Roger Stone Commuted While Trump Wants Students Commuting
It's almost impossible at this point to keep up with Donald Trump's lies and corruption, but co-hosts Nick Hauselman and Jared Yates Sexton do their best. Trump has commuted Roger Stone's sentence while Secretary of Betsy DeVos is pushing kids back into school without proper precautions. Also, author Katherine Stewart stops by to talk about her book The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism and the threat posed by members of the administration and weaponized religion.
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Every school should have plans for that situation to be able to pivot and ensure that kids can continue learning at a distance if they have to for a short period of time.
But you're the Secretary of Education.
You're asking students to go back.
So why do you not have guidance on what a school should do just weeks before you want those schools to reopen?
And what happens if it faces an outbreak?
What do you tell parents who look at this, who look at Arizona, where a school teacher recently died teaching summer school, parents who are worried about the safety of their children in public schools?
Yeah, schools should be opened.
Schools should be open.
If kids want to go to school, you're losing a lot of lives by keeping things closed.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muck Rig podcast.
I'm your co-host, Jared Yates-Exton.
I'm just going to be honest.
I'm already exhausted by how much we have to talk about today.
I am joined in this madness.
I'm so happy that I have him, Nick Haussmann.
Here in a few minutes, we're going to be joined by Catherine Stewart, the author of The Power Worshippers, Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.
Also has a really amazing Daily Beast article out right now called Mike Pompeo and The Global Holy War Against Liberal Democracy.
Nick, I'm exhausted.
We got to talk.
I'm so frustrated about these people.
I'm so pissed off at the Trump administration.
I'll just say that from the very beginning.
We gotta talk about just coronavirus exploding everywhere, Betsy DeVos throwing kids into the jaws of a generational pandemic, but before we get anywhere we have to start With the President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, helping his friend Roger Stone and commuting his sentence after Roger Stone refuses to roll over him.
And every one of them, Nick, every one of them is just not going to go to jail because Donald Trump is President of the United States.
How are you feeling about the rule of law right now?
Oh, I feel great because they have William Barr on record in front of the Senate saying that that would be illegal, what he just did.
So, that's it.
It's over, right?
We can now get him out of there?
Man, it would be so great if there was a silver bullet that took care of it.
Wouldn't there?
Like, if there was just a way to do it.
But hey, Barr waved his finger and said, Mr. President, you should not commute this sentence.
Oh, I assume he meant it, right?
I assume he was really troubled.
Yeah, it is.
It's a troubling thing, you know, when you're the head of the Department of Justice and your president is committing crimes that you've already acknowledged were crimes.
Now, let's not parse the difference between a commutation and a pardon, because there's the same quid pro quo going on here, which is illegal and unethical and all sorts of problems.
I guess the question now is why didn't Manafort get one earlier?
I suppose he's waiting for that The normal situation would have been right before he leaves office or, you know, after the election, he'll pardon him.
That's what normally happens, right?
So maybe that's what he was waiting for.
But, yeah, it's pretty disgusting, especially because he had already telegraphed it, right?
He had already called in on Hannity or somebody was saying, oh, Stone's dreams will probably come true if that's what he's dreaming about.
So it's a mess.
And every day it's getting worse, like we keep saying.
That just made me really sick.
That really just made me sick.
And by the way, you brought up Paul Manafort, and this is what's really disgusting about it.
Do you know where Paul Manafort is right now?
You know, I think he's still in prison, or they let him out for the COVID thing.
Yeah, he's at home because he could have been endangered because of the coronavirus.
But guess who has to go be endangered by the coronavirus?
Everybody except for Paul Manafort, who committed federal crimes.
You have Roger Stone, who, by the way, for those who, I don't know, have been asleep for the past couple years, Roger Stone conspired with WikiLeaks to get trafficked, stolen material from the Russian government In order to interfere with our elections.
And that comic book villain is currently free.
Because the President of the United States is, what's the phrase?
Oh yeah, he's a criminal crime boss.
He's a total crime boss.
And because he has the power of commuting and pardoning, he's just taking all of his cronies and letting them loose.
I am so angry and sickened and just demoralized by the whole thing.
Is it safe to say that Mueller and the other people involved in the investigation probably know a little bit more than we do about what he did?
Is it safe to say that?
Yeah, they would have to.
And that's kind of the really terrible thing about all of this.
We haven't talked that much about Robert Mueller.
We've talked about sort of the cult around Robert Mueller, the idea that Americans were hoping that he was going to like save us from ourselves or he was going to swoop in like Superman or Captain America, you know, one of these many memes.
And it turns out he was just a paper pusher who was afraid to sound an alarm and actually do his job.
So yeah, I assume that Mueller and his team know a lot more about all the crimes that were done, what they could prove, what they couldn't prove.
And again, I mean, you know, just to put a put a nice cherry on top of it, I mean, this is the most corrupt administration that America has not only ever seen, but probably ever been able to imagine.
And it's just the rule of law.
It's shredded, Nick.
It's just shredded.
I mean, I look back to the time when Ben Carson tried to spend too much money on silverware.
That was corruption.
Can't we go back to that?
I think it was Carson who was doing that, amongst the others who had already resigned in disgrace as part of the Cabinet.
Yeah.
And my point, by the way, would be that clearly, whatever we know that Stone did, there's probably a lot more that's even worse that's been redacted that we don't know yet.
And, by the way, we heard from Mueller.
Mueller came out of his cave to write an op-ed, almost like the letter he wrote to Barr admonishing him for misrepresenting the report.
You know, guess who suddenly wants now to have him come testify in front of the Senate?
All of a sudden, Lindsey O. Graham is all sorts of on the side of something to be like, yeah, let's have him come in.
But I think that's what we all know is that Mueller's performance, and we have to call it a performance, was so bad when he testified in front of Congress before that I'm sure what Graham is thinking of is he'll just bumble his way again through any kind of testimony and make Trump look better.
Man, that feels... How many lifetimes ago does that feel at this point?
That was this year.
No, it wasn't.
Right?
It was like February.
Stop, that's not... No, that wasn't in February.
When did he do... Wait, when did he go?
Because he didn't obviously speak during the impeachment trial.
It was before the impeachment trial.
