Theory of Change Podcast With Matthew Sheffield

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Cover Photo: Former President of the United States Donald Trump speaking with attendees at the Republican Jewish Coalition's 2023 Annual Leadership Summit at the Venetian Convention & Expo Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. October 28, 2023. Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0

Doomscroll: Trump wins NH primary, Haley says she'll stay in

Matthew Sheffield — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 08:21:45 GMT

You can watch this episode on video as well

Audio Chapters

0:00 — Trump wins NH primary, Haley insists she’ll stay in

00:39 — Ron DeSantis attributed Budweiser advertising quote to Winston Churchill

02:44 — Nikki Haley seems to be running as “Plan B” in case Trump dies or is jailed

08:20 — Fox is conflicted on how to deal with a decrepit Trump

13:54 — Who is more bizarre, Elise Stefanik or Peter Navarro?

18:21 — Kanye West claims he had his teeth removed and replaced with metal dentures

23:36 — “Daily Show” says it won’t have a full-time host

26:31 — The not-so mystery of Bigfoot sightings and black bear populations

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Doomscroll is a podcast from the Flux media network. Visit https://plus.flux.community/ or more smart podcasts and articles about politics, culture, and media.

STJH Bonus: Ohio grand jury spares woman from miscarriage prosecution, but other women won't be so lucky

Matthew Sheffield — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 08:00:34 GMT

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Paid subscription required to listen to full discussion

00:00 — Ohio jury declines to indict Brittany Watts for miscarriage, but many other women will not be so lucky

03:11 — Case against NYC subway killer Daniel Penney allowed to continue

04:20 — Yes, it is Confederate Christianity

06:28 — Right-wingers dropping the pretense of respect for Martin Luther King

09:17 — Stephen A. Smith and many other sports media people trash far-right commentator Jason Whitlock

14:26 — AI generated content, including fake porn images, is flooding the internet

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Theme song

Easy Lover: “The End of Our Deceit”

Lyrics and Vocals by Kali Holloway

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Brittany Watts photo via screenshot

TOC: The ‘post left’ grift is as lucrative as it is unpersuasive

Matthew Sheffield — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 08:00:57 GMT

Introduction

As the American right has become dangerously radicalized, there is a small number of people who insist that Democrats are the real extremists.

These arguments are absurd on their face given that disgraced ex-president Donald Trump openly talks about “suspending the Constitution” and becoming a dictator three years after an armed mob of his supporters tried for the first time in American history to stop the peaceful transition of presidential power.

But it isn’t just 90-year-old Fox addicts who are saying things like this. There are also more than a few self-described progressive commentators who claim this as well, people like Tulsi Gabbard, Glenn Greenwald, or Matt Taibbi.

These fake leftists who never criticize Republicans are unserious people who refuse to debate the things they claim to believe with serious progressive commentators. One thing they are, however, is rich. There’s a lot of money to be made telling right-wingers that they are the real liberals, and claiming reactionary policies are actually pro-worker.

Were these people even on the left to begin with? Is there any truth to “horsehoe theory,” the idea that far-right and far-left ideologies converge? Is it possible or even desirable to find common ground with people who have extreme religious viewpoints but who are somewhat skeptical of capitalism?

These are questions worth asking and they are explored at length in a report co-written by my guest in this episode, Kathryn Joyce. She is the investigations editor at In These Times and also the author of “Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.”

Scroll down to view the audio transcript of this episode. The video of the conversation is available as well. It was recorded December 21, 2023.

Related Episodes

‘Fan fiction leftism’ and how the right manipulates the left
Libertarianism, neoliberalism and the ‘Californian Ideology’
As libertarianism has radicalized, some of Silicon Valley's biggest names are turning toward fascism

(Cover image: Former U.S. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard speaking with attendees at the AmericaFest conference sponsored by the Christian nationalist group Turning Point USA. December 18, 2023. Photo by Gage Skidmore)

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

03:11 — Compact Magazine and right-wing market skepticism

07:32 — Catholic Integralism, another form of Christian nationalism

10:41 — The political spectrum isn't just about left and right

12:14 — Why Compact's token leftist joined and then quit

19:12 — Why “finding common ground” with right-wing elites is almost impossible

28:28 — The impact of conversion stories in politics

34:33 — Left-of-center people patronize the right instead of making them confront their own ideas

41:19 — How the covid pandemic caused some libertarians embrace their right-wing views

47:05 — Final thoughts

Transcript

The transcript of the audio is below. It is automatically generated and is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Kathryn Joyce. Welcome to Theory of Change, Kathryn.

KATHRYN JOYCE: Thank you so much for having me, Matthew.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So this article that you and Jeff Sharlet published over in In These Times, it's a very important one. And it's important because as the Republican party has become so much more radical, a lot of people who are kind of not really paying attention, and are vaguely apolitical or vaguely centrist have been sort of drifting over to the right, not really understanding that they have been doing that.

It's an interesting thing [00:03:00] that does seem to kind of happen in kind of politically uncertain times that not just right now, but we've seen this in other moments where there's been some sort of cross pollination between the sides.

But I want to start off with the you guys talked about a publication that was started called Compact. For people who don't know about Compact, what is it and how did it get started? Who's running it?

JOYCE: Sure. Sure. So Compact Magazine, it's one of a number of publications that I think generally group themselves under the heading of heterodox or kind of pushing for what they would call a Republican realignment or a political realignment. These are publications, Compact is probably the most prominent of them, that are making the argument that both Republicans and Democrats have failed, some new sort of fusion is needed. And in particular drawing together somewhat more [00:04:00] liberal economic policies, somewhat more concern for the working class with substantially conservative social policies I've been reporting on.

Some of the people in these orbits for the last couple of years some of them have been associated with right wing movements like National Conservatism or the Catholic Integralist movement, and they're coming from a place of critiquing liberalism, not as in progressivism, but classical liberalism, the political philosophy that united both the Republican and Democratic parties generally for the past many decades, with a shared emphasis on free markets, pluralism, generally support for individual rights, and making a critique that liberalism has failed people on all of these different levels that it has immiserated the middle class and the working class. And also that on the [00:05:00] social side having social free expression, social liberalism, and individual rights has really undercut the traditions that hold up society, and so that this should be abandoned, something new should come in its place.

And so these magazines or these publications, online only mostly, I should say, they are part of this larger project to, you to sort of peel people away from the left with this promise of softer forms of capitalism. Not as kind of hard, libertarian laissez faire. 'We're just not going to talk about the social issues.' That's sort of the compromise they offer is, if we focus on the material issues, maybe all of these social issues can kind of go to the wayside.

But that's really frankly, disingenuous the people at the helm of this publication and these movements are, are very far right socially they have made their names [00:06:00] calling--

SHEFFIELD: Or like specifically, can you talk about,

JOYCE: Sohrab Amari is one of the founding editors of Compact and he is, he's himself somebody who's kind of been politically all over the map, but he really became a national figure in 2019 when he wrote this absolute broadside against this conservative writer and lawyer, David French saying that, David French was basically a sellout to the conservative cause because he defended the existence of things like drag queen story hour on the grounds of free expression and Sohrab Amari wrote this piece called "Against David Frenchism" that went wildly viral and it became this kind of rallying cry for the new, new right. The people who are really kind of rejecting this, this idea of classical liberalism and looking for new ways to formulate their politics. By saying we have to prosecute the culture wars with the idea of winning and enjoying the [00:07:00] spoils. And it's, it's this movement that believes in, transforming government power to be used to enforce their own culture war positions.

So for them to now kind of turn around and argue for this political realignment, and can we just put all the social issues to the side it really kind of, It's, it's disingenuous.

SHEFFIELD: It's a subterfuge, yeah.

JOYCE: It's, it's ignoring the fact that they have that platform for having made that argument.

SHEFFIELD: Well, and it's also, yeah, and just as a historical matter, it's important, I think, for Americans, who are used to kind of this more market fundamentalist dominated right to understand that, outside of the United States, this type of, of conservatism and reactionism is very common, and nobody has any illusions that it's on the left or is centrist of any kind.

But can you talk about the idea, and, and, and certainly [00:08:00] Sohrab Amari is an example of this, this, this idea of integralism. What is that for people who don't know what that is?

JOYCE: Sure. Yeah. Integralism is well, it's a very small movement it's a Catholic right movement that, that basically believes that society should be reordered along the lines of the doctrine of the Catholic Church or the conservative interpretation of Catholic Church doctrines.

And it, it, it matches up with a lot of what we were just talking about. I mean, it would include policies that are, somewhat. more, friendly to the middle class or, or the working class than current Republican parties. It certainly would be following kind of all of the social positions conservatively interpreted of, of the Catholic church.

It, it. It started in, in a way as, or it's gained kind of a lot of [00:09:00] prominence through the writing of a Harvard law professor named Adrian Vermeule, who has made an argument that, The conservative legal movement should, should go beyond originalism which is kind of famous, the, the, the, the philosophy of a lot of most conservative members of the Supreme Court now and they should move towards an idea of, the law being reordered.

Toward the common good or they would say sometimes the highest good and so it's it's this argument basically for a Catholic version of theocracy It is again a very small movement, you know overwhelmingly most Catholics in the United States, if they've even heard of it would almost certainly be opposed to it.

But it's, it's nonetheless been very influential because a lot of the people talking about these ideas are professors from prominent [00:10:00] universities Harvard or Notre Dame.

SHEFFIELD: And they're lavishly funded.

JOYCE: Lavishly funded as well, well-represented in Christian right and Catholic right media. First Things magazine is a very right wing, I guess pan-Christian magazine but very Catholic in orientation.

And, it has been making and advancing some of these arguments and the people who are reading it are pretty influential people. So it's, it's sort of got this outsized footprint.

SHEFFIELD: And the other thing about this idea of a market-skeptical religious right wing viewpoint, it's unfamiliar to a lot of Americans and but it's still very real.

And I want to put up on the screen a chart that, that I made a little while ago that kind of talks about that politics shouldn't, in my view, be thought of as a left and right thing. It should be thought of as a X and Y graph kind of thing. And one of the things to notice when you do that is that [00:11:00] ideologies overlap pretty significantly.

If we think of politics as a matter of epistemology, that we have believing that everything you think is pure reason, that's Marxism by its own self description. And then all tradition, of course, being the furthest right viewpoint as well.

And of course, whether they're correct in any of that is their opinion, not ours, we don't have to get into that. But then also in terms of who do you trust, and whether you should trust society, or institutions, or you should trust the individual. Then the thing about a religious market skeptic viewpoint is that if you look in the, in the middle of the chart and for those who are listening, you'll definitely have to click the link for the chart to see this, so sorry about that. But in the, in the middle of the chart, we have religious democracy, which can be kind of a centrist philosophy in many ways, and certainly is outside of the United States. And it exists that way for many, Christian [00:12:00] Americans as well, but it also has some significant overlaps with conservatism, with libertarianism and some with reactionism and fascism.

And that I think is the real concern about this viewpoint and you talked about how with Compact, they did initially manage to recruit somebody who had a more left wing background and they've paid, paid off a bunch of socialist writers to write content for them. But that at what the editor that was a co founding editor, he's left the publication.

Can you talk about him and why why he did that?

JOYCE: Yeah. Yeah. That was really interesting. This was a guy named Edwin Aponte, who described himself as a Marxist or a labor Marxist, and he had joined Compact pretty early on, when it was, first in its kind of idea stage in early 2022, I guess it is.[00:13:00] And, just a few months in roadblocks started to appear. He described that he had joined it because, he was very disillusioned after the, the loss of Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary. He began feeling he was a member of this kind of very small group of people called the post left who believed, there is no left anymore. The left has failed.

And in order to achieve, some of our goals in, in terms of materialist politics we might want to make some different sorts of alliances. And so they were open to working with people on the right who were expressing the same sort of economic policies. And this was kind of the other side of that proposed realignment.

I think, if there's one hand reaching out from the right, these were some of the people they were reaching out to people who were disillusioned, maybe even a stronger word for, for some [00:14:00] of them in, in despair about kind of the, the prospects of what they believed in ever coming to pass.

And they, they responded to these sorts of overtures. In Aponte's case, he ended up joining Compact as it was launching. In his telling of the story, there was an agreement that they weren't really going to be relitigating settled issues like abortion. That this was not going to be a publication where that was going to play a huge role. I ended up speaking to Compaq's other co founders while I was reporting on this this year and last year and, they had a different interpretation of that. They said, we never said we weren't going to talk about social issues, but that we would talk about them through this material lens.

But this, things really kind of came to a head when the early draft of the Dobbs decision was leaked in in the spring of 2022, and Compact published a piece that Aponte felt was triumphalist in his [00:15:00] words that wasn't anymore talking about, What are we going to do about abortion?

Because now they thought, okay, this is settled. What do we do next? And the answer in that piece that was published in Compact was we should look to Hungary. I, which I was thinking of looking at your graph just now in terms of. Religious democracy. I like that, in, in those various Venn diagrams, you can see that overlapping with all of these different sorts of tendencies.

But I think when we are talking about Hungary we're definitely seeing the strong overlap with conservatism and, I think a lot of people would argue strongly there in terms of reaction and, fascism or on the way to that anyway. So Aponte told me that he started to have this realization after, after that Dobbs leak and after the piece that Compact published, thinking that, we're coming at this from from really different directions. We might all sincerely [00:16:00] have a desire to have better economic policies that are more supportive of of working people that are less kind of rah rah rapacious capitalism, but that they were coming at it from really different motivations.

And what he came to believe was that his fellow editors at Compact were coming at it from a position where they saw this sort of as a means to an ends.

That they saw ultimately this is going to inform the sort of moral governance system, moral kind of order in the country that they wanted to create, and that that was the primary goal. Everything else was really secondary or was a part of getting there.

And so he realized this is a really the the strongly different position to be coming at this from, to be aiming at these shared economic objectives [00:17:00] from.

And it really does matter. Those social issues can't just be put entirely to the side. They can't really be put to the side at all, because if, you're talking about better economic policies so that they can support the formation of more traditional families and the enforcement of that as the moral order of a society. That, that's suddenly not secondary at all. And, and, they ended up parting ways within a couple of months.

SHEFFIELD: And one of the other, just to go back to the chart again, and I'm sorry to keep doing that, but one of the other aspects to understand with the, with the chart idea is that that everything wraps around as well.

And that's, I think. What Compact kind of is an example of that. With a sort of traditional Marxist viewpoint, everything is about economics. Everything is reduced to that. And so, the idea being that if you have somebody, if you see [00:18:00] somebody who is anti capitalist, for somebody who has a more traditional Marxist viewpoint, that's going to be a very attractive to them on a certain level.

And in this piece that you wrote, it's not just about Compact. So I want to make that clear for people. But that seems to be the motivation that of, of a lot of the people that you talk about, that they kind of believe that there is a, that they can somehow collaborate with these far right people because they're anti capitalist, not understanding that injustice is like the, the elephant in the Indian fable of, that it has many different parts of it and that if you only can see one part of it, then you're not, you're not understanding the totality of the situation.

And that does seem like that's what what the lesson that he ended up learning, Aponte.

JOYCE: Yeah, I, I think that's, that, that's, that's a, a very accurate [00:19:00] summary. He said, for them, these material politics were just a means to an end, not the end in itself, and the end that they have in mind was not something that he thought was just or good.

SHEFFIELD: Mm hmm. So there is something there that's legitimate, I think, in the desire to, because a lot of, and this is a pretty common thing that progressives have talked about and written about for many years that a lot of Republican voters do not share the economic policy agenda of welfare for billionaires, basically that the Republican Party that's their primary objective. So there's a lot of frustration on the left of saying, well, how can we save these people from being taken advantage of, or supporting ideas that are harmful to them.

I think that's, that's also where some of this originates, but the reality that I think a lot of people have to understand is that [00:20:00] the leaders of the right wing, you will never come out in a beneficial manner by working with them. You can save individuals, but you cannot save the right, because they're not in it for the same thing that you are, despite having some occasional agreements. What's your take?

JOYCE: Yeah, I, I think that's true. I mean, and I think, what we're talking about with Compact and Aponte is, it's, It's one, one entry point of, of a larger phenomenon. I, I don't think it is just one thing happening. But for the people from, the so called post left who ended up making these alliances whether because, they really felt that they were going to have an effective partner to achieve, the, the sort of, economic policy advocacy that they wanted or, or for other reasons some of them both in the post left or, or kind [00:21:00] of from, from other political factions drawn there because they were frustrated about what, so called identity politics or so called cancel culture sorry to keep saying so, so called, but I mean, they, these are politics, such manipulative phrases that I kind of just want to highlight that.

But I think for the people who were drawn there for, quasi idealistic reasons yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's a really hard lesson to learn that. In a lot of cases, you've, gotten in bed with some people who are coming at things from an extremely different perspective and also that are, are open to or allied with in very real ways, people who are pushing some really scary politics.

The, the same broad new right that the conservative co founders of Compact are from is, also the place where Peter Thiel has [00:22:00] been kind of dumping all of his money to prop up very far right candidates like Blake Masters who wasn't successful, or Julie Vance who was successful.

They have been in the same universe, even as they sometimes bicker and fight with the people in the national conservatism movement, which is doing its very best to rehabilitate the term nationalism, I think they've been pretty successful at that within conservative circles by now, to the point actually where, what I started hearing at NatCon conferences last year that we as conservatives should just reclaim the, the title Christian Nationalism with pride.

I think that is now more or less a mainstream Republican position. These aren't people who are eschewing the culture war. These aren't people who are putting social issues to one side. They're coming down, very hard on one side of them. And they are kind of as, as a separate side project, [00:23:00] they are making this outreach to disaffected people on the left for a variety of reasons.

I mean, I think including that the presence of people on the left gives them the ability to, to claim that they are a different sort of thing, that they are a new thing, that, this is as they like to say the transformation of the Republican party into the new party of the multiracial working class.

No matter how little that has to do with reality, I think the presence of leftists helps them make that claim.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And this is something that historically the right has always sought to do. And then it's important to note also that, reactionism and fascism there, they are very closely related, but they're not necessarily the same.

And I think maybe some of the difficulty that people have had in using fascism as a word is that they don't know that they think of it as just, uniquely something affiliated with Mussolini or Hitler [00:24:00] and, and don't understand that. And that's why actually I, I generally encourage people to use the word reactionism rather than fascism because the F word gets stuck in people's head too much. And they don't understand that this is a tradition that's much, much older than Nazism or Italian fascism.

But the thing is though, reactionism as an idea set, it doesn't really have policies. It's about will to power rather than anything else, that's what it is primarily. And I think that that fact can be confusing to, to leftists who don't understand the history of reactionism and fascism. What do you think?

JOYCE: Yeah, I, I think that's all true. Yeah, I, I use the F word these days myself. Um, I, I recognize that there's a long debate that, you know. It goes well beyond me [00:25:00] about when it's appropriate to use that. And that a lot of smart people have come down on different sides. Um, you know, just not to say that everybody I'm talking about certainly I would refer to as a fascist, but rather that I do think that we are seeing strong elements of that today. I think it certainly applies to a number of the political candidates and the movements behind them. Today on the right.

And also, I just think it's important to point out that we are seeing this slide in, in so many different ways. Jeff and I wrote this article about the slide of individual people towards the right and then often towards the far right. But I think just also on a societal level, we are sliding, it feels like daily sometimes, towards the normalization of a lot of things that are, are really very frightening. So I, I use the word, but I, I respect where you're coming from. And I think--

SHEFFIELD: Oh, yeah, well, I'm only saying in a limited, [00:26:00] in a limited context, there, there's some contexts where I think it's, it's definitely okay to use the word fascism. But just to describe the larger historical phenomenon, that's what I'm saying is different. But let's talk about some of these other people that you guys wrote about.

So, I think, one of the other problems, and this is a real huge problem in the American left is that I think a lot of the, both the audience and the leaders, they're very rightfully worried about being propagandized and sort of a mob mentality the way that, I mean, you could, you turn on Fox News and all the shows say the same thing, have the exact same line on the same story of the day.

