Dr. Steve Turley joins me to discuss his new book, The Black Pillaged: How Liberals, Conservatives, and Liberals in the 21st Century Conspirate and why they should all be worried about each other.
00:03:08.780Well, I was in academia for 20 years, a part-time university, and I was in a classical education for 18 of those years.
00:03:19.920I did my doctorate research at Durham University where I came across this field of study known as post-secular studies.
00:03:28.440So this is right at the height of the Obama era, so like 2008, 2009.
00:03:32.920And I remember just being so fascinated by this field of study.
00:03:38.780I mean, it literally covers everything from post-secular law, post-secular politics, post-secular urban development.
00:03:45.340I mean, you name it, fashion, economics, and the like.
00:03:49.000And they were basically arguing that the liberal, secular, globalist world was faltering and more and more populations returning to nation, culture, custom, tradition.
00:04:03.880And little did not, I mean, I didn't take it very seriously, to be honest with you.
00:04:08.100I think I was very black-pilled back then.
00:04:10.620I was like, what are you talking about?
00:04:11.900I think secularism is doing just great.
00:04:13.860But then just a few years later, you know, well, first June 23rd of 2016, Brexit, which was for the first time in its history, the European Union started to get dismantled.
00:04:31.320And then just a few months later, November 8th, when I think that we now know, thanks to the Twitter files, that the deep state was absolutely panicked with those back-to-back victories.
00:04:44.820They were suddenly looking at a populism that was no longer peripheral.
00:04:49.300This was a populism that was changing the world.
00:04:52.360I had been arguing that leading up to it a bit.
00:04:55.300But after Brexit, that's when I said, you know what, I talked to a colleague of mine who was in marketing.
00:05:02.240I said, you know, I really would love to get online and make some commentary because I didn't think most conservative talk radio personalities really understood Trump.
00:05:17.220And they didn't understand this nationalist populism that was coming.
00:05:21.700They were still kind of, yeah, the ideological conservatives that you love, I noticed.
00:05:28.680So I just said, you know, the NRO crowd, they just don't, I don't think they get it.
00:05:34.540They're not understanding Trump from this post-secular nationalist, populist, traditionalist perspective.
00:05:40.720He said, why don't you start a YouTube channel and do some commentary?
00:06:20.360You could really feel the wokeness creeping there.
00:06:22.680Um, I do miss, uh, the classical education world, the classical classroom.
00:06:27.720That was always a wonderful experience, but now I'm a full-time, uh, into broadcasting and, uh, we have over a million, uh, subscribers on our YouTube channel.
00:07:25.300It really is a wild thing when you, when you think back into the way that he ended up just decimating that field because he came through in a moment that just, it blew up what people expected from politicians.
00:07:37.280Then you said, no one understood that.
00:07:39.020And I, I kept trying to explain this to people, uh, in, you know, in my personal life.
00:07:42.800And then eventually, and now what is my professional life of just, you know, there is a huge shift in mentality.
00:07:50.000People are seeing something that they've never seen before.
00:07:52.220A lot of people in the Republican party complained about Trump saying, well, he's going to turn the party into a cult of personality.
00:07:58.220He's going to destroy the Republican party as it, as it was.
00:08:01.860And they didn't understand that that was the point.
00:08:04.000That's what Trump was for people who hated them, who, who wanted real representation.
00:08:09.400And Trump was the first chance for them to do that.
00:08:15.500That's, it's actually one of the, uh, the, the arguments I make, uh, in the book.
00:08:20.200One of the reasons why I, I wrote it is because of this, this misconception that MAGA is somehow totally specific to Trump or even totally specific, uh, to America.
00:08:32.100Um, and, uh, and, and the left hopes that, and the right fears that, you know, that, that, uh, were Trump to lose in November, MAGA would disappear.
00:08:42.220And we'll just go back to a politics as usual.
00:08:45.260And what I try to make, and you know, and by the way, that is somewhat understandable.
00:08:49.720It is after all, make America great again, right?
00:08:52.580It is his slogan, his hats, all that sort of thing.
