00:05:42.260And it's the anti-feminist view of the reformers.
00:05:45.660And so he ties patriarchy and right order of the home and society, government, business, everything to created order that is explicit through both old and new covenants in the scriptures and uses a lot of original sources.
00:06:04.440And it's very thoroughly researched, many footnotes for people that like that sort of thing.
00:06:09.800And I think it'll be a excellent resource for people to really help illuminate what
00:06:16.720is meant when we say that all of us human existence should be patriarchal.
00:08:53.180and what he shows is that what what some of us have been saying for for quite a while now is
00:08:58.120that we're often criticized as basically being this novel sort of movement that is hyper patriarchal
00:09:06.540and founded upon the gothards and when i've even heard aaron wren refer to zach garrison our camp
00:09:11.440as neo patriarchy yeah neo patriarchy which is kind of a slip up i think for for aaron wren
00:09:17.940He's usually pretty careful in his labels and in his his facts.
00:09:23.640I think there's nothing new about it, because what we're saying is, is that complementarianism and Gothardism and any of those modern movements, those are the neo movements.
00:09:34.520And those movements are neo because not only are they historically new, but they're founded upon newer modes of thought, modernistic modes of thought.
00:09:42.480And what Pastor Garris is doing is he's actually, instead of starting with modern assumptions, modern philosophical and theological frameworks, and building a doctrine of sexuality, he's actually going back and saying, what did our forefathers, what did the reformers themselves reason concerning sexuality?
00:10:01.840And he goes from their theological foundation, which is 500 years old plus, because it's also a method that is founded far beyond the Reformation as well.
00:10:11.460But he goes back to the source and he demonstrates that the things that we've all been saying in this sort of reformed patriarchal world aren't new.
00:10:20.740They're exactly the type of things that our forefathers have been saying.
00:10:24.740And actually what we're doing is we're saying we don't want anything from the 1980s and the 1990s and the 2000s.
00:10:30.300we want to go back to the 1500s, the 1600s, the 1700s and ask the question of where did we depart
00:10:37.680from this mode of thinking? And then, yeah, not all resourcement is going to lead to us
00:10:42.680uncritically accepting the reasoning and theology of everything that happened in the past.
00:10:46.620Of course not. But let's lay out the fruit and let's say what fruit has modern sexual theology
00:10:54.060born in the world. Mostly good. Mostly good. Versus what about this older vision? Yeah. Which
00:11:02.440is, I would say not just a reformation vision, but it's a vision because it's reformational,
00:11:07.560it's rooted in natural law and in scriptural law. And so it's deeply harmonious between nature
00:11:13.640and scripture, the nature of man as he was created and what God says in his word.
00:11:18.760and what you'll find is that um it's a it's very much a position that you can not just hold but
00:11:25.920you can live in quite fruitfully and so i'm i'm very excited i think that people are going to
00:11:30.860love this book hate this book you know it's going to run the spectrum but they're going to have to
00:11:36.220reckon with it and and it's also what i love about it is that it's accessible it's not 500 pages of
00:11:43.020dense scholarly you can't penetrate it with you know without a you know million candle watt bulb
00:11:48.160It's like, this is clear. It's under 200 pages. It's full of primary sources. People are going to have to reckon with it. And to your original question, though, in the topic of this episode with time and in his fortress article, I think that one of the main defense defensive mechanisms for making sure that the right people are inside the fortress is going to be recovering doctrinal systems and practice like this.
00:12:14.840because you can't build a fortress with the enemies inside and hope to defend it well and
00:12:20.460that's that's actually one of the really interesting things we'll get into in the
00:12:23.240episode that we talked about but they'll say in the article that um one of the things they've
00:12:29.020noticed about particularly our messaging is that because it's so polarizing it helps keep the wrong
00:12:35.620people out of the camp yes exactly like i actually don't want um you know let's say like an owen
00:12:41.520strand if he's going to be in the camp but then just be a traitor it's like well i actually don't
00:12:45.640want that person in the camp i want them flushed yeah or if you know even think about just in
00:12:49.920ogden um we actually don't soft pedal our sexual theology no absolutely not we front load it yeah
00:12:56.600it's got to be out front these things function as filtering mechanisms yes where people self-select
00:13:02.360out and they also function as um culture building within because they're not just a negative we don't
00:13:09.760like trash world kind of view. It's a, well, we don't like that, of course, but it's because it's
00:13:15.720completely impossible to live peacefully with trash world and to build the positive thing that
00:13:20.940we want to build, which is the new humanity in the image of Christ with a right view of human
00:13:27.040sexuality, a right view of the polis, a right view of every aspect of human life. And when you try to
00:13:33.040hide in lowest common denominator, those things for the sake of a big tent, what you end up with
00:13:38.640is not a fortress you just end up with a big battlefield where you'll see the sbc it's just
00:13:44.360a constant battle with the people that are supposedly inside of your tent well i think
00:13:49.280they're not defending the walls yeah that's the point of a fortress is like the walls just can't
00:13:52.680be porous to anybody yeah what actually in our church's history you we've had both ends of the
00:13:59.220spectrum right so as we've come to some of these convictions uh in essentially the culture and the
00:14:05.980theological positions that we have now, uh, the church we were in did not start that way.
00:14:13.360It was not very much. So more in your mainline, big Eva stream. And so as we were changing some
00:14:21.460of these theological positions, especially applicational, that's really the key because
00:14:27.560when you're talking about, uh, people adopting Westminster standards and things like that,
00:14:32.080if you don't get the application right, what you get is PC USA. So you have a high liturgy with a
00:14:38.920lot of the elements that we practice on a, on a liturgy on Sunday mornings being led by some
00:14:44.320lesbian pink haired, you know, lady pastor, you know, with a rainbow stole. Yes, exactly. So,
00:14:52.720but back to the cultural screening, if you will, we had a period of reformation in the church to
00:15:01.180where we knew strategically that we were going to have to, you know, hold the line at some point,
00:15:07.200we were going to implement certain changes to the church, to the culture. And we knew there was
00:15:11.860going to be cost. Why do we know that? Because there was actually a battlefield within the
00:15:15.840church. There was a mixture of people that were in and people that were definitely not in, you
00:15:21.860know, as far as the culture and the vision and a positive vision for the future and all those
00:15:25.880things. And so one thing that, that Brian would joke about in the past is that, Oh, there's too
00:15:31.040many people in the pews. Uh, I must've gotten soft. Not really. You're just, you know, preaching
00:15:36.260expositionally and it comes up when it comes up. And so you'd say it like, it's time for a topical
00:15:41.160sermon on this thing. And you'd go hard and then clean out like, you know, 10% of the people school
00:15:47.460or 20% of the people in that case to now, we have a different problem. So in our new membership
00:15:55.640class uh we've given the same advice uh that that brian takes on a sunday morning where we look out
00:16:02.060on the pews and we're like man it's getting kind of full we need to go hard to see if we can preach
00:16:06.020anybody out and what ends up happening is that more people come in because we've actually have
00:16:11.020people that are like-minded of the same culture we're actually i mean this article is so good
00:16:16.520because it actually points out a lot of things that are reality that we've experienced but we
00:16:20.720haven't really formulated you know into we were you you guys especially you were doing the things
00:16:26.180even though maybe not thinking this analytically about what was happening well and a lot of the
00:16:31.340reason was because we weren't necessarily trying to build what we have now in a way that's like
00:16:36.900the grand vision but a lot of it was just principled stands like this is what we believe
00:16:42.960and my convictions command me to live in consistently with those convictions and so
00:16:49.560we're going to do this no matter what it costs,
00:16:51.720even if that means we're going to have to find a different career.
