Episode Description: Donald Trump's attack on the Postal Service is blatant and craven. Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss how the Republican Party has come to embrace the destruction of democratic norms and how Americans, including the Democratic Party, need to step up and oppose it. Also, historian Kristin Kobes du Mez stops by to discuss her book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. To access exclusive episodes and coverage of breaking news, become a Muckrake Podcast patron at http://www.patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
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That means you can't have universal mail-in voting, because they're not equipped to have it.
I don't know if he realized he was saying that out loud, but, I mean, he said it out loud.
Anderson!
I don't have— You're asking me to comment?
I don't have to comment.
He just said it.
If they're not going to approve a big bill, a bigger bill, and they're not going to have the $3.5 billion for the universal mail-in votes, how can you have those votes?
Hey everybody, welcome to the McCrake Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton.
As always, Nick Halsman is here with me.
When you're hearing this, it is Tuesday, which means that last night we stayed up late covering the Democratic National Convention, which you can join us on for the rest of the week.
Live from 9 p.m.
Eastern until the whole shebang is over by becoming a patron over at patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
That's how you can get instant access to not just bonus episodes, but also our bonus coverage of the national conventions.
Today we're going to go ahead and we're going to talk about the threat against the Postal Service.
We're also going to welcome in Kristen Kobes-Dumais, the author of Jesus and John Wayne, How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
Nick, I can't imagine what we're even going to talk about, how that could possibly be relevant to our moment.
Oh, it's nothing.
It might as well be the most random thing you could bring up in a podcast about politics.
Yeah.
And so we find ourselves here in a country right now that is not only glowing with COVID-19, so many unnecessary deaths.
We're over 170,000 dead, which I don't know if people are following.
We have a lot of schools that are coming, opening up today around the country.
A lot of really, really terrible stuff.
And the president of the United States of America.
is destroying the Postal Service in full view of the entire country to try and steal an election.
Nick, how are you feeling about the planned implosion of the Postal Service?
You know, again, it's the evil genius behind him.
He's not smart, but he's got people behind him who are able to get ahead of this thing and sort of plan out, OK, we need to suppress the vote.
We can do all the normal stuff we've been doing on the day of the voting.
We can get Russia involved and all that stuff.
But what's another way, especially in the context of, oh, my God, we're going to lose this election if they can send in votes without having to actually go, make it a lot easier on people?
Clearly the next step is, oh, well, we'll have to try and stop them from being able to send things.
Do you see the images over the weekend of, you know, mailboxes that are now locked on the streets?
Yeah, and we're watching mailboxes get loaded up onto trucks to be taken away around the country.
And by the way, I assume it's not in Democrat-heavy districts, right?
I assume it's just a random collection of boxes.
Well, you know what they say when you assume.
Well, what was it?
It also came up this this weekend that it's something like 46 states think that they might not be able to carry out mail-in votes and that they won't get there on time and that they're going to be impeded.
We're watching, I mean, we have a guy right now who's in charge as Postmaster General who has money in Amazon and in privatized efforts you know against the postal service which is nothing new obviously with this administration but the the the egregiousness of it is just off the charts right now i mean and and it's happening in real time
while meanwhile being contrasted to i don't know somewhere like belarus where the people are out in the streets in mass protesting against uh you know a corrupt government that no longer serves them and has violated the contract uh social contract and the host of their office um it's it's a really kind of a it's a frightening moment that i don't think there's really another way to put it you know we We could criticize Obama for not, at varying times during his administration, he would hide who was coming to the White House and who was having visits.
And eventually they would open it up again and reveal the records of who was doing this.
The W. Bush administration was really bad at that.
I don't think there's anybody worse now because what we know is that Trump ultimately did meet with DeJoy, the head of the post office, in the first week of August.
And so it took the most, you know, in-depth background reporting to actually get that information out and there's nothing official.
We don't know what they talked about, but clearly this is what they talked about, right?
There was nothing else they would have been on their minds at that point, especially because it's all turning around right now.
You're also seeing images of these sorting machines, these huge sorting machines that are worth millions of dollars just being taken out of the sorting facilities.
And you're hearing all sorts of, you know, it's anecdotal, but it's certainly compelling when you hear from actual post office workers who are just, you know, shocked and they don't know what to say.
It's like their whole job is being destroyed here because they can't sort the extra billions of pieces of mail that are coming in now.
So the real question is, is this affecting the actual ballots going out to the people, or are we talking about it going to affect it coming back in to be counted?
I suppose it's double, but do you have a sense on exactly what the real fear is right now?
I think it's everything.
I mean, it's honestly the intentional implosion of a public service.
I mean, my mail's been screwed up.
I don't know how your mail's been.
My mail's been screwed up.
And by the way, it's not... One of the things that we have to talk about when we're doing this, and we're going to get to in a second, because the word on the street is that the Democrats are calling the House back into session to try and address this thing.
God knows what that's going to turn into or what it's going to feel like, and we have to get more in-depth into that.
But this is, I mean, the Postal Service has been under attack for a very long time.
And here's the reason why it's working.
One is because the Postal Service has had constant unnecessary restrictions on it.
The Republican Party passed legislation that said that it had to make a profit, which It's not a business.
There's no reason for the United States Postal Service to ever even try and make a profit.
It's there to get mail from places to place and provide the connective tissue of a country.
It's not supposed to be a business.
But I assume that you've seen this too.
It's like, I live I live in a small town.
I know my postal carrier, right?
My postal carrier has worked his ass off, and he's had to work basically every day of the week, or he's had to do multiple routes to try and make these things happen, and it's not the same.
