Dr Steve Turley - Are We Seeing the Revitalisation of Christian Civilisation? A New Conservative Age is Rising

Show notes and Transcript

For years Dr Steve Turley has been bringing an optimistic and upbeat analysis of current events. 
His Turley Talks are some of the most popular social commentaries in the Conservative sphere.  
He joins Hearts of Oak to ask if we are seeing the revitalization of Christian civilization and a new Conservative age? 
We look at the political shockwaves happening across Europe with the rise of populist conservative political parties in many countries. 
And we end off looking at the rise of the parallel economy as a bulwark against the increasing woke economic wave that is sweeping through many large corporations.

Steve Turley (PhD, Durham University) is an internationally recognized scholar, speaker, and author who is widely considered one of the most exciting voices in today’s growing patriot movement.
Dr. Steve’s popular YouTube channel has over 1 million subscribers and daily showcases his expertise in the rise of nationalism, populism, and traditionalism throughout the world. His videos, podcasts and writings on civilization, society, culture, education, and the arts are widely renowned.

Connect with Dr Steve and join the movement of Courageous Patriots...
WEBSITE:         https://turleytalks.com/
TWITTER:         https://twitter.com/DrTurleyTalks
YOUTUBE:        https://www.youtube.com/@DrSteveTurleyTV
PODCASTS:      https://podcasts.apple.com/am/podcast/turley-talks/id1520478046

Interview recorded 17.7.23

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Transcript

(Hearts of Oak)

Hello, Hearts of Oak, and welcome to another interview coming up in a moment with Dr Steve Turley. You'll have seen his Turley Talks, and I've loved watching these over the last few years, bringing an optimistic and hopeful message, looking at world events, looking at the political side, and often quite at odds with a more dour, conservative message, which we sometimes see in the media. But we look at, are we seeing the revitalization of Christian civilization? A new conservative age is rising. And we look at the political winds, the political conservative winds blowing across Europe and how they're changing also in the US. Why is that? We look at a search for spiritual meaning in the midst of the moral vacuum decay collapse of society when there is no right and wrong. People are searching for meaning and often people are looking to faith and to Christianity for that. And then we finish off on parallel economies.
This is a pushback on the woke corporation, the woke agenda, the progressive wave that is coming through commerce and we are seeing a new set of companies that don't want to force that upon our throats and want to cater for a more traditional conservative market. 

Dr Steve Turley, it is wonderful to have you with us today. Thank you so much for your time.

(Dr Steve Turley)

It's my honour, Peter. Thank you so much. It's wonderful to be here with you.

Oh, thank you. And you can find @DrTurleyTalks on Twitter, @SteveTurleyTV, obviously on YouTube. All the links are in the description, but turleytalks.com and the many podcasts at Turley Talks, but all the links are there in the description. And Dr. Steve Turley is internationally recognized, best-selling author. I didn't actually realize one of the books, touching on C.S. Lewis. Anyone who writes anything on C.S. Lewis is wonderful to have on. So from my home town back in Belfast. 

Yeah, of course. Yeah, that's right.

But you're a scholar, speaker, obviously, Turley Talks. I think you've been putting stuff up since, what, 2016, 2017, something like that? 

That's right. Yeah, we started on November 1st, 2016, just seven days leading up to November 8th, which was what I like to call Brexit Part Two, which was the election of Donald Trump. And so I started there. I made one video per day analysing the current political situation. I made the argument, the extended argument, that Trump was going to win against all odds, as it were. And of course, I spent the next few weeks gloating and we just kept going.

Yeah, give us a little bit of your background. Probably 80%, well, 75% of our viewers are UK, 15% US, and then the rest all over. So, Dr. Steve, could you just take a moment and introduce yourself to our UK audience who may not be as familiar with you as others?