And that's how it is on Newsmax. They're all talking about the same thing and they're all saying the same thing. And that's how it is on these innumerable channels that exist now on the right. And, but then when you look, there are no competitors to MSNBC that have [00:27:00] been launched recently, not one.

And so it's created this political economy where a lot of people who are journalists who would like to make a living as a political commentator or pundit on the left, they can't because no one wants to pay for it. The audience doesn't want to pay, and the founders and the funders don't want to pay.

And so some of them seem to have gravitated over to the right just as a matter of maybe not even deliberately financial calculation, but they saw that there is so much more money and support on the right. And let's talk about that. I mean, the, some of the people that you guys looked at that have seen seemingly had some of those concerns.

JOYCE: Yeah, I mean, preface this by saying nobody knows what is in anybody's hearts, nobody knows the truth of anybody's specific motivations. And I certainly think that there aren't many people who would acknowledge [00:28:00] I, I moved right. Because I could just get a much bigger paycheck there.

We, we do talk about that in general terms. As we note in the piece there, there is money to be made in saying I was blind, but now I see, I see how terrible the left is. And, and let me tell you that. And I think there's always, this isn't even really that new of a phenomenon, I think everybody loves a conversion story.

I, I know, as somebody who's been reporting on the right for a long time pretty much every movement that, that I've ever reported on had people who liked to hype up what they presented as their former left or liberal or democratic or feminist credentials in order to explain how they had the inside story on how bad they are over there and what they made them leave and how right everybody, all of their new friends on the right are.

So I think that [00:29:00] that is that that's just kind of an old media story and an old, probably human story is, is that we, we gravitate towards converts who promise to give us an inside look into the other side. What we talk about in the piece is that, yeah, I think it is undeniable that there is for some people that kind of element of what people call grift or I think Ryan Cooper is who I heard in a report that he did about Matt Taibbi talking about the term like hop on the wingnut welfare train that there is money to be made by, by going over to the other side.

Our position was there's, there is likely always some of that, but it's not just that it's, it's that, yes, that, and also something else, because even if it starts out that way, by making this transformation something transforms within you as well, it might be transactional at first, but it ends [00:30:00] up being transformative.

SHEFFIELD: So you mentioned Matt Taibbi and there's something that is interesting with a lot of People that, that you, you guys talk about in your article that is different from people like me who, went from right to left people like me, we actually said that we changed our ideas and we have different ideas. And we realized the left was correct. Whereas people like Matt Taibbi and, let's say, Tulsi Gabbard or, any of these other people that you guys discuss, they actually still insist that they're on the left and that their ideas have not changed and I, and I think that that's, it's an important distinction in that, I sometimes gets lost in, in talking about these people.

And, it's, oh, go ahead.

JOYCE: Oh, no, please.

SHEFFIELD: Okay, yeah, and I was going to say that, it's, When you look at the way that both left and right are kind of viewed in a generic sense, that the left is viewed [00:31:00] as kind of having a broadly speaking, having more moral authority, and then the right is viewed as having more sort of that you should feel sorry for them in some sense, that you should understand them.

And it's given rise to this dynamic that of what I call right privilege that while people might agree that left wingers are more compassionate or whatever, no one really tries to understand that position, and understand, well, where are these viewpoints coming from in the mass media, mainstream press.

Whereas on the right, you constantly see this right privilege which is, it's, it kind of flows that the further right you are, the more we should try to understand you, and the more we should allow you to say your viewpoints and not really question them and not really debate them because there's this subtle implication that you can't.

And I think it's true that they can't. And, but people who have more of a, center [00:32:00] to left, center left perspective, they don't understand that that's, you really need to, to, to make them do that. And, and, and so as a result, we've got this media ecosystem now where, you turn on CNN or any of these Sunday morning shows and they will have, or, read the New York times opinion page and they've got these people who they are presented as sort of speaking for conservatives.

But they have no credibility in the right wing world. Everyone in the right hates them, as a matter of fact. But, but there's just this, total affirmative action for them. That people with no constituency are just allowed to, to talk about things as if their views represent anyone. And they don't.

JOYCE: That's, yeah, that's really interesting, I feel. Like that. I have so many thoughts in response to that. But first I, I just, I really appreciate your anecdote and your perspective about, your own kind of [00:33:00] political transformation moving left. Because I've spoken, in my reporting over the years to a lot of particularly young people, but not only young adults who have left evangelical or fundamentalist Christian upbringings and overwhelmingly have moved left.

I mean, for many of them, the only direction to move would have been left for the most part. But you know, many of them moved really substantially to the left. And yeah, I, I. I think that I could safely say that that seems like their experiences, as they described it to me, is similar to what you were saying, that they changed their ideas that, that they had a realization.

It wasn't like, oh, the right left me. It wasn't, it wasn't kind of the inverse of what we're seeing today in terms of, of people on the left who have moved right in terms of the wonderful way to put it, the affirmative action for, for right wing [00:34:00] people in, in the mainstream press. Yeah, I think I, I agree with what you're saying.

I, I also I feel like. It, it comes and I guess this is kind of what you were saying as well, or at least how I heard it, it comes from a place of, lack of familiarity and ultimately I, I think lack of respect that kind of disguises itself as, this over solicitousness.

Of the right wing viewpoint.

SHEFFIELD: It's like a patronizing respect is what it is.

JOYCE: It is, yeah. It's it's kind of not Not grappling with the ideas on their face. It is looking for The same sort of stock characters In diners all over the heartland. to say something folksy. It's It's kind of not giving [00:35:00] people the, the respect to, to hold them accountable for the movements that they are supporting and, holding them accountable for the, the sort of order that would result from, the election of their candidates or kind of the realization of the movement that they are pushing for.

And I, I tend to think that a lot of times with the really mainstream media, it comes from a place of being so unfamiliar and so removed from, people with these viewpoints. That, yeah, I guess that patronizing approach feels respectful. I actually think it's, it's the opposite of it. I think it's more respectful to kind of take people and their arguments and, and grapple with them sincerely, even if that means being extremely critical.

Because yeah, there's serious movements

SHEFFIELD: there. Yeah. And as a result, yeah. And as a result of this kind [00:36:00] of patronizing disengagement, there are the, the average Republican voter really doesn't even know what their party stands for and what their leaders want. And so, they, they think that.

Donald Trump, his policies are better for the middle class or, and, or they think that he helped them out with tax cuts or, like, and, and they, and they, and they really have no idea because nobody actually is going out there and telling them, no, this is how it really is. And your people have lied to you.

And, and some of that, a large part of that is the fault of Democrats, I feel like. Because, there was this after the Barry Goldwater people came in and took over the Republican party and turned it from being a conservative party to a reactionary party a lot of people left the Republican party, particularly in the the Eastern seaboard, the Acela corridor, as it's sometimes referred to, and they kind of, you know, and they were welcomed into the Democratic party.[00:37:00]

As sort of refugees in a sense and, but they never were required to change any of their viewpoints. Or to even consider them. And, and, and we're seeing that I think to some degree with, some of the people who have come, who were kind of thrown out of the Republican party under Trump, some of these political consultants and writers that they come over and, and they, and they basically, and.

I mean, it's a bit odd for me to be talking about this, I suppose, given my own movement, but it's maybe I can say that I can see it because, I made this movement, now the Democratic Party is filled with people who are saying, Oh, be careful, don't go too far to the left. Be careful. Don't.

And the people who are saying that are Republicans. So it's like, it's just this very weird situation and nothing like that exists over, with these. Migrants from left to right, the, the Taibes of the world. And the uh, [00:38:00] uh, the various, other people like sorry, I just forgot her name.

Oh, Naomi Wolf and, various people like Max Blumenthal. They don't, they don't tell the Republicans who are their new friends. You guys should be careful about going too far to the right. They never say that to them. And again, it's just this whole right privilege that no one ever really takes, the Republicans are assumed not to have any agency.

That they're assumed to have this, deranged base that's crazy and full of, lunatic Christian supremacists and they just have to manage them and, I'm sorry. That's they, they just, that's just the way it is. We can't do anything about it. And so as a result, there's no center right media.

And no one ever stands up for themselves on the right or at the center right. And, and then, the, the So called liberal media is filled with people like Atlantic magazine editors or New York times op ed editors who, are [00:39:00] conservative, but they don't have a dialogue with the Republican party.

And they're not engaging with them in any way. And so as a result, the Republican party just becomes more and more right wing. And then, also is having some gravitational effect to, sort of get people to flip over from the far left as well. That's a lot. I'm sorry.

JOYCE: No it's, it's all really interesting.

I mean, you know, all of this of course follows decades of kind of just the increasingly constricted. News ecosystem that so much of the Republican base finds itself in where while maybe Fox for some of them is becoming, the liberal fake news media, but, where something like Fox or Newsmax or one American news or epoch times, like become the only sources of information they get.

And, that. Going back decades there has been this simultaneous message [00:40:00] alongside all of the, propaganda or disinformation that is frequently appearing on those channels or outlets along with that is this message that you can't trust anything you hear that's not from us, everything outside, as Rush Limbaugh said, is a universe of lies and we're the universe of truth.

So basically don't look outside, don't get any information from outside. It's, it's really, it's really hard to deal with the fact that there is such an effectively propagandized population in this country that is a third of the country almost, that is really getting their news from a place that is so radically divorced from the rest of the news media ecosystem and if the alternative to that, I mean, in, in the kind of the, the regular media ecosystem, if you have places like the Atlantic that are functioning as [00:41:00] conservative media, but are still perceived as liberal media not just by the right, but often also from people, kind of within the center broadly, that's really, it's kind of a confounding problem. I think, yeah, there's a lot of good points there.

SHEFFIELD: We've talked about the idea of the American right, sort of the, the leadership class being heavily libertarian or, or market oriented, but at the same time, one of the other things that a lot of these people that we're talking about here, they have themselves also a libertarian bent. Many of them in the case of like Glenn Greenwald, he worked for the Cato Institute earlier in his career and some of them, became kind of outraged at institutions and the government during the COVID pandemic from a, a libertarian kind of framework. And I'm going to put it, this is the last time I'm going to put the chart on, guys but libertarianism, if you look [00:42:00] in the chart here, it's underneath, but it has a lot of overlap. And there is some, there is some framework under which you can be a libertarian and be on the left in some sense.

And, but the problem is of course, libertarianism can also be connected to many other things, including reactionism and fascism and conspiracism, which is the belief that no institutions are telling you the truth, that everything is a lie. And that seems to have also played a role for some of these people that you guys talked about.

Do you want to talk about some specific examples here, if you could?

JOYCE: Yeah, sure. I mean, I think Naomi Wolf certainly seems to fit in that category of conspiracism playing a strong role. And, of course Naomi Klein's recent book, Doppelganger goes into this in, in great depth. It's not a book explicitly about Wolf but is looking at kind of the political transformation of Wolf from being, not really on the left, but being, [00:43:00] just a, a sort of, Steady centrist liberal and, a pop feminist icon who wrote these sort of big ideas books to somebody who is now like Steve Bannon's favorite guest going on all the time, first to talk about COVID and then just increasingly to talk about all kinds of things that Bannon wants her perspective on.

But Klein talks a lot about how the, just the explosion of conspiracism around the first couple of years of the COVID 19 pandemic kind of served as this vehicle for a lot of people to, in her words, end up falling down the rabbit hole and a rabbit hole that seems to just go kind of in one direction towards the right.

And Klein's book also popularized this, this competing theory To the idea of horseshoe theory, which we haven't talked about, but you know, it's, it is this sort of pop [00:44:00] explanation of what happens that some people who are on the left end up going to the right. And it's, I mean, I remember a middle school social studies teacher kind of first outlining this to to my class as though it was a fact that if you go too far left, you're going to fall off the other side that the political extremes meet when they bend around to touch each other.

A lot of people have argued, very convincingly against that as not being a really good explanation for this and this, I, and just to kind of put a nail in that coffin, some of the people that we spoke to said, it's, it's not horseshoe theory because these people, they are not going so far left that they turn right it's often aside from any other cases of kind of resentment or Perhaps grifting or anything like that.

It can be just selecting one element of leftist politics and dropping everything else, saying I'm only going to focus on economics [00:45:00] and everything else. Every other kind of justice movement is just extraneous. I'm dropping them. And that is how you end up making common cause with people on the right who are making those same arguments.

Anyway, sorry, tangent but diagonalism, which is this sort of counter theory that Naomi Klein popularized in, in her book this past year it's an alternate explanation and it's It came out of observations of some sort of COVID era protests in Germany, actually, where there was this weird kind of eclectic group that was coming together that didn't have, very clearly defined politics except that they, they were conspiratorial.

They were suspicious of kind of all institutional power in general. They drew together people who were sort of lifestyle liberals with people who, were kind of hardcore ideologues and, and that again, it just seemed to go in one [00:46:00] direction. seems to go rightward, even though it's it's drawing together people from a lot of different political perspectives, but also people who weren't particularly political to begin with and then pulls them in this one direction.

And I, I mean, I think a lot of us saw this in 2020, 2021. I mean, I know I, saw people in New York City that I knew suddenly talking a lot about 5G and COVID or kind of, how they would never get a vaccine because all of the things that might be in it, from microchips to sterilization agents, so that Bill Gates himself can control the population of the world.

I just think, this was, you said at the beginning of the show one of those radical moments of change, this period of really intense radical change when a lot of people end up kind of falling into or jumping into these really different ideologies or onto these bandwagons [00:47:00] that are, whether they know it or not, taking them in the direction of, of a really specific ideology.

SHEFFIELD: so let's maybe wrap up here with you, you guys. You, you, after talking about all these different people many of them, podcasters that, you get to the end and I have to say, like, I'm not sure what was the takeaway that you wanted people to have from it.

Let's talk about that. And like, what is. Because the it comes down to the question, well, what is to be done? Understanding that you guys provided a great, documentation that this thing is happening, but can anything be done about it or should it?

JOYCE: Yeah. I mean, I think part of, part of the motivation for writing the piece was In These Times is a. not a liberal magazine but a left magazine and kind of doing this entire issue about the special, the special issue about the far right, the first time that [00:48:00] in these times in its nearly 50 year history has done a special issue about the right. I think the idea was speaking to An audience of really committed people on the left and, and arguing that this is something that you need to take very seriously.

Um, so, to that end, part of what we were trying to do with the piece is show where a lot of this stuff leads and some of the people that we spoke to who had kind of made this journey a little bit like Bilbo Baggins says, there and back again and then, went left to post left to dissident right and then kind of came back to just being maybe, maybe on the left, maybe being a squishy Democrat.

But their arguments that, this is really dangerous. You end up going down this path, for various reasons including that, the democratic party has really let [00:49:00] you down. That you feel like it's never going to take some of these issues seriously. And then finding themselves in the company of people Who were making, increasingly alarming arguments who were making alliances with, kind of increasingly dangerous movements.

One of the sort of scenes that we talked about a little bit in the piece as kind of an IRL in real life scene of Dimes Square in New York City, where, you know, a number of people who, would have once considered themselves on the left or even socialist, ended up joining this movement that within a couple of years went from just being sort of contrarian about, what they would call wokeness or about COVID precautions to talking about eugenics in a positive way to, praising kind of the ideas of white nationalists and ultra reactionaries or [00:50:00] neo reactionaries who believe that, we should have some sort of patriarchal Aryan warrior state or a monarchy, like really extreme ideas.

And then watching these people who maybe at first were just dabbling in this and then start to espouse real racism, real misogyny really extreme homophobia lots of other bigotry along the way. And I think, it is their point that people, who dipped their toe in this or went, part way down this path, and then realized they, they felt like they were getting into, some really dark areas of, of the political landscape and retreated from it. I think part of it, our intention was to show that, that as one of our sources said, this is a train that only goes in one direction.

And a lot of these people don't have any idea what that map looks like. And it is, people being ironic. about, George Wallace, and you could only do that for so [00:51:00] long before you start thinking these are good ideas. So I think part of our intention was to show that this is happening to show that this is serious, and like, people who once where fellow travelers are not just defecting from a political party, but defecting from kind of an entire shared, view of what is just and kind of what is equality and for.

Us to kind of, as, as the left generally, to, to think about that means and, what to do about it. And I don't think we have any silver bullet answers. Um, you know, I think we did want to grapple with it a little more than just saying good riddance. They were never ours they were never really with us but to look at what it means for these people to have left.

And what that means for the movement, what that means, kind of, as, everybody [00:52:00] from the left to a lot of places on the center and even some conservatives who are not on board the MAGA train. What does it mean? When we're facing that in 2024 and the really, really explicit plans that are being laid out by the far right for what they would do if, if they win power.

So I don't think a really concrete answer trying to raise this as an issue that I think we all need to think about and, and grapple with. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: And it should be noted that these people who are making these authoritarian plans for Trump are overwhelmingly the National Conservatives, the very people who are doing this outreach to the further left.

JOYCE: Yeah, the new new right, going very far right and at the same time, kind of extending a hand to people on the left, we should be aware. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: [00:53:00] Yeah. And I think, maybe that's at least one takeaway is that for me is that and it's part of why I started this podcast is to get people to understand that political ideologies and political philosophy, it might seem boring and dry, to have to understand, or to think about, Kierkegaard or Kant or, Nietzsche or whatever.

But this stuff matters, even if you can't see that it matters. Ideas matter, and they influence you whether you realize it or not. And I think it was John Kenneth Galbraith, I believe it was him who said that most people are animated by the ideas of some dead economist or philosopher and don't even realize it.

And so that's why it's important to know about them and important to know how they permeate the world that we live in and our political system. So, yeah. Oh, okay. I was gonna waiting to see if [00:54:00] you had any response to that or

JOYCE: No, I, I think that that is, that's, that's very true. I think, um.

There's, there's a lot of intentionality behind, these efforts to make this, this outreach. Behind the sort of organizations and outlets that are presenting themselves as, as heterodox as some new political formulation. And, they are part of this broader new right that is doing really alarming things.

And people, I think a lot of times aren't aware of it. I think for some people there's like a little bit of a contrarian cachet to dabbling in this stuff. But maybe. They don't know everything else that's behind it or they don't understand kind of what it would mean to to get, to get in bed with this, this movement and all of the people who are associated with it.

Yeah. [00:55:00]

SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, yeah, it's been a great discussion. So people who want to keep up with your work. What's the your recommendations for them?

JOYCE: Well, I'm an investigative editor at In These Times, so I'm editing there and sometimes writing there. I am a disappointing Twitter follow, but you can follow me there at kathrynajoyce. And I'm on Bluesky as well.

SHEFFIELD: Okay, cool. All right. Well, we'll have links to those in the show notes for everyone who wants to do that. And I'm glad you were able to join us today.

Thanks for being here.

JOYCE: Thank you so much for having me.

STJH: Stop pretending Nikki Haley has a chance

Matthew Sheffield — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 17:23:03 GMT

Headlines

00:00 — Nikki Haley has no chance, please stop pretending otherwise

08:18 — Vivek Ramaswamy ends his fake campaign after getting 7 percent in Iowa

11:23 — Despite their genuflections, Haley and Ramaswamy will always be “other” to Republicans

17:40 — Trump has turned to the “pound the table” legal defense because he knows the facts and law don’t favor him

22:50 — Kentucky Republican moves to legalize first-cousin incest

Join the Conversation

Matt

Kali

STJH on Twitter

Theme song

Easy Lover: “The End of Our Deceit”

Lyrics and Vocals by Kali Holloway

Music by Jeremy Wimmer

Nikki Haley photo by Gage Skidmore

Doomscroll: Republicans destroyed their 'voter fraud' argument in the Iowa caucuses

Matthew Sheffield — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 08:00:37 GMT

You can watch this episode on video as well

Audio Chapters

0:00 — Iowa Republicans cast ballots in shopping bags, proving they don’t care about “election integrity”

03:28 — Ron DeSantis gets trolled with participation trophy gag

07:21 — Secretary of Defense didn't tell Biden he was going to be hospitalized

09:38 — Fake AI George Carlin special circulates on YouTube

15:39 — Mike Johnson becomes latest Republican Speaker to face mutiny

18:22 — Mike Lindell banned from advertising on Fox News for not paying bills

20:42 — Federal highway department wants to ban road sign jokes

23:27 — Roy Wood begs for "Daily Show" to name new host during Emmys

26:27 — eBay fined for employees stalking and harassing people

29:29 — Emma Stone says she has failed to get on "Jeopardy" for years

Follow or Die!