No, it was way before that.
Yeah, okay.
You just actually had a pandemic moment where all of a sudden it's like, It's like the idea of post-modernism where all times collapse in on each other and like gel and blend into something.
So no, when Robert Mueller, and by the way, I never have stopped being grossed out by the fact that Robert Mueller does this investigation.
He goes out in public and states the facts and says, hey, by the way, the president of the United States is a totally corrupt criminal.
And America's like, You know, his warning?
There was a lot of stuff to be worried about, but I just didn't get a real movie feel out of it.
Like, I just really don't think it was entertaining enough.
And then meanwhile, over here, Donald Trump is just, I don't know, throwing around racial slurs and cultural poison and everyone's like, you know, he is really destructive and he's ruining the rule of law, but you know, he sure is fun.
I, I, the whole thing, The hall of mirrors, the twisted mirrors that we're living in right now, is just terrible.
Before we got on here, we were waiting to record.
I was watching one of these press briefings.
When's the last time you watched one of these?
Are you still watching these regularly?
Yeah, I mean, when they come on, I watch them whenever I can.
Man, dude, you're such a masochist.
I don't know how you do it.
I watched 10 minutes.
I did watch it.
I watched 10 minutes today, and it was this... And you know, like, you become...
You become not immune to their lies but you become used to them to a certain extent and then every now and then you don't watch it for a little while and then one of them just comes through and it just like it cuts in a way that like maybe you weren't prepared for you thought you had a thicker skin and it's the one that they're doing about the coronavirus which is oh we have so many cases because we're doing so much testing which is their favorite lie right now and it is uh I don't know, it just hit me the wrong way.
And that, along with the Roger Stone situation, is just so... not just deflating, but infuriating on a level that I don't think I was ready for.
You know, I watch these a lot of times trying to put myself in the perspective of the other side.
Because I just need to be able to picture somebody going, yeah, yeah, that's right.
Can you imagine?
That's amazing what she's saying.
God, she's smart.
She went to Harvard.
She's a lawyer from Harvard Law School.
Can you imagine being a living, breathing human being and watching Roger Stone come out dressed as a third-rate Batman villain?
And like throwing up like the Richard Nixon peace sign and being like, we won one today.
Can you imagine that?
Like just trying to put myself in that mindset is just mind melting.
Well, here's the thing.
Howard Feynman was tweeting out saying he had a long conversation with Stone.
And the problem that Stone and Trump, they all have is they can't keep their mouth shut.
So they just admit this shit all the time.
And he said that he knew, he actually told Howard, I would like a commutation because I don't want to admit that I did anything wrong by accepting a party.
And I knew that I was going to go through a lot of hell to cover for him.
Basically, he said that he's like, I need to cover for him.
And I went through a lot of trouble with the investigation.
Hoping that I would get rewarded with a commutation, basically.
It's not unprecedented, though.
We heard this whole notion, everyone's running up and down, screaming, this is unprecedented, this is terrible.
But you know what, Jared?
We've got some historical context.
Rings the bell.
There's somebody named Scooter Libby that was commuted his sentence by W. And it wasn't even W. Now W is relegated to just a nice guy who was drinking some beers and hanging out in the White House while fucking Dick Cheney was doing everything behind the scenes.
Well, by the way, just real fast to correct the historical record on that, George W. Bush was drinking O'Doul's in the White House as Dick Cheney was running the entire public government.
But because he gave a Werther's Original to Barack Obama's wife and hangs out with Ellen DeGeneres, we have to pretend that he isn't a... what's the phrase for it, Nick?
Oh yeah, war criminal.
And that he didn't destabilize the world and also throw jet fuel on extremists and death cults.
But you know, he's just an old dude who paints naked pictures of himself in the shower.
So we just gotta pretend for whatever reason that George W. Bush was just a gray guy now, which is funny.
Who doesn't paint pictures of themselves in the shower nude?
I do.
Nonetheless, it was a college thing, probably.
Nonetheless, we also saw this happen around the Iran-Contra, where they commuted or pardoned a lot of the people.
Guess who was involved with that?
William Barr.
So there is a lot of precedent for this.
Wait!
No, hold on!
Listen, I'm not going to sit here, Nick.
Will you tell our audience that there is a legacy of corruption in the Republican Party that led to Donald Trump in this situation.
Because he's an aberration, Nick.
He's a phenomenon that just happened.
It just occurred.
Are you telling me that the Republican Party for the last few decades has relied on extra-legal behaviors and then immediately the people who carried out those behaviors are either having their sentences commuted or they're being pardoned?
Because I will not sit here For those lies, Nick.
That's an indictment of our institution in general, Jared, is what you're trying to tell me.
Of course, this has been a pattern all the way back.
We can go back to Nixon if you like.
And it's generally Republicans.
The hell are you saying?
I want the normal kind of pardons of just friends who were buddies but didn't have any kind of criminal history.
They got caught with a speedboat full of cocaine off the coast.
Yes.
Right?
Or they were running, like, a shill game with, like, a housing development and they threw some money at, like, a housing authority.
The old-school proper WASPy.
Is that what you're saying?
That's what you miss?
Exactly.
I want the country club corruption.
That's what we should call it.
That's what I'm looking for.
I mean, heck, I would even take...
No, I can't even take that.
I mean, listen, look at what he's done so far with pardons and I guess commutations now.
Like Joseph Arpaio, he wasted a pardon early on.
You're not supposed to hand those things out in the beginning of your term.
You're supposed to wait.
When you see injustice, Nick, when you see a patriotic, American-loving sheriff who, oh yeah, just kept his prisoners in unconstitutional squalors and engaged them in slave labor, you gotta do something about it, Nick.
You can't let that happen.
You have to put it right.
Right?
That's the American way.
Yes.
Concentration camps go back, you know, in our history, at least to World War II.
So, yes.
To reward him.
But you know what?
A lot of this has all been explained.
Trump's behavior, you know?
We got a really good insight over the weekend, too, from his niece, the psychiatrist, who broke down a lot of what was going on in his head.
So that must make it all okay.
Well, he's broken.
I mean, like, I'm sorry, but if you at any point... And maybe this is the moment of truth for our listeners.
I don't know.
