Transcript
The Jacobsen Group with Jon Jacobsen · Mon Nov 3, 2025
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What appropriate fanfare Howard Rosenman's Academy Award nominated score to Star Trek for the voyage home This is the fourth voyage home of this enterprising crew.
We've reassembled the team John Jacobson here on KXEL with his special half-hour homage to the McLaughlin group and I've got with me Craig Bergman, Andra, Draeneur, I have Curtis Bauer veteran
and attorney, I have Joel Kirtanitis, who is our IT wizard and father of many.
And then we have, I saved the last, because he's not least, our bonapastore, our cleric, our great pastor, Sam Jones.
You're listening to us on KXEL, North America's original blow torch, the only 1540 AM.
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It's been a while since we've reassembled this team.
We're going to go right into it right now.
I'm John Jacobson, your McLaughlin-esque moderator.
We'll ask for a few scale of
One to ten, ten big metaphysical suititude.
Let's start out first of all with our ad-walking theme music and set the tone.
Mike Shane, Super Engineer.
If you won, a lot of water has gone over the dam, but where are we now in Iowa?
Governor's race, U.S.
Senate race, U.S.
House races juxtaposed against the backdrop of internecine GOP warfare for the carbon capture pipeline.
I turn first to you, Craig Bergman.
Nothing has changed.
Ashley Henson will be the nominee and will win easily on the Republican governor's side.
absolutely the snake from the fourth district whose name I won't even mention is going to win handily because the other candidates are simply pathetically ineptly not even campaigning in the neighborhood of make believe and he probably has a 51% chance to beat sands because sands is simply just mired in his own stupidity so literally nothing.
Any upsets in U.S.
House of
Reps races?
Nope.
We're going to pick up probably 10 to 15 seats with the redistricting and Trump's amazing economy and what's going on.
You know, the only thing that's changed is we've gotten better.
How about in Iowa?
Do four stay red?
One, two, three and four.
Do they all stay red?
I
think we're all red barely again.
Go back to, you know, 12 votes for Miller Meeks.
Nothing changes.
Curtis
Bauer.
Governor, U.S.
Senate, four House seats in Iowa.
What say you?
Well, I would say that Feinstra will likely win the Republican nominee.
However, I do believe that Rob Sand will pull out by one to two points ahead of him.
In the U.S.
Senate race, Ashley Henson's got it very handily.
In congressional district one, I believe Marionette Miller-Meeks will lose her seat.
That Democratic candidate just edges her out and I think she's going to lose it by about five points.
It's hard to know how Iowa district two is going to go.
There's a lot of Republican candidates.
Rod Blum fell out.
You have...
Wow, Shannon Lundgren is throwing her hat in the ring.
Charlie McClintock is throwing his hat in the ring.
We'll have to see how that one pans out, because I think it's just too early to call.
I think Zach Nunn's going to keep Congressional District 3.
And I do believe that Chris McGowan is the favorite for Congressional District 4.
So there you have it for that.
Sam Jones, Bonaparte Store, your take on Governor U.S.
Senate for U.S.
House of Rep seats.
Yeah, John, you know, the first thing that I have to ask, though, before I get into this is, is it true that Randy Fienstra dressed up as Lurch for Halloween?
Sorry, just had to ask that question.
But no,
I thought you were going to say Herman Munster.
Well, one and the same, right?
You know, when it comes to the governor's race, I think that right now it is interesting.
Obviously, Feenstra has the huge advantage over the Republicans just because of name recognition and finances.
And, you know, I think the biggest issue, though, is that this is going to go down to convention.
I don't think that this race is going to just be one-handedly by Feenstra that way.
But I think that convention is going to be his home field.
The best
thing that could happen is if Eddie Andrews, Brad Sherman, and Adam Steen all got into a room and only one of them came out as running for governor.
That would be the best thing that could happen for Republicans at this point.
But looking at this, I do think that right now if it's Feenstra versus Rob Sand, I got to put my money on the guy who can hold a coherent conversation and has a lot of money.
And so I would put my money on Rob Sand.
It'd be close.
It would be quite the upset.
But I think that he would be the one who
leading in that doghouse.
I got to agree with both Craig and Curtis at this point that Ashley Henson is the leader in that U.S.
Senate race.
And I'm interested in District 2.
I think we go chalk, red for the other three, win the gown, winning District 4 there.
But District 2 is, I think, very interesting to look at just because it has historically gone back and forth.
I mean, think in our
was the representative there not too long ago.
But there's not really strong candidates running anywhere yet or anyone who's who's given themselves a leg up.
I shouldn't say strong candidates, but nobody's really risen to the top yet.
And so we'll have to wait and see on that one.
In alpha order, we save the last position for Joel Kurt Knight as Joel.
What say you?
Well, I'm not going to be super controversial about anything here.
I do think that Marionette Miller-Meeks has got a weak position and I think Democrats are desperate for some kind of win here.
I would expect their strategists to throw everything they can at her because she's just not a strong candidate and she doesn't have, you know, demographically an advantage in that area.
The only interesting point that I would add to what's already been said as far as the governor's race goes is that Feenstra actually does have competition in the fourth district and so he may have to choose where his resources go.
Candidates have faced that decision before and had unexpected problems trying to run in two places at once and so I don't think he'd have he'd have a much trouble with the current field of governor candidates.
