On this episode of The Bespoke Parenting Podcast, host Julie Gunlock talks to APP President Terry Schilling about the importance of fathers, the cruelty of the phrase “toxic masculinity,” the need for strong and present fathers in our culture, and how his own dad taught him important lessons about life’s challenges and rewards.
TRANSCRIPT
Julie Gunlock:
Hey everyone. I’m Julie Gunlock, host of the Bespoke Parenting Hour. For those new to the program, this podcast is focused on how parents should custom tailor their parenting style to fit what’s best for their families, themselves, and of course, their kids. Today I’m speaking to one of my favorite people, my good friend Terry Schilling. He is the president of the American Principles Project. Look at that smile. I love that smile. Before joining APP, Terry managed the successful campaign of his wonderful father, former Congressman Bobby Schilling for U.S. Congress, in 2010. That was quite a campaign. And he is the proud father of six wonderful children. He and his wife, Katie, who I also adore, and their family live in Virginia. Hey, Terry.
Terry Schilling:
Hey Julie. Thanks so much for having me.
Julie Gunlock:
So I said to you before we went live, I said this could be so hard because there’s so much I want to talk to you about. I think the issue, we are going to talk about fatherhood today and the importance of fatherhood, and sort of the status of fatherhood in America, which is pretty grim to be honest with you. So I want to talk about all that stuff. But American Principles Project and the Independent Women’s Forum, we intersect so often on the issues of K through 12, on the issue of children, and parents, and parents’ rights. So try to keep me on path, Terry. We want to focus on fatherhood. Before we get into that, though, I always ask a question of my guests, because this is a podcast about celebrating differences in parenting. We shouldn’t say like there’s one way to do it. And I know you and Katie probably have a specific way that you parent, probably a combination of the way she grew up, and the way you grew up, and you’ve made your own style of parenting. But if you were to characterize your parenting style, what would it be?
Terry Schilling:
It would be not quite laissez faire or free range, but more towards the free range of things. I grew up — and I’m the oldest of 10 kids — and the important thing about being raised in…. There are two types of big families like that. There are the military-type families that everything’s very structured, everything’s very ordered, there’s a plan to everything. And then there’s my family, which is just kind of ordered chaos and you just go with the flow. I can adjust to things very quickly, and that was just how I grew up. And so Katie and I, Katie’s the youngest of five, and we just kind of raised our kids the same way. They learn the consequences of things very quickly because we don’t bail them out, and they’re adaptable, and we have a great time. But there are obviously rules and we don’t let them get away with everything. And we’ve had to start to crack down on certain things. So we let things go, and then when it starts to become a problem, we’ll crack down. We’re cracking down on screens right now because the grades aren’t doing so well.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah, that is so important. But it’s funny, when I introduced you, I think it’s always important because I see so many people who have big families, they’re introduced where the person goes, “And he’s the father of six children” and there’s this big moment, it was like, how do you handle it? And I really intentionally don’t do that because honestly, I think it’s a wonderful thing to have six children. It’s possible. People used to have big families. I think people are more interested in having big families these days. But I hate this idea that it’s just this impossibility. It really isn’t. And probably part of the reason that you are so good at it is you are one of how many? 10?
Terry Schilling:
Yeah, 10. Yep.
Julie Gunlock:
10. 10. And I know your mother, I know your late father. Great people, obviously they seemed the type to go with the flow too. So I’m sure that part of the reason you’re so adaptable at this is because you grew up in, as I’ve heard you say, a loud house. So that’s probably why you’re so skilled at this. So let’s get into the meat of the area. What is the status…. Look, you work for APP, and I know that you have a program at APP that sort of celebrates fathers and encourages fathers to be a part of a community there. What is the status of fatherhood in America?
Terry Schilling:
Well, it’s not great and it’s not great for a few reasons. There was a recent study that just came out that showed that it’s like, I think 61% of men are not in a relationship and not seeking one. And then 36% of women are in the same boat. And there’s obviously questions like, well, if they’re equal amount of men and women, why is there some discrepancy there? But I think that what’s happening is men are under attack; masculinity is under attack. We don’t describe femininity as toxic, but we definitely describe masculinity as toxic.