We've got a growing audience.
We always get to test the boundaries, Nick.
We've got to see where we are.
It's like testing the electric fence in Jurassic Park and seeing whether or not it sparks.
You know what I mean?
Throw the wood against it.
See what happens.
If you have ever watched Donald Trump for more than five seconds and not thought to yourself, my God, this man is broken.
Something has gone wrong with this person.
And not just in a...
Not just in terms of corruption, but something fundamental.
Do you know what I mean?
Like something in this man is broken and there's an endless black void that no amount of riches or relationships with models or airplanes or gold toilets will ever fill, right?
And I don't know about you, but if somehow or another I failed in everything I ever did and I woke up one day and I was President of the United States, I would just go around buying lottery tickets.
I'd be like, "Oh my God, what an incredible thing that has happened." But the truth is, he actually got the presidency, and he is the main focus of attention in the world, which is what, oh yeah, an attention starved little boy wants, right?
He got it, and he hates it.
He hates it.
And if you watch him, and I posted about this on The Muckrake, the other night him and Sean Hannity, and by the way, Sean Hannity has all of the intelligence of like a Little League baseball coach's bag of bats.
That's who that guy is.
And a wonderful head of hair.
Do not get me wrong.
Sean Hannity has an amazing head of hair and it has made him millions upon millions of dollars.
And him and Donald Trump spent, I believe, like 35 minutes just complaining about the world.
And both of them are multi-millionaires who have all the power in the world that they would ever want and they just complain.
These are broken people.
So you're exactly right.
We found out the actual brokenness of it.
And his father, Fred Christ Trump, absolutely screwed him up.
Which Donald John Trump then passed it forward and screwed up Donald Trump Jr.
So the legacy continues.
But yeah, it's a broken, destroyed family.
Well, I'm also reminded, as we see these shots of Roger Stone, that the back of his head is extremely flat.
And so the wife, the missus, who's a pediatrician, instantly sees, you know, he really needed a helmet when he was a kid.
And what it also indicates to us was that the parents just left him on his back, lying around as an infant.
So here's another guy who was not treated properly as a kid and is now, you know... The thing I only worry about is when we get these insights, these deep insights into the evil and the behavior, it almost sounds like we get to give them a pass or an explanation and it sort of makes it almost okay that they are like that.
And it makes me very frustrated because there are plenty of flatheads out there that have not turned into Roger Stone.
Dude, okay, so Roger Stone has spent his entire career being openly corrupt and evil.
Right?
It's like somebody opened up.
I mean, like, you know, it started with his younger career when he was like, you know, walking around being Nixon's bag boy, right?
And just going around with his dirty tricks or whatever.
And then immediately he gets in with, you know, like Atwater.
He gets in with Manafort.
They start, and by the way, they made a ton of money.
And do you know how they made money?
They did it by working with warlords.
Genocidal Plutocratic madmen and they ran PR for them and actually made sure that they stayed in power and they continued to loot the people and kill the people.
That's how he made his money.
And do you know how he became famous?
He became famous by becoming a third-rate Batman villain.
Who told everybody who would listen, I'm committing crimes, who's gonna stop me?
And do you know what ends up happening?
He gets caught in one of his crimes and immediately Donald Trump swoops in like a defective claw game and picks him up out of trouble and he's back at home probably figuring out how he's gonna profit off this.
Now if you don't look at this and understand what's wrong with America, I don't know what to tell you because this is exactly what's wrong with America.
It's people like Roger Stone and people like Donald Trump.
Well, we had another crony that wasn't getting the same kind of treatment as Stone, and Manafort probably will, who was out to dinner in New York, hanging out and just getting this photo taken, violating the terms of his get-out-of-prison-to-avoid-coronavirus.
That's Michael Cohen.
But here's what's interesting, because I kind of was like, God, what a dummy.
You know, of course someone's going to see him take a picture, it's going to get out, and the parole guy is going to say, hey, you're back in prison because you did that.
But apparently, that wasn't any effect on why they threw him back in the clink.
It turns out, they are throwing him back in there because they want to make sure that he will not write a book, like Mary Trump just did.
You know, and it's a violation of First Amendment rights.
Like, no one's ever seen any kind of agreement like this that would require him that he couldn't talk to any media, couldn't get on any social media, couldn't write any books or movies or whatever, or else he'd violate this term and get thrown back in prison again.
This is interesting because, again, this goes back to implicating Barr more than it does probably even Trump.
Trump is probably like, I don't want anyone writing books, and Barr is the guy who's got to go back and walk through it and figure out, like, the machinations of that.
Speaking of which, And we have Jolene Maxwell, who is in the Eastern District, which is now under the control of William Barr as well.
I'm all over the place.
I apologize.
But, you know, if something's going to happen to her and it's bad, it's going to be kind of set up to happen that way.
Well, I mean, I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm still kind of shocked that we haven't gotten that breaking news that something has happened to Maxwell at this point.
I want to say about Michael Cohen real fast.
Just for the record, Michael Cohen is a criminal, and I know that everybody got really excited when he went up and testified against Trump.
He did that for a lot of reasons.
He's still a criminal and engaged in tons of criminal enterprises and intimidated people left and right.
He's also tragically stupid.
And this entire thing, like, it's one of those things where, like, he went out and he testified against Trump, and everybody then ran out the next day with their hair on fire being like, this is gonna be it!
This is the thing!
Donald Trump is done!
And, like, listen, Donald Trump's not going to be done until Donald Trump is done.
So, just wait until it happens.
But, look at what has happened.
Michael Cohen, going back to jail.
Right?
And then Roger Stone and Paul Manafort are probably somewhere right now hanging out without masks on.
You know, like, probably toasting Bill Barr.
By the way, we're going to have Catherine Stewart on here in a few minutes to talk about people like Bill Barr.
They're shredding the rule of law because they see it as their way towards, like, a theocratic movement.
That's what's happening.
They know Donald Trump's stupid.
And they also know that Donald Trump is a criminal.
They're well aware.
Like, Bill Barr has been around the law for long enough that he looks at Donald Trump and he's like, oh, shit, that's a criminal.
Right?
It makes it even worse that Bill Barr looks at Donald Trump and understands that he is a criminal and still continues to do this stuff.