00:16:54.600The number of conversations Brian and I had about that, he's like, well,
00:16:57.820I could go, you know, serve coffee again. You know, we,
00:17:00.800we can feed our families, but I would rather do that than live in some like,
00:17:06.140you know, milk toast sort of church. Yeah.
00:17:08.700It was like it wasn't a church growth strategy.
00:17:12.260It ended up being one about five years in,
00:17:15.420but that's how long it took before it was a church growth strategy.
00:17:18.880it was a church shrink strategy church yeah well i think a lot of it too gets back to
00:17:25.000as you're thinking about fortress building and your people the people inside your walls it means
00:17:30.820that if you're going to be we've talked about tribal leadership but if you're going to lead
00:17:34.120well in this environment your focus has to be on upgrading and cultivating the tribe
00:17:38.260right so that's what you're talking about the way that you preach the way that you do membership
00:17:43.180classes um it really is focusing on that and i think once you get to like critical mass and you
00:17:48.640of momentum then you start seeing like five years later that that culture has a it's like
00:17:56.480centrifugal force it just gets more and more powerful yeah it's a flywheel it takes a lot
00:18:01.100to get going yeah that's right and i think power one thing that people in for the sake of strategy
00:18:06.620or tactics what they try to do you see this a lot in in big eva mega churches is that they do hold
00:18:12.720certain convictions that are actually really good and principled but they hide them with the idea
00:18:18.180that eventually they will win people to those ideas.
00:18:21.220But the funny thing about principles is that you don't live consistently with your principles.
00:18:26.580If you don't actually practice them, you will lose those principles.
00:18:57.500But that's not the case because what's happening simultaneously when you're hiding those principles is that you're attracting people with what you're currently using for your messaging and for the culture.
00:19:09.740You're getting them the message that you use to win them with you win them to to go with that with time and fortresses.
00:19:16.960what the message that you're up on the walls crying out with is actually going to end up being
00:19:22.200the walls of your fortress yes that's what's because the it's going to define how big the
00:19:27.200thing is who's inside of this wall and who's outside of this wall is actually one of the
00:19:32.380most important things you can figure out about a fortress believe it or not you know yeah is this
00:19:38.360thing are we going to make this thing broad and narrow how's it going to work and um you know i
00:19:43.280I really, I thought that was a great picture in the article of like, like Dan said, it
00:19:48.360puts some words to some things that we've experienced ourselves.
00:19:51.600And I was like, yeah, that that's exactly it.
00:19:54.160One of the things I really liked was the combination of things.
00:19:56.920So it's not, um, the Benedict option, um, in the sense of Roger where you just go to
00:20:02.300a monastery, but it's a fortress combined with this idea of cultural insurgency.
00:20:07.640Like we don't have the power, but we're working for the day when we would have it.
00:20:11.720So strategically picking, say, like small towns or places like Ogden, Utah, Moscow, and then building fortress out from there.
00:20:20.580One of the things I think is helpful, they define fortresses this way.
00:20:24.140Fortresses are pockets of insurgency strongholds located in strategic places, sufficiently resilient to external attack and vigilant against infiltration.
00:20:34.640They offer not just a negative world survival strategy, but a springboard to a new world hereafter.
00:20:40.940and they provide a new positive world one of the things he said that i especially like because it
00:20:46.740was about us is uh we we are not looking for evangelical chaz or christian occupy wall street
00:20:53.640or a new munster germany circa 1535 for that matter we must build for a new future not a larp
00:21:00.860hashtag return but a real and new american christendom amen to that and then he says this
00:21:07.200new christened press seems to share some of this vision in their upcoming building christian
00:21:11.340burroughs conference if you're a reader that needs an option quote unquote go ahead and call
00:21:16.540this the alfred option it's it's athelny yeah tell me about that first of all alfred option
00:21:22.960great yeah we trademarked dm we came up with it i mean time in must have been it was already
00:21:28.060trademarked i just want you to know we already thought no we already thought of that no um
00:21:32.180It's Athelny. It's it's recognizing Ren's positive, neutral, negative world paradigm that there's a lot of truth to that and that we're in a negative world. It's recognizing that the broader culture isn't dominantly ours. Like we don't own the institutions. We don't own the palace. We don't own the culture yet yet. But it's also recognizing that what we're trying to build isn't a retreatist monastery, but it's actually more like Athelny, which was the it means Prince Isle.
00:22:02.180It's the little swampy island where Alfred was driven all the way back
00:22:06.160with the Vikings invading his homeland that he was king over.
00:22:09.360And he ends up being king of this little island in a swamp, pretty much.
00:22:12.480But from there, he built out and he ultimately reconquered.
00:22:41.800And from that, he historically he really did go go back and win his lands from enemy occupation and led to, you know, we're going to get an Alfred much more, but led to rebirth of British civilization, basically.
