Money, Lies, and God
Who is "Woke Jesus"? It’s the actual Jesus from the Bible—the dark-skinned Jewish revolutionary who advocated for feeding the poor and healing the sick. The Christian nationalists who use Trump’s MAGA movement as a weapon against our democracy are also at war with Jesus, as this week’s guest explains. By the strictest definition, doesn't that make Trump the anti-Christ?
Investigative journalist Katherine Stewart, author of the new book Money, Lies, and God, examines the right-wing Libertarian elites taking over our democracy through white Christian nationalist foot soldiers and offers ways to fight back. Stewart is also the author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism and The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children. Her journey included witnessing Christian nationalist recruitment and hate campaigns take root in her child’s public school. As Andrea discuses in the opening of this week’s show, MAGA/Russia are weakening the U.S. from within (mass purge, trade war, declaring war on experts, etc.) so that we’re scared and confused, and easier to conquer. We won’t let them win.
Thank you to everyone who joined Gaslit Nation’s first book club last month! For March, we’re reading Gene Sharp’s revolutionary handbook From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation, which informed revolts in Ukraine, the Arab Spring, Hong Kong, and beyond. Our March 31st salon at 4pm will open with a book club discussion of Dictatorship to Democracy. For April, we’re reading (if you haven’t already!) Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, and May’s book club pick is Total Resistance: Swiss Army Guide to Guerrilla Warefare And Underground Operations. Get ready to make some good trouble!
EVENTS AT GASLIT NATION:
March 17 4pm ET – Dr. Lisa Corrigan joins our Gaslit Nation Salon to discuss America’s private prison crisis in an age of fascist scapegoating
March 31 4pm ET – Gaslit Nation Book Club: From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation, which informed revolts in Ukraine, the Arab Spring, Hong Kong, and beyond
NEW! April 7 4pm ET – Security Committee Presents at the Gaslit Nation Salon. Don’t miss it!
Indiana-based listeners launched a Signal group for others in the state to join on Patreon.com/Gaslit.
Florida-based listeners are going strong meeting in person. Be sure to join their Signal group on Patreon.com/Gaslit.
Have you taken Gaslit Nation’s HyperNormalization Survey Yet?
Gaslit Nation Salons take place Mondays 4pm ET over Zoom and the first ~40 minutes are recorded and shared on Patreon.com/Gaslit for our community
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Show Notes
Voting is an act of fact checking: The dictator or wannabe dictator claims legitimacy. By voting, even if your vote is illegally not counted, your presence casting the vote adds up, and together the exit polls can indicate whether the election was stolen. Look to Venezuela’s grassroots powerhouse effort to count votes to prove the opposition won the election: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/10/gonzalez-proof-win-venezuela-election-vote-tally-maduro
Russia sought to influence LGBT voters with ‘Buff Bernie’ ad: Materials made public in committee dump of Facebook propaganda
https://www.washingtonblade.com/2017/11/01/russia-facebook-ad-sought-influence-lgbt-voters-buff-bernie/
The Insider reveals new details of Russian intelligence scheme offering Taliban $200,000 bounties for killing U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan https://meduza.io/en/feature/2025/01/09/the-insider-reveals-new-details-of-russian-intelligence-scheme-offering-taliban-200-000-bounties-for-killing-u-s-soldiers-in-afghanistan
Marisa Kabas on Blueskye: “SCOOP: Now that Linda McMahon is confirmed/sworn in as secretary, Trump will be imminently issuing an executive order eliminating the Department of Education. I’ve obtained a draft of an email that McMahon will be sending to staff re: the EO and the department’s “final mission”. Here is a portion:” https://bsky.app/profile/marisakabas.bsky.social/post/3ljj64pfjzk2v
Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by Katherine Stewart https://bookshop.org/p/books/money-lies-and-god-inside-the-movement-to-dismantle-american-democracy-katherine-stewart/21368231?ean=9781635578546&next=t&next=t
The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-power-worshippers-inside-the-dangerous-rise-of-religious-nationalism-katherine-stewart/8555591?ean=9781635577877&next=t&next=t
The Good News Club: The Religious Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children by Katherine Stewart https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-good-news-club-the-religious-right-s-stealth-assault-on-america-s-children-katherine-stewart/6717978?ean=9781610392198&next=t&next=t
Download "From Dictatorship to Democracy" for free here:
https://archive.org/details/from_dictatorship_to_democracy_1306_librivox
Download "Total Resistance: Swiss Army Guide to Guerrilla Warefare And Underground Operations"
https://archive.org/details/total-resistance-swiss-army-guide-to-guerilla-warfare-1965
Opening clip: https://x.com/theelishev/status/1896120665532719511
Clip: Trudeau: "I heard he talked about banking again this morning in a tweet, which doesn't make any sense because 16 banks are currently active in Canada holding about $113b worth of assets in this country, so American banks are alive and well and prospering in Canada. It's an example of not really being able to see what he wants ... what he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that'll make it easier to annex us." https://x.com/atrupar/status/1896962522764227069
Clip of Daryl Hannah at the Oscars: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1301955947523848
Clip: Conan Jokes About 'Anora' and Russia At The Oscars 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiwBNniPhR8
Transcript
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Unknown Speaker (00:00:30):
Is the president of Ukraine. Boy, he got the power of a Zen boy. I'd have flipped all them goddamn tables over in there. Like fuck that shit then. We're going to fall on our goddamn sword and then bring it on goddammit. Everybody die. Ain't no way, boy. Ol' boy JD Vance tell me being disrespectful. I'd a showed him some disrespect. Ain't no goddamn way. God damn. Pretty much they trying to make him goddamn bow down. Fuck that boy. I have walked in there with my Ukrainian flag draped around my motherfucking neck. No goddamn way. Fuck that shit, boy. Damn. I ain't never seen a motherfucker go back and forth like that. That supposed do that in private. They say you ain't say thank you or nothing. I'd be like, kiss my ass. Ukraine.
Andrea Chalupa (00:01:29):
Our opening clip went viral among Ukrainians, giving them a sense of solidarity that not all Americans lack empathy. I don't know who the original speaker is, but thank you sir, and I'll link to it in the show notes. Thank you to all Americans standing with Ukraine, especially during this difficult time for not just Ukrainians but the whole world. There is a maniac, several maniacs in the White House. All of us are in danger. We've been warning about this for so long. Let's get into it now. If you would like to make a donation to help Ukraine, check out razomforukraine@razomforukraine.org. A nonprofit that I've known personally for years thus sprouted up with the Euromaidan revolution and brings a much needed humanitarian aid in Russia's ongoing genocide, which just attacked a children's medical facility in the name of JD Vance and his complicit wife, Usha Vance, who of course had their ski trip crashed by thousands of patriotic protestors in Vermont. Thank you so much. Vermont.