It's like an extra layer of just awfulness.
You know what I mean?
Because he looks all that he knows that he's breaking the rule of law, but he also knows it's the only way that he can ever realize some sort of theocratic regime.
It's it's really gross.
I'm going to record the next point I'm going to make and just have it on cue whenever I just need to say it over and over again.
Just press the button because, again, these people live in a world that everything is justified because of the vision they have of what the government or what the country needs to look like.
And no matter, by any means necessary, are they justified in doing these things that will eventually, reveal to all of us.
And you can describe it in a religious way, or you can describe it in some sort of, you know, neo-Republican fantasy way, that like, you will realize finally one day that we are so smart and that this is how the government or the country is supposed to be run.
And so that's what they do.
And it's not surprising to me that we have these people that can then justify Trump and his behavior, which I'm sure they all find abhorrent, because they know that there's an end to the means here that's going to be justified eventually, which, by the way, It never will.
And what they want is horrible.
But nonetheless, that's where we are.
Well, and to tie in a couple things that we need to talk about, Trump isn't loyal to anybody besides the people who decide not to snitch on him.
The only way that you can actually get Donald Trump's loyalty is if you get arrested and then you're getting ready to go to jail.
That's it.
Like the otherwise, it's just chess pieces.
It's just like, hey Jared, Steve Bannon was really talking about you the other day.
How do you feel about that?
Hey, you know, Steve, Jared.
And then it's just like watching them clash together like a child bashing Transformer toys together.
That's what authoritarians do.
They make their subordinates fight against each other.
And by the way, he will discard you in a moment's notice.
Like right now, one of the things that's happening, We're watching Dr. Fauci just be not only thrown underneath the bus, but the bus is driving over it and then backing up a couple of times.
And this is a person who has been operating with a responsibility to the public, but he's getting in the way of Trump's lie about the coronavirus, right?
Well, so Fauci's being thrown under the bus.
Then, on top of all of this, we have somebody like a Betsy DeVos, right?
And DeVos... Why does Betsy DeVos want to be Secretary of Education, Nick?
Can you nail that down?
Is it because she cares about the education of children?
Is that what's happening here?
Well, first of all, they kind of probably gave it to her because she helped win the election for him.
No, she hates public education!
That's why they gave it to her, because she wants to destroy and eradicate and wipe it off the face of the earth.
Okay, I mean, that's that too.
Yeah, she likes all the charter stuff and she wants to make all religious schools and stuff like that.
Well, and by the way, they hide behind the religious part, which is part of the indoctrination.
But the real reason that they want religious schools and private schools, it's because of racism.
It's because immediately after desegregation, after that passed, all of these people like Betsy, they started forming Christian private schools where, you know, you can decide who goes there.
And all of a sudden, isn't it weird, Nick?
It just ends up being a bunch of white kids.
That's really odd how that happens, right?
And they can segregate themselves.
So she literally wants to destroy public education.
And guess what?
And by the way, you know how I said that Bill Barr looks at Donald Trump and knows he's a criminal?
Betsy DeVos is so stupid.
I have to imagine she looks at Trump and just like heart eyes.
And she's like, what an intellectual.
Because this is a person who is incapable of understanding a basic human concept.
Well she was on Dana Bash and on her show and remember the movie the original version of oh my goodness the Schwarzenegger when he goes to Mars you know Total Recall?
So remember the taxi driver, automated taxi driver guy, who simply repeats the phrases and can't really process any kind of real questions.
That's what Betsy DeVos did.
She literally was like answering some other question that was pre-programmed without ever preparing.
And she hasn't prepared for any of these appearances she's made either in front of Congress or for the media.
And it's embarrassing.
I don't think it matters to anybody, but it's embarrassing nonetheless.
I just have to say this really fast.
There's an alternate reality, an alternate future out there where people like DeVos not only live forever but own Mars.
Just like in Total Recall.
So that's not that far out there.
That's not even sci-fi anymore.
That's prescient.
Yeah, man.
She goes on Dana Bash.
And actually, Dana Bash is like this really consummate professional.
She laughed at her.
But we can't call her Dana, though.
We have to call her Dana.
She... Dana.
I'm from Greene County, Indiana.
I'm lucky I can tie my shoes in the morning, alright?
She laughed at her.
She was just like, this is incredible.
This person has no idea what they're doing.
And by the way, it's not just... We can't just laugh at the Secretary of Education because she's obviously incompetent.
She's putting your children in harm's way.
I'm not sitting here telling you that schools shouldn't open.
Science and experts tell us that school is really good for kids, right?
That it gives them the community that they need.
They need to go out, they need to meet people, they need to get this in-person education, right?
And by the way, you can do this stuff.
It's going to take money, and it's going to take time, and it's going to take plans.
Guess who doesn't want to give money and time and plans to public schools?
Betsy DeVos.
And Donald Trump.
They have no plans, they have no money, they have no interest in helping any of this.
So they're just shoving children back into these schools and they're like, yeah, maybe 10,000 or more are going to die.
Probably more, but you know.
Let's paint the picture, because when you see the cabinet meetings, when Trump is at the table, and all the cabinet secretaries are around there, and he allows them to speak.
And what do they do?
They simply praise the leader, one after the other.
So what's established here is that these secretaries simply must serve the president and his agenda, and his political agenda, without any other thought of anything else.
Sure.
Without any thought of the constituents as who they represent.
So we take that at face value, we understand what that means.
So we also understand that I think what Trump has made politically as a decision is he figures that the suburban moms who he's lost in mass, they're all gone.
He figures that if I can triumph getting the kids back to school, those suburban moms will be so happy to get their little Yes.
out of their hair for a few hours of the day so they can go out about their business.
And it's such a horrible miscalculation because these suburban moms, however you want to characterize them, actually care about their kids and would never send them into a situation that wasn't like 100% they feel really great, perfect about how safe it might be.
And meanwhile, none of the language that they're using has any sort of notion that we got to wait and see a little bit.
We need to kind of make sure that certain areas are okay or not.
All you hear right now is we are going to remove your funding if you don't open up your schools in the fall.
Like that is ridiculous.