I do think he may have a problem in the fourth district and may have to withdraw from one of those two which would make things really interesting.
One round done, others to go.
I want to thank all of our listeners at KXEL.
The election coverage cycle garners this station with news director Jeff Stein, including programming such as ours and almost nine ratings share unheard of outstanding demographics and the 25 to.
54 zone.
We appreciate your listenership and as we go to round two and head to the national stage, we welcome our Kansas City Metro and East Central Plains of Kansas listeners from Emporia to Manhattan, to Rockchalk, Jayhawk, Lawrence, to Olathe, to Ottawa itself, as well as Wellsville, Baldwin City, Osage, Osawatomi, Princeton, Paola, Gardiner, and Garnett City.
Issue two.
Split among MAGA in the twilight of the Charlie Kirk assassination, especially regarding Israel.
Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens stoking the flame.
Where goes MAGA?
Where goes Turning Point USA?
Is there a schism?
Within MAGA, I start with you, Curtis Bauer.
I 100% would say that there is a schism inside MAGA.
And really, and truthfully, I would look at this latest podcast between Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson.
It just, wow, holy cow.
I think that there were a lot of great things that were pointed out.
It's just that I would view Nick Fuentes as someone who is just too polarizing for MAGA at this point, and it's just creating too large of a schism.
We go now to Sam Jones.
Sam, is there a split among MAGA exacerbated in the aftermath of the Kirk assassination with Fuentes Tucker and Candace fueling the fire?
Yes or
no?
You know, John, I think this is an interesting one to look at.
And I would say both yes and no.
And yes, there is plenty of schisms within MAGA.
Here are lots of disagreements, but also no, because I think that this was always the original intent, not necessarily on this position, but to have a big, a very large tent running a populous thing.
So I think the schism has existed for a while.
The question comes is,
Will there be anything that's done about it?
Is there actually going to be a leading voice that comes out of this as a victor?
But my answer is not trying to ride the fence, but both yes and no.
We go now to Joel Kirtanitis.
Joel, split among mag, especially with regards to Israel.
Is Israel the fault line?
Take it away.
No, I could spend all night on this one.
Israel is actually not the fault line.
Israel is just the thing that they found to be the most dramatic that would get the biggest reaction, because this is not actually a symptom of anything political.
It's a symptom of something deeply wrong socially.
It's about the faith, it's about the nature of reason, not to go down Pastor Sam's lane here, but this is a problem with us being a post-truth society.
It started on the left, and if you
look at the expressions and the mannerisms and the themes and the approach of everything that Tucker and Candace and Nick Fuentes are doing, it is a mirror image.
of what the left did with trans absurdity over the last few years.
It is going for inflammatory nonsense and conspiratorial nonsense just for the reactions.
That's what's happening.
There is no counter to it right now.
The conservative superstructure that's trying to oppose it is reeling because the tools that have always worked in our favor, reason and logic and mass media, they're not there for us anymore.
So I wrote an article years ago for the register that said, your conservative friends aren't racist.
and the accusation provides cover for real racists.
That prediction has been fulfilled.
It's coming true before our eyes.
That was Joel Curtinitis, ladies and gentlemen.
Craig Bergman gets the final say in this round.
90%
agree with Sam and 90% agree with Joel.
There is no schism.
There's no division.
It's a bunch of gristers who have always been leftist.
May I remind you, Tucker Carlson was on CNN as the make-believe conservative foil, and Candace Owen started as a leftist who was doxing conservatives with her website that would list what elementary school your children went to so they could be harassed.
Before Charlie Kirk saved her, all of her angst, she is a
unrequited love, who is infinitely jealous of Erika, and that's what's motivating her.
Fuentes is just a Nazi like Richard, whatever his name.
from Virginia looking for money and Tucker Carlson has always been a feckless grifter.
There's no division whatsoever.
It won't show up in the mainstream election in the midterms and just keep sailing right on in.
Right now there is nothing on the horizon that would stop a Vance Rubio ticket three years from now.
Issue three.
Trump's incredible fight de-chests in trade negotiations, in peace negotiations, and his parapetetic world tour.
We start with Pastor Sam Jones on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 meaning insignificance near nil, 10 with metaphysical certitude of total success.
How would you rate President Trump's peace and trade initiatives over the last month vis-a-vis his travels abroad?
Sam Jones.
You know, John, I actually got to give a really high grade here for Trump, probably a seven or an eight, but specifically because of what he just did in Nigeria and really making Nigeria a country of particular concern.
I think that that has incredible significance for what he's doing.
And so I have to tip my cap here to our president.
He did a very good job with that.
I moved now to Joel Kirtanitis.
Yeah, I appreciate everything that's going on with the trade deals and negotiating peace all over the place.
I think that Trump is making a great case for the effective use of American power internationally.
It's been a terrific counterbalance, and I think he's maintained that balance pretty well.
It's also reassuring, I think, to the U.S.
market, especially, to see that the tariffs were always a tool rather than an ideological
Stance and so Trump has used these use them effectively in the ways that people early on thought that he likely would using them as leverage to bring rates down across the board Barter a better deal with some of these countries that are hostile in their stance toward us So full marks for that.