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00:27:13.620yeah and i like that picture too because it's like yeah you know david and his mighty men same
00:27:20.020deal you're on the run you're in the wilderness um but they're living in caves they can they can
00:27:25.040be effective for a time in that. But it's looking forward, Dan, to really a cultural insurgent,
00:27:29.680the right moment where they can grow, expand, et cetera. One of the other principles I think
00:27:35.240that's in play here is Alfred's boroughs, which we vowed we would be talking more about as we
00:27:40.760come up to the conference. But Dan, one of the things that they kind of employ this language
00:27:45.840of being connected. So their individual places, I'm sure they were unique places, geographically
00:27:51.560distant. Um, but that, you know, they built roads to get from one to the other, uh, but they were
00:27:56.840somehow connected. And when you connect them all together, you could then defend your country and
00:28:01.720you could support culture. Yes. So just talk to me about like, okay, we have Moscow, we have a,
00:28:07.160we have an Ogden, uh, you know, maybe a Batavia. Why is it important that we don't just have like
00:28:12.740one central hub, but that we have these different connected quote unquote boroughs like Ogden. Why
00:28:20.540is that important? Yeah, it's important for a number of reasons. We were just talking about
00:28:25.400how we don't have institutional power. We don't have, you know, a lot of really influence at this
00:28:31.580moment. Just backtracking a little bit to Athelny. Did I say that right, Athelny? Yeah. As long as
00:28:38.200I'm saying it right. Yeah. Is that Alfred, while he's in this island in the swamps, one thing that
00:28:44.560he did that uh time and mentions in his article was that he had if you will you know this is a
00:28:50.840bit of a stretch he essentially had a media or a communications uh venture where he is communicating
00:28:56.880with all with people off the island and he's letting them know they're still a king and
00:29:01.780there's still a positive vision for the future so he's doing that while essentially conquered
00:29:07.820at that moment saying all hope is not lost and i feel like that's where we are right now that's
00:29:13.120moscow is that's where a lot of these different places are right now is is that we're painting a
00:29:18.120positive vision for the future saying like things won't always be like they are now and giving that
00:29:23.860positive vision for the future the reason why it's so important in the alfred's borough model
00:29:29.140to have the way that he's structured these different boroughs is that there were a day's
00:29:32.940march or a day's walk from each other so that travelers and merchants could spend the night
00:29:38.740behind fortified walls with, uh, garrisons. They had, they had soldiers in these, you are protected.
00:29:45.840And then they had economic protection as well. So that merchants weren't being robbed,
00:29:50.380you know, their wares could be sold economically. And so if you apply that to modern day,
00:29:55.260why is it important to have these different regional fortresses, if you will? Well,
00:29:59.680it's because we have to insulate ourselves from not relying on the negative world economically
00:30:05.160for entertainment for different messaging and teaching uh and for resources such as education
00:30:12.240you know and we're already doing that that's why i think we're building fortresses right now is
00:30:17.780because we're having to insulate ourselves in some ways not not benedict option where it's
00:30:23.120retreatist but we're having to say what are the resources available it's education is something
00:30:27.480that we need and the resources that exist stink you know and so we we're going to have to develop
00:30:33.240a lot of our own or recover things that have been lost in the past.
00:30:37.560And so it's really important to have first communication and good relationships with
00:30:42.540these different places for the sake of economics and all that I just mentioned.
00:30:47.420It's also to produce safe harbors for people, because what happens when you're in a place
00:30:52.820that is hostile towards Christianity and you're a Christian and you're trying to live out
00:30:57.520these principles while you're going to have to move.
00:31:00.700And that's what people are doing right now is that there's a great relocation happening at the moment where people are shuffling around.
00:31:07.120And they're basically looking for a fortress.
00:31:09.080Yeah, they're going to we're going to see definitely ebbs and flows of that, depending on what's happening economically and politically and socially.
00:31:15.540We're going to see mass movements of people.
00:48:39.280I'm curious, Timon, when you talk about a defensive construction of a fortress, are
00:48:44.860you saying it should be defensive forever, it should remain small, roll up the gates,
00:48:49.220the homos are coming, or is this strategic in a different way?
00:48:53.300Yeah, so we try to make clear that this is a provisional strategy.
00:48:58.420There's an aspiration that's beyond that.
00:49:00.220And this is where we try to distinguish ourselves from other models of cultural reaction at this time.
00:49:07.800You know, I think Rod Dreher's approach has been somewhat caricatured sometimes, but it's, you know, the imagery is monastic.
00:49:14.180And so that's kind of brought upon yourself when you use that.
00:49:17.440Ours is, you know, this is provisional in order to, in some sense, recover our footing.
00:49:23.260And I wrote a piece, I think, a couple of years ago that was dealing with some of this of you need to get yourself some distance so that you can build something.
00:49:33.280You need to construct yourself in a way that's defensive to hostile forces, which are coming, but also, you know, in a sense, build up build up your army, whatever you want to say.
00:49:44.460Our executive director at AMREF and our friend Josh Abitoy added that, you know, he wanted to add a piece to this that was you have raiding parties, too.
00:49:53.260So every now and then you might branch out and go steal some, you know, goods and bring them back to your fortress and feast upon them.
00:50:01.820But in general, it's, you know, this is, again, a military analogy because things are coming for you, but you're not going to stay holed up there forever.
00:50:11.640The goal is to get to a position where you could reach out and go conquer more territory.
00:50:16.640And hopefully when you have a sufficient network, as we say it, and we can get into like Clifford already has a bit.
00:50:23.260various ways, what constitutes a fortress in various environments, but a sort of network
00:50:27.820that has some transference of currency and status and these sorts of things. So it's interconnected.
00:50:34.540You could, you know, at some point either launch an attack or upgrade then to a city. You may have
00:50:40.300the sufficient means and technology, as we put it metaphorically and everything else to build that.
00:50:46.740But right now you don't have the ability to conquer the cities and you also don't have the
00:50:51.160ability to build them. You have to wait. And so you have to develop yourselves into being truly
00:50:56.380excellent and truly virtuous. On the one hand, that's what we're pursuing. But on the other hand,
00:51:01.560to be strategic and sensible in the sense that, you know, Cliver is talking about, there's been
00:51:06.020sort of a, there's a new layer of analysis added to the guy who wants to start a business or a
00:51:10.540church they didn't previously have to consider. We can consider that unfortunate, but it is the
00:51:15.720case. But yes, to answer your question, this is not purely and perpetually defensive. It is with
00:51:22.300further aspirations. Otherwise, we would consider it defeatist and we're intentionally not trying
00:51:27.640to be that. Yeah, I think that's a really, really helpful point. One of the things too
00:51:30.880that interests me, you guys quote Machiavelli at a couple of points here. But one of the quotes is,
00:51:37.380if the people hold you in hatred, fortresses do not save you. And so you say there's no substitute
00:51:42.940for esteem. One of the things that's, again, interesting to me here in Ogden is how you can
00:51:50.040build a tribe through messaging. We've done it through podcasting largely, but really the force
00:51:57.640of power seems to come from, you know, shared, I guess, tribal alliances, ideologies, things like
00:52:05.780this. And one of the things I've seen in the past is guys will build tribes this way, but then they
00:52:11.260start attacking their base. And then so you get something like resentment building within your own
00:52:16.400walls. And then it's, you know, the fortress is worthless. But I want to ask you, why is that so
00:52:21.280important? How do you build that esteem? How do you establish that with your people?
00:52:26.980I think the part that really deals with that most is this idea of screening where you're,
00:52:33.420and this goes into what you were saying before, the logic that people have to, you know,
00:52:37.680consider now whenever you're going to start a school, business, church, anything like that,
00:52:41.960you've got to be wary that there's going to be people who, if you bring them in,
00:52:48.660they're going to subtly undermine the project. So you want a very thick layer between us and them.