Isn't it weird that the party that for years and years and years attacked women for wanting jobs outside of the home are pushing a situation that penalized working women?
It's really odd, right?
It's almost like that's been the philosophy and one of the goals.
So what you have now is a complete false dichotomy.
Like, you just say, well, the kids need to go back.
Well, no, we're not going to give any money and we're not going to give any guidance.
Good luck, everybody.
The alternative is that we don't have school and we don't also have childcare.
You know what I mean?
Like, these are all things that, like, we actually should have.
And if there was any sanity in this country, it would already be in place.
But these false dichotomies that keep getting laid out and keep getting laid out by people like Trump and DeVos, they don't exist.
It's just weaponized dichotomies, right?
Like, we could give a ton of money to make sure that schools are safe, and we could also give a ton of money to make sure that people could work from home or aren't going to be evicted.
And, you know, what was it?
It's like 31, 32 percent of American households missed their house payment and or their rent last month.
Like, this is not a situation where the government is actually looking after people.
They are obviously punishing people, and they're obviously creating fake dichotomies.
And the reason they want kids back in school is so that people will go to work, and they'll get an economy, and hopefully Trump will get re-elected.
That's it.
It's about profit, and it's about power.
It has nothing to do with basic human decency.
Well, meanwhile, the other argument we're getting from that side is that people want the kids to stay out of school and extend this whole pandemic thing so that it hurts Trump's election possibilities.
And I got to tell you, I have to imagine, again, there's got to be some like what we would call quote-unquote reasonable Republicans who are somehow still affiliated with the party who are looking at that and nodding their head and saying, yeah, that's right.
All they care about is getting Trump out, the Trump's Arrangement Syndrome.
And they're willing to kill people.
I mean, this sounds like a familiar argument, right?
They're willing to just kill people and have them, you know, increase this pandemic so the economy stays bad and then Trump will lose.
You know, and that's what they'll say.
And it's, again, remember when I spent all that time listening to only right-wing propaganda, they say exactly what we say.
Exactly.
But just flip, you know, the bizarro version of it as far as, you know, what we accuse them of.
I hear where you're coming from, but I don't think that's exactly accurate.
Because on one hand, I actually think a lot of what happens on the right is based on unconscious decisions made based on greed and power.
So like, for instance, I assume that people who don't listen to our podcast but have heard of our podcast, imagine that you and I are just like, Oh, I love America falling apart.
It's my favorite.
You know what I mean?
And we're just like, God, I just can't wait to like dine on like the death of America.
And, and in fact, you know, we're sitting over here and we're talking about like what's actually wrong with the country and how we would actually like to see it get better.
Because I said this the other night on a live stream.
I actually consider myself patriotic.
I actually think it's more patriotic to expect more out of your country and that it can be better than what it is, as opposed to the pessimistic idea of America is as good as it will ever be, so stop asking for more.
I just think that that is not only pessimistic, but ugly and limiting for yourself and other people.
But I think that they truly, and by the way, we're getting ready to have Katherine Stewart on, author of The Power Worshippers.
I really, truly believe that a lot of them think That you and I and the people who listen to this podcast Are evil.
I truly think that they think that not only, and when I say evil, I don't just mean like we do the wrong thing.
I truly think that a lot of these people, and by the way, people in my family, people I grew up with, they truly believe it's like supernaturally evil.
You know what I mean?
Like it's, it's not even villains.
It's like the devil.
It's like demon like behavior.
And I think that that mindset is what animates so much of this stuff.
And I think is part of, you know, the reason that we have Trumpism in the first place.
Right.
I mean, I was envisioning, like, if I were to sit down with a, you know, a Trump Republican right now and, like, go through Trump's speech, like, for instance, when he was at the place, you know, Mount Rushmore, you know, first of all, they would not have heard it, right?
Most people like that, they don't actually listen to these speeches.
They don't really, like, they just sort of get, you know, whatever Fox News might release in little sound bites.
But I kind of would want to sit down and sort of point out and say, look, look what Trump is saying about 65, 70% of the country.
Look how inflammatory it is.
Look how hateful it is.
And I have a feeling that a lot of those people would just sit there and go, no, no, that's true.
He's saying the truth.
He's saying that you, you know, the liberals are going to tear down the Washington Monument.
They're going to, they're going to escape.
You know what?
I'm so glad you brought that up.
I'm so glad that we got that in on this episode.
I read that this morning.
After, you know, obviously him retweeting, um, you know, fourth-rate game show host Chuck Woolery.
Oh, he retweeted that?
Oh wow, because I saw it before you even must have done that.
The idea of like, I just kept picturing Antifa.
Just, like, tugging on the George Washington Monument as another team is, like, trying to topple Abraham Lincoln.
I was picturing the Spider-Man movie where, like, they almost pulled it down or whatever.
Like, that must be, you know, another image he has.
That's incredible.
Yeah.
So, you know, that's the divisiveness that we used to not see, right?
The presidents used to not, weren't supposed to do that.
It was supposed to have a negative, such a negative association that it would really, you know, doom his chances to be reelected.
But, you know, when you hear him say those things, again, there's this notion that maybe he doesn't even want to win.
They're all kind of like throwing up their hands.
And that's a little dangerous, because even if you don't want to believe that, that just gives him carte blanche over the next several months, until January, just to burn it all down, like a kid who wants to take his ball and go home.
Well, I think he definitely wants to win, but what you're talking about in terms of that tinderbox is absolutely true, particularly as he spreads conspiracy theories and these vilified mythologies about, you know, who he's facing off against.
And we're going to talk about that, where that comes from, where this sort of idea of religious nationalism comes from, and why all of this has happened in the first place.
So we're going to be back here in just a second with Catherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers, and yeah, hang around for a second.
Hey everybody, we are back and I have to tell you, we are incredibly lucky to have Catherine Stewart with us here today.
Catherine is the author of The Power Worshippers, Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.
If you don't have the book already, I don't know what you're doing.
I really don't.
This is a fantastic book and as important to this political moment as it gets.
We also would really like you to go check out her recent Daily Beast article, Mike Pompeo and the Global Holy War Against Liberal Democracy.
You know, we get excited about guests and especially guests who are talking about the stuff that we feel like we're talking about every single week.