Julie Gunlock:
No, it’s funny that I hear you saying this stuff and it’s amazing to me that this is quite provocative, what you’re saying, in our day and age. It certainly isn’t provocative to me, and it certainly isn’t provocative to a lot of women. But in our day and age, the very idea that saying that women want certain things from men, like men to take care of them and men to take the lead role in making money and making sure the family is secure. How in the world have we gotten to this point, Terry?
And again, I just want to back up on that because I do want to address it, that these concepts are now attacked. And look, this isn’t anything new. We know with sort of third-wave feminism that the idea of traditional roles for men and women went out the window, or at least it did for a certain segment of society. But what do you say to people who look at you and or your reactions on Twitter or whatever when you say these things that I think most people can agree on, but again, have become provocative in our current culture?
Terry Schilling:
Well, it’s interesting because I witnessed this firsthand with my parents. They worked really well together, they complemented each other, and they were a great example for me. But there’s all too many of these gender warmongers, and they don’t want peace, they don’t want equality, they don’t want us working together. They want to win and they want to destroy the patriarchy. And so they allow for this brainwashing, or however you want to say it, this ideology to take over their lives. And what I’ve found is that the ends of those ideologies end up becoming much worse than the current situation. And I just look at men and women as complementary, which means that we go hand in hand, that we each need each other and that we’re both different. And I think that there’s a small but powerful group of people in this country that reject that. They think that all of the differences between men and women are not genetic, not natural.
Julie Gunlock:
Are make believe.
Terry Schilling:
They’re make believe, they were forced on us by society, by the patriarchy.
Julie Gunlock:
That’s right.
Terry Schilling:
And it’s just not true. My mom was explaining this to me — my mom reads a lot, I’ve learned so much from my mom.
Julie Gunlock:
I love her.
Terry Schilling:
I was one of the Rush Limbaugh babies, like the original OGs. But she was explaining to me why women have a much more natural bond with their children and why they first started staying home with the kids is because they nurse their babies. The mom, when the baby’s in the womb, she’s taking care of the baby full-time, giving it all the nutrition it needs and everything, and that’s still important afterwards. And the nursing and the taking care of the baby, it’s important for that bond to develop. And if you’ve ever met someone with mommy issues, they’re very cold people, and they’re very angry people, and you don’t really want to be around them. A lot of serial killers, I mean, I’m not saying that everyone that has mommy issues is a serial killer, but you look up most of the serial killers, they had mommy issues, and it’s because they developed this coldness to their fellow man because they don’t think they need anyone. If you grow without a good mother….
Julie Gunlock:
And also on the other side, if you didn’t grow up with a good father, look, fathers teach children, particularly boys, basic social skills, self-esteem, and understanding of manhood, what that means, what masculinity really is. And without a father, these boys grow up utterly rudderless. I want to read a quote from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan after the 1965 riots. You know this quote, of course you do. “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history.” That’s my dog. “A community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship with male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future. That community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder are not only to be expected, they are very near to inevitable.”
That was 1965. And Terry, the data bears this out. You talked about collections of people who want to say that masculinity is toxic, that marriage doesn’t matter, that families don’t matter. We know that Marxists are actively working in our schools to tear down the family, to separate children from their parents. And they don’t look at the data, which clearly shows fathers matter. Do you think this problem is getting better? Do you think it’s getting worse? Where are we with this problem?
Terry Schilling:
I think it’s getting worse, but not for the reason you expect. I do think that there are a lot of crazy dads like me out there who are opting into just letting God decide how many kids we have and it’s giving us huge families. But there are so many young men that either can’t find a partner, can’t find a wife, or just don’t even want to have a wife. We have to really understand that the elite culture has a huge impact on our lives. Once the elites start to go rotten, it’s very shortly after that that the people start to get rotten.
