July 6, 2023 • 27 mins
Democratic strategist Tim Hogan explains his strategy to have Democratic billionaires buy TV stations to combat the right-wing media takeover. Professor Bradley Onishi tells us about his new book, Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—and What Comes Next.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean
we don't have an excellent show for you today. Skidmore
College Assistant professor Bradley Onishi tells us about his new book,
Preparing for War, the extremist history of White Christian Nationalism
(00:24):
and what comes next. But first we have democratic strategist
Tim Hogan, who tells us about his strategy to have
democratic billionaires by TV stations to combat the right wing
media takeover. Welcome Tim Hogan to Fast Politics.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Thank you, it's good to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
So I want to talk to you about your super
interesting idea.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yeah. So we put together, over the last few months
a look at the trends in media production, consumption, the
ownership landscape, without really doing like a full analysis of
every media trend because that would be impossible to do
in eighty pages, we put together. And interestingly enough, while
we're putting that together, BuzzFeed folded. But BuzzFeed News folded
(01:12):
Vice felt for bankruptcy. They were layoffs. I've met a Twitter, NBR, ESPN,
The watching Spotify Box, I mean, name like any media company,
and you're seeing these rolling layoffs, and then we're continuing
to see a gutting of local newspapers year over year,
plummeting in circulation advertising revenue. And so it's a really
meaty question of what's happening in the media space. And
(01:37):
we don't presume to have all of the answers, but
we wanted to take stock of what was happening give
some directional recommendations because we initially thought, well, let's look
for this document. Where does this document exist? There's this
big conversation happening, but we couldn't find it.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Oh, so you decided to create it.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
And so we decided to create it ourselves.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
So you know, Margaret's Alivan and from the Washington Post
is like my she's not the Washington posting were now
she said Guardian, but she is my mentor, and she's
constantly having this conversation about what happens when you don't
have local news. So I mean, were you able to
sort of see what the consequences of that were.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Yeah, you see, in a lot of different markets, people
are just not informed about what's happening, and there are
a lot of downstream effects of that, whether that is
people not voting, or an increase in corruption in local offices,
or just people not being informed about what their representatives,
to take a political view of it, are doing. You know,
(02:38):
I came to this rapport from the perspective of someone
who has worked at a media company, the BCPTA twenty
Am in Chicago. It's an am radio station. We launched
a digital newsroom. We watch what people are doing in
state houses and what they're saying and what legislation they're passing.
And it's stunning to watch some of this regionally in
the Midwest and realize that there are no local news
(03:00):
outlets that are able to cover what's happening, simply because
they don't have the resources. So we have a debate
in Wisconsin, for example, last week over access to birth control,
and you've got a Republican taken in the floor saying
that birth control makes women feel superior to nature, it
deductive system at least proliferation of STDC Jesus, I haven't
even seen that, yeah, exactly, And I'm like, is anybody
(03:22):
else watching this? And frequently the answer is no. And
so you know, from that perspective, it is just a
lack of information about who's representing you, what's happening in
your government.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Yeah, I mean that's crazy.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
You know, it's funny because I've seen little bits of
the people who took away choice trying to get involved
with taking away birth control. So none of this should surprise,
but it still kind of does.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Right, it's people like that. But it's also you know,
we monitored a candidate in Michigan, mad Daperno, as a
Republican candidate there. He's running for attorney general. He compared
Plan Beat a fentanyel. We caught that We saw Georgia
Governor Brian Kemp say he was open to signing legislation
that would restrict access to contraception. So it's it's these
little bits of information that I think paint a clearer
(04:12):
picture sometimes of who's representing you that get missed if
you don't have the resources to do it right.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
It's such an interesting sort of quandary that we find
ourselves in here with this. So, I mean, it's funny
because it's like, I feel like one of the worst
examples of it is like watching these tech bros. Right, So,
like Twitter is now dominated by people like David Zax
and he's a tech bro. I mean I could explain
(04:38):
who he is, but who cares?
Speaker 1 (04:40):
And Elon Mush and these people, and you see in
real time, like these people do not read The New
York Times like they must not, so they come up
with these things. You know, David Sax was furious that
there were troops in Ukraine, right, I mean, there are
not supposed to be any troops in Ukraine. And this
whole time, Biden has made a real point of We're
not sending a single troop to Ukraine. So you know,
(05:03):
maybe they're American contractors, maybe there are Americans, but there
aren't troops. And there's so much disinformation with this crew
that are all like Ivy League graduates, who are you know,
at least with some things known to be quite adapt.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
That is an example of what we found too, is
that there is this explosion of options for consumers and
you don't have an editorial staff outside of community notes,
you know, right right, I'm not who is that. I
don't even know. You've seen as a result that people
just go to where they're comfortable, versus when you used
to have a local newspaper or local TV station was
(05:42):
your main way of getting the news. Now you need
to have a little bit more of a motivated consumer
if you really want to seek out accurate information. And
so I think the question is, as a lot of
these standard newspapers TV stations have struggled with a shift
to digital distribution, people are going out elsewhere. How do
we adapt to that type of information ecosystem. And one
(06:04):
of the recommendations that we make in the report is
that we do shift to looking more at investment in
creators because they carry a certain level of credibility and
they are where people are going to get their news.
So what derivative content, for example, do they create from
a bombshell news report. Not everyone's going to go to
(06:25):
pro Publica right and read the intricacies of their coverage
of Alito or Thomas or really good study they did
in the trucking industry. So how do you get people
who are already have an audience involved in helping distribute
that type of content?
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Is it just me or does it seem like there
is a real movement from like the trusted brand of
the New York Times to the trusted brand of the
actual journalist.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
I think that's right.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
I feel like The New York.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Times a bad example because that is like the gold standard.