So, Catherine, thank you so much for being here.
Such a pleasure to be here.
Thanks so much for inviting me.
So, Catherine, let's go ahead and start off for some people.
We talk about this topic constantly about how there is this movement in this country that I don't think most Americans truly understand.
And it's a little hard sometimes to wrap their heads around because a lot of the times when we say things like evangelical or Christian, we sort of have a really generic idea in mind.
Right, the idea that it's just a religion and obviously we live in a country that has the wall between state and religion.
Can you talk a little bit about this idea of Christian nationalism and exactly what it is and why it's a threat?
Sure.
I mean, I want to start off and say that Christian nationalism involves the claim that the foundation of a legitimate government in the United States is bound up with a reactionary understanding of a particular religion.
So it's not a religion.
It's an anti-democratic political ideology, as well as a device for mobilizing and often manipulating large sections of the American public to vote for hyper-conservative political candidates that the movement favors.
And what that ends up doing is concentrating power in the hands of a new elite.
So Christian nationalism is a form of identity politics, and that it's tying the idea of America to specific You know, in 5th grade, oftentimes we're taught that in the history class about the separation of church and state.
It's the one phrase that anybody ever remembers from that time, right?
That was in 5th grade for you, Nick?
I don't know.
Is it 6th?
Is it 4th?
What is it?
I want to say we never talked about it because we were in the grips of Christian nationalism, but sure.
Well up in our area in Chicago, that's how we learned to separate the church and state.
So I'm kind of curious if you have any insight into does that really exist?
Is that written very explicitly in the Constitution or any kind of our laws that would actually trigger something when we now see these so much of the religious stuff going on in the White House itself?
Well, the idea of church-state separation, which is sort of built into our founding documents, if you look at the writings of Thomas Jefferson and some of the other founders and what they intended when they wrote the First Amendment, was this sort of idea of religion-state separation.
It doesn't really, it's a principle that served our country very well since our nation's founding, obviously very imperfectly, but it's really been degraded under the Trump administration because this is a movement that doesn't believe in pluralism or equality and certainly would like to sort of, you know, is promoting the idea that to be a true American
You have to be on board with certain varieties of sort of hyper-conservative religion.
But, you know, again, it's really important to note that, you know, Christian nationalism, what I call religious nationalism in my title, is not in the title of my book, is in a subtitle of my book, The Power Worshippers.
It's really not a religion.
It's a political movement.
It's almost like they're exploiting religion for political purposes.
It's almost like they've boiled down all of politics to their religion, and then all of religion to certain questions on culture war issues in order to capture and control the vote.
They know very well that if you can get people to vote on a single issue or on maybe two or three key issues, you can control their vote.
So it's a form of partisan agitation. - So listeners of the podcast know, I talk about this often, I grew up in this.
I grew up in what I call white identity, neo-confederate Christianity, right?
This idea that there's a racist God, that the white race is superior and chosen by God to carry out things like, I don't know, manifest destiny and, you know, the founding of the country.
A lot of people when they hear the idea of religion and maybe they're culturally religious or maybe they're spiritual or things like that, they're like, well, what's the problem with having religion in government?
What's the issue with looking for this religion to be sort of an ethical or a moral guide?
Can you talk about what you just said about it's anti-democratic and anti-pluralist and why that actually is a danger to the country and why people should understand that that's like a real actual threat?
I think most American presidents have appealed at times to religious symbolism or imagery in order to unite the country, in order to refer to kind of universal values.
Sometimes they'll do so surrounded by representatives of various faith traditions in order to signal their recognition of the irreducible pluralism of our country.
We live in an incredibly pluralistic country.
Even within the Christian faith, there are so many different interpretations of the religion, different ways that it's practiced.
People have a lot of different perspectives on these issues, even with any particular faith.
I'm just thinking about that moment when Trump did his photo op in front of St.
Mark's Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C.
You know, had the way cleared by the military with, you know, tear gas and in order to be able to hold up his Bible and have this Bible up.
He was basically, at that moment, using the Bible as a symbol of division.
It was us against them, the pure versus the impure, the insider for the outsider.
So he's using the Bible as a way, and they're using, the movement uses religion as a way not to unite the country, But really to divide it, to signal that there is a kind of insider, you know, those who sort of believe correctly and are on board politically with the agenda, and then sort of everybody on the outside, and who they actually don't even often, you know, represent as people with different points of view, but often even represent as somehow demonic.
So there's a lot of dehumanization there, and I think that's very dangerous.
Yeah, I tried to explain to people that my, as somebody who grew up in this stuff, my antenna immediately just perked up because we had been told for years and years and years to expect something like this.
And the more research I did of it, it was definitely like an ode to like Emperor Constantine, you know, going forth and conquering and announcing that he was like, you know, sort of the new face of Christianity.
It was really disturbing.
I'm glad you picked up on that too.
Well, my question I have is, you know, judging by the landscape of the country itself, does it even make a lot of sense politically to so entwine your administration around such a specific religion or, you know, or however we want to classify what they're doing and the manipulation of it?
But, you know, it almost doesn't seem like it's a wide enough tent at this point to have a successful run.
So what do you think about that?
Well, Trump would not have won without this movement's support, and he'll do everything he can to maintain that support.
The movement represents a minority of our country, but they vote in highly disproportionate numbers, and that's why they have the power that they do.
And I think to sort of understand how that works, we can turn to the work of somebody like George Barna.
He's the evangelical pollster who identified a group of the most fervent religious right supporters.
He has an acronym for them.
He calls them SAGECONS, which stands for something like Spiritually Activated Governmentally Engaged Conservatives.
It's this sort of acronym.
And he notes that they number only 10% of the country.
But in 2016, they voted, 91% of them turned out to vote, and 93% of those turned out to vote for Trump.
And that's how they win elections.
This is a group that is a minority of the population, but in voting in disproportionate numbers, They're able to win elections or have been able to win some elections.
In the last decade of researching my book, The Power Worshippers, I went to innumerable religious right gatherings and strategy meetings.
I remember Ralph Reed, who's one of the movement leaders, saying it doesn't pay no attention to the polls.
It doesn't matter that our percentage of the population is shrinking.
All that matters is who turns out on Election Day.