00:08:56.300But what's so fascinating here is that there are virtually identical movements to MAGA happening all over the world right now, particularly in Europe and Latin America.
00:09:08.920Interestingly, particularly wherever globalism, liberal globalism is strongest, we're seeing the biggest backlashes.
00:09:16.260So of course I, I brought up the Brexit, uh, movement, uh, with Brexit, we were seeing, again, literally the same political concerns.
00:09:25.040Uh, they wanted to, uh, they wanted to go back, uh, to national sovereignty.
00:09:29.420They were concerned about losing economic and, and, and cultural sovereignty, uh, just like we were.
00:09:35.000Uh, in fact, uh, Boris Johnson at one point even said, uh, Brexit would make Britain great again.
00:09:40.680Uh, Trump called himself Mr. Brexit right after it was passed.
00:09:44.900He said he's going to do the same thing for us.
00:09:46.700But we're seeing very similar dynamics with the rise of Marine Le Pen in France and, uh, Georgia Maloney, uh, and, uh, in Italy, Victor Orban wants MEGA to make Europe great again.
00:09:57.820Um, we're seeing the populist revolts, the farmers revolts in, in, uh, the Netherlands and, uh, the yellow vest uprising in France.
00:10:05.620And I, and I can assure you those farmers and those yellow vesters, they weren't uprising because they suddenly read Murray Rothbard or, or, or suddenly read, you know, road to serfdom or something.
00:10:17.620This was a way of life that they saw being destroyed by a political class.
00:10:23.500And so it just brought left, right, right, center all together as a pushback.
00:10:28.400But again, we're seeing something very similar in Latin America with the recent election.
00:10:32.340Naibu Kelly and El Salvador were just one with 85% landslide, uh, Javier Millet, who literally wants a MAGA, make Argentina, right?
00:10:41.500Great again, um, uh, J.R. Bolsonaro, uh, in Brazil, uh, president there who's called the tropical Trump.
00:10:47.980So the argument in the book is, is really that Trump and the MAGA movement are actually part of these much wider trends happening all over the world, uh, where more and more populations are rejecting liberal globalism.
00:11:04.140They're rejecting their establishment, their center-right, center-left political establishment, and in turn embracing, uh, culture, custom, uh, tradition, and nation.
00:11:14.360And so the book really tries to explore all the various ways in which the MAGA movement and Trump are unique expressions of this much more worldwide phenomenon.
00:11:25.580Yeah. And that's what I found really interesting. It is, it is talking about MAGA, of course, it's talking about Trump and his, his leadership and the interest that many people have surrounding that, but it's also analyzing this larger global system, the events that are driving things, not just here in the United States, but across the world.
00:11:42.560And why we're seeing this phenomenon with its own flavor and its own particularity as every, you know, every movement that would have that as their central core would need.
00:11:50.940But, but, but we can see this consistent movement over and over again, the book again, that is called, uh, fight how Trump and the MAGA movement, MAGA movement are changing the world.
00:12:00.060And, you know, the first thing I, as you're talking about this, the first thing that jumps to mind is Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations, because in that book, he talks about how basically we had the world divided into these two ideological empires.
00:12:14.520You had the Soviet Union and then you had liberal democracy and that was it. Everybody had to change their nation, their system, their way of life and fit into one of these two boxes.
00:12:26.020And while guys like Francis Fukuyama said, well, this is the end of history, you know, the Soviets lost America one history is over.
00:12:33.500And now it's all just going to be kind of this liberal paradigm globally. Huntington said, no, actually what you're seeing is that these movements are come, are turning nationalistic.
00:12:43.440They're trying to find ways to return, as you say, back to these traditions, these ideas.
00:12:48.480And he said, the biggest question is going to be, who are we? And I thought that was a very interesting thing because you, you kind of touch on this from a different area of these different movements, trying to rediscover these regional identities, these civilizational identities, these understandings of themselves in a post-liberal world.
00:13:07.620Yes. Yes. Yeah. That, that was really, that was a wonderful summation. Um, I, I, I think you just nailed it. Um, I think what, uh, we're seeing today.