But like if you think of the trusted brand of
like Vice, which we love but has gone now rip
to the trusted brand of like Jim Acosta.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Yes, and but I think that's a good like The
New York Times is a very good example there because
I think they as an institution are grappling with this
question even more because yes, the trend is toward individuals
as the brand and the trusted voice. But you do
have these big institutions that weathered a lot of changes, right,
But the New York Times, like the Washington Post, who
(07:32):
did create a smart revenue model and Ben Smith writes
about this in Traffic for Themselves, you know, in twenty fourteen,
twenty fifteen, based on subscription and not necessarily just traffic
and ad revenue generated that way, so they were able
to weather some of it. But the larger trend is
still towards individuals. And you see someone like Ben Smith
(07:55):
at Semaphore. He was just talking it can about how he,
you know, wants to give his journalists the ability to
follow things that they're curious about and build an audience
that is attached to them, not necessarily to Semaphore, but
Semophore is their home. And I think that's a large
trend that we're seeing too.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
It's so interesting because it's like, I mean, I think
of my own career, right, I popped around, you know,
I started at The Daily Beast, and then I went
to Vogue and now I'm at Anti Fair.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
So I've seen, you know, firsthand that.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Like it's interesting because it's like I almost wonder, like
I come from the nineteen nineties. So in the nineties,
the platform was a much bigger deal than the creator, right,
and so if you had a piece in Vogue or
you had a piece in the New York Times, you know,
that was sort of it.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
And now that's really different. I mean, it really is.
Explain to me what you guys are talking about with
this idea.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Of buying a.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
TV local news station.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Yeah, well, I feel like that was the ghost of
BuzzFeed showing up at Themophore and said, we need to
really click baby headline it is. You know, we do
talk about local TV in the report, and what we
see that's interesting about it is that unlike newspapers, which
truly have been in free fall, local broadcast TV, at
least so far, has proven relatively impervious to you know,
(09:21):
declines and employment and revenue and news production volume. And
they also hit that spot of trust because we frequently
see people less trusting of national institutions, national brands, but
more trusting of their local for a variety of reasons.
I mean, like I can name the news anchors that
I grew up with in the suburb of Minneapolis. I
think that is part of it. And part of it
(09:43):
too is that they see their community reflected back to them,
and we haven't really seen a huge change in local
television formats right think about what it was a decade ago,
two decades ago, three decades ago. It feels kind of
the same. And part of that too is that they've
been able to be stable with the revenue that they've
(10:04):
brought in. They rely cyclically on political ads, that's a constant,
and we're seeing record spending that's helping them keep afloat.
And they're also making some money from these retransmission fees
from some of their content. So that is a place
that I think is underappreciated. I think we light our
hair on fire when thinking about local news focused on
newspapers because there's been such a decline there. But we
(10:26):
should be looking at television too, because it's been relatively stable,
very surprisingly.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
Yeah, I mean I feel like a lot of this
sort of came up when we saw Sinclair come into town.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Yep, go on, you talk to me about that.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
From the you know, I want to say, like twenty fourteen,
twenty fifteen, you started to see people paying attention to
them doing must runs right where you see the same
talking points echoed by that video.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Is amazing, Wow, amazing. Right, So this is we're talking
about a video that sint Clair.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
They came up, by the way, recently was brought back
to the forefront by one Elon Musk, who was criticizing
it for that it was group think, but it was
actually this conservative station called Sinclair had these must reads
and every news anchor, no matter what if it was,
(11:19):
you know, Michigan or Wisconsin or Florida, had these same
must reads and they said the exact same thing the
exact same way at the exact same time.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Right, exactly. Hilarious, like history collapsing in on itself. But yeah,
the point being, it is a trusted medium. It's not
something that really ever gets looked at in terms of investment.
It has a reach, it has audience that relies on it,
it has high trust, and it's not a place where
(11:49):
we really have looked. But you have seen organizations like
Sinclair make investments in local TV and I think, you know,
move the need probably in key markets as a result
of their coverage.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
I think a lot about there's this one state where
it's a small New England state, New England. It's a
small northeastern state where all of the local newspapers are
owned by the same guy. And you know, if a
conservative conglomerate AD buys them, that's it, right.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Right, It's a huge problem, and they often do so quilely.
There's not a ton of pushback. And I think, you know,
one thing that is frustrating sometimes when you think about
political spend, and we didn't approach this just as a
you know, we're Democrats and this is a political goal.
But when you think about political spending and the amount
(12:41):
of money that gets dumped into thads ads in the
final two weeks of an election, and you know, maybe
I'll never get work in Florida, but is it worth
you know, dumping fifty million dollars in the in the
final sprint for television ads, or should you invest in
some actual infrastructure and look at this in a more
long term way? And I think pretty clear where I
(13:03):
would come down there.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I think that's a really good point.
You do see like there's so much money going into politics,
especially now that every candidate, or not every candidate, but
certainly in the GOP primary, each one of these candidates
has a pack, right.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
They have their own money, and then they have their
pack money. So you really do see that there is.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
A place, for sure for some sort of thoughtful spending, right, It's.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
True in the political side too. And then part of
the report, we also looked at what investment looks like
on just digital global digital ad spend, right even even
just divorced from politics, and you've got to market where
influencer sponsored content in twenty twenty two looked something like,
you know, sixteen billion dollars, which sounds like a huge
amount of money, but you compare it to the overall
(13:55):
global digital ad spend of six hundred billion dollars, and
it just seems like there's a bunch of efficiency there
that should be should be looked at and uncovered, and
I think that is one of the lessons we learned too,
is where is capital going and is it being effectively spent?
And then there are also questions embedded there of us
for us for media models of you know what do
(14:16):
these types of entities even look like?
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Right?
Speaker 2 (14:20):
Are they nonprofit newsrooms where I think we've seen an
awakening of a lot of local coverage through those vehicles.
Are they for profits that are our low profit you know,
you no longer looking at a news or media outlet
says something that you need to draw a large value from.