I've watched it disrupted over the past couple of years, so it's been debilitating to the postal service, but now that sort of undercutting, that kneecapping, is getting worse, and I keep talking about this.
It's synergy.
It's not only to rig an election, it's to try and privatize the Postal Service.
They want to do both things at the exact same time, which is kind of the evil genius of all of this, right?
Is everything that Trump and everything that the Republicans and the Trumpists do is for a couple of goals at once, which always leaves so many people being like, oh, this is a distraction for this and this is a distraction for this.
No, they're just incredibly good at doing multiple griffs For multiple reasons.
I mean, they're kind of brilliant in the way that they do it.
They're just transparent about it.
And we're actually really lucky about that.
We're lucky that the Postal Service isn't being destroyed in the darkness, right?
And that it's just blatant what's happening.
We're incredibly lucky, but that doesn't mean that we're going to get out of this thing with any semblance of a Postal Service or a democracy if we're not careful.
Well, to any of the Republicans who might be listening to this and think that we're completely biased or, you know, completely ham-handed for the Democrats or something, what you're saying has been confirmed for decades and decades as the Republicans have tried to cut social services and then turn around and say, oh, we don't have any money for these things, we have to get rid of them.
And they don't work!
And they don't work!
We've been cutting them so much, they don't work!
They just don't work anymore!
Who could have figured?
So, when you look at it in that context, it's clear, oh yes, the post office was the next great thing after social security and all sorts of other things they've been trying to privatize.
Like you said, this is a service to the community and certainly not anything that needs to be run for profit.
Do you know why?
Because here's where it got creative by the Republicans.
Diabolically creative.
Do you know why the post office is not solvent?
It's for one reason and one reason only.
The Republicans passed a law a few years ago that required them to fund their pensions for 75 years going forward.
And no business does that at all.
Nobody.
Ever.
Any private business doesn't have to do that.
So that was the evil genius of this, where they're like, OK, how can we force this to look like it's not solvent?
And that's what they did.
If they don't have to do that, they actually are fine.
They're not bleeding money like they would have been in the past.
But you know what?
So what?
I don't care if it bleeds money.
Hell, our Defense Department, they bleed money.
They don't make any money for us, yet we keep putting in billions and billions of dollars to that every year for the budget.
Why don't we somehow try to make the Army- Wait, do we not need all those planes?
We don't need all those planes and tanks?
You're telling me that we don't have a massive land war between nation states that is, uh, you know, happening?
Are you telling me that a military doesn't need all these planes and tanks that they're paying for?
Well no, what I'm telling you is they should be charging people to ride on them.
Well, I'm telling you right now that they should not have these things.
And that is the problem.
This is a shame.
Like, this is a literal shame.
And the thing that we're... And again, we've talked about this on a podcast before.
We get so caught up in the pageantry and spectacle of American politics that we forget all of the stuff underneath the hood, right?
The components that makes the car run.
Think about this.
All of the Postal Service people who, I mean, you know, it's not like they're running for office.
It's not like they're going to be at the Democratic National Convention or the Republican Convention.
They're a bunch of people who clock in every day and just do their work, right?
And it doesn't matter if they're Democrat or Republican or Independent or Green or any of these things.
There are so many members of this government who show up and do their job and they're being betrayed.
Like this used to be a great job.
A postal service gig used to be one of the best jobs.
And they have been intentionally run down.
And right now what's happening with postal service is a national shame.
And it would be a national shame even if it wasn't in trying to steal an election.
This just happens to be multiple things happening at once because it is a shame that they're not funding it and they're not taking care of it, but it's an even worse shame that it's in it's in service of trying to destroy democracy.
And meanwhile, you have, like, these soldiers.
The post office workers are now sort of bearing the brunt of this on their backs and saying, like, we are going to make this happen.
Like, you see, like, almost as if it's a challenge to somehow figure out.
Now, maybe because they can't work overtime, that's the other thing they were cutting a lot of, which is a big reason why, A, you get paid a better salary to be a post office worker, but also it's a reason why you get the mail in a timely manner.
So maybe what they're going to end up doing is on their own going rogue and sort of sorting mail to be like, OK, these are the ballots.
This is clear.
These are the ballots.
We're going to make sure these get out first before anything else.
And then we're going to make sure when we pick them up, we're going to get them processed before anything else.
That might be what they have to do.
And it's also the short-sighted thinking because by torturing the post office workers like they're doing, you know, they're probably going to act in their own self-interest, which would be to get rid of a guy like Trump who's destroying it.
I want people to stop and think about what you just said.
That postal workers might have to go out of their way on their own time through a patriotic duty to make sure that an election is free and fair.
And I was talking about this last night, like this is how dire things are.
I was doing a live stream last night, one of my bourbon talks on Sunday nights, and somebody said, should we get some UN observers in here?
You know, like some non-partisan UN election observers.
And the truth is, yeah, we should.
We actually should.
We actually need international observers here.
But then I said, you know what would happen?
And by the way, this is people I know, people I love.
Can you imagine if the UN sent in anybody?
Like, can you imagine the moment?
That this stuff would like take over.
I was watching and this is a recommendation for people and you should watch it too.
There's a thing called Boys State.
It's a it's a documentary now and actually it's like this American Legion type thing where you send a bunch of kids like 17, 16, 17, 18 year old kids to like a state capital and they like perform a government.
Right, and they like form their own government and they learn all these things in the institutions.
It's a really disgusting thing because all of these kids have absorbed Like, the negative, awful, you know, anti-democratic tendencies.
And they're all performing like Little Trumpist and Little Stephen Miller's and all this stuff.