Doomscroll

Lisa

Matt

Doomscroll is a podcast from the Flux media network. Visit https://flux.community/ for more smart podcasts and articles about politics, culture, and media.

TOC: Democrats haven't realized they must do more than attack Donald Trump

Matthew Sheffield — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 18:09:12 GMT

Introduction

The 2024 presidential election continues to be perilously close between Donald Trump, the fascist ex-president who's been found guilty of numerous crimes and is indicted for many other ones, and Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential incumbent. But the close race that is happening right now is actually a function of a much larger problem that has existed for many years in which neither party has been able to gain the advantage over the other one.

While Democrats are closer to the political views of most Americans, the party has been dominated by centrist and conservative leaders who are unwilling to elevate labor unions and focus their attacks on Republicans' far-right ideology. Instead of educating voters about the extreme policy agenda of Republicans as a whole, they have focused their attacks on Donald Trump, a fundamentally weak candidate. They have also failed to advance an alternative to the powerful religious-racial identity politics that reactionary leaders have crafted.

For this discussion, we're joined by Mike Podhorzer. He is the former political director for the AFL-CIO union, and he's also the author of a newsletter called Weekend Reading, which we'll discuss later.

Scroll down to view the transcript of this episode. The video of the conversation is available as well.

Audio Chapters

0:00 — How Trump's weaknesses as a candidate masked Democratic weakness

08:56 — America's political divisions are primarily geographic more than income or education

16:03 — The influence of white Christian nationalism on the Republican Party

20:22 — The declining role of labor in the Democratic Party

30:48 — Neoliberalism broke "linked fate," the left's biggest advantage

36:13 — How Republicans tapped white Christian identity to win elections

45:04 — The challenges of creating left-wing media are about both funding and audience habits

53:37 — “Mad poll disease” and how to get over it

01:00:59 — Right-wing media and a “vibes recession”

01:05:16 — What can Biden and Democrats do?

Transcript

The transcript of the audio is below. It is automatically generated and is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Thanks for being here, Mike.

MIKE PODHORZER: Sure, glad to be here.

SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, so, before we get too far into discussing some of your work with Weekend Reading, let's maybe talk about briefly what it is for those who have not seen it yet.

PODHORZER: Sure. So the idea of it really started in the wake of Donald Trump's victory as a way for those of us who are, were political practitioners to try to understand what had happened and [00:02:00] how to prevent how to make sure that he lost in 2020.

And over the course of several years, it grew among the sort of the political practitioners. And when I retired from the AFL-CIO at the end of last year, I decided to make it available to all and what I try to do there is bring a very different perspective than I've seen elsewhere of understanding how politics works the moment we're in.

But most importantly, the, the proper way to understand threat of fascism in this country and what we have to do to push back against that.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and the moment that you chose to start writing it, I think there were a lot of [00:03:00] people that were extremely surprised that Donald Trump was able to win in 2016 on the Democratic side of the aisle or the, the center to left, generally speaking. And I guess from your perspective, they ought to have seen this coming better.

PODHORZER: Well, I think those of us who were really very involved understood how close the election really what that all of the sort of models that forecasting models that were out there saying that it was, between 2 to 1 for Clinton to 90-10 for Clinton really had no idea what was going on in the country and reflected really just not having a handle on what was going on in the Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and those of us who are really very involved understood. There's going to be [00:04:00] razor thin and I think for the sort of broader public and this is something that has sort of stuck in the sort of narrative about Trump winning that's got to be really upside down is that if the Republicans had nominated anyone Trump, then they would have won easily.

They would have won the popular vote, the Electoral College, and probably would be finishing up their second term. Right.

Trump is probably the most successful intra party presidential politician we've had, and the worst inter party politician we've ever had. And he came as close to blowing a sure-fire Republican victory as you can without blowing it.

But what [00:05:00] was still the case was that he could have been beaten in terms, just in a political practitioner level. And that's really what we have to get our head around and figure out how to win in 2020.

SHEFFIELD: Okay. And so just to be clear, you're you were you disputing or agreeing with the idea that another Republican would have won.

PODHORZER: No, I'm saying they would have easily that, that, that Trump was like such a unpopular candidate for them that he almost lost an election they should have won going away. And, and that there's a way in which the, to your beginning 50 yard line, I think Trump has created kind of illusion that.

Democrats have more support than they actually do.

SHEFFIELD: Mm hmm. Okay. Oh, okay. Well, one of the I guess [00:06:00] some of some of the ideas behind that. Let's maybe explore some of your ideas behind that. So with. With, with regard to Trump being kind of a weaker Republican candidate so, one of those obviously for Republicans generally in 2016 is just simply the fact that the Democrats had the White House for eight years and there's always a strong appetite for or motivation for the out party to come out and vote after eight years of the other people in the in charge and some dissatisfaction by the occupant party. So that's part of it, but what else was it from your viewpoint that they were well positioned in 2016?

PODHORZER: Well, in the context of the Electoral College being decisive I think, and I think this is still something that's not really understood. Remember when Obama won in 2008, which was [00:07:00] obviously a victory that was driven by Bush's unpopularity, the collapse of the financial system and so forth. It was still the case that places like Ohio were competitive, right?

The way in which Obama's policies address a breakdown of the financial system, which was essentially leaving it to Federal Reserve to supply liquidity through quantitative easing essentially meant that there was no new investment in rural America for that entire time and a lot of the sort of popular commentary talks about Democrats losing it with By extreme margins in rural areas, simply because they're too woke or something, but in fact, these are places that many of those places were devastated while Obama was president, and we're not really getting any kind of [00:08:00] attention.

And so there's nothing unusual about people in that circumstance, even putting aside social issues, not wanting more of the same. In 2016 when Clinton was running in e there's, there are various ways of classifying geographic areas. And if you a common one that divides it into six from most rural to most urban in all, but the most rural employment had recovered from the Great recession mostly by 20 12, 20 13.

And there was still less employment in the most rural areas of the country in 2016 and yeah, and that just changed the Electoral College math in a way that are barely able to get out from under right now.

SHEFFIELD: Speaking of sort of regional classifications, that's [00:09:00] something you've been writing about recently talking about how there's this very common myth that has settled in in both media and among political practitioners that the Donald Trump has somehow made the Republican party a populist party. And that they are sort of the, the, the party for the less economically Prosperous people, and you've kind of tried to puncture that in a number of different ways.

Let's talk about what you're you wrote a long piece about trying to basically making the contention that. The different, yeah, the, the idea that the congressional districts have been sort of flipped but it's maybe not completely false this idea, but you, you really unpacked it quite a bit.

So let's can you briefly summarize what your, your.

PODHORZER: Sure, right and I think there's [00:10:00] 1 of the things that makes but this kind of unpacking a little challenging is because there's a difference between describing a set of people and saying that that description represents causality. What has happened since 2008 is that mostly because of the sort of the MAGA, first tea party, the MAGA reaction that really returned the country into its sectional alignment between sort of the red states in the South, the blue states in the North and West.

Consequentially means that Democrats now represent more prosperous people because they represent a more prosperous region of the country. Right? And so it's not [00:11:00] because prosperous people are going to Democrats and not prosperous people are going to Republicans. It's that the preponderance of Prosperity is in one region and press ponderance of sort of lower socioeconomic achievement is in a different region.

And so the challenge is, though, that if the only way you can that the media generally tries to understand what's going on in the country is through the prism of national polls, which may no geographic distinctions. Right. You have an effect being treated as a cause. Right. But to go back, the 1 of the places, this sort of, I think, maps to what you're saying where people look at.

Republicans being the party of non college [00:12:00] Americans and Democrats being the party of college, right? In blue states, white non college voters supported Biden at a higher level than white college voters did. In red states, right? It really have to get around the idea that the 1st important division in the country is sort of where you live right now.

It's true in both places. Non college voters are more Republican than college, but--

SHEFFIELD: We're talking about whites were

PODHORZER: Yeah, that but that that that doesn't explain what's happening in the country. Right? Because. You, and as I was saying, even with the rural area, Biden almost won rural blue America, which no one would think because of [00:13:00] the way we just generalize from national numbers when, in fact, national numbers are just sort of tallying up what happened all over the country.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it's true. And in that such that the core differences really are more about the approach that the voters in these regions have their epistemologies, if you will. And, and you can really see that with, when you look at the, the, and, and you note this in, in, in your pieces about this, that, when you look at the Republican, Operative class, the people who run the Republican party, they are from all the same, expensive elite schools the Josh Hollies of the world, JD Vances and Peter Thiels and, even Donald Trump himself.

And so it isn't about education itself in education of itself is not dispositive. And I think that, a lot of that oversimplification [00:14:00] has really made a lot of people on the left not understand how to respond to MAGA and sort of the rise of neo fascism.

Would you agree with that?

PODHORZER: Yeah, I think I think that's part of that. I also think that the that

I think that. When you, this is a thing, something through in sort of how you were talking about Republican operatives and what operatives, I think it's really important to understand to not to anthropomorphize the parties like. They are making a decision. There's a, like, a person making a decision. We're going to do this instead of that, right?

The way politics works in America, because we only have 2 ballot lines, is that all of the organized interest in the [00:15:00] country on the big ones understand that the way to have access to the enormous resources the federal government has to the enormous power it has is to advance candidates that will carry their agenda.

And when people say, well, the Republicans took this turn here as if there was a Republican who changed their mind about the best tactic, they miss the fact that what happened was that a different faction of the Republican Party gained the upper hand and it's new people. Right, like, all the, the Ryan's and everyone, like, they leave, they either lose outright or decide they can't stay.

Right? It's not like someone sitting in a DC headquarters saying, aha, we're going to look at this poll and say, well, we really need to be more fascist. Right? It's the fascist taking over the [00:16:00] party and in the, in terms of the house, right?

It's really the white Christian nationalist faction that has. That is hacked Congress.

Basically 1 of the pieces I have shows how, our Byzantine 18th century way of figuring stuff out really enables any sort of big interest. That is. Sufficiently geographically clustered right now, because of how gerrymandered and partisan sort, the districts are that you can basically ladder from, 18 percent of the population nationally so Control the house and, the Republicans in the house because in red districts in the South event, white evangelicals make up, between 30 and 50 plus percent of all primary Republican [00:17:00] primary voters and to win a Republican primary on average, if you didn't come in over the last dozen years, only has taken 50, 000 votes.

And the national media doesn't see it because he's They treat sort of the Congress as a kind of national constituent assembly, because they're looking at polling.

Well, the Republicans are this percent this and this right, but they don't get votes places, get votes and the right cred by Christian nationalism is extremely strong in enough places that they get to control the Republican caucus.

SHEFFIELD: And they spent, the better part of Donald Trump's entire presidency. Kind of saying, Oh, he's not that extreme. He doesn't really believe this.

He's not really a fascist. You guys are overreacting. There's no, this isn't racism. This isn't, whatever the, I mean, he would come out with all these horrible statements and they would just excuse them and pretend that it was overreacting.

So yeah, [00:18:00] so, but that said. It's also that I think to your regional point and with regard to the white evangelicals, I think a lot of people also haven't realized that southern white evangelicalism sort of colonized white Protestantism outside of the South just through its sheer business prowess, whether it was Christian bookstores like Lifeway Christian Resources, which is owned by the Southern Baptist Convention and they've got stores in every state and they, they just, their, their sheer power of organizing and entrepreneurship.

They just overwhelmed all the other Baptist factions and, kind of, ate the lunch of, of mainline Protestantism to a large degree. And so, yeah, go ahead.

PODHORZER: No, I was just saying, and it's like, really not recognized part two is that And sort of Southern Ohio, Southern Indiana there's been significant [00:19:00] migration.

So, which is another element in why those states went from kind of purplish to red.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah, the Southern parts of rural generally speaking and that's, that is true of Illinois as well outside of the Chicago area. So, yeah, but, but I guess to a large degree though, I do think that, when you look at the responses of, of let's say left of center operatives to this stuff.

It, yeah, it's, it's, it's about generally kind of have wanting to have the same narrative in every place. And, this idea that we can, we can create the perfect message. And, and the reality is there is no perfect message. What there are is, is many messages. And you have to, you have to tell, you have to relate what you want.

To what the people want and, to your, your point [00:20:00] about and we were talking about before we were recording this, that, the, the two parties really haven't tried, they're not trying to create Oh, hold on. I hear an echo the, the, the two parties are not trying to create. Policy platform and even a message or a coalition that that includes a majority of Americans seems like.

PODHORZER: Yeah, I think that I think that, somewhere around the mid 70s and something that was happening in other countries to business interests, which had. Really been centered in the Republican Party basically expanded and won the battle for the Democratic Party and forced labor out in the way it's been in a lot of other countries.

And so there's no party that actually is advocating for working people, right? There's no question that, that Democrats have been [00:21:00] better for working people economically than Republicans. But neither has actually, especially relatively recently been at all concerned with their working lines and that's a like, complete change.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and now to what degree though, is that. Does labor have responsibility for that situation?

PODHORZER: Well, I think that, that, that, and it's a really important question. I think that to, to get at it, I think that many people talk, you talk about it, people who often, Are very much feel as allies of the labor movement that sentences like, quote, the decline in membership. And I think that [00:22:00] when we do that, we miss the that it's sort of.

It makes it sound like it's something that labor to itself when, in fact, right since the 1940s, the business corporate community has been relentlessly attacking the ability of. People working people to act collectively in unions, and they've been very successful in because there's been essentially a bipartisan consensus that has prevented.

Union organizing in each new part, each part of the economy as it expands. Right? So there but in 1940s, General Motors was fully unionized. It's fully in nice today. But through a set of policies, right? [00:23:00]

With right to work in the South, you create a context to have auto plants that aren't, or you do NAFTA so that you make it easier for foreign companies to take union market share when we started having the service sector exploding there were new barriers erected to make it more difficult to organize service worker right now it's very difficult to organize gig workers, even though they want it because. Laws, regs, whatever are trying to make them independent contractor.

And so I think yeah, labor that's labor's job, but we shouldn't be blind to the billions of dollars that have been spent empower exercise to prevent people from joining unions.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's true. I mean, [00:24:00] but this has been a thing that's been going on for a long time. I mean, I guess you could maybe say it kind of started with the so called Atari Democrats of the 1970s.

And this is not my place to say any of these things, but, I mean, the reality is that I don't know, I mean, it's, it's tricky because I guess to some degree, the Democratic party kind of welcomed these new people to come in and especially after the Nixon resignation and 70 and the 74 election in 76, those it so they liked it, they wanted these new members in, but fundamentally they kind of changed the Democratic Party from what it was and, it's been kind of the same to a large degree since then. What do you think? [00:25:00]

PODHORZER: Well, I think that Biden has really been a break with that neoliberal Democratic tradition so far thing.

We don't know what's going to happen in the longer run, but I think. It was really significant that he went to the UAW picket line, right? That's something that Obama never would have come close to, that Clinton never would have come close to, that Carter never would have been come close to. And I think it, it stems from the fact that there was this period and there's still a lot of it of, and this is what really galls me about people who should talk about appealing to working class voters is that.

That these are the same people who are have tried and been pretty successful at trying to tell a story of America in which there are no class divisions. Right that weirdly, the only [00:26:00] class division is over sort of gendered bathrooms and a sort of social vibe that has nothing to do with people's economic lives, and that that kind of that's kind of the problem.

SHEFFIELD: Let's can you clarify what you mean? Yeah.

PODHORZER: So here's a clear way of thinking about it, right? Before the mid 70s, right? You had through the consensus worldview was that unconstrained capitalism brings you the depression horrible outcomes, but that what was called us for pluralism that That working for this for democracy to function for an economy to function.

Well, you have to create institutions like unions that allowed people to act collectively to have at least some relative balance in power [00:27:00] with the corporations and the most wealthy. Right and that's an idea that goes back to Jefferson everything you can't how can you have like democracy when people aren't political equals and the sort of fix that came in the new deal was that while each working person wouldn't have the power of a Carnegie to if you put them all together, you're sort of starting to get a balance and you have some.

Guardrails on capitalism, right? And, but it was very much understood that there were two classes. There's like an ownership class and a working class. And their interests were not the same and that the role of government was to make sure that that contest happened in a balanced fair way. You get what you call the Atari Democrats, get the neoliberal, whatever you're going to call them, right?

They decide [00:28:00] that that's like, that's so yesterday. And that in fact, all we have to do is rely on the market and everybody's going to have better, more prosperous lives and, and all of that. Right. And so now there are not 2 sides anymore. There's just private public partnerships and, the era of big government is over and so forth.

And so at that point, right, you have what Piketty and others sort of call, a, a, an elite. Yeah. Duopoly of parties, right? Both are parties of different factions of the, of the powerful, you have the Republicans putting aside the white Christian nationalists, they're the party of the extractive industries of a set of industries that have worked to keep the regional low wage economy.

Democrats are captured [00:29:00] by, the tech and finance and knowledge economy, right? And they've created. That's why the 2 pit areas are so different, right? There's a different theory of everything, but they're both believe that the market is the best way to do things and like, and really want to avoid the idea of class war.

SHEFFIELD: Okay, and then now you mentioned the idea of so where does gender and race fit into that? This framework that is the divisions you're talking about

PODHORZER: That there are, I think, in a fundamental way, I think that the, the, the through line for. What's red America, from the founding was an idea of a kind of theocratic state that the purpose of the government is to make sure [00:30:00] that people follow an already revealed law, right?

And that and that that law has a very clear cut. Social hierarchy

SHEFFIELD: That they know their place, yeah.

PODHORZER: Right. And then you have a more like classically sort of liberal blue states where people don't think there's a reveal truth already and are willing to try to have. Systems to get to the best place by working it out together, and so that's obviously going to be much more conducive to gender equality, racial equality and so on.

SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah, and I think 1 of the other things, though, that the neoliberals did is that they. That they de linked the struggle for justice such that [00:31:00] that basically they wanted to remove. what Martin Luther King and, and, a bunch of other people, Bayard Rustin and others like him understood, which was that this is all, this is a collective struggle here that, things may not impact one set of people the same way.

But if you don't support their struggle, then you're, then you won't win the thing that you want. And the neoliberals kind of broke that and basically tried to, and, and, tried to get people to focus only on whatever in particular one day we're interested in and, and, and that's, and that's kind of how the, the, the, the Democratic Party became broken and non majoritarian, I would say,

PODHORZER: Right. No, I think that it was a switch from parties that were fairly about advancing their bases, aspirations and.[00:32:00]

Uh, to sort of to sort of consumer parties where each sort of saying, well, here are the reasons to vote for me. And here are the reasons to vote for me, but not actually, which is antithetical in a way to real democracy, because. You only have real democracy when people are engaged in a practical functional way more than every two years when they get to choose between the same two choices.

And then really have no handle on it in between and--

SHEFFIELD: Well, and also, and sorry, also take that. They get something that is more than just semiotic. In other words, that, that having the symbology of your preferred group. As sort of in people's faces that actually doesn't really do very much for you.

So, like, the white Christian nationalism doesn't actually help the lives of the [00:33:00] Republican voters who, who want it. And then, but, but by the same token, it also doesn't really help it doesn't really help black Americans to have the CEOs be black of these corporations and then they exploit the workers just the same.

PODHORZER: Yeah. No, that's a really important point is, and that's, I think, sort of the sort of genius of neoliberalism is by really insisting that everybody only has their individual interest, rather than that. There's any kind of collective interest or responsibility to a collective. Right, you essentially split within racial groups or gender groups, or you're, you're basically what you just said, it's like the 4 people who don't have the access to pre K.