I don't trust China to keep their end of the bargain We'll see if that deal falls through again, but it's clear that it's a leverage play at this point and I'm all for it
Craig Bergman rate Trump's peacemaking and trade delegation ventures
As SpinalTap
said, these go to 11.
So what Sam said, his stance on Nigeria, Sam, you all of us on this call know Judd Saul's been working that for 15 years and Trump is the first president ever to do it.
The critics of Trump who have said, oh, he's an adulterer and he was on Epstein's plane and any of this nonsense judged by the fruit and I am looking at the Garden of Eden from this trip.
He got Japan and Russia's war to end.
He's gonna go after the minerals in Siberia.
I believe we are looking at because of tariffs and trade as a military Weapon where politics and war are the same thing same Side of the same blade we are looking at a post Putin and post Xi Jinping world in the next five years
that is cryptocurrency Bitcoin expert
Craig Bergman, Curtis Bauer.
You have the final word on this segment.
So as far as his grade, I'm going to give him a nine.
I have to say that his use of tariffs, especially with regards to China and Russia and some of the other
countries that are in Africa, the way that he's positioned using the tariffs on the trade to influence the security in those regions is very, very spectacular.
And here's the other thing I would point to that has been very stabilizing and that is re-establishing relations with Saudi Arabia with regards to basically recommitting to the Abraham Accords and
It further stabilizes the Middle East and it really puts Iran and Hamas back on their haunches.
And you know, China, they're starting to recognize they're fighting a social war inside themselves.
It's going to end up destroying them.
I think that
President Trump has done very well with the tariffs and the national security and the trades.
I give him a nine because I only have a few minor tweaks that I would make, and that's about it.
All right, guys, before we head to round four, I want to thank our engineer, Mike Shane, back at studio in Omaha.
Our delegations here traverse all quarters of Iowa on this unique format.
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culminating just down the road in Atchison, Kansas at Benedictine University.
Issue number four.
Is the Democratic Party been co-opted by the left?
Our leftists sowing the seeds literally of domestic civil unrest across the nation in blue cities with defiance, with doxing of ICE agents, and et cetera.
I turn to you, Joel Curtinitis.
Yeah, absolutely.
But that's been their game for many years now, most of my lifetime.
They are relying on a cultural feminization that's happened for a long time by which you can be a bully and you can go to excess and you can tantrum and you can do anything you want.
And anyone who confronts you is going to be wearing kid gloves.
I think that they are assuming that incorrectly with the Trump administration.
Or alternatively, if they're smarter than I give them credit for, maybe they're assuming that the gloves are going to come off and that that's
going to justify.
This is kind of the game that they've played consistently.
We do brinkmanship so that we can justify scorched earth as a response.
And so yeah, I think they're deliberately planting this all over the place.
They've lost the younger generation.
They've lost the revolutionary edge that they had under Obama.
And I think they're desperately trying to regain that, which can only really be done by confrontation because they don't have a worldview to support it.
We now
move to Craig Bergman.
Thanks.
1860 when they fired on Fort Sumner.
The Democrat Party has been the party of corruption, the KKK and racism, the opposition to everything progressive is supposed to stand for.
Hey, can I throw in, Craig, can I throw in Japanese internment camps in the United States?
You can throw in everything abortion.
They are the party of division, death, communism, socialism.
There has never been an election for president legitimately won by a Democrat since FDR's fourth term.
There you have it from Craig Bergman.
We now go to Curtis Bauer.
So I will say this, ever since the riots in Minneapolis and St.
Paul, especially in Minneapolis, following the death of George Floyd, the things that I am.
most concerned with when it comes to the left is their willingness to go right to, oh, let's defund the police.
Oh, wait, we've got chaos and anarchy on our hands.
Oh, wait, the police, we've tied their hands so they can't do anything.
Well, it's come to the point where President Trump has made some very, very good calls in using the National Guard, using the Marine Corps to go into places like Los Angeles.
You know what?
Here's the big, big ticket thing that I would tell you.
Hands down, the Democratic Party has done nothing but over-enable and over-nurture this ideology where we think it's okay to be, oh, it's not your fault.
Oh, you poor little thing.
Oh, you've been oppressed.
No, the reality is, is nobody's ever taken accountability and ownership.
And at the end of the day,
There are no excuses and there are no shortcuts.
So put on your big boy pants and grow a sack.
Final word from Pastor Sam Jones.
Well, you know, Marxists are always revolutionary.
The question is, are they in a cultural revolution or are they in a physical revolution?
That's the question, but the issue is never the issue.
The issue is always the revolution and the Democrats are Marxists.
And so, yes, they are in a revolutionary state.
And I think that we really are on a razor's edge.
What will really, I think it goes back and forth between cultural and...
and physical revolution.
I think that that's where they are.
And I want to just remind everyone of Marx's own words that he said that his goal was to destroy or to dethrone God and to destroy capitalism.
You know, this isn't just about economics.
This is ultimately about a spiritual battle about who is God and who can create laws.
And the Democrats, frankly, are lawless.
And so they're always, you know, revolting against God himself.
We begin with Craig Bergman.
Very likely that this coming week, a new candidate enters the race for governor and upsets the apple cart.
Wow.
Care to shed any more life, any more hints?
Uh, I'm under an NDA.
Oh,
this is gonna be interesting.
Uh, Craig, damn you.