And so I think a lot of men are just opting out of marriage, they’re opting out of fatherhood, it’s too much, it’s too expensive. And there are alternatives. You have OnlyFans now. That’s one of the biggest booming businesses in the country. So men are basically telling us, are telling women, “Hey, we don’t need you either.” And it’s really sad and it’s tragic because these are not going to be happy people. But the Moynihan quote is fascinating to me. There was a 1926 article in The Atlantic about the dissolution.
Julie Gunlock:
That’s the last time I read The Atlantic, but go on.
Terry Schilling:
So it’s actually pretty cool because they have it archived. So you can see the actual print edition from 1926. And they had a reporter embedded and the Soviet Union when they abolished the family, and the fruits of it were so terrible. Basically they made marriage dissolution a five-minute process, and they made it no-fault divorce basically. So what was happening is men would get married to these women for a month, a few weeks, three months, they’d impregnate them and then they’d abandon them for another woman somewhere else. And they’d just keep doing this. There are stories of these villagers and these farmers talking about how these hoodlums, these orphan hoodlums would just go and create chaos. They would steal, they would rape, they would commit violence, they would rob. It was just a total nightmare. And that’s what we’re experiencing. Now look at Chicago. What do you think the [inaudible 00:12:38] rate is in Chicago? Why do you think the murder rate’s so high? It’s because there’s no fathers in there to go and kick the crap out of these guys….
Julie Gunlock:
It’s okay. Cuss.
Terry Schilling:
…when they’re getting out of line. That’s the big thing that dads do is we enforce consequences, we discipline. There were, real quick, there was this article in Reason Magazine, and it talked about how they were, that researchers were shocked to find that in study after study, it was actually fathers who instilled empathy into their children. And how I had come to understand it is because I come home from work, and I’ve had my kids break my tools, my expensive tools, and I’ll come home and I’ll say, “Hey, you little cuss. You know how much that tool costs me? I had to work so hard to get that tool and you just broke it.” And that gets kids to start thinking about other people. And so look, it’s so obvious, the benefits of motherhood, the benefits of fatherhood, the benefits of marriage, benefits of raising kids in a marriage, in a happy household. The data is so boring because it’s so predictable. We all know what the truth is going to be.
Julie Gunlock:
Yes, yes. Let’s have a study on the sky is blue. I mean you’re right. I sometimes read these studies and there was a study in 2010 on childhood obesity. It to this day remains the best study on childhood obesity. And it is the most respected study. It’s very rigorously done. They studied, there were huge cohort of kids in this study. And guess what they found at the end? This was years. They studied these kids for five years, and again, thousands of kids were involved. And at the end they found that to prevent childhood obesity, put your kid to bed at a regular hour, limit their screen time and, get this, have dinner together as a family at least four times a week. They didn’t say “and it has to be organic applesauce, and a chicken you raised in your backyard, and wheat that you grew in a field.”
It says nothing about the quality of the food. It doesn’t even say anything about the type of things that they’re watching on screen. Just limit it. And it doesn’t even say it has to be nine o’clock when you put your kids to bed or seven o’clock if they’re teeny. It just says put them to bed at a regular hour. I was so excited about this here, this study. And it’s funny, the researchers that were involved in this study were like, “We were hoping for something like more of a silver bullet here, but it turns out, just be a good parent.” That’s how you prevent these things from happening. And I can tell that it frustrates people, and that’s why people on the left and Marxists obviously in our schools, don’t talk about the data. What you just talked about is exactly why they avoid this.
