Alan Harrelson on Moving and Building Platforms to Preserve Culture

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, as always, here with another interesting episode.

I think many of you will find this interesting. This is a little different than a lot of the episodes that I do.

I think I've been getting gutsy. I've been going out there and doing things that I enjoy, that I like, that I think are interesting that might not fit with going against social justice, which

I think is what most of the listeners are probably aware of and expect from me.

But this is, we might even talk about that a little bit, but this particular podcast episode is going to be a discussion of a number of things, a number of developments.

One is that young men are looking for places where they can be young men, where they can fellowship, where they can learn from older men.

And social media has provided a network for this, but also a barrier to this, because of some of the controls that are imposed.

And my guest today has a way, at least in a certain world, a way around that.

And I'm seeing this kind of thing, these new networks popping up everywhere that don't have these controls on them.

And so we're going to talk to my guest today, Alan Harrelson, about that. We're also going to talk about the great sorts, people moving from blue states to red states or blue areas to red areas, because Alan is part of that.

And we might talk a little bit, well, in fact, we will talk a little bit about pipe smoking, if you can believe it.

So without further ado, welcome, Alan Harrelson. Thanks for coming on the podcast and talking.

John, it is a privilege to be here. I've been looking forward to this for quite some time, and you and I have had the chance to become acquainted over the past several years, and I'm just so excited to be here with you and your audience.

Yeah, I think we met in 2017, if I'm not mistaken, and I had the privilege of having supper with you in Mississippi when that was maybe 2018 or 19.

That was a while ago. Yeah. But yeah, we've kept in touch for years, and I guess both our lives have taken a winding path.

I think though yours, because you're in Mississippi, then you're in South Carolina, which is where you're from, and now you're in Kentucky.

Maybe we'll start there. Tell me a little bit about that, because I know you were looking for a place where you could raise your family in safety, security, and have some of those cultural things that you want instilled in your family present, and you've decided

Kentucky's the place. Well, the reason, yeah, we were in Mississippi primarily because that's where I finished my doctorate in history, and that's what drew us there.

I was writing my dissertation, and so when that was completed and when we had our first son, we decided to go back home to South Carolina so that we could raise children around grandparents and so forth, and so we bought a 1905 farmhouse and had about 10, 12 acres with it, and I loved my time there.

It was beautiful, but what I noticed during that three -year timeframe was that South Carolina, the state of my birth has changed drastically.

It has changed drastically, and not simply because people from elsewhere are moving into the state.

Many people who were born in the state are now accepting a woke ideology that I absolutely abhor, and this became much more of a problem and much more noticeable after the shooting in Charleston.

I think it was 20, when was that? I think it might've been 2015,

Dylann Roof. Yes, yes. I think that was 2015, because that was, or maybe it was 20, maybe it was a little before that, 2014, 2015, but yeah.

Yeah, well, when that happened, that was a tragic event, but when that happened,

I think that the state responded in a way that I was not expecting. Essentially agreeing with this idea that we need to cancel history, particularly the history of the

American South, and that was a shock to me, because that is a symptom of a larger problem.

That's a symptom of a larger problem that we're now dealing with in full force, which is now, of course, called woke ideology.

So my second child, our daughter, was born in South Carolina, and now

I had two children, and I wanted to think about this idea of where I wanted to be when

I was my parents' age, because we reached a point where the only thing keeping us in South Carolina was my parents, not necessarily my wife's parents, because they really don't care anything about our marriage, but it was my parents, two people.

That's the only thing that was keeping us there. And I did not speak to my wife very much at all about the idea of moving to a different state until we were having a conversation in the backyard one afternoon, and I just felt the wonderful spirit of the

Lord, and I asked her to go in the house, take the children in the house, and I literally,

I went on my knees next to the little kitchen garden we had there in our backyard, and I just prayed and just sought the wisdom of the

Lord. And I probably prayed for 45 minutes to an hour, and I had been dealing with this idea of moving away for some time.

And so I went back in the house after that prayer session, and I told

Alex, my wife, I said, we've gotta move, I don't know where we're going yet, but I know that God's asking to go in a separate direction.

It's not here. And so I began to seek the Lord more about that, and I decided that I wanted to raise my family in a place that was primarily rural, a place where we could buy a large amount of land at a price that we could afford.

I wanted to be fairly certain that the politics and the culture of the area was not going to change too drastically in the wrong direction during the course of my lifetime.

Now, my children's lifetime, that's a different story. And I was seeking a sense of a community, particularly an agriculturally -minded community.

And so I looked at Tennessee, I looked at Southwest Virginia. I knew that the region overall where I wanted to go was

Appalachia. And Appalachia has a negative reputation among many people in urban America.

But I have been infatuated with the Mountain South since I was a small boy.

I've always appreciated the culture and the history of the area, and particularly the way that Appalachian society has maintained an understanding of an older America.

And so I looked at properties in Tennessee, Southwest Virginia. I did not look in North Carolina at all, because there's too many people in the price zone.