Or are they like journalists driven or influencer driven to
mediums like substack, you know that are sort of empowering
(14:42):
journalists in a way where you can build a really
loyal audience, sustain yourself. And they have some tools like
you know, a substack defender, which is a legal legal
shields or you know, legal access if you ever get
in trouble, you know, for some of your reporting. So
I think that's a big that's a big part of
this report too.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Can people find this report?
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Yes? How we have a really self descriptive website and
it's at Media Landscape report dot org. And nobody had
taken it. So we took and that's where this lives.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
Yes, it is, like, I think, a really important thing
to be thinking about and to be thinking about how
people can get like just legitimate information that's real. Facebook
and Twitter, I mean Twitter now whatever.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
I think we give up on Twitter at this point.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
But Facebook had this opportunity to really like they had
killed local news and they could have really come in
and replaced it with like actual quality news, but instead
they decided not to.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Yeah, it was you know, a companied of maybe a
year or so spaced apart to the metaverse, which is
like a cartoon video game. Guess that is our future, right,
that's the social value we're getting there, which is bobbing.
But and it's also you know, for Googles, for Facebook,
(16:05):
for other platforms you're seeing for example in Canada, Australia.
California is considering legislation that would in some ways reimburse
publishers for content that gets shared. But you know, I
don't know, and it's a little bit out of the
purview of this whether or not that's a solution for
funding local journalism. It feels like the genius is out
(16:27):
of the bottle there, and you've also got these platforms,
and this is a pressure that we heard from a
lot of folks who are individuals publishing their own content.
They're just at the whims of these platforms, right, Like,
in the world in which you are a writer, editor,
and distributor of your own content, Google can change something
in their algorithm and your entire model can be upended
(16:47):
and they won't even tell you about it. I mean, Facebook,
same thing, Twitter, same thing. What do the blue checks
even mean anymore? It's a little bit of like a
Wild West situation. And I do think part of the
reason that individuals have shifted back towards email is that
that feels a little bit more under control. Right, I
am emailing you via substag, via ghost via medium work.
(17:09):
You can subsproud and support me if you.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Like, right, and that you feel like there's more object
permanence to email.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Right exactly.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Oh that's really really interesting. Thank you so much, Tim.
I hope you'll come back.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
Yeah, absolutely, this was great. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Bradley Bonishi is an assistant professor of religion at Skidmore
College and the author of Preparing for War, The Extremist
History of White Christian nationalism and what comes next?
Speaker 3 (17:40):
Welcome to Fast Politics, Bradley.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Thanks for having me, so talk to me about your book.
Speaker 4 (17:45):
Sure Preparing for War is I look at the history
of white Christian nationalism basically start with the Goldwater Campaign
nineteen sixty four and we end with January sixth. Then
what comes next? And you know, for me, it's it's
pretty personal. I converted to a church that was a
white Christian nationalist church when I was fourteen.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
I became a minister at twenty.
Speaker 4 (18:04):
So when I watched January sixth, I thought maybe I
could have been there, and that scared me.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
So as a scholar religion, I wanted to lay out the.
Speaker 4 (18:11):
Kind of history that led us to that point and
show that, Yeah, it was definitely an aberration. It was
definitely singular in American history, but there was a lot
of signs throughout the last decades that that's where we
might be heading as a nation.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
How did you change your course?
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Yeah, So when I was twenty, I was a full
time minister.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
I was married, I was in charge of like a
couple hundred kids in a youth ministry at a megachurch.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
You know, I just began reading and reading and reading.
Speaker 4 (18:35):
I you know, heard all the time that if you
if you let your brain, it'll lead your heart away
from God. And I don't know if that's true, but
I definitely had a more expansive understanding of the world.
After investigating history and philosophy and theology, I went to
Oxford to get a degree, and that obviously changed everything
for me. So I began to realize that the faith
I'd been brought into was more about a conservative political
(18:57):
agenda and a certain myth of the United States than
you know, something about a timeless faith.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
And that's when things really really changed.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
Was there one specific thing that did it? A book?
Speaker 4 (19:07):
There was a lot of moments, but you know, one
moment was really the John Carey George W. Bush election.
I was convinced I was going to vote for John Carey,
and I told all my elders at church, you know, look,
I just think this is somebody who has a vision
for the country that's just more in line with what
Jesus teaches. And they said, hey, great, that sounds wonderful
for you. But he is pro choice, and if you
vote for someone like that, you and along with everyone else,
(19:29):
will be responsible for the murder of millions of unborn babies.
So if you want that on your conscience, then go ahead.
Otherwise I would think about it a little harder. And
you know, for me, that was a moment, a watershed moment,
because I realized that we'd reduced some of the most
complex issues of our public square, the human condition, to
either or this or that. There was no nuance, there
(19:49):
was no detail, there was no compassion, And after that whole,
you know, set of events, I was really on a
different path.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
It's so interesting because I constantly have this argument conway
about abortion, and you know, I wonder how much of
it is like nurture in a way it is.
Speaker 4 (20:07):
I mean, I think the trick is convincing people, as
I was at one time, that life begins a conception,
and that that is a fact that has been not
only scientifically proven, but has been taught by the Christian
Church for two thousand years. And as long as people
buy that simple piece of teaching or propaganda, however we
want to frame it, it's really hard to get them
(20:27):
back from the brink because anything you say is simply,
in their ears, a pro murder agenda. And that is
the tragic effectiveness of that approach.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
Yeah's unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
Talk to me about Goldwater, because I want to talk
about Goldwater. You know, there's this chicken of the egg
thing with trump Ism, like was it Trump?
Speaker 3 (20:45):
Was it Nixon? Was it Goldwater?
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Where did Republicans start to go wildly off the rails?
Though there's an argument to be made that they were
always off the rails, but yes.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Go on for sure.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
And I think for me Goldwater was a nice place
to start because Goldwater really appears on the scene after
two decades of either a Democratic president or Dwight eis
At Howard, who's famous for his Middle Way. Hey, you know,
Goldwater shows up and says, look, we want it our
way and we won't compromise. And you know, he's just
this magnetic force. He's got a big baritone voice and
a square jaw, and he's you know, supposedly a cowboy senator,
(21:20):
and he's willing just to say bombastic and outrageous things.