00:13:18.480Is sort of the inevitability of identity politics. Now we tend to think about identity politics only on the left. Right. But I, I, I would, I would, I would surmise, I would put for your, for your consideration that, uh, that's, that's the establishment's way of trying to control identity politics.
00:13:38.160So they'll, they'll have some identities that they allow for. They're all on the left, of course. But if you're, you know, uh, Christian nationalists, right, that's the new scare today. If you're that, oh, no, no, no, no, you can't have that. But if you're a BLM nationalist, no problem. Of course you've been oppressed. That's of course what you're going to say. You're going to, you're going to go towards. No, I think identity is at the heart of the new 21st century politics. And that's, and you got it exactly. That's Sam Huntington of Harvard's thesis. Um,
00:14:08.160and basically, and he didn't even, you know, he, I don't even think he lived long enough to actually see all of this, uh, uh, come about. I forget when he dawned, maybe 2010 or so. I'm forgetting. Um, but what globalism does is it, it, it disembeds time and space in such a way where our politics are wrenched away from the local and it's reallocated in the hands of the managerial elite, a managerial class, your audience.
00:14:38.160knows this, I'm sure like the back of their hands. And so we, this is the biggest complaint with Brexit. This is the big complaint right now among the, the populist movements going on all throughout Europe. Back in 2000, only 4% of the EU seats. So the seats in, in Brussels, the, uh, European union parliament, only about 4% were occupied by a populist today. It's nearly 30%. They've grown astronomically in just 20 years.
00:15:04.160years. And one of, one of the reasons for that is because populations are sick and tired of seeing political and economic decision-making taken away from the local and reallocated in these translocal, transnational centers of power where more and more power is accumulating in the hands of less and less people.
00:15:24.160So it's something we could talk about, uh, uh, Joel Chapman or Joel, uh, Kotkin of Chapman university calls the neo-feudalism, which is a wonderful description of the world that's forming today. So what's happening in this blowback and this backlash is that more and more populations are wrenching political and economic control out of the sky, out of the ethereal, ideological, uh, sky.
00:15:54.160So if you bring your politics and your economy back to the local, inevitably it's going to take on the frames of reference of identity, region, religion, race, nation, culture, custom, tradition, because that's essentially what identity is. Identity is positionality.
00:16:12.160My position, uh, in the world. And so, um, make America great again is a civic nationalist identity, uh, uh, movement, whereas BLM and La Raza are an ethnic or ethno nationalist identity movement. Again, some of those overlap like in Japan or something, you know, there's all kinds of configurations for that.
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00:17:04.600But what we're seeing today is, I think, the inevitability of identity politics. And to their credit, to their credit, like the guys at National Review and so forth, the old guard, as it were, the old modern liberal Francis Fukuyama guard saw that. They saw, wait, this is just, this is just warmed over identity politics or cultural Marxism or, you know, that kind of stuff.
00:17:27.900To which the response is, well, no, that's bringing it down to the level of absurdity. No, identity itself is the new paradigm. It's not, okay, we can keep the ideologies going, and then we just have to keep these identity politics off to the side and marginalized.
00:17:50.380No, identity itself is disappearing. There's a whole reason for that, largely post-modernity. Nobody believes in metanarratives anymore. I mean, Francois Leotard found that out in 1979. This isn't news. We don't believe in this stuff anymore.
00:18:04.940And so, politics inevitably is going local. And when it goes local, it takes on the frames of reference of identity. And so, identity politics is going to be the future, whether we like it or not.
00:18:17.820And I think Francis Fukuyama was proven completely wrong. Sam Huntington was proven completely right.
00:18:25.340Yeah, I think that's a really interesting and important way to put that, because a lot of people are very scared of what you just said there.
00:18:32.700You said it in a very happy and jovial and convincing way, but those are bold statements that will get you in very serious trouble in most of mainstream right-wing politics right now.
00:18:45.160In fact, I have people screaming at me constantly about how dangerous this is.
00:18:48.720I was going to say, I think you found that out firsthand, yes.