00:52:56.340That's what you have to build. And so when you're screening everything that you're doing,
00:53:00.820your messaging, your marketing, you want to appeal to the people who are going to like what
00:53:04.500you're doing. And you're going to signal to the people who don't like what you're doing that they
00:53:08.980don't want to be a part of you. You don't, the last thing you want is for them to be a part of
00:53:13.680what you're doing. And so you shouldn't be, this is critical. You shouldn't be afraid of them
00:53:18.980calling you names that are going to signify that, well, if you act like that, we're going to push
00:53:23.760you far away. Your response is good. We want to be far away. We want to be seen as far away from
00:53:30.400you. And, you know, we see this on Twitter every day, this dance, people trying to signal, well,
00:53:35.820if you do that, I'm going to push you away. And everybody's trying to figure out sort of how far
00:53:39.880they want to be. And how do they not, you know, signal the wrong thing to the wrong people? It's
00:53:45.320a game. It's a strategy. And because you're not marketing just to your crowd, anything that you
00:53:50.160say, even in your church, as you know, can get blasted out to the entire world that afternoon.
00:53:55.960So it's a very difficult concept, but a very important one that people have got to figure out.
00:54:04.720Are you going to play to win or are you going to play to lose?
00:54:06.960If I can just say on the screening aspect, the game you're describing, Cliff, that we see all the time, it's people trying to operate and build groups within the preexisting status hierarchy and discourse.
00:54:22.860If you reject that, in a sense, there's always going to be an extent to which in terms of being insurgency and somewhat covert at times, you have to be aware of how those things work. And of course, bucking the system is no excuse for immorality or anything else.
00:54:38.980But OK, caveats aside, that's playing the game that, again, is designed for you to fail. And so it's inherently self-defeating. And so embracing this sort of distance that Cliff is talking about is strategic. And then the screening process to make sure you only get your – we talk about from Machiavelli, you need for any society good arms and good laws. And it has to be yours. It can't be foreign.
00:55:05.100That's why he says, again, mercenaries and these things, because their loyalty is not reliable, especially when the rubber meets the road. Right. And he really starts to come. So reliance upon, you know, a foreign currency in that sense and foreign arms or foreign resources is not good. That's part of what we're trying to get away from.
00:55:22.700And the screening process, how it works out. I mean, Aaron Wren uses Doug Wilson's blogging as an interesting example of this, of it like repels the people that you wouldn't want there anyway, and it attracts the people you would want.
00:55:35.960Another example of this, just to branch out into different sort of categories. And again, you know, Moscow is more like a town. It's not a city literally or figuratively, but they have many things going at once. So they're not just a fortress. They have several fortresses going.
00:55:50.700So in just one fortress would be, I was talking to a headmaster this week at a Christian classical
00:55:55.800school in rural Tennessee, and he was explaining how a lot of Christian schools have a sort of
00:56:02.220evangelical requirement, which is anyone can come here as long as you agree that we can teach
00:56:08.060XYZ thing. And everyone's like, great, you could be a Muslim, you could be anything. We just want
00:56:12.260to be allowed to teach. Inevitably, that starts to break down in relatively short order. And I've
00:56:16.620known to lots of people involved in classical Christian schools that have that model where it
00:56:21.040breaks down really fast for various reasons. The model that this guy had adopted was what he called
00:56:26.240a covenant model, which is not only do your parents have to be Christians, they have to sort
00:56:30.240of agree up front and sign on to that they're going to maintain certain conditions in their
00:56:35.240own home. They're going to maintain this sort of allegiance to the school. So it's much more robust
00:56:39.800is the point. And that's a screening process. That's exactly what that is. And it ensures the
00:56:44.040longevity of your fortress. It ensures aligned arms that are not mercenary. And it gives you
00:56:51.720some integrity as well. And that's kind of what we're talking about is those processes that seem
00:56:56.920cumbersome and maybe a bit annoying and even unloving or unwelcoming or something like this,
00:57:03.380I think is how they'd be explained away before. The current situation calls for them. Otherwise,
00:57:07.940all of your institutions will be decimated in very short order because the rest of the world
00:57:13.700is designed the way it works is designed for that right now yeah i want to just say one thing on
00:57:18.520that that's a brilliant way of describing it timon but that but what the other thing that
00:57:22.680you're giving up when you're doing that is part of the market right you're saying look those people's
00:57:27.900money is just as green as anybody's but because they're not going to sign on to this thing i'm
00:57:31.380not going to take it and for a lot of people that that you know their school might be dependent on
00:57:37.240on dollars uh and and that's that's the principle of own space right if you are dependent on other
00:57:42.920people that are not part of your, what you're doing, you're setting yourself up in a way that's
00:57:48.580going to be tough. So when you, if you, when you establish yourself, try and think about it in
00:57:53.120terms of being as independent as possible on people who hate you or who do not even care for
00:57:59.060what you're doing. So that, that's a great, great way of describing it. America is built on the
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00:59:55.040partner Chuck DeLaDurante at his email, chuck at privatefamilybanking.com. Again, that's chuck
01:03:28.000that's the very thing that makes you cancelable.
01:03:32.660Yeah, your recruitment strategy is important.
01:03:35.900And all the modes of engagement or war or whatever have a recruitment strategy.
01:03:41.600I mean, and they're not always that – they haven't been that dissimilar.
01:03:44.480The seeker-sensitive, whatever you want to call it, in the sort of positive world was a vulnerability.
01:03:51.920There's a certain brand of that that also occurred in the cultural engagement strategy that was – and what it does is it ends up – you're not so much converting them, at least at a certain scale if you get this many recruits.
01:04:05.200and they're they're essentially mercenary or barely aligned they end up converting you all
01:04:10.580of a sudden your army is is all these people that aren't really from where you are or really aligned
01:04:16.080and have no skin in the game and so you end up either catering to their their whims where the
01:04:21.580the army is basically dictating the policy of the generals or you've actually just changed and now
01:04:27.340you you think the way that they do because you have enough foreigners in this sense in in your
01:04:31.060midst. And so what we're saying is there's still a recruitment strategy, but the recruitment
01:04:36.660strategy that like what you're describing is going to attract the right people. And that is
01:04:42.100the source of strength. And you really do not wring your hands or worry about the people you're not
01:04:47.400winning. Check your own conscience and do the Lord's will, but don't worry about, throw out
01:04:54.220all those books from seminary that tell you how to build these things. And don't worry about it,
01:04:58.480like all these people you're losing supposedly, you know, ditch Rick Warren, all this stuff,
01:05:03.260because that's just going to perpetuate or reproduce the preconditions for the situation
01:05:07.040you're in now. So that, yes, that's, I think that's very important to recognize, but that is
01:05:12.220really hard, especially for business leaders and, and schools and churches. I mean, three of our
01:05:19.720main institutions we're including in our analysis for all of them, this is very hard for real
01:05:24.500reasons. It's not easy. So, but it's important to adopt this, this mindset in terms of your
01:05:29.520recruitment. One thing I want to add to that too, is that you're talking about different kinds of
01:05:33.600loyalty. So when you're, when you make a seeker sensitive church or school where you don't want
01:05:40.080to offend anyone, right. And you're bringing in as many people as possible. You may get a lot of
01:05:44.440people who prefer what you've got on offer today, but two things, somebody down the road could
01:05:51.500easily come up with something that's slightly more preferable to you and they're gone.