Or decent education, knowing [00:34:00] that that there are black CEOs is of limited value.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it also, the other thing about that, the, the neoliberal bargain, if you will, was that, yes, it did bring some more educated, higher income Workers into the Democratic coalition, but what it also did is that it made it easier for the much larger group of, blue collar workers of all races to leave because, that for them for, for many of these people, like they were motivated by, like they were Christian fundamentalists and, and you see that and you first saw that with, with white blue collar workers, but now you're starting to see that with, yeah.

Evangelical Hispanics, and you're starting to see that with black, evangelicals as well that they're not, and they say this, when, when people, and I think focus groups are a very limited value, but nonetheless. The idea, some of, some, you do hear people [00:35:00] say, I don't see a difference between the parties for me.

And some of that is a failure of democratics people letting people know that Biden's very pro union and he, did all these things that's, that isn't a democratic sort of. infrastructure of communication problem. But it's also that, that again, that they, the fact that people would even think this at all, it shows that the, the Republican party has identified what for them, these individuals is their, they view as their primary identity and, and, and, and basically they've, that's why they constantly are, talking about.

Social controversies and whatnot. Like there's this myth that the democratic party only talks about, racism or gender equality or, transgender participation in society. None of that's true. But the Republicans want you to believe that. And Democrats, I don't feel like they understand that, [00:36:00] they think that people will just figure it out.

That they don't have to be told what's actually happening, that they'll just, the marketplace of ideas, the good ideas will win. And it just, it seems kind of naive.

PODHORZER: Yeah, I mean, I think it's 1st of all, I think, but 1 thing that I want to pull out is it's going to go there anyway, but I think it's really important is that is when you talk about identity.

And I think that almost all the discussion about the appeal of the parties and politics and messages and everything miss the fact that the most powerful way to realign the electorate to win elections is when people. Feel that their identity is fundamental and core to 1 of the other parties or candidates, right?

That people aren't out [00:37:00] there sort of looking at sort of side by side of where the. Candidates or parties who are on issues, whatever, when they think that this is the party. If you're a white, you're evangelical, right? The reason they're 80 plus percent for Republicans is because Republicans tap into their white Christian nationalist identity.

And so for people like who, for whom identity is dry is politically salient. Right, they're not going to say, but maybe Democrats are good on this issue or what they don't you don't think past that and what and so identity when people like you people you feel are like you are all one party or the other.

That's alignment. Right? And the. Right now, the very odd thing in terms of the way people talk about working class voters, [00:38:00] whatever, is that most of the electorate actually is voting on one or other identity, either their identity is MAGA or it's anti and, and that that's really got its grip on, over 85 percent of the electorate.

Which is just never going to switch sides, because it's not about either side's issue suite. It's people like me are or are not. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I had when I was I'll go ahead.

PODHORZER: No, I was going to say, I think 1 thing that, like, gets, like, left out of this kind of conversation is, let's not forget that in the 17 blue states, yeah that Biden Clinton and Obama 12 won by 2 dozen points and that in those states.

You have functioning democratic governors that [00:39:00] have actually been making life better for people over a period of time. The characterization of a dysfunctional party that can't do anything right really has to do with this national contest. Right, and the National Party, and one of the reasons why it is so dysfunctional is that in those 17 states, blue wins by two dozen points.

In the 27 red states, Trump won by more than a dozen points twice. And so did Romney, right? And they're two different types of politics. And there's like, no, not a middle ground that you could be smart in.

SHEFFIELD: Well, okay. So, but so then how can people who want to have more a politics that are, is for working people, [00:40:00] how can they succeed in that type of environment?

What do you, what do you think?

PODHORZER: Well, I think that it's going to depend on what working people rising again, like we did in the 30s and did before. And I think what we're seeing this summer and fall with for CPS, WGA, UAW is at least finally a stirring uh, You know, I was looking this morning for something I was writing that in 1974, there were more strikes than there were in the last 25 years that that, like, the world was just very different and working.

People had a very different sense of agency and were more engaged in getting a better life for themselves than. They have been in quite a while.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. [00:41:00] Well, and I, and I, and it's something that is tricky though, because, I, the other reason why Republicans have, created kind of a, I mean, the, the Republican party is a.

Identity politics party. And it was built that way, by the, the, the Goldwater ites and, the Reaganites they, they, they rebuilt the party into being that based on, on white Christian rural identity. And it was effective not just at getting the South, but it's also effective as a way of.

Preventing, worker uprisings and things like that, because essentially what it is, it's a, it's a divide and conquer

PODHORZER: 100 percent, right. It's like, right in this period, right? Where the, and this is essential. I have a lot of respect for Michael case and who you had on, but I think there's. Like a really, we have to take a hard look [00:42:00] that that the Democratic Party from Jackson on could be called the party of white working people, but throughout that period in the Confederate States in the southern states, those the people so named. saw themselves just as white, right? Now, when it push came to shove, their white identity was more important to them than their working class identity. And that the quote loss of white working class for the Democratic Party really happened in the 40s in the, in the South. And most people who like, try to tell that story are don't understand that Democrats continue to have.

Majorities of the members of Congress for those states for quite a bit [00:43:00] longer, because those Democrats in the House and Senate, they were electing were fighting against all the working unions and working class policies that would allow there to be multiracial unions in the South.

SHEFFIELD: Well, so then it, I mean, because that is ultimately, I mean, you could argue that those are the two issues that the, a more, let's say, left leaning Democratic Party faced is that one, trying to include black Americans in the party, and then also, Trying to cleave off allow, the creation of a, of white Christian nationalism and not do anything in response to that.

I mean, and even now, like, I, I, the, when you look at the Democratic Party leadership, they don't really talk about it. White Christian nationalism at all and, and, and say that it's [00:44:00] bad and say that it's a manipulation and, and, and, and so because of that, because there is literally no countervailing message to say that, if you're a if you believe the Bible is literally true, you're not going to be imprisoned.

If, if Joe Biden gets reelected, you're not going to be imprisoned. If Bernie Sanders somehow became the president, nothing bad is going to happen to you. And, and it's what you'll, you'll, you'll get, better healthcare, you'll get more worker protections and things like that. Like they just, it's just like they, I feel like they pretend that they don't have to, if we don't talk about it, then it will go away.

And they've just had this, this naive approach to the Christian nationalism. And now because they've ignored it for so long and not tried to talk about, just how manipulative it is now it's starting to ensnare Hispanic evangelicals and some evangelicals as well.

PODHORZER: Yeah. I mean, I think [00:45:00] the, it's, it's interesting. It's just part of that. I really agree with part of that, man.

I think as long as you have a information ecosystem. Like Fox and all the other right wing media that has already that that really it's commerce. You should probably under were there like commercial model. They're making money selling sort of white grievance stories.

That is the white Christian nationalist worldview, and it's not like there's a billionaire or something that's like creating this propaganda thing. It, it, it makes money. Right? And so they're doing it. And I frankly, don't think that there's a way for Democrats to show people that, no, we're really not going to take your Christmas away.

I think that, like, that, that, that was gone. Right. And because of what you're saying is, [00:46:00] it's just really a powerful way to divide people. Right. And, and it's working by default, much more the mainstream media. For pretending that white Christian nationalism is in the threat to the country for such a long time.

And even now it has a tough time saying the words white Christian nationalism. That's really what's problematic and I think that's what makes. The presidential election as close as it is, or the country as close as it appears to be over Trump is the equivocation about how much of a fascist, how much he's really going to do the things he says he's going to do.

I mean, you know, the media is just about sort of telling people not to take what he says seriously. [00:47:00]

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, they certainly do that. But at the same time, they've always been this way. So yeah, it seems like the left should be investing a lot more in media than they do. I mean, like, to me, as somebody who created multiple media organizations on the right, I can tell you, it is So easy to get people on the right to be interested in starting up some new media business.

Whereas on the left, there is this idea that, ah, well, we can put a we got an interview on NPR the other day. We got to start ABC news to do a profile of us or 16 minutes did a story about it and it's, it's, it's incredibly naive and they don't, and they don't understand most people.

Especially, in this internet age, most people don't see those stories. They, they don't know about them. So you have to take the message to the people, but they don't want to, they don't seem to want to do it because it's beneath them.

PODHORZER: Well, I'm not quite sure that's completely fair because I know a [00:48:00] lot of people who have tried to do it and failed, I think from, and there are some really good rigorous sort of studies of.

Like, what happens and I think that 1 of the handicaps that those who tried to do what you're saying on the not on the right is that the mainstream media, the times, the journal, Washington post, whatever right basically have the most lucrative audiences locked up. Which means that there is, like, no one's really found the equivalent of a 3rd of America.

That's a untapped commercially available market for the left wants to like. Spend their time [00:49:00] in the car listening to people brag on own the conservatives or something, right? It's very asymmetric, right? And, and so, yeah, I think it is, it is both are true. There are many people on the left who are too condescending and self disqualifying for the job.

I know a lot of people who are really serious. Invested money a lot of time and just can't find a market for it. It's really just a symmetric.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I mean, well, I, I, I don't disagree with that. But, I mean, I would say even, to the extent that the, like, the web has built. It has enabled some people to build pretty large audiences and on the left and they don't share their audiences.

They do not engage in cross promotions. They don't invite other people on their podcasts or, invite them to write articles. It simply does not happen. Like they invite their personal [00:50:00] friends. To come on their show, a hundred times or whatever. And then unless you're their personal friend, you don't get invited.

And so as a result, the ecosystem doesn't like here's, here's the paradox is, and I can say this, having been, how things work on both sides, that the left. is actually, the left media ecosystem is far more capitalistic and far more dog eat dog than on the right. The right does not practice capitalism in its own affairs, and the left does.

So like, almost all the largest center to left media operations are owned by corporations,

PODHORZER: right, yeah, of course, yeah.

SHEFFIELD: And, and, whereas on the, on the right, they will go and sink millions or tens of millions of dollars, year after year into, into these organizations that they know will not ever be profitable, but they serve a valuable purpose.

And so they continue to do that, but in some cases, like the daily wire or [00:51:00] talk radio, these things that were unprofitable. For a number of years eventually they, they can, they get to the point where they are profitable and, and extremely. So in Fox news is another example of that. I mean, it was an enormous money loser for Rupert Murdoch for a long time.

And then eventually it, the, the audience finally found it. And has been printing money ever since. Whereas, so I think there are people who want this stuff. It's just that everybody on the left gives up too soon. And I would say Air America is an example of that, that, it was created if they had just stuck to it longer and not been so wasteful in their expenditures.

They, and you can see that with the host, like a number of the hosts who were there have been able to continue making a living and, and make do quite well for themselves because they kept going.

PODHORZER: Right. But remember that there's the, in terms of the, the, the financing of all of that, right?

Is that the other [00:52:00] asymmetry is that for the cokes for murder for all of those people? There's a corporate bottom line that creating a movement to lower taxes and reduce regulation has an ROI, right? And there isn't that on the other side, right? There's no sort of what the Left media, like, I don't even know how to say the sentence.

Right. A left media, that's a Trojan horse for pro billionaire policies. Right. Right. It's, that's the problem. And I'm, I feel awkward to defend. I'm not trying not to defend any particular people in this. It's trying to say that what I think is important is that to understand that the problem isn't like, finding people to do it better.

It's that we're in a system that kind of that is that that that's [00:53:00] here. Right? I mean, these are decisions that mostly Democratic presidents made to not renew the fairness doctrine to do the communications deregulation bill that, has allowed the test. Yeah. That loud cross ownership and all those things I didn't used to be the case are the case and that's a ditch Democrats built it dug for themselves.

But it doesn't mean, like, we're just looking for somebody to come in and transcend that. I mean, it's a pretty deep ditch.

SHEFFIELD: Well, okay. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I think that's all true. And yet, you're, you, in your writing, you have talked quite a bit about how things are not inevitable and Trump's not going to, to, he's not inevitable in terms of coming back.

And you've been particularly notable in [00:54:00] pushing back against people panicking about, Joe Biden's polling numbers you, you, you call it “Mad Poll Disease.” What, what does, what does that term mean for people who--

PODHORZER: What, what I mean is that I can't imagine there's much, very many people who are listening to this podcast and don't know about all the horse race polling that's been out there and the big splash at the New York times.

Created a couple of months ago now with poll showing Trump ahead in a number of battleground states. The point that I think Mad Poll Disease is that there are two things that we know about the presidential election: one is that it's going to come down to as it has in 2020 and 2016, less than a percentage point difference in 5 to 6 states that we know [00:55:00] which states they are.

We know it's going to be that close. And we know that polling can't really tell us. Anything valuable beyond that, but the, but when you think that polling can, you panic about it in an unconstructive way, because you're basically thinking, oh, my God, there is a noble outcome there and we're screwed, right?

When in a democracy without polling right now, we wouldn't be talking about how old Biden is. We'd be talking about Trump's fascist agenda. And getting everybody we know to make sure they should go out and vote against him, right? It's the wrong conversation to be having. And in the last couple of elections, right in the midterms, the 5, 538, which does a better job of [00:56:00] something, which really can't be done perfectly.

And if you've been following it, when they started their Senate in June, they said Republicans had a 60, 40 chance of taking Senate. But after the J6 hearings and dubs, they said Democrats had a 60, 40 chance of holding the Senate on election day. They said Republicans again had a 60, 40 chance of holding, flipping the Senate of the five races that mattered most, they got three wrong.

You literally would have been smarter not ever going to look at any of the forecasting and just knowing what everyone knew is it was going to come down to those states, right? And just go out and try to win. That any, all of these races are within the margin of error, and when they're there, they're in the margin of error.

And that's what Mad Poll Disease is. It's paralyzing. It keeps you away from being a small d [00:57:00] democratic citizen.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, it is interesting that the, the Republican Party and the right wing media ecosystem, they became completely disregarding of polls beginning in 2012 or so, and they've been that way ever since that they really say, well, it doesn't, it shows us behind, but that's fake and that's, that's not true, but they basically have said, we don't believe that.

We're just going to continue to, push forward.

PODHORZER: Right. And then we've had like, 200 years plus of successful elections without having polling a year out. Right? I mean, like, democracies do, actually can function without the media putting its central attention on trying to be the first to sort of say something smart about who's going to win.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, now, is this kind of do you think this is an [00:58:00] example of what, what decision theorists call analysis paralysis on the part of people on the left of center? Is that what this is?

PODHORZER: Um, I mean, maybe for some, but it's more that as a saying that the problem is that anybody who wants to think about, like, the basic, is America going to continue as a non fascist country in terms of, like, someone, a media organization talking to 1500 people to tell you something, like, that's just crazy, right?

The right, right. Like, if you believe That it's like that horrible for Trump to win again. That's all that matters. But the thing to be clear is, in what I'm saying [00:59:00] is not for the same reason Republicans say that, right? Republicans were saying that because they didn't like the poll number, right? And they were getting in the way of the story they wanted to tell.

In 2020, if you remember, the polling and media had Biden headed to a really big victory, and in October I was writing, and we can read it, the polls are wrong, right? It's going to be as close as it was. Right and right. It's like the polling. We are such a divided country and those states are so on the 50 yard line that to just keep going back over and over again and take, taking their temperature again and again, right?

Makes it seem more fluid than it actually is. [01:00:00]

SHEFFIELD: Well, okay, so for. There's no, as you, as you said, there's no magic wand for all these things. But I mean, so what are, what are the things you think Biden should be? Doing because the polls are right that that he has, the potential to lose.

PODHORZER: Oh, yeah. That's what I'm saying. We all know that, right? That's, that's the challenge of our life, right?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

PODHORZER: Right. We don't need to know what I'm saying.

SHEFFIELD: What would you say that he should do to not lose?

PODHORZER: I don't know what he should do. I know that what we should do is in whatever roles we have, make sure that We understand what the threat is and that that's our central charge as citizens of this country to make sure that Trump isn't reelected, isn't elected again.

SHEFFIELD: Well, and what if people feel like that I mean, like, and you, and maybe we can end here with--

PODHORZER: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: [01:01:00] There's been a lot of discussion with in, in the world of economics about what some people call a vibes recession in, in regards to polling that when people. Are asked about the state of the economy.

They think that it's, almost depression level bad, for many people and the response and you know and the economic indicators do not really show that and you know to a certain extent I think or to pretty large extent I think this is the product of right wing media having completely sort of Uh, removed Republicans from all rationality when it comes to questions about the economy.

So in other words, when a Democrat is the president, the Republican respondents are now seemingly for the past several years maybe perhaps for the long term trend, they're going to say it's a depression. Just because a Democrat is the president and, and then when Trump was the president, they, even during the worst parts of the pandemic, they said the economy was great and [01:02:00] the prospects were amazing.

And it was like 70 percent of them, even, even at the very worst shutdowns and, and, and whatnot, they said it was fantastic. So I mean, what's your take on if the on this whole vibes session? Yeah.

PODHORZER: So I think that the, what, first, what you're describing about Republicans and Trump and no matter how about the economy as he's doing great is what I was saying before about identity.

Right. Once you see yourself as being on team Trump or team red, right? That's the power of, of identity and identification, right? And it, but that, that's the way human beings work, right? The on the other side, though, I think that there's that the, that the indicator economic indicators that everyone deals, That people are not [01:03:00] like, delusional for not realizing what of an economy.

It is just don't actually indicate that don't really reflect how people experience. Their lives, there was a time when something like GDP growth was a pretty good heuristic for how people were feeling because, as the economy grew with prosperity was fairly shared. Right? But when it goes from, rising tide, lifting old boats, GDP indicator.

Yep. That's a good thing when it's mostly if lifting yachts, yeah. Right. Why should people feel any better? And I think there's a way in which the people in the sort of media class really don't understand what rising prices due to people and the idea that someone who is. Like daily stressed by [01:04:00] wondering the uncertainty of whether in this season, they can avoid the afford the toy.

Their kid wants because they don't know whether they're going to have, rent's going to go up in January or something like that. Like, they're not. Like, whoopie, inflation isn't going up by as much as it was before, right? We're sort of in the media class. It's, oh, well, he's getting inflation under control.

Prices are still going up. They're not, and it's that disconnect. I think it's a real disconnect about how people really are experiencing the economy and what the indicators economists say should matter. And I think to the sort of larger point since 2000, in almost every institution, people just have less confidence.

People feel the society's broken [01:05:00] and then, which everybody sees in polling and then everyone's surprised about why this or that leader is in popular. People are not happy and that's being reflected in these polls.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So I guess what can, what can Biden or other people on the left do in response to that, or what should they do?

PODHORZER: don't know that I think that. The, in terms of our conversation about Trump and MAGA, white Christian nationalism, all of that, that just has to be the thing that unifies people and I don't have any particular advice for what Democrats should do to make themselves more popular. I think that's really, they've kind of put themselves in a position that makes it really hard for that to ever sort of succeed.[01:06:00]

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, so then it sounds like they need to change their policies in your view, then to be more responsive. Okay. All right.

Well, appreciate you joining today, Mike. So if people what's the what are the best ways for people to keep up with,

PODHORZER: But basically my sub stack weekend reading.

SHEFFIELD: Okay, so we can reading dot net.

Yeah, everybody to check that out. And are you on any of the social media places? Yeah, I am.

PODHORZER: But mostly post that. So if you're getting the Substack, you're getting that.

SHEFFIELD: Okay. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you for being here today. Thank you for having me. Take care.

All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody for joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show, where you can get the video, audio and transcript of all the episodes. And if you are a paid subscribing member, thank you very much. And you have complete unlimited access.

Some of the episodes in order to keep the show sustainable are [01:07:00] not available to the general public. So I appreciate everybody who is supporting the show in that way. And please do tell your friends or family about. This program as well. I appreciate that as well. All right, that'll do it for this one and we'll see everybody next time.

STJH Bonus: Mass grave discovered in Mississippi

Matthew Sheffield — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 20:01:16 GMT

Audio Chapters

This is a paid episode so only the first chapter is available for free

0:00 — Mass grave discovered behind Mississippi jail

02:57 — New York Times publishes irresponsible piece on Taylor Swift's sex life

05:12 — Trump hatchet-man Roger Stone recorded asking for murder and kidnapping

07:03 — Ray Epps sentenced

08:59 — Far-right Christian women tangle over how much misogyny is enough

16:18 — How fear can keep us in bad situations

Join the Conversation!