You know, we're gonna use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. There's
no way I'm going to sign legislation for civil rights
and so on. And when he accepts the nomination, you know,
the most famous line in San Francisco at the GOB
Convention is extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
(21:40):
And he's basically setting the stage for the next six
decades by saying, Look, we're in the midst of a
decade here in the sixties, or in the midst of
a time of what feels like change. If you're gonna
keep your country, if you're gonna get your country back,
extremism is your approach. And you know, he got destroyed
in his race against Lynnon Johnson, but the foot soldiers
of that campaign never forgot those lessons. You know, Paul
(22:03):
Wirick was like a twenty one year old kid at
that point, and he goes on to found the Council
for National Policy, the Heritage Foundation and ALEC. So Goldwater's
really for me this moment of Hey, white Christian men,
if you want your country, extremism is the way to
do it. And you know, there's a line from there
that kind of brings us into the present from Goldwater.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
Just give me a little bit trace it, keep going.
Speaker 4 (22:26):
Yeah, for sure, I'm from southern California and Goldwater is
a place where he gets just a ton of support
from that part of the country. But you know, Goldwater
sets the stage for a Republican party that embraces extremism,
that sees moderation as something to be avoided as a vice.
And he sort of inspires a whole generation of a
(22:46):
Republican party that understands something. And this is where Wyrick
and his cohorts and the Council for National Policy really
were genius. If they can combine what is an essence,
a right wing libertarian agenda, with the voting power of
millions of white conservative Christians, then they can occupy the
GOP and eventually occupy the country.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
And that's what they do.
Speaker 4 (23:07):
And so if we go from Goldwater all the way
fifteen years later to the Carter Reagan election, we see
another foreshadowing of Trump. Jimmy Carter is like built in
a lab. If you're a white Christian, you know he's
your guy.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
He's a Southern.
Speaker 4 (23:19):
Baptist by birds right, Yeah, your rural Georgia peanut farmer,
Mary's his high school sweetheart, goes into the Milletary. I mean,
what else do you want from this man? If you're
a white Christian to vote for him? And yet who
do they vote for? They vote for the divorce Hollywood
actor who at one point was pretty good, you know,
into abortion as the governor of California.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
Right, he was the guy.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
Who ended no fault divorces, which is one of the
most progressive legislations.
Speaker 4 (23:46):
Weirdly, right, it's wild. It's absolutely wild to think of,
you know, Reagan as the golden child of the religious
right and the Council for National Policy and everyone we're
talking about. But they chose power over piety, right. You know,
so when you go from Goldwater to that and you
start looking at Trump, you're like, wow, I see a
lot of Goldwater and a lot of Reagan in this
man who eventually becomes worse than all of them. But
(24:08):
it's no accident, you know, it's not like there was
no historical precedent for this.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
Right. So interesting, I mean, it's funny because it's like
you really.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Do see that the difference between Reagan and Carter, right,
the guy who's so right, and then the difference between
Trump and Biden, right, Biden, who like was the poorest senator,
it speaks to really, you know, the sort of hypocrisy
of the Republican Party.
Speaker 4 (24:33):
It's repeating itself in the sense that you know, Biden.
And I know everyone's going to have their different views
on this, whether good or bad. But Biden's like one
of the most religious presidents. I mean, the man goes
the Mass numerous times per week.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
You know, he is very inter religion.
Speaker 4 (24:47):
Yeah, and then you know Josh Holly and the folks
are saying if if you bring up God on the left,
they laugh at you. And it's like, and again, I
I'm not here to debate whether it's good or bad.
Biden's so religious. I'm just here to say it's the
same thing playing out of again for sure.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Yeah, as someone who is not religious, who grew up
not religious. My family Jewish, atheist, communists. But you do
really see that Biden is quite religious. I mean it
speaks to this idea. And again I don't love this,
but it is it's worth mentioning. Is that there was
always you know, this anxiety I think underlying anxiety that
Trump was actually I mean, he's obviously not. I mean,
(25:22):
if you think about who has probably had more experience
in our lives with abortion, Trump or Biden. So you
got out, you became an academic, Tell me a little
bit more about your story.
Speaker 4 (25:34):
Sure, I'd become somebody who studies religion from a historical perspective,
from a sociological perspective, and during the Trump years, I
wanted to kind of find a way to help people
decode how all this happened from a religious perspective. And
so we started our show Straight Wide American Jesus. And
we don't think Jesus was straight white or American, but
we want to know why so many people do and
(25:55):
why they see the image of Jesus and Trump and
what we offer. And I think for me, this is
what I I'm always sort of telling folks is I've
lived this. I've been on the inside, and I can
help you understand that. And I've now spent twenty years
studying it from the outside, and so we can give
the long historical view, we can also give the insider view.
And so yeah, I spent the last five years basically
every waking hour analyzing their every corner of the religious
(26:19):
bride and Christian nationalism in a country and basically trying
to warn folks about what I take to be a
proto fascist movement.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
What is the single sort of scariest thing that you
think when you think of this proto fascist.
Speaker 4 (26:31):
Movement Democracy is not a sacred value to this group.
Democracy is not the goal, the goal's power. The goal
is to have dominion over the United States, and if
democracy needs to be done away with in order for
that to happen, they're completely fine with that. And I
can show you the evidence. I mean, democracy is a problem,
not a solution for many of the folks that I
(26:52):
that I'm talking about, and that's overwhelmingly scary. And the
tentacles of that position just sort of go every where
in terms of dehumanizing migrants, dehumanizing trans folks, in terms
of being willing to follow an authoritarian leader, being willing
to write a rough shot over democratic norms and processes.
So if democracy is a problem and not a solution
(27:14):
for you, then it's really hard to have a public
square that is healthy or safe at all. And I
think for me that's what it comes down to.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
So interesting, Bradley, I hope you.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Will come back, of course, anytime.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds
in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you
enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend
and keep the conversation going. And again thanks for listening.