Um, I have to say that, um, my opinion is, um, if I, going back to what Pastor Sam Jones had said earlier, if we could get steam, Eddie Andrews and.
bred German into a room and and and just have him duke it out and have one candidate come out on top.
I agree.
I think Randy Feinström would be doomed and I'm going to be honest with you.
I believe that Eddie Andrews would be the top candidate for that that thing because he can win Polk County.
He can win Lynn County and he cuts the margin
on Johnson County, Scott County and Black Hawk counties where there's a democratic stronghold.
So I've strongly believed that Andy Andrews would be the best candidate amongst both parties.
Pastor Sam Jones.
Yeah, you know, I'm not going to go with the prediction.
I'm going to go with a
a rant.
I don't know if you'd quite call it a rant, but I'm just going to continue to talk about Nigeria for just a little bit here and what is happening.
Amen, brother.
I agree.
Go with it, Sam.
Yeah, you know, in in Nigeria, you've got in the northern half, it's Islamic Muslim.
And in the southern part, it's Christian.
And so right in the middle is this jihad.
This this this jihad is moving down through.
You have the the Fulani ethnic militia that are coming down and killing Christians to a tune of 90 percent of the world's Christian martyrs over the last five years have happened there in Nigeria.
President Trump said three thousand had died.
He was wrong about that.
It's been at least 7,000 directly through attacks that we can that we have counted over at equipping the persecuted which you can find out more by going to equipping the persecuted org once again That's equipping the persecuted org and I would just encourage you to stand with your brothers and sisters in Christ And to demand that this bloodshed stops, you know the the amazing thing is is when we go and talk to the Trump administration We make trips over to DC.
We're not talking
about, hey, can you give Nigeria a bunch of money?
We're saying, hey, can you threaten Nigeria with sanctions until they fix their problems?
That's the kind of foreign policy that we need.
And Trump has started to do that, but he does need to take one step further.
That's why he only got a seven from me is because he needs to take this one step further in order to stop the bloodshed of innocent Christians being killed over there in Nigeria.
And so just once again, going to do the shameless plug here.
equipping the persecuted.org, equipping the persecuted.org.
And it's a good sign when even Bill Maher is on our side, Sam.
Joel Curtinitis, you have the final word.
All right, well, I'm going to circle back to Fuentes then.
We have got a situation in our country by which, with the election of President Trump, which I believe was by divine intervention, followed by the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the revival that has been in the wake of that, we have an opportunity, I think particularly as men in this country, to rise above where we have been.
We can't squander that.
And Christian Mann, if you're listening to this, the number one thing that's going to cause you to squander that is going to be being terminally online and losing grip on reason.
and letting go of sound principles and biblical truth for outrage and clicks and controversy.
Those things will lead you away.
Be bold, be courageous, don't become an unreasoning brute, don't go at it for clicks and likes, log off, touch grass, raise a godly family, and challenge this culture.
A masterful half hour in homage to John McLaughlin's format, I want to thank Mike Shane, our engineer from Omaha.
They're brilliant.
KFAB veteran who is piecing this together, part of our award-winning panoply of folks here, along with Craig Bergman, Curtis Bauer, Sam Jones, and Joel Kirtanitis.
We're going to round this team up again for an encore, because these have been such popular broadcasts.
And I want to give a shout out in memoriam.
Rest in Peace, Yvonne Ben-Kusky.
In her 10th decade, passed away recently, a devoted listener of this show who particularly liked the political format that we did.
Rest in Peace,
Yvonne.
You can hear us on the radio, statewide at AM 1540 and in the Cedar Valley at FM 100.5.
We stream live on the web, not only through KXEL.com, but also through our free KXEL mobile app.
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It's where Iowa comes to talk, News Talk 1540, KXEL.
Welcome, guys.
John Jacobson here, K-X-E-L-Land, North America's first and only totally clear channel, 1540 AM.
A hundred years of excellence and folks.
We've got excellence.
A half a century plus of excellence.
Our weekly feature with the great people from Hames, Homes.
Boy, did I know the great Kurt and Norma Hames outstanding.
Citizens outstanding.
Christians, outstanding patriots, outstanding businessman and woman, and that patriarchy and matriarchy extends multi-generationally today.
We've got the great Curtis Haymes on well-named after his grandfather, and we've got Curtis back today to talk about these tremendous
home ownership opportunities of comfort, beauty and value in eastern Iowa with financing options and safe communities.
Curtis, welcome back to the show.
I am so blessed to be here today.
Thank you for having me.
And who'd have thought a few weeks ago that the Hawkeyes after two tough early losses by just barely a field goal or less to Iowa, state and Indiana would be on a tear and now be
Bowl eligible already in this part of the season after eight games, be in the top 25 with incredible offensive performances against Wisconsin and Minnesota and a huge game coming up here this weekend.
Curtis, Kirk does it again.
I
was lucky enough to be at Nile Kinick on Saturday.
What
a
pleasure.
A punt return, a.
Pick six.
Man, they look great.
We were joking.
My buddies and I were talking about running Minnesota out of the Big Ten.
You know what?
What's great about it is the punt return.
That still wasn't a fair catch either.
It
sure wasn't.
It sure wasn't.
We've had some bad luck in the past and it worked out on Saturday, didn't it?