So moving on from fathers, I want to again focus on boys and specifically boys in school. We hear a lot of talk about these gaps, and we hear a lot about equity, which we know that equity does not mean equality. But just for the purposes of this conversation, let’s pretend it does. So we hear all this about equity, we hear about the gap in the race gap, we hear about a gap on special needs kids. And look, that exists, that’s a real problem that we need to focus on. And we also hear a lot about, “Oh girls, girls need this. Girls need special STEM programs and encouragement in math,” which actually isn’t true. In the ‘70s, girls were far below boys in terms of these academic goals. Now they’ve exceeded boys; girls are graduating, they’re going to college, getting As. Boys are dropping out, they’re doing drugs, they’re committing crimes, they’re going to jail, they’re committing suicide. Boys are in crisis in this country. Why don’t we talk about that gap, and why is the narrative still that girls need special STEM, they need special math programs, they need all this help in education. Why haven’t we been able to switch that?
Terry Schilling:
Well, so the nature of progressivism, what they inherently believe, is that human beings should be free from all constraints, from all boundaries that keep us from truly flourishing. And they look at this as the patriarchy’s always been in control and they’ve instituted all these values and they’ve created women to be second-class citizens. They actually believe that. And so how they view it is it’s a long march. They have to destroy men for a temporary period of time in order to get to full equality. This is all Marxism. You look at these Marxist nations, these Marxist revolutions, they kill millions and millions and millions of people because the ends justify the means. And so they don’t care that boys all of a sudden are starting to become under attack because it’s not about that. Their goal is not for flourishing. Their goal is not for prosperity. Their goal is for equity. They want us to all be equal in misery, equal in poverty. They want to be the ones pulling the lever. So they don’t care that men are finally….
They view it basically as men are finally getting theirs. Justice is finally being enacted on these boys. And it’s just enraging because who are you going to send to war to defeat the Nazis? Men have sacrificed a lot, and they just dismiss it all as if we haven’t contributed anything to society. We build skyscrapers, we put food on the table. But guess what? All of our jobs, all those sacrifices were for our families. They were for our women. They were for our wives so that they could have peace, so that we could go home at night and have a nice meal and have peace in our home. We don’t work to change the world. We work so that we can have a family that has a roof over our heads. And I don’t know, they’re just psychos, frankly. That’s what it all stems down to.
Julie Gunlock:
This podcast could be a lot shorter if we just bottom lined it right now. They’re all just psychos. Yeah, I agree with this. Look, I do think, though, that there is really something dangerous going on. Look, I’m the mother of three boys. I have all boys, so really I have six children. I’m just kidding. But at a certain age, boys are just off the walls. I mean, they really are. And I grew up in a girl’s household. I had a sister. Everything was coloring. And I know I’m making generalizations here. Boys are nuts sometimes. They just really are. And as a mother of a child with ADHD, I see the difference. I can see the normal thing. And my child does take a small amount of medication; it really helps him manage school. But we see abuse of ADHD medications. We see kids being called ADHD when they’re really not. They’re just a kid.
And we see boys…. I’ll never forget, Terry, you’ll love this. My son, in his file, in his third-grade file — I’m sure I can still find it — he got in serious trouble because he was doing the pew, pew, pew, pew during lunch and a teacher was just horrified, took him to the office. Principal called me and said he was using finger guns. And I told her, I will in no way discourage him from doing finger guns. That is a normal boyhood activity. Now, God bless this teacher, it was a vice principal. She actually started laughing because I think she could kind of see the absurdity, which I’m really lucky. I live in Northern Virginia. I’m surprised he wasn’t thrown in jail.
But tell me about, we have even seen people say that masculinity in boys is a psychological problem, that boys should not behave this way. In fact, they want little boys to act like little girls and, look, little girls…. There’s exceptions to all of this. I had a very dutiful little boy, too, who actually did not act out in class, but it’s almost as if there’s an effort to sort of feminize boys, to take away that natural masculinity. What do you say about that? What would you say to parents who are getting this from their teachers?
Terry Schilling:
I would just say to encourage it. When I’m with my kids, I encourage them in the areas where they’re strong and I discourage them in the areas where they should be avoiding. So my son, Bobby, he’s just now really starting to get obsessed with sports. I mean, it’s basketball, it’s football, it’s wrestling, and I encourage that. I go out and play with him. I want him to be rambunctious. You learn a lot from being rambunctious. You learn a lot from jumping off of a tree house and hurting yourself.