So one of the things that I did in my book is try to sort of lay out the machinery of the movement.
How do they turn out people to vote in disproportionate numbers?
How do they get everybody on the same page?
Where you look at sort of progressives and the sort of liberal left spectrum and everybody's sort of infighting.
But then if you look at the right, they really unite at the poll, you know, or did certainly in 2016, united at the polls when it was necessary.
And I showed how they do it through, you know, decades-long investment in data, media, messaging, all of the tools of modern political campaigns.
They have this really incredible get-out-the-vote machine, and they target their people, and they get them out to vote.
A lot of, actually, a lot of that machinery operates, in a way, through some of the conservative-leaning churches that have effectively been turned into, you know, cells of a shadow political party.
So I just want to encourage people again to check out the Daily Beast article that Catherine wrote, Mike Pompeo and the global holy war against liberal democracy.
We obviously have a president right now who the most Christian religion he's had is like Gospel prosperity, right?
And around him, he's surrounded by people like Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence.
And, you know, these are sort of people who have hidden in the past behind sort of rhetorically tested ideas of Christianity, like family values and, you know, keeping your families together and, like, making sure that, you know, you don't have too much violence on TV or whatever.
It's not about that, though.
Can you talk about what a world would look like if these people realized what they actually want?
Like, what a theocratic world that people like Pompeo and Pence are actually after would resemble?
You know, here's an aspect.
So I want to say something that is, I think, a really underappreciated aspect of the movement.
It's really intimately bound up with right-wing economic ideology.
Absolutely it is.
Yeah, right, a cohort that says they stand for the American family, but the policies that they're endorsing make it harder for families to survive, especially at a time like now when we have a widening of economic inequality.
And this is something that's well documented by innumerable economists and social scientists.
You know, the data is right there.
So, you know, I think that You know, they could say we stand for the family, but they're endorsing policies that make it so much harder for families to succeed.
That's one thing.
Actually, I wonder if you could help us get into the mindset of the religious right or these people that are so well organized as a machine.
And I like how you describe them as basically a shadow political arm of the country, of the Republican Party, I guess.
How do they justify getting so fervently behind a guy like Trump, who so clearly doesn't follow their... We need like two hours on that topic.
I know.
I know.
There's so much to say.
I mean, a lot of people think they got behind him because they know he's going to appoint judges that are favorable to their positions in the so-called culture wars, and that's part of it.
A lot of them say he's going to enact economic policies that are favorable to the pocketbooks of the movement's most plutocratic funders.
I'm thinking about like the DeVos and Prince family, the Wilkes brothers, so many of the other, and Mercer, so many of the other Uh, sort of, uh, deep pocketed funders that I talk about in my book.
But I think there's something more than that.
And that actually relates to your last question, Jared, is that, you know, Trump, they're often comparing him to biblical kings like King David or King Cyrus, an imperfect ruler through whom God chose to enact his will.
Um, so here's the thing about kings.
Kings don't have to obey the law.
They are the law unto themselves.
They don't have to follow the rules.
And they are not the rulers of democracies, are they?
They're the rulers of monarchies.
And that gets to the fact that this really is an authoritarian movement.
It doesn't believe in pluralism.
It doesn't believe in equality.
I mean, a few weeks ago, I believe it was, somebody caught Trump saying in audio, Like, if everybody was able to vote, a Republican would never win an election.
And that reminded me immediately of what Paul Weyrich said back, you know, at the beginning of the sort of movement that is a kind of intellectual precursor to today's religious right.
You can find it on YouTube, actually.
He said something like, I don't want everyone to vote.
Our influence in elections goes up when voting goes down.
And this gets to the fact they really don't have much respect for representative democracy itself.
Yeah, and I want to talk about that a little bit, because it's a weird movement.
Like, on one hand, of course, they have this sort of, you know, the visage of being under Christ and being in Christianity.
But when you actually talk to people outside of this movement, they see Christianity as a religion of social justice and martyrdom and restorative justice.
And this group, and I've talked about it a lot, like particularly after the Civil Rights Movement, it moved much more towards power and wealth and the worship of power and wealth, which is the reason why I ordered Catherine's book, The Power Worshippers, so hard I hurt my hand.
The fact that it was called the Power Worshippers.
Can you talk a little bit about how this faith, for some people, it's like a real actual faith.
That's what guides them, right?
The idea that they can lead to like a second coming.
But for other people, it's definitely a means of gaining power and wealth.
Absolutely.
I mean, I think that that goes back, if you look, you know, the, if you look at the history of the movement, I'm thinking about, go back to Paul Weyrich, and we could go back even further.
But he was one of the leaders of a movement called the New Right, which wanted to kind of inspire a hyper conservative counter revolution.
He felt like the Republican Party at the time was too soft on communism.
He was very upset by the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement.
And they were really trying to find an issue that was going to unite their movement.
And they sort of went down a laundry list of issues until they were very upset, by the way, about the fact that The IRS was starting to question the tax status of segregated schools.
And so they sort of went down this list and finally they settled on abortion.
And when they got to that issue, it was almost like a light bulb went off.
And they're like, huh, that could work.
And, you know, they had sort of allied themselves also with this sort of hyper, like a libertarian, like pro-corporate wing of the Republican Party.
And we see this carrying through to today.
When, um, uh, you know, if you look at groups like the Family Research Council, one of the leading policy groups of the religious right, they'll call things like, you know, public assistance and job training and, and food assistance and things like that against the biblical model.
And then if you, because they really don't believe that government should be assisting the poor.
If you look at some of the most politically connected preachers today, uh, people like Ralph Drallinger, who's has this organization called Capital Ministries.
He's targeting political leaders at the highest echelons of power.
His cabinet sponsors of his group include Pompeo, include Alex Azar, Betsy DeVos, even Mike Pence appears on that page of his website.
He has actually called public assistance to the poor.
Like he says, there's no basis in scripture for it.
And he says, you know, the responsibility for the poor is first for the family, for the husband, sorry.
Secondly, with the family, the husband isn't present.
And thirdly, with the church, he says something like, nowhere does God command the institutions of government or commerce to support those with genuine needs.
So it's a really different idea of how they want government to be run.