Real estate there was too high. Looked at North Georgia. But the only place that made sense after a lot of research and a lot of prayer was the mountains of Southeast Kentucky, or Kentucky on the whole.

And so I went to my wife about it, and she said, I'm with you. I'm with you.

I understand where you're coming from. And she was eager to go. She was eager to leave South Carolina a lot earlier than I was, because she wasn't born there.

Actually, my wife was born in Southern California. And so she did not have the ties that I did to South Carolina being born there and having family.

So a few reasons why. Well, it's a long, long, long story. It almost didn't happen.

But we found a beautiful, beautiful property in Southeast Kentucky.

And I had a real estate agent friend of mine from Richmond, Virginia. And I asked him,

I said, get me in touch with a real estate agent in Kentucky. I don't know anything about how to determine who's a good agent and who's not.

And so he got me in touch with a wonderful lady, and she and her husband have a real estate agency together.

And so I told her what I was looking for. At this point, I was dead certain I would go into Kentucky.

And she sent me a couple of properties. And I said, no, that's not it. About a week later, she sent me a new listing that hadn't reached the market yet.

And she said, how about this property? And it was 170 acres with a three bedroom house.

She showed me the pictures and the aerial photographs. I said, that's it, that's it. That's the place I have to have.

And I showed it to my wife and she was just dumbfounded because it's got half a mile of wonderful creek frontage going through the middle of the property.

It's got beautiful forest that haven't been timbered, thankfully, and wonderful bottom land.

And this doesn't matter to a lot of people, but it matters to me. I think that God has placed this desire in our heart to be stewards of a piece of land.

I mean, this idea of being a landed family goes way, way back to the beginning of time.

And I think it's rather unnatural for people to seek as their dream and their goal to live in a subdivision for the rest of their life.

I think that the natural course that God has instilled in us is to raise a family in an environment where you have a community, but it's rural and you have your own land because what does land mean?

It means freedom and independence. At least that's the early American perspective of it. So a lot of things happened that I could feel a very serious satanic influence when we decided to move to this property because everything that could have happened to prevent us from moving here happened.

And I was talking to a couple of other people that I knew at the time, and they were stalwart

Christians, but we didn't always agree. And they said, well, if God was wanting you to really move to Kentucky, it would be a smooth road.

The doors would just open up. There wouldn't be any trouble. That is wrong. Whenever there is a goal, and this is just simply what

I believe, I really think that when there is a definite goal that you know God has asked you to achieve, it's not gonna be easy to achieve it.

And this is an incorrect notion that a lot of evangelicals especially have, which states that God's gonna open that door and you're not gonna have to work very much for it.

God's gonna smooth the way. There's no linear path from point A to point B when you make big life decisions like that.

There's gonna be bumps in the road. But we finally sold our property in South Carolina and moved here to our new farm in May of last year.

And since then, we have bought an additional 50 acres of land, so we're now up to about 220 acres.

And that means the world to me, to have property where I can raise my family.

That's a lot of land. So what are you growing? Are you growing, what are you doing with the farm there? The people who helped us move here actually, the moving company, when they arrived to the house from South Carolina, they said, how much land y 'all got?

And I told them, they said, what you gonna do with all those acres? I said, well,

I don't want to do anything with the majority of it. I just want to let it be and enjoy it.

And we have beautiful, we have horses. And so we ride horses through the beautiful trails we have on our property.

We also have about 20, 25 acres of cleared land and we're not doing anything with it yet because that takes time.

And you've got to have, I agree with Joel Salatin on this from Virginia, with the guy who's really, really famous among the homesteading community.

He said, you need to just sit down and observe a new property for at least a year before you decide to make any changes to it.

See how the seasons of the year function on that new property. And he's exactly right about that.

And so that's what we did. And so now we have plans to plant some orchards.

This part of the country is very good for fruit production. But I don't want to use the land to market produce.

We don't need the money from an agricultural endeavor. I wanted the land for the atmosphere, the environment for my family.

This is where I want to spend my final years, not in South Carolina.

And that was a difficult decision to reach. Yeah. Yeah, I can imagine that.

I know, you know that I have a lot of family in Mississippi and I grew up going down there for reunions and they're rural

Mississippi. They're very farm agricultural minded, at least when

I was young, the older generation was. And we would go to, most of the time, my

Aunt Marian's farm is where we would stay. And it was over 200 acres. It was, and I think the majority of it was not,

I don't think they had cultivated it. It was, it was just an adventure land. That's what I remember.

It was just, for a kid, this was amazing. We had, you know, a Creek we could go in. There were places where you could actually find fossils because it had been underwater at one time.

And yeah, just all the kinds of things kids do, I guess, you know, shooting and fireworks and whatever.

But that is something that I do, I would love for my children to have. And I think that I'm not alone in that.

I think a lot of people want that. Let me ask you this. So there's two things, two questions popped out at me.

The first one was the hardship of moving from a place that you know and love. And that is,

I think, one of the things that keeps people from making the move, even when they want to, when they see their area changing.