Julie Gunlock:
Learning your own limits.
Terry Schilling:
You learn you shouldn’t do that. Right.
Julie Gunlock:
Yes.
Terry Schilling:
And our kids are in an age where even fighting — I’m okay with my sons fighting. I’ll cut it if they start to do anything crazy with choking or [inaudible 00:21:24].
Julie Gunlock:
I just don’t want to go to the hospital. I just don’t want to go to the emergency room.
Terry Schilling:
Exactly. But you want them fighting as kids between each other because they learn that there are consequences to running your mouth. They learn that there are consequences to punching someone or hitting them because you’re going to get hit back. You don’t want them not learning that lesson at a young age because then they grow up and they start world wars like Joe Biden. These guys are getting ready to start a world war because they’ve never had their teeth punched in, they’ve never been kicked in the guts, and they haven’t learned that there are consequences to running your mouth. And so why not let them fight when they’re little and they’re not that strong and they really can’t do that much damage to each other?
So I would just encourage these parents, ramp it up, encourage them to take risks. That’s one of the beautiful things about men and women is we balance each other out. Men are so into taking risks and you know why? It’s because we’re not that smart. I mean, we are smart, but we don’t think through the consequences of our actions. We just run and we jump off the cliff and then we break our leg and we’re like, oh, probably shouldn’t have done it. Whereas girls are very thoughtful and they’re balanced and they’re not going to jump off the cliff.
Julie Gunlock:
I just want to make soup and binge-watch Netflix. That’s all…. But, Terry, you make such a good point. And I think that one thing that…. I know that this is not a Catholic podcast, but one thing that I love about the Catholic Church is the reverence for the Virgin Mary and how if you’re a part of the church, that sort of extends to mothers and then to women in general, that true masculinity means also respect for women, caring for women, looking out for women. And that is a serious part of fatherhood, is teaching your boys to be respectful of their mother and, by extension, of all women. And I know that’s something you do as well. You are married to Katie, who is lovely, and you guys have this incredible bond, but also this partnership in raising these kids. And I feel like you have this sense of you are the protector over the family.
Talk a little bit about that because I think so often people kind of go, “Well, masculinity isn’t all bad” but they forget this angle that is, it really is a sense of protecting…. And look, not just women and children, but everybody, protecting the society, being of good character and passing that on to the rest of your community, of your neighbors and community.
Terry Schilling:
Well, no, that’s exactly right. And there is this, ultimately, if you were to boil what it means to be a man, it is being willing to protect the vulnerable and to take those, to use your strength, to use your power and your influence to be able to protect vulnerable people that are coming under attack and that need to be protected. And that APP with our big family and all the NRA for the family stuff, we’re kind of filling that role. I see it as the dads of the pro-family movement. So you have the moms and they’re awesome because they’re mama bears. But that’s how I’m coming at it. I want to protect these kids, I want to protect these moms so that when they go to a school board meeting, they aren’t having their mics shut off, that they are able to speak their minds. Women absolutely have a say in these things and they’re really smart. One of the things that bothers me is I was raised by very strong women. My great-grandmother was a Women’s Air Corps in World War II. She worked the Rock Island Arsenal in the Quad Cities.
Julie Gunlock:
I love it.
Terry Schilling:
No one got anything by Grandma Great. But Grandpa Chuck would never pull anything on her. She ran the show. And so I’m raised by all these super strong women who, by the way, my Grandma Great was born in 1922. And she’s not a product of feminism. She’s a product of Catholicism. She’s a product of America. And they’ve painted and they’ve cast this BS narrative that women were always second-class citizens. It’s just not true because men and women need each other. Think about this. One of the things I hate about porn, I know it’s kind of a little bit off-topic, but before porn, men would need to keep peace with their wives in order to be happy. You could only sleep on the couch for so many nights.