(00:02:36):
As you can imagine with Trump extorting Ukraine once again, the Republican party trying to force regime change, regime change in Kiev by pressuring Zelensky to break the Ukrainian constitution by holding elections, which Maga, including Elon Musk and Russia clearly plan to steal, to install their own puppet, to join them in their axes of autocrats to rape and pillage the world. So as you can imagine, these past few days have been particularly hard after I've devoted several decades to raising awareness of Russia's last massive genocide of Ukraine 92 years ago. Stalin's genocide, famine, the Holodomor that took place in 1933. Here's the most important thing to understand about what we are up against. Russia and Trump wield three highly effective weapons, which helped Russia to occupy the White House far faster than it took them to occupy 20% of Ukraine.
(00:03:50):
Weapon number one, disinformation weapon. Number two, golden handcuffs buying people off. Weapon number three, threats. If the mob can't buy you, they'll kill you. But I would add a fourth equally important weapon waged against the world, and that's plausible deniability.
(00:04:15):
Lots of people have been killed on foreign soil, especially in the UK by the Russians, but how can you prove it? Charismatic, opposition, leader Boris Nemtsov gunned down in the shadow of the Kremlin. How do you prove they did it? Plausible deniability. Like any mob boss Putin is very good at keeping his hands clean and letting others get caught with the dirty work. Same with Trump and Maga. Are they or aren't they working with the Russians or is Trump just a sword swinging businessman? He's Mr. Art of the Deal, likes to make money. That's what this mineral deal is all about. They want you to believe he's just trying to make that money.
(00:04:57):
But then if you look closer, you'll notice that there are conflicting reports of what's really going on, and there's a whole track record of this, of Trump trying to remain looking. He's not the hatchet man, right? He's not the one holding the gun to destroy our democracy. It's Elon Musk doing it. Trump has a history of this. Look back to June, 2016, in the infamous Trump tower meeting between Russian intelligence agents and his campaign chairman, longtime Kremlin operative Paul Manafort and Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner who was running that campaign with Ivanka, Don Jr., the idiot's son was there. It is believed that in Trump Tower June, 2016, after a long lucrative relationship together over decades where Trump businesses throughout the world were highly dependent on Russian money, a lot of Russians were buying into Trump properties.
(00:05:55):
Fred Trump kicked off this party by developing Brighton Beach with the help of Russian money flooding in with the Jackson Barrack Amendment, helping get namely Russian Jews out, but also with the collapse the Soviet Union those Russians were flood into Brighton Beach like it was Crimea. And so Fred Trump was really the guy that got the Russian trader train started Fred Trump who was arrested at a KKK rally in New York City.
(00:06:20):
So his son, the Nazi, grows up to take over the father's fortune, gets bankrupt six times, but has the Russians bail him out again and again and again when no credible institution will lend to him. And so it's time now for Trump to finally become president like they've always told him he could be. Mark Burnett, before he launched The Apprentice, he went over to Putin and try to get that reality show going. Didn't work, but suddenly Trump emerges making Mark Burnett hugely famous and influential and they get to convince mainstream America that Trump is a real businessman and not a career criminal fraudster. So we got this whole apprentice makeover on mainstream TV.
(00:07:04):
Thanks Jeff Zucker. And now it's finally time to pull the trigger and go for the Golden Goose. June, 2016, Trump Tower, Trump campaign. Trump family members in the room with Russian intelligence. Trump may or may not have been there. He may have been on speakerphone, but it's believed that there's some sort of handshake deal that happened in that room because weeks later, Kremlin cut out WikiLeaks released Democratic party emails hacked by the Russians. The media pounced on that instead of the fact that a foreign adversary had just carried out a crime larger than Watergate, like mafia-state boss Putin, mob boss Trump has others do his dirty work for him so he can maintain an aura of plausible deniability. It was JD Vance soiling his pants over Zelensky defiantly standing up for his country in a genocidal invasion. JD Vance did the dirty work of getting aggressive and showing the world we're on the Kremlin side now. Or are we?
(00:08:04):
All the messages they put out, including Marco Rubio said their attempted frat boy hazing of Ukrainian Churchill was simply America first. We're putting America first. We're squeezing money out of this war ravage country for America First. Trump said Zelensky can come back to the table. Once he's ready until then aid is cut off. This all seems like some aggressive negotiation, but Trump's a businessman. This is Trump being Trump. I want to make clear for everyone since plausible deniability is a weapon of the Kremlin, plausible deniability is a weapon of Trump. It's used to delay us. It's used to gaslight us. It's used to question reality itself. What is really going on here? Who do I believe? And suddenly everybody's debating. Remember the lesson of how dictatorship, propaganda disinformation works. It's not about convincing you the sky is zebra colored. Right.
(00:09:03):
It's not about convincing you that there's spaghetti and meatballs falling from the sky. Propaganda disinformation is about confusing. You don't know what to believe. And here talking out of both sides of their mouth, creating this "I'm just a businessman" plausible deniability. To clarify it for everyone, to cut through the smoke and mirrors, Trump's minerals deal for Ukraine is Trump extorting zelensky to sign that deal so then Trump can then say to Putin, these minerals are mine, not Russia's. Hand them over and in return you can do whatever you want with Ukraine. I don't care. I just want that money. The MAGA idiots keep telling us this mineral deal is a security guarantee because it means America will protect its financial interest in Ukraine. When has Trump ever done that?New reporting, which I'll link to in the show notes, just came out in January confirming yet again that Trump let the Russians for years during his first term pay Taliban fighters to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan.
(00:10:13):
New reporting out just last month confirms this yet again. Trump will let Russia do whatever it wants to American interest in Ukraine, as we're already seeing, as long as Trump gets paid. This mineral deal is to get leverage over not just Zelensky but the Kremlin itself to claim those resources in Russian occupied Ukrainian land for Trump and his fellow bandits, and to force Zelensky to capitulate so that Ukraine can be served up to Russia and Trump fulfilled his end of the bargain. He doesn't care about Ukraine, he doesn't even care about Putin and Russia. He just wants this axes of autocrats so they can enrich each other in their spheres of influence, live above the law and stay in power and die in power like any dictator. None of this is creative. None of this is surprising. This is what's happening. Believe your eyes and ears, and I'm telling you this because again, the weapon of authoritarian disinformation is simply to confuse you so you don't know what to believe and you're just debating basic facts. Is up, up? Is down, down? Yes it is.