Yeah, PJ Flack is now one in eight against Kirk Farrance.
That's just the way we like it.
We want to keep Floyd of Rosedale.
Floyd would look good at your corporate offices.
They're a little traveling Floyd of Rosedale trophy.
The Hames has been such great Hawkeye fans and it's a short track.
from your offices
to Iowa
City.
So a lot of Iowa Cityans go into school at the university or wanting to start families in homes while maybe in grad school or wrapping things up.
You've got spacious and attractive manufactured home communities there, both at Summit View and Grand View.
Talk to us a little bit about those, Curtis.
We're excited to have people with a lot of different walks of life.
My co-worker, Clinton, and I were visiting the other day about how a single sectional may be a great fit for
maybe a family who are thinking about going to Kirkwood or University of Iowa short or long term and how it might be a great fit as opposed to paying rent and an apartment.
This is so salient.
This is a great point, Curtis.
And Curtis, I'm teaching
A lot of finance and stats classes right now, and I've been telling kids interest rates continue to matriculate down.
We had another 25 basis points, that's a quarter of a percent interest.
We've now gone down a full half a percent interest rates nationally.
This portends well for financing homes as well, including manufactured homes.
Absolutely.
All loans in general are going to be trending in the right direction.
We wish it was a little bit more, but any relief that we see from the Fed is relief that's seen in the pocketbooks of individuals.
Our industry is no different.
We're seeing better and better interest rates as the year goes on.
Yeah, it's it's a great point.
And it's like pulling teeth to get Jerome Powell to do the right thing.
I think he's going to be forced into yet another at least quarter point drop here before the end of the year.
And you know, to paraphrase the late great Everett Dirksen, a quarter of a point here, a quarter point there pretty soon, you're talking real interest rates.
So
very well said,
guys, I love the hamshomes.com website, H-A-M-E-S H-O-M-E-S.
and we've got a great blog post that you guys put together.
Hey Curtis, what is a data plate on a manufactured home and why does it matter?
That's a great question.
A data plate is a way to identify how one of our homes was built in the factory.
We do not physically build the homes here in eastern Iowa.
We build them from reputable builders and we get guidance in our industry
from the federal government to explain how they're built.
The facts are it's a very well built product and this will annotate the information here.
The information on the home, make, model, gear and size and then other amenities.
and how the home was built in a high quality, high end way, making sure that the home can handle the elements and the region of the country that it was built in.
Yes, it is really efficient.
These homes are so efficient and they're also very sturdy.
They've withstood the high winds of the derecho.
And what I love are the planned communities.
Curtis, a lot of people, especially parents, are very concerned about what's seemingly across the country, especially in the urban areas.
been a bit of a crime epidemic.
However, you guys have gone the extra measure.
I think you've got the safest security and safety paradigm that any neighborhoods could have.
Talk about the extra steps that you guys take for vetting and protecting.
John, we appreciate that compliment.
Thank you very much.
Now there's no neighborhood who's going to be perfect, but what we do here is we consider ourselves what's called a planned community.
So the first and foremost, and this goes back to Graham and Grandpa, they wanted our communities to be owner-occupied.
We're not running a lease agency.
We're not running a rental service.
All of our
homes are owner occupied.
You don't sell them and lease them out.
There's not sub-leasing.
And what that allows us to do is to ensure that our standard for background checks is followed.
Again, we're a planned community.
We're going to check people's background.
You know, we're not going to fingerprint people or dig too deep.
But if people have real rough, outstanding things,
They may not be for a fit for us at this time.
Here with Curtis Hames from Hames Homes, part of this new generation of leadership as this family has been worthy custodians of that great virtue of providing hearth and home for families that can't think of a higher calling, especially when they're affordable, beautiful and safe like the Hames Homes are.
And again, this powerful signal, caroming through Eastern Iowa, actually to 14 states and two Canadian provinces on.
AM signal alone, but on the 1540 AM and the 100.5 FM out of Cedar Rapids and the listening live features, you're listening to us in Tiffin and North Liberty and Ely and Cedar Rapids, Hiawatha, Marion and all the way up to Waterloo and Dubuque, Clinton, the Quad Cities.
Guys, you're within striking distance of these wonderful homes that are not far from great Southwest Iowa retail as well as the East
or an Iowa airport.
Curtis, how do they drive by, call, or find you guys online to check in to these great offerings?
Because I urge you guys to go to the site and check out.
They've got the listings of these beautiful homes and the testimonials.
Listen to people.
Love the community.
The very best.
I love living here.
Such a well run park.
Clean and neat.
I think it's adorable, great community, great place to live on and on and on.
Curtis, how do they find you guys?
We want to meet people where they're at, whatever's easiest for them to contact us.
We have a wonderful website that we work hard and diligent to stay current.
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love that legacy Marion number and Curtis before we depart for this segment.
I want to tell you
Please pass along Debs and my greetings to Barbara and Teller.
We'll be celebrating a great family milestone for her come mid-November.
I think we're going to take a trip up there and say howdy.
Very good.
We'll see each other in person.
That'll be wonderful.
Sounds great, guys.
The great Curtis Haymes here with us today on KXEL, your home and away voice.
of Eastern Iowa All Things News, Weather, Sports and Ag on America's original blowtorch.
