In the olden days, conservative media was simple. We had National Review for ideological discussion and Rush Limbaugh for political commentary. Today, things are a chaotic storm of pundits, personalities, and social media powerhouses battling the legacy media. How can Gun Culture 3.0 handle this, and what should we be doing?
Dr. Steve Turley of TurleyTalks joins the podcast to discuss how things are going, and some of the deeper cultural shifts going on beneath our feet, and around the world. In short, Gun Culture 3.0 is poised to be an import part of this ongoing conversation.
In the olden days, conservative media was simple. We had National Review for ideological discussion and Rush Limbaugh for political commentary. Today, things are a chaotic storm of pundits, personalities, and social media powerhouses battling the legacy media. How can Gun Culture 3.0 handle this, and what should we be doing?
Dr. Steve Turley of TurleyTalks joins the podcast to discuss how things are going, and some of the deeper cultural shifts going on beneath our feet, and around the world. In short, Gun Culture 3.0 is poised to be an import part of this ongoing conversation.
It's been fascinating to see how the world of conservative thought and conservative media has changed over the last 20 or so years, and in order to learn more about some of the trends, I decided to ask around. We'll get into it. Welcome to another episode of T-Rex Talk, and I have a guest today. His name is Dr Steve Turley, a man that I had to have on the show. Obviously, his podcast is called Turley Talks. We have T-Rex Talks, so obviously we had to have a joint talk together. But, dr Turley, could you just introduce yourself first? You have a pretty interesting and, I would say, extensive list of things that you have done in the past, but I would love to get your introduction in a nutshell direct from you. So I have a million points that you think you would want to bring to our audience.
Steve Turley:Yeah, I'm always asked that you know if I go to the dentist or a doctor's appointment, whatever. So what do you do? Oh, yeah, my initial reactions I make videos. That's basically what I do. That's my daily. I read and I make videos. But yeah, the last gosh, three, four years now, I've been a full-time YouTube channel with over a million subscribers. Where my stick is, I daily analyze current events in light of what I see as a new conservative civilization list world that's rising. So I give people conservatives hope and courage to faithfully live out in the present in light of even better things to come. Before that, I was in academia for 12 years or 20 years, and I wrote over 20 books on all kinds of civilizationless themes, from politics to nationalisms to the return of Christendom, the theology, aesthetics, education, art, beauty and the like. So today I devote my time to bringing hope to courageous patriots all over the world, with daily optimistic broadcasting in light of what is, admittedly, a very crazy and turbulent age.
Isaac Botkin:Yes, so the main conversation that I wanted to have with you our audience, as you know, is particularly interested in the second amendment aspect of this. But we've talked about the importance of weapons and tools. Civilization is largely built on the capabilities of weapons and tools, and the weapons and tools that are popular, that are used, do indicate a huge, huge amount of the underlying culture of a civilization. Art and war are like these two sides of the same coin that represent what a culture does with its free time, what a culture is willing to die for, and they overlap as well. Some of the art that comes out of wars, some of the artistic craftsmanship that you see in weapons. There's a huge amount of overlap between these. So maybe we'll get there.
Isaac Botkin:But what I really wanted to talk to you about was you are relatively new to being a full-time video producer and cultural commentator, but you've also been around a while. You've been in academia for a while and you've watched the conservative movement over the last 10 years. So what has changed? What is different? We were mentioning this earlier about, just like when I was a kid, it was national review and then it was a bunch of guys on AM Radio. Those were the conservative voices, and now it feels like there's just tons of them all over the place. Twitter, YouTube, there are daily blazes, daily beasts, daily wires, daily everythings, Breitbart, etc. You're doing daily stuff. The amount of conservative media that is available, even in the spite of the shadow, bannings, throttling, reduced visibility, whatever the different platforms call their completely non-censorship-based eyeball controls. There are a lot of conservative voices out there and that feels to me like a relatively new trend. Yeah.
Steve Turley:Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. So when Rush first came on the scene back in 1988, we literally lived in a very, very different world. I mean, the Soviet Union was still in power, Berlin Wall was still up and in 1991, that cold war, that bipolar world of two major superpowers collapsed and we entered into what a lot of scholars refer to as a unipolar moment where we were the only superpower on the planet and you had scholars like Francis Fukuyama, to a certain extent Charles Krauthammer, who were basically making the argument. This is our moment. Now we can reconfigure the world, recalibrate the world around American norms, geopolitical norms, and we had already been doing that to a certain extent in what we call the Western worlds after World War II.
Steve Turley:After World War II, I mean, we were the only nation, more or less, that was standing. After that, japan was a wreck, europe was a wreck, the Soviet Union was a wreck and we were the only ones who were really able to build institutions that would create the rules to which all nations, if they wanted to prosper, if they wanted our protection, so forth, would abide by. Now, of course, the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union created its own world, but we created a world of international monetary fund and the World Bank and the World Trade Organization alike. In 1991, those institutions became the official international institutions for a rules-based order.
Isaac Botkin:And we sweetened the pot. So, when countries would pick between the Warsaw Pact and this giant socialist expansionist machine, there was also this very non-communistic country over here that had a whole bunch of free money and free protection for trade, and not all of it was completely free, but a lot of it was largely funded by the US. These rule-based systems had a lot of carrots attached to them.
Steve Turley:Absolutely. I'll just ask Saudi Arabia, right, you know, just fair, creating the petrodollar and all that I mean. That world provided the model for what a unipolar world would look like, and it was, interestingly enough, I tend to follow Sam Huntington on this. Samuel Huntington of Harvard University, the author of Clash of Civilizations thesis. I tend to follow his lead on this. I would agree that that was a highly ideological age. In other words, it was an age just going back to the bipolar era in the Cold War.
Steve Turley:It fundamentally came down to what do you believe? Are you a communist or are you a capitalist? Are you, do you believe in democracy or do you believe in more totalitarianism? What is your ideology? What do you believe in? And even when Rush came on the scene, I mean, he spent a lot of time explaining to people what is a conservative and what is a conservative Republican and how is it that what we believe in is fundamentally different from what these crazy, wacky left-wing Democrats believe in, like remember Dick Gephardt and all those guys? So, and that was Rush's brilliance, and he was able to do that better than anyone else. But what Huntington argued in the early 90s is that, as people like Frank Fukuyama were arguing this is the end of history. The world had finally come and arrived to the single one science fits all universal political ideology, which we would call liberalism, and liberalism not in terms of left-wing, but liberalism in terms of the political notion of the restraint of executive power in order to maximize human freedom. That would be basically the 18th century political liberal ideal that links together all Western liberals, whether you're on the left or the right. That notion, that conception that that was going to be the number one universal political system, economic system for all people's times and places, that was very popular. That conception is very popular.
Steve Turley:In the 1990s you had someone like Sam Huntington said no, no, no, no, you don't understand. That's not what's happening here. We haven't reached the end of history, we're actually reaching the end of liberalism. We're actually reaching the end of modernity. Liberalism's rooted in this deeper conception known as modernity, going back to the 18th century enlightenment, which basically argued that scientific rationalism was the one true way of understanding reality. Religion just was no longer necessary anymore. All the Enlightenment figures spoke religiously because that was the only philosophical idiom that they could use. It was the vocabulary. Yeah, that was the vocabulary that exactly just like the early church used Greco-Roman vocabulary, philosophical categories and so on.
Steve Turley:But at 19th century industrial revolution, 20th century social revolutions, eventually society became radically secularized and the notion was that scientific rationalism can provide the one true political and economic system that was transferable all over the world. It didn't matter what culture you belong to or what religion, because culture and religion are irrelevant. Today. All that matters are systems, political systems, economic systems, liberalism, capital L was going to be the one dominant political and economic worldview for all people. What you had with Sam Huntington is an argument that said that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of fascism prior to that were both indicators that this universalistic conception that there is a one size fits all political and economic system for all people, that itself was collapsing. It's only a matter of time before liberalism and its ideology, its universalistic ideology, collapses as well. That's the era we're finding ourselves in today.