(00:11:17):
Okay. You know all of this by now because you've seen this coming. You've listened the show for years as we warned at the very start of Gaslit nation. Think of the stolen 2016 election of Donald Trump coming to power illegally with the Kremlin's help as a marriage between the Russian mafia in the East with the Russian mafia and the West. Even the dictators of Soviet satellite states of the USSR like to flex their muscles and independence from Moscow from time to time. That is what Trump is doing this mineral deal now that Russia did the hard work of seizing that land, Trump gets to develop it. In return, Russia gets Ukraine. This is an axes of autocrats. I am spelling this all out for the leaders of the European Union and the whole free world, which must urgently wake up.
(00:12:09):
America is now firmly on the side of Russia. Do not fall for plausible deniability. It will only waste your time and your energy. Just accept the fact now work through the stages of grief. America is off the board and it is in fact working against you. Now America, switch sides. Anything a democratic world leader tells the Trump administration, they're telling the Kremlin. Just to underline this point, Trump's White House shut down the DOJs Russian focused investigation into election interference and weaponized kleptocracy. Fox News host Pete Hegseth shut down the Department of Defense's cyber operations against Russia, which has carried out a cyber Pearl Harbor against United States against leading industry companies at the height of a once in a century pandemic cyber experts called Russia's attack on us back in 20 20 21, a cyber Pearl Harbor and Pete Hegseth told the Department of Defense, stop all cyber operations regards to Russia and Trump cronies are working with the Russians to try to bring back Nord stream to the pipeline that made Europe dependent on Russian gas, which they shut down in response to the full scale invasion.
(00:13:38):
That's why Elon Musk needed the AFD and Nazi party to win the German election and get influenced in the German election so they could be part of a ruling coalition. So they can bring back Nord Stream 2, turn on that gas tap again to bring the Russian gas flowing into Europe to increase dependency. Keep in mind that Russia likes to turn off its gas to Ukraine, to blackmail Ukraine, extort Ukraine, and it would threaten to do the same to Europe if Nord Stream 2 was active. That's why they had to shut it down. And Trump cronies are trying to bring it back with the Russians. So I understand the free world depends on weapons systems from the us including help repairing and replacing those weapons with parts that only the US can provide. But Europe's first priority to save Europe, including Ukraine, is to become fully independent of the US.
(00:14:38):
You need to do this on an industrial scale. You need to get on war footing now because the most powerful military on this planet by far is now under Russian occupation and it's mass purging and weakening the country within so that it's easier to occupy. Let me give you a historical metaphor for what's happening to the US right now under Project 2025. Yes, the Christian nationalists, as you'll hear in this interview, they want to establish a dictatorship. They want to terrorist to control us and all that. We know that by now, but they also are weakening us deliberately. If you look at the Warsaw uprising at the end of World War II where brave Poles took to the streets and fought the Nazi occupation, the so-called allies and the resistance to the Nazis, the Soviets just stood there and let it happen. Let the Nazis just destroy the Warsaw uprising.
(00:15:32):
Why would the Soviets allied with the Poles like free Poland, free France, and all of the free world against the Nazis why would the Soviets do that? Because they wanted the Nazis to destroy the resistance in Poland so that Poland would be easier to occupy. So Russia, Trump, what they're doing to us, they're making America easier to occupy. And if the Republicans successfully force regime change in Kiev, that will make Ukraine easier to occupy. And then some Putin puppet will begin the process of pillaging Ukraine from within, stripping it of its military, putting Russians in charge of the military and on and on and just gutting programs and mass murdering Ukrainians that way by starving them to death, starving them of vital lifesaving programs. Just like what's happening here in the US, it's all intentional. This is Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau today sending this same urgent message to the free world warning that Trump's chaotic trade war is far more sinister than just crashing the market, destroying America. It's something far more dangerous. And it illustrates the point I just made
Justin Trudeau (00:16:52):
I think in terms of what he wants, I heard he talked about banking again this morning in a tweet, which doesn't make any sense because American banks about 16 American banks currently active in Canada holding about $113 billion worth of assets in this country. So the American banks are alive and well and prospering in Canada. It's an example of not really being able to see what it is that he wants because even the excuse that he's giving for these Paris tariffs today of fentanyl is completely bogus, completely unjustified, completely false.
(00:17:32):
So we actually have to fold back on the one thing he has said repeatedly that what he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy because that'll make it easier to annex us is the second half of his thought. Now first of all, that's never going to happen. We will never be the 51st state. But yeah, he can do damage to the Canadian economy and he's started this morning, but he is rapidly going to find out as American families are going to find out that that's going to hurt people on both sides of the border. Americans will lose jobs, Americans will be paying more for groceries, for gas, for cars, for homes, because we have always done best when we work together
Andrea Chalupa (00:18:24):
To our European allies. I am reporting to you on Radio Free America, the American resistance. I'm calling to you from Russian occupied America. Do not depend on the United States for anything. Keep America at the kiddy table. Give the US fake intelligence to try to throw us off the scent of your real operations. Treat America under Trump like Churchill treated the Nazi regime because that is what we are today. I want to remind everyone that there are more of us and there are of them and that like Putin puppet Yanukovych in Ukraine, this friend of Jeffrey Epstein in the White House who backs Russia, an army that carries out mass rape in war including of small children, will be overthrown at the voting booth ideally, or the American people will be forced to find some other way to uphold the US Constitution. But whatever we need to do, the revolution is coming. You can count on that.
(00:19:29):
This week's guest is investigative journalist Katherine Stewart. She joins Gaslit Nation to discuss her new book, "Money Lies and God. Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy." This conversation comes on the heels of reports that Linda McMahon, the United States Secretary of Education, will carry out Project 2025 to abolish the Department of Education, leaving education policies up to the states. Keep that in mind as you listen to this interview.
(00:19:57):
But first, here's some defiant support for Ukraine at this year's Oscars from famously nonpolitical comedian Conan O'Brien, as well as extraordinary iconic actress Daryl Hanna, whose husband Neil Young will play a free concert in Ukraine because that is why we love Neil Young. Thank you to everyone joining the fight for Ukraine. Wherever you are in the world, slava Ukraine.
Daryl Hanna (00:20:23):
Slava Ukraine.
Conan O'Brien (00:20:26):
You know Anora is having a good night. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, that's great news. Two wins already. I guess Americans are excited to see somebody finally stand up to a powerful Russian.