Matt

Kali

STJH on Twitter

Theme song

Easy Lover: “The End of Our Deceit”

Lyrics and Vocals by Kali Holloway

Music by Jeremy Wimmer

Doomscroll Bonus: Hunter Biden, Roger Stone, and the Florida surgeon general walk into a bar

Matthew Sheffield — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 08:00:51 GMT

This Doomscroll episode is only for paid subscribers. Enjoy the laughs and support our work on Substack at the link above or on Patreon!

Audio Chapters

0:00 — New report shows Trump companies paid millions by foreign governments

02:52 — Roger Stone and the Republican lying tradition

06:25 — Alaska Airlines plane part breaks off mid-air

09:04 — Florida Republican surgeon general says mRNA vaccines are "anti-Christ"

14:14 — Daily Wire host tells fans to make Nazi Mickey Mouse memes

Follow or Die!

Doomscroll

Lisa

Matt

https://youtube.com/user/coreyforrestercomedy

Corey Forrester

https://twitter.com/CoreyRForrester

Corey on Substack:

Doomscroll is a podcast from the Flux media network. Visit https://flux.community/ for more smart podcasts and articles about politics, culture, and media.

STJH: Democratic division on Palestine, Bill Ackman exposes himself

Matthew Sheffield — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 10:49:39 GMT

Headlines

0:00 — Anti-war protesters at Biden’s Charleston speech reflect unsettled questions of what democracy looks like

14:24 — Deranged billionaire Bill Ackman proves attacks on Claudine Gay were not about plagiarism or antisemitism

22:47 — Mark Cuban tangles with Elon Musk over diversity initiatives

31:08 — Mehdi Hasan leaves MSNBC after show canceled, how about that liberal media?

34:02 — Christian Ziegler, embattled Florida Republican chair, fired after rape allegations

35:38 — Florida county ‘reviews’ dictionary from schools for sexual content

Join the Conversation

Matt

Kali

STJH on Twitter

Theme song

Easy Lover: “The End of Our Deceit”

Lyrics and Vocals by Kali Holloway

Music by Jeremy Wimmer

Doomscroll: Nikki Haley renaming her husband and the 'cancel culture' grift machine

Matthew Sheffield — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 08:31:59 GMT

Audio Chapters

0:00 — Nikki Haley renamed her husband

08:38 — Trump is polling well because Democrats won’t talk to regular people

16:41 — Trump attorney Alina Habba says she’d rather be pretty than smart since you can fake being smart

19:42 — Britney Spears says she will “never” return to music industry

23:38 — Golden Globes stiffed “Barbie” and host Jo Koy threw his writers under the bus

27:54 — Can we be as canceled as Ricky Gervais?

You can watch the video version of this episode

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TOC: Seeing the bigger picture of Moms for Liberty

Matthew Sheffield — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 11:52:09 GMT

Moms for Liberty, the dishonestly named far-right Christian group, is in the news after Bridget Ziegler, one of the group's co-founders, has been reported to have been in a relationship with another woman and her husband,. Christian Ziegler, her husband, has been accused of raping the woman in Sarasota, Florida.

As shocking as that allegation is, it's important to note that Christian Ziegler says he is innocent. There are no criminal charges that have been filed.

But nonetheless, it is still worth looking at Moms for Liberty in the larger context of astroturf right wing organizations, especially in the discussion that we're having on Theory of Change about how the Democratic left is less able and willing to promote grassroots organizations.

And as we'll see in today's episode, this is not how things were for Moms for Liberty.

Joining the program to talk about all this is Kelly Weill, she is the creator of a new website called MomLeft, which focuses on reporting about the activities of far right parent organizations. And she's also the author of a book called Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything.

The video of the conversation is available. A computer-generated transcript of the edited audio follows. The recording was made on December 6, 2023.

Audio Chapters

0:00 — Moms for Liberty and the bigger picture

01:39 — A background on the scandals of Bridget and Christian Ziegler

09:31 — How reactionary groups use low-turnout elections to impose their extreme agendas

10:57 — Many journalists seem unaware of Moms for Liberty's extremism

15:00 — Normal people are now asserting their own parental rights

28:01 — Why many right-wing women don't live the lifestyle they preach to others

40:46 — Republicans show they will throw away lower-level politicians but they fear dumping Trump

43:03 — Flat Earthers are more of a thing than you might think, and most are far-right Christians

Related Episodes

Transcript

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, thanks for being here.

KELLY WEILL: Thanks so much for having me.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. All right, so let's start our discussion here by talking about the current news story that is, seems to be a ever growing scandal concerning Christian Ziegler, who is the chair of the Florida Republican Party [update: , but also the husband of a woman who is a [00:02:00] co-founder of the Moms for Liberty group, Bridget Ziegler.

At this point in time, and things might change during the time that we're recording this versus when it airs, but as things stand right now, what is the deal with this whole scandal concerning Christian Ziegler?

WEILL: It's a mess, in a word. Christian Ziegler, he's the chair of the Florida GOP. He's been really close with Ron DeSantis and he and his wife Bridget are real power players in both Florida politics and specifically Florida educational politics. Bridget is a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, which is a group that has been instrumental in pushing anti LGBTQ legislation related to students in Florida.

Now, Moms for Liberty will say that Bridget Ziegler is no longer with the group, but she's very much a model for the kind of school board warrior that Moms for Liberty wants to promote. So, earlier this month it came out that a woman who had been sexually involved with both [00:03:00] Christian and Bridget Ziegler in some capacity had filed a police report against Christian Ziegler.

She said that the couple had planned some kind of three-way and then that Bridget said, Oh, I can't make it that day, that the woman had canceled because Bridget wasn't going to be there. And she alleges that Christian Ziegler attacked her in her home and raped her on that day. The woman went to a hospital, got treated with a rape kit, right after this.

They have a good number of text messages from Christian Ziegler and members of the Florida GOP are calling on him to step down. He is not doing that, claiming that the incident was consensual on both parties.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's right. And basically saying that we've got a country to save. And he's just too important to everything. Now, it's my understanding, though, that there were two different boards with Moms for Liberty, and she had been involved with an [00:04:00] advisory board. Is that correct?

WEILL: The exact details of her Not the board of directors. Yeah. Right. The exact details of her involvement are I'm sure you could drill down. I don't have them committed to memory. She was a co-founder, and she is involved in a lot of groups that are also involved with Moms for Liberty.

These are groups like I believe the Liberty Institute, just a number of right wing organizations that are adjacent to this sphere and that are very, invested in getting moms like her involved in school board politics, running for these school board roles and really mobilizing around educational issues.

SHEFFIELD: The other thing about the Zieglers with regard to Moms for Liberty is that their connection to the group is actually really what helped them get a pipeline directly into the Republican party elite. Christian Ziegler was not in, he wasn't the chair of the Florida Republican party, but he was the assistant chair [00:05:00] and seems to have gotten them, heavily involved with this very wealthy group called the Leadership Institute.

Do you want to talk about that at all? Who they are, the Leadership Institute and what they do.

WEILL: Sure. They're an organization that, helps to sort of groom up-and-coming Republican voices. They're quite hard right. And they have been plugging in with Moms for Liberty.

They have been offering training for promising moms in that space who might want to become the next school board rabble rouser. And so. You are right that this is a very well-funded sphere Moms for Liberty has received significant payments from, say, the heiress of the, Publix fortune, the Florida supermarket chain.

So there's a lot of money and specifically a lot of Florida Republican money sloshing around here.

SHEFFIELD: And where did they, like what was their original impetus? It wasn't about getting angry at books [00:06:00] originally, right?

WEILL: Right. Bridget Ziegler is actually a really interesting figure to follow in the origin story here because she's tried this a couple times getting right wing mom organizations up and running.

She had a conservative school board. member group that she tried starting a couple of years back, didn't really go anywhere, but I think where Moms for Liberty really got its initial momentum was in debates over mask mandates at school. Masks obviously became this intensely polarized issue with a lot of, I think, performative politics on the right.

And. I think Moms for Liberty in its very early stages was able to tap into that anger and tell parents that we're a group with which you can mobilize. You can take back your school board. You can reclaim your child's education. And of course, a lot of these things are euphemisms for other grievances that they're already pushing.

And so that's why when the mask fight died down. Moms [00:07:00] for Liberty didn't die down. It pivoted into those harder right grievances like banning books related to LGBTQ issues restricting education about race, gender, sexuality. So that's, that's how it got its foothold and how it's moved forward since then.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. their transition in that regard is actually pretty common in, in the history of Republican social movements, such as they are. Like the Tea Party, for instance. I mean, I used to be a Republican activist before I had my own little transition as, my audience knows it, but you may not.

And I did speak at some tea party events, local tea party events in Virginia a couple of times. And I was always shocked at when I was invited to speak how, almost invariably. With the people who were there, the attendees would try to turn every conversation over to, God created America and that sort of stuff.

And I was not [00:08:00] religious at the time. So I was like well, can't we just focus on the topic here? Why are we talking about this? But they did just kept pivoting toward that. And so I'm curious. What do you think? Were they responding to demand or were they responding to what they actually wanted to do? The co-founders, the leadership.

WEILL: I think they always wanted to do this. I think they always wanted to get some kind of right wing moms group off the ground. And I think that's pretty savvy for Republicans. We're a few years out now from the election cycle where it seems like mobilizing conservative parents for age was really a good way to win office.

And I think that's the message that a lot of people took from Virginia governor, Glenn Youngkin's election was that he was able to tap into anger that. Some parents had about say LGBTQ issues in schools. And that's not to say that those in many cases, bigotries are valid, but it does mobilize some people [00:09:00] does get some people to the polls.

And I think groups like Moms for Liberty were able to see this maybe underplayed political block and. Identify them as a group that they could really mobilize that could really get going in a concerted direction. All they had to do was dangle a few hot button issues. And suddenly people are in a group and can vote and mass.

And I, do think, you hate to give credit, but it has been effective to a certain degree in certain swing districts.

How reactionary groups use low-turnout elections to impose their extreme agendas

SHEFFIELD: Who are the other key leadership figures with Moms for Liberty, for people who aren't too familiar with the group?

WEILL: Right. The other the other main leaders right now are a woman named Tiffany Justice and a woman named Tina Descovich, I believe.

And they're the ones that you see these days on stage at say, Moms for Liberty convention. But. After the 2022 cycle, 2021 and 22 election cycles, Moms for Liberty was able to sweep a lot [00:10:00] of elections. I think a combination of novelty and rage. They weren't a really known quantity, but because they were so organized in these school board races that are usually pretty passive or certainly don't have the--

SHEFFIELD: And they're low turnout. Yeah, they're low turnout.

WEILL: Exactly. Exactly. And so they were able to, I think, hijack these elections in ways that Were unexpected. And so I think a lot of Republican leadership saw that they saw these Republican wins, they saw this new mobilization and they really did key into groups like Moms for Liberty being a good vector electorally for them.

So that's why the summer at Moms for Liberty's convention, yes, you had the the founders, the leaders like Descovich and justice, but you also had pretty much every prominent. Republican was speaking there. You had Donald Trump spoke, Ron DeSantis spoke. This is a group that was only getting started.

I think like two, three years ago.

Many journalists seem unaware of Moms for Liberty's extremism

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, it's true. And [00:11:00] well, one of the other things about the coverage of a lot of the media out of that convention in Philadelphia is. I feel like that a lot of, and because I read a lot of it and a lot of the coverage was really, and not just of the convention, I will say, but even a lot of their local chapters, a lot of the news media coverage, it seems like they don't know how to cover this group.

And they don't understand how radical that the leadership and the membership are. And it was only after that a Indiana chapter that had used a quote from Hitler and if Hitler in one of their newsletters which and you can remind me of what the phrasing was.

It was something about. If those who control children's minds control the future or something like that and they put that on their newsletter and got some flack for it. And then Tiffany Justice basically mentioned that she supported the mom who did that. And at the mention of Adolf Hitler, people in the crowd started cheering, [00:12:00] for apparently Hitler, or quoting Hitler. And that caused them a lot of problems and actually she and I guess I should say I had a small role in that in that I posted that video clip on Twitter and they started attacking me for doing that. But like that was, but before that moment regarding this Hitler quote, a lot of news organizations, and I'm interested in your thoughts on that, but a lot of news organizations, especially local ones, when they would find these, astro turf, fake grassroots groups showing up at school boards, they would take it at face value. And they would just say, Oh, these are just regular parents showing up here.

When in fact, these were people in many cases, especially in Virginia, who were you know, hardcore professional political consultants paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. They're not just regular, parents showing up.[00:13:00] And you didn't, and you didn't say anything about, people talking about their agenda or anything like that.

It was just, they, limited it only to that surface- value analysis. Would you agree with that?

WEILL: Yeah. And I think you're totally right to call them astroturf to a degree, because this is a tightly managed nationally run organization. I mean, Media Matters this summer, I think, ran their like national playbook, which is so anti gay. Like, it's just it's homophobia.

And yeah, Because it's, it's run on local chapters and also, I think, because the face of it is moms, we have, I think, a very paternalistic, very infantilizing view of motherhood where we say: 'Oh, she's just a mom. This isn't a savvy political organizer. She's a mom.

SHEFFIELD: Operative, yeah.

WEILL: Exactly. And that's not the case. These are people who have political training. These are people who are very organized, who are very networked, who are well funded. [00:14:00] And so I, I think when a local news outlet covers maybe a, bit of a debate at a school board meeting. They're missing the broader context, which is how is this being replicated across the country? What messaging are they following? What message are they often copy pasting? And most importantly, how is this affecting the children in their district?

Because what really grates at me and, if I might also spotlight myself as a mother here, there's so much discussion here about parental rights. We, the parents, some candidates in my town recently had signs, lawn signs, the year of the parent. Where are the kids in this?

Because it's this centrality of parents and their rights, and I think it overlooks the oppression and the control of children that they're suggesting, especially when it comes to queer kids, especially when it comes to kids who need extra support in any capacity.

I think that's where they're really doing students dirty. [00:15:00]

Normal people are now asserting their own parental rights

SHEFFIELD: Mhm. Well, and it's also, they never specify that they only want some parents to have rights. They don't want other parents to have rights. And or to have input into the curriculum. So, if they're a, if they want their child to learn about slavery or they want their child to realize that not being heterosexual is okay.

Like those parents don't get any rights. And I think that's also something that's missing often, I feel like.

WEILL: Absolutely. And I mean, this group has been part of a real broadside on some of those parents. I mean, bringing it back to the Zieglers on a school board where Bridget Ziegler sits, there's a gay member, there's one gay board member. He has been attacked and smeared in these meetings completely baselessly as a groomer. They use the slur against queer adults, and it's completely to undermine the support network that kids get.

It's completely to tell young people that it's not okay to be gay. And it's to, I think, really put [00:16:00] terrifying legal pressures on gay adults for existing.

And so, yeah, when they talk about parental rights, they're talking about a very, small subset of the parental base. One thing I broke down in a recent newsletter is the overwhelming unpopularity of book bans and the overwhelming popularity of certain basic liberal programs like free school lunches, that sort of thing.

That is the majority of parents who support that. Moms for Liberty is a small minority in that. And so to cast themselves as the voice of parents, the parents crusaders. I mean, even factually, that's not right.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's true. And and yet, despite all the machinations and local level achievements in, when people weren't paying attention to them that they, Moms for Liberty was able to achieve.

it Seems to me that, the people in the Democratic Party or people in the broader center to left still haven't fully [00:17:00] understood, how they were able to do things and what they were able to achieve and there isn't any real analog to it that's emerged on the, I mean, there, there are some people are trying, but they're not getting so like that, that, that's kind of the, one of the core differences, I think, between the Democrats and the Republicans is that, When, people are trying to do something on the right, and I can say this having been on both sides of the fence now, that when people are trying to do something on the left, no one supports them in the leadership.

Whereas when people are trying to do something on the right, money is thrown at them. And people are constantly saying, how can I help you? What can I do for you? Who can I introduce you to? How can I help you achieve the cause and help what we're doing? No one does that on the left. And you had, I guess, must have some sense of that because you started your own website called Mom [00:18:00] Left. You want to talk about that in this context here?

WEILL: Yeah. So a couple months ago, I got a newsletter blog up and running called Mom Left. It's a new newsletter for moms on the left. Title's little tongue in cheek, but it emerged out of, being a relatively new mother looking for progressive voices in this space, seeing that there's a huge demand for it, seeing that it's quite popular, but also hearing that the loudest voices in the room are these well funded, very fringe right wing voices.

I think there's a few reasons for that to your point, all the funding really gets thrown at the right. And I think maybe that's to counteract the real popularity of left leaning programs when it comes to parenthood, people support public education, people support freedom to read, lack of censorship, that sort of thing.

So, I think a Moms for Liberty type group can really be the tip of the spear for a lot of more insidious mainstream [00:19:00] Republican activities

SHEFFIELD: And Christian right, especially.

WEILL: They are hugely networked through the Christian right, absolutely. And that was very evident in their conference this summer. This is very evident in the legal groups that they network with when they are called into any kind of legal jeopardy.

So when I was thinking about launching this newsletter, I was looking for the alternatives. I was looking for the voices for moms who are acting in opposition to that. And what I did find was that overwhelmingly moms are opposed to this sort of thing, but that. There's no central organization because I think to organize a group like, Moms for Liberty is a kind of weird thing to do.

People aren't really drawn to the antagonistic school war politics that they represent. People don't really want to get into those battles. And so I thought that, there's a void on the left born out of, weirdly, its popularity with parents.

SHEFFIELD: [00:20:00] Yeah, no, it's true. And so what's been the response so far that you've been getting from since you've launched it,

WEILL: It's been really cool. It's been really affirming. Some of the best messages I've received are from parents of queer kids who are saying, that that there is.

An attack on their Children and that they do feel under supported that they do feel like there has been an under investment of resources where they're desperately needed. There's been just a good amount of camaraderie in response to these pieces. I think a lot of. Parents feel similarly or a lot of parents are frankly just appalled at what they're seeing in school board meetings.

They're appalled at the right wing takeovers of their school districts, and they want some mechanism for fighting back. And I think some of my writing is certainly spoken to that, and I would love to see other voices in the field. There are others, and I'm just hoping that the discussion around this may be surfaces a few more.[00:21:00]

SHEFFIELD: Okay, well, that's great. Good to hear. And, to your point about what parents actually want versus what Moms for Liberty pretends that they want, in the 2023 elections, the Moms for Liberty candidates did very terribly, almost like 100%. I mean, there were, there were some pockets here and there, but overwhelmingly in their big high profile efforts, they failed except for in, the most right wing areas and that we're probably going to do that anyway.

And, so it's been interesting to see because, as you were saying, I think people misread the Glen Youngkin victory last in 2022. And actually on, on this podcast, I'm proud to say that we called it that that would not work, that people could not replicate Youngkin's victory because, in Virginia, the party that has control of the presidency and almost never wins the Virginia governorship the [00:22:00] following year historically speaking.

And of course, that doesn't mean it's going to always be that the case, but overwhelmingly, like, I believe that in the past 30 or 40 years, only two candidates from the president's party have won the Virginia governor's race in that lineup.

And so people, they, seem to misunderstand why he won. And the reality is he probably was going to win just by running a not completely disastrous campaign. And that's what happened. He won and, and, so the Republican party, and unfortunately a lot of the media had also fallen for that narrative as well.

But yeah, it, it just didn't work for him in 2023 because people were actually paying attention. It seems like.

WEILL: Absolutely. Yeah, I think there's this weird tendency to kind of use Children to argue one's existing priors. And so I think kids really became like this load bearing argument for a much larger discussion [00:23:00] about, gay rights about transgender existence.

And so, these, were going to be debates that folks were having anyway, but people on the right found it much easier than to argue. The trans person face to face saying, are you allowed to get medical treatment that you need or not? They found it much easier to say, what about this hypothetical kid who might say that they're trans?