Yeah, well, I'm Dr. Steve Turley. Technically, I'm an internationally recognized scholar, speaker and author, that's part of the elevator pitch. But I've spent most of my life either in the world of music, my first degree was in classical guitar, or in theology. My other degrees are in theological studies, the last one being a PhD from Durham University in the UK.
Which we were just talking about. And as a result, I was in academia for a number of years, both at the university level as well as classical schools. Classical schools are going through a bit of a renaissance here in the States and as well as in Europe where we're going back to the great books tradition, Latin, Greek, the importance of theology as the queen of the sciences and so on.
So I spent about 20 years, 18 years in that world and then a friend of mine suggested I start doing some YouTube videos to analyse the political and cultural scene going on back in 2016. It was obviously very exciting. Brexit had just passed in June, which I mean, I didn't think it stood a chance and I was, of course, hoping for it, but when I saw it actually happening, that's when I I realized a lot of the scholarship that I had encountered at Durham University, which we can develop a bit, called post-secular studies.
That's when I started to see some of the ramifications of those studies actually in real time. So my friend suggested I do something akin to that kind of analysis for people with the upcoming Trump-Clinton election, which I did. And the channel turned out to be a hit, as it were, over time. And so I ended up leaving academia and going into broadcasting full-time. And I've since written 20 books on various subjects, and we now have over a million subscribers to the YouTube channel. And really in the end, my daily analysis is one of looking at current events in light of, of what I would call very real conservative trends.
And so my analysis tends to be very optimistic for the conservative, which is fair, which cuts against the grain and rightly so, fully noted.
We've lived for the last 300 years in what's called the modern world and the modern world's inherently leftist, liberal, anti-traditionalists, you know, it's...
Keep science and religion worlds apart, they have nothing to do with each other, and on and on and on. So rightly so, we've been rightly frustrated, but that modern age is coming to an end and a new world is rising. And so what I try to do is provide hope for courageous patriots with daily optimistic broadcasting of news and events.

Can I start with your tagline on your YouTube, it's the secular world is at its brink and a new conservative age is rising. Tell us about, because bad news sells better than good news, which you mentioned in the conservative circles. Tell us why you use that, I guess that tagline, that message.