Andrea Chalupa (00:20:52):
I was recently at Bard College and I was meeting with these academics, historians, some who are from Ukraine and they have mostly for no choice of their own, been forced to be on the front lines of this global war of fascism versus democracy. And that is disinformation warfare against democracy, whether it's coming from the Kremlin or today from the Oval Office. And what they were saying is what I've often heard for years now, which is we are facing a war of realities, which reality is going to win. And Americans in coping with this war on reality, they are hiding in their safe little bubbles away from other Americans who see reality completely differently than they do. And you had the courage, you had the grit to travel across America and visit all these different realities. Could you tell us about that experience? Because one thing that's weighing on me, and I just have to get this out of my system, we spend so much time on social media. I'm now on Blue Sky mostly because Twitter is a Nazi den intentionally so by Elon Musk, a Nazi, and I'm on Blue Sky and I'm like, we've been at this for so long, guys talking to the choir. Eventually we have to go into Candace Owens comment section and present the factBs there, but we don't want to engage with Candace Owens or people who look up to her. It's like I don't want to deal with the yuckiness of the reality, but you did. So could you tell us about that experience?
Katherine Stewart (00:22:25):
Over the past 16 years, I've been researching and writing about the anti-democratic movement in the US and I've always thought I'm an investigate reporter and I've always thought, you really don't know what's happening unless you're in the room, unless you're in the spaces where these folks are talking to one another and not just sort of maybe invited to be on CNN and giving their massage talking points the general public. So I've gone to innumerable right-wing conferences and strategy gatherings and meetings of political pastors, groups like Watchman on the Wall, where they draw these pastors into networks and give them tools and talking points to turn out their congregations to vote for their supposedly biblical values. I've put my findings in three books. My latest "Money Lies and God. Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy." It's more than just a series of dispatches from this world.
(00:23:24):
I divide it into three sections. Money, lies and God, because first money is a huge part of the story, meaning what I found is that huge concentrations of wealth are really destabilizing the political system in some really fundamental ways. Second, lies, or conscious disinformation, is another massive feature of this program. A lot of the funders, they want policies that are going to justify and increase these massive concentrations of wealth, but they can't get the rank and file to sort of be on board with this unless they get them to believe a bunch of lies and conspiracy. So that's where the disinformation comes in. And then God of course, because religious nationalism is I think the most important ideological framework for the largest part of this movement. But when you're talking about how people often don't go into these places, I think that part of the problem is that our default position when we're looking at religion is really often in favor of civility, right?
(00:24:25):
Because we want to believe that we're tolerant of others. We want to believe we're engaged in sort of good faith conversations with people who might differ on some issues, but that share our ultimate goals of getting along with one another and respecting others. But we have to accept that sometimes this just isn't the case, and we also have to accept that at times our civility can be used against us. And I think it has been, there's been a lot of pussyfooting around the discussion of political religion in our media, and I think that's unfortunately been a tragic mistake. Now more people are sort of waking up to the realities, but is it too little too late? To be determined.
Andrea Chalupa (00:25:09):
And our norms can be used against us, Merrick Garland leaving office as America's burning and say, well, at least I upheld the norms. I wouldn't even say he did because in America's history we stood up to traitors. We had laws put in place following the Civil War against traitors. He failed at that too. That's another episode. But I want to ask you, in going into the lion's den of people with such hate in their hearts and just full of gaslighting, these are Christians who were going against the very teachings of the New Testament, which is a love thy neighbor take care of the poor, and they went to...
Katherine Stewart (00:25:46):
Oh, all that "woke" Christianity as they call it, which they dismiss it as woke Jesus. Some of the leaders say, I've made it my mission to eradicate woke-ism from the American pulpit, and they're literally calling progressive Christianity, which they identify with the social gospel, heretical. So this is something you hear, your mouth is open. I mean, what do you expect? But here's the thing, a lot of the rank and file are not bad people. I've met a lot of folks in those spaces that on a personal level, I like, I think some of them have, a lot of them have unexamined bigotries really or unexamined racism, but a lot of them are people who love their families, care about their neighbors. They've been so subject to all of this propaganda that they truly believe they're doing what's best for our country. They've been told over and over again that conservative Christians are the most persecuted group in society. So there's been this cultivation and weaponization of grievance. They have been told they represent the true Americans and the others, the feminists, the liberals, the Wokes, the whoevers.
Andrea Chalupa (00:26:58):
The Big Gay agenda, gayifying our schools.
Katherine Stewart (00:27:02):
Exactly, and that's bad, and they think that that represents an apocalyptic threat to the nation. They've been told that our public schools are gender change factories, that they've been told all of these lies, and so they think that we're on this precipice. So any action, no matter how dramatic is necessary in order to save the country from this apocalyptic threat, and that clears the way that helps it rationalizes their support for a leader like Trump, a lawless person who has shifted the goalposts so far, they're nowhere near the playing field and who they've been told over and over that his criminal actions and the judgements against him in a court of law are just political persecution and they believe it because they've been so disoriented by this sort of torrent of misinformation.
Andrea Chalupa (00:27:58):
How great of a force are they? I mean, obviously you talked to a lot of these militant Christian groups and their shadowy, dark financial backers and so on. If you could put a number on in terms of the percentage of the population, we see it in the election results obviously. What percentage of the American population would you say are we dealing with?
Katherine Stewart (00:28:21):
I think that we need to, when we're talking about the rank and file, and this is a leadership driven movement, the movement is not led by the rank and file, and I'll give you a number in a second, but first I want to qualify it. I don't think every person who casts their vote for the candidate who promises to end abortion or protect the American family or whatever is a Christian nationalist. They may be when they're casting their vote, they want to defend in their minds the American family. They're really making a statement about what they value in themselves. They're making a state about their own identity, but they're not necessarily making an argument for major changes in the way our government is run, not necessarily, and the greatest moral issue of our time or moral outrage of our time is they've been taught to believe abortion is, or some of the other issues related to sexuality, issues that are used to distract the rank and file, but the leaders of the movement have a much broader agenda.
(00:29:20):
The number of voters who support this agenda are a minority of the population. I think the most devoted religious right supporters, a group that the evangelical pollster, George Barna calls SAGE Cons, meaning spiritually active governance, engaged conservatives represent like nine or 10% of the population, but they vote in wildly disproportionate numbers, and it does in a country where 40 to 50% of people don't bother to turn out to vote and an additional number have their votes discounted because of other factors like race-based gerrymandering or voter suppression tactics, which disproportionately target the moderate center liberal left, you don't need a majority to win elections. All you need is disproportionately motivated minority. And then of course you have other fellow travelers, but he's talking about the most rabid and active, I would say, religious rights supporters. More broadly speaking, I think we're talking 25 maybe to 30% of the population.