What you're talking about is, like, it's the essence of a democratic country, right?
It's the essence of, like, a good, decent, shared society, and we can't expect that.
And not only can we not expect it, we know that it can't happen.
How gross is that?
Like, that really, it pisses me off, Nick.
It makes me just infinitely sad.
By the way, I think you just did our first ad for Apple TV Plus.
It's worth watching.
I have to tell you, if you want to, and we've talked about a lot in this show about how like performance breeds more performance and everybody, it sort of absorbs into culture and it reciprocates.
If you want to see what things are happening, this was taped in 2018, it showed on the ground level what Trumpism is doing to America and what the Republican Party is doing.
It's really well worth watching.
And it's what we've hit on all the time, which is the people that support Trump pride themselves on their independence and no one tells them what to do.
And yet they are the most sheep-triggered, whatever the word is, snowflakes of all of them.
And they end up being exactly who they think they're not.
That's probably the most troubling thing for me and the thing that I really ultimately had the most trouble with when I interact with Trump supporters is the lack of sort of self-reflection and self-understanding of what they're really saying.
There's no depth of thought to really what they're saying.
They're just simply repeating a lot of the stuff that they've heard in the past.
And, again, I believe in the goodness of humans.
So that's why I'm sort of going to rely on the fact that when we hear these post office workers who are, you know, they're determined.
Now, remember, is it safe to say, Jerry, that post office workers are really probably some of the most vulnerable workers across the country right now in this pandemic?
I would say that they are right up there with the essential workers.
I say as my post carrier drives by my house with everybody's mail and is exposed to COVID probably on a regular basis.
Absolutely.
Yes.
I think they're absolutely vulnerable and they deserve better.
But they're not getting it.
No.
And so it's like they're already putting themselves out there above and beyond what anybody should expect them to do to keep this thing going.
And we're going to have to expect them to do it even more.
Now, who knows?
Maybe the numbers are going to keep going down a little bit and it'll look a little bit better.
But again, there's this fear of how once the winter hits or the fall, it'll start to go again.
I have all these different versions of the Matrix that keep popping in my head because it could backfire on them and all of a sudden it's like, you know what, it isn't a problem to go to actual vote and register your vote there.
Now the thing I like about the mail-in thing though is there's more of a paper trail than some of these bullshit machines that they use that we've seen documentaries on in the past as well.
Hackable machines?
Yes.
Oh, yes.
You have to watch the thing.
I watched it.
We talked about it already once.
It's a great documentary on Netflix.
Anyway, so yeah, so that's really the key here is, you know, this is when we're talking about what can you do?
Well, it's the post office is going to have to really rise to the occasion here to save democracy to some degree.
And I want to say a couple things.
One, first and foremost, I would not, in order to win an election, and by the way, I've deeply held political beliefs.
I mean, we've documented now for months how we feel about Donald Trump, that he is an existential crisis.
We've talked about that.
I wouldn't destroy the Postal Service to win an election.
Would you?
Would that even ever enter into your mind?
And people need to understand this.
We're not talking about hardball politics.
We're talking about blatant corruption and abuse of power.
We're talking about corrosive, toxic, poisonous politics.
It's not even politics.
It's actually just oppression, is what it is.
And, you know, one of the things that's happening here, and we need to shine a light on this, I want...
I want somebody called this to task.
We cannot let this continue.
Like, and I know that, you know, the House is supposed to be coming in session.
I believe it's on Saturday, if I'm not incorrect.
They're supposed to come in and address this situation.
It's not enough to just go in and give a couple speeches that you can fundraise off of.
Right?
This is something that you have to meet and you have to say, listen, this is enough.
We're done with this.
Like we reject Trumpism.
We reject this kind of behavior.
It has to go away because for too long and this is one of your things.
This is one of your platforms that you stay on all the time.
It's Watergate, it's Iran-Contra, it's Dubya, it's all these people one after another and they cause precedence and they cause further and further corrosion of democratic principles and open society.
And this right here, this isn't just a bridge too far, this is a continent too far.
This is a major problem.
That's what you said.
Just right there is what you said as far as this is a democracy.
It's supposed to represent the will of the people, the majority of the people.
That's what the Republicans don't seem to understand.
Now, this notion of disenfranchisement goes back all the way to the history of our country, the notions of poll tax, literacy tests to be able to vote.
And I'm reading through the history of this stuff.
And during the Reconstruction, it was awful because they realized, oh shit, all these freed slaves Our votes, right?
They're not just votes.
They were really good at politics.
That's the other thing we don't talk about with Reconstruction.
Freed slaves, African Americans, were really good at organizing.
Like they figured it out real fast.
And like this whole idea that they were, you know, they were lazy and ignorant, they needed protected or whatever.
No, they got together really fast.
They went at warp speed and they were fantastic at it, which is why you got all that stuff.
It wasn't just that they were votes, it's that they had a peculiar talent for it.
Yes.
And here's the other issue is it resonates with white people that you say, well, don't you think you should be able to read in order to vote?
Don't you think that that's really that if you can't read, if you can't pass this literacy test and you can't vote, like that would resonate independent of the fact that the Constitution doesn't have anything to say about whether you can read or not to vote and whether or not you can understand the, you don't need to be able to read to understand concepts and issues and what you want to, who you want to represent you.
That doesn't have anything bearing on whether you can read or not.
And by the way, the literacy tests are one thing, but if you can't read, do the laws still apply to you?
I'm just checking.
I just want to make sure that this is how this works.
Oh yeah, that's right.
Even if you can't read, the laws still apply to you.
It's really weird how that works, right?
It's really weird how all that works.