Yeah. Well, I, you know, I have you guys over on the other side of the pond to blame for that, I would say a little bit of it when I was doing my doctoral studies at Durham University.
It was while I was there that I came across a field of study that's broadly known as post-secular studies, and it's a huge field of study. I mean, it deals with, philosophy and law and fashion and media and politics, you name it, and involves all kinds of scholars like Jürgen Habermas, a sociologist, he's really the one who kind of coined the phrase decades ago, Peter Berger's another one, Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, they're all united in their assessment that what's known as the secularization thesis is for all practical purposes dead in the social sciences. So secularization thesis is this notion, it was very popular in the early 20th century.
It's this notion that the more educated and technological society becomes, the less religious it will be. So sociologists like Max Weber, Emil Durkheim, they all saw secularity and progressivism and so forth, as just basically baked into the cake of this progressive, evolutionary movement of history. And what these post-secular scholars were arguing is that thesis, for all practical purposes, is dead. And they made the argument that very few contemporary sociologists will take the secularization thesis seriously today. And that's because, as it turns out, religion is more prevalent in our world today. It's actually, well, I should say it's just as prevalent in our world today as it's always been. And in fact as Rodney Stark at Baylor University would put it, we're actually going through the single greatest religious renewal the world has ever seen. But the key here is that what all of these different scholars are noticing in their own way, in their own bent, and their own degree of, you know, strength or certitude, is that this return of religion that's going on all over the world, because of this extraordinary religious renewal, the world's political order is changing.
So these aren't just personal private sentiments that people are just having new religious experiences of. No, this is changing the balance of power. This is something that's enacting a kind of paradigm shift we haven't seen probably in 300 years.
In other words, we're increasingly shifting away from the world order that began in Europe with the Enlightenment in the 18th century, that was founded on the fundamental tenets of scientific rationalism as a one-size-fits-all vision of reality for everyone, that became universalized through colonization and industrialization and globalization and westernization.
And what we're seeing here now is more and more populations rejecting that modern world, and embracing what's commonly called a more post-modern or post-secular world.
That's ultimately working itself out with populations going back, going back to nation, culture, custom, tradition, most particularly religious traditions, to quite literally, ironically, pre-modern beliefs and practices, while at the same time maintaining modern technology. So this is something akin to what Guillaume Fay argued, or what he called archaeo-futurism.
Some have called it techno-primitivism, but it's the notion that the antithesis between science and religion and church and state, you know, technology and tradition, that's at the heart of the modern age, that antithesis has collapsed. And now the two are joining forces, like we're seeing with the rise of neo-Orthodox Russia or neo-Confucian China, Shinto Japan, Hindu nationalist India with the BJP party there, the neo-Ottoman vision of Erdogan in Turkey.
Of course, we saw it in 1979 with the rise of theocratic Iran. Now we've got theocratic Afghanistan, now we've got neo-traditionalism absolutely on fire all throughout the African continent and on and on and on and on.
And I think it's taken Western powers by surprise. I mean, it doesn't matter if you're dealing with the Dolts in D.C.
or the bullies in Brussels or the demons of Davos, my comic book names for them.
But Western elites just don't really know what to do with this new, far more traditionalist, conservative world. Or that's how I use the term conservatives, ultimately is a traditionalist.
That's what, that's what unites a Texas conservative with a with a Hindu conservative in, you know, in India.
Because they don't know what to do with this world order because it doesn't respond to the political and economic manipulative pressures that the West has learned to rely on over the last several decades and sort of closed the loop here to make things even worse for them.
The same dynamics are manifesting themselves in the West. But obviously from a different vantage point, because we were really the centre, the epicentre of this industrialism, of this globalism, of this enlightenment, sort of ideology that has morphed into a very bizarre wokeness.
But we're seeing comparable nationalist, populist, traditionalist trends on both sides of the Atlantic, with the Brexit and Trump earthquakes happening literally within days of each other, what, 90 days or so, just a few months of each other, more than that. But Trump actually campaign back in 2016. There was a time in the mid-summer when he said, call me Mr. Brexit.
I mean, he was a huge supporter of Brexit, a huge supporter of dismantling the liberal world order and the globalist institutions that make up that order. So while there's all kinds of hiccups and and there's all kinds of oppressions and all kinds of roadblocks and frustrations and setbacks.
There's really nothing the Dolts in DC or the Bullies in Brussels can do to stop this tectonic shift that's happening underneath their feet. No political paralysis in the palace of Westminster, can stop it because again it's a foundational paradigm shift from secular to post-secular, from modern to post-modern, and so secular modernist sentiments and structures are indeed withering away. 

You talk about kind of religion, spirituality, and certainly it's strange because we have this search for meaning in an age of chaos where there is no order, no right and wrong, no truth, and people are looking at spirituality. Certainly I have seen it here in the UK, people once again opening their Bibles, trying to understand what it is all about.
So you have that rise of inquisitiveness, of curiosity, and at the same time, certainly from a Christian point of view, you've got a very weak church that seems to have bought into that lie, the progressive lie. What are your thoughts on that, and how does that work out in the U.S.?

Oh yeah, in terms of the mainline churches, we're seeing very much the same thing. I mean, what happened, of course, is in the modern experiment, the church got privatized. I mean, even in the UK in many respects, even though you have a national church there.
And we get to see it and we're actually enamoured by it whenever there's a coronation or a royal wedding or a funeral, a monarchical funeral, whatever. 

You can have the Church of England any day, Steve. Please take it. 