But with porn, the fights will just continue. And there’s no peace to be made up because, well, I can sleep on the couch all month long and I don’t care. But men need women, have always needed women, we’ve always loved women. I look at my wife…. The only thing, if my kids really want to have me lose my cool, they just need to insult Katie. They need to talk back to her. That sets me off.
Julie Gunlock:
Same with my husband.
Terry Schilling:
It’s enraging because it’s your mother. She gave you life. And I don’t know, I could go on.
Julie Gunlock:
No, and I am glad you brought that up. But I wanted to veer. I feel like you said porn and now I’m going to bring up Hollywood. And I was like, I’m veering off slightly. But actually no, they’re kind of the same thing nowadays. But let’s talk really quickly. One of the last things I want to talk to you about is the image of fathers and fatherhood in Hollywood. It’s a disaster. And I’m not talking just on the big screen because sometimes they’ll produce a movie that’s uplifting and it’s a good family film. But I’m talking about the small screen, television, and specifically advertisements where the mom is always so competent and so smart, and the dad is sitting there with socks on, standing in cement, or he’s washing a product in an entirely different wrong way. And the mother sweeps in. And this isn’t just in advertisements; it’s in sitcoms, it’s everywhere. This idea of this sort of dumb dad. I think that is a significant problem. Is that something that you’ve noticed as well?
Terry Schilling:
Oh yeah. I mean, look, the attack on fatherhood has been happening since I was a kid. And I’m trying to think about why it is that these shows do so well. Because if you were to have a show where the dad is the one that’s put together and the mother is just the dystopian version of a mother, like, she’s hysterical, she’s constantly drinking, she’s reading Red Book Magazine, she doesn’t do anything around that. If you were to paint that and have the exact opposite, that show would not do well. And I think that it goes to the nature of men and women in that men are very self-deprecating. Like if you’ve ever been around a group of guys and just listening to their conversation, we are busting everyone’s balls nonstop. We like making fun of each other. It’s how we build community and build friendships.
So when someone’s making fun of a dad on TV, our first thing that we go to is not righteous indignation about this attacking fatherhood. We’re like, oh yeah, no, Homer Simpson is pretty funny. And Peter Griffin’s hilarious. He’s a total idiot. But he’s hilarious. And the reason that the show that I talked about, if you were to reverse the roles and denigrate motherhood and mothers….
Julie Gunlock:
Women would never stand for it.
Terry Schilling:
Women wouldn’t stand for it. But also men wouldn’t want to watch that. We don’t want to attack women. I mean, we’ll make jokes. We’ll make funny jokes about women, but we’re not being mean. We’re not actually acting women are all a bunch of hysterical nut jobs. We love them. We deal with them every day.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah. Well, I could think of a few women on Twitter that it’s okay to be mean to. Taylor Lorenz, that 80-year-old.
Terry Schilling:
Tay Tay.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah. That’s okay. I want to conclude this by talking about a really, really good dad. And that is your dad. We lost him a couple of years ago. I know incredibly painful for you and your whole large family. Tell me, what was some of the gifts your dad gave you and what are some of the most treasured lessons? I know it’s hard to distill that in just a few minutes.
Terry Schilling:
Well, Julie, my kids, you just did what my kids do to me sometimes. And then you just catch me off guard. You catch me with that left hook. Look, my dad was, he was great because he was such a flawed person and he overcame huge obstacles. And I don’t really talk about this a lot, but my dad was a recovering addict. He had a serious drug addiction, he was an alcoholic, but he got clean after number four. And my mom had basically filed for divorce and it was not good. He would go out binging for three days at a time, wouldn’t even come home. She tried everything and he just wasn’t getting better. So she filed for a divorce, and essentially my grandmother stepped in. So my dad, part of the reason why he had a lot of issues is his parents got a divorce when he was a senior in high school. And he just kind of fell apart. He’d have huge parties and just really bad stuff with bad crowds.