Steve Turley:I think that is pretty much that prophecy back in the early 90s from Sam Huntington. That has been fulfilled, and what we're seeing now is we're seeing conservatism not so much as an ideology as an identity. That was Sam Huntington's thesis. We're moving from ideology to identity. That's the clash of civilization's thesis, in other words, all the great clashes of the 20th century were ideological fascism versus liberal democracy and communism, then liberal democracy versus communism, all that. Now it's going to be Ukrainians versus Russians, or it's going to be Slavs versus Croats, or it's going to be the Houthis versus the larger Yemeni population, everywhere you look now. And it's going to be BLM versus Christian Nationalists. It's going to be. Everywhere you look, you're going to start to see clashes around identities as opposed to ideologies. Why? Because there is no universal ideology anymore. It's basically clashes.
Isaac Botkin:Which definitely, I think, is highlighted. We were talking about National Review and William Buckley and all of his guys wrote about ideologies. Obviously, they were identified as conservatives by the legacy media. These guys are the conservatives. They're the only ones. They were Pigeonhold. Their identity was conservative but they wrote about ideas. They didn't write about a specific type of identity. Now when you look at the new conservative commentators on the internet, it is much more of an identitarian thing. It is interesting how that has developed. I do feel like we're missing some of the ideological side. It almost feels like it's. I know that a lot of people feel that it does unnecessary because the existing alternative ideologies that are out there are so ridiculous and they are producing such ridiculous results that we don't need to write a book about the failings of this over here. Just turn on a little to bed it, that's good, yeah, yeah.
Isaac Botkin:I think that there is a lack of ideological rigor because we're getting a little tribalistic. I think that does explain why there are so many different conservative voices on the internet. What holds us together is that we think the world is clowns, that we've identified ourselves as conservatives. In some way, that phrase is losing a little bit of clarity and meaning. What's coming?
Steve Turley:Yeah, I think the word traditionalist is actually being used more often than conservative at this point, because that's what holds, say, a Hindu conservative together with a Texan conservative or a Russian Orthodox conservative with a Nigerian conservative. They're traditionalists. They're going back to their nation, culture, customs, traditions, particularly the religious traditions, as frames of reference that enable them to flourish in the present and the future. That's basically what a traditionalist is is one who believes in institutions, beliefs and practices of the past that they consider to be indispensable in the present for human flourishing in the future. It binds past, present and future together, which stands in stark contrast to the modernist. The modernists tend to see anything in the past as primitive and knuckle-dragging and no longer relevant to a brave new world. There was a radical break from the past. Anything that's traditional is, by definition, passe and irrelevant. I like using the modern movie theater, which is itself, ironically, becoming more and more extinct, as there is streaming, it's true, yeah, right, but if you go into a movie theater, it's an incredible iconic experience. I mean, there's posters everywhere, images everywhere, but you'll notice they're always the future. It's never the past, unless, again, unless they're having some retrograde movies. An art house, a castle, blanca's 50th anniversary or something akin to that. They're advertisements that are always trying to get you back by promoting the new and the novel.
Steve Turley:What traditionalism is? It's this notion that, while the future is extremely important, I mean we're all going to be living there. We're going to spend the rest of our lives in the future. We can't negate the past, and the reason for that is because tradition exemplifies eternity. Tradition is, ironically, trans, temporal. All the great traditions in some way, shape or form apply to any age, precisely because they transcend any age. That's what the true, the good and the beautiful are so wonderful about. And again, this is where ideology does come in, because ideology is trying to identify the true, the good and the beautiful, those things that are sort of the first principles, that are the foundation for a flourishing life, regardless of the age you're living in. So that's kind of that's the traditionalism we're all kind of going back to in some way.
Steve Turley:So that's why scholars refer to what we're seeing here in the United States and the Brexit movement in Britain, or the new right that we're seeing pop up all throughout Europe, or the rise of the Orthodox Church in Russia, hindu nationalism in India, and so on. They refer to it as civilizationalist populism. And it's this notion that borders matter, economy matters, culture matters. All of these things matter. When you put border, economy and culture together you do get a kind of the basic frames of reference for civilization. But our leaders have sold us out. They've sold us out to this ideological globalism, this one size fits all political and economic system being governed from the top down. You know classic Carl Schwab, wef kind of stuff.
Isaac Botkin:Stuff that didn't used to be believable in a bad movie guy in a leather cave standing around.
Steve Turley:And that would have been the key difference between, say, like a Rush Limbaugh and an Alex Jones. Right, alex Jones really went there very early on, before everyone else, and saw this more in this class of civilizations kind of way, with alternative explanations to how to fit life events together and so forth. Regardless, that would be. I think we're all a bit more Alex Jones today than we are than Rush Limbaugh, because we do recognize the world in this clash of civilizations sense.
Isaac Botkin:Yeah, if you would ask me in 1990s, like, would we look back on Rush Limbaugh, this guy who had these hilarious sayings and these Paul Shanklin parody songs? Like, would we look back on him as this distinguished guy with a lot of gravitas? And no, we would not. And yet here we are. We look back on Rush Limbaugh as this old-fashioned sort of guy and the other thing.
Steve Turley:Can I, if I just say and we were talking about the interview, which is so cool is that Rush did recognize unlike a lot of people say at National Review Rush did recognize this change. He did see that politics were becoming much more populous, they were becoming much more anti-political elite. We weren't, we weren't. The animosity wasn't so much horizontal left versus right, democrat versus Republican as it would have been in 1991. Now the animosity is becoming more and more vertical. It's the people versus the permanent political class, the ruled versus the rulers. And he and he recognized that to his credit and that just to me, that just shows what an astute observer he was of political life.
Isaac Botkin:Yeah, so it was. It is really fascinating. I do think that, oh, there's a whole bunch of threads to pull right at this moment, but in the, in the gun community, the wider sort of second amendment community, there is very much a definite I don't even know how to put it exactly, but there definitely is a sense of this is civilization level stuff, and things are so crazy on one side that the ideology doesn't matter a lot. And I see a bit of a a bit of a weakness with pure, pure traditionalism and that is that traditionalism also doesn't require an ideology, it just requires nostalgia plus something now to to to compare with nostalgia.
Isaac Botkin:And I think that that is a distinct weakness where traditionalism will give us a whole list of things that we should run away from and not engage with, and that's good, but it doesn't really give us the way to develop, say, a sound economic policy or the way that we actually want to develop civilization in the future. Obviously we theoretically could go back to the 1500s and do things the 1500s way, and if we actually did that maybe we could build those 1500s cathedrals again. But we probably have the 30 years war again and we probably have the plague again. Like. Obviously we want to figure out and distill what are the things that build civilization in there and build on those, rather than just be a pure traditionalist where it's like return to monkey or something.
Steve Turley:Yeah Well, yeah, can I, can I, can I push back on that a little.
Isaac Botkin:Oh, for sure yeah.
Steve Turley:Swinging on trees. There you go. How traditionalist do you want? I'm more traditionalist than you are. Yeah Well, it's kind of hilarious.
Isaac Botkin:That return to monkey meme is like all right. So you know that Darwinism was what brought us this whole past as evil, future is good, right, exactly, you're playing into their hands, man.
Steve Turley:Exactly, exactly, exactly, no, go on. I think. I think the. I think that's a bit of a mischaracterization of the traditionalism that's being promoted in Russia today and in Iran and India and Saudi Arabia Ironic. Or Shinto, japan, confucian China. Ironically, there's some of the most technologically advanced cultures right now, particularly Japan. So what's actually? It's what it is. It's a rediscovery of what Jordan Peterson would refer to as a nation's lawgoss or a people's lawgoss. You know, it's their. Well, a Guillaume Phi called it their arcos. It's, it's, it's that which, it's an ancient, eternal principle that holds your people together. So, constitutionally, I mean, we're. We're touching on that, aren't we? When we're, when we're talking about how our rights aren't granted to us by some landowner, by some Duke or some noble or some.
Isaac Botkin:Careful, now You're. You're sounding very Christian nationalist.