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean
we don't have an excellent show for you today. Skidmore
College Assistant professor Bradley Onishi tells us about his new book,
Preparing for War, the extremist history of White Christian Nationalism
(00:24):
and what comes next. But first we have democratic strategist
Tim Hogan, who tells us about his strategy to have
democratic billionaires by TV stations to combat the right wing
media takeover. Welcome Tim Hogan to Fast Politics.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Thank you, it's good to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
So I want to talk to you about your super
interesting idea.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yeah. So we put together, over the last few months
a look at the trends in media production, consumption, the
ownership landscape, without really doing like a full analysis of
every media trend because that would be impossible to do
in eighty pages, we put together. And interestingly enough, while
we're putting that together, BuzzFeed folded. But BuzzFeed News folded
(01:12):
Vice felt for bankruptcy. They were layoffs. I've met a Twitter, NBR, ESPN,
The watching Spotify Box, I mean, name like any media company,
and you're seeing these rolling layoffs, and then we're continuing
to see a gutting of local newspapers year over year,
plummeting in circulation advertising revenue. And so it's a really
meaty question of what's happening in the media space. And
(01:37):
we don't presume to have all of the answers, but
we wanted to take stock of what was happening give
some directional recommendations because we initially thought, well, let's look
for this document. Where does this document exist? There's this
big conversation happening, but we couldn't find it.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Oh, so you decided to create it.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
And so we decided to create it ourselves.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
So you know, Margaret's Alivan and from the Washington Post
is like my she's not the Washington posting were now
she said Guardian, but she is my mentor, and she's
constantly having this conversation about what happens when you don't
have local news. So I mean, were you able to
sort of see what the consequences of that were.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Yeah, you see, in a lot of different markets, people
are just not informed about what's happening, and there are
a lot of downstream effects of that, whether that is
people not voting, or an increase in corruption in local offices,
or just people not being informed about what their representatives,
to take a political view of it, are doing. You know,
(02:38):
I came to this rapport from the perspective of someone
who has worked at a media company, the BCPTA twenty
Am in Chicago. It's an am radio station. We launched
a digital newsroom. We watch what people are doing in
state houses and what they're saying and what legislation they're passing.
And it's stunning to watch some of this regionally in
the Midwest and realize that there are no local news
(03:00):
outlets that are able to cover what's happening, simply because
they don't have the resources. So we have a debate
in Wisconsin, for example, last week over access to birth control,
and you've got a Republican taken in the floor saying
that birth control makes women feel superior to nature, it
deductive system at least proliferation of STDC Jesus, I haven't
even seen that, yeah, exactly, And I'm like, is anybody
(03:22):
else watching this? And frequently the answer is no. And
so you know, from that perspective, it is just a
lack of information about who's representing you, what's happening in
your government.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Yeah, I mean that's crazy.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
You know, it's funny because I've seen little bits of
the people who took away choice trying to get involved
with taking away birth control. So none of this should surprise,
but it still kind of does.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Right, it's people like that. But it's also you know,
we monitored a candidate in Michigan, mad Daperno, as a
Republican candidate there. He's running for attorney general. He compared
Plan Beat a fentanyel. We caught that We saw Georgia
Governor Brian Kemp say he was open to signing legislation
that would restrict access to contraception. So it's it's these
little bits of information that I think paint a clearer
(04:12):
picture sometimes of who's representing you that get missed if
you don't have the resources to do it right.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
It's such an interesting sort of quandary that we find
ourselves in here with this. So, I mean, it's funny
because it's like, I feel like one of the worst
examples of it is like watching these tech bros. Right, So,
like Twitter is now dominated by people like David Zax
and he's a tech bro. I mean I could explain
(04:38):
who he is, but who cares?
Speaker 1 (04:40):
And Elon Mush and these people, and you see in
real time, like these people do not read The New
York Times like they must not, so they come up
with these things. You know, David Sax was furious that
there were troops in Ukraine, right, I mean, there are
not supposed to be any troops in Ukraine. And this
whole time, Biden has made a real point of We're
not sending a single troop to Ukraine. So you know,
(05:03):
maybe they're American contractors, maybe there are Americans, but there
aren't troops. And there's so much disinformation with this crew
that are all like Ivy League graduates, who are you know,
at least with some things known to be quite adapt.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
That is an example of what we found too, is
that there is this explosion of options for consumers and
you don't have an editorial staff outside of community notes,
you know, right right, I'm not who is that. I
don't even know. You've seen as a result that people
just go to where they're comfortable, versus when you used
to have a local newspaper or local TV station was
(05:42):
your main way of getting the news. Now you need
to have a little bit more of a motivated consumer
if you really want to seek out accurate information. And
so I think the question is, as a lot of
these standard newspapers TV stations have struggled with a shift
to digital distribution, people are going out elsewhere. How do
we adapt to that type of information ecosystem. And one
(06:04):
of the recommendations that we make in the report is
that we do shift to looking more at investment in
creators because they carry a certain level of credibility and
they are where people are going to get their news.
So what derivative content, for example, do they create from
a bombshell news report. Not everyone's going to go to
(06:25):
pro Publica right and read the intricacies of their coverage
of Alito or Thomas or really good study they did
in the trucking industry. So how do you get people
who are already have an audience involved in helping distribute
that type of content?
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Is it just me or does it seem like there
is a real movement from like the trusted brand of
the New York Times to the trusted brand of the
actual journalist.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
I think that's right.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
I feel like The New York.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Times a bad example because that is like the gold standard.