00:18:52.240But what you're saying is exactly right, and it echoes things like R. R. Reno said in The Return of the Strong Gods, another great book along these lines.
00:19:00.240There's a lot of people converging on kind of this point, I think, simultaneously.
00:19:05.260And it's great to have so many people coming together and understanding this.
00:19:08.540But, you know, we're going to have identity. Identity is an inescapable part of functional human civilizations.
00:19:15.140We've tried stripping it away, and that built a global empire, and it built, you know, some impressive things.
00:19:21.660But we are also seeing the failure of these things, and we are seeing them coming apart, as you describe in the book.
00:19:27.440And so the question is not, will you have identity? The question is, will you have healthy identities, or will you embrace something much darker?
00:19:36.740Will you ignore this problem so long that those that have bad answers to this question are the ones answering it?
00:19:44.720And I think that's really important for people like you to embrace and point to this, because if we don't, if we stay silent, if the right is too afraid to address this, then only the left gets to decide what identity is and what it means.
00:19:58.540And then you get movements like BLM, and then you get all these really destructive ideas that come to dominate the discussion because the right has simply ceded the ground because they're really afraid of being called racist or something.
00:20:11.160That's right. That's right. That's right. No, yeah, I think that it's brilliantly put.
00:20:16.940Again, the whole racist rhetoric, this resentment politics is fully part of the globalist movement, as you're well aware.
00:20:29.320It intentionally seeks to disenfranchise, particularly rural populations and traditionalist populations, and recast their cultures, customs, traditions as racist, bigoted, and so forth.
00:20:42.880And then what do they do? They just simply bring in all of these ethno-nationalisms, very odd thing, to replace them.
00:20:49.620So they don't want to have anything to do with the macro-ethno or religious nationalism that we would be most organically prone to, given our historical contingencies.
00:21:02.860Instead, what are they doing? They're bringing these rabid, hate-filled ethno-nationalisms to the left.
00:21:09.160So what's so interesting to me, whenever I see Trump or I'm seeing BLM or I'm seeing LeRoz, whatever it is, I'm seeing nationalisms coming in.
00:21:18.780One way or the other, you're getting nationalisms. You're getting civilizationalisms.
00:21:22.880Well, I thought it was so fascinating, one of the very first acts that the all-Muslim city council in Hamtramck, Michigan, passed, was banning the rainbow flag from flying on any public property.
00:21:40.840And you just, now they're all Democrats, and you just saw the woke Democrat freak out.
00:21:46.720I was watching some video from their city hall meeting, and they were freaking, they were accusing them of hate, and how could you do this, how could you do this?
00:21:57.240But then you just saw one Muslim citizen after another, after another, and they are the majority now, in Hamtramck and in Dearborn.
00:22:04.120They came up and said, that flag has no place on our buildings, on our public property, and that all-Muslim, all-Democrat city council unanimously voted to get rid of that flag.
00:22:18.520So identity politics of the left is breaking up, it's falling apart, it has no future, because the only thing that unites all the different identities is victimhood.
00:22:32.120So when one identity gets power, they're not victims anymore, so they don't, and when they become the majority, they don't need the other identities that don't have anything to do with each other, certainly historically.
00:22:46.520So I think we're seeing it break up, actually the mayor of Hamtramck just endorsed Trump, interestingly enough, as obviously retribution for getting locked out of the Democrat convention.
00:22:56.220So it's very, very fascinating, one way or another you're getting nationalism, one way or another you're getting identities, like you said, is it going to be a good one, or is it going to be faithful to our traditions, and our customs, and cultures that are fruitful, and beautiful, and good?
00:23:10.900Or are we going to bring in some of these pseudo-identities that can cause a lot of trouble?
00:23:17.820Yeah, that coalition, as you point out, is really only bound together by its unified attack on what has been kind of the Christian identity and the originally Anglo-Protestant understanding of the American experience.
00:23:32.580And when that, as you say, when they win those victories, the reason to hold that coalition comes apart, and then you start seeing these fractures.
00:23:39.900So I think that's a fascinating development, and I want to dive deeper into your analysis in the book.