Steve Turley:Right, that's right. Isn't that fascinating we're? We're that far gone now that to say, my rights are unalienable precisely because they are uncaught. They don't have a historical contingent. They may have been discovered historically and culturally, but they're reflective of an eternal, transcendent, divine order of which I'm an image. And then the government simply is there in order to protect that.
Steve Turley:Ironically, right, so, so, so it's really getting back in touch with that, our call, so that lawgoss of what holds us together as a people that got buried under layers and layers of modernity. That said, all you need is scientific rationalism and nothing more. There's all kinds of problems with that, because scientific rationalism is rooted in doubt and skepticism. To its credit, that's what makes it so good. So how do I know? You got to prove it to me and then.
Steve Turley:But then it was thought in the in the 18th and 19th century that if you dispelled that doubt and skepticism through the scientific method, somehow a doubt and skepticism would disappear. And we didn't realize that. You don't have to be much of genius to figure out that if your worldview is rooted in doubt and skepticism, pretty soon that doubt and skepticism is going to be turned on the worldview itself, and that's so. That's how we end up from modernity to post-modernity now, and that's what we see with BLM and everything like that. Everything is racist, everything is white supremacy, blah, blah, blah. And so so it's this notion that, no matter what claim you make to the true, the good and the beautiful, that's just some disguised political power ploy and and and nothing more.
Steve Turley:And so what? What? What traditionalism is? It's a rediscovery of the arc-hals of a people that's been covered up over by centuries of modernity, but for the purpose of being able to take where we are technologically to a new level. So that's why GM5 refers to it as Archeo-Future. That's where we're going, or, or you might have even heard the term techno-primitivism. Ironically, it's Saudi Arabia, it's Iran, it's India, it's China, it's Russia, it's Japan that are producing some of the most technologically advanced things on the planet.
Steve Turley:Right now, we're falling way behind. We're falling behind because our we're we're still stuck in modernity and the, the modernist worldview is crumbling as we speak. So, ironically, tradition is becoming a means to kind of reawaken technological innovation. But where modernity split tradition and technology, meaning that they had you know, science and religion had nothing to do with each other. A post-modern world is bringing tradition, technology together. I like to say so we end up more like Star Wars than Star Trek, right? So Star Trek, star Trek, is totally secularized. There's no mysticism, nothing like that, whereas Star Wars is all the tech of Star Trek, but rooted in extraordinary sense of of mysticism.
Isaac Botkin:Yeah, and one of the things that sort of I found very fascinating when I was young and I was very much into Star Wars as a kid this idea that there was this past civilization you know, the lightsaber was a as the weapon of a previous greater time and primitive blasters have come afterwards. That always got me as a kid. I was like how can you lose a civilization? And I was like, oh no, I get it now.
Steve Turley:I see it now Again go visit San Francisco. Right, I can visit San Francisco, I can see the yeah.
Isaac Botkin:So here's a question. Here's a question for traditionalism. So one of the dangers is that you lose a lot of your traditions because so much of your culture is stripped away. So not only in San Francisco but other places, like we have people tearing down statues, we have 150 years of people inside public school systems being taught revisionist history, like now. I'm not pessimistic about this. I have a whole shelf full of books. All my favorite theologians are from the 1600s. All those books are not only in print now, but the public domain means they're all free. On Gutenberg, like we have tremendous capacity to go back, but I also feel like we're missing a big chunk of the middle. Like we've had so much of the 1950s and the 1930s and the late 1800s completely revised historically speaking. So our traditionalism is kind of disconnected and we can go back a ways, which I'm not opposed to. I love reading Puritan theologians. But that's a big step for somebody who has just decided like, oh, san Francisco is terrible, now let's go back to cotton-mather. That's a big step.
Steve Turley:That's right, god's law, and yeah, right, right. What you're saying is precisely the kind of conversation that civilizationless all over the world are having, and the university, ironically, is the Johnny come lately on this. The literature on civilization was only about four years old. It's a very, very new discipline. The conversations were being had among guys like us on social media. It's more the right-wing media, print media and the like. Nigel Farage likes to say that he learned more about Brexit by visiting pubs his local pub than listening to the BBC. The BBC had no idea what was going on behind Brexit, the civilizationless populism that was rather rising up, but you got an earful over a swift half of bas-ale in a pub and I think that's the kind of conversations it's. Basically. It works like this, if I could kind of reduce it to this Okay, we're in India and we got colonized.
Steve Turley:We got, we turned our country into a formal country in what was 1947, after the partition of Pakistan, and then we were basically ruled for the next 40 or 50 years by every single member of our Indian parliament. All were educated in England, they all got degrees from a British University and then came back and basically ruled us with this common law, british law structure, and we've lost what it really means to be Hindu, what it really means to be Indian. What if we could go back to right around where we lost it and pick up again? Where would we go from there? The Russian Orthodox Church did very much something, very much like this. So by 1917, 1918, we all of a sudden have to go underground, we get persecuted. We went from 60,000 churches at our height, at say, 1915, 1916, to, by the time halfway through Stalin, we're down to 2,000 churches. A thousand monasteries disappear. They're all gulags. That's what makes books, like you know, alexander Solzhenitsyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich so fascinating. It depicts experience in the life of these gulags. But it's an old monastery. So you see the flashes of divine grace even in the midst of the darkest moments of life. In other words, we may have left God, but he never left us kind of theology which is beautiful. So what did the Russian Orthodox Church do with Yeltsin coming in and then with Putin coming in in 2000? It was like, okay, well, where were we back in 1915? Well, we had 60,000 churches, a thousand monasteries. All right, let's get those monasteries back, let's start building churches again. And so retraditionalization is really.
Steve Turley:It's a very interesting thought experiment that basically says let's go back to where things first started going awry and let's kind of imagine they didn't. Where would we be right now? What would our nation look like? And that's the thought experiments that are happening among civilizationals today, and then they get enacted into policy in different ways. The Modi government in India is instituting Hindutva, particularly throughout their schools. We're seeing that also with he mentioned evolution. We're seeing with President Erdogan in Turkey passing a law no longer teaching evolution. They only teach intelligent design in Turkish schools.
Steve Turley:So you're starting to see some really interesting and again, not saying that's right or wrong, I'm saying this is this is this is this is descriptor, this is the movement. Yeah, this is the mood, this is what's happened. Whether you like it or not, it's totally irrelevant. This is where the world is going. It's going back and it's going back to the time they felt like things started moving in a wrong direction. And okay, from there, how you know, what could we have learned from where it turned, particularly technologically? And then from there, where can we now Pick up with the great civilization? Less conversation and and project We've been doing for a lot of people. Well, if you're doing with India or China, you're talking to three thousand years. I in many ways what I think what's happening in Israel and Palestine right now the Palestinians is very much, very Flash. Exactly, yeah, absolutely it's. I think it's impossible to understand their rhetoric, and their mutually exclusive rhetoric, without understanding it in civilizationless terms.
Isaac Botkin:Yeah, our family is reading through, we read the Exodus and now we're going through just some of the rest of the story before Joshua and it's like, hey, this also happened last week, this happened, this happened in numbers chapter or whatever. It also is happening this this month. So it is kind of interesting to see that, extremely Fascinating, and I am curious, just kind of to see how this plays out. I'm fascinated. I have a lot of Thoughts and opinions about India that are largely uninformed, but I am Obviously America is much closer to home and I feel much more plugged into American cultures and communities, different sub communities and sub cultures, and then I also know American history better. So, yeah, where do traditionalists think we went off the rails? If you could boil it down.
Steve Turley:That's gonna be part of ask a northern traditionalist.
Isaac Botkin:Yeah, yeah, that's, that's where it gets a bunch of people in the south who are like well, it was the 1860 you got it, you got it, you got it, yeah, I, yeah.