(00:30:27):
I mean, I think an underappreciated feature of this movement are the pastor networks, which I describe in my books, including Money Lies and God, the first chapter of course. I describe the actions of an organization called Faith Wins, where they gather pastors around the country to churches or mega churches. Sometimes the dozens or even hundreds of pastors attend each event. And then you have movement leaders like Chad Connolly from the Council for National Policy or David Barton who's one of the movement's key. mythmakers. They get up there and they tell them it's your duty to get your congregations to vote their biblical values. They're aborting babies after they're born, which isn't happening. Your kid goes to school at eight am and comes back from school at three a different gender, which doesn't happen. They pump them up with all this lies and fear, and then they give them extremely sophisticated tools for turning out their congregations to vote like by turning conservative churches almost into partisan political cells. If you can get 95% of your congregation to vote, I mean you can really punch above your political weight, and they're also very strategic about the areas that they target. So if you can get a swing district in a swing state, you can really flip the state and you can flip an election. Let's look at what happened to Florida, I mean, which used to be more of a blue state and then purple and now it's gone red in the last couple of elections.
Andrea Chalupa (00:32:00):
Do you see anything being born to counteract this on the little D democratic side?
Katherine Stewart (00:32:09):
That's a challenging question because I think there are a lot of democracy building organizations out there, and they need support. They need funding. But here's the challenge. We don't have the kind of movement on the other side of the political aisle that we have on the religious right and the sort of broader anti-democratic movement. I guess I would count the new right as very much a part of that. I described the religious right and the new right. In my book, "Money Lies and God" as the power couple of American fascism. That movement draws on decades of investment in this deep organizational infrastructure. We're talking billions of dollars over five plus decades have gone into policy groups and all throughout a few names here, but this is by no means comprehensive. You get policy groups like the Family Research Council and Heritage and groups like that.
(00:33:01):
Then you have networking organizations like the Council for National Policy that get leaders of the different organizations on the same page and different factions of the movement. You've got think tanks like the Claremont Institute and the Heartland Institute and so many others. You've got an Acton Institute. You've got, oh my gosh, a vast right-wing legal ecosphere, which includes groups like the Alliance of Friending Freedom, that litigate cases intended to destroy separation of church estate and enforce kind of conservative religious values and other sort of features onto all of America. And then that works alongside groups like First Liberty and Liberty Council and the Federal Society, of course, which spends a lot of money, a lot of money cultivating and developing right-wing legal talent, including judges to occupy the Supreme Court and lower courts. You have policy groups, I think it's called AFPI, but there are so many others that are sort of crafting policies that will satisfy the different factions. So they don't just want to satisfy religious right leaders as sergeants and power players. They also need to satisfy the funders. That's why you have a real alliance with the sort of right wing almost they call it libertarian economic ideology. A kind of economic set is going to justify an increased wealth at the tippy top of the economic ladder. And that has been sort of married with a kind of reactionary religious agenda as well.
Andrea Chalupa (00:34:37):
Have American churches on the right been basically taken over by this libertarian anti-social safety net billionaires multimillionaires to be foot soldiers in their war against regulations and taxes?
Katherine Stewart (00:34:59):
Absolutely. I mean, except they don't lead with that. If you tell that...
Andrea Chalupa (00:35:03):
That's what's happening.
Katherine Stewart (00:35:05):
I know, but that's not the messaging to the rank and file. You can't say we're driving support for politicians whose economic policies are going to make it harder for you and your family to succeed, which is exactly what is happening. You get 'em on the culture wars, you get 'em on the sexuality stuff, which distracts everybody. So religious nationalism really plays a central role for the rank and file. It's the way they can legitimize their support for amoral and authoritarian leaders. This is a movement that clearly sets itself against the constitution against America's democratic ideals, against the notion, I would say, of the common good, but the leaders of the movement really need to square this with the people who've been brought up to be patriotic and promoting the ideology of Christian nationalism really helps them to that end.
Andrea Chalupa (00:35:56):
I studied the New Testament in college. I took a course on it and I've read all sorts of early Christian texts that I could, like Elaine Pagels, the great researcher out of Harvard and so on. I can tell you the strictest readings of Jesus's teachings are very all about the common good. You can't get more socialists than Jesus Christ. And that was also why his movement historically spread like wildfire. And so many women were involved in building the early church because it was inclusive giving is receiving, yours is mine. We're all in this together. I mean, it took over the Roman Empire in what, like 300 years or so. And so, I mean, the words that Jesus speak for themselves. So if Kamala Harris could raise a billion dollars, a billion dollars to take on Trump, there's money out there grassroots, mega donor level to invest in Christian churches, and of course I think the money's there, the will to save American democracy in the US Constitution is there. I think Democrats and liberals, leftists generally are queasy about religion and basically preaching to people what they should believe, but the churches, Martin Luther King most famously, were on the, as well as Jewish organizers from the north and west were on the front lines of the civil rights movement. So I feel like if the battle for the soul of the nation is in these fake churches, then maybe the solution is for us to just get creative here and inspire Christian churches to promote the common good and to promote their civic engagement in the churches.
Katherine Stewart (00:37:36):
Yeah, there's money on, when I say left, I mean the big tent liberal left. It is spent differently. I mean, I think in advance of the 2024 lesson
Andrea Chalupa (00:37:45):
Well it's all going to David Pluff, who's telling Tim Walls to tone it down and to be nice to JD Vance in the debate
Katherine Stewart (00:37:50):
Or it's going into TV ads that is not as persuasive as relational organizing I was at recently at the AmericaFest, it's Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA gathering, and there was this lady there who was like, if you've got an election, she was talking about how they get out the vote, how they turn out their base, and they go after low propensity voters. They talked about going after the Amish, and nobody had ever thought of doing that before, and it really actually worked and helped them swing Pennsylvania. But she was also saying, if the election is in November, don't reach out in September. You've got to start all year long and in March you've got to have a barbecue and don't even talk about the election. Just get to know people. Only invite Republicans get to know them so that when you reach back out a couple months later and say, have you been thinking about voting this year?