01:05:55.920And secondly, there's no loyalty there. There's no conviction. There's no, I'm here because I
01:06:02.580believe these things to be right, regardless of my particular preference of this. So
01:06:06.640if you notice, we're moving away from market language all the time. Like we said, you might
01:06:11.520have to have a covenant model that says, sorry, I know you got some money and you'd like to be a
01:06:16.060part of this community, but if you can't sign this thing, you can't be a part of it. We're not going
01:06:18.780take your money. Um, likewise here, you might just say, Hey, I know that, uh, if I said this
01:06:23.800thing, then my, your tithe dollars would probably come here and we'd, we'd love that. But you know,
01:06:28.100I'm going to say these things anyway, and if they're going to offend you and you leave,
01:06:31.340you're going to have to do that. I'm not going to change what I'm going to say because it's the
01:06:34.200word of God. So all of that, again, leads into this, um, the fortress mentality, which I think
01:06:41.140is what we're trying to help describe. Yeah, absolutely. The other thing that's tied to this,
01:06:45.500you mentioned loyalties, but you guys talk about shifting loyalties. In any article,
01:06:50.240you'd say Ren advised Christians to shift their loyalty from the incumbent regime
01:06:53.880to the American people. So I want to ask you practically, what does that mean?
01:06:59.160Yeah. So, I mean, this is a, we kind of expound on Aaron's concept and we use some Michael Lind
01:07:05.380from a book he wrote. And then the point is basically this, and this is a bit of a broader
01:07:10.020setting the stage kind of analysis of what's going on. For a long time, I think Americans
01:07:16.260in particular have seen both what we call the governing regime, meaning your apparatus,
01:07:22.080the government itself, all these things as being synonymous with, and with some justification,
01:07:28.220they can do this synonymous with the nation itself, which is the American people, right?
01:07:32.340That the government and the regime and all these things are ostensibly formed for.
01:07:37.380and all that's being pointed out here is that that is no longer at least everywhere and alike
01:07:42.560the case. And so one example Aaron brings up is, you know, the military. We have in our country a
01:07:48.900very, you know, a great culture in a sense surrounding the military. We love it. We respect
01:07:55.400through our public demonstrations and even personal, you know, patriotic piety, we can say
01:08:00.840people who've been in the military. And that's a virtuous thing to think, a virtuous impulse.
01:08:07.380The problem is the military itself, at least at the high level kind of Pentagon policy and then the culture of the military and especially our academies, are demonstrably antagonistic to the American people and the American way of life.
01:08:21.140And there's many markers for this you could choose. One would be the types of decision-making and foreign policy that are evident.
01:08:30.700And most of the people who are dying in foreign wars are from Middle America and Appalachia and they're white young men.
01:08:37.380But the entire culture of the military, publicly speaking, is, you know, to promote the latest thing, you know, the rainbow flag brigade.
01:08:47.280And you can see this through recruitment strategies and propaganda and everything else.
01:08:53.380And so the point is, these things are not congruent. These are not aligned.
01:08:57.300And so what you need to do is as great as it would be to return 50 years ago to how we can think about the military, it's not the case.
01:09:04.260So you should stop where where possible and to, you know, where unnecessary, you should not be giving your time, blood and treasure to the military.
01:09:14.340It is part of the regime apparatus and you need it is no longer in service in this in the census we're describing to the American people.
01:09:21.860You should shift all of those resources to investment in things that are conducive to the American way of life.
01:09:27.760And that's necessarily, we think, going to take on a more localist expression, maybe a state level expression, depending on where you live. But that's difficult for people. And this and it applies elsewhere. This is one example. But you need to shift your loyalties to the American people and away from, you know, the governing order, because they're no longer sufficiently synonymous.
01:09:48.120Yeah. And another way of looking at that, too, something that we were talking about earlier, I think, is that shifting your loyalty from the I'm dedicating my life to this status hierarchy and trying to jump through these hoops to impress those people, shifting here to trying to say I'm going to do these things instead and I'm not going to try and impress those people.
01:10:09.220So shifting the loyalty even in that way as well is all part of what negative world we think is going to come to mean for Christians.
01:10:17.500And this is how that looks. That's right, Cliff. Something we've talked about, I don't think it's in the piece, but we've talked about it. If you're going to break free of the pre-existing status hierarchy where you're enslaved to this for your career, your livelihood, and for your reputation, you've got to establish alternative sort of pipelines.
01:10:36.300So this is something that involves education and business in churches in a real way, which is, you know, most Christians, I think, or a lot of them, are now moving past the sort of tired public school arguments and are willing to flee them and put their kids in better schools, right?
01:10:53.860Those – the success of those is going to be in large part dependent on the extent to which those graduates can go to colleges, right?
01:11:01.440But if you go to the aspiration for Christians no longer needs to be getting into Harvard because they hate you and it's bad, you need to go to Hillsdale or New St. Andrews or something, right? That's where you need to go.
01:11:16.220But then that is only secure as a viable option. And this is just, you know, being reasonable about what people need if you have a promise of employment the way that Harvard graduates do and networks and, you know, alumni and otherwise.
01:11:30.120And so then that requires in this sort of pipeline for businesses to be aligned also, where they give preferential treatment to those who are coming through an alternative pipeline, the way that Goldman Sachs and Bain & Cat Company do today to Harvard graduates, right?
01:11:47.040We have to do this. Otherwise, our people are not secure. And the demand that they take these alternatives is not realistic for them.
01:11:54.740I mean, you can't do that to people really. So it requires this sort of, you know, this network of fortresses, we're saying, to cooperate so that we can actually begin to establish our own thing. So you can reject the regime in this sense and also build something new that can grow. So I think that's essential for cooperation in that sense.
01:12:17.280Yeah, really good point. One of the things you mentioned, Michael Lind, I think it's his book, The Next American Nation. This is it comes up in the Christian nationalist debates. It comes up a number of places. But this idea of a propositional nation, you will have people pounding pulpits when you challenge this idea. But I believe in democracy and the propositional nation and all sorts of problems arise for a lot of Americans.