And when my mom filed for a divorce, my grandmother called her and she said, “I heard you’re divorcing my son, why?” And my mom explained, “He’s not getting better. I’ve drawn tons of lines in the sand.” And by the way, my grandma’s name was Pat. She goes, “By the way, Pat, he hasn’t asked me not to divorce him. He doesn’t even care.” And my grandmother sat him down and she said, “I just want you to know I never would’ve divorced your father if he told me he didn’t want to.” And I think about that, and that’s a very self-sacrificial thing for a mother to admit to her son. And overcoming a serious drug addiction like my dad did, that is so Christlike. Not to go all religious, but it’s so masculine.
Ultimately, being a man is about sacrificing for vulnerable people. It’s about giving up your own liberty, your own freedom so that other people can have a better life than you had. And my dad, instead of just going along with getting a divorce and cutting our family off at four kids, he got clean, he struggled, he worked hard, and he had six more kids with my mom. And by the way, the next kid after number four, she has four kids. So we don’t think about this, but there’s a real human impact. The reason abortion’s so bad is because you’re wiping out an entire lineage of human beings, and you’re acting like we’re disposable. We’re not. When you have a baby, that baby is going to be someone’s spouse someday, they’re going to be someone’s teacher possibly, someone’s doctor. We all change the world in infinite ways. And my dad definitely did that for us. It’s actually joy. It’s actually joy.
Julie Gunlock:
Oh Terry.
Terry Schilling:
I’m so self-deprecating. I make the worst morbid jokes about him passing just to get through the pain. But he was such a great example, and I’ll never forget the day he died. He had intestinal cancer, so he really couldn’t keep food down.
Julie Gunlock:
Of course.
Terry Schilling:
When you have intestinal cancer, you starve to death essentially.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah.
Terry Schilling:
And the day he died, my mom and I were comforting him. And my mom said, “Is there anything we can do, Bobby?” He’s like, “Nope, I just want my family and I want Jesus.” And so we did last rites and everything, and that’s the goal. And he died surrounded by all 10 of his kids. The saddest thing for me in this world is dying alone, or the thought of someone dying alone. That’s what was one of the worst things about COVID.
Julie Gunlock:
That’s right.
Terry Schilling:
How many people died away from their families? And the left, the progressives, the feminists, they’re creating an entire generation of people, a majority of which very likely will die alone.
Julie Gunlock:
Die alone.
Terry Schilling:
And have the saddest possible death. And they should have the exact opposite of that.
Julie Gunlock:
Well, Terry, I knew your father and I know your mom, and I just adore them and adore them both still. And I am thrilled with the family that you are creating with Katie. You’re a great influence on not only your own kids, but this whole country. I really appreciate you being with me today and talking about this. And if you can just tell people really quickly, where can they follow you? Learn more about APP’s Fatherhood Initiative and some of the other initiatives? APP’s a great organization, so tell us where we can follow you.
Terry Schilling:
You can check our website out online at americanprincipalsproject.org. You follow me on Twitter and all the social media, Instagram. I’m on everything basically. It’s just Schilling1776. I’m actually temporarily suspended today from Twitter.
Julie Gunlock:
What?
Terry Schilling:
I know. It’s so stupid. I basically said that transgenderism is sexual abuse and mutilation of children, and apparently I’m targeting a whole group of people by saying that.
Julie Gunlock:
Oh dear.
Terry Schilling:
So I’m in the timeout.
Julie Gunlock:
Well, Terry, I know that you are pretty provocative also on Twitter, so I’m not surprised. But Elon should straighten that up. Listen, you’re great. It is a great joy to talk to you. Please say hi to your mom and say hi to Katie as well. And we need to finally get our families together. So maybe this’ll boost that effort. So, Terry, thanks for coming on.
Terry Schilling:
Thanks so much, Julie. Have a great day.
Julie Gunlock:
The Bespoke Parenting Podcast is a production of the Independent Women’s Forum. Please help us by hitting the subscribe button and leaving a comment or a review on Apple Podcasts, Acast, Google Play, YouTube, or iwf.org. Hang in there, parents. I’ll see you next time on Bespoke.