(00:38:44):
And these are some of our biblical concerns, et cetera, you already have a relationship. I mean, I think relational organizing is really critical, and I know that there are folks who have tried to develop organizational infrastructure that serves as a giant voter turnout machine, and some have had more success than others, but the money is there. It's just been spent very differently for sure. There are plenty of American churches that believe in social gospel and believe in the common good, but they don't have the funding or the organizational capacity. It doesn't mean there aren't some voter turnout operations. We all know about souls to the polls, but it's really a minor operation as compared with a massive operation all over the country that the religious right has been engaged in developing for decades.
Andrea Chalupa (00:39:36):
Would you be open to consulting? I feel like we need to get you in the room with all of the top donors of the Democratic Party and say, this is their playbook and this is how you can recreate it.
Katherine Stewart (00:39:46):
I'd love to, but can I tell you something? I'm not like a beltway person, so
Andrea Chalupa (00:39:50):
No one in their right mind would want to be.
Katherine Stewart (00:39:53):
I don't really even know how any of that works, but that's very...
Andrea Chalupa (00:39:57):
They don't even know how it works. They're all just grabbing their consulting contracts hand over fist and then repeating the same failures, but just it's very clear that the people who have been on the inside of running these campaigns, it's like, we need a new way of doing things.
Katherine Stewart (00:40:12):
You need to see what's happening on the ground. My three books, my first one came out in 2012, it was called The Good News Club and was about the religious rights war on public education. I could see right away that it was part of a larger war on the foundations of America as a modern constitutional democracy. I mean, 16 years ago, it started really when some Bible program showed up in my daughter's public elementary school targeting children in their earliest years of learning children who are too young to read with books that have no words, just pictures and shapes. So we're talking like 5-year-old kids, and they would teach these kids in their public schools that you're going to go to hell without Jesus, and they would offer kids candy or prizes for recruiting their peers to the club. They called our public schools, their mission field.
(00:41:02):
They called our children the harvest. And I thought, how is this legal and possible given the separation of church and state? I realized there were thousands of these clubs operating in public schools nationwide. I think the number at the time was like 2100 or 2130, and now the number is much larger. And I was just sort of astonished. I was like, how is this possible? And I could see that kids attending the clubs were being confused into thinking that their public school endorsed this particular religion, and they were using this misinformation to try and do what I could only describe as faith-based bullying and bigotry telling kids, figuring out who's not the Christian kid, who's the Catholic kid. Because this particular organization didn't really view Catholics at the time as being properly Christian and tell them, you're going to go to hell without Jesus. And I know it's true because they taught it to me in school. So it's sort of a long story. But that got me interested because I looked at the legal strategy that had allowed these clubs in recent years to be placed in elementary schools, public elementary schools, targeting these very little kids. And once I started researching the legal strategy that the religious right had pursued over time, very carefully bringing the right cases to the right courts to create these novel legal building blocks that would build up to a big win to destroy the separate church and state, I could see at that moment where we were headed. And so I've written three books about, and then I started looking at their organizational infrastructure, the different organizations that they're connected to, the way that they derive funding and support from these extremely wealthy individuals as well as the small dollar donations. And so I've written my books to show how it's done.
(00:42:52):
It's not a mystery. It's not a mystery how this movement has as much power. I think for years, the Republican Party thought, wow, these people are going to vote for our people no matter what. We can make use of them, but we don't really have to take them all that seriously. We don't really have to do what they want us to do, because that's too extreme. But in recent, the movements was quietly growing, and now this is a movement that absolutely controls the Republican party. It's become much more overt and it's anti-democratic aims, and we can talk about that. But now that movement is like the guardrails have fallen away from the Republican party completely. And this is a movement, this anti-democratic movement, is controlling the GOP today.
Andrea Chalupa (00:43:36):
Oh, we see it in that Oval office meeting against a Jewish president of a democratic country with showing that region of the world that there is an alternative to being trapped in Russia's orbit and being a dictatorship where L-G-B-T-Q people are openly scapegoated with violent attacks against them and immigrants and so on as takes place across Russia. So yes, we see it. So they want dictatorship. They want to overthrow the US Constitution, and they see Trump as an imperfect vessel of God's perfect plan. During your years of research, and especially on this book, because you're going in taking a tour of the Rotten Salad Bar buffet of American's disinformation crisis and, did you ever feel under threat?
Katherine Stewart (00:44:23):
No. I mean, I think those spaces are full of people who have warm feelings to one another, and I just go places I'm allowed to go. Anyone could go. You just buy a ticket and go. When you're in those spaces, I don't feel a sense of threat, but I do feel that our country is under threat. They've been promoting for years this idea that America's not founded on any principles, but on a specific religion and cultural heritage. They promote the idea that America's on the brink of an apocalypse because of what they call wokeness in a radical left anyone to the left of them is called honestly, a woke communist or demonic are often satanic. They have this idea again that democracy can't solve our problems, and so the rules don't apply anymore. And what we need is a strong man, an authoritarian leader who's going to seize the reins of power and scrap the rule of law in favor of the iron wrist.
(00:45:18):
So it's really a kind of incredibly un-American idea. The idea that a government is representative of the people respecting individual rights in a pluralistic society whose leaders have to be held accountable to the law as well, and there should be transparency. There are checks and balances. They have this idea that that kind of government doesn't work and they want to create an autocracy. By the way, a lot of this is really about cronyism and kleptocracy. Let's just look at what authoritarian leaders do around the world when you have leaders like Putin, as you mentioned in Russia, or leaders like Orban in Hungary, or leaders like Erdogan in Turkey, or leaders in Iran.
Andrea Chalupa (00:46:02):
Or Ron DeSantis in Florida.
Katherine Stewart (00:46:04):
Well, they're bind themselves really tightly to ultra conservative religious figures in their own countries to consolidate more authoritarian forms of political power. And they're doing it to guard against investigation of their own theft from the public treasury, the way they're enriching themselves in their cronies at the public expense, the way that they're perpetrating abuses against their own people. So you could describe those countries as theocratic in a certain fake sense, and that there's a supposedly official religion with laws depending on where may be based on a certain interpretation of their holy texts, but they're more accurately described as cronyistic kleptocracies with absolute suppression of free speech and political opposition.
Andrea Chalupa (00:46:49):
Yeah, pigs at the trough. That's how my film Mr. Jones opens, and that was a creative decision by Agnieszka Holland, who, the director who was born and grew up in Soviet occupied Poland, a dictatorship. And so I wanted to ask, you we're hearing a lot of talk about, oh, how did the party of Reagan become the party of Putin? And it's like, because Reagan declared war on the common good, and when the social safety net was fraying, fracturing, and he created this culture of every man for themselves turning Americans against each other, originally. That's what Reagan did with his whole greed is good culture. Could you from your years of books, draw a direct line between Reagan's revolution and Trump's revolution?