But by the way, there's instances in the past back then where there were black people who went to college that would fail this literacy test, and then there were non-educated high school whites who could pass it with no problem.
So then you have to wonder, yes, how is this being administered and who are the questions given?
What questions are they giving to which people?
There's a direct line.
The SATs and the ACTs could not be reached for comment, by the way, because these are culturally biased tests that are all about maintaining white supremacy and elite control.
Well, you don't like to have questions where you're talking about Muffy on a yacht sailing for three hours across the Atlantic.
That doesn't appeal to you.
Now, but you can see a direct line between the poll tax and literacy tests for polling and voter ID, right?
There's a through line here.
It's almost the same issue all the way across.
Because for voter ID, for instance, so many people who are poor, who can't afford to do that and take time off and go and travel far away to do DMV, get their pictures, all that stuff.
It's basically the same thing as a poll tax and but there's a certain and a bit unfortunately a big enough section of this country still that will cling to this notion that oh well of course you need to have a voter ID to make sure that you are who you say you are and really that's never what it's been about and that's what just kills me is that we know what where the country stands on so many of these issues and yet
We can't progress to get the laws to reflect that because of this whatever percentage of old white people who want to keep control.
Well, a few points.
One, we don't have a problem with voter fraud in this country.
We have a problem with getting people to vote.
So, if you really want to talk about voter fraud, that's not necessarily the most pressing matter because it doesn't exist.
Second, it's a matter of projection.
Wait, wait, wait.
They had a commission.
They established a commission to find all the voter fraud.
How many did they find?
Because I remember that being a big part of the agenda of the Trump administration.
How much voter fraud did they find?
That's right, none.
No.
They couldn't even talk about it.
They found so much voter fraud that they couldn't do it.
The second part is that it's projection.
And I keep trying to tell people this.
The right is drowning in conspiracy theories because they're worried about other people doing the things that they do.
They're like, well, if I had power, that's what I would do.
Or if I was facing a losing election, I would definitely rig that election.
And that's the problem here is that the right is so paranoid because they know what they are capable of doing and what they would do to have power.
Number three, the Republican Party for the last 50 years has had a complete...
And this is on the books.
This isn't like conspiratorial.
This isn't something like that you got to put a tinfoil hat on.
They have taught people to do this.
They've said we have made a decision and that is this.
We're not going to go after everybody.
We're just not.
We understand the Electoral College is an advantage to the South and white supremacists in a formerly advantaged slaveholding state.
We're going to take advantage of the Electoral College.
We're going to go after aggrieved white people, and we're going to find our electorate that way.
We're not going to appeal to everybody else.
We're going to find a niche, and we're going to stick with it.
And that's who they are.
They don't care about democratic ideas.
They don't care about democratic principles.
If they did, they wouldn't have the strategy that they do, and they wouldn't intentionally disenfranchise and keep people from voting.
But that is the strategy, and we have to reject that, and we have to set a precedent for the future.
You know, I'm reading the book, It Was All a Lie, by Stuart Stevens.
And if you haven't read it, you really should, because it's a history, he started in the 70s, of basically creating ads and developing the campaigns for the Republicans.
And he gives us a glimpse into all the things you just said.
And it's almost like, I don't want to call it reassuring because it's infuriating, but there's some notion of, oh, all the things that we thought and what seemed pretty clear are actually exactly what they thought and exactly what they wanted.
And he was a GOP operative, first of all.
Second of all, that dude reached out to me, and he's like, yeah, you're right about everything.
Like, everything I just said, he's like, oh, absolutely, that's what we did.
Like, he reached out to me and, like, DMed me on Twitter, and he's like, hey, by the way, I just want to let you know, that's exactly what happened.
And I was like, cool, but also terrifying?
Yeah, like, fuck you?
Thanks?
I don't know.
Yeah, but I'm so glad that he's exposing it.
But like, what is it?
And we keep saying this and I know that people who listen to this podcast every week are tired of hearing it.
The Republican Party is terminally ill.
It needs to go away.
Like, we can get a conservative party, we can get a new Republican party, we can figure out whatever.
We can have fights with the Lincoln party.
I don't care.
But these people are not interested in actual politics that helps the United States of America.
They are, and this is the thing, when you have a group that is a power group and they start losing power, They don't care about democratic institutions anymore.
All of a sudden democratic institutions are like, I don't know, the Postal Service.
All of a sudden those things are their enemies and they're disposable as long as they can hold on to power.
And that is the unfortunate truth about who the Republican Party is.
Right.
Now, by the way, another huge issue to all of this is that because this administration is so, I guess the word is awful, they don't hire great people.
They can't get competent people to work for this administration.
So that's how you get guys like Corey Lewandowski involved.
That's how you get Manafort involved in these things.
And then you get the corruption involved in that.
And certainly the top is with Trump.
You know, if you're not careful, you know, because, again, I think it's pretty safe to say, like, another four years of this could really end up making all these norms completely destroyed, broken, never to get back again.
Maybe we'll never get them back anyway.
But it just feels like, and we always say this, it really frustrates me when someone says, this is the most important, you know, election of our lifetimes.
But we've said that every single year we have.
But each one of them is.
That's the problem.
is it's all been leading to here.
And we talked about it before we started recording.
It's like, people look back on 2000 and they're like, man, that was pretty screwed up in retrospect.
And it's like, listen, why did Al Gore concede even though he won the election?
Why did he not, like, you know, spit and shout a little bit more?
It was because he didn't want to hurt the office of the presidency.
He wanted to, you know, be a stand-up guy and not cause a problem.
And the Democratic Party, as they always do, tucked their tails and ran.