Should we allow them to use the preferred pronouns in school? And I think that became just a, very loaded argument that bears a lot of emotional weight for parents. And so was it something that really played a critical role in Virginia? I think to your point, maybe not, maybe it was already a lost cause for Democrats there, but for people who wanted to extract that message from a yunk and when it was very easy for them to do so.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it was. And we'll see, of course, going forward, but it seems like that the Republican party nationally is kind of [00:24:00] trying to edge away from this organization. But of course I'm sure they're not going to be going anywhere because they do, they, the right wing has, wanted for a long time to be able to try to mobilize the minority of women who have reactionary viewpoints.

And so they perform a useful function if, it's only that for, for the Republican party and, I'm curious what your sense is, but, in the research that I've done and, the, in my own observation, it does seem like overwhelmingly women who lean right word.

Are, extremely religious and there are almost none who are either not religious we're not religious or as best for particularly non Christian. Is that what's your sense on that?

WEILL: Yeah, Moms for Liberty is an extremely Christian organization. They'll say that they're not, they'll say that they're [00:25:00] open to everyone.

You go to a conference. It is, it's Bible flipping. And. A lot of the justification is offered for their policies is couched in a language like, oh, we're teaching Judeo Christian values. And 1st of all, as a Jewish person, I'm not sure I necessarily feel so comfortable in those circles, but that's a different story.

But, yeah, it's an intensely religious. Movements and 1 other thing that I would highlight is that a lot of activists involved for mom with Moms for Liberty are not necessarily people with children in public schools. We have people who are religious homeschoolers who are going to school board meetings and arguing against the right of those children to receive a public education.

Often on, grounds of their own religious objections, these are not far removed from people who have argued against evolution being taught in schools. It's just the latest [00:26:00] permutation and they're arguing a very religiously right program in these schools, but sometimes under more updated language.

SHEFFIELD: And I think it does, it does also make sense that the to the extent that they would have success in mobilization, it would be of women that it would be through motherhood rather than any other. Organizational paradigm what do you think?

WEILL: Absolutely. And, I think to some degree they're onto something because the U. S. does not treat mothers well, we're a country without maternity leave. Our social safety net is paper thin. There's a lot of sense of neglect for mothers, a lot of sense that we've been done dirty. I think a lot of women will take that feeling and look for new outlets for it. Some women are able to find that in reaction.

Some of them will lean into this paradigm that's [00:27:00] very common on the Christian right that says that if you want to be truly valued, if you want to be a really good mother and wife and, fulfill your job as a woman, you need to be the subservient figure who doesn't work. Maybe she homeschools her children.

She's very cloistered away from society, from solidarity, from power. And for some women, that's, it's a comforting message. It says that at least somebody is going to care for them and look after them. And it affirms their womanhood in a way that I think is appealing for some people. And so it doesn't surprise me at all that.

Groups like Moms for Liberty and, zooming out, I think a lot of maybe the like trad wife influencers on TikTok, they're all speaking to that message that you know, dissatisfaction. But the difference is that I don't think most of the women who join up with those movements are ultimately.

Going to get the rights and the dignity that they're looking for.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, [00:28:00] no, I, that's a, it's a good point.

Why many right-wing women don't live the lifestyle they preach to others

SHEFFIELD: And there's also even attention with these, we'll say traditionally feminine or anti feminist women that, they don't actually fully believe the things that they say, even though they claim to so like, and you can see that.

So, like, there's there's this woman named Alex Clark, who is kind of big in that space for anti feminist women and she also is. Has never been married and she's like 29 or 30 or something like that. And yeah, I guess actually in her 30s, I believe, and is constantly lamenting how she can't get dates.

(Begin video clip)

ALEX CLARK: Every time I tell a guy at the bar, when he asks me, you work in politics, what does that mean? You're conservative? Oh. And they will say, does that mean that you're pro life? And I say, yes. Their eyes light up. Their eyes light up. They grab their friends and like, dude, get a load of this. This girl says she's pro [00:29:00] life.

And they're like, so wait, what does that mean? Do you ever agree in abortion in any circumstance? Is there any, circumstances where you think abortion is okay? And I will say, no. I am pro life. No exceptions, no matter what. And then, they're always fascinated by this and floored by this, and they're like, Dude, I've never heard a girl say this.

Like, I'm so curious. Like, I always hear the other side, like, a woman's right to choose, her body or her choice. Like, I, like, what do you say to people when they say that? Guys love this! Guys love a conservative woman. At least at the bar. And then, you know, they don't really, they're like, into it, and then they don't text me back.

But, hey, you know, tomato tomatoes! Semantics!

(End video clip)

SHEFFIELD: There are a lot of these anti feminist commentators, women. And they are in this situation, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, those are the ones that come to mind, but a lot of these women, they want something that can't exist, it seems like.

They want to be able to have their own agency. But they also think that women should not have power, and it's like, those [00:30:00] things don't work.

WEILL: Right. I think a lot of these women have made a very cynical deal where they know that they need the agency that they have. They need the agency that's provided by their careers, by their rights by their independence from men.

They've also bought into, and sometimes I mean literally, bought into, they make their money from espousing this paradigm in which, women's worth is derived from their relationships with men. Women's worth is derived by having a man who's like, who she's subservient to and who is her provider and that, her currency is her attractiveness or.

Something like that. And I think it's, I think it's extremely, I think it's morally bankrupt to be selling that to young girls as Alex Clark tries to do. We see this in a lot of, I think, TPUSA videos. I mean, it's, untrue. It's, she would be, I think, tremendously dissatisfied in the [00:31:00] life that she is pitching other women on.

And she is, outside of this clip, pitching women against going to college, she's saying that your value is, again, it's, contingent on your getting a man. And I don't know how many young women you have listening to your podcast, but I'm telling you that if you're normal and you want a normal partner, you can just do that.

And that also does not determine your value, but you do not have to be Alex Clark. That just sets my teeth on edge.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And the other thing, it's like, I'm sure that there had been plenty of men that, who agree with her, far right Christian viewpoints that she has found one way or the other over the years, but she hasn't chosen to marry any of them. So in the clip, she bemoans that, we'll say regular men are not interested in someone with her extreme viewpoints.

But I'm sure there are guys out there that have those same viewpoints. But she hasn't chosen to marry them. And I think a lot of that [00:32:00] just simply is that, if you're a man who has those views and wants to, quote, unquote, provide for a woman, it's also usually a code for you want to control her. And Alex Clark doesn't want to be controlled. So, that's probably why she hasn't gotten married to somebody who has her viewpoints.

It's like they live in a bubble of cognitive dissonance, their entire existence is wrapped in it. And it's tough to say, I mean, ultimately, whether this is just purely cynical or it's cognitive dissonance or whatever it is, but it's not, it's clearly is not a good way to live for her, based on what she said.

WEILL: It's not, and, I've seen this born out another right wing women's influences, all of them quite far. Right. White Christian women. And they're unhappy. I'm thinking about figures like Lauren Southern, who made this, who was fielding all these questions about why she wasn't married.

Finally, I think did get married, [00:33:00] husband left had some kind of breakdown where she lived in a trailer park for a bit. You're not pitching yourself in a world that values your dignity. I, can go on. There are other figures. There's a like radical Mormon figure who was huge on having as many kids as possible and was blogging about it.

And I was reading her blog and it's all the comments are men saying, if you're really this good wife, why are you online? Why are we hearing from you at all? So again, this is not a paradigm in which these women can exist in as influencers. So I think maybe to a degree, they know that the life that they're pitching for themselves, that they're pitching for their followers would make them unhappy.

And so they are getting, The freedom afforded to them, ironically, by a culture that provides at least some abortion rights, that provides no fault divorce, that has some [00:34:00] value for women's independence and dignity. And they are, actively campaigning against that while also profiting from it.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. No, it is a really it's, just, it's sad in a number of ways, but it's also, upsetting as well. And for those who haven't seen it, the TV series The Handmaid's Tale actually does deal with this dynamic very well, with one of the characters who was definitely doing that. So if you haven't seen that, I definitely would encourage you if you're interested in that, this sort of exploration of this type of subject.

Have you seen it?

WEILL: I saw the first couple seasons of it. And yeah, I agree. I mean, ultimately, if you're a woman cheering on this sort of thing, you're cheering for the wrong team. I think some women on the far right do understand either explicitly or tacitly that they are arguing for their own ends to the extent that they [00:35:00] are arguing against queer parents that they're arguing against women of color.

So they are trying to get some measure of edge over people who are, not straight white women. But, if their preferred program ever did come into existence, it would place them wildly inferior to men. And I think, yes, they do dress that up with this romantic talk about having a provider and being a real woman and that clearly, and as is evidenced in their personal choices, would not make them happy.

SHEFFIELD: And of course there's nothing wrong if that's what somebody wants to do. But what's wrong is forcing everybody else. To make that so it's actually not a choice, that it's mandatory. That's ultimately what the problem is here.

All right. So, just going back to the Moms for Liberty and the Christian Ziegler scandal, that's to what you were saying about some of this there, there's also a lot of hypocrisy involved [00:36:00] as well, because, in the case of Bridget Ziegler, this is a woman who very clearly is bisexual, and having a relationship with a woman, but at the same time, actively going and trying to not allow other people to be something other than heterosexual in public as a matter of public policy. It's, just really, it's really disgusting, frankly.

WEILL: It is. It's upsetting. And, we don't know the full extent of this relationship. We only know from a police report that Bridget did say, I have been in a relationship with this woman before.

Clearly, they planned on doing it again. And, that's completely her business. And those are absolutely her right to do.

The trouble is, though, where she is part of a movement that teaches children that it's degenerate to do exactly what she's accused of doing. It's the trouble is that she sits on a school board where she has enabled the harassment of a gay colleague, not just, [00:37:00] the harassment, but smearing him as a quote groomer for, being gay.

She didn't say that, but she allowed those comments to continue while she was chairing the board.

I think the hypocrisy there is it's stunning, but it also reminds me that for a lot of folks on the right. It's not so much about internal ideological consistency as it is about power. They can, you can be gay on the right and still advance an argument that ultimately does not work in your favor, but is working to crush people who don't have who are much more vulnerable to anti gay legislation.

So, if. It were punishable to be by in Florida. Well, I don't think someone like Bridget Ziegler would really be the the first person in line to be harmed by these kinds of policies. So, they are exacting this very like Christian hegemony while also,[00:38:00] doing a lot of the same things that they're, that they denigrate in their enemies.

It's just, it's wildly hypocritical. And yet there are. March toward power advances.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. No. And that's a good point because, ultimately their main motivation is will to power rather than a policy agenda. Like there, there, are some policies that they want, but ultimately, they could in their ideal world basically all be passed in one week, and they wouldn't really have any other policies left to put forward-- in the sense that, they don't have fully formed policy viewpoints. And you see this with the Trump administration that ended in 2021 that, they, had no idea how to manage the bureaucracy.

They had no idea who to hire. They had no idea how to execute anything that they wanted. Because they, or like what they said they wanted, they, once they had the power, they [00:39:00] couldn't really do anything with it. Other than engage in retribution against disfavored groups. But in terms of actually helping the people that they voted for them, they really had no idea or apparent interest.

WEILL: Right. I think a lot of these people run and govern on grievance politics, right? Trump, I think his, True dream would be someone who calls into Fox News and gets called, sir, all the time. Well, in vain against immigrants and that sort of thing with a lot of these folks, it's not so much about having a fully realized ideology or program so much as it is about domineering and aggression about being at the top of a hierarchy.

And certainly you can advance that while also holding some attributes that. Your ideology, if implemented consistently, would hammer down. And so that's why I, I think it's so interesting that Trump won [00:40:00] so much of the evangelical vote, even though he is, on his face should be repugnant to them, right?

He's a womanizer, he's been divorced. Bunch of times he's been accused of sexual assault a bunch of times, but if you drill down into it, and I'm very grateful actually for the work that some Christian scholars on the left have done, they said, it looks like theologically he is misaligned with evangelicals, but in the actual political underpinnings, this will to power, this will to domination, he represents a lot of this aggressive, masculine Christianity that they're lining up behind.

And so, I think there's a real disparity between what they preach, what they say their political program is and what they really want to enact.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, exactly.

Republicans show they will throw away lower-level politicians but they fear dumping Trump

SHEFFIELD: But it is interesting that with regard to Christian Ziegler it seems like he's getting thrown under the bus by the Republican party in Florida and, and, we kind of saw that recently [00:41:00] with George Santos getting expelled and.

Just under half of the Republican caucus in the house voting to expel him. But at the same time, they refuse to take any action against Donald Trump that is meaningful. What do you think is the dynamic? Why is there a, why are they willing to not defend certain people, but, are willing to do anything seemingly for Trump?

WEILL: I think Trump is just too useful for them to discard. He represents this huge base that is, not necessarily aligned with the orthodoxy of the Republican party. He speaks to so much latent bigoted rage that I don't think any previous candidate was able to tap that he has this cult of personality around him.

And for the GOP to discard him would be certainly, it would be earth shaking for them. It would be very I think maybe politically unwise. He's certainly far and away the. [00:42:00] runner for the 2024 election. But when you get to a figure like Christian Ziegler, I think a lot of people say who, or you get to a George Santos, who, I mean, a man, he's just criming left and right.

He has like some scam with stolen puppies from an Amish puppy mill. Like you just can't make it up with this guy. There's nobody really lining up to say, Hey, I'm behind the puppy mill guy. It's so I think occasionally someone will have to take the fall. Occasionally someone is a combination of too toxic and not valuable enough for them to defend.

And so you can swap out the Florida Republican chair quite easily. It's not a big deal. You can, you can get somebody else to run in a hard right district in Long Island. It's not a huge deal. So I think they understand that, not everything is not every scandal needs to be fought to the death.

Flat Earthers are more of a thing than you might think, and almost all are far-right Christians

SHEFFIELD: And so your interest in sort of, far right groups and organizations, you've had that for a while and you came out with a book on that topic. Let's talk about that book called Off the Edge. What was tell us about what, did you cover in that book?

WEILL: Sure. So off the, yeah. Off the Edge is the product of my years long fascination and involvement with the Flat Earth Movement. I have, for ages, been so fascinated with conspiracy theories, what they say about how we believe, what we allow ourselves to believe, and increasingly their role in politics.

And that also, overlaps with some of my interest in weird and, Dark internet spaces. So while working as a reporter at the daily beast covering the far right, I started seeing a lot of neo Nazis who seem to believe in flat earth. And I said, they must be kidding. This [00:44:00] must be a joke. And I dug into it and it was not a joke.

So I spent years going to flat earth conferences, hanging out with these folks, meeting some really interesting characters, some characters who I think are a lot smarter than people would. Imagine of flat earthers, a guy who built his own rocket ship to blast up and see how, if he could see any curvature really I'll say unique thinkers.

Some of that is not necessarily praise, but some of it was certainly challenging to me and interesting in the way that I interrogate how people think and believe. And so off the edge is the culmination of that.

SHEFFIELD: Okay. And then. No, it's, and it's interesting you you touched on something that I think that does, it bedevils a lot of, public reaction to conspiracy movements is that, I think a lot of people, they, find it hard to believe [00:45:00] that these things are real.

Even with Donald Trump, a lot of these extreme policies he's talked about doing, like building concentration camps for unauthorized immigrants, rounding them up and putting them into a concentration camp with, millions of people in it and, and these are things that he's, is people actively say, and, person, imprisoning people who don't do what he says who are government employees or firing them or even executing them in the case of of general Millie, he had said yeah.

there is this, I don't know, it's, to some degree, people, these ideas are so out there. They're so crazy. They're so awful that do people who disagree with them, like. Is there, is that, a challenge in your viewpoint of getting people to accept these things are real and they're coming for you?

WEILL: It is challenging. And I think part of the reason I took [00:46:00] up flat earth as an example, when I was looking to write a book about conspiracy beliefs is that flat earth is almost the hardest to believe that anybody believes is it's so out there that I think it really served as a stand in for, look, people can believe.

Anything. And so in writing that book, not only did I speak to a lot of folks who believe in flat earth, I talked to a lot of psychologists. I read a lot of studies. And, what I learned was that conspiracy belief. It's not necessarily it's not a logical. Brain process, but what it is doing is it's it's serving as a coping mechanism for a lot of folks.

It's providing stability for people who don't want to believe the available answers or who think that there's not a satisfactory answer for the world that they're presented with conspiracy theories. And I think this is especially important in politics are also, I found a form of identity formation when [00:47:00] you don't want to believe some reality in front of you, say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, conspiracy theories allow you to link with other like minded people to form this sense of self and the sense of community, really, with other people who agree with you.

Flat earthers are almost like building their own reality, a very small one, but this circle of people who say it's us against literally the rest of the world. And I think for people of the community who do feel very isolated, who do feel very lost or maybe confused or antagonistic against the rest of the world, having a flat earth community for them is huge.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. So if you were to make some generalizations though, is this religious reasons or other reasons predominantly that the flat earthers are into it?

WEILL: Religion is the biggest one. One way that a lot of people I've spoke to have gotten into it is [00:48:00] by extreme biblical literalism, also very cherry picked biblical literalism. So they'll go looking for some, in the case of one guy I spoke to looking for some answer about, say, the floods of the Bible, and they'll find a YouTube video that says, actually, if you read it the way that the Bible was meant to be read, you'll see that there are all these references to circles and to the plane. And that, the only way to be a real Christian is to accept the reality of God's perfect, flat earth.

So for a lot of them, it is religious. And I also, to go back to the point I made earlier about this, not necessarily being logical. I think having a conspiracy to that degree, a conspiracy that's so out there and invalidating of every other fact is that once you accept it on extremely tenuous, like religious grounds, It allows you to throw away all the other facts that you don't want to contemplate either.[00:49:00]

So you could say that you know, Bible says flat earth. Oh, wow. Everybody else is wrong. Let's see what else is wrong about. And you get into all kinds of anti Semitic conspiracy theories. You get into a bizarre health hoaxes, anti vax belief, things that are more immediately dangerous for you than flatter.

So I think a lot of it is religiously, it has a religious hook, but then it has a real ideological selling point for people who believe,

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it's, a way of constructing an alternative reality for yourself to live in and and like, that's, that is ultimately the, larger sort of meta crisis of this moment in human history is that, we, for, most of humanity's history, our people who.

Who didn't believe in reality or who had false beliefs, they couldn't organize themselves, but now they can. [00:50:00] and they're, trying to go against everybody else. And, that's, I think is, the challenge. But anyway it's, been a great discussion. I'm glad you can join me today.

WEILL: So thanks so much for having me. Yeah, it's been wonderful.

SHEFFIELD: All right. So that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody joining us for the discussion and you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show, you can get the full archives of the podcast with video, audio and transcript of all the episodes.

And if you are a paid subscriber, you can have unlimited access. Some of the content is available only for paid members and my great thanks to those who are contributing in that regard. And then also if you are on the Theory of Change website, you get access to the two other podcasts that I am co hosting, Doomscroll, which is a [00:51:00] satirical look at the news. And then also So This Just Happened, which is a look at the people and personalities behind the news as well.

So I encourage everybody to check those out and you can get more also by going to Flux.community. This show is part of that, and I appreciate everybody for joining us today and I will see you next time.

Doomscroll Bonus: Kevin Spacey, AI models, and Mickey Mouse

Matthew Sheffield — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 08:00:30 GMT

This episode is only for paid subscribers. Enjoy the laughs and support our work on Substack at the link above or on Patreon!