00:23:45.240But before we do, guys, let me tell you about Joe Biden's plan for the Supreme Court.
00:23:48.700Don't kid yourself, the future of the Supreme Court is on the ballot.
00:23:51.440The radical left want to eliminate the court's conservative majority by packing the Supreme Court with their own hand-picked justices to get the outcome that they want.
00:23:58.620Even President Biden has gotten into the act by making reforming the court one of his final priorities before he leaves office.
00:24:05.320But don't be fooled, their endgame really is to pack the court.
00:24:08.860At First Liberty, they call this assault on the court what it really is, a Supreme Court coup.
00:24:13.660The frightening thing is that come January, their plan could become our nation's reality.
00:24:18.460Simple majority votes in the House and the Senate combined with the President's signature could turn their plan to pack the court into law.
00:24:25.360That's why First Liberty is sounding the alarm, and they need you to join them.
00:24:29.940If we take action together, if we unite our voices, we can put a stop to the radical left's plan to take control of the Supreme Court.
00:24:37.680As the 2024 election approaches, we need to do three things.
00:24:41.640Find out where each of your candidates stand on the radical issues of packing and purging the court.
00:24:46.500Share what you learn with everyone, and do your civic duty by voting.
00:24:50.260The future of the court, or preserving it as an independent judiciary, is literally in your hands.
00:24:55.140If we lose the court, then we lose the country.
00:24:58.180That's why First Liberty is taking action, and they need all of us to join them.
00:25:02.700With patriots like you standing for the Supreme Court, we can safeguard the independence of the judiciary, just as the Founding Fathers intended.
00:25:09.720And by saying no to the left's Supreme Court coup, we can secure the blessings of liberty and protect the future of our constitutional rights for our children and grandchildren.
00:25:18.120Please go to SupremeCoup.com slash Oren.
00:25:21.680That's SupremeCoup.com slash Oren to learn how you can help stop the radical left's takeover of the Supreme Court.
00:25:28.900Now, in your book, you have a term, civilizational populism.
00:25:35.460Can you unpack that for people so they can better understand?
00:25:38.940How does that relate to kind of the, well, I was going to say popular definition of populism?
00:25:52.120Yeah, that's, civilizational populism is really key in the book because it is the wider international movement of which MAGA and Trump are specific American expressions.
00:26:06.020So we can unpack it just in reverse order.
00:26:14.400It is a, it's a realignment of the electorate around a vertical divide as opposed to a horizontal divide.
00:26:22.920So when we think of politics, we generally think of horizontal divisions, left versus right, liberal versus conservative, Democrat versus Republican, labor versus Tory.
00:26:34.000But populists literally stand that on its head.
00:26:37.940For populists, they see the real divide as the people versus the permanent political class or the ruled versus the rulers or the ordinary citizen versus the oligarch.
00:26:53.360So in 2010, Scott Rasmussen and Doug Shones, a Republican and Democrat pollster each, they published a book on the Tea Party movement called Mad as Hell.
00:27:03.940It was a very good book because it's poll after poll, study after study, survey after survey.
00:27:08.780And what they found, their conclusion in that book back in 2010, 14 years ago, was that they were already seeing this realignment where more and more people were saying, you know, there really isn't a difference between Republican and Democrat anymore.
00:27:23.320I mean, it doesn't matter who I vote for.
00:27:25.100We always just seem to get the same thing, just like you said at the beginning, just these formulaic, check the boxes kind of policies.
00:27:32.000It just doesn't matter if it's left, right, conservative, doesn't matter.
00:27:37.140So they felt like they were living more and more under like a, you know, a uniparty or a duopoly.
00:27:43.840And and one that was that did not care about the people and their values, their interests and their concerns.
00:27:53.120It's a it changes a horizontal divide to a more of a vertical divide.
00:27:57.020But it doesn't tell you much about the movement other than the people really don't like the other people in charge.
00:28:02.780You can have a communist populist movement.
00:28:05.120You can have a right wing populist movement.
00:28:07.420It doesn't tell you much about the, dare I say it, ideology or just the basic structure of the concern.