And then all of a sudden, a couple years later, they're like, absolutely, you can have the Patriot Act and the Iraq War and all this stuff.
And then, you know, a couple years later, they were like, well, you know, there are a lot of irregularities in place.
Like, real fast, Nick, is the state of Ohio usually important in presidential elections?
Sure.
Oh, okay, yeah.
Okay, so maybe Ohio's important.
So maybe there are irregularities in Ohio, but we're not going to worry about that.
And then you get to Donald Trump, and here is the problem.
And here's what the Democratic Party needs to do.
We need to stop acting like this party is rational and reasonable.
We have to call it the existential societal crisis that it is and say, you know what?
Listen.
America's not going to be better if Donald Trump is elected out.
It's not instantly better.
There's a lot of work to do.
And what I want to hear from the Democratic National Convention, which by the way you can hang out with me and Nick and watch it live as it unfolds, hear our critiques, hear what we think is working, what isn't working, you can do that by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
We're doing that all week.
What I want to hear from the Democratic Party is I want to hear a reality check.
I want them to stop screwing around with this.
You know what I mean?
I want them to stop pretending like this is just a momentary blip and it's not the side effect of so many wrongs that have just grown together and created this really, really disgusting party that needs to go away.
Right.
And I feel like everyone is on board, at least on the other side of Trump, that he needs to be punished punitively for his actions in office, which clearly would be going to prison, certainly for obstruction of justice that the Mueller report dug up.
But what you just said, the reason why we haven't ever done this before, like after Watergate, we needed to heal.
So Nixon gets a complete pardon.
The long national nightmare, Nick.
It needs to go away.
Everything's fine.
The bad man flew off on a helicopter.
It's hard.
Iran-Contra doesn't get punished because, well, we don't want to go through another Watergate again.
And that was the Democratic Congress.
That was last episode.
And so the direct connection to here would be if you do not punish the bad behavior, this isn't like you're raising a kid and you want to use progressive measures and don't spank anymore or whatever.
We are talking about adults.
We're talking about politics.
We're talking about policies that will kill people.
You need to be as punitive as possible here.
He needs to go to prison.
A precedent needs to be set that if you were ever to behave anywhere near what he did and how he processed his administration, you're going to go to prison for a while.
In fact, it would probably be a death sentence for him.
So, you ready for some hard medicine?
It's late in this segment.
Let's have a little bit of hard medicine.
What, Trump's brother died of COVID?
The more that we keep doing this thing, we're like, well, we can't really talk about Iran-Contra and what it is because it will probably sort of topple the myth of American exceptionalism, right?
Oh, we really can't get into Watergate and really have a president look bad like that.
And we really can't talk about the fact that the Bush administration could have stopped 9-11 and that they shouldn't have gone to war in Iraq or the idea that H.W.
Bush and W. Bush both fought Iraq and Iraq was using weapons that was sold to it by the United States of America.
We can't get into that stuff.
And by the way, we can't get into it because it might actually hurt America.
That's a conspiracy, everyone.
We have been engaged in a giant political, cultural conspiracy to try and just sweep our dirty laundry under the bed.
And we're like, well, it won't happen again.
But guess what?
It keeps Happening.
And every time it happens, it causes a larger and larger crisis.
And we're at a tipping point.
And if we don't deal with it now, we're going to look back and we're going to be like, holy hell, those were the good old days.
You know what I mean?
Like, it's going to get really bad if we don't deal with this and we deal with it immediately.
Well, is this the part where I say, well, don't forget, you know, uh, Barack Obama waged a terrible war in Yemen and a lot of people died and we did a really bad thing there.
I mean, right?
We'd be remiss if we don't mention that there are Democrats who are equally responsible for some of this stuff.
Well, and by the way, like there's a difference between being, there's a, there's a difference between saying this and because here's the thing, and I've said this before and I'll say it again, I am not a registered member of the Democratic Party.
I have problems with it.
Again, I will break my hand voting for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris this November because they are the only rational party in this country.
We have to be reasonable about it, though.
We cannot create heroes and martyrs and saviors.
We have to sit here and listen.
I'll tell you, I think Barack Obama was a pretty good president.
I really do.
But I have problems with exactly what you're talking about.
That foreign policy.
I hate that the so-called blob, the defense state, the national security state, continued unabated.
I hate that we saw so many of those measures undertaken.
We have to start taking that hard medicine.
You know what I mean?
We have to start realizing where things don't work and we have to reel it back in and figure things out.
But did you just admit that you're going to commit fraud in your voting because you're going to vote so many times for Joe Biden, you're going to actually break your hand?
I heard it.
I heard you say that.
You joke.
You know what, Nick, you joke about that.
But there's somebody right now who's sitting there with like some sort of audio editing thing that they're just like putting it together.
And it's good.
It's going to be it's going to be a YouTube viral hit in just about an hour is what's going to happen.
I mean, that is how the brain, the Republican brain, it's not even the Republican brain.
I got into it with a couple people on Twitter.
I know you're not supposed to do that, but hey.
And by the way, follow me.
You have to stop.
Follow me on Twitter and we'll have a discussion about it.
Can you include me in your SMH?
And you're a good Twitter follow.
You're a good Twitter follow.
I am.
You just have to stop.
You have to stop fighting with people on Twitter.
That's the only thing.
But it's funny, I have a lot of funny stuff up there.
A lot of the people who take umbrage with me when I sort of classify the Republican Party is that they feel like they're the civic-minded conservatives, compassionate conservatives, they're still out there, and you shouldn't lump us all in together.