Audio Chapters

0:00 — Kevin Spacey predictably snuggles up to Tucker Carlson

06:22 — AI-generated fake people are taking over the influencer business

09:56 — Mickey Mouse and Tigger are now in the public domain and chaos is already ensuing

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STJH: Claudine Gay and why the ‘issue’ is never the issue

Matthew Sheffield — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 08:00:36 GMT

Headlines

0:00 — Claudine Gay and the bigger picture

05:06 — Christopher Rufo, William F. Buckley, and the right wing’s 70+ year war on education and equality

12:47 — Gay’s ouster will make black Americans pay closer attention

16:43 — “Liberal media” outlets aren’t getting tricked by reactionaries, they agree with them because they are center-right

24:50 — Jeffrey Epstein lawsuit documents release have nothing new so far

26:52 — Pharmaceutical companies lowering insulin prices after Biden's price control

28:04 — Minimum wages are going up in 22 states in 2024

29:51 — Michigan Republicans face financial and political disaster thanks to QAnon chairwoman

31:55 — Elon Musk and other right-wingers shocked that Green Day is left-wing

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Theme Song

Easy Lover: “The End of Our Deceit”

Lyrics and Vocals by Kali Holloway

Music by Jeremy Wimmer

Maine bans Trump from ballot as Vanilla Ice plays Mar-a-Lago

Matthew Sheffield — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 08:10:20 GMT

Audio Chapters

0:00 — Maine becomes second state to ban Trump for 1/6 insurrection

03:25 — Trump still pushing failed "immunity" argument in court

08:09 — Lauren Boebert switches districts after theater groping exposure

12:09 — Nikki Haley faces criticism for Civil War slavery gaffe

14:08 — Right-wing Christians rage at conservative bikini calendar

20:08 — Company asks FDA for permission to market legal ecstasy

25:27 — MAGA cheers as Vanilla Ice and a Ninja Turtle perform at Mar-a-Lago

You can watch the video version of this episode too

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Encore: The Christian right plotted against democracy long before January 6th

Matthew Sheffield — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 09:57:14 GMT

Almost three years have passed since a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol with the intent of overthrowing the 2020 election so that then-president Donald Trump could illegally remain in office against the wishes of the American people.

During the intervening time, while hundreds of people have been indicted and convicted for their role in the events, almost nothing has emerged from the law enforcement investigations as to what Trump and his inner circle of aides were doing that tragic day. And that’s because federal investigators can only reveal information connected to a formal criminal indictment.

What is very clear, however, is that the tens of thousands of people who came to Washington on January 6, 2021 were doing it for something much more important to them than the grievances of a snobby New York investor. For many of the people who entered Capitol that day, invading the building was striking a blow for God against a wayward America they despised.

Unfortunately, this information was out there well before the Capitol invasion, but it wasn’t reported much by the mainstream press, which spends most of its time obsessing over political gossip instead of actually understanding politics.

Joining the program to discuss all this with me is Bruce Wilson. He is a researcher and journalist who has studied Christian nationalist movements for decades and has tracked their ever-growing influence on Republican politics. In the show — which was recorded on January 6, 2022 — we go through a number of specific moments to show that the attack on America was building for years and why the extremists who did it want to come back for more.

This episode previously aired January 8, 2022.

Video

Transcript

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Thanks for being here today, Bruce.

BRUCE WILSON: Sure.

SHEFFIELD: This is such a large story, there’s a lot of context, that is difficult for mainstream journalists whose primary job is to chase politicians around. So it’s kind of hard for them to tell this full story. And even in a one hour podcast, roughly it’s hard for us to do that. So we’re going to tell the story through the lens of a guy who is a member of a radical anti-abortion movement group.

Let’s talk about the group first a little bit, if you could. Talk about that briefly, if you will, for a second.

WILSON: Well, it’s a number of decades old founded by Randal Terry, later picked up by Flip Benham, and now it’s got shared leadership. It was a more legitimate wing of what amounted to probably the biggest domestic terrorism phenomenon in the United States in the 20th century. There was nothing else like it, and the targets extended more than abortion doctors or abortion clinics. There was Eric Rudolph who blew up a bunch of people at the World’s Fair because he hated gays the United Nations. There was a whole list. He was concerned about the “new world order,” but anyway, so the ideology extends a lot further than you might think of.

And underpinning it tends to be the Christian Reconstructionist movement, which is where, more than not, the anti-abortion movement came out of. So there’s a whole totalitarian, if you will, vision of how to radically restructure society that lays behind the anti-abortion movement. So ultimately the Christian reconstructionists want to radically pare down government and to impose Biblical law at the local level.

SHEFFIELD: Because they see that government has somehow intruded upon the rights of the church. And that the church should be in control of society, not the government.

WILSON: Yeah. The Christian reconstructionists divide things into three separate spheres. There’s the government sphere, the family sphere, which is the most immediate, and essentially the church sphere. And that’s pretty much it. So most justice would be administered through biblical law at the local level.

SHEFFIELD: So we’re going to center the discussion around this guy who was a member of this movement and his name is Ante Pavkovic, he’s a far right pastor based out of North Carolina. Mostly what he does is he travels the country and screams at people and stalks them outside of abortion clinics. That’s his, seems to be his primary occupation, if you will. So I’m going to play some footage of him, denouncing people and denouncing America.

(Begin clip)

ANTE PAVKOVIC: Most of the people today in America that go to church do not know God. Half of the churches in America are fake. The ministers are fake. They don’t know God. It’s a job to them, it’s a vocation. It’s a way to make money. They don’t preach the true gospel.

There’s plenty of pastors in America that tell their congregants that abortion is all right. Those are not men of God. Those are servants of the devil!

So it doesn’t matter how many people go to church in our nation. Most of our nation is lost. Look at it!

(End clip)

SHEFFIELD: And the clip goes on for ad infinitum, frankly. We don’t need to play all of it.

But basically, the core things to take away from it are that this is a far right movement that sees America as ultimately, fundamentally, illegitimate. That hates fellow Americans, thinks that it’s God’s personal servants, and that anyone who criticizes them is Satan’s little helper, if you will.

It’s a movement that blends racism, that blends misogyny, that blends religious fanaticism all in into one, just this noxious cocktail. And there’s something that’s kind of interesting and unfortunate about a lot of people when they observe far-right politics, is that they tend to think it’s all just one thing. It’s all sexism, or it’s all racism, or it’s all religious fanaticism, but the reality is that it’s all a different mix for different people. The idea of a divine imprimatur is perhaps the biggest motivator, but it certainly isn’t the the only one.

WILSON: Yeah. Another way you can look at it is that, broadly speaking across the spectrum from the Christian Reconstructionists to the charismatics, who I spent an awful lot of time studying, they think that America has fallen away from God and God’s commandments. And there’s a palingenetic process. They feel like the nation has become almost impossibly corrupt, and it needs to be restored to some imagined future glory. It’s what was going on in Nazi Germany, that they had a similar vision of a national rebirth.

So that underlies this, even as much as the anti-abortion people will talk about how awful America is, there still will be this vision in the background. It’s always there in the Christian Reconstructionist vision that America has betrayed God’s commandments, and therefore we are cursed. But if we shape up and we prostate ourselves before God, we will again, receive God’s blessing and we will be great again.

SHEFFIELD: Make America great again. And that’s one of the things that we’ll see later on in the episode that Donald Trump, his campaign slogans and the things that he says are explicitly designed to parallel in some cases literally, the exact words that these people say.

So that’s the theology of these people and and their political outlook and they, in a lot of cases are the engine behind a lot of other right-wing movements as well. So like the militia movement is heavily affiliated with Christian Reconstructionists and people like that have this idea of: ‘Someday, we’re going to overthrow the government and return it to the way that God had made it in constitution.’

And the other thing also to note is that the January 6 insurrection it wasn’t the only time that we’ve had violence at the Capitol or interruptions on the floor of Congress by people trying to stop official duties. One of those that took place was an event that took place in 2007.

And at the time it got almost no media coverage. And it was involving Ante Pavkovic. Pavkovic. He and his Christian nationalists comrades decided they were outraged that Harry Reid, who just recently passed away, who was the Senate Majority Leader at the time, Harry Reid had invited a man who was a a Hindu religious leader to deliver the prayer in the Senate.

So they, every day they have an opening prayer of their session. Most of the senators never attend it, but I guess it’s a traditional formality that they’ve decided to just keep going. No non Christian or Jewish religious leader had ever done it up until this point in 2007.

And so, Well, actually I think in fact there was another incident that happened in 2000. So that was the first time when they actually did have a Hindu person do a prayer. And there was a lot of anger on the Christian right against them. But nothing really happened as a result of it.

But in 2007, there was a second moment where a Senate leader decided that they were going to invite in the name of religious pluralism, and the fact that this is an America for everyone, no matter what your faith or non faith is, to deliver a prayer.

And so, there was a man that was invited whose name is Rajan Zed. And he’s a Hindu religious leader based out of Nevada. So he got up on the dais at the Capitol and he was interrupted. And C-SPAN 2 actually captured the footage of that day, but to my knowledge has never aired on any television network.

(Begin clip)

SENATE STAFFER: Today’s opening prayer will be offered by a guest chaplain, Mr. Rajan Zed of the Indian Association of Northern Nevada

ANTE PAVKOVIC: Lord Jesus, forgive us Father for allowing the prayer of the wicked, which is an abomination in your sight!

SENATE STAFFER: The Sergeant at arms will restore order in the Senate.

PAVKOVIC: You have said that we shall have no other gods before you! You are the one true and living god!

SENATE STAFFER: The Sergeant at Arms will restore order in the chamber.

PAVKOVIC: Have mercy Lord!

RAJAN ZED: Let us pray.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: In Jesus’s name, I pray.

ZED: We meditate on that transcendental glory of the Deity Supreme.

WOMAN: We will keep saying your name, O Jesus! You are the only one who can save us!

SENATE STAFFER: The Sergeant at Arms will restore order in the Senate, in the chamber.

ZED: Let us pray. We meditate on the transcendental glory of that Deity Supreme, who is inside the heart of the earth, inside the life of the sky, and inside the soul of the heaven. May he stimulate and illuminate our minds.

(End clip)

SHEFFIELD: And he went on with a very nice prayer to try to get people to think and respect each other. So there was certainly nothing objectionable to it and normal people were not offended by it.

But it was an important moment because– so at that time, so you heard two voices in the clip. Obviously the male voice was, he was identified by the police, as Ante Pavkovic .

But then also his wife, Katherine Pavkovic, was believed to be the woman who was in the clip as well. And they were carted off by the police and subsequently arrested for what they did and charged. But in the far right Christian community, there was no condemnation for what they did.

And there was no acknowledgement that it was a gross violation of all their rhetoric of pretending to be concerned about religious freedom. That’s something that you’ve looked at also that these movements often try to use the term “religious freedom” as kind of a cudgel to bash everyone else. But they themselves don’t actually believe, right?

WILSON: Yeah. They’re there they’re ultimately supremacists. No other religion other than their particular form of Christianity, which in this case, would be typically Protestant, which Christian Reconstructionism is. And this viewpoint extends over to the charismatic side of the equation. So even the fellow Protestant denominations: Methodists, and Episcopalians, and Presbyterians and so on, certainly Unitarians are seen as illegitimate and perhaps under sway of demons.

So that’s how extreme it is. And even though the Christian reconstructionist don’t do this, but among the charismatics, say the New Apostolic people, they will show up on stage quite happily with Catholics, but when they’re in private, they will make no bones about the fact that the Catholic Church is, at least, under the sway of demon influence.

So that’s how extreme it is. So it’s no surprise that these Operation Save America people were screaming out a Hindu prayer, which they saw as the worst form of sacrilege that was probably at some point going to break down God’s wrath. That’s the way it works.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And and they’ve, some of them, have explicitly talked about how that, I think Rushdoony actually talked– RJ Rushdoony who was the founder of Christian Reconstructionism– actually wrote about how religious freedom was something that they would use but didn’t believe in.

WILSON: I vaguely remember it, but it was also echoed by his sometimes second in command, Gary North, there was a break at some point, but North essentially said the same thing. He said, we will use democracy to get rid of it.

SHEFFIELD: Well, and it’s something that they have in common with other far right movements, whether it’s ones that tend to be more misogynist oriented, like the Proud Boys, or ones that tend to be more racially motivated, is that they see the vast majority of Americans as not real Americans. That only they and their political allies are Americans. That no one else actually deserves rights or freedom in their thinking. Is that accurate, would you say?

WILSON: Yeah. And I’ve been really surprised since the advent of Trump that the Republican Party has almost, they’ve walked right up to overtly acknowledging that they want to be a herrenvolk democracy. They want to a herrenvolk democracy, which is an ethnic democracy or for them, that would be a white, ethnic democracy, a democracy of the minority and that they would of course, find ways of excluding all other ethnicities from the vote.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And now I’m going to play a clip from a guy named John MacArthur. He’s a mega church pastor here in California. Extremely influential within far right Christianity, but most people have never heard of this guy, but he is rolling in money and actually was behind the lawsuit when he wanted to keep his church open in the pandemic, that the Supreme Court ruling.

So this is him talking about what he really thinks about religious freedom.

(Begin clip)

JOHN MACARTHUR: I read the other day that one of the evangelical publicists, whatever that is, said he’s happy to let us know that the new administration will uphold religious freedom. Really? The new administration will uphold religious freedom? Um, I don’t even support religious freedom, religious freedom is what sends people to hell.

To say I support religious freedom is to say I support idolatry. It’s to say I support lies. I support hell. I support the kingdom of darkness. You can’t say that! No Christian with half a brain would say: ‘We support religious freedom.’ We support the truth! (applause)

But if the new administration supports religious freedom, get ready, persecution will be ramped up. Because the more supportive they are of the devil’s lies, the less they’re going to tolerate the truth of scripture. (Break in audio)

We’re not going to lobby for freedom of religion. What kind of nonsense is that? We are in the world to expose all those lies as lies.

(End clip)

SHEFFIELD: And he goes on. That mentality that America is only for them. And they’ve had the increasing realization since Republicans have not won the popular vote in the presidential elections since 2004, that the hold that they think they deserve and that they’re entitled to on America, it’s slipping and they’re getting upset about it.

It’s really disturbing. So that’s kind of the background, the context here. We have the theology, which says that the far right are the only ones entitled to governance. Then we have the idea that they can just go ahead and disrupt anything that they want because they’re the servants of God.

And I think one example that at the time it did receive a lot of coverage, but people didn’t– I don’t think they paid attention fully to it. And that is Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk, who in 2015, refused to perform marriages after the Supreme Court in Obergefell versus Hodges had said that same-sex marriage needed to be legal.

And so, people, were generally aware who followed the news that she was doing this, but they didn’t understand why I think. And a lot of that was because of the newspaper. They didn’t cover it much. So I’m going to just briefly play a clip of her talking to people when she was refusing to do the marriages.

(Begin clip)

Unidentified Man #1: Why are you not issuing marriage licenses today?

Kim Davis: Because I’m not.

Unidentified Man #2: Under whose authority are you not issuing the licenses?

Kim Davis: Under God’s authority.

Unidentified Man #1: Did the God tell you to treat us like this?

Unidentified Man #2: I don’t believe in your God.

Kim Davis: I’ve asked you all to leave. You are interrupting my business.

Unidentified Man #1: You can talk to police if you want us to leave. You can call the police.

SHEFFIELD: So that’s just a little short moment. But there’s a lot of doctrine there that I think a lot of people haven’t heard of. Tell us a little bit about that, Bruce.

WILSON: Well, it emerged out of the most extremely racist, white supremacist wing of the militia movement. And the doctrine was the doctrine of the lower magistrate. That if a lower authority were asked to do something which ran contrary to God’s law, or the perceived interpretation of the Constitution also, because there’s a lot of legalistic, mumbo jumbo attached to this basically crackpot interpretation of the Constitution. But should this happen, the lower magistrate- and they’ve walked this back to English common law. The idea is that some officials, especially county sheriffs who are almost sacred in this viewpoint, they can simply flip off state or federal government and this’ll be okay. But this ideology has been gaining ground to the point where we’re on the cusp of having county sheriffs openly deputize militias.

There is this character, Dar Leaf, in Michigan, who was friends with a couple of the characters who have been charged with plotting to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer and that’s not the only example. There are a lot of examples of county sheriffs across the country, it’s far from a majority, it’s still very much a minority, but still, there are lots of examples of county sheriffs who have become quite close to local militias.

SHEFFIELD: So they believe that they can, any lower official, no matter how low level, like a county clerk, if they believe that a higher official has acted in violation of God’s law, that they can just overturn it, right? And so what is the idea behind that? Like where do they get that idea?

WILSON: Well, ultimately God’s laws supersedes man’s law. The ultimate authority is God. And if you’re really sticking to your guns, if you’re really true to your beliefs, you will stand by that now.

SHEFFIELD: Of course, but now how do they resolve, or do they even consider the problem of what if you’ve got two people who say they’re acting in God’s name, but have different ideas?

WILSON: Well, I think the idea is that we’ll take power first, and then we’ll work out those details later. The religious right is a vastly complex coalition and should they achieve complete control, the resulting in-fighting will be quite extreme. Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, Jews can do this on and on. There will be lots of religious persecution, lots of internecine religious infighting. And so it will be, in short, a mess.

SHEFFIELD: They’ve resolved first, we have to destroy pluralism. And then after that, we can sort everything out subsequently. The problem with pluralism is that it’s something that almost everyone believes in, but most people don’t understand why it’s good and what the point of it is. So like in America’s founding, the creators of the constitution deliberately decided to keep religion out of it because they saw that it would be harmful to the people who were minorities, but they saw that it would be harmful to the majority as well. Basically, you could argue that this idea of America as a nation only for Christians, that’s the original “big lie.”

WILSON: Yeah. They kept that space open, but there were other things going on, like allowing for slavery, which eventually generated a whole new theological tradition in the South, which that’s the guy kind of codified by people like theologians like Robert Lewis Dabney, which in turn actually became the precedent for Christian Reconstructionism, which in its most extreme form, is wildly racist and validates some form of slavery.

SHEFFIELD: That was the point of it originally. And the other thing about the Kim Davis episode that I think is important in retrospect is that, so here you had a government official deliberately refusing to perform official duties. And it was something that built on what happened in 2007, with Rajan Zed.

First, that was only just three people screaming in the well of the Senate. But now with Kim Davis, you had, after she was held in contempt of court, she held a rally outside of her jail after she refused to even comply in any way with judicial orders and Mike Huckabee, who was a presidential candidate, Republican presidential candidate, was there and he literally built a stage for this woman and were treating her as a hero. And I’ve got a clip here of Rick Santorum, who was another Republican presidential candidate, who hailed her. And he did it on CNN.

(Begin clip)

RICK SANTORUM: The obligation of, I believe, of a president, of a Congress, when the court acts unconstitutionally, and I believe they have acted unconstitutionally, is to use the power that is inherent in the Constitution that they call checks and balances. When a president acts unconstitutionally, the court can slap down the president.

What happens if the Supreme Court acts unconstitutionally? Who has the– who gets the opportunity to challenge them?

JOHN BERMAN (CNN host): Do you think it’s Kim Davis? Do you think it’s a county clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky?

SANTORUM: I would agree that what, what Kim Davis did, in my opinion, was heroic. And she suffered the consequences from it. She, she was, she was, uh, uh, you know, obviously, I think the, the putting her in jail was ridiculous, as is an extreme position. But you know what? That’s sometimes what it takes for people, who, uh, stand up and conduct civil disobedience because the law is unjust, uh, to suffer the consequences of that.

And, uh, so I commend her for actually standing up for her principles.

(End clip)

SHEFFIELD: You could argue, I think, that in some sense, what Kim Davis was doing, was it that different than what Donald Trump wanted on January 6th the Congress to do? I don’t think–

WILSON: Yeah, if Kim Davis’s argument had any legal or constitutional merit, regardless of what Rick Santorum says, she could have filed a lawsuit and it would have plodded its way up tothe Supreme Court eventually, if it had some merit.

SHEFFIELD: She did appeal actually and they denied her.

WILSON: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: So that was it. So yeah, she lost through the court system and she refused to comply with lawful orders. And so, but this was, as I said, in the first insurrection, if you will, with Pavkovic and his family interrupting the Senate, people didn’t pay attention to it. And even on the Religious Right, only the most extreme people dared to say anything about it favorable.

There were some people in organizations, this far-right group called the American Family Association, which actually owns over a hundred radio stations across America, pumping out Christian supremacist stuff. They were in favor of them and a couple of other organizations that said something. But here with Kim Davis, she was being hailed at the national level by presidential candidates for defying the law.