I went to school with some of the clergy in Durham and I was shocked by some of the interaction I had with them. Yes, I know exactly what you mean. And again, we're facing it here to the extent that the Episcopal Church manifests our wing of the Anglican Church or the United Methodist Church. Mainline denominations have basically gone the way of modernity, and it's because they got privatized. And we have to just remember that, you know, if you just compare the way, like we were just talking about the beauties of Durham, medieval cities, where the church was in the urban planning of the medieval city, of course, it was right at the very centre. I mean, you've got a map of the Christian image, a Christian cosmos in every medieval city here in the states the New England commonwealth drew from similar frames of reference, the church steeple, the highest building in the commonwealth there with it with a town green and Edenic green in its front and like you look at modern urban planning today, where's the church? if it's even there it's been it's been pushed into the place of consumerism you know, it's right next to pizzerias and dry cleaners and it's and what's happened as a result is the truth has been privatized because public life and private life operate by very different dynamics. Public deals with the obligatory, whereas private is more optional, right? Public is objective, private is subjective, public applies to all, private applies to only some. So when you privatize the church, what you do is you basically wither, you hollow out its truth and its moral claims because truth is public, it's not private.
Truth is objective, it's not subjective. Truth applies to all by definition, not to only some.
And so when you're pushed into the social equivalent of a Weight Watchers program or the YMCA or like a pizzeria or whatever.
If you're pushed into that equivalent, you can know more proclaimed truth than they can.
That's what got hollowed out of the gospel. So the gospel no longer weighs on us, like it would have, say, just in the 18th century. So the clergy, I mean, they're more interested in all these gimmicks and church marketing programs and the like. I'm broad brushing, but you know where I'm coming from. In the states, we do, since church and state are so separated here, in one sense, right, the church can be actually pretty vibrant here at local levels. And so many leftists think we live in a default theocracy in all the red states, or even more specifically, sort of the red counties where the church exercises, very conservative church exercises, so much inordinate influence and the like, but there are very, very heavy barriers placed on that, where it's not allowed to rise to more national levels. They do everything they can to quell that.
But it does seem to be, for all kinds of reasons, particularly demographic reasons, it does seem to be rising in a way that they just can't clamp down on anymore.

And Christian faith still seems to be something that's seemed positive, certainly in, generally in politics. I mean, when you look at the front bench of, in parliament, of any MP, the last thing they would ever want to say is they'd go to a church or they may be a Christian. That's just not on the radar. In the US, it still seems that that is part of, kind of, the identity, and even Joe Biden claims he's a Christian, and I'll let him take that up with God personally, but how does that, because you still seem to have that as a central tenant, as an anchor, certainly in the political sphere.

Yeah, right. Exactly. It's still very, very strong here. It's right. I mean, I guess we would be more akin to the Irish side of the UK, where religion is just a stronger part in the United States. Yeah, it's no coincidence that secularization thesis was actually formulated in Europe because that's what they were seeing. They were seeing these radical secularizing forces as liberalism, and the liberal project began to take over in Europe. And yeah, it just, it took over here in the States to a certain extent, particularly among our elite, but that never really made it into the heartland. We, for whatever reason, we just were able to keep, I guess maybe it's just the frontier sort of culture that we have here, but in our rural and in ex-urban areas, Christianity's just been able to flourish.
I think largely also because of the demographic revolution that's happening today, where liberalism more or less destroyed the family, they stopped having kids.
And so with all these alternative lifestyles or just with very secularized conceptions of the family, woke liberals, while busying themselves trying to take over every cultural institution in the nation and being very successful in doing so.
They forgot to procreate. So for whatever reason they omitted replacing themselves from the cultural takeover plan. So we have a number of studies, Ed Dutton actually has an excellent studies, he's in the UK, Durham fellow as well, on the extraordinary fertility differences between atheists and religionists and liberals and conservatives. And in all kinds of demographic studies all over the world, but particularly in North America and Europe, we're seeing a very clear and direct relationship between, for lack of better term, you know, how right-wing you are, particularly how religiously conservative you are, and how many children you have. And the demographic discrepancy is extraordinary, and that seems with the United States and with its concentrated population, that's having some pretty profound effects. So yeah, it'd be very hard to win an election here nationally and be hostile, overtly hostile to faith in your expressions. Like you said, I think Joe Biden's incredibly hostile to faith. Just ask any Christian baker, for example.
But he will never admit to that. He'll always try to say, oh, I'm a good churchgoing, Catholic and blah, blah, blah.
Obama did the same thing. Yeah.
Clinton, you know, scenes of him singing in his church choir.
You just, there's no way around it.
You have to, you have to do this. If anything, Trump, Trump may have been probably the least overtly Christian fellow we had, but I mean, his pod, they were, it was so woven into his policies that it just, it didn't matter.