And my response is generally, okay, fine, if you are one of those civic-minded conservatives, Conservatives and you and you're still part of the Republican Party then there's something wrong you're not what you think you are.
No, and listen, we, and again, we're taping this on Monday.
We're going to be covering the Democratic National Convention this evening, and also when you hear this on Tuesday, we'll be doing it on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
And to go ahead and, you know, subscribe on Patreon, patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
You'll be able to watch everything with us and watch our reactions.
The Democratic Party is welcoming in a lot of never-Trump Republicans.
And that's a good thing, because we need to make it clear that Trumpism is this problem.
It is a disease that we need to isolate and get rid of.
But let us not pretend that never-Trump Republicans did not play a role in creating Trumpism.
It just so happens that Trumpism went in places where they're not comfortable with.
Or they understand that for their political faiths, they can't go along with Trumpism.
That they played a role, and we cannot let people forget that.
That there is historical precedent for Trumpism, and that this thing has been coming for a very long time.
And to talk about that, we're now going to welcome onto the show Kristen Kobes-Dumais, author of Jesus and John Wayne.
We'll be back with her in just a second.
Hey everybody, we're here with Kristen Kovacs-Dumais, the author of Jesus and John Wayne, How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
Before we get started, I will just tell our listeners that this is absolutely must-read stuff, and I think that Kristen is doing some really incredible stuff that is taking Religion, white privilege, and masculinity, and coming together to create, I think, a lens that we need to view this country through.
I want to start, before we get into the thesis of your book, I would like to hear your thoughts a little bit.
This is something we wrestle with on the podcast.
We're just sort of in this Donald Trump era, sort of starting to wrestle with the idea that evangelicalism and Christianity are not just one thing.
And that there are several different things happening and there's a lot of political sort of fractures and cleavages in these things.
Can you talk a little bit about why you think we're just sort of coming to terms with that and what it's like to study this and start to realize that this is such a particular type of evangelicalism?
Yeah, so, I mean, white evangelicalism is right in the subtitle, and that's really important to acknowledge that this is a white religious movement that I'm talking about in this book and that really, that we're wrestling with in this political moment.
You can perhaps argue about there may be non-white evangelicals, black evangelicals, Hispanic evangelicals, but those traditions and, frankly, belief systems are fairly distinct from the cultural, political, and religious movement that we see as white evangelicalism. and religious movement that we see as white evangelicalism.
That said, white evangelicals have been incredibly powerful in terms of presenting their religious brand as true Christianity, as traditional Christianity, as old-time religion.
They've been just marvelous at branding and marketing.
And so in terms of kind of the conversation around faith in politics, evangelicalism in politics, or Christianity in politics, they play a central role and they've done that quite intentionally and very successfully.
There are multiple Christianities, but they're kind of the elephant in the room.
Well, I have to say, for regular listeners of the show, I think they're well aware that I grew up in the world that you're talking about.
And when I grew up in it, I had no understanding that this was a particular subculture.
I also did not understand that evangelicalism could necessarily be Racist and white identity based and of course like the thing we're talking about here is is this sort of like corrosive element of masculinity and American ideals and the sort of myths that Americans live by and they've sort of injected into Evangelicalism and Christian texts and all this stuff.
Can you talk a little bit about how that came about and how it shaped this country?
Yeah, I mean, you're right that if you're moving in white evangelical circles, you won't necessarily hear a lot of talk about race, except maybe this summer it bubbles up a little bit.
And so that's why I think for many evangelicals, it's hard for them to grapple with the fact that their faith tradition is actually kind of rooted in their white identity.
Even things like, you know, the idea that America is a Christian nation, and that America was founded as a Christian nation, and we have to return to some pristine, you know, time, make America great again, if you will, that that's a very white idea, right?
That doesn't make sense if you take whiteness out of the equation at all.
And so I think that there are things that evangelicals kind of present out and stories that they tell themselves that we are biblical, that we, you know, we are faithful Christian, and we kind of hold, you know, the true Christianity.
And And, and these stories that they tell themselves are not about race.
And they're not about necessarily, well, they do talk a lot about patriarchy, but that's always defined as simply God's will, right?
This is just biblical.
It was handed to us.
We've received it and we're just living faithfully.
When in fact, as a historian and as a cultural historian, it becomes very evident very quickly that their understanding of what is Christian, of what is biblical, is deeply shaped by the culture that they've inhabited.
and in many cases by secular ideals.
And I think that's the really fascinating but also horrifying part of it.
Like, the thing that did it for me when I was doing research on my book, and again, I grew up in this stuff, I had no idea.
So I grew up in rural Indiana, which, you know, is not what a lot of people consider like a hotbed of the Confederacy, right?
But I started to realize as I did this research that so much of the white supremacist ideals of America, and particularly the Confederacy, had leaked into even the Midwest.
Absolutely.
And so the smoking gun that I found that like made it finally come clear was when I found that Jerry Falwell was a neo-confederate preacher and that his initial crusade wasn't just televangelism and raising profits and fighting abortion, but it was arguing that segregation was a line drawn by God.
And all of a sudden it becomes this weird marriage Yes, yes.
politics and religion that is combustible and toxic and often very, very fascistic.
Yes, yes.
So, I mean, first of all, you have this deep influence of Southern evangelicalism within evangelicalism as a whole.
And you can trace that, historians have traced that in terms of migration patterns, that you've got these Southern evangelicals who then by mid-century move out to Southern California, which becomes the epicenter, as we know, of the religious right.
And then that just goes national.
And so you can absolutely trace this kind of racist past, patriarchal past, and the two are always intertwined.
So, So that's a very clear story that I think that we haven't fully reckoned with.