Well, there's a second thing, but let's start there because for you growing up, being a native South Carolinian, having all your memories there, to pick up and move because you realize it's time for the elves to leave

Middle -earth. That's difficult. So how did you kind of overcome that or what,

I mean, was it just, you said you were praying. Was it just the Lord impressed upon you that those memories and all of that was, you needed to leave that behind?

I don't see it as leaving it behind at all. My children are taught their

South Carolina heritage and their South Carolina lineage. But it's sort of the same thing in my mind as people from Europe who were moving to this country originally.

They were leaving behind a lot of memories, not simply one lifetime, but several generations of memories.

And they were coming to this country to seek a different opportunity. I can be at mom and daddy's house in about five and a half hours.

It's not like we moved across the continent, but some people were aggravated about the fact that we left

South Carolina, couldn't understand it. But the state, as I've said, culturally is heading in a direction that I don't like.

And the state that I grew up in almost doesn't exist anymore.

And what I see in this part of Kentucky is a lot of things that remind me of those memories that you mentioned.

I am reminded more often of my grandparents and so forth living here on this land than I did in the place where we came from in South Carolina.

It's a difficult question to answer. And I think that at the end of the day, I had to realize that being born in one place,

I mean, Elizabeth Maddox Roberts, who was a Kentucky writer during the early 20th century, she had a profound quote about this.

And I don't recall exactly how she said it, but the gist of it was simply, some people don't really find the place where they are supposed to be until much later in life.

It's not necessarily the place where you're born that is where God wants you to remain.

It's the place that you'll find later in life because of various and sundry circumstances.

And I believe that wholeheartedly. I feel more at home here in the mountains of Southeast Kentucky than I have felt home anywhere, anywhere.

I mean, this is home. We love it. Now that we're here, we can't imagine being elsewhere, if that makes sense.

Yeah, no, it totally does. People need to have, it's a leap of faith. It's simply a leap of faith.

And a lot of this, if we did not believe in the divine providence of God, I doubt that I ever could have made that step.

But - Yeah, I mean, I know what you're talking about with South Carolina. Obviously, I didn't grow up there, but I was there maybe a year ago and I went to Fort Hill to just take some pictures of it, which for those who don't know, that's

John C. Calhoun's residence at Clemson University.

And while I was there, I could not believe the trouble that I caused just by taking pictures of this historic house.

Clemson University, of course, was his plantation. It was donated by the family to the university, to the state,

I guess, to form the university. But now they are very,

I would say, disrespectful of that generosity. And the guy who runs the whole entire, the

Calhoun home or Fort Hill came out to me, and all I was doing was taking pictures. I didn't think anyone was gonna walk up and say anything because I thought it's a beautiful home.

I can get some good B -roll for some of my documentary work. And he wanted to know everything about me, why

I was there. He wanted me to go get approval from an office on campus to even take pictures of the place.

He, I mean, it was just suspicion. And I had to walk past a booth of these students sitting there and they had on their table there at the university, students for racial justice.

Or Christians, I think it was Christians for racial justice or something. And I just thought to myself, growing up most of my life in New York, I knew the contrast between where I lived and then where my family was in Mississippi, and I could see the differences.

And to see Southerners adopt the same things that led to the ruin of my area is disheartening.

Because I, it's just sad. And I think you probably experienced a lot of that when you were there.

And so now that you're in Kentucky in a rural area, you're not experiencing that woke stuff then is what

I'm hearing you say. No, no, no, no, not at all.

This part of Kentucky, Southeast Kentucky, if you look at the national scheme of things is one of the poorest regions of the country.

And because of that, it's considered to be a place where you do not want to move to.

Now, yes, this part of the state suffered tremendously when the timber industry and the coal industry began to move out.

But the federal government owns about 70 % of the land in the two or three counties surrounding us through the national forest and so forth.

So that's not good in some ways, but in other ways it is.

That land cannot be developed. There is no industrialization that will occur on that property.

The Forestry Service is planning a large timbering project on that land, which

I've been fighting against since we moved here. But I really do believe that to be,

I think this woke stuff, this woke ideology, and I think there's probably better names for it, actually, demonic worldviews, it's found primarily in urban areas.

The more rural you become, the less likely you're going to find this stuff. And in Charleston, they removed

Calhoun's Monument, and they've removed so much of South Carolina history in the urban areas.

In the areas that remain rural, folks don't put up with it for the most part. But if you look at the county map here in Kentucky, there's only like one or two counties that are blue, and that's around Louisville.

Louisville is a cesspool. I absolutely despise Louisville, Kentucky. But the rest of the state's overwhelmingly conservative, and there is a strong Southern identity here as well that some people like to perhaps reject.

But this, no, no, no, no, no, no, that everybody I know around me, they are extremely conservative in the traditional sense, not simply

Republican Party conservatism. They are conservative in the old traditional sense, which means they have a respect for the past.

They believe in a primarily agricultural lifestyle. They have a great respect for the accomplishments of previous generations.

And these people know their history. The people in Southeast Kentucky actually remind me a lot of the folks in Ireland who

I met when I visited that country a few years ago. I was so impressed with the historical consciousness of those people.