Steve Turley:I think, generally speaking, there is a sense that something where everyone does agree is something when arrived post-World War two, prior to World War two, we were, we were pretty isolationist in many respect. I would say, world War one, but the interregnum between World War one, world War two, that was really more. I mean, it was kind of a, you know, the roaring 20s, what you had, the, the great depression. That was, that was rough, but but generally speaking, the 20s were, I mean, we've arrived, we've got money, we, we don't have to bother with anything. And then you, the World War two comes in, depression comes in, and there was this notion that our Leaders are no longer our representatives anymore after that. They now are the rulers of the world. You know, it didn't matter if you're Republican or Democrat, just didn't matter.
Steve Turley:You, your number one goal when you won federal office is is Implementing a rules-based order that would at least said its promise, would never allow another Hitler to emerge again and would protect our nation from a red scare that wants to bury us, as khrushchev would, would say, because of this ideological, dialectical materialism that says, hey, it's just a matter of time before you guys get subsumed into this Communist utopia. So we built a national security state over a course of 40 or 50 years that, with the fall of the Soviet Union, basically flexed its muscle around the world. My wife's from Japan and you know, if you, if you want to, you ever want a year full of how America is a bully? Listen to Japanese. They, they're, they, just they see it. They they're For right or for wrong. You know it's again Descriptively. People feel like they just get bullied all the time by the United States. And Mark Twain once said you can't be an empire abroad and a republic at home. Eventually, eventually that tyrannical, so despotism is going to make its way back home. And that's what I think we're experiencing right now. We're no cotton of.
Steve Turley:Chapman University refers to it as neo feudalization or refu-tilism. We're basically experiencing this union between billionaires and bureaucrats Like we've never seen before, unlike not unlike the feudal era, where tremendous amount of powers in the hands of very few, and then what they do is they enforce that power, not just through rules and regulations, but through a, a Fundamentalist ideology, the ideology of wokeness, that's being enforced not so much by a Clerical class, but now by a clericy class, a class of pseudo intellectuals of the universities, and the idea there is wokeness Ultimately hollows us out morally. It hollows us out institutionally in terms of our mediating institutions like family Remember, blm wanted to get rid of the nuclear family it ha. It hollows out community, it hollows out the church, it hollows out everything, so that it's just me as a consumer In this mass cog of consumption, and so I basically Live to enrich those billionaires and bureaucrats. Enrich and empower those billionaires.
Steve Turley:Yeah, so I think a lot of it. Certainly. This has been Papua cannons sustained argument for decades. Now. That's the post World War two Rules-based order where America stopped being a Republican, became an empire, and I think that's, I think we could agree there. But that's where things really started going wrong at all kinds of levels.
Isaac Botkin:Yeah, no, I agree that the wheels are really coming off around that time, but you can kind of trace it back before like you can't. Yeah, no, president.
Steve Turley:MacKinley are the back you trace.
Isaac Botkin:we were doing yeah, yeah, the farther back you trace it, the more now you're gonna get kind of the Divergent strands.
Steve Turley:Yeah, I think we can agree there.
Isaac Botkin:Yeah because that turn of the century, right there is just such a Amazing time you go from the world really hasn't changed all that much in thousands of years to all of a sudden it's cars, airplanes, steam has been around for a while but you don't really see the effects of the steam engine until right there at the turn of the century. Oh, quick book recommendation. It's very interesting to read. This is not, this is not a political theorist. You've probably heard of this guy.
Isaac Botkin:John Buchan was a man who fought in World War one. He was in the, the British government, and he wrote five spy novels. They're almost like a predecessor to James Bond and you know Fleming fought in World War two. This guy fought in World War one. His first book is the 39 steps, which Hitchcock turned into a spy movie.
Isaac Botkin:But his books depict before, during and after World War one, and and there are aspects of this book and the culture he just writes about it so matter-of-factly. Yeah, in some ways it is one of the most familiar Cultures that he describes and the most alien at the same time, because it's right at that turn of the century where he is a South African bower. He's a traditionalist through and through. He comes from a world that hasn't seen a lot of change and there's just nothing but change or go into war and his Very old-school wilderness scouting experiences are still applicable. But there's all this new technology, and then there's all these new ideas, and then, after the war, there's all this fallout and people are not really sure, like how, how this is working and so right, right, it's, it's yeah, it's interesting.
Steve Turley:It is so fascinating because you do. You do see the rise of a new class, known as the technocratic class, or a literally a ruling class, where the more Technological society becomes. This is, this is, this is critique going back to the 1920s and 30s, reckon, where scholars recognize the more Technocratic our society becomes, the more it becomes dependent on technocrats. And technology, by definition, involves control. So technocrats, you see, are, are in charge of control. And Then it goes a step further. Cs Lewis talked about this in his abolition of man, which is that's a nice book recommendation. Well, yeah, for sure. Yeah, where he, where he argued that the kind of the evil genius of the technocrat is Convincing the masses that you're most free when the technocrats are most in control. Right, yeah, so I mean that, so that that's a whole different world. Then even the feudalized, original feudalized world of medieval period, which is, which has extraordinary freedoms in comparison to the technocratic age, which becomes really totalitarian.
Isaac Botkin:And I feel like we're at not exactly a crossroads. But when you see some of the technological developments that are happening in the early 1900s, they are all double-edged swords like a, a, a Steam engine is a thing that you and your neighbors can use to drastically output the, the, the crops, the. The amount of Acourage that you can now till and the amount of crops that you can actually harvest and process Goes way up and you can buy those things as a small community of farmers, as a town, or you can let a big corporation that owns a gigantic railroad that they got from government land grants Is, you know, there there are ways in which it can go and I see that happening now with 3d printers and 3d scanners and Small desktop CNC machines. At t-rex we do a lot of, I would say, pretty low-level Manufacturing, but we're doing it with pretty advanced digital manufacturing tools now and it can easily be a thing that you Bring into your home like you could do super advanced stuff in a cottage industry setting, like in an actual cottage you could have a pretty advanced manufacturing capability.
Isaac Botkin:But there is a temptation to be like no, I don't want the 3d printer that I calibrate myself, I want the one that connects to the cloud and it automatically does the thing and it's automatically Subscribes to the pellets and they arrive, and this happens, and I have this other thing and I I pay to unlock features and I'm tied into a large centralized control mechanism. Yeah, yeah, the temptation is there to go the easy route or to actually master the fundamentals, yeah, which, which, in my opinion, is one of the main things. Traditionalists should look back to Old-school craftsmen who mastered fundamentals and didn't chase the Even the froth on the top of the wave like the trends, but who actually mastered the fundamentals. And if you can do that with some of these new modern tools, it's incredibly powerful, and you retain all of this freedom to do what I want. Yes, yeah.
Steve Turley:Yeah, oh, I love there's so much what you just said there. So when you had the servile arts as they were, as that complimented the liberal arts, yeah, one of one way of schematizing it is in terms of classical concepts of knowledge, where again they, they believe knowledge was manifold, it was. It was very pluralistic in my respects, but it you could, you could organize it around three main kinds of knowledge. They are a schiantia and proxies, and and the the differences. They are, as is really in many respects, kind of a wisdom, a divine knowledge. You're talking about reading the book of Exodus. That's they are. Yet it's it's seeing the truth again, the beautiful that are, e are eternally relevant.
Steve Turley:Schiantia is problem-solving. If all I'm doing is is studying. They are. You know, I've got a, I've got a family I need to feed. They're gonna be like hey, yo, dad, you know, hello here, can you do? You know how to make a fire, do you know how to keep us warm?
Steve Turley:I mean, schiantia is basic, structural problem-solving. Obviously we get the word science From it and it could be very, very theoretical. I mean, physics is like that. Physics has a theoria, a theory At the highest level and he equals MC squared, but then it, but then it applies it to the material world, and that's just that hierarchical structure of life. But then there is proxies, and proxies is a knowledge of the world through what you do With stuff. So it's like we we don't just know what a tree is from meditating on A theology of tree-ness. You know the, the trees in the garden of Eden, the, the cross, is the tree of life Returned. That's all wonderful, it's amazing, but we don't. We don't just analyze it by, you know, in terms of the biology of a tree either, or horticulture, through schiantia, we also know what a tree is based on what we do with it. Do we climb it, cut it down, do we turn it into a chair, do I decorate it around December 25th? And so that's proxies.