01:12:42.320So if you were going to kind of break down for me, like, what is the problem with a propositional nation? What does it produce, as opposed to, I think, the kind of nation that you would espouse? Walk me through that.
01:12:54.620So, I mean, the proposition nation, strictly speaking, refers to a kind of theory of looking at the United States, one that usually comes out of a perspective of Lincoln, who in the Gettysburg Address says we're going to establish a new birth of freedom here.
01:13:10.660And we're, you know, we're going to align the whole American, which used to be, you know, originally 13 colonies and 13 separate states into one giant, huge nation. And the thing we're all going to have in common is this proposition, this idea. And as long as you accept that idea, then you're an American.
01:13:29.400The principle there, though, is that similar to an idea, you sort of spiritualized the nation. You've spiritualized the thing that you're loyal to, and you've lost touch with the on the ground, the folkways, the physical space, the relationships that are there.
01:13:51.360I think there's so much pressure that we all experience now to shift our loyalties and see ourselves as sort of atoms in this giant thing and we're all separate so that I can easily just separate from the church and the family and school that I grew up in and I can move over here and be a part of that.
01:14:09.560um and and i i'm not going to say there's not there's nothing true to that at one level but i
01:14:15.380think um for the way that we have to try and live in a resilient kind of way in the negative world
01:14:21.240we're going to have to see ourselves as part of an organic kind of thing rather than this
01:14:27.400spiritualized thing so um we have to our loyalties like we were saying before to our churches to our
01:14:33.780schools to our businesses uh have got to run deep so you know something we were saying before like
01:14:38.860if I'm needing a certain service, I need a contractor to help me build something,
01:14:44.200I'm going to go and look for people in my church before I go looking in the wider marketplace.
01:14:49.920Because, see, the Proposition Nation would be a sort of similar to the Proposition Marketplace,
01:14:53.960where everybody is sort of equal in this space that's spiritualized. And so instead of that,
01:15:00.560I'm going to think of myself, no, no, I'm a part of an organic body. You know, I think
01:15:04.180part of the trickle down effect of the Proposition Nation, you conceive of yourself,
01:15:08.860as, you know, the only requirement for entry is assent mentally, maybe spiritually to a set of
01:15:15.900ideas. It really does get, I mean, this has trickled down into basically all of our institutions.
01:15:22.080You know, a lot of, I'm not in the Southern Baptist Convention anymore, although I grew up in it,
01:15:26.780but you hear a lot of the rhetoric coming out of that as, you know, the sort of alliance to the
01:15:31.100mission. And as long as we're all agreed on the mission, well, we might debate a little bit over
01:15:35.380the mission, because that's not really clear either, but that's sufficient. You give some
01:15:39.040monies, so like tax, and then the mission, which is very amorphous. And that's coming to the school
01:15:46.360example I described before, the predominant model being as long as you assent to these,
01:15:49.920we're allowed to kind of do this thing, it's fine. And that just sidelines most of what human
01:15:55.760life is. And as Cliff is getting at, it's disembodied. There's no there there, and it's
01:16:04.440totally decontextualized. And that's very difficult. It's disorienting to people. It's
01:16:08.400not actually how we work. So in some sense, our model of what we're saying for institutions
01:16:13.040in the negative world is forcing us to be more human in the way that we think about our social
01:16:18.180relations and our projects together, and to make it thicker in that way, and to not run from the
01:16:24.840sort of natural impulses that are inherent there. I mean, what Cliff is deciding when you need a
01:16:28.360service and you're going to give preferential treatment to your church member because he's
01:16:33.040part of your group, you know, this sort of nepotism in a sense, it's very natural. In fact,
01:16:37.880it's what the left does constantly. They're extremely loyal to their own people and they
01:16:43.320give preferential treatment to the people that have the right credentials according to their
01:16:47.360status hierarchy. And this sort of idea of meritocracy was, you know, that was supposed to
01:16:52.800allegedly get clean up all of that, right? Because it's unfair. All it's been is a cover
01:16:59.160for the perpetuation of their, you know, their dominance in a sense. And they cheat on it all
01:17:04.340the time. I mean, we see the, you know, the Harvard cases about their admissions policy being
01:17:08.960one example of this. So all we're saying is, you know, we have limitations to how we can respond
01:17:15.840because we can't, you know, we're not liars like much of the left is. We can't, we do have,
01:17:23.220all of this is about recovering a particular public morality and culture and place that
01:17:29.000we've lost. So we do have limitations, but there is some of that, that is just inevitable
01:17:33.080that you, that we need to embrace in terms of our operations and strategery. And, you know,
01:17:38.920I think getting away from propositional living in the, in that limited sense, you know, as Cliff
01:17:44.820said, there's some of it that's true. I mean, every nation is going to have a creed in a sense
01:17:49.200in, in terms of it, it idealizes a certain aspiration in existence that you're all supposed
01:17:54.360to pursue. But that is a product of a particular people at a particular time. And as soon as you
01:18:00.140cut the legs out from under that, it becomes infinitely malleable and subject to interpretation
01:18:05.260for usually nefarious ends. So that's something that needs to be resisted in all institutions
01:18:10.080as we try to build them back up from the rubble. Yeah, I think that's really helpful.
01:18:15.020It's interesting to me too. I mean, I was watching the other day, I think it was college basketball,
01:18:20.740But one of the commercials that runs is a Ford truck commercial.
01:18:24.720But it's like people from all around the world.
01:18:27.200And they're like, we don't know who each other are.
01:18:37.300One of the things I want to ask you is I'm recently watching a debate with you and Stephen Wolf and a couple other guys talking about Christian nationalism.
01:18:45.700A lot of this seems to be part of the same conversation, where I think a lot of people, you're basically going to get called a racist if you point to any of those earthy components of a nation. So I'm wondering strategically, what has been your, I guess, plan of attack, your strategy on that? You just kind of grab the third rail and say, look, I'm going to take a shock here, but we need to defend these principles of what a nation is.
01:19:12.660I mean, even the concept that a nation, you mentioned this in the article, that a nation would be for its people's interests.
01:19:19.600I mean, that's today to a lot of people, that's crazy.
01:19:23.160So, yeah, just thinking through how you go about that, knowing that it's going to be a hot time.
01:19:26.880In a sense, I guess I do grab the third rail because I find it very difficult to do good political theory, even if you're doing it at a high level.
01:19:36.040And you're like, we've obviously got to make adjustments for our current situation.
01:19:39.520And some of this is just not going away.
01:19:41.120You're going to have to figure it out.
01:19:42.140But we at least need to get established the right way of thinking about these concepts that are intricate to a theory and what the ideal would be.