But like if you think of the trusted brand of
like Vice, which we love but has gone now rip
to the trusted brand of like Jim Acosta.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Yes, and but I think that's a good like The
New York Times is a very good example there because
I think they as an institution are grappling with this
question even more because yes, the trend is toward individuals
as the brand and the trusted voice. But you do
have these big institutions that weathered a lot of changes, right,
But the New York Times, like the Washington Post, who
(07:32):
did create a smart revenue model and Ben Smith writes
about this in Traffic for Themselves, you know, in twenty fourteen,
twenty fifteen, based on subscription and not necessarily just traffic
and ad revenue generated that way, so they were able
to weather some of it. But the larger trend is
still towards individuals. And you see someone like Ben Smith
(07:55):
at Semaphore. He was just talking it can about how he,
you know, wants to give his journalists the ability to
follow things that they're curious about and build an audience
that is attached to them, not necessarily to Semaphore, but
Semophore is their home. And I think that's a large
trend that we're seeing too.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
It's so interesting because it's like, I mean, I think
of my own career, right, I popped around, you know,
I started at The Daily Beast, and then I went
to Vogue and now I'm at Anti Fair.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
So I've seen, you know, firsthand that.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Like it's interesting because it's like I almost wonder, like
I come from the nineteen nineties. So in the nineties,
the platform was a much bigger deal than the creator, right,
and so if you had a piece in Vogue or
you had a piece in the New York Times, you know,
that was sort of it.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
And now that's really different. I mean, it really is.
Explain to me what you guys are talking about with
this idea.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Of buying a.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
TV local news station.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Yeah, well, I feel like that was the ghost of
BuzzFeed showing up at Themophore and said, we need to
really click baby headline it is. You know, we do
talk about local TV in the report, and what we
see that's interesting about it is that unlike newspapers, which
truly have been in free fall, local broadcast TV, at
least so far, has proven relatively impervious to you know,
(09:21):
declines and employment and revenue and news production volume. And
they also hit that spot of trust because we frequently
see people less trusting of national institutions, national brands, but
more trusting of their local for a variety of reasons.
I mean, like I can name the news anchors that
I grew up with in the suburb of Minneapolis. I
think that is part of it. And part of it
(09:43):
too is that they see their community reflected back to them,
and we haven't really seen a huge change in local
television formats right think about what it was a decade ago,
two decades ago, three decades ago. It feels kind of
the same. And part of that too is that they've
been able to be stable with the revenue that they've
(10:04):
brought in. They rely cyclically on political ads, that's a constant,
and we're seeing record spending that's helping them keep afloat.
And they're also making some money from these retransmission fees
from some of their content. So that is a place
that I think is underappreciated. I think we light our
hair on fire when thinking about local news focused on
newspapers because there's been such a decline there. But we
(10:26):
should be looking at television too, because it's been relatively stable,
very surprisingly.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
Yeah, I mean I feel like a lot of this
sort of came up when we saw Sinclair come into town.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Yep, go on, you talk to me about that.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
From the you know, I want to say, like twenty fourteen,
twenty fifteen, you started to see people paying attention to
them doing must runs right where you see the same
talking points echoed by that video.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Is amazing, Wow, amazing. Right, So this is we're talking
about a video that sint Clair.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
They came up, by the way, recently was brought back
to the forefront by one Elon Musk, who was criticizing
it for that it was group think, but it was
actually this conservative station called Sinclair had these must reads
and every news anchor, no matter what if it was,
(11:19):
you know, Michigan or Wisconsin or Florida, had these same
must reads and they said the exact same thing the
exact same way at the exact same time.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Right, exactly. Hilarious, like history collapsing in on itself. But yeah,
the point being, it is a trusted medium. It's not
something that really ever gets looked at in terms of investment.
It has a reach, it has audience that relies on it,
it has high trust, and it's not a place where
(11:49):
we really have looked. But you have seen organizations like
Sinclair make investments in local TV and I think, you know,
move the need probably in key markets as a result
of their coverage.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
I think a lot about there's this one state where
it's a small New England state, New England. It's a
small northeastern state where all of the local newspapers are
owned by the same guy. And you know, if a
conservative conglomerate AD buys them, that's it, right.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Right, It's a huge problem, and they often do so quilely.
There's not a ton of pushback. And I think, you know,
one thing that is frustrating sometimes when you think about
political spend, and we didn't approach this just as a
you know, we're Democrats and this is a political goal.
But when you think about political spending and the amount
(12:41):
of money that gets dumped into thads ads in the
final two weeks of an election, and you know, maybe
I'll never get work in Florida, but is it worth
you know, dumping fifty million dollars in the in the
final sprint for television ads, or should you invest in
some actual infrastructure and look at this in a more
long term way? And I think pretty clear where I
(13:03):
would come down there.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I think that's a really good point.
You do see like there's so much money going into politics,
especially now that every candidate, or not every candidate, but
certainly in the GOP primary, each one of these candidates
has a pack, right.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
They have their own money, and then they have their
pack money. So you really do see that there is.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
A place, for sure for some sort of thoughtful spending, right, It's.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
True in the political side too. And then part of
the report, we also looked at what investment looks like
on just digital global digital ad spend, right even even
just divorced from politics, and you've got to market where
influencer sponsored content in twenty twenty two looked something like,
you know, sixteen billion dollars, which sounds like a huge
amount of money, but you compare it to the overall
(13:55):
global digital ad spend of six hundred billion dollars, and
it just seems like there's a bunch of efficiency there
that should be should be looked at and uncovered, and
I think that is one of the lessons we learned too,
is where is capital going and is it being effectively spent?
And then there are also questions embedded there of us
for us for media models of you know what do
(14:16):
these types of entities even look like?
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Right?
Speaker 2 (14:20):
Are they nonprofit newsrooms where I think we've seen an
awakening of a lot of local coverage through those vehicles.
Are they for profits that are our low profit you know,
you no longer looking at a news or media outlet
says something that you need to draw a large value from.
Or are they like journalists driven or influencer driven to
mediums like substack, you know that are sort of empowering
(14:42):
journalists in a way where you can build a really
loyal audience, sustain yourself. And they have some tools like
you know, a substack defender, which is a legal legal
shields or you know, legal access if you ever get
in trouble, you know, for some of your reporting. So
I think that's a big that's a big part of
this report too.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Can people find this report?