No, absolutely. Can I ask you, obviously the message you bring, a hopeful message, and I've seen you on numerous, I think I saw you on Seb Gorka the other day. The only person kind of I come across with that, kind of more positive outlook possibly is Steve Bannon. But yours, I mean, do you, are you told, come on Steve, it's really, look, we've got this against, we've got that against, just come on, it's and you're living in a fairy world.
How do you kind of cope with that pushback that just fit into the this is a fight and it's a dark fight and we may win in the end?
How do you kind of cope against that? The choice to tune that positivity down?

Yeah, yeah. They I've been accused of pushing copious copium on. Oh, no, absolutely.
And again, well, the irony to it all is when I first came across post-secular scholarship, I didn't believe it. I thought it was applicable to the Middle East, Africa, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa.
Maybe I noticed Russia being in the orthodox tradition. I noticed Russia was doing quite well.
But outside of that, I mean, I came across this during the Obama era, right after the Obama era started in 2009.
And I just, I didn't buy it. I thought the West was shot. The West was done.
So I share, ironically, I have shared in that kind of pessimism.
But the more I studied, the more I was confronted with the data and the more I'm seeing the political outworking's happening that data just is is playing itself out it's just getting confirmed and I think too one of the ways of thinking about the current climate we're in particularly spiritual climate analytically helpful way of seeing it it is through the prism of post secularism sort of a counter reading of it, we have to recognize how frustrated and disconcerted our secular left is. Remember, secular progressivism lived by the notion that religion was on its way out. Conservatism was on its way out.
Traditionalism was on its way out. It was an evolutionary throwback that had no relevance to us today. And so you have the likes of like a Sam Harris who's repeatedly and openly expressed his utter dismay as to the stubbornness of particularly American Christianity but also Islam, not just its persistence but its actual growth and flourishing. And so to these people who've admittedly captured all the cultural levers of power, to these people, we're not supposed to be around, Peter.
So a lot of the persecution that we're facing here, political, cultural, economic, the de-banking, the latest trend of de-banking that Nigel Farage has had to deal with, these persecutions are happening precisely because we're not supposed to be here. We're not supposed to persist.
So I see a lot of the the obstacles and the frustrations that we face as an ironic confirmation. That the jokes on them. We're winning. We're not going away. They can clamp down as hard as they want on us. We've got all the demographic back winds behind us blowing in our direction. One of the fascinating statistics is that in just three decades, they predict there will be one liberal woman here in the United States for every so-called, for every four far-right women. And it's just because when all is said and done, right-wingers are having families and in many ways, bigger than ever, because you take in consideration child mortality rates having imploded.
So we're having more kids than ever, and we have the data on whether or not those kids retain that conservatism into adulthood.
And the answer is yes, because the more conservative, the more you tend to rely on parallel structures, like Bible colleges or home-schooling or what have you.
And the United States and Britain are number one and number two in terms of home-schooling populations.
Populations. Interestingly enough, Russia is number three, which is also fascinating.
But so what we're seeing is we're seeing 70%, 80% retention rates among young people.
We've studied particularly with the Amish, the Amish population.
And the Amish retention rates have actually been going up over the last 30 years. Eric Kaufman, who's a Canadian expat at University of London, has done a lot of writing on this.
And back in the 70s and 80s, if I recall, they had about a 70% retention level. About 30% of their kids would go through Rundspringe, this kind of, you get to flirt a little bit with the outside world. About 30% of them said, no, I like this. I'm going to stay in the outside world. And they basically become Mennonite, so they stay close to their families, but they have more freedom with modern technology and so forth.
Those numbers have hit upwards of 80% or 90% retention of late.
So the more woke and crazy our society gets, ironically, the more traditionals hang on to their kids.
So there's just no way around it.
They're disappearing. We're growing. And there's nothing they can do to stop that.
And so as long as those dynamics are in place, Kauffman says by 2030, the United States culture war should tip dramatically in favour of the right permanently, or at least for the foreseeable future.
We're estimated to have upwards of 300 million Mormons in our country just by the end of the century, 300 million Amish by the end of next century.
So we're basically evangelicals, Mormons, Amish. I know there's a joke in there somewhere.
I haven't quite figured it out yet. It can't be walking into a bar, Mormons don't drink, but three guys walked into a bar.
But Europe is the same thing. Now it's slower because you don't have the density of the population and the Bible Belt per se, but you look at what Viktor Orban's doing in Hungary.