Economics is the study of human choice in the world we live.
Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
By investigating faith in economics we can learn how they lead to human flourishing.
This is the Faith in Economics podcast, a presentation of the Gortney Institute at Ottawa University.
Welcome to our show today.
My name is Peter Jacobson.
I'm the Gortney Professor of Economic Education and Research.
Joining us today, we have Dr. Russ McCullough, the Wayne Angel Chair of Economics and the founder of the Gortney Institute.
as well as Dr. Justin Clark, I'm an art family professor of philosophy and ethics.
All right, so I'm kind of excited today to learn about some things that I know a little about.
Love to have Dr. Clark guide us through humanism, naturalism, and supernaturalism.
Dr. Clark, take it away.
Okay, so I've kind of been thinking a lot recently about the way worldviews have developed.
And in particular, like this, the development from
what's usually called the humanist worldview, which we usually date at, you know, the renaissance on and the development of naturalism, which is usually seen as a kind of development of the humanist worldview.
Now, prior to the humanist worldview, usually people will say the worldview that most people had was a religious worldview or a supernatural worldview.
And I guess the
The line that I want to push is something like humanism was thought to be this kind of freeing worldview in that the doctrine of humanism is that man is the measure of all things, right?
So this is, I think that's from Vico, I could be wrong.
But, and this was the view that we get starting in the Renaissance where
Instead of thinking of the world as something governed by powers we don't understand or various different kinds of religious views on the way this is usually told to us, the Renaissance put humans at the center of the universe and said, well, humans are the measure of all things.
What's important is what humans can figure out about the world.
This led to the development of science.
Well, it
started at Renaissance, approximate
timeframe, what year?
century 1400s on, like 1400s on.
And so the development of things like the Industrial Revolution are said to have their roots in this philosophical turn that we get in the Renaissance that enables the development of science.
Once this humanist worldview developed the scientific method, so this view, so this goes, we realized that actually
Once we put humans at the center of things and we realized that the way that humans understand things is through the scientific process, this actually led and then
18th and 19th centuries to the naturalist worldview and natural here means a worldview that is dominated by the natural sciences and this view says instead of saying that like humans are the measure of all things it says that the natural sciences are the measure of all things the way we know about things is through the natural sciences and the stronger versions of this like people who call themselves philosophical naturalists say the things that we should countenance as existing in our
theories of everything are the things that are demarcated by the natural sciences.
Sure.
Does that make sense?
And naturalism was really really powerful in the late 1800s and at least the first half of the 19th century.
And I think it's still the dominant view in like academia generally.
Yeah.
It was the dominant view in philosophy departments for a very long time and you saw this in
the attempt to kind of reduce mental phenomena to physical phenomena and philosophy of mind.
This was the view that's usually called physicalism or functionalism.
In the late 20th century, in the late 1900s, a bunch of challenges to the naturalist conception of the distinction between or the mind-body relationship led a lot of philosophers of mind to kind of
abandon these really, really naturalistic philosophies like physicalism, which is that the mind just is the brain and mental states are brain states.
Would you say it's mostly secular than the humanism movement and that you've kind of got now supernaturalism with God being at the center, riding along with this growing population of people who believe humans are at the center?
Naturalism is a purely secular
world.
So it's a secular world.
Okay.
And
So it will say things like, since we don't find evidence of God, or evidence of God, or in our physics equations, God doesn't exist, right?
And in fact, if we define God as something that's supernatural, that is above or outside of natural sciences, then not only are we not going to find God in our scientific equations, we couldn't by definition, right?
Does that make sense?
Nope.
Okay.
So one of the things that happened is people realized, okay,
If we take the natural scientific worldview really seriously, which is what we naturalists are demanding that we do, it seems like there are some things that are going to drop out of the theory, in particular mental states, and things like qualia, which is the experience, subjective experience, and it also
it also is very hard to make sense of like abstract objects like numbers or even like the integers.
So in philosophy of mathematics, there's Hartree Field who says we can do physics without numbers and therefore numbers aren't real, right?
Because the only things we need to admit into our actual ontology or whatever physics demands that we admit are real.
Now the problem is what does physics actually range over?
And the problem is in physics,
What we're actually, what we talk about in physics are particles in fields of force.
That's really it.
And if we want to be like, we can move this forward and we want to talk about particles in fields of force, we'll talk about collapses of the wave functions at certain times.
And it turns out that if we really try to be really strict naturalists, we have to say that
a lot of the stuff that we actually want to care about, things like personal human experiences, you know, your mother, your GPA, those don't show up in a finished physics.
They can't.
They're gonna fall out of it.
And so my claim is something like, it's very interesting that we started with, okay, let's go humanism and put humans at the center of everything.
And this move to humanism,
pushed us into naturalism.
And if we take naturalism seriously, it makes everything that the humanists actually cared about not even exist or worth caring about.
And so my claim is that actually if we want to be really strict about it, humanism is a form of supernaturalism.
That is, a strict naturalism is going to by itself and by definition
exclude almost all of those features of the human experience that the humanists were initially set on centering.
And so on this view, instead of driving, I think the wedge was initially driven between humanists and those with the religious worldview.
And on my view, that's not where the wedge actually goes.