I could talk to somebody on the street in Galway, Ireland, and they can tell me about Oliver Cromwell murdering a particular member of their family in the 17th century, and they are still mad about it.

The historical consciousness was just overwhelming to me. And this country has made the mistake of developing a futuristic worldview.

And the only parts of the country that embattle that and don't follow that is rural America. And so we've got it.

We've got all of the elements that I was looking for and a place to move to here in Southeast Kentucky.

But I don't wanna tell too many people about it because if the word gets out how good it is, folks are gonna stop coming here.

See, the podcast you're on right now, though, I think the people listening, you would be happy to have most of them as neighbors.

Yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, don't go on NPR or somewhere. Don't go on Fox News if they invite you and tell them, keep it a secret from those people.

I have a friend who just moved from Louisville to Pella, Iowa. And it's funny because he said something very similar to what you're saying.

And of course, Louisville, as you just said, is very blue. And I think he grew up there. He's been living there a long time.

And now that he's in this small town in Iowa, he says he feels more at home. It reminds him of his childhood.

And I thought that was so interesting because I would think Iowa's very different, and I'm sure it is, than Kentucky, but yet it is this urban -rural thing,

I think, that being in a rural area, no matter almost where you are in the country, whether that's the

Midwest or the South, maybe even to some extent the Northeast, I don't know, but at least those places, they're gonna have a lot more in common than people in urban areas, no matter where those urban areas are.

And so one of the things, this is the second question I had, that people object to, because I've had this objection.

I have advertised for Ridge Runner, which I told you about briefly, which is a development, a land development in Kentucky, in rural

Kentucky, not far from where you are. And the intention is to attract people who are more conservative, who have a

Christian understanding, if possible, who want their children to be raised in the way that you're raising yours, Alan.

And I had someone comment to me from the South, from, I think, Alabama, if I'm not mistaken, and say, why are you encouraging people to move to a

Southern area? Because that's the problem we've been fighting, is all these Northerners coming in, changing everything.

And then I thought of you, and you are someone who moved from an area actually farther South to Kentucky for the same exact reasons.

And I'm wondering whether Kentucky is the place, not, you know, if a Northerner wants to go there and wants to respect their culture, fine, but maybe it's a place for other

Southerners to move, to still retain their Southernness. What do you think about that? Well, I have a lot of thoughts about that.

I'll share with your audience a quote that I mentioned to you previously.

Good friend of mine in Virginia, when we moved here, he told me that Kentucky is the new face of the old

South. And I think that he is probably right about that. A lot of people know that Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky, but far fewer people know that Jefferson Davis, President of the

Confederacy, was born here as well. Actually, the Obelisk Monument to Jefferson Davis here in Kentucky is larger than the monument of similar shape to Washington in Washington, D .C.

But you will never hear many people talk about that. Actually, I named my first son after the great

Confederate president. And so his first name is Davis. And so to get to this question, let me see how to start unpacking that.

First of all, I agree with your idea that the divide now is not so much

North and South, East and West, it is rural and urban. And that divide is not simply politically, political rather.

That divide is cultural in many ways, religious. Thomas Jefferson once said very clearly, and I think he was right, that cities are to a democracy what sores are to the body.

And so this theme is constant throughout American history.

The American dream, as it's often called among historians who study the 19th century, the

American dream is to own your own piece of property. And there's a reason for that.

The historian Lacey K. Ford from the University of South Carolina once called this country republicanism, small

R republicanism. And it descends from a much, much older Greek and Roman way of viewing the world, which is you can't have independence and freedom for you and your family without a piece of land, because land is a source of capital if we want to use a modern term for it.

You can do so much with a piece of land that you cannot do with your life otherwise. So governors, and I saw this in South Carolina Southerners are concerned about people from elsewhere moving in, folks from off, as it's sometimes called.

But I think that's an artificial dichotomy now, because there are many people in the

South who do not have a proper understanding of what the role that regionalism plays in American history.

I don't, there were a few Southerners prior to the Civil War who called themselves Southern. They thought of themselves as Americans.

Being called Southerners was sort of a derogatory term that began among people from the

Northeast who were traveling through the South during the antebellum period. And one of the best books that describes this phenomenon is titled

Cavalier and Yankee by a fella named Taylor. That's his last name.

I don't remember his first name. And that was published in the 1960s. And so what he's simply describing about the antebellum period of American history is that when

Northerners traveled down South, they thought that one of two, it was so different. It was so different of a culture that one of two things had to happen.

It either had to be conquered or it had to be assimilated into a New England idea of American nationalism.

That's not, people are not thinking like that anymore. And it's true that the 19th century lasted longer in the

South than in perhaps other parts of the country. And I have studied

Southern identity and Southern history for a long period of time. That's what I have my PhD in, is simply trying to understand how the

South fits into the larger story of the American past. But what

I do when I study history is separate from how

I decide what needs to happen with my family in the present. And many

Southerners are in a situation where I think there needs to be a better education about how the

Civil War particularly fits into the larger story of the American past. The South doesn't begin in 1861, it doesn't end in 1865.