And it’s important to remember also the court when they made that decision, the majority of Americans supported same-sex marriage. So this was something that everybody for the most part was in favor of.

But interestingly enough, one person who showed up for Kim Davis afterward, according to the Associated Press and several other publications that were out there was Ante Pavkovic. He showed up there at a rally, he stood in the lobby actually of the office. So after Davis was released from jail, she decided that she would have her deputies issue marriage licenses but not have her name on them. And so, Pavkovic, he showed up saying that the deputy clerks should be fired.

And then he said the following, and definitely this is not family friendly language, so I’m just going to read it here. But yeah, not, I wouldn’t recommend kids listening to it. So he said: “Thinking of what the sodomites have done should make you sick,” he told the deputy clerks.

Ante Pavkovic is kind of like the Forrest Gump of insurrection, he keeps turning up at all these things. And so does this Operation Save America. But he’s not the only person involved with this organization. So it was started by this guy named Randall Terry, and then later ended up being taken over by another guy named Flip Benham.

And the interesting thing about him, is that he kept all the same confrontational tactics of screaming at abortion doctors and clinic patients and also getting arrested numerous times. But another thing about him is that because a lot of the media doesn’t really report on the activities of these people, sometimes they are able to worm their way into mainstream media outlets, in a way that later surprises people.

And Benham actually has two sons who were given a show on HGTV, a real estate property show and it was starting his two sons. And they have all the same extreme views as their father, but nobody involved with the HGTV network seems to have done anything to investigate them at all.

And after people started watching the show, they started looking into well, who are these people that are starting in this program? And what are they all about? And they found out, wow, they were affiliated with the radical anti-abortion groups and have a lot of extreme ideologies.

While the Kim Davis episode certainly was an example of Christian supremacist ideas about disregarding the rule of law for their religious opinions was very influential on Republicans, it wasn’t the only time where that happened. The 2008 vice presidential nomination of Sarah Palin also brought these ideas into the Republican mainstream.

That was something that you and several other people did a great “Flux Capacitor” discussion for us, which is available exclusively to our Patreon subscribers. But if you could talk about it just briefly here for this episode, on “Theory of Change,” that would be great.

WILSON: You can walk it back further than Sarah Palin. The 2000 election was shut down by an acolyte of the New Apostolic Reformation. And the effect on our politics is almost hard to overstate, but Palin was far from the only,

SHEFFIELD: So what is the New Apostolic Reformation for people who have never heard of it?

WILSON: It’s basically something that’s emerging out of a hyper charismatic movement that’s global called the Third Wave which purports to do miracles, raised the dead, everything that Jesus was said to have done. It claims that eventually its followers can learn to do that.

So it’s very seductive. It’s sort of aligned with the prosperity gospel movement, but not exactly the same. It’s organizing out of this Third Wave movement, which was about 300 million strong by 2000 and at least twice as big now. So it’s kind of a big deal. And it’s essentially becoming organized as a new religion, but Palin grew up in essentially the heart of this New Apostolic Reformation’s effort to move into Alaska. Her church– they called that her church the beachhead.

So she she was groomed by one of the movement’s apostles and prophets, and grew up as a young woman trying to pray witches to death, and was subjected to all of the movement’s various propaganda.

And I can guarantee you that these people were out in considerable force, on January 6th. I’ve tracked some of them. One of them I’m not, I can’t positively say, but one of them seems to have been there, Larry Brock who is a guy who was seen in tack gear with a helmet and holding zip-ties on the floor of the House, apparently looking for people to zip-tie and a major newspaper discovered a Facebook photo of Brock and his wife and two children in front of Dallas’s Gateway Church, which is one of the biggest mega churches in the country right now. But the Gateway Church was where the New Apostolic Reformation really launched. In 1999, they put together essentially a dues paying organization of their so-called apostles who, they pretty much deem who is an apostle.

But anyway, this is a real organization, it’s still around, and they’ve got now a U.S. component. They’ve got an international component. They’ve got the apostles organizations and maybe a third of the countries on the planet, a lot of places, and nobody even knows this movement exists, but they were very much there on January 6th along with the Christian Reconstructionists.

SHEFFIELD: And the NAR organizing strategy is important also, because they target and try to work from the inside of other people’s congregations. To some degree, some of these pastors that they’re targeting have no idea that they may actually be referring people to an organization that is going to turn their members against the church.

So there were all these different constituencies who were there on January 6th. But the New Apostolic Reformation and the Christian Reconstructionists, besides their love of Donald Trump, they’re also linked to the prosperity gospel as well, which basically tells people: ‘If you give money to me, the pastor, then God will give you money in return,’ and things like that.

But anyway, these prosperity gospel preachers, they were really some of the very first people on the Christian Right to start supporting Donald Trump when he first declared his candidacy in 2015, isn’t that right?

WILSON: Yeah. Yeah. The charismatics, especially the New Apostolic people. Back in 2015, I started to notice a guy named Lance Wallnau. He’s an apostle, he’s an apostle in the U.S. Coalition of Apostolic leaders, a dues-paying organization which has regular meetings, yearly meetings, at least.

Back when I met him, I identified him as being in the New Apostolic movement, and he told me: ‘How do you know that?’

I said: ‘Well, people write articles, your name pops up.’

And he said: ‘Did I ever write a book?’

I said: ‘No.’

He said: ‘Yeah. That’s why, so you can’t pin me down.’

After the advent of Sarah Palin, he dropped that and start writing books. And he’s been in a lot of books, essentially ‘capture the Seven Mountains’ books, that sort of thing.

But anyway, he was maybe the earliest, one of the earliest people to jump on the Trump as a king Cyrus figure–

SHEFFIELD: And who was King Cyrus for people who don’t know?

WILSON: King Cyrus was a king who essentially released the Jews from captivity. He didn’t believe in the Jewish faith in any way. But he did that.

SHEFFIELD: And he’s a character in the Bible Book of Esther.

WILSON: He’s seen as a righteous figure, not a believer, but a righteous figure who, ultimately, is somehow being influenced by God to do the right thing.

So by making Trump a Cyrus figure, they allowed for all of his personal faults, while suggesting yeah, he’s kind of wretched personally, but he will do the right thing. And, for the movement, he did. Those Supreme Court justices are an amazing contribution to the movement. And there’s so much else we don’t know and may never know about how he influenced the federal government. So really it was a good bargain for them to overlook his wretched personal life.

SHEFFIELD: One of the other precursor events to January 6th took place in 2020 in Michigan.

And you, can you bring, you mentioned it for a second there. But so much happened in those few months that people kind of forget about it. It’s easy to forget. So in Michigan they had a protest in which they have people from different militia movements come into their capitol with all kinds of weapons, body armor, and then they started pounding on the doors, and demanding to be let in.

And Trump, he responded: “These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again. See them, talk to them, make a deal.”

That’s pretty much what he essentially tried to do on January 6th.

WILSON: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: People invade the Capitol pound on the door demanding something, and Trump wanted them to get what they wanted.

WILSON: Yeah. One thing I want to add about the Michigan thing is that since 2009, there was established across from the state building in Lansing, a House of Prayer. This is where charismatics, usually kids in their teens or twenties, will basically live and pray nonstop. And they’ll be hanging out in front of the Capitol praying a lot too. And this is part of a charismatic initiative called “Transformation Michigan,” which has been running since 2009. And there’s a relationship to that and the militia movement. I can guarantee not all the people in the militia movement are of that particular brand of Christianity. Some of them will be, but there’s this, it has the function of once again, sacralizing opposition to government and they’re right across the street.

SHEFFIELD: And then they subsequently, the militia movement then other people were, contemplating the idea of kidnapping Governor Gretchen Whitmer as well.

WILSON: Mmm-hmm.

SHEFFIELD: So these people we’re talking about are even further to the right than your average, typical conservative Christian Republican. Like these are genuine reactionaries. I think it’s fair to use that label. And after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and was looking around for any possible way to stay in office despite losing, he filed all these court cases and lost pretty much all of them.

But after that, by the end of December, after all the legal options had collapsed, or as they were collapsing, Trump and his White House started going for the plan B, which was an intimidation campaign on the Congress.

Because people forget that for the longest time, there were no members of the Senate that were actually going to challenge the votes of the different states. On the days leading up to January 6th, they were actually refusing to do it. So Trump and his minions really started to try to drum up any possible way to get these senators to knuckle under. And so naturally they went for the people who supported them the hardest at first.

And that was the reactionary Christian Right. They came up with this campaign, which they called “Save America.” Which is interesting when you think about it. Because, of course, that is the exact name of the same organization that we’ve been talking about here today. “Operation Save America.”

And of course, when they say “save America,” who do they want to save it from? That was a question I never really heard anybody in the mainstream press ask people. Why are you calling it Save America. And why are you using that exact phrase from another group. What’s the larger context here?

So it was a very real and direct attempt to sort of adopt the actual slogans of these far right groups. And Donald Trump himself literally was using that symbology as he was going across the country on his loser tour, putting it on his podiums and banners behind him.

They even released a picture of him pointing upward toward the sky with that Save America signage all around him and the light shining on his face. So it’s a very deliberate adoption of their imagery, really.

WILSON: At a later stage, there came the rallying for the actual coup, which I interpreted as that the Jericho March events, and there were a number of those. There was the one on 12/12, which was pretty big. And you had a number of people who were directly associated with the apparent coup attempt up onstage with, well, predominantly the biggest block at that one, it was called of course, ecumenical. There are Catholics but the biggest Christian block were the New Apostolics, but since nobody, really covers them, that was not identified.

But anyway, that’s when the language turned really militant. They were talking about the “Black Robe Brigade,” and well, the very concept of the Jericho March, we’re gonna march around Jericho, the walls will fall down, and then as Joshua’s army did, to slaughter everyone inside. Christians know this story, it was very deliberately picked.

SHEFFIELD: And also, they were going even further than just telling the story or taking the label, they were taking the traditional Jewish trumpet, the shofar, and blowing it at their ceremonies.

WILSON: Well, that’s a New Apostolic thing, by the way. That’s coming out the Messianic Jewish wing of the movement, and they tend to pull out the shofars, bring in the Messianics, and pull out the shofars, at big events. There was one stadium event back in 2007, probably by Lou angle, where they had 200 people going, 200 shofars marching into a baseball stadium. And Senator Sam Brownback was there. The shofars are, there’s a context for them.

It’s about the appropriation of Jewish identity. It’s done because this Messianic Judaism, it’s meant to sort of woo and also supplant Judaism. So that’s why. And the shofar has also carried this very aggressive, symbolic meaning of that, that we’re gonna, we’re gonna conquer. Pull out a shofar, and people know the story.

SHEFFIELD: So in the Joshua and Jericho story, they were doing the shofars in the days leading up to the big battle of Jericho. And so it was preparation for the battle that they were going to enter into the city and take it over.

WILSON: Yeah. They marched around Jericho for seven days, presumably blowing on the shofars, and on the seventh day, they blew the shofars again, the walls came down. Interestingly, the New Apostolic s, they got a number of permits around the Capitol and they had a thin perimeter of their people with shofars.

They commenced lowering those shofars at just about the same time as the onslaught on the Capitol commenced. Not saying that it was an army of New Apostolics, and it was quite a mix of different people from the Operation Save America types, the antiabortion Christian Reconstructionists, there are New Apostolics. There were lots of, much more secular anti-government types, but they were the ones who are sacralizing the attack with those shofars.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. They turned it into a religious ceremony–

WILSON: Yeah, yeah.

SHEFFIELD: –with what they were doing, and their many days of praying up onstage. And so January 5th in a lot of ways, was when you saw the motivations of the people who were actually there. Like sometimes they actually would take people out of the crowd and put them up on the stage at some of these events. And so, whereas, the Trump January 6th rally, it was tightly controlled and being limited to people in his inner circle .

But even there, you have the violent language where Trump said that people have to ‘fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore.’ And then you had people like Mo Brooks, the Alabama Republican congressmen who talked about how we’re going to start ‘kicking asses and taking names.’

When you add that type of rhetoric to these days and days of telling people, this is your moment to be a Bible character.

WILSON: Mmm-hmm.

SHEFFIELD: You can be part of the Bible. That’s what this is basically. And for a lot of people who don’t believe in the Bible or let’s say they do believe in the Bible, but they don’t believe those stories are real.

There’s a temptation to think: ‘Oh, that’s just stupid. These people are dumb.’ But they’re more than dumb. They’re very determined and extreme. And if you just dismiss them as that, then you’re being naïve.

WILSON: To return to the Joshua- Jericho tale. Part of that tale is before the attack, Joshua sends a couple of spies into Jericho and they’re put up by a prostitute named Rahab, who was the only person who is spared after the sack of Jericho? So in the January 6th attack, what happens is shofars blow, the swarms of people from various factions start to attack. And at the same time, Michele Bachmann, who very much it’s taken me a while, but I’ve identified her as part of the New Apostolic Reformation. She saunters up to a door of the Capitol knocks, she’s got her ID. So he has the credentials to go in, and identifies herself. They let her in, lock the door again.

And she walks up. She makes her way to Kevin McCarthy, and has some sort of powwow with Kevin McCarthy. This is by her own description, by the way. I’ve got that. I got the audio of her talking about it. And she talked about it on a podcast. But she talks to Kevin McCarthy and then she makes her way to a room in the Capitol that’s some sort of prayer room. But it just happens to be almost adjacent to Nancy Pelosi’s office, and by her own account, she stands there watching people flee Nancy Pelosi’s office.

So think about this, the context of Joshua Jericho narrative. Well, they’ve got a handy spy on-hand.

And then eventually, she makes her way to a late afternoon appointment with the secretary of state. So make of it what you will.

SHEFFIELD: There have been some allegations that Lauren Boebert, who also is a far-right evangelical, had allegedly been giving tours to some of the people who went into the building as well beforehand.

And some other individuals were accused of that as well. But at this point according to the committee they haven’t seen any evidence that substantiated that allegation yet. I think we should point that out.

Just to continue the story though, Ante Pavkovic, he also was there again at another insurrection.

So he was there, and on their website, Operation Save America, they filed that report from Washington DC. And obviously you can’t see it on the screen here, so I’ll zoom in, in a second, but they acknowledged that they were there and they said: “Ante Pavkovic, Frank Campagna and the assistant director of OSA (that’s Operation Save America), Jason Storms set up the Lord’s beachhead at this immense gathering.”

And so, they were there by their own admission. And there was some other details about what they did there, what Operation Save America did that are also worth noting. The website Prism worked with a couple of organizations to track some footage that came out of that day.

And they talked about specifically how anti-abortion activists were there. And Jason Storms, who I mentioned is the assistant director. He videotaped himself standing on the scaffolding, outside the Capitol and calling it a revolution. So he was there to cheer it on. He was there to participate, he was not just there to minister to the wayward protesters.

And then further on, in the piece, they talked about other anti-abortion people who were there, John rock Hoff who’s convicted abortion clinic, set off a bomb in 1985 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and then was convicted of planning to do another bomb in Pensacola, Florida.

So these are, and then there were other people there who that you had noticed as well. And I guess we can maybe talk about that in a second, but one of the other things that was in that Prism article was that the woman who got shot by the Capitol police, as she was trying to enter the Capitol’s secure room, Ashli Babbitt, supposedly pro-life individuals just sat there filming her, as she bled to death. And nobody bothered to try to administer to her wounds or anything like that. They just sat there and watched her die. And these are people who say that they care about life. So it was an interesting illustration of what they actually seem to think.

WILSON: Oh yeah. Well, among the New Apostolic leaders, what was interesting to me was somebody like Lance Wallnau, who was there, he marched over after Trump’s stump speech. He went on a podcast the day after and said: ‘Gee, the media is painting it as if we were some sort of rampaging army. That’s not what I saw. I saw the intercessors. Yes, they were getting tear gas, but the people who are really behind the violence were antifa.’

And he had a whole bunch of obviously pre-memorized details to regurgitate about that. And he was not the only one that, that was the line coming out of a lot of New Apostolic leadership, not all the ones, specific factions. And right after January 6th, there was a big push to try to blame antifa, even though the evidence wasn’t there.

And meanwhile, there was absolutely no recognition of the fact that the mob was viciously beating Capitol police with clubs and flags and, they’re using bear mace, and all sorts of fun items of assault. So there was absolutely zero recognition of violence that went on. There was an attempt to totally invert reality because, well, it was clear to me that they’re going to hope that antifa would actually show up and be a pretext, and nobody from the left did show up. So they were left hanging. And it’s not fitting that well a year later.

SHEFFIELD: And one of the people that I mentioned, Jason Storms, you sent me before the show, so he’s another Operation Save America guy. But he is also married to the daughter of a Christian reconstructionist named Matthew Trewhella. Do you want to talk about him a little bit?

WILSON: He’s been convicted of various forms of anti abortion clinic violence, but he’s also very much a Christian Reconstructionist. Even people seeking abortions should be executed, so he’s fairly far out.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it’s important to note that this is the theology that we’re talking about here, that when you believe that you are God’s servant, your opponents are Satan’s servants, they are murderers who of themselves deserve to be killed. And also you have the right to disobey any law that you want. That’s a recipe for insurrections pretty much.

So that’s what we saw and this is a movement that in the hours and days afterward, they were proud of what they did to a large degree. So some of the more media savvy ones started realizing, oh, this is a bad look for us. The shock troops, the cannon fodder, they were happy with what they did. And they want to do it again. I think that’s fair to say.

WILSON: Yeah. And parenthetically, Jason Storms, one of his operations, he runs a ministry for rehabilitating veterans with PTSD. So this is not the only operation like that in the Christian Right. There are a number of them. It’s a way of inducting ex-military people in their viewpoint.

SHEFFIELD: And so all of this is the context of January 6th. And it’s important for people who do know the truth, the full truth about these movements, and how much power they have within mainstream Republican politics, you need to spread the word about it.

Tell people when you see a good article or a good podcast. Share it on your social networks or with your friends and family to let them know. Because as somebody who used to be involved in Republican politics myself, I had no idea how horrible these people were and who I was helping. So there are some people out there who can be educated and learn about what’s going on.

So it’s worth the effort. Even if you can’t convince a lot of these reactionary fundamentalists to mend their ways, at least you can help people not help them.

WILSON: Yeah, well actually in my experience, the people who sometimes get it the most are former moderate Republicans. One year I worked part of the year or Mikey Weinstein, he runs the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. He flew me down to Stone Mountain, Georgia, where I recorded a B1 bomber pilot saying that: ‘Yes, there will come a day where I’m going to have to buck the command chain and work for Jesus.’

I have no idea what happened with that, but anyway, Mikey Weinstein was a former lawyer for Ross Perot, and he was a moderate Republican, until he found out what was going on at the Air Force Academy, because his kids were going there and they were Jewish and they’re getting beaten up. And there were predatory evangelism efforts going on against them too.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, it’s important to spread this knowledge. And so I do really appreciate you coming on the show today, Bruce.

WILSON: Yeah, sure.

SHEFFIELD: I always love talking to you and tapping your brain about all this stuff. So for those in the audience who are on Twitter, Bruce is also on Twitter, he is just simply @brucewilson on Twitter. I guess that’s the best way to find you. And you’ll probably be sharing some freelance stuff here and there as well, right?

WILSON: Not for a while, but I may be getting back into it.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I hope you do. And you’re certainly welcome to publish something for us at Flux as well. I definitely love that. So thanks for being here today, Bruce. I wish it was a better occasion, but you’re definitely somebody who knows about how we got to January 6.

WILSON: Yeah. Thanks a lot. I enjoyed it.

A cozy holiday crossover

Matthew Sheffield — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 21:16:44 GMT

Kali and Matt are joined by the first-ever STJH guest, Doomscroll co-host Lisa Curry

Headlines

0:00 — Winter solstice and the season is the reason

04:42 — The Christmas song sweepstakes

15:32 — Far-right Christians hate Hallmark now for making some lesbian and gay stories

25:38 — MAGA obsessives can't understand why relatives don't want to be around their BS during holidays

44:21 — Are there physical brain differences between conservatives and other people?

46:41 — New year's resolutions for other people

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