Katherine Stewart (00:47:36):
There was more to it than Reagan back in those, say late 1970s and early 1980s. In those years, a movement began to coalesce, call the New Right? Included leaders like Paul Wyrick, Phyllis Laffy, Howard Phillips, Allen Dye, and others. And they brought in some, what they call them, electronic ministers, people like D James Kennedy and Bob Jones. And they felt the Republican party had become too soft on communism, and they were also very upset by American religion becoming too liberal, least remember, Ronald Reagan was not like a religious right guy. He belonged to some Protestant church, probably mainline, and they were very upset about developments, social developments. They were very upset about the women's rights movement, a nascent gay rights movement. I mean, desegregation of schools was not something that they agreed with either. I mean, Bob Jones was one of their allied pastors. He had called segregation, essentially called it scriptural, and he and others were running these ministers or running racially segregated religious schools.
Andrea Chalupa (00:48:42):
Nevermind that Jesus was a Middle Eastern man, a Jewish man.
Katherine Stewart (00:48:45):
Oh no, he has blue eyes and blonde hair didn't you know? This is the thing that really got them up in the morning, and they needed an issue to unite their movement. So they got together, they were having these meetings, and one of these meetings, they went down a laundry list of the issues that they could use to unite their movement. They know if you can get people to vote at a single issue, you can control their vote. So they looked at some issues. They were like, should we do school prayer? Well, that tends to upset our Catholic allies because they remembered how the Bible wars and Philadelphia Protestant nativists against Catholics. Phillys Schlafly, by the way, was Catholic as well. So there was some cross denominational collaboration here. They looked at the women's movement, but the ERA was going down inflamed. They were like, well, what about stop the segregation, the tax on segregated schools?
(00:49:35):
Well, that's not really going to work out. So they couldn't use that. The issue that really got up in the morning is their uniting issue. It was so ugly. So they got to abortion, which was not number one on their list. It was like number four or five or something, and it was like a light bulb went off, and they're like, oh, that could really work because it touches on issues of family and sexuality and people's anxieties around that. It touches on issues of social change, and we can pretend to be championing the vulnerable. Now remember, Ronald Reagan had signed the most liberal abortion law, can't remember the year exactly. It was prior to Roe versus Wade. So they worked over time to purge pro-choice voices from the Republican party. That actually took a long time, and it was hard to do. Phyllis Schlafly wrote a book about it called How the Republican Party became pro-Life. The issue was it was not a pro-life party. It was broadly, I would say most Protestant Republicans supported abortion rights, or at least some form of abortion law liberalization at the time. But they knew if they could purge those voices from the Republican party, they could really shift the party in a much more hard right direction, unite them, get to vote on this one issue and take the party in a much more reactionary direction. So there were various forces at work and sort of dragging the party to the right at this time.
Andrea Chalupa (00:51:01):
When you were going through this tour of these disinformation centers, was there anything, any encounter you had that surprised you? Anything that gave you a glimmer of hope that America might be able to overcome this?
Katherine Stewart (00:51:16):
I think there are a lot of sources of hope that American, I mean, there's no guarantees. I'm not, I think hope is in actions. Who said, I'm not an optimist. I'm not a pessimist. I'm determined. And truly I do believe hope is. It's not just like, oh gosh, maybe it'll turn out great. It's really about taking action and having faith that those actions can potentially make a difference.
Andrea Chalupa (00:51:41):
Right? Because people keep convincing themselves that, well, Trump can't live forever, but what he built will outlast him.
Katherine Stewart (00:51:49):
The movement long preceded Trump, and it will long outlast him, but he did give it rocket fuel. But listen, we have elections in less than two years.
Andrea Chalupa (00:51:57):
Will we? because I think Musk has some plan for that. He is tech support. So I don't know, but is there anything, did anybody say anything, do anything? Can people wake up from being turned into a libertarian zombie army?
Katherine Stewart (00:52:13):
I think the really critical thing to do, which they do, is turn out your base and go after low propensity voters. Look, if you look at the statistics by which Trump won this election 2024, it was by a much smaller margin than Biden won in 2020. And what there was is depressed enthusiasm for voter turnout on the Democratic side.
Andrea Chalupa (00:52:36):
A hundred percent, because we've pointed out before Gaza, inflation.
Katherine Stewart (00:52:40):
There's so many reasons why that happened. But the country didn't go MAGA. Trump doesn't have a mandate to totally destroy democracy from the entire country. So hopefully people will be a little smarter about the importance of their vote the next time around. And you can spend a lot of time trying to peel away a person who's been totally propagandized and you can bash your head against the wall. But I think that's what's going to happen is people are really going to start getting hurt by these policies. People are going to lose their jobs. People are going to lose benefits that they need or deserve. The so-called administrative state, which is the institutions of functioning democracy are going to stop functioning. They're firing federal workers, decapitating, the FBI, sidelining individuals at the Department of Justice, the shuttering of various kinds of aid canceling Head Start. These are going to start really hurting people. And when that happens, I think we need to be prepared to say, here are the people who did this to you, and here are the people who are actually fighting for you.
Andrea Chalupa (00:53:52):
Two final questions for you. Number one is what advice do you have for America's traditional allies, Canada, Mexico, the European Union, to understand where America is today, especially with Trump and the White House? What should they know about the psychology of the power structure of the Republican party and their base and the shadowy network? What should they know about that psychology?
Katherine Stewart (00:54:20):
I mean, I think that one thing that we have seen over time is that, I mean, first I want them to understand that this is not coming from Americans, and it's not even necessarily the attacks on Canada. It's not even coming from Trump voters. Whatever ll winds are blowing from the west of Canada. They're all coming out of Trump and may the Musk, and they're frankly reflecting their own psychological dispositions. It really follows a classic pattern with the rise of authoritarian leaders. It's not especially logical, but it just happens. They need to channel their aggression and focus the rage of their constituents on external objects. So authoritarians have a long history of engaging in these futile expansionist projects. I'm afraid that Canada and Greenland and Panama, whatever, they're falling victim to the same malevolent forces that are also attacking American democracy. When it comes to the European alliance, I think that we have to acknowledge that this didn't happen overnight.