Steve Turley:Proxies means I know through manipulation. Schiantia I know through problem-solving and categorization, and they are a I know literally through, through prayer and worship and and mystical experience. And then cool thing was, they realized that Theoria was necessary in order to prevent schiantia from falling into pure manipulation. When you get rid of the area, all you have then is schiantia and proxies, and so science is there solely at the service to manipulate and coerce. That's it and that's the world we're living in, you see, right? Yeah, so we need that theoria, we need that traditionalism, that civilization Listen so, as ironically to enable our Technologies to become as flourishing and as human affirming as the theory itself. So I mean, when you were talking there, I just had all these thoughts jumping around my head go, I love this. I, this is. This is when I do miss academia, being able to talk about this more and more with students and the like.
Isaac Botkin:So that was awesome, yeah well, and the fun part is, this is an area where I feel like there can be the largest break from academia, the flawed academia that we have now. At our shop we have three engineers, but only one of them has a degree. We've discovered that so much of this stuff is. You know, you can learn this stuff yourself, you can think Universities, they're worth the exact way that waste of time.
Isaac Botkin:Yeah, and so I feel like a sort of a winnowing is happening, where COVID did this to some extent, where, where it filtered people out of certain institutions and some of that was on purpose, but I feel like it also filtered a lot of good people out of universities to the point where the sort of people that you're what, that you don't want to waste four years here, right, are exactly the kind of people who are no longer wasting four years there, right, right, and so it is fascinating.
Isaac Botkin:I do think there needs to be a lot more encouragement in there, because in the, in the sort of DIY maker space, there definitely is more of a trend toward a I don't know, I don't know how I describe it like what the burning man types, you know, sort of neo paganists, are very much into some of these Technologies, and and Christian traditionalists, who have previously been the drivers of so many areas of technology and craftsmanship in the past, really need to not get left behind. Right, there's all these golden opportunities that are there to provide for families and to build civilization.
Steve Turley:Absolutely. Yeah, that's that our future paradigm? Yeah, I, I know there's, there's some attractiveness. I live in right outside of Lancaster County so I've got the Amish not too far away from me here. I, uh, so there could be a little attraction to go back to the old nineteen century, right?
Steve Turley:But ironically, even the on this have to wrestle with this. On the side, blackberries on the shop, bus, uh, smart phones, uh, depends on just what the at the or none, is the at the order of all mission by none of them are. Generally, they're not allowed in their home. The home is a safe place, place and so forth. But for working uh and so forth, uh, accounting, and so, yeah, no, they use this. They have to wrestle with the same thing, uh, you know so, even if you, even if you were to go all full blown on this, you're still wrestling with the same thing, granted in a different degree, but the wrestling, yeah, the same issue of tradition, technology yeah, and as much as I find the olden times attractive, it's only parts of it I still like twenty first century dentistry.
Isaac Botkin:In fact, there's there's, there's uh, medical technologies and like connect com, come quicker. You know, I feel my age like it. Could we, could we stop all this government nonsense? I'd like the free market to improve the science I'm I'm really not anti medical science.
Steve Turley:I'm anti this politicalization of the science that is like big bad and all that exactly for sure.
Isaac Botkin:Yeah, so there there does. Uh, there is a lot of work that needs to be done and, uh, it's just fascinating to me the opportunities that that we do have. And it does feel like so many times in history when technology, a new technological wave happens the printing press, the steam engine, gunpowder, and these are all these double-edged swords that could be used one way or another.
Steve Turley:Uh, the internet yeah, I'll just remember the internet in the early days.
Isaac Botkin:Yeah yeah, internet in the early days was so decentralized, was so, so free. There were no, there were no centralized control figures. Now it's like, yeah, there's, there's three companies yeah, exactly, exactly it's.
Steve Turley:It seems like it's good. Well, especially with the internet three point zero, with the blockchain as it's, as it's getting developed, that that's when we're gonna finally see that. I it looks like blow apart because it's going to be an ownership based uh internet. So right now I have the way it's been presented to me I thought was brilliant. Is uh? Is it youtube? Is is a lot like china, it's so. So the chad, the chinese communist party, basically owns everything and they tell you you can flourish if you play by our rules. You can make as much money as you want. You can do is much you can reach all these people. You can do amazing things in the chinese system, but we own it. We could pull the plug anytime we want. That's pretty good. That's a. That's basically face book that you know. That's I mean even uh, is it?
Steve Turley:Illan musk is talking about turning uh twitter acts more into a blockchain technology where you actually own your account, you own your subscribers, you know. You know you own your email list and and the like. But I I think what we're seeing today is something very interesting. You mentioned that printing press. You know, last time we had a feudalized society. It got blown apart by the protestant reformation process of information in many respects was a populist movement. It was uh, it was an anti-clerical movement and anti- I have all these books from the sixteen hundred it's so neat because in many respects, I see civilizationalist populism as a kind of reformation.
Steve Turley:I you even have this notion of, uh, restoration politics. Uh, this is something that erdoğan talks a lot about in turkey, but it's again the same idea of, uh, okay, let's imagine going back to before things got all messed up. How do we? How do we restore those conditions so as to be able to move forward, but this time on the right path? And so I think what's happening today is just like you had the printing press back in the day that spread reformation ideas like wildfire. Now you've got the uh internet and the network society that's spreading civilizationalist ideas like wildfire and and it's, by its nature, is decentralizing, even if it's still is controlled by, you know, big three or four big tech conglomerates.
Steve Turley:Nevertheless, the beauty of you know you look at what we've done to the legacy media. I mean cnn and msnbc. They're just, it's almost kind of sad and I always found by then is being this interesting symbol of the modern age in general, just this decrepit, you know, cognitively declining system that it's just kind of hard to look at because it takes itself so seriously and yet nobody else does. And so you look at cnn. You look, even fox news to a certain extent, and you realize wait a minute now. Every time there's a breaking story anywhere in the world, the first images always come back from somebody's smartphone. It's, it's not. It's not from some satellite truck like in diehard. You know what they think right or right where they're listening to the opportunities, yeah, the opportunities for decentralization are immense, immense.
Isaac Botkin:We carry with us these incredible decentralizing tools that all go through these centralized companies exactly that's very, very hard to to think about how you would separate them in from. You know a low-level technical perspective, but like we're, so I feel like we're just right on the edge of some unique opportunities.
Isaac Botkin:Yeah yes, absolutely so now, that being said, uh, it requires that people do an awful lot of work and it does require, uh, an ideological it. I think it does require truth, because the, the chinese actually had printing presses, working printing presses as a little more complicated because of the, the typology that they had at the time, uh, but they had working movable block printing presses in the eleven hundreds, in the ten hundreds, and they didn't use those to decentralize, right. They didn't use those for freedom, right. They use those to create anti-counterfeiting government edicts. You couldn't counterfeit this because the printing presses were controlled by the emperor's dudes, uh.
Isaac Botkin:And so there's another example you, you, the technology isn't enough by itself. It really has to be wielded by people that have, uh, that really do have an ideological reason for what they did. I mean, the, the protest and reformation is such a fascinating time of history and it kicks off this immense uh, fruitfulness, uh, but at the same time, it was no picnic. I don't want to live in those days and deal with that kind of, yeah, the, the cost of decentralizing some of those things, right, was enormous. Now, the benefits for the following generations were also incalculable, but, but that is, that is the uh, the uh, you know which way modern man mean like yeah, I like all these things for your grandchildren.
Isaac Botkin:Here's what is going to cost you. Would you like to enjoy the last gasp of of uh fun and games I'm right, roam or would you like to go build something way up in the hinterlands and chop down the oak trees of the vikings and fight them for for fifty or sixty years, so that your grandkids can build uh something better? Yes, that's. That's kind of the the place where I feel like we're at right now I think you, I think you're right.