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Yes? How we have a really self descriptive website and
it's at Media Landscape report dot org. And nobody had
taken it. So we took and that's where this lives.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
Yes, it is, like, I think, a really important thing
to be thinking about and to be thinking about how
people can get like just legitimate information that's real. Facebook
and Twitter, I mean Twitter now whatever.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
I think we give up on Twitter at this point.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
But Facebook had this opportunity to really like they had
killed local news and they could have really come in
and replaced it with like actual quality news, but instead
they decided not to.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Yeah, it was you know, a companied of maybe a
year or so spaced apart to the metaverse, which is
like a cartoon video game. Guess that is our future, right,
that's the social value we're getting there, which is bobbing.
But and it's also you know, for Googles, for Facebook,
(16:05):
for other platforms you're seeing for example in Canada, Australia.
California is considering legislation that would in some ways reimburse
publishers for content that gets shared. But you know, I
don't know, and it's a little bit out of the
purview of this whether or not that's a solution for
funding local journalism. It feels like the genius is out
(16:27):
of the bottle there, and you've also got these platforms,
and this is a pressure that we heard from a
lot of folks who are individuals publishing their own content.
They're just at the whims of these platforms, right, Like,
in the world in which you are a writer, editor,
and distributor of your own content, Google can change something
in their algorithm and your entire model can be upended
(16:47):
and they won't even tell you about it. I mean, Facebook,
same thing, Twitter, same thing. What do the blue checks
even mean anymore? It's a little bit of like a
Wild West situation. And I do think part of the
reason that individuals have shifted back towards email is that
that feels a little bit more under control. Right, I
am emailing you via substag, via ghost via medium work.
(17:09):
You can subsproud and support me if you.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Like, right, and that you feel like there's more object
permanence to email.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Right exactly.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Oh that's really really interesting. Thank you so much, Tim.
I hope you'll come back.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
Yeah, absolutely, this was great. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Bradley Bonishi is an assistant professor of religion at Skidmore
College and the author of Preparing for War, The Extremist
History of White Christian nationalism and what comes next?
Speaker 3 (17:40):
Welcome to Fast Politics, Bradley.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Thanks for having me, so talk to me about your book.
Speaker 4 (17:45):
Sure Preparing for War is I look at the history
of white Christian nationalism basically start with the Goldwater Campaign
nineteen sixty four and we end with January sixth. Then
what comes next? And you know, for me, it's it's
pretty personal. I converted to a church that was a
white Christian nationalist church when I was fourteen.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
I became a minister at twenty.
Speaker 4 (18:04):
So when I watched January sixth, I thought maybe I
could have been there, and that scared me.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
So as a scholar religion, I wanted to lay out the.
Speaker 4 (18:11):
Kind of history that led us to that point and
show that, Yeah, it was definitely an aberration. It was
definitely singular in American history, but there was a lot
of signs throughout the last decades that that's where we
might be heading as a nation.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
How did you change your course?
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Yeah, So when I was twenty, I was a full
time minister.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
I was married, I was in charge of like a
couple hundred kids in a youth ministry at a megachurch.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
You know, I just began reading and reading and reading.
Speaker 4 (18:35):
I you know, heard all the time that if you
if you let your brain, it'll lead your heart away
from God. And I don't know if that's true, but
I definitely had a more expansive understanding of the world.
After investigating history and philosophy and theology, I went to
Oxford to get a degree, and that obviously changed everything
for me. So I began to realize that the faith
I'd been brought into was more about a conservative political
(18:57):
agenda and a certain myth of the United States than
you know, something about a timeless faith.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
And that's when things really really changed.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
Was there one specific thing that did it? A book?
Speaker 4 (19:07):
There was a lot of moments, but you know, one
moment was really the John Carey George W. Bush election.
I was convinced I was going to vote for John Carey,
and I told all my elders at church, you know, look,
I just think this is somebody who has a vision
for the country that's just more in line with what
Jesus teaches. And they said, hey, great, that sounds wonderful
for you. But he is pro choice, and if you
vote for someone like that, you and along with everyone else,
(19:29):
will be responsible for the murder of millions of unborn babies.
So if you want that on your conscience, then go ahead.
Otherwise I would think about it a little harder. And
you know, for me, that was a moment, a watershed moment,
because I realized that we'd reduced some of the most
complex issues of our public square, the human condition, to
either or this or that. There was no nuance, there
(19:49):
was no detail, there was no compassion, And after that whole,
you know, set of events, I was really on a
different path.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
It's so interesting because I constantly have this argument conway
about abortion, and you know, I wonder how much of
it is like nurture in a way it is.
Speaker 4 (20:07):
I mean, I think the trick is convincing people, as
I was at one time, that life begins a conception,
and that that is a fact that has been not
only scientifically proven, but has been taught by the Christian
Church for two thousand years. And as long as people
buy that simple piece of teaching or propaganda, however we
want to frame it, it's really hard to get them
(20:27):
back from the brink because anything you say is simply,
in their ears, a pro murder agenda. And that is
the tragic effectiveness of that approach.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
Yeah's unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
Talk to me about Goldwater, because I want to talk
about Goldwater. You know, there's this chicken of the egg
thing with trump Ism, like was it Trump?
Speaker 3 (20:45):
Was it Nixon? Was it Goldwater?
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Where did Republicans start to go wildly off the rails?
Though there's an argument to be made that they were
always off the rails, but yes.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Go on for sure.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
And I think for me Goldwater was a nice place
to start because Goldwater really appears on the scene after
two decades of either a Democratic president or Dwight eis
At Howard, who's famous for his Middle Way. Hey, you know,
Goldwater shows up and says, look, we want it our
way and we won't compromise. And you know, he's just
this magnetic force. He's got a big baritone voice and
a square jaw, and he's you know, supposedly a cowboy senator,
(21:20):
and he's willing just to say bombastic and outrageous things.