01:19:49.920And that's what so you have something to work towards.
01:19:51.900And I just can't do that very well when you ignore large components of how that theory has been articulated over over the centuries, going back to the ancients and then in our own, you know, Protestant forebears.
01:20:05.280I mean, basic requirements for life together, for building a way of life, is the ability to, of course, communicate, but then also to foster these preconditions, you know, like John Jay brings up in Federalist II for what a people is.
01:20:20.840And it's a shared ancestry and culture and language and religion.
01:20:25.900These are like the main components that that's a people.
01:20:28.940And you can see this in the Old Testament, of course.
01:20:30.600Now, in both of those examples, this does not preclude what we could call adoption or, you know, newcomers. That's always going to happen, too. But what you have to have is a sufficient process of assimilation. And there's always going to be changes. You have newcomers, they're going to bring something and it's going to kind of get mixed in. And that's that's totally fine.
01:20:50.260But you have to have a sufficient degree of assimilation to where they become you, right? Like that's the whole point. They're not there to transform you. They're there to become a part of you. And that's something that seems oppressive today to people to say, you know, it used to be 19th century, 20th century America, whoever it is, Italians, you know, coming in, you're expected to become culturally at least Anglo-Protestant.
01:21:16.360That's just the bottom line. That's what we are. That's what we do. That's how you make sense. And this is why someone like Aquinas would say it basically takes two or three generations for sufficient assimilation to give people like real fully fledged citizenship because now they get it. They're, you know, invested and they understand how to think and operate like the rest of you.
01:21:35.940And so this is just a political reality of different ways of life. Other ways of life can be viable and good and everything, but it's not ours. And so you need to, I think, we need to be more assertive as a people in that way, not simply in locking down the border where you have so many newcomers at an untenable rate coming in.
01:21:57.880You can't possibly deal with this. But then the people that do come, however many you're going to let in, and that's always an art, not a science. It's how much your culture can handle. You need to aggressively assimilate them. And that's more than like a nighttime English class, right? You need to. And most of this is not even a self-confident people. It doesn't really require much government intervention on this front, right?
01:22:20.560It's everything else because that's where the cultural life is, demanding, you know, this kind of conformity in order to be a full participant. And this is just a natural feature of a nation. That's what a real nation is.
01:22:32.900And so now we're in a situation where all of our language and political concepts that we're supposed to use express something that's not real anymore, which is we have a multiplicity of nations inside one particular geographic area with no attempt to rectify or unify them.
01:22:49.840And that's supposed to be OK. And it's inevitably destabilizing.
01:22:54.100I mean, Samuel Huntington wrote about this in like 2004 of there's going to be a backlash when you when you have this rapid population change with with, again, no assimilation, no, no real unity.
01:23:07.640And, you know, native stock, white people, whatever you want to call them in California are going to be 30 percent of the population in 2040.
01:23:15.160You are going to have some kind of backlash. This is destabilizing. It's not good.
01:23:19.660It's really dumb policy and people can can find it offensive all they want, but it's just how people work.
01:23:25.340And so we're kind of seeing some of that already.
01:23:28.200And it, you know, it exposes how inept and how much of ideologues are our current ruling classes that they don't want to address any of it.
01:23:38.800Yeah, it's huge. I think a lot of it goes back to, you know, particularly on the Christian front in the church, you guys mentioned just the ahistorical nature of how people have become. So that somebody like Stephen Wolf can write a treatise on really classical two kingdoms theology, and people act like they've never heard it. Nobody is even familiar with it. They think it's from another planet.
01:24:01.560One of the things that interests me about this is you guys say prolonged captivity does that. Reliance on foreign arms made domicile and rented space invariably leads to servitude. And then you go on to say their muscles have atrophied. So how do you go about waking people up to this?
01:24:19.840I mean, you, I think part of it is 2020. Part of what we've seen in success is that there's a lot of people, like maybe the regime overplayed their hand, people are sort of waking up to this. And so now we can talk about magistrates and sphere sovereignty, and we can talk about Christian princes and people are a little bit more willing to listen. But yeah, I want to get your take why that's so important to get Christians to think historically, political theology and a lot of other areas.
01:24:47.400I don't know because I'm still muddling along how to get people to get it. You might say part of what's been successful and has to be part of the equation is just exposure to better material that, you know, it's like, look, this is, these are our theologians and this is in our confessions. And like, you know, this is what we rely on for all manner of other doctrine and thought. So it's the same source.
01:25:12.220You know, if you can refute it, go for it. But I haven't seen anyone do that yet. And the other problem, and I think really part of the reaction is owed to this, is much of what is being talked about now is almost purely descriptive.
01:25:24.780You know, so I mentioned Josh Abbottoy earlier. I mean, he wrote, you know, this piece at First Things based on the tweet about the Protestant Franco. And it was really just a regime cycle analysis, right? Anasoclosis, which is standard fare in, you know, ancient philosophy, ancient political thought and onward up through the founders. And it's just descriptive. I mean, it's not asking you whether you like it or not. It's saying this is what happens.
01:25:50.280And I think that's really unsettling to people. Some of the elements of what it takes to constitute a nation we were just discussing is unsettling, but they're just descriptive. This is how it works. And so people can try to, and it fits the times, to be defiant of reality.
01:26:06.080But I think the people you're talking about where there's been movement are waking up to reality and it's going to press upon you and force you to reconsider some things.
01:26:18.880Both of those things are happening at once. There's more exposure to good material and, you know, good resourcement of our tradition, which has answers for many of these things. And the other is just encountering a certain return to like real politics where you're reconsidering fundamental requirements for your way of life together, such as, you know, what even is the family and what are we going to do with it?
01:26:44.320And those two things together, I think, are, you know, as a combination sort of making people reconsider things. And even if they're not there yet intellectually, they're acting differently. Right. Which is almost just as important.
01:27:00.260So I am somewhat optimistic on that front. But I think the people also have to accept the world can look very differently than you were expecting it to over the next 10 years or so. Again, this is just descriptive. It's not necessarily good or a happy thing, but it's the way it goes.
01:27:18.200So at least trying to understand it properly and then to the extent to which you have opportunity to rebuild things, do it in a coherent way that, you know, it takes account of this reality of political life where we've lived under a veneer because of prosperity and other elements where we were able to ignore a lot of these things happening.
01:27:43.820And now they're kind of smacking us in the face.
01:27:48.200I want to go to something that you guys have toward the very end of the article, but we can kind of wrap things up with this. But of all places, we've gone to Machiavelli. Now we're going to Thucydides and the history of the Peloponnesian War. I mean, you guys have range. I got to give you that. You got range in everything that you talk about in the article. But I want to ask you about this instance.