Steve Turley:I mean peterim sorikin, who's a russian, american sociologists you found at the sociology department in harvard back at the in the forties and fifties. But that's his, his theory of society, which is very, very he's, he's. He wasn't read for ages and what. During our modern unipolar moment, everyone just throw them away cuz he kept arguing that inevitably, decrepit societies end up going back to their sacred sources. So we always saw religious renewal as inherent to any society. Uh, and he just wrote so extensively and brilliantly and in multiple cities is going all the way back to the ancient egyptians and their revival of religiosity to the he bruised it, you know. Uh to greco, roman, world christians, indians, chinese, you name it.
Steve Turley:Brilliant scholar and and his basic thesis is at all civilizations are religious, they are, they're all rooted in some kind of sacred, some kind of absolute, unquestionable uh source of uh of life, that's in an inexhaustible fountain of of life, in some way shape or form. But then all those societies always have some kind of secular out working as well. Uh, we need to know how to eat. Uh, we need to know how to build things. We need to know how to fight war, to live just very similar to how you just started the whole conversation here uh, the techniques of, of survival, and in fact he would label that as sense eight secular in our word and and for. For a while, on, the, uh the religious is able to sanctify, uh, the sense eight. So we think it, you know, will pray over a meal or so, will pray, but will pray before a hunt with are out. Will see, the house is a little church. All of our secular activities always have some sacredness to it, but what he noticed is that what he called uh, the, the, uh, the sacred troops, these eternal, true, good and beautiful, I would dare we can even call ideological tropes, the provide the foundation for secular top boy, oftentimes those top boy, as you call it, plural of top balls, those top boy sort of severed themselves from the sacred tropes so that they become, they become self referential. So now I go to a science lecture and rafial is completely thrown out. Or I go to a law lecture and cannon law, which is the precursor to our civil law, completely thrown out. We don't need recourse to that anymore, I'd say.
Steve Turley:That problem, though, is it severed itself off from that eternal source of life that, even again, even someone like jordan peterson is talking about is absolutely necessary for flourishing civilization that logos that are called, and so eventually, that's those secular top boy, begin to erode, they begin to collapse under their own weight and uh, and in effect they almost become like a compost, rotting pile that then reawakens sacred seeds again.
Steve Turley:The sacred never completely disappears. It was always there, was hidden for a while, but, like we saw with the orthodox church in russia after seventy years, we're seeing with the renewed brahmin hinduism in india, or the renewed, uh, auto man, uh, uh sensibilities in in turkey, and on and on, and in the indigenous religions and, uh, africa, even just the christian, massive christian conversions that are happening there. Whatever it is, and I would argue, here in the united states, particularly in red state, we're seeing a reemergence now all of those original sacred seeds, as it were, that gave birth to the civilizations that we had all love and then, particular, the civilization that we call home, so that first or can the future is religious.
Isaac Botkin:It's really fascinating pieces yeah, well, we've in india, I would say, even in the little microcosm of the, the gun community, uh, t-rex uh is ten years old. For the last seven or eight years I've been going to shot show I think there are six or seven and even in those last six or seven years I can see this very interesting progression is cultural progressions, as in what's interesting, what's cool. But I also see that there has been this, uh, this sort of move back towards christianity. And it isn't because christianity has become cooler in the last five or six years. Uh, the media certainly hasn't said that, that the institutions have not come to that conclusion, but I think people have butted their heads up against the alternatives and and decided like, oh, oh, after postmodernism comes nihilism. Not cool, where we're gonna, we're gonna take this other path.
Isaac Botkin:People that I know who have flirted with neo paganism uh have have sort of figured out like, oh, you know, what pagans do best is converts christianity. Uh, that's right. And so, uh, I even met a guy at shot show this this past, uh, january who, uh, he is a non-christian christian nationalist. He uh he sort of believes in god. Yeah, doesn't believe in the bible, right, he does believe our laws really need to be based on the bible, because that's what the founders did. So he yeah, I was neat talking to him. I was like I need to take you to the southern baptist convention because you're gonna blow some people's minds well you know, even richard docens is referred to himself as a cultural christian right you know so you're.
Steve Turley:You're not going to get a more, you know, staunch, atheistic stance than richard dalkin. And yet even he recognizes that stuff yeah, yeah, that did that. His, his imagination has been uh inordinately shaped uh by fifteen hundred years of christendom. There's just no way around it, and and the alternative is unpleasant and he, and he's seeing it, he's seeing it.
Steve Turley:You're always gonna have a religion, there's no way around it. You're always gonna have a sacred and um, and you're seeing this very uh, vicious wokeness rise up. Uh, that is tribalism on steroids. When all said and done, that's all wokeness actually is. It's it's taking this move to identity, uh and uh. It's taking the shattered shards of of modernity and globalism that have divorced identity from civilization, and now it's just inventing identities, and these identities are unique in that they uh, they have no obligation for mutuality whatsoever.
Steve Turley:What makes christianity so powerful or, frankly, any other civilizationalist uh ideology or identity uh so powerful, is there's always going to be the norm of mutuality that we are expected to to serve uh and and bless one another. Wokeness has created this new cast system, and I think that's an insult to cast systems to even call it that. Uh, it's great, this new cast system where you have identities placed on top who are under no obligation whatsoever to serve others none, they are only to be served, and that's that. And if you say anything in any way that could even be remotely construed as uh offensive to them, you've committed heresy and you are to be excommunicated. So it is. It is. It is a very ugly faith, but it is unfortunately precise the kind of postmodern, cultural, marxist faith that that's very natural in a, in a world that's falling apart, in a world that's rotting. I I think too we don't want to uh, we don't want to underestimate the role of demography in this uh uh, when all said and unsecular liberals uh have stopped having kids. Uh, where christian conservative in the west and this religious conservatives in general are having more kids than ever, special when you consider the uh uh mortality rates among children having dropped dramatically by ninety percent. So we're having more kids than ever and that uh scholars argue that really contributed to the rise of the moral majority and the reagan uh revolution, the christian uh coalition uh in the nineteen eighties uh, because uh, back in the nineteen fifties, about seventy eighty percent of the church was uh, was uh Protestant, liberal mainline uh denominations uh piss kibbles.
Steve Turley:You know that the pc u s a whenever they were uh technically uh for a method, is in the light by the time you get the eighties and inverts. It's all the sun, it's conservatives and evangelicals and one of the reasons for that it's not like there was all these mass converges, no one of the reasons for this. Uh, they had kids and they raise their kids in the faith and the kids tended to keep the faith into adulthood. You saw the rise of homeschooling in the uh seventies and eighties is all the rise of classical christian education, particularly in the late eighties and nineties, and uh, and so all of this country, this, this demographic advantage that we still have. By the way, uh contributed to a growing, shall we call it almost uh, you know, uh red state, like a red county, like uh feel and demographic in our country, so that blue states are basically collapsing and and red states are are rising that's true.
Isaac Botkin:I mean, now comes in a little bit of a difficulty, like we here in tenancy, uh, we have pretty significant immigration from places like illinois, in california, uh, but mostly illinois, mostly, mostly left you jays, yes, uh, and a lot of them are tremendous. They they've seen the result of bad policies. They would not like to pay more taxes. They come to tenancy and they vote against those policies and they vote against, uh, those taxes. But a lot of times there's cultural baggage that comes along.
Isaac Botkin:Uh, the other big difference that I think that we see between, say, the rush limbaugh years of cultural commentary, uh, conservative commentary, and what we have now is, uh, rush spent a lot of time on political stuff. There wasn't quite as much of that cultural side. That's right. You see, today, that's right the culture war is much more visible and as a result, uh, I don't know that rush time out a movie had to be really extreme, uh, for rush limbaugh to stop talking about congress, to talk about what the movie was doing, that's, and I remember, being a christian wanted to get into christian film making. It would be in like, will you just go make regular r-rated hollywood movies? And and you being there on the set. That's your testimony, because you don't send a message with the movie nobody does. Well, now everyone knows like star wars is completely politicized by cathleen kennedy. She's ruling star wars because of a specific agenda like and and it's not just conservative to talk about this, it's. If you would like to be a youtuber who talks about movies, you will talk about this.