You know, we're gonna use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. There's
no way I'm going to sign legislation for civil rights
and so on. And when he accepts the nomination, you know,
the most famous line in San Francisco at the GOB
Convention is extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
(21:40):
And he's basically setting the stage for the next six
decades by saying, Look, we're in the midst of a
decade here in the sixties, or in the midst of
a time of what feels like change. If you're gonna
keep your country, if you're gonna get your country back,
extremism is your approach. And you know, he got destroyed
in his race against Lynnon Johnson, but the foot soldiers
of that campaign never forgot those lessons. You know, Paul
(22:03):
Wirick was like a twenty one year old kid at
that point, and he goes on to found the Council
for National Policy, the Heritage Foundation and ALEC. So Goldwater's
really for me this moment of Hey, white Christian men,
if you want your country, extremism is the way to
do it. And you know, there's a line from there
that kind of brings us into the present from Goldwater.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
Just give me a little bit trace it, keep going.
Speaker 4 (22:26):
Yeah, for sure, I'm from southern California and Goldwater is
a place where he gets just a ton of support
from that part of the country. But you know, Goldwater
sets the stage for a Republican party that embraces extremism,
that sees moderation as something to be avoided as a vice.
And he sort of inspires a whole generation of a
(22:46):
Republican party that understands something. And this is where Wyrick
and his cohorts and the Council for National Policy really
were genius. If they can combine what is an essence,
a right wing libertarian agenda, with the voting power of
millions of white conservative Christians, then they can occupy the
GOP and eventually occupy the country.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
And that's what they do.
Speaker 4 (23:07):
And so if we go from Goldwater all the way
fifteen years later to the Carter Reagan election, we see
another foreshadowing of Trump. Jimmy Carter is like built in
a lab. If you're a white Christian, you know he's
your guy.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
He's a Southern.
Speaker 4 (23:19):
Baptist by birds right, Yeah, your rural Georgia peanut farmer,
Mary's his high school sweetheart, goes into the Milletary. I mean,
what else do you want from this man? If you're
a white Christian to vote for him? And yet who
do they vote for? They vote for the divorce Hollywood
actor who at one point was pretty good, you know,
into abortion as the governor of California.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
Right, he was the guy.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
Who ended no fault divorces, which is one of the
most progressive legislations.
Speaker 4 (23:46):
Weirdly, right, it's wild. It's absolutely wild to think of,
you know, Reagan as the golden child of the religious
right and the Council for National Policy and everyone we're
talking about. But they chose power over piety, right. You know,
so when you go from Goldwater to that and you
start looking at Trump, you're like, wow, I see a
lot of Goldwater and a lot of Reagan in this
man who eventually becomes worse than all of them. But
(24:08):
it's no accident, you know, it's not like there was
no historical precedent for this.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
Right. So interesting, I mean, it's funny because it's like
you really.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Do see that the difference between Reagan and Carter, right,
the guy who's so right, and then the difference between
Trump and Biden, right, Biden, who like was the poorest senator,
it speaks to really, you know, the sort of hypocrisy
of the Republican Party.
Speaker 4 (24:33):
It's repeating itself in the sense that you know, Biden.
And I know everyone's going to have their different views
on this, whether good or bad. But Biden's like one
of the most religious presidents. I mean, the man goes
the Mass numerous times per week.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
You know, he is very inter religion.
Speaker 4 (24:47):
Yeah, and then you know Josh Holly and the folks
are saying if if you bring up God on the left,
they laugh at you. And it's like, and again, I
I'm not here to debate whether it's good or bad.
Biden's so religious. I'm just here to say it's the
same thing playing out of again for sure.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Yeah, as someone who is not religious, who grew up
not religious. My family Jewish, atheist, communists. But you do
really see that Biden is quite religious. I mean it
speaks to this idea. And again I don't love this,
but it is it's worth mentioning. Is that there was
always you know, this anxiety I think underlying anxiety that
Trump was actually I mean, he's obviously not. I mean,
(25:22):
if you think about who has probably had more experience
in our lives with abortion, Trump or Biden. So you
got out, you became an academic, Tell me a little
bit more about your story.
Speaker 4 (25:34):
Sure, I'd become somebody who studies religion from a historical perspective,
from a sociological perspective, and during the Trump years, I
wanted to kind of find a way to help people
decode how all this happened from a religious perspective. And
so we started our show Straight Wide American Jesus. And
we don't think Jesus was straight white or American, but
we want to know why so many people do and
(25:55):
why they see the image of Jesus and Trump and
what we offer. And I think for me, this is
what I I'm always sort of telling folks is I've
lived this. I've been on the inside, and I can
help you understand that. And I've now spent twenty years
studying it from the outside, and so we can give
the long historical view, we can also give the insider view.
And so yeah, I spent the last five years basically
every waking hour analyzing their every corner of the religious
(26:19):
bride and Christian nationalism in a country and basically trying
to warn folks about what I take to be a
proto fascist movement.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
What is the single sort of scariest thing that you
think when you think of this proto fascist.
Speaker 4 (26:31):
Movement Democracy is not a sacred value to this group.
Democracy is not the goal, the goal's power. The goal
is to have dominion over the United States, and if
democracy needs to be done away with in order for
that to happen, they're completely fine with that. And I
can show you the evidence. I mean, democracy is a problem,
not a solution for many of the folks that I
(26:52):
that I'm talking about, and that's overwhelmingly scary. And the
tentacles of that position just sort of go every where
in terms of dehumanizing migrants, dehumanizing trans folks, in terms
of being willing to follow an authoritarian leader, being willing
to write a rough shot over democratic norms and processes.
So if democracy is a problem and not a solution
(27:14):
for you, then it's really hard to have a public
square that is healthy or safe at all. And I
think for me that's what it comes down to.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
So interesting, Bradley, I hope you.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Will come back, of course, anytime.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds
in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you
enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend
and keep the conversation going. And again thanks for listening.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
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