Can I ask, because you've written and one of the things that I've enjoyed about, what you put out is that you
cover what's happening in Europe and I wouldn't want to criticize the wonderful U.S.
commentators and maybe not looking at Europe. We certainly in Europe look to the U.S. for kind of... 

Terrible. No, you could criticize, they completely ignore you and it makes me upset, because at least Eastern Europe particularly they're ahead of us. You know, we're all honouring Viktor Orban but we were talking about Viktor Orban six years ago before anybody knew his name around here. So yes, no, go ahead, beat them up all you want, Peter.

He's an absolute rock, but it's not, I mean, two of the, uh, two podcasts you put out recently, France's right-wing party surge and first persons riots. In other words, WEF, Dutch government collapses, and that's going to be phenomenal to watch that with the new farming party.
But all across, I mean, Sweden, Finland, Hungary, Italy, uh, Austria, Germany, it's, it's happening all over and how, I guess, as an American commentator, do you view what's happening?
Because I think a lot of us maybe in Europe had thought, you know, we're post-Christian in Europe and conservatism is very much out of fashion and this liberal way of this, the EU just knitting everyone together, throwing off the nation-state and suddenly you've got a push back on nearly every single country across Europe. How do you see that from the States?

Absolutely, yeah. I think again, well, getting my doctorate in the UK helped, no question, to kind of broaden my horizons to what was going on in the world. But also, when I encountered the post-secular studies, a lot of it was on Europe and the trends that were happening, particularly starting in Eastern Europe, going into Central Europe, talking a lot about Hungary and Poland. We were just seeing the rise of the Law and Justice Party Poland back around that time. And I really thought, and again, you have to remember this was during our Obama era. I really saw the so-called far right. They're not far right. They're just, you know, the apostles of common sense, I think you would call it, but I was noticing that we were already seeing the 300% surge in so-called far right parties, these nationalist populist parties. And I really thought, wow, something's going to happen in Europe before we know it. And then again, this is before Brexit sentiments came in. The Cornell sociologist
Mabel Berezin has written about what she calls post-security politics. And it's very interesting because she argues that the nation state historically promised to provide three things, secure borders, a stable economy, and a space for the celebration and perpetuation of a population's customs, traditions, and religion. And what Berezin argued is that, of course, over the last three, four decades, we've seen all those securities just erode as a result of globalization, so border security eroding as a result of mass unfettered immigration, economic security eroding through what's called a global division of labour, where manufacturing and industrial factory jobs are shipped out to third world nations, while capital and finance are relocated in urban centres, leaving rural populations highly disenfranchised.
So that's where you got the Yellow Vest uprising in France, where there were no jobs, where rural folk were living. They had to commute to the big cities to work.
But they couldn't work there because the gentrification of those cities through finance had jacked up the real estate prices.
So there was no work where they lived, and they couldn't live where there was work.
And then they're commuting an hour and a half each way.
And then Macron slaps a fuel tax on them to pay for some green initiative.
And that just blew up into the Yellow Vest uprising.
So we saw that kind of post-security politics there. And then the cultural security has eroded through progressive political correctness, redefining our traditions as racist and bigoted and all kinds of phobic.
At the same time, we're seeing this mass influx of migrants coming in with a different culture, different language and so forth.
So it goes right back to the border security. So it's a closed loop, as it were, a self-enforcing loop.
And so post-security politics was manifesting itself very clearly in the rise of bootleg parties.