And again, for many evangelicals, they've kind of whitewashed that past, put that in the distant past, and they're talking about things like family values.
They're talking about things like, you know, authority as God-given.
And that really struck me when I started reading this family values literature, reading about how to raise kids, about how to be a good wife or a good husband.
Authority is everywhere.
It's all about submitting to proper authorities.
And if you follow that chain up, the highest earthly authority is always a white man.
The father, pastor, right?
And so it is actually a very authoritarian system.
And I wasn't expecting that when I went into this.
That's not the story we tell ourselves, right?
We're patriots, you know.
But obviously in light of recent events in recent years, I think it's something that demands closer scrutiny.
Well, and I couldn't agree more, which is one of the reasons why I think that Jesus and John Wayne is, it has to be on your bookshelf because this is, we were talking about before we started recording, I think it's one of the missing puzzle pieces that Americans, unfortunately, are in deep, deep denial about.
I assume that you read, you read the news with sort of a groan like I do, where it's like every week there's something like, why do white evangelicals stick by Trump?
He's obviously not one of them.
And he's obviously not Christian-like.
And I just want to say, like, once and for all, it's not about the religion.
It's about the power.
And the two kind of work together.
And it has been perverted from the idea of a faith or an ideology into a pursuit of power.
Absolutely.
It is about the power.
And I'm one who won't say it's not religion.
It's about power because their religion has become a religion of power.
And it's not just that it's not just transactional, that they have these religious beliefs.
And then there's this guy over here who's going to help them get where they want to go.
It's much deeper than that, right, that they have embraced an understanding of power that is very close to the authoritarian abuses of power that Trump himself is modeling.
So the affinities run deep.
And this actually became really clear to me right in the fall of 2016 with the release of the Access Hollywood tape.
I'm so glad that you brought that up.
that moment when I saw, oh yeah, they're not turning from Trump at this point.
And I've seen this before, because this is exactly how they've treated their own pastors, their own leaders, their abusers within their own communities.
And this is a longstanding pattern.
I'm so glad that you brought that up.
I've been trying to explain to people that, you know, I grew up in this Southern Baptist tradition, and especially the televangelist tradition.
And, you know, you have these televangelists who are all made up and their hair is all kind of crazy.
And then it's like every other week that they're getting in front of the congregation, and they're like, I've sinned, I got caught with a prostitute last week.
And there's a tradition there, and it happens in congregations around the country.
It It would always be a thing where, like, your pastor would be caught in an indiscretion, but he's one of us, so he's not going to be judged, and so we'll sort of, you know, we'll circle around him in order to protect him.
Exactly, exactly.
That's this repeated pattern.
And I want to stress too, it's not just the flamboyant televangelist, although it is the flamboyant televangelist, right?
It's the charismatic.
Right, right.
When I was first starting this research, I had a really hard time figuring out, okay, who's marginal?
who's fringe and where's the mainstream here?
And I think that a lot of observers of evangelicalism have been very quick to write off these televangelists or, you know, as, okay, they're fringe, and you've got the homeschool movement and they're fringe over here.
And then, but where's the mainstream finally, if you write off, and over the course of this research, I just ended up flipping those really.
We see the limitations of Christianity today, of Wheaton College, in this historical and political moment, right?
They are leaders without a lot of followers right now, and we have this kind of populist movement, and that's where the power really is.
And so, really, I think in writing this book, it was a struggle with what is the mainstream, what is the fringe, and what is the relationship between the two?
So there are probably a couple of hundred of our listeners who right now have been listening to this.
They're at their Amazon cart getting ready to order Jesus and John Wayne.
And the thing that they want to know is, how can you get from Jesus to John Wayne?
Can you talk a little bit about how that affected your project and how this ended up being the focus?
Yeah, so when I started reading books on Christian masculinity, how to be a Christian man, and I mean, millions of these books have sold.
millions of copies.
So when I first started this, over 15 years ago, I started digging into this project, actually.
And what really surprised me was how little these books reference the Bible.
Again, for Bible-believing Christians, the Bible really wasn't central to these books on Christian manhood.
Instead, they were looking to Hollywood heroes, to mythical models of masculinity.
And the favorite two were Mel Gibson's William Wallace from the movie Braveheart, and John Wayne just kept popping up.
And that was striking to me because these are kind of secular models of masculinity.
John Wayne was not an evangelical Christian, and he certainly didn't live a kind of moral life by narrowly defined moral values.
And yet he was this icon of Christian manhood.
I mean, somebody like Eric Metaxas, right?
You know, well, of course we all know that John Wayne is, you know, this ideal Christian man, and go on from there.
And so, I mean, that was an important clue to me, to see what was going on, right?
This wasn't necessarily biblical, this was cultural, and it was precisely the men who had not been shaped by traditional Christian virtues, like the fruits of the Spirit, for example, Who best modeled this very militant masculinity that they had then embraced and baptized as ideal Christian manhood.
There's a weird thing that happens with that too, right?
Because on one hand, they're trying to live up to the actions of a mythologized figure.
We get John Wayne.
It's not like, you know, every time John Wayne fell off a horse that showed up on the screen, right?
He's always strong, in control of himself, and quite frankly, Christ-like, right?
Perfect and just never faltering because he is the embodiment of American mythology.
And somehow or another, he becomes a savior-like figure and something that people are aspiring to.
And the whole point of, I believe, masculinity, and this is something I wrote about in my book, is it's you just can't reach the aspiration.
It's impossible.
You can't be invincible.
You can't be stoic.
You cannot be at all times strong.
And when men aren't able to reach that level, that's when they overcompensate.
They become violent.
They become angry.