01:28:08.380So this is the Athenians establishing a fortress on the, I believe, Spartan Island, right?
01:29:12.800Look over here, you know, believe this thing.
01:29:15.220According to that strategy, that somebody like Grill Americans is a really important population.
01:29:20.360Another important population might be moms.
01:29:22.560Think about Moms for Liberty or something like that, right?
01:29:24.540I mean, like, especially when you think about schools, they get really outraged when they find out that their children have been exposed to things that really they shouldn't be.
01:29:32.760So I'm going to throw out another metaphor, though, for us to consider here on this, and that's that I think what we have to watch out for is people being inoculated against the seeing things in reality from being inoculated from the red pill, we'll say.
01:29:49.160And I think about I think about Francis Collins, right, whose whose job was to get into evangelical circles and convince people to take the vaccine and to align it with theology in a certain way to try and get them to to follow the regime and do exactly get in line and to think that it's part of what it means to be a Christian.
01:30:11.420And so what I think we have to do is anticipate that circumstances are going to be pushing grill Americans and really strategic targeted populations toward waking up in this way.
01:30:24.900But there are people out there who are going to try and inoculate them so that they don't see those things.
01:30:30.160And that's really we've got to watch out for.
01:30:33.200And so the articles and stuff that we're publishing, the conferences that you guys are hosting and that kinds of things are really out there to kind of keep people free from those inoculators who would try and keep them from swallowing the red pills.
01:30:47.980Another image that came to mind about all this is the image of Nehemiah rebuilding the wall.
01:30:55.260A couple of things that come out of that image is that, A, he does it in kind of partnership with Cyrus, right?
01:31:01.280So he's got permission from someone that he would otherwise not be connected with or allied with.
01:31:07.720But given the circumstances, he needs that alliance.
01:31:10.640And so Christians are going to have to figure out when we're talking about strategic populations that we need to win.
01:31:15.680It might be people who are aligned with other parties that we normally wouldn't want to ally with.
01:31:20.220But we have to, given our circumstances, or it's strategically important to.
01:31:24.100The second thing that comes to mind is that Nehemiah describes the way that the Israelites were rebuilding the wall with a tool in one hand and a sword in the other, right?
01:31:32.260Being ready while they're building their fortresses to have to engage if they have to.
01:31:36.400And again, this is not a world that Christians like to, in our day, like to think that they're in.
01:31:44.500We really believe that this is where we are.
01:31:46.720So we're going to have to be more offensive, and I mean that in both ways, than we normally have had to be in the past.
01:31:55.600So when we're talking about strategic populations, I think we have to consider these things as well,
01:32:01.600knowing that the more persecution comes our way, the more certain Christians are going to start lining up on either side of the line in the sand.
01:32:09.760And what we've got to be there is to help say what the line is, which is the word of God.
01:32:13.880Are you on this side or are you on that side?
01:32:16.340Yeah. And it's always grill Americans, right? Like I'm something of a grill American myself, maybe in a more like Marxian utopian vein, like grill all day and then read some philosophy at night. You know, this is like the vision I have. But, you know, it's always been grill Americans.
01:32:33.260I mean at the – in the American Revolution, if you want to use that example, it's a bunch of grill Americans who like at their level, these – we could say comparatively moderate taxes are enough to – this is intolerable.
01:32:49.120Now, you have an intellectual class that's like, well, it's not really taxation.
01:32:53.700This is a constitutional crisis and here's all the – it doesn't matter.
01:32:57.060What gets people going is the on-the-ground thing and a long trail of abuses and usurpations, right, is what – it's maybe – it's even conspiracies.
01:33:07.460It's maybe the Catholics are coming from Quebec.
01:33:10.060We're not sure, but if they are, that would be really frustrating.
01:33:13.140So, you know, you just – this is how it works.
01:33:15.340And I love grilled Americans, and at some point they've had enough, and it's usually on something kind of funny that just ticks them off and then they're off to the races.
01:33:24.300So we have to be sensitive to that and not be snobby towards it either, either that they're not coming along fast enough or they don't have the right reasoning for all of it or whatever.
01:33:35.040And you've seen some of this in like the school curriculum stuff.
01:33:38.520I have much more robust theories about the purpose of education and what good curriculum looks like.
01:33:43.380But if that's what gets people going, that's totally fine.
01:33:46.560And then maybe they're open to considering of what you'd want to implement.
01:33:51.680So all these dynamics are things, again, we haven't had to encounter for a long time. So it takes some catching up to do. And we've got to be like John Adams. We've got to study some war and these sorts of things so our children can spend their time doing something else in a positive world.
01:34:07.940but we do have to play catch up and we are colonials. We have no experience in this and
01:34:11.920we're incapable of meeting the red coats in open, open combat, right? We're going to have to take a
01:34:16.460more guerrilla approach and be nimble and ultimately resilient. You know, we're going to
01:34:21.560have to stick it out through the winter and let our toes freeze off some, uh, but, but show up
01:34:26.000the next day to fight, you know, so just, we need to recover this sort of, um, you know, American
01:34:30.400martial spirit, I think. And, uh, you know, I've got a sufficient amount of Scots Irish in me to
01:34:35.120do it but uh we're gonna have to be patient too that's great well no and i think it's a it's a
01:34:39.820great thing uh you mentioned the education uh we saw this a lot alabama virginia when the wokeness
01:34:47.020crt but also like the trans stuff was getting into education all of a sudden now we could get people
01:34:53.500listening to us about basical christian homeschooling like they were willing to have the
01:34:58.920education conversation because they were like yeah this is terrible you know they're they want
01:35:02.840to mutilate kids and do other weird stuff. And so now we're willing to listen. So I figure part
01:35:07.360of it's got to be capitalizing on some of those cultural moments with some of our principles
01:35:11.880and putting that message forward. Gentlemen, it's been a wonderful treat to have both of you
01:35:17.220on here. I know, Timon, you're on social media. Cliff, are you active Twitter guy?
01:35:23.680I'm not as active as Timon, but I'm on there. Yeah. C.P. Humphrey is my handle.
01:35:28.460Okay. So we can follow you guys there. And you guys are pretty regular writers at
01:35:32.180American reformer. Yeah. I mean, it's his job. It's just a hobby for me to twist,
01:35:36.760twist Cliff's arm every now and then to get him. That's great. What Clifford likes to do,
01:35:41.280if anyone is struggling with writer's block, he likes to just come up with wild ideas for
01:35:45.460everyone else to write about. And he just, he forces you into it. So that's right. It's very
01:35:49.640productive in that way. That's great. Well, awesome gentlemen. I appreciate you coming on
01:35:54.140the show and we'll point to the show notes for the article. Encourage people to check that out
01:36:01.200as well. Again, thank you. Our pleasure. Thank you. See ya.
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