Culture Friday: Zuckerberg’s Meta shake-up

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 10th of January.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. So we’re 10 days into the new year and that should give you a picture of how long it took for us to do the accounting on the December Giving Drive. It was two big factors, one I mentioned last week and one I didn’t. What I said last week was that because we’re in temporary quarters, counting up what came in the mail the last few days of 2024 just took that long—a lot longer than it normally would.

What I didn’t say, because I didn’t know, was this: There was so much of it! So many checks to count.

All tallied up, WORLD Movers exceeded the giving from last year and I don’t know why we’re surprised!

Our director of development Debra Meissner is on the line.

Deb, I sound like a broken record saying I’m surprised, but our WORLD Movers don’t sound like broken records they break records, and this year, they broke another December Giving Drive record! I don’t know why we’re surprised.

DEBRA MEISSNER: Nick, I shouldn’t be, but I just want to give a shout out to these extraordinary people. This is a group of—you know, they are listeners or readers or viewers—they make up our donor base and even though as you know they went over and above and they're giving to WORLD after September storms that did not stop them from giving generously in our December Giving Drive.

I wish I could read to you every card, every letter, every encouraging email that came in with these gifts. These folks are fiercely supportive of the excellent work that you guys produce every day and they are eager to sustain it.

We share these notes internally, and as you know, and our entire staff is just humbled and encouraged, and so grateful that the Lord continues to provide through the people who believe in our mission. And that's encouragement to all of us. So if you are one who has partnered with us this past year from the bottom of our heart, we thank you.

BROWN: Thank you indeed. We can’t do this without our WORLD Movers, and I’ll say it again: With our WORLD Movers, it feels like there’s nothing we can’t do.

EICHER: Thank you indeed. We can’t do this without our WORLD Movers, and I’ll say it again: With our WORLD Movers, it feels like there’s nothing we can’t do.

MEISSNER: Thank you for that and honestly, if history has shown me anything it's that you and the editorial team will definitely make the most of these funds.

EICHER: Debra Meissner, our director of development.

BROWN: It’s Culture Friday. Joining us now is John Stonestreet … president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Good morning!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning!

BROWN: John, big changes for META, announced this week from the top, META CEO, Mark Zuckerberg:

ZUCKERBERG: So, we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expressions on our platforms. More specifically, here’s what we’re going to do…we’re going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X.

Zuckerberg calls it getting back to their roots, but I’ve heard some other theories. Is it an AI manipulation, an early April Fool’s Joke—

STONESTREET: [Laughs]

BROWN: —is free speech really coming back? And why the change of policy now?

STONESTREET: Oh, there’s so many jokes that come to mind about, you know, Elon Musk being an alien and Zuckerberg being a robot and those just write themselves. I’m going to leave those to the comedians.

I think the best take, as is often the case, was from the Babylon Bee, whose best headlines are when they just describe what actually happened. The headline on this story: “Tech exec who swears he’s not suppressing free speech promises no longer to suppress free speech.”

But, you know, in the larger scheme of things, this is significant. You can’t really see this outside of the reversal of companies that we talked about right before the end of 2024, backing off DEI policies and DEI hires and things like that.

You can’t see this separately from the election results and what I think was a clear pushback by the American people, particularly in institutions when it proves to be harmful. What came to light in those congressional hearings with Zuckerberg was just damning, for Facebook and for the decisions that they made.

I do think that it’s important, though, to hesitate before we make any pronouncements of conversions.

I think that, you know, a lot of these folks, they follow the bottom line. There is a difference between the pragmatist who’s trying to maximize profits for a company or maximize distribution for a product like Facebook, and people who are true believers.

I don’t think Zuckerberg was ever a true believer in those policies. He just thought it was the most promising way forward. And now he doesn’t think they’re the most promising way forward. So the human motivation there maybe emerges past whatever rumors there are of that, you know, that he’s some sort of cyborg.

BROWN: Interesting story a colleague brought to my attention:

Three prominent members of the so-called “freethought” organization ,the Freedom from Religion Foundation, spiked publication of an article that went against the party line on transgenderism. Leaving the group were biologists Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, and psychologist Steven Pinker. They protested the removal of an article by Coyne, in which he pointed out that sex is binary, and expressed a view about men who identify as women being sexual predators.

This was way over the line, way too much freethinking, apparently.

The group’s leader emphasized its commitment to LGBTQ rights, prioritizing its broader opposition to Christian nationalism, which is seen as the bigger threat.