And on top of that, they do things like, I don't know, embrace authoritarians who are also weak and scared and overcompensate through violence and anger.
Exactly.
I mean, it is an impossible ideal.
Many men confronted that who ended up, you know, going off to war to fight a war that had been inspired in part their participation in it, had been inspired by, you know, John Wayne's on-screen heroism, which was entirely fabricated, obviously.
And they ran up against that.
And so what did they end up doing?
Often they blamed themselves, right?
That somehow they were deficient in their masculinity.
Same thing for, you know, Christian men who are trying to follow this very kind of rugged, tough, militant model of masculinity.
It just doesn't work.
Many of their wives aren't gonna put up with it, for one thing, and it's just not true to who they are.
And so, yeah, how do they respond?
Some are going to walk away.
Some are going to leave the faith.
Others are going to just quietly persist, but feel like they are, in the words of one guy who talked to me, you know, second-class Christians and second-class men.
And some are going to, like you say, see the leadership exhibited by some alpha male, right?
And then, so he's worthy of leading, because clearly I'm not, and so I'm going to throw my support behind the guy who really has the balls to lead.
Well, that should have been the subtitle of this book.
Getting behind the guy who has balls to lead.
Because I think so much of that has to do with the fact, and you know, I wrote about this in my book about masculinity.
We all know men like Donald Trump.
We all, you know, they're in our families, they're in our communities, they're at our work.
And they do this thing where they boast, and they brag, and they talk about how much money they have, and how cool they are, and how many women they've been with, and like all these things.
And the thing is, if you're not within their circle, when they walk out of the room, you're like, this guy is so sad.
I feel so bad.
And watching Donald Trump, he's a really pitiable, pathetic figure.
But for the people that you're talking about, they're so wrapped up in the mythology of what a man is supposed to be that if they reject him, they're rejecting their entire worldview and religion and faith.
Yeah, right.
And many will say, well, we don't approve of everything he does.
We wish he would tweet a little less is what I hear a lot.
That's the root of the problem.
But I think one of the things that really is attractive about Donald Trump in these communities is that he transgresses norms, right?
He is not politically correct, and political correctness has gotten a really bad rap in these communities.
And so they take delight in the fact that I think the rest of us All right.
disturbed by his behavior, are troubled, are not cool with this.
And that just enhances his appeal because he just doesn't care about those norms.
And he's not going to let political correctness stand in the way of what needs to be done and what needs to be said.
Well, so when people always ask me what I think is the way out of this stuff, I always think it's I think knowledge is the first thing.
I think being educated about the problem is the first thing.
And that's one of the reasons I actually think Jesus and John Wayne, how white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation, is really important.
I think this is like one of the blows that breaks some glass when we can start actually dealing with the problem and understanding what it is.
Because I think Americans are in a lot of denial about who they are and where we've been.
What do you see this movement and sort of fight for power, what do you see this becoming?
Where do you see this, after studying this and looking at where we are now in 2020, where do you see this extended out if you had to start extending out the timeline?
It is so hard to know what's coming next.
I mean, I agree with you, knowledge is key.
One of the common reactions I've gotten from readers thus far, readers within these communities, is, you know, I was bumping into a lot of these trees my whole life, but I never saw the forest.
And I think that people have participated in this, have seen pieces of it, have never really understand, like you said, what we're really dealing with here.
So that's key.
What it's going to take then is for some of those people to speak out vocally, and that's going to come in.
Great costs for people within these communities.
So what's next is really going to depend on how many people are willing to speak up in this moment, in November, and in the months after to say, you know, this is actually not what we meant, or this is not what I meant, and there's got to be something else.
If the historian in me is not optimistic, frankly, this is deeply entrenched, these values and these systems, And there are great powers at play that enforce and kind of maintain control.
But this is also an unprecedented historical moment.
So it's possible that we can see change if enough people are emboldened to step away and to really to call this out.
I'm so glad you put it in those terms, because I think that's one of the things when we look at not just the history of religion in general, but the history of religion in America, is I feel like there are these moments where it reaches like a terminal point where there has to be some sort of reformation, right?
There has to be, like there have to be, and you hear them more and more, you hear people who are saying that White evangelicalism has gone so far over the line that it's a perversion and it's a problem.
I think the more that people speak out, particularly telling their stories and talking about alternatives and that this is not a hegemonic faith.
It's not just religion in America.
It's not just Christianity.
I think the more that there's a possibility that that pendulum can start to swing.
But I hear you and that's one of the things that I feel like we have to tell when we know history is that This thing's ugly.
I mean, it's a really dangerous thing.
And to hear you say that, I think is really important.
Yeah.
And I think that the other thing that history does in these communities is it shows that things have not always been this way, which for people who have grown up, you know, hearing that this is God ordained, this is, you know, this is Christian manhood.
This is Christian womanhood.
It's very static, very, you know, handed down from heaven.
And if you look to history, you know, that not only is that not true, but Christian militarism, is also not true throughout all time and in all places.
Even in the 20th century, many conservative Protestants were not militarists.
And so just showing that things have not always been the way they are now, even that can be liberating for people who've grown up in these circles, I think.
Well, that's fantastic.
We've been talking with Kristen Kobes-Dumé, the author of Jesus and John Wayne, How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
I'm telling you, this is a book to pick up.
This is really, really important if you want to understand what's happening right now, not just in America, but around the world.
I think you need to pick this up.
Kristen, where can the good people find you?
I'm on Twitter at KKDumé, so K-K-D-U-M-E-Z.
I have a website, KristenDumé.com, and a Facebook author page, also Kristen Kobes-Dumé.