There is still bitterness about that conflict, particularly in Alabama and South Carolina, the lower

South states that you're mentioning. There's still a lot of bitterness about that, but I don't think there's enough of historical understanding about where that bitterness comes from.

And Southerners are tired of being the redheaded stepchild of American history. And that's the way it's been, that's the way it's been happening for a long time.

Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s, when he was instituting his New Deal program, he had the

South first and foremost on his mind. He said, the South is the nation's number one economic problem.

And the South is still viewed as a problem. And I've seen this more in the past 10 years than I have in my entire life.

Because Confederate symbolism, Confederate symbols, monuments to the

Confederate past, monuments to the Southern past, monuments to the founding generation of this country, all of this is now being challenged.

And it's almost like we're going through the French Revolution all over again. And there are so many similarities between what's going on now and what happened with the

French Revolution. So I don't think that Southerners who are worried about Northerners coming

South are worried about the right thing. That's not where the problem is.

The problem is this larger satanic demonic attitude, which teaches that everything that's important begins the day you're born.

This secular humanist worldview, which is literally, we can see it before our very eyes, it is literally destroying

American history and traditional family values. So I could go on, but I'll stop there.

I'm sure you could, it's all good. One of the things that I think I've, maybe I've been a little frustrated about, and I haven't really thought about it till just now when you were talking, but I guess behind the scenes, in the back of my mind, this has been the case, is that I experienced this when

I first went to a college or a seminary in North Carolina, Southeastern, when there were, at the time

I started in 2014, I mean, there's still, I remember one of the guys who worked on campus had a little Confederate flag thing on the back of his truck.

You would never see that now. And that wasn't that long ago, but they still had a, there was a bit of a

Southern identity that they wanted to, I don't know, they were proud of maybe, some enough people were at least.

And anyway, one of the things that I thought, my outside perspective coming from a very secular area, now it's a very secular area, at least in the

North, was that I didn't want the problems that I saw disrupting my community, affecting places that I thought would be the escape hatches, right?

Because then I can't go there to escape from the problems here. And to go down there and to see these people, now these are

Christians, right? At least that's their claim, starting to participate in bashing, in almost siding with, in some ways, their overlords, to try to destroy their own history and their own identity, it was just disheartening.

Because I knew where that would lead. I knew that that was only the beginning. And that eventually the whole goal of this,

I don't even think, it's not about North and South, I don't think, you can disagree with me if you think I'm wrong on this. But I think that this is about Christianity primarily.

I think that the left, the progressive left, you said demonic, they want to take down Christianity.

Where are most of the Christians? They're in the Bible Belt. What's been the moral conscience about things like gay marriage and abortion and all the things we've seen in the last 50 years or so?

It's been in the South primarily where there's been resistance to some of these innovations. And that needs to be stopped because that's where you have

Christianity, not just believers, people believing it, but it's institutionalized. You have the culture supports it.

Politicians still talk like Christians, even if they're not. And that's gotta go, that's forbidden.

And so to try to convince people in these more traditional areas, whether that's the South or the Midwest, that their lot is tied in with Christianity, and then to convince

Christians who are maybe even living in urban areas or want to, that, look, your lot is tied in with these traditional areas that have been impacted by Christianity, which you might want to look down on.

I'm talking about like the Tim Keller types who think the city's, they look at the city with stars in their eyes.

That's been the gap that I don't feel like I've been able to see bridged by anyone.

Do you understand what I'm trying to say? Yes, and I will respond to that with a story from my own past.

I was raised in the Church of God, which is a Pentecostal denomination headquartered in Cleveland, Tennessee.

And I was an ordained minister in the Church of God, actually, and I served on the pastoral staff as the college minister of one of the largest

Church of God congregations in South Carolina from about 2013 to 2016.

And during that three -year timeframe, I decided that I had to leave the denomination that I was raised in.

One of the reasons was, and this is Southern, the Church of God is primarily a Southern denomination.

There are few Church of God congregations in the North. And actually, the denomination is growing larger internationally than it is in this country, when that's another subject.

America is now a big, big mission field. But I started to notice that the church was being run like a business, and I didn't like that.

I started to notice some word of faith theology creeping in, some prosperity gospel stuff.

But what was the real kicker is after the Dylann Roof thing in 2015,

I guess it was. One of the main contributors to the Church of God monthly magazine that comes out,

I don't even remember the name of it now, have a publication out of Cleveland, Tennessee. And he was telling people his opinions on that.

And he said verbatim, if you fly a Confederate flag, you are nothing more than a racist thug.

And so I wrote him an email. I said, I'm an ordained minister in the

Church of God. And I also, at the time I was working on a PhD in history.

And I argued against this point. I said, as much as Shelby Foote from Mississippi, the great historian and novelist has argued time and again, that the

Confederacy respected law above all things, as Foote said it. And it is entirely incorrect to portray this particular symbol in that period of Southern history as an attempt to perpetuate some type of 19th century racism.