Well, John, a house divided against itself cannot stand. We heard that somewhere.

STONESTREET: Yeah, it is a remarkable thing to see the exposure, not just of these radical ideologies, but also just kind of the exposure of “the science is settled”-narrative that really is a subplot. Which, by the way, folks like Coyne and certainly Dawkins and the new atheists were guilty of perpetrating, right? Basically dismissing any inferences of design as being clearly non-scientific.

And we know this because the “science is settled” on Darwinism, that was so 1990s. I mean, if there’s one thing the science isn’t settled on anymore, it’s the Darwinian theory of how life came about. It seems to be wholly inadequate for the sorts of things we now know.

The “science is settled” is exactly the wrong thing to say about science, because true science isn’t settled. True science is a process of observing and extrapolating and repeating. When we get more data, more information comes into play, sometimes even unexpectedly, you have to take that into consideration.

Otherwise, it’s not science. That’s part of the story, too. But look, we’ve been hoping that some of these quote-unquote “conversions”—and that’s too strong of a word for what we’re talking about right now—but we’ve been hoping that some of that stuff would happen.

So let’s welcome it. I don’t want to be too cynical. You know, it’s tempting to be the “I-told-you-so” religious Christian voice. But I think we need to be thankful for it.

I think we need to point people beyond it to the source of the truth that now is being exposed. Thank God for these small wins. It’s not to me as exciting as when Richard Dawkins admitted he really likes Christmas carols and to go to church on Christmas, but hey, it's in that ballpark.

EICHER: A word to the listener. What I have to bring up now is a story that is going to be inappropriate for the younger listener. So if you have young ones are nearby, please be advised. John, you know what I’m talking about here with Islamic gangs in the UK?

Terrible stories.

STONESTREET: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

EICHER: So, just an extra second or two of delay to press pause if you need to.

There are reports of a horrifying pattern of abuse, exploitation, and sexual assault of vulnerable young girls in Britain—carried out, allegedly, by gangs mostly comprised of Pakistani Muslim men.

Many victims, some as young as five, were silenced through intimidation, while authorities failed to act—fearing accusations of racism and risking votes from Muslim communities.

Former U.K. Home Secretary Suella Braverman—who is of Asian descent—didn’t shy away from identifying the horror of these gangs, saying, “The perpetrators … hold cultural attitudes completely incompatible with British values.”

We mentioned Elon Musk earlier; he’s been all over this and has laid the blame for the coverup at the feet of the prime minister. For his part, the prime minister’s part, he denies it.

What can we say about this at this point, John?

STONESTREET: Yeah. Look, these reports are horrifying and I want them to not be true on every level—because it just means a level of cultural breakdown that’s way worse than even all the grumpy British writers that have been writing about British cultural breakdown for the last decade understood. And let me talk about what that cultural breakdown looks like on a couple levels.

One is certainly the interference of political forces into the family, the state basically usurping the authority of parents. The second aspect of this is that a culture that was so clearly steeped, historically, in a particular framework of right and wrong, would allow this level of wrong to take place. So you think about the world that Charles Dickens wrote about, you think about the world that William Wilberforce and the Clapham group engaged, and the moral revolution that took place. and then you hear about this and you say there has been a culture squandered.

And then the final thing that has to be said is that look, Islam is safer for the world when it secularizes. The closer that Islam is to its true religious identity, the more dangerous it is, particularly to the west, and you look at Islam on its own terms, and this is the sort of behavior that has defined Islamic literalism for centuries. This is not coming out of the blue. This is not coming from these folks because they’re immigrants.

That’s going to need to be corrected. This is Islam. And that we need to be really clear on that that our national identities are not as important as our religious identities in terms of true believers.

That’s another aspect of what has now entered western culture to a degree that we just haven’t experience before. Immigration is a factor in that, a big factor in that. But this has to do with the religious worldview of Islam and the historical behavior that has to do when you follow a prophet like Mohammed.

It has to be said this way, and the corrupting influence on Western culture, I mean, this is to a degree that is leaving everyone a little speechless. And I understand why a lot of people were incredulous. Like can you really believe that this took place to this scale?

I can’t. I hope this is not true.

EICHER: Even if some of the reports are even half true … it’s still one of the worst things I can imagine.

STONESTREET: Look, it’s going to have to be overexaggerated by a factor of a lot for it still not to have all of these I think implications that I just walked through.

BROWN: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thanks, John!

STONESTREET: All right, thank you both.

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