That's a neat phrase. again, I think goes back to Eric Kaufman, where the centre-right, centre-left were in their political paralysis.
They refused to deal with any of those issues, any border security, any economic security, any cultural security.
And so you ended up seeing the rise of these so-called, we call them third parties here in the parliamentary system, and they started to win.
Nigel being one of the most extraordinary examples of that. I mean, back in 2019, one in three Brits voted for a party for the European Parliament elections before Brexit was finally instituted.
And even then, you know, we know we got the issues, but they voted for the Brexit party and it was only what, six weeks old, five or six weeks old.
The Tories collapsed.
It was absolutely astonishing and the Tories only had their best election ever months later with Nigel basically bowing out and giving his blessing that if you want Brexit, put Boris back in. So you're seeing these, if you've got border security, economic, I'm sorry, yeah, border security, economic security, and cultural security as the new main issues of European populations, then you inevitably see nationalism, populism, and traditionalism emerging as the political forces that are changing politics in the continent.
Now again, bullies in Brussels are doing everything they can to stop it. You'll hear them talk that way, as you well know, where you just hear them say, well, we have instruments that we can use to force compliance and things like that. But increasingly, it's just not working. Finland, you mentioned, the Sweden Democrats, the rise of the AFD in Germany. They're doing everything they can to try to prevent the AFD from running in their next national election because it looks like right at this point they're going to come in second only to, formally, Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats. So the Vox party in Spain, keep an eye on that next week. They have their, socialist government collapsed and they're going to probably boot out Sanchez and they're going to probably get into a coalition government with the Podemos party, the centre-right party, so you have something very much like what we're having in Finland, in Sweden, in Greece where the left just collapsed, and on and on and on. I think France is next. I think National Rally is poised to win a very impressive national election. And then if they begin to coalition with the centre-right Republicans and a couple of the others, Eric Zemmour's party and so forth. Now suddenly France is going to be a, the France that was supposed to be the globalist space par excellence for
Europe's new emperor, Emmanuel Macron, now they're going to have a government more on par with Viktor Orban. It's incredible.

It is and we could have the AFD arrive second in Germany, could have a freedom party first in Austria next year and Le Pen leading France. I mean that would just be the most beautiful scenario... 

And it's happening, that's the thing, what we try to do, every day on my channel and what you're doing is we're tapping into the trends that are moving, in this direction. So a lot of people are late to the party. A lot of people are like, what's going on in Europe? This is amazing stuff. Well, it's Nigel Farage first came on the scene in the 1990s. This is stuff that's been happening. I mean, remember the European union sanctioned Austria when the when the freedom party first got a certain amount of the vote. And if I recall, that was back in the 1990s as well, well before the 2008 global financial crisis. These are seeds that have been germinating for a while, and they've already been sown, and now we're just going to witness how big the harvest is.

Another part of the jigsaw, and we'll finish up on this area, but is the economic side. And one of your phrases from your website is, now is the time to build a parallel economy, to live out our God-given freedoms and leave a legacy of faith, family and freedom for our children and grandchildren.
And that idea of a parallel economy intrigues me, especially when you see corporations bound to wokeness and being severely damaged because of it, happily. Tell us more about that parallel economy because we've talked about kind of the spiritual and the political side but, you also need to have a juggernaut, an economic juggernaut, taking that on and people need an alternative and this is what a lot of the conversation has been about a parallel economy.