The wedge goes between naturalists and everybody else because all of those things
that naturalists, or sorry, all those things that humanists wanted to care about, those are going to look on the naturalist picture exactly like religious claim.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense, and I want to argue that this idea has been brought forward by other thinkers as well.
in particular, Max Stirner.
Now, I don't know if Max Stirner was a naturalist.
I would assume no, based on what I know about him.
But he does recognize that this movement towards humanism is itself a religiosity.
So I'm just going to read an excerpt from his book, The Ego and Its Own.
And so again, this is someone I, Stirner, by the way, is an atheist.
He's not a supernaturalist.
And most of his argument relies on arguing that these categories that people invent, the moral categories, the idea of having responsibility to
anything in particular, he calls these things spooks.
In other words, they're things that people believe are real, but they're not actually real.
So it is a naturalist critique of these systems, regardless of if Sterner himself is a naturalist.
He is bringing in a naturalist critique.
And so he spends the beginning of the book criticizing my belief systems.
That's religion, you know, traditional morality, things like that.
But then he moves into the humanists.
And so he starts by criticizing a thinker who is not super popular nowadays, but very influential in the early Hegelians.
So for Hagel and Karl Marx and people like this named Ludwig Führbach.
And I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, but I tried.
And so Führbach basically writes that Christianity is not real and really the truth that Christianity is communicating is something about how humanity should love each other.
That's Führbach's like main conclusion that he draws.
And here's what Sterner says about Führbach.
After the annihilation of faith, Führbach thinks to put into the supposedly safe harbor of love.
The first and highest law must be the love of man to man.
This is the supreme and practical maxim.
This is the turning point of world history.
But properly speaking, only the god has changed, the deos.
Love has remained, therefore, to love the superhuman god here, to the superhuman god here, love to the human god, therefore,
Man is to me sacred.
Who is God?
Man with a great M. What is divine the human?
Then the predicate has indeed only been changed to the subject.
Instead of the sentence God is love, they say love is divine.
Instead of God has become man, man has become God, etc.
It is nothing more or less than a new religion.
Does it love the man, this man for the man's sake, or for morality's sake?
And so, for homo-harmony deus, for God's sake.
And so in other words, what Fierbach is saying is that when we... or excuse me, when...
What Stirner is saying about Furibach is Furibach is saying, well, we don't have to have Christianity literally.
What we can have is Christianity metaphorically.
So we don't have to believe in a real God and a real incarnation.
Instead, what we take from Christianity is, oh, man becomes God.
That's the main point.
And well, what does that entail?
Well, that means that we should love other people, that we should value man with a capital M. That's all things human.
And by the way, I skipped some of the lines in there, but he says that would also entail loving everything.
categorically that is beneficial to humanity.
So things like friendship, things like marriage, right?
And this is some of the things that Feuerbach points out are valuable because they forward the cause of man.
And so what Sterner's pointing out is all you've done is changed the subject of the sentence.
So everything is remained the same except for the word God.
Now you're saying the word man, even though, and this is Sterner's main contention, there's not such a thing as man properly.
And this is maybe, again, it fits with the naturalist argument that
Well, what is man in general?
And Stirner's thought as well.
There's no such thing as a man.
There's only me, and then there's everything else against me.
So again, I don't think he's a strict naturalist.
But his point is this.
It's like the category of man that you have decided is the new safe harbor, that we should love man, that category doesn't have any of its own legs.
And so what Feuerbach is doing is simply renaming God to something else and giving us all these like things that are morally entailed by that.
And so again, even though I don't think Stirner is a naturalist, I think that
he highlights the same thing, criticism of humanism that Justin highlights, which is that humanism is religious by its nature.
In other words, it's supernaturalism rather than anything like strict naturalism or materialism or anything like that.
So this is probably getting close to a good time for a break.
That made me think of a couple different things.
One is
Ayn Rand, which I'll leave as a little bit of a cliffhanger to get into where her philosophy and stuff would fit into this.
But then also Luther, Martin Luther was one of the first people to talk about the law versus gospel and the Bible and how the law is there to convict and show you of your humanly faults to actually turn back to God.
And so here this whole thing is really turning away from God.
towards man, making man the center, right?
And so it is kind of a complete opposite of that view that we're really turning to yourself, whether from a moral standpoint or from other ways to run society.
So yeah, that looks like a good spot for break.
Why don't we come back and we'll get some thoughts back from Dr. Clark.
We'll be back in a
moment.
Each of these fields is interesting in their own right, but they intersect in ways that are important to understand both individually and for your community.
If you find philosophy fascinating but want to make sure that your study of the subject is practical, if you enjoy economic analysis but want to see how economic laws interact with more principles, if you are interested in politics but want to explore how economic and ethical realities constrain our political choices, you should consider the PPE program at Ottawa University.
This spring, Ottawa University is organizing a PPE League competition or Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.
Students in this competition will compete leveraging the ideas of philosophy, politics, and economics in various events.
If you're a professor or an advisor of college students and you're interested in your school competing in PPE League this spring, contact Peter, Justin, or Russ today.
By 2030, the Gorton Institute will be known for its alumni, supporters, and participants who incorporate economic understanding with their faith in their careers, vocations, communities, and personal lives.
We have some great programming going on for high school students.
We have an online microeconomics class.
Yes, you can earn college credit for $200 by taking an online class.