Steve Turley:Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. Rush, uh, david limbaugh's brother often talked about it was it was very, yes, evangelical christian and it, yeah right, rush avoided religion. He did not like to bring up religion, but that was the time. The times were nineteen, nineties, absolutely hide of the secular area era, height of a multi, uh unipolar world. One single power uh, we can reduce everything to political, an economic system. That's all you need, just right, systems in place. Which he argued I think rightly so was conservative systems. What gingrich was arguing for balance budgets, sensible government, uh, low taxes and and so on, muscular, uh, defense, uh, that were. Yet the world is gone anyways, right, yeah, astonishingly, that world is going into the unipolar world's gone now. It's multi-polar zigzag. What I've argued for last two years, what's behind the whole uh situation with russia? And and you crane, you can, you can understand it using all the cold war, uh, frame reference of all it's all dumb k gb. You know govachov want to be an odd.
Isaac Botkin:No, that's not what's going on there, you got you can no longer talk about war is a country versus country, because within most countries, right government is against its own people. Yeah, more than neighbors to the side in many instances where there's a lot of work.
Steve Turley:That's not the. The divide isn't horizontal, it's uh, it's vertical, exactly. But with it, with the rise of china, russia, india, turkey, saudi arabia, uh, iran, I mean the, the, the ua, e, the power access now is massive and uh, and the rise of bricks, uh, bricks plus, uh, the uh, economic union, uh, the g seven are the only players in town anymore. So the world is changing dramatically, but moving ironically in the direction of nation, culture, custom and tradition uh.
Isaac Botkin:So your recommendation it sounds like what you're saying is, uh, the the world is changing rapidly. Uh, we need to have more kids, uh search through the ancient traditions, uh, sift through and find those things that really contributed to uh civilization, readop to those, uh, those really important disciplines and skill sets, uh, but we do need to have a standard to know what that actually is. Because, yes, uh, everybody has a definition of, of civilization, even the people who are tearing stuff down at the moment.
Isaac Botkin:Yeah, I says I believe they're creating something exactly yeah yeah, oh, I was thinking about people in congress actually not much of a difference, but you're right.
Steve Turley:Yeah, but you're right. I mean, that is so. In a civilizationless world, it's not going to be this one size fits all globalist. The technocratic system, it's every if, if, if. Politics is downstream from culture. We have lots and lots of different politics and uh, and so I think we have an amazing opportunity here.
Steve Turley:Uh, in the united states are just the anglosphere in general where we've got this uh amazing civilization inheritance, uh from christened them, uh, where jr russlem athens in roam got synthesized through london and made its way over to philly, uh and uh and uh that I should call it philadelphia. I don't know if they called it philly back in the day, but yeah and uh and and it created a, a nation that has become, and uh, an epoch of liberty the likes of which the world just has never seen before. And we're losing it. We're losing it uh to to this, these, these woke globalist leftists who, who occupied both parties there, are more uh enamored with their own accumulation of wealth and affluent, uh, power and affluence than they are preserving uh, the republic. So we have an amazing opportunity to renew those republican uh values.
Steve Turley:I think we're seeing it in red states abbey you mentioned. So you're just showing off with with ten a c, here I'm in delaware, I'm I'm twenty minutes from biden's basement, for heaven's sake, but you know. But you mentioned, interestingly enough, even here, uh, we're in many respects the second amendment, sanctuary, it'si. I could go into a gun shop right now, a walkout with a glock, portie caliber, no problemo, none whatsoever. I look where's where? I grew up in canada. Kit, I mean enough to you, can buy blocks anymore than canada, for heaven's sake canada gets rough.
Steve Turley:Yeah, yeah, canada yeah, romances and but that's the mean, uh, the gun enthusiast culture. I don't know if you ever saw uh read that. Abigail cones uh shooters to java read that all I've heard about.
Isaac Botkin:I haven't read it. I know I know roughly the concept.
Steve Turley:Yes, yes, it's a fascinating read. It's it's published by the university of berkeley too. That's what I had to talk about.
Steve Turley:I need to get that I really yeah, but it is totally pro gun culture, it's one hundred, and she points out that it is in many respects it is a traditionalist culture that transcends red and blue. It trans, you know, you got gays and lesbians and you got women in it. You got, you got, uh, you know many red states. But so here, even in dalaware, even though we're we're liberal in almost every other way, ironically, you cannot touch our guns, don't even come near it. So it transcends, ironic, this red uh, blue uh, the animosity, in such a way that I actually think gun culture providesa super majority paradigm for bringing us together to re imagine our society in light of and through the prism of a timeless tradition and I feel like it is a fascinating intersection of a bunch of things because it intersects with manufacturing, manufacturing freedoms.
Isaac Botkin:Guns are, uh, not only are our guns, you know, throughout history a technological driver, but just the ability to make guns at home. If you can make a modern firearm, then you're doing. You're doing good. Metalwork like this is a good thing to have spread around and decentralized, but it's also a great ideological kind of litmus test, because when we talk about firearm freedom and then you talk about losing firearm freedom, right, you can pretend like you're only having a conversation about hunting hobbies, but you can't really have a deep conversation about firearm freedom without talking about those intrinsic rights, without talking about whether or not people are allowed to oppose it, uh, a government that over them, without talking about how you would impose, uh, oppose a tyrannical government. So, uh, guns are an intersection of so many really important aspects of freedom nothing yet and uh, just such a phenomenal place to be in culturally as well.
Isaac Botkin:Just the fact that, uh, you know, we, we, we've been talking about the big technological players and how much they control information. Youtube and instagram have done more to spread gun culture and make stuff discussable, like back in, you know, we've been talking about it and kind of like the good old days when gingrich was doing this and rush was doing that.
Isaac Botkin:Guns were not very cool back then, I know they were so many people who owned guns and would never talk about them because they didn't want to get put on a list and they didn't want to do this. Now, thanks to youtube and instagram, most people my age. You buy a gun. What's the first thing you do with it? Back crunchy. Second thing you do with it take pictures, put on instagram so people consider cool. It is changed the way that people talk about firearms, believe me, majorably so don't.
Steve Turley:But don't you think, don't you think to the twenty, twenty, uh race riots, just it's it. That's when I think. And then defunding the police, that's when it's the whole. I know this. I in my family, uh, the, uh, the younger, uh bluer sign of, uh our family, all of a sudden all became pro second amendment. After that, they, they're like there's no way, I'm gonna. I get a subject my safety to the winds of the of a woke city council uh, it's.
Isaac Botkin:I think that's a big factor and it wasn't just firearms. One of the trends we've seen a shot show is uh, uh. There is a trend away from hunting stuff towards more tactical stuff for civilians. The number of booze that are selling whatever product and they have a mannequin wearing night vision and body armor in the booth astronomical, because that's cool. You want to see that in a booth and you go up and you find out that they sell a trigger upgrade. But you want to sell it in this particular guys, not with a hunter with a elk on his back, you know you're. You're selling a more of a particular message because people are more interested in the home defense and some of these other capabilities.
Isaac Botkin:Some of that's global war on terror stuff, but some of that is just the development of youtube and instagram. But, uh, also, I would say I don't want to give you the exact numbers on air, I'll tell you after, but in twenty, twenty, when the riots kicked off, we had started selling body armor, ceramic rifle plates. Uh, I think it was almost six or eight months prior and they were just trickling slowly off the shelves expensive, heavy, it's not really normalized. People don't really want body armor. That stops rifle plates, that's that uncomfortable to wear. All of a sudden, in this summer of twenty twenty, body armor started flying off the shelves and obviously there was a huge spike during that that uh, summer, peace and love.
Isaac Botkin:But the after the spike, the new normal is body armor is a very big part of our business. Uh, the ambient normal sales of body armor is extremely high and that tells you something. Yes, uh, it's very easy to buy a shotgun or revolver and put it in a closet just in case. But body armor is expensive. It's not fun to wear. You are thinking on a whole different level of the level by body armor. So it's, I think that's another great uh witness or thermometer indicator. Yeah, for sure, yeah fast.