Absolutely, and again it's a term or it's a concept that's also European as well. I mean just in terms of the way it was formalized and written about, I'm thinking in particular of Václav Havel, Václav Benda, and the Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 80s.
They wrote a lot about what they called a parallel polis, and they actually pointed to churches and the concept of the churches in Jerusalem as this notion of being able to create an alternative society where citizens can live out truth in the midst of a society dominated by lies, like in the Soviet period, and the more we live out truth, the more we reveal those lies to be what they actually are, fabrications and the like. So, obviously, Václav Havel was a brilliant fellow, ended up becoming president of Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic.
And the Berlin Wall fell within just a decade or so of those writings.
So we're taking a lot of inspiration from that as we live in a kind of, well, what scholars actually call a refeudalization. I've heard the term refeudalization for the United States, and I've heard the term neo-medievalism when applied to Europe because of the EU functioning very similarly to, say, the Holy Roman Emperor or something, or the Roman Catholic Church,
working in that way, having sort of ultimate control over districts and emerging sovereign nations and the like. But refeudalization refers, it's a very helpful model to see what's going on today, because it refers to ways in which the structure of society is increasingly reflecting the, this kind of caste system. So for example, today, like say in the medieval period, you have an astonishing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of very, very few. So five years ago, 400 billionaires owned half the world's assets. Today, that number's dropped to a hundred. Now, thank God one of them is on our side. Elon Musk is, and that, and he's just, he's been one of the biggest boosts to this parallel economy that's trying to provide a different kind of space from this neo-feudalism or refeudalization.
But it's not just the billionaires and the bureaucrats that are that are teaming up.
There's also a new kind of radicalized fundamentalism involving all things woke, the environment, gender and race. And again, that's where bureaucrats and billionaires, you can really see them teaming up where you have corporations now enforcing ESG and DEI.
And this is where the demons and Davos come in. They're enforcing stuff that none of us would ever vote for, right, from our politicians, but because bureaucrats and billionaires are hooking up here with this bizarre kind of ideological fundamentalism.
Where there's no room for dissent whatsoever, dissenters are heretics, but instead of a clerical class, now it's a clerisy class, a class of pseudo-intellectuals from the universities, the professional class, the credential class that are imposing an ideological inquisition on the whole of the population. But again, the good news is what we're seeing is something akin to a Protestant revolt that we saw coming out of that feudalized period, and the Protestant revolt in many ways was a populist revolt where the people had the right to the scriptures and so on and so forth and to pray and to have a direct relationship to God, And so what we're seeing, I think, is we're seeing a new kind of Protestant revolt in the form of a parallel economy where more and more people are with money and investment opportunities and seeing extraordinary business opportunities are starting to pump lots and lots of money into an economy that is the only requirement of being a part of it is you must disown all things woke. Anything woke is not allowed.
Anything else, you're come on in. You're going to love it. So we're seeing the Sound of Freedom movie.
It's number one at the box office. It's about to hit a hundred million dollars in revenue.
This is all as the Disney's new Indiana Jones has just bombed and as a matter of fact, Disney. I just came across a stat the other day, Disney has lost nearly 1 billion dollars in its last eight releases. Nobody's going to see it anymore, So they're going to alternative movies. Um, they're going to alternative stores. They're boycotting, well, I would say they're going to alternative beer, but I don't think bud light is beer quite frankly. I'm partial to British beer myself, but you see Bud Light's sales on the tank, Target, you know, they had their pride section for children in their clothing store.
Target is a department store here in the States.
They're falling apart because of a boy, actually Boycott Target was a song and it hit number one on iTunes.
It's just amazing stuff going on. And it's happening at the same time, even within the Democratic Party.
There are constituencies like Muslims who are pushing back against the LGBT agenda.
So in Hamtramck, Michigan, which is a Detroit district, it votes 70% Democrat, but they have the first all Muslim city council there.
They were the first city council to vote unanimously to officially ban the rainbow LGBT pride flag from flying on any and all city public property.
And these were all Democrats. And Democrats and the woke just don't know what to do with this, because they're seeing all of their cultural products basically going bankrupt.
And now they're even seeing what was up until now very loyal voting constituents rebelling against them as well.
It does really look like it's starting to implode. And this parallel economy may indeed be the mainstream economy within the next five to 10 years.

Dr. Steve Turley, I appreciate you coming on and sharing that optimism and upbeat message, which I think is often missing in commentary. So thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you, Peter. It's been my honour.