You're missing the point of that period of American history entirely. And so he actually responded with a great apology, and which was great, it was warranted.

He did not need to say that. And so there is a great deal of historical ignorance among Christians in the

South now. They're not able to see, I mean, some are, but from my experience, which is not vast, it's rather limited,

I'm just one man. But in my experience, many people who attend church every

Sunday in the South do so more out of a sense of tradition, rather than a sense of a proper understanding of what they're going to church for.

And this is an interesting subject. Yes, Christianity is strong in the

South. It's historically been called Bible Belt. But I don't think many people in the

South are relating their Christianity to Southern history very much at all. I don't think there is a connection there that people are consciously trying to wrestle with.

Because historical consciousness is not very strong even in the South. Although I have argued in the past that the

South has been and remains a bastion of Western civilization or Christendom in American society.

And one of the reasons I think that Southern history is being lambasted and has been lambasted, particularly over the past eight years, is because when people look at the

South, they see the cross. They see the cross. There are good, genuinely good

Christian people who live in this part of the world. And they'll give you the shirt off their back.

They are kind, they are polite. And there's a lot of people in the South now who are following Christ in a real and personal way.

And when you are dealing with large amounts of people who are following Christ, I don't think it's about the

Confederacy at all. I think that when COVID came out, and I think that that was also demonic.

I think it did come from some factory in China. I do think that it was used as a source of spiritual war and spiritual warfare.

There were, in my opinion, some serious demonic forces unleashed as a result of COVID spreading around the world.

It's, the question that matters is not North and South. It's not, it's not, those don't matter right now.

The big questions that matter is how can we, as the church, embattle this spiritual warfare?

A pastor once told me years ago, we don't fight for victory, we fight in victory. We know how the story ends.

That's right. And so all this that's been happening over the past eight years with attacks on American history, the 1619

Project, this notion that American history begins in 1619, these are all distractions.

These are all symptoms of a larger problem. And the larger problem is this, this battle, this ancient, ancient battle between good and evil.

And it boils down simply to that. So that's one of the reasons I moved to Kentucky. This notion of living in South Carolina for the rest of my life, because that's where I was born, that didn't matter anymore.

The world is not the same now as it was in 2013, 10 years ago. The parameters and the paradigms that we have to use to make big life decisions are not the same now as they were 10 years ago, from a cultural and political standpoint.

Spiritually, they've never changed. But the culture and the politics of the country is so contested now.

There is so much division in American society. I wanted to be in a place where I could live around people who shared a similar worldview to mine.

And that was getting increasingly hard to do in South Carolina. It's getting increasingly hard to do in many parts of the country, not simply the

South. I'm sorry. Yeah, it's funny, because people from New York moved to South Carolina and they think, oh my goodness, this is so much better.

It's so Christian, it's so, and you're moving out of South Carolina to Kentucky. Man, we've, man,

I can't believe how long we've been talking. We've been talking over 40 minutes now. I need to get to the two other things that I wanted to talk to you about, at least one other thing.

Let's talk about the Pipe Cottage a little bit, because, and this fits in, because not only have you moved, but you've also moved digitally.

You've moved off of YouTube, and I know you had some very popular videos on YouTube. Well, no, no,

I'll correct you there. I went back to YouTube. We can talk about that if you want to. You did?

I thought that you moved off of YouTube. No, no, no, no, no. I did, but that was a drastic mistake.

And the reason for that, I talked to some people who

I trust and I admire, and they made some good points. Even when Jesus was living on the earth, he used

Roman roads, and he lived in a Roman environment. He had to use the tools that were available to him.

And so I went back to YouTube, and that audience continues to grow.

That said, most people who follow me on YouTube don't like YouTube either. It's just what we have until something better comes along.

Well, same. This is gonna broadcast on a number of places, including YouTube. So, all right. So anyway, though, you still did,

I think my larger point still stands, though. You did create your own platform, your own social media plat, not a, just so people understand, this isn't a page on other social media websites.

You created your own website, your own platform called The Pipe Cottage. And I think you did that about a month ago, so it's been pretty new.

How many people are on the platform? We have over, well over 2 ,000 now. Wow, okay.

And growing. And that's, so we, it's called Pipe Cottage Social, pipecottagesocial .com.

We also have a website, pipecottage .com, where I have videos and I have articles on there about various and sundry things.

But yes, my wife is a tech genius. I could not have done this without Alexandria.

My wife has a marketing agency. She designs websites for people. She knows computer coding.

This is not something that the average person can do. Actually, if you wanted to create an app for your own business or your own endeavor, that costs several thousand dollars.

Right. She did it herself. And so I have that blessing. But yes, we have an app now.

And what I wanted to do was to, I mean, I did remove myself from Instagram and Facebook.

I'm not on those two social media platforms anymore. I did go back to YouTube, but I refused to go back to Instagram and Facebook.

I still despise Mark Zuckerberg. And I very much think that Instagram is unhealthy in a spiritual manner.

You get sucked into it. You're just sitting there moving up and down on your screen and Facebook too.

And most of it is just trash. You're not really seeing anything that's of value.

