gives it life and meaning. They want virtue without God, law without the lawgiver, morality without metaphysics. And so they end up sawing off the very branch that they're sitting on in the name of liberation. They've enslaved themselves not to God, but to their own appetites. And then it's no longer a matter of what's right, but of who can persuade, manipulate, or intimidate the best, and which means is the most effective at getting there. That's how you get authoritarianism. Not from the rule of God, but from the rule of men who think they can play God. But that can all end once humanity realizes that the only way to have logic. The only way to even have reason, the only way to even be able to tell someone how to live their life and what they should and shouldn't do is that it all needs to be grounded in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, one God. That the people who remove God from the picture, but want to keep the Christian notion of morality are not justified in doing so. And that the only way to reclaim this morality is to ground it in the God of Christianity and then the fullness of the Catholic Church. Because like many philosophers point out, when man dethrones the divine, something else always will fill in that void and take its place. The philosopher always becomes the priest and the politician becomes the prophet and the mob becomes the false body of Christ, the icon of the age. Nietzsche saw this clearly. When God dies, man becomes God. But what he didn't realize is that most men aren't fit to wear that crown.
So, how do we move forward from here? Well, first of all, share this video with anyone who needs to hear it. Sometimes being confronted with the truth is the wake-up call that pulls someone out of the fog. But more importantly, don't just see the manipulation. Resist it actively. Turn down the noise. Reclaim your attention, your imagination, and your desire. The same mind that can be enslaved by images can also be sanctified by truth. It's never too late. We don't need to match the world's chaos with more chaos. We need silence. We need prayer and beauty. Go to liturgy. Go to mass. Become sanctified because no algorithm, no ad campaign, and no propaganda machine can outshine a soul that is awake, disciplined, and anchored in something real. The battle for the world always begins with the battle for the heart. And remember friends, don't negotiate with terrorists.