Steve Turley:I'd love to go to a gun show with you. I I just I'd feel like a kid in the candy store.
Isaac Botkin:I just learned so much to be awesome I'm trying to, uh, you know, pick up on some of these indicators. One of the great things about, about here I let's go back to the main topic, which is, uh, conservative commentators. I love the fact that there's more of them. I love the fact that there's more variety. I love the fact that, uh, amongst the conservative commentators, there is a conversation about all of life and and the culture war, uh, but there is a little bit of a weakness that I see. You can make good enough money being a cultural commentator that that kind of becomes your whole gig and then you're a little bit separated from real life. You have kind of the same problem that academia does, yeah, and I, I am so grateful for the fact that, t-rex, we have our fingers in a bunch of different parts, so we have this podcast, we have a youtube channel, but we also sell products, we also develop products. So we're we're hearing from a lot more people and we're, uh, I think, have a little bit more insight in this and we're, you know, we're a business.
Isaac Botkin:Uh, there's a bunch of folks who I really appreciate their opinion on a lot of stuff, but when they start talking about business, uh, I can't help but notice that they they only sell bumper stickers, so there's a lot of business stuff that they're not touching on a day-to-day basis. I wish they would go a little deeper. See this other thing here. So I feel tremendously blessed that we are, uh, as stretched. Sometimes it's too much. Uh, we are as stretched as we are because it feels like, uh, there's a lot more to learn and to gather if we're doing manufacturing and running this type of business and we're involved in this industry and, yeah, uh, it's, it's super fun because I feel like, uh, we have a little bit more of a holistic approach.
Isaac Botkin:Yeah, and uh is, is that something that that's sort of, I would say, needs to be the future of cultural commentary word? We're talking about movies, so that's great. We're talking about cultures that's great. Are there other areas where, uh, we conservative commentators, uh, is there an area that's lacking, where some listener, uh, the next generation of conservative thinkers you know, probably on your podcast, possibly on mine, the next rush limbaugh could be listening to us right now? What's, what's the thing you know? What's the next blind spot that we can cover?
Steve Turley:what's the thing that that we're really going to need to the handle really well in the well, I think I, uh, fortunately, I think it's it's happening a lot, but I I do think it's something akin to what, uh, we call a parallel economy, uh, rising up. Uh, you know, because, again, going back to the reformation, uh example, uh, you know you, we, the reformers, were unable to break free from the feudalized medieval world without building their own parallel institutions, right? So, you, you gotta build, and, uh, now, it takes a while, right, you didn't see products in scholasticism, really, for another hundred years. It took a while. Before you, you had these protestant universities churning out top-notch protestant thinkers who could all come together and start putting together these confessions of faith, for, for the, remember, all the nation states that are popping up there are confessional, yeah, our confessional states. So, uh, to me, I think that's the big. That's the big one I'll be. I'll be speaking later on this week at re-platform vegas, and that's what it's. It's focused solely on, uh, building the parallel economy, but really focusing on building the infrastructure for the parallel economy, because it's a, you know, you need payment processors, you need, right, all these things that may not be very sexy, uh, but are absolutely indispensable to uh as a hedge against the banking and and and the like. So I would say, if you could, you know, think about again. I love what you're doing, I love what all the uh dan bongino's actually been a bit on the front lines there with with uh, uh parallel economy. Stop, I don't just think in terms of ideologies or you know uh lofty liberal arts sort of you know, triton is in beauty, those are out by, devoted my life to that but also think of exactly what you were talking about at the beginning. Think in terms of the servile arts. What can you bring, what skills do you have that you can uh bring on to uh, the parallel economy market that other patriots can benefit from so they're not dependent on uh a woke economies, uh offering of that that very skill.
Steve Turley:We are becoming more and more creatures of what's called consumer politics, where we boycott and we buy cotton. You know just, they just ask, yeah, just ask Bud Light about consumer politics. I don't think they're gonna want to talk about it anytime soon. But one of the things that we we forget is what there was a fellow who put. What was it? Something like a ultra right or something, a beer that that he did a couple of commercials for. Put it out there, dude. He made over a million bucks in just a few months Just with it, just as a statement for people to tell blood life right. So that that's the buy-cott.
Steve Turley:People will buy from you if they see that you share and championing their values, as opposed to belittling them, mocking them and and demeaning them. So we're becoming much more of a consumer Politics culture where we intentionally buy in accordance with shared values. So you don't even need to have, you know, a quote, superior product. You just have to be, you have to show you're one of us and that's it and we'll buy from you. That's we love to do it.
Steve Turley:I love talking with you more than I would be BC, because I don't share their values, I don't like them. They're creeps, they're weird, right, whereas I would rather spend an hour and a half with someone who I know Loves truth, goodness and beauty, loves faith, family and freedom, and we can together strengthen it, and so, I think, a parallel economy, and then, of course, that means anything and everything. That's the beauty of it. Whatever your talents are, tap into them, learn to market them. I love what you said. Yet Don't just, don't just create your bumper stickers or shirts. Those are great, but that's just where it begins. You need to, you need to start creating industries and if you go there, man Skies limit.
Isaac Botkin:Yeah, yeah, I mean, I can. I can vouch for the fact that the fact that we do have a functioning business at T-Rex is what makes everything else possible. Our YouTube channel is completely demonetized kind of doesn't matter, because we have a different, a different way of generating economic income and you know it's it's. It's kind of unpleasant because If you want to build a parallel economy, there's all kinds of tools. There's some amazing e-commerce platforms that we can't use because the gun industry is banned from them. There's. There's some really cool payment processors, like we're banned from PayPal, right right, fraud protection was amazing. We saved so much money by them protecting us until they kicked us out in the street.
Isaac Botkin:So you will have to take, you know you'll need. You'll need to have a, a willingness to pay a little bit of a tax, for lack of a better word. There are some hurdles for you. Right, there will be some, some. In some ways, though, you'll end up. I would say that, in many ways, t-rex arms were, in this, somewhat unpleasant, somewhat discriminated against industry Mm-hmm, the firearm industry and yet it is such a healthy industry at certain times. There were times in in 2020 when other companies were just falling like flies because they were supported by all these other pieces of infrastructure that failed and T-Rex arms and many other firearm industry companies. Those are companies that do well in good times because they're the recreational component, and they do well in bad times. There's another component and so, yeah, there will be. There will be obstacles and difficulties, and you will, but I think climbing up the steep side of the mountain really has its perks a lot of the time, for sure it does.
Steve Turley:I does. Yeah, no, that's very, very well said. Yeah, we've. We've faced demonization as well. And and then that's. You know, there is a theory out there that all the great, all the great Innovations that have happened historically are all the result of problem solving. And so what's the prerequisite to that? Well, you got to have a problem, yes. So so the the genius, the, the imaginative genius, doesn't tend to operate when you're sipping pina coladas in Bermuda. It tends to operate when, oh oh, we just got to monetize. How are we going to pay the bills next year? We got to figure out a viable business model here, or we're not. We're not eating. Well then, that's good. That's good to create some ingenuity right there.
Isaac Botkin:Yeah Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate you giving us your time, but also I really enjoyed the conversation. I got some book recommendations I'm going to go dig into and read and I'm looking forward.
Steve Turley:I got mine, mine, john Buchanan. Oh, that's great. Yeah, right back at you. Thank you.
Isaac Botkin:It's gonna be. Yeah, we we're. We're heading into a interesting but fascinating future. I I am optimistic in the long term. I think the short term is gonna be tough.
Steve Turley:Yeah, I'm really very turbulence yeah.
Isaac Botkin:Yeah, I'm looking forward to you know, standing side by side with a bunch of people. Some of them will be folks that we've known for a long time, but I also anticipate a bunch of new people Um, standing up as as things go on. So, yeah, eager to see what that next, next generation of Conservative commentators look like, what skills they bring to the table. It's gonna be, it's gonna be not so that'd be fascinating, that's for sure Very good.
Isaac Botkin:Well, thank you so much again, dr Turley, and I will give you some some secret Body armor statistics as soon as I end recording awesome.