It's affordable, flexible, layered with support.
Our new online micro is optimized for you.
If you'd like to consider some events for your high school students or that class, please contact Justin, Peter, or Russ today.
Okay, so we're back and Peter laid out some things there.
I think we need Dr. Clark to shed some light on.
What do you think, just?
So I think what Peter said about Barback kind of touching on this is dead on.
And a lot of, I think you find this point being brought out by a lot of the early existentialists as well.
People like Dostoevsky and
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche grappling at, like, okay, in this new worldview that we get from Newton where the universe is just one giant clock or mechanism, how do we salvage all of those parts of that world which we used to think were sacred or divine?
Right.
And you have thinkers like Kierkegaard saying, the world you must be wrong because we have our conception of the sacred is important and true and more true than the theories of the universe is the clock or whatever.
You also have people like Nietzsche, and I think even more than Nietzsche, a lot of followers of Nietzsche who said things like, no, the universe just is a clock or it is just deterministic and all we have are atoms in the void and therefore there is no room
for meaning in it.
And in particular...
I said a lot of followers of Nietzsche rather than Nietzsche himself because at the end of his life you find Nietzsche saying things like, um, oh, you lovers of truth, you scientists who claim to be lovers of truth.
And that's why you hate religion and superstition.
You haven't yet, um, faced up to your original superstition.
That's the superstition of Plato and Aristotle, which is the superstition that the truth is somehow good for us.
Um, and Nietzsche's point is something like you guys, you
I think that you can save the concept of the sacred and say like, oh, by somehow tying it to the concept of truth, but there's...
There's no scientific guarantee that what's true is going to be good for us if we take the naturalist worldview.
That is actually just as much of an example of religious or dogmatic faith as you would find in any kind of religion.
And Nietzsche's point is something like, if you want to really, really be naturalists, you're going to have to abandon even that.
And so I think this is getting at the point, one of the points which I take, I take it that
Peter might have been making is that humanism, I think it was sold as this idea that we can maintain.
a lot of the categories of the sacred with regard to what we regard as sacred and human and somehow just like not worry about that religious stuff.
Right.
But the truth is like if you give up that foundation you're going to be surprised about with how quickly all that other stuff slips right through your fingers and there is no foundation for any property of sacredness that you find in any natural science.
There just won't be unless you import it via some
superstition that you're going to get called out out on and have to abandon.
Would
you call that you fell fall
into relativism essentially?
I would say nihilism.
Yeah, that the choice then is between
On my view, naturalism is just a form of nihilism.
And it has to be by definition because it's going to have no way to admit anything that counts as a value, let alone as something sacred.
So yeah, the kind of nihilism for me, maybe some other reasons.
Nihilism being the view that nothing has any inherent value whatsoever.
And so on my view, then the choices between like nihilism and non nihilisms and all non nihilisms are going to be
at least in some respect, religious.
Another way to, I mean, they're just kind of like synonymous in the way that I've just put them forward.
And so yeah, so that's what I'd get at, is that I think you find existentialist philosophers making a lot out of this, but existentialists as philosophers are more often a venilist and atheist bent.
So they're,
A lot of existentialist philosophers are trying to sell you something else that you can use in the stead of the concept of the sacred, or how to create sacred in your own life, even though there's nothing sacred objectively or whatever.
There are a bunch of Christian existentialists as well that are just outnumbered.
And
existentialism, give me that.
I
always get
a lot of these philosophical stuff.
Existentialism is just the name for a branch of philosophy.
It might be like if you ask like what is a Chicago economist.
There might be like one certain thing that all Chicago economists have in common.
With some of them it's they went to Chicago with some of them it's the you know I'm a disciple of Gary Becker even though I never took his course or whatever.
But it's like this intellectual heritage that leads back to Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky.
About the truth, or what the truth is,
or truth-seeking,
or... More about how difficult it is to... The really pressing problem, philosophical problems, are problems about meaning in the universe.
How we get meaning to our individual lives, given whatever.
world view that we have.
And so you often find a lot of existentialist thinkers talking about these issues, but existentialist thinkers are difficult to read, and they usually get kind of subsumed into the French-German continental philosophy, which is, I think, just intentionally obscure.
and difficult, whereas Anglo-American philosophy is clear, but usually deals with problems that nobody cares about.
So
let me throw my iron ran thing in.
So it's on my mind because I'm going through Alice's shrug right now with my students for class.
And so she was what people call an objectivist.
Objectivism maybe I'll let you expand more on that but the the idea is she was an atheist so the whole kind of meaning to her was centered around the human and that you morally don't owe anything to anybody other than yourself and so the only person to worry about so sometimes the criticism came that you know is built on selfishness and that's kind of a loaded thing but am I reading right that with her philosophy that would fall more into the humanist camp?
I think she would describe herself as 100% just a humanist, right?
Okay, so
that's what I thought.
Well, this has been a production of the Gortney Institute here at Ottawa University.
I'd like to thank you all for listening.
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I think that'd be fruitful and multiply.
Thanks.
you
Thanks again, guys.
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In the meantime, listen to all the wisdom of Jeff Stein during his weekday news and commentary, and folks, always remember and never forget to be safe, be smart, be good, be strong, love Jesus Christ, and God bless us.
everyone till we meet again have a great weekend and bye bye