(00:55:22):
There have been efforts by many religious right leaders to make alliances with illiberal actors and forces in other countries in Europe and beyond. In "Money Lies and God," and also in my previous book, "The Power Worshipers," I describe a gathering of the World Congress of Families, which is a gathering organized by the International Organization of the Family. These things always have such lovely names, don't they? International Organization of the Family, who doesn't support that. But what they really do is there were speakers there who said, we want to make liberals fear you. We want to crush liberalism. We talk about the move to crush liberalism is as global as globalism itself, and they're collaborating on anti-democratic projects. In fact, in both of my latest books, "Money Lies and God" and "Power Worshippers," I talk about how there's been a transfer of organizations and ideas from illiberal actors in one country to another and vice versa. So it sort of has gone both ways.
Andrea Chalupa (00:56:27):
And what's interesting is that the far right in America waging war against the communist Soviet Union, which really wasn't Communism. George Orwell's Animal Farm explained that it was this godless, atheist empire. And once they brought it down, Reagan does get credit for that, obviously contributing a great deal to that. But once they brought it down, they still needed an enemy because suddenly Russia comes up from the ashes saying, we're now a Christian nation and Putin is going to church with this bare chest and giant cross and telling Russians not to drink and to live upstanding Christian lives. And the Republicans are like, yay, he's our guy. And they did that whole shock capitalism, the privatization of former Soviet states overnight, bringing in their whole shock doctrine. And of course, that's going to produce oligarchy. And so much of the Reagan revolution brought us this resurgence of Russia as this terrorist regime helped by all of its corrupt oligarchs, exceeding that weaponized corruption around the world. And it's extraordinary, the irony, the painful irony of it, but without the communist atheist empire of the USSR to battle this far right said, well, we're going to redouble our efforts on battling progress in America. That's the new communist atheist threat. These trans kids and their parents and women and non-white people, and on and on the list goes.
Katherine Stewart (00:57:52):
Yeah, this sort of DEI stuff, were there issues here and there? Sure, there were, but that's not what we're dealing with. They're totally, it's like declaring total war on anti-discrimination law. There's no acknowledgement that these programs are put into place because the most qualified people were often just frankly not even getting a chance. And they're basically calling into question the idea that women or people of color could have legitimately be the best person for their job. They frame this in terms of merit, but it's transparently. All you need to do is look at Pete Hegseth. It's like transparently affirmative action for conservative white men. And what it's going to do is create a chilling effect where employers are going to be afraid to hire the most qualified person who is a person of color or a woman because they don't want to be accused of making a DEI hire. I have a friend in the government who received a notice: If you suspect any of your colleagues are using DEI, here's a number to report them. Can you imagine it's going to create a nation of snitches? Which by the way, isn't that what communism was? A nation of snitches?
Andrea Chalupa (00:59:02):
Well, they glorified children that turned in their parents.
Katherine Stewart (00:59:05):
Yeah, it's really, really horrible. There's something else I was going to say. Russia is not our friend. The disinformation operations that they have funded, not just on the right, but also on the far left have served to fracture our country. Disinform people. You get a disformed public, it makes your country weaker. And I actually think that that is the most toxic consequence of a democracy relies on people being cognizant enough of the facts that they can deliberate public policy in public to find the best possible path forward in ideologically, religiously politically diverse society. But you have to have some basis of reason. You can have different ideas about how to get there, but it's like, how can we make public schools better? You can't do it if you've been persuaded that public schools are woke communist factories of gender change. It's really kind of astonishing.
(01:00:02):
So I do write in "Money Lies and God" a bit about the disinformation operations targeting the far left as well as the far right, because you can say they're targeting the far right and the far left, but the consequence of this disinformation that targets the far left redowns to the benefit of the far right, they find incredibly divisive issues and the most divisive voices within those issues that could be weaponized. And they amplify them or create them often with very angry bots who are always like, I don't know, saying outrageous stuff and then getting everybody all upset. And then what does that do? That depresses enthusiasm for the vote on the Democratic side?
Andrea Chalupa (01:00:43):
A hundred percent. And we saw that in 2024. It was divide and conquer.
Katherine Stewart (01:00:47):
You saw in 2020 as well. They really told, remember that gay Bernie meme, it was found to be something created by a Russian troll farm. Oh, you could look it up. I mean the MIT Media Lab, the Shorenstein Center, these organizations have identified specific memes on the left, which if you're lefty, you might look at a them, that's pretty cool. But if you're sort of on the center, you might look at that and be like, well.
Andrea Chalupa (01:01:13):
I'll link to the analysis on it in the show notes for sure.
Katherine Stewart (01:01:16):
Yeah, that'd be great.
Andrea Chalupa (01:01:17):
Well, final question for you. Obviously, in all my years of researching authoritarianism and the people that stood up to it, there was always a debate among those groups, do we have a future? The world was falling apart, so it seemed like the world is coming to an end. We have no future. What would you say to the people listening and especially those who are raising children or thinking of having children and even vulnerable children who are non-white trans or so on. What would you say to the folks listening to answer that question? Do we have future? What sort of future do you think we have?
Katherine Stewart (01:01:50):
I think we should be careful of all this hopeless talk because that's part of what they want. The shock and awe is intended to make us feel intimidated and feel like we don't have agency. Well, we still do. We still have the freedom of speech. We still have the freedom to get involved in political organizations. Infrastructure really matters. Action really matters. It's really time for everybody to get out a bit. I understand that right after the election, a lot of people needed to a beat and just kind of regroup. And now is the time for moral courage. I think that hope is in action, and I think when you get engaged in the struggle for our freedoms and for our future, it takes away all of that feeling of hopelessness because you see how many wonderful people there are in this country who really are fighting for our democracy.
(01:02:41):
I also think that things are happening so fast with the administration. I think that a lot of people can actually see when they start cutting social security and Medicare in order to give tax cuts to billionaires when you have old people like on the street because they get kicked out of the residences. Or when you have children who aren't being fed when you have public schools just collapsing because of the siphoning of funding from them. When the government stops working in the way that it should, as rights for the people in the workforce are eroded, I think we really have an opportunity. I don't think there are any guarantees, but I think we should take courage from the fact that there are more Americans who would prefer to live in a functioning democracy. Not perfect, but at least guided by the principles of equality and pluralism and rule of law than those who would like to live in a CRO kleptocracy where public money is being siphoned off by people at the tippy top of the economic ladder. So I think we really do have some opportunities and, uh.
Andrea Chalupa (01:03:46):
Keep fighting.
Katherine Stewart (01:03:47):
Yeah, there are things we can do as individuals again, but there are things we can really only do when we join together with others. Everybody's got to sort of figure out what their strengths are and find their lane and join together with others.
Andrea Chalupa (01:04:08):
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