00:28:15.000So populism is tends to be thought of as a thin ideology that needs to get some kind of thickness from outside of itself.
00:28:22.780And so it usually every populist movement will marry another movement for that thickness to justify that and give a coherent rationale for that vertical divide.
00:28:36.720And what we're seeing today, particularly with MAGA, is something called civilizationalism.
00:28:41.680And what civilizationalists do is they interpret this vertical divide as a battle between a corrupt elite, oligarchical elite, and the people who are fighting to preserve their unique culture, custom and traditions.
00:29:02.240And they see that elite, that corrupt elite, as selling out those unique cultures, customs and traditions for their own profit, for their own political gain.
00:29:14.280So they see them selling out their national sovereignty through open borders.
00:29:19.360They see them selling out their economic sovereignty through a global division of labor that sends manufacturing and industry overseas and then reallocates capital and finance around first world metropolitan, cosmopolitan centers, leaving rural populations highly unemployed.
00:29:41.000And they're selling out our cultural sovereignty by recasting our cultures, customs and traditions as bigoted and racist and all kinds of phobic and all in the name of what's technically referred to as emancipatory politics, claiming that the individual person is a sovereign individual.
00:30:00.560And traditions, and traditions, and traditions, customs, they're impediments to your own individual autonomy.
00:30:09.360And so we're going to push those out of the public square.
00:30:14.140And then lo and behold, you become who you're always meant to be, which is a worker and a consumer within this globalist system.
00:30:21.660They don't tell you that part, but that's basically, they strip you down to you're just a worker and a consumer and literally nothing more.
00:30:28.400And so civilizational populism is this massive backlash against liberal globalism.
00:30:48.200As you point out, there's this global condition, which all of these different civilizations are trying to emerge from.
00:30:55.280They recognize themselves as distinct entities.
00:30:57.700They understand, as you point out, this problem of this overarching empire and the way that it's stripped away so many of the things that they desire as a civilization, as people with an identity and a future that they would like to realize.
00:31:10.040But in each one of those different civilizations, because they are inherently, as you point out, nationalist or civilizational regional, they have to have what Gatano must have called a political formula.
00:31:21.100They need to have a justifying ideology that kind of unifies that populist instinct and says, okay, but then how are we going to order ourselves to our particularity?
00:31:30.520Now, I think a very interesting problem that faces the civilizational populism is that up to this point, systems of scale have won, right?
00:31:42.360That's why the managerial elite rose to power.
00:31:44.660Is that linking these supply lines, linking these propaganda outlets, linking these armed forces, compacts, all of this allowed them to operate at a scale that simply dwarfed and destroyed any competing ideology.
00:31:57.720Now we're seeing the cracks in that show and we're seeing the supply lines falling apart.
00:32:02.160We're seeing the military alliances weaken.
00:32:05.460We're seeing many of the flaws of this, but simultaneously you have this problem where all of these civilizational populist movements are working kind of towards a similar goal, but in distinct in different ways.
00:32:17.920Do you see a world in which these movements recognize each other as allies to some extent, but still are able to maintain their own distinct regional identities and interests?
00:32:30.620Yeah, very interesting observation there.
00:33:00.620So what's really animating all this stuff is that the securities that we were guaranteed in the nation-state project, border security, economic security, cultural security, they've all eroded under globalism.
00:33:14.500So the backlash now is in a new nationalism, a new populism, a new traditionalism.
00:33:19.500That's basically the structure of the backlashes.
00:33:23.260And they're just finding that they have so much in common.
00:33:27.480This is so interesting too, Oren, because in many ways it's not even nationalism per se.
00:33:37.220This is why the civilizational paradigm is so important.
00:33:40.820Because yes, it's expressed in the nation-state in a renewed civic or even ethnic nationalist sentiment.
00:33:50.920But when you listen to the speeches of George Maloney or Marine Le Pen or Gert Wilders in the Netherlands or Yemi Ockeson in Sweden, a lot of people don't know that.
00:34:02.280Sweden actually has a nationalist populist government right now.
00:34:05.280The most liberal country in all of Europe has a far-right coalition government with their center right.