I mean, it's really obvious in the field of education, where we see education secretary Betsy DeVos, who appears to be doing everything she can to, you know, destroy public education as we know it, certainly to defund it.
By the way, Nick, can you believe the audacity of Jesus Christ and just handing out all that free fish and all that free bread?
I mean, it's just incredible.
The audacity.
Listen, I was raised to think that he was a nice Jewish boy from Bethlehem, but he said some really cool stuff.
And whatever, you know, they're twisting it now is frustrating.
Let me ask you this because you described how the government is sort of structured and I'm kind of wondering what is more concerning having a Secretary of State who subscribes to this or the Attorney General or I guess the Vice President?
What do we think?
Is there a dartboard here that we have to figure out which one's the worst to have?
Which position would be the most concerning?
I don't know.
It's like we're spoiled for choice, aren't we?
Yeah, I mean, Bill Barr is special, isn't he?
You know, he's supposed to be, you know, one of the things about authoritarian movements is that they don't hold power accountable.
And, you know, religious nationalism generally doesn't lead to democratic systems of government.
It leads to kleptocracies where corrupt leaders often nepotistic reward their friends or those who are loyal to them and punish their enemies and insist on a hyper Loyalty, you know, everyone around them has to sort of say nice things about them, even when they behave like idiots or worse.
And and where instead of religion, religion gets all too often reduced to organized hypocrisy.
And I think that kind of describes a lot of what we're seeing when it comes to Bill Barr and his defense of Trump.
I have to add a quick bonus question on top of that.
I think a lot of people are really worried about the possibility of post-Trumpism involving a move towards somebody who is more disciplined and actually has an ideology.
Which of the group that you've talked about now would you be most worried about ascending to a place of power and actually enacting their ideology?
You mean, would I be more worried about Pence or would I be more worried about Pompeo?
It's, you know, it's interesting, the movement isn't Really like a leader driven movement.
I think what really drives the movement is all the different components.
The judicial component, you know, the the I think a lot of the movement derives its direction, strategic direction from the legal advocacy organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom.
Then there are organizations like the Federalist Society, which play an outsized role in grooming and also spending huge amounts of money promoting Appointments, judicial appointments or, you know, folks who can be nominated for judicial appointment.
I think that's very concerning.
I think the data initiatives, organizations like United and Purpose, which works with a Koch-backed I-360, are incredibly effective or have been incredibly effective in targeting folks that they want to, you know, turn out the vote, you know, to turn out the vote in disproportionate numbers.
The policy groups like You know, the Family Research Council and its pastoral initiative Watchmen on the Wall.
I mean, it's almost like the organizations will stay in place no matter who the leaders are.
So I don't really think that it's, I mean, obviously there are a number of folks who occupy leadership positions, but the movement really doesn't depend on them.
What it really is depending on is all of these organizations that have been built up over time.
Go on.
I'm sorry.
Does it worry anybody else listening to you speak that you're basically describing Al-Qaeda in some weird way?
Right?
Oh, it's the other side of the coin!
Right?
Leaderless.
You don't need a leader.
All these things will function without when you get rid of the top.
Everything you're saying to me just kind of reminds me of that in a way.
And the fact that it really isn't religious.
It's more of a manipulation of this religion to achieve more power.
Right?
It's frightening.
Or am I crazy to think that?
No, you're absolutely right.
I mean, I think if you look at authoritarian leaders, like if you look at Putin in Russia, or if you look at Erdogan in Turkey, or if you look at some of the leadership in places like Iran, or if you look at, I think, Duda, who just won the election in Poland, you know, when these leaders ally themselves, bind themselves tightly with religious hyper-conservatives in their countries in order to consolidate a more authoritarian form of political power.
We rightly recognize that as a form of religious nationalism.
This is what religious nationalism does.
And this is why some of these movements are really very, can be very challenging to defeat.
Now, I think in America, we do have a great advantage in that we are irreducibly pluralistic.
We have the numbers.
It's really all about getting organized, turning folks out to vote.
I mean, you know, they feel like they can change the direction of the country if they activate that key 10% of the votes, not just 10% who are voting, but those are the folks also, you know, getting their neighbors, their fellow churchgoers to vote, people in their circles, um, all of All those tools are available to all of us, to those of us who reject the politics of division and conquest that this movement represents.
Yeah, and I think the first step in doing that is understanding exactly what we're dealing with.
And I have to say, we've been sitting here talking with Catherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers, Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.
If you want to understand how this thing works, and you want to understand what we're against, you've got to pick up the book.
I think it's an absolute must-buy.
Pick it up as early as you possibly can.
Catherine, where can the good people find you?
Oh, you can follow me on Twitter at CathSStewart there.
Two S's and a lot of my work is on my website, which is katherinestuart.me.
Awesome.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Great to see you guys.
Thank you so much for having me.
All right, everyone, welcome back.
That was Catherine Stewart, now author of Power Worshippers, Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, and also the recent Daily Beast article, Mike Pompeo and the Global Holy War Against Liberal Democracy.
That was a pretty good interview, right, Nick?
Oh, it's so insightful to be able to, and like what you had said, which is important, is we really got to understand where they're coming from, what this whole world is about, so that we can, you know, I guess mobilize better and be driven to get some of these people out of office.
Well and you know it's the thing about religion of course is you know like I was saying in the interview it's like we think it's one thing as a culture we just think oh religion it's like you know a good thing you get together in a church and you worship together or whatever but one of the reasons we do this podcast is because There's so much to discover and understand about why the world works the way that it does.
And again, I think Catherine's book, The Power Worshippers, does an incredible job.
So pick that up at your earliest convenience.
I promise it's going to make a lot more sense of what's going on right now.
Hopefully we're helping with that as well.
We appreciate you hanging out with us.
The audience is growing by leaps and bounds.
That is, let's be real, it's really gratifying and it really means a lot to me and I know it means a lot to Nick.
People keep asking what can they do to help out.
Keep doing what you're doing.
Tell people about the podcast.
Share it on social media.
Like us.
Subscribe to us.
Rate us.
Comment on our podcast page.
It honestly helps so much.
I mean, we're growing like crazy right now and we're so excited about that and we're so grateful for you.
Until next time, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