So like many people in my generation, I have grown to appreciate where social media can excel and what it can add to one's life.

And so I and my wife, we created our own social media platform and we removed all the trash.

It's very user -friendly and there are some excellent, excellent people who have decided to join this.

And you can, there's different groups in the platform. You've got groups for people who want to talk about art, who want to talk about music.

And of course, most of them are pipe smokers. This is, but I will say this,

I sincerely believe that the Lord has used this endeavor as a vehicle for something bigger, a vehicle for even a ministry of sorts.

Because I get emails almost every day from people who are wanting to reach out to me and talk about spiritual matters, not simply pipe smoking.

And why pipe smoking? Well, it's people who are drawn to pipe smoking are not the same type of people necessarily who are drawn to cigarettes.

I've found that most people who smoke cigarettes do so to get a nicotine high. Most people who are smoking pipes are looking for a connection to a bygone era.

And these people know about C .S. Lewis. They know about Tolkien. They know about G .K.

Chesterton, all of these wonderful Christian writers from the past 100, 150 years, who also wrote essays about their tobacco habits, which involved either cigars or pipe tobacco.

And C .S. Lewis was a longstanding pipe smoker. And so there is this wonderful milieu, this mosaic of people who are interested in the pipe and the traditions of pipe smoking, but they're at the same time interested in history, in religion, in the beauty of this life that God has given us.

And so Pipe Cottage Social has actually turned into a way for all of these elements of humanity to come together and people have really enjoyed it.

The feedback has been phenomenal. And we have in fact created our own social media community, which has nothing to do with Facebook or Instagram.

It can be done. And actually, my wife is creating different social media platforms for other people who want to create their own communities.

This is not just us. There are a lot of people who want to do this. And I think that's the answer to getting rid of Instagram and Facebook is having many, many multiple localized social media platforms.

If you're interested in this topic, here's a platform for you. If you're interested in this worldview or you want to learn more about people in that community, there's a platform for you.

It doesn't need to be centralized in one or two platforms. That's a really interesting approach to this because most of the other approaches

I've seen from conservatives have been, we'll create our alternative to Facebook. So you have Truth Social and Getter and what was the one,

Parler that they kind of canceled. And so they create these things. I mean,

Elon Musk is no conservative at all, but of course he's not as far left as Zuckerberg, I guess.

And so conservatives flocking to Twitter, this is gonna be the thing. And I've always felt uncomfortable with that.

Like there's something off. I never was quite able to place what it was, but it might be what you're talking about that having these localized social media platforms, it's like the urban rural divide we were talking about.

Having a localized, more independent community is going to be a lot better and safer.

And you're gonna feel the latitude, I think, to interact more when it's people who share your interests or share your region or your religion, rather than on Twitter where anyone can see it and then you're gonna get canceled, right?

You're gonna get in trouble. So anyway, I love it. I think it's great.

I think that's, we need to put places to go, watering holes of encouragement. And it sounds like that's what you're doing with this.

So yeah, my hat's off to you for doing that. So if people wanna sign up, they can go to pipecottagesocial .com.

I don't have a, I mean, I don't really smoke a pipe, but make the argument for people here because you have a

Christian audience here primarily who have an aversion, some of them to this. What's the argument for smoking a pipe?

Where is tobacco mentioned in scripture? It is not. It was a phenomenon at the time.

And this is not original to me. This is a conversation actually that Malcolm Gite from England and I had on a video that I posted on pipecottagesocial .com.

I heard it, I heard it, yeah. And so I'll just simply share a little bit of that conversation that we had.

And Gite is right, tobacco was a phenomenon. It's not mentioned in scripture.

What you have to go to is what scripture does teach, which is temperance. I mean, I also drink whiskey and I'm also a

Christian, but I think that these are blessings from the

Lord. I think that tobacco has been put here as a solace from God for people who simply want to, there's no command that every

Christian smoke a tobacco pipe, but there is absolutely no command that they do not.

I think that this anti -tobacco crusade that's now going on in the country is the result of cigarette smoking, which is more or less a product of industrial

America over the course of the 20th century. If you look at cigarettes, they've got over 200 chemicals in them and you inhale cigarettes, it goes into your lungs.

And there are, you absorb hundreds times more nicotine and chemicals from cells in your lungs than you do from the oral cavity.

And I have known many, many pipe smokers and I have not known any one of them to have any type of oral health issues because of moderation.

Now, you can debate what moderation is, but I don't think that no

Christian, I said this in one of my videos, actually, I said, and this was a video

I did about being a gentleman and I would apply the same thing to being a

Christian, a Christian gentleman, if you want to say that. We should not decide our habits based upon what we think we should not do.

We should base our habits based upon what we ought to do. There's a stark difference there.

And so, yeah, I know many people, even in my own family who say, well, you shouldn't use tobacco in any form, but this is a fundamentalist

Christian approach. And I think it's wrong. I think it's missing the point.

I don't think that that's really an important question at all. I think that moderation is the key in all things.

Temperance, whether it's pipes, whether it's whiskey, whether it's food, whether it's television, whether it's social media, temperance in all things.

It's interesting, I was at a Lutheran colloquy a few weeks ago in Wisconsin, and these are a bunch of Midwestern Lutherans, German Lutherans, and in between the sessions, they were always grabbing the whiskey or whatever they had there,

I guess. They had a lot of beer, of course. And I just thought to myself, man, in the

Baptist circles that I've more or less grown up in, some fundamentalists, some

Baptists, some just non -denominational, but it's all kind of Baptist. That would never be tolerated, accepted.

They would look down on that. But these were my brothers in Christ. And they were, as you say, practicing moderation.

There wasn't any, I didn't see anyone getting drunk and outside of their own mind. And in an interesting way, too, some of them, they were also smoking.

Some of them had pipes and cigars. There is something about this, and I know we don't have much time left, so I know we can't delve deeply here, but you talk about this some on your podcast, that there is this kind of camaraderie, this sense of solace, solitude, comfort.

It's almost, it helps the conversation kind of flow when you're with someone else, in a way.

And I was skeptical of this at first, but I've seen it now with my own eyes. And I think that is true.

I think it's like when guys get around a campfire, right? And they're looking at the fire. They'll share things that they won't share if there wasn't a fire there.

So anyway. Well, if people want to learn more about this, since we are running out of time, you can go to my

YouTube channel, or the podcast. Actually, I talk a great deal about these topics. But there are other people that you can listen to.

I would encourage people to listen to some of Malcolm Guy's stuff. He's got a YouTube channel.

And he speaks a good bit about these topics as well. And so, it's catching on.

Actually, pipe smoking is gaining steam, particularly among younger people, college age, et cetera.

Because as I said previously, it's a tangible way for them to connect to the past.

Tangible way to do that. Yeah, yeah. Well, Alan, with that, since we have been going almost an hour now,

I appreciate it. Thank you. And if people want to find out more, then go to your podcast. Go to, check out pipecottage .com,

or pipecottagesocial .com, if you want to be part of that community. And yeah, so God bless.

Anything else you want to plug? No, no, no. I am done.

Okay. I'm ready to. I tuckered you out. No, no, no, no. I could sit and talk about this for a long time.

We just don't want to extend the patience of your listeners. Well, I will say this in closing.

If people are interested in, you've just heard Alan talk about the great life he has in Kentucky. If people are interested in going to Kentucky to check it out or to move there, you're going to want to check out this video.

I'm going to play this for you now. This is a video that I made with my friend, Josh Abatoy.

And this is on some of the properties that Ridge Runner has, Ridge Runner USA. Check them out.

Go to ridgerunnerusa, I believe it's .com, and you can find out more. But without further ado, here's

Josh. Hey everyone, thanks for listening to the podcast. I want to take a moment to share with you a little bit about Ridge Runner.

We're at one of the properties right now. There's a number of plots actually before us, as you can see, that border the

Cumberland River. So we're in an area where this plot would be, I think, more for people who want to garden.

Is that right, Josh? Yeah, this plot that we're standing on, it's over five acres. So you can have some livestock on it and garden here.

And it's not on the river directly, but one of the virtues of stepping back from the river and getting a little elevation is that you can see this sort of panoramic view here.

So you've got almost 270 degrees of bluff running around where we're standing. So, you know, any house built here, it would be breathtaking,

I think. Oh, it's breathtaking right now. What about the local government situation?

People who are trying to move to a place like Kentucky, maybe escaping a place like Nashville or LA or New York, they want to make sure that their freedoms are protected, that the local government's not going to be tyrannical like the place they came from.

I mean, well, this is, the local government, you don't think much about the government.

I mean, you don't get taxed very much. You don't interact with them very much. There's not a lot of crime here.

You don't need to interact with the police very often. People govern themselves out here to a large degree. You're in the country.

People out here are great. They take care of themselves and they take care of each other. And the government is pretty far away in a lot of ways.

You don't think about them in your daily life. You know, it's all, of course, you know, this whole area is deep red, very

Republican, low crime, all of that, like you can imagine. But even more than that, people govern themselves out here.

It's country living. You learn how to fend for yourself and take care of your neighbors and they take care of you. Now, you obviously have a vision for all of these plots being filled,

Lord willing, with Christians who are of like mind and faith, want to build a community together.

That's all the things you just talked about, low on crime and honoring the

Lord and their social arrangements. Is this gonna have like a neighbor, like some communities have like rules, right?

That the community must abide by. Have you thought of any of that or? Yeah, I mean, look, there's gonna be some really basic rules like you have a lot of places, you know, some basic rules about not leaving a bunch of trash out in your yard and things like that.

Don't make a nuisance. So we'll have some of those rules in place. You know, we can't discriminate in who we sell to and we don't do that.

But we do hope that the community that grows up here is a very high trust, virtuous community, the kind of community where you don't need to lock your door, where you don't need to, you know, worry about your kids going and playing next door and coming back trans.

Just, you know, community of people who have traditional values, who wanna live out in nature and get back to a more natural way of life.