The Trump Administration Has Officially Gone INSANE
The lead up to the election continues to be defined by paranoid fascism, now with a Trump Administration member talking about "left-wing death squads" and CDC assassins. Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss this madness, as well as calls by the Right for Trump to use the Insurrection Act to steal the election, and welcome author and journalist Jeff Sharlet to talk about the intersection of religion, power, and greed.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hey everybody, it's Jared Yates Sexton of the Muckrake Podcast.
Before we get to this show, I want to talk very quickly because my new book, American Rule, How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People, is coming out this week and I'm incredibly excited and I just want to tell you a little bit about it.
American Rule is a reckoning with the real history of America and an intentional dismantling of the propaganda and weaponized myths used by people like Donald Trump To consolidate power and expedite wealth.
This book is meant to explain this current crisis, bring some order to the chaos, and help to find a way forward.
I'm really proud of this book.
It is one of the hardest things I've ever done and I'm really hopeful that maybe it might make a difference.
I hope you'll check it out and I hope that it finds you well.
And now, on to the show.
And I have a sneaking suspicion, and no, I have no first-hand knowledge, but a sneaking suspicion should our president be re-elected, God willing, that he will dust off the Insurrection Act that was first passed by the Jeffersonian Republicans and used by Jefferson and used by so many presidents since Jefferson.
And he will have to use it to put down the enemy.
A top communications official at the powerful Cabinet Department in charge of combating the coronavirus accused career government scientists on Sunday of, quote, sedition in their handling of the pandemic and warned that left-wing hit squads were preparing for armed insurrection after the election.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I am Jared Yates Sexton.
We have a really great show ahead for today.
And great's a weird word to use because obviously so much is terrible right now.
But later on we have an exclusive interview with Jeff Charlotte, author of The Family.
You know him as one of the most important voices right now calling out Christian nationalism and Christian fascism and talking about how religion intersects with power and money.
But right now, we have an absolute mess on our hands, and as always, I'm incredibly glad to have with me my loyal, wonderful co-host, Nick Halseman.
It's getting crazy as hell out there, Nick, and it's not like it hasn't been crazy already.
We've seen violence in the streets.
We've seen the President of the United States of America endorsing sectarian violence, vigilante violence, extra-legal killings.
Now, in this new chapter, and by the way, according to my calendar, we're only midway through September.
We still have a little ways to go before we get to this election.
We have now gotten to the point where members of the Trump administration, this guy, Michael Caputo, who is the Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs of the Department of Health and Human Services, got on Facebook Live, which by the way is where all good things happen.
Absolutely.
Tell you what, if you want to fire up Facebook Live and you just want to get wild, always a great idea.
So Michael Caputo got wild on Facebook Live, said that the CDC, which by the way he said the Department of Health and Human Services, works hand-in-hand with the CDC in, what's that thing that's going on right now that's killed 194,000 plus?
Yeah, it's the invisible plague.
Yeah, that hoax of a plague, right?
He says the CDC, which is of course trying to take this invisible hoax plague on, has a resistance unit against Trump.
He says that the CDC is going to have to kill him.
Meanwhile, he's doing a lot of cosplay and live-action role-playing, talking about shadows on his wall.
And then he says that when Donald Trump refuses to step down, the shooting will begin.
He then tells Republicans who have guns to buy ammunition to get ready for this.
Meanwhile, your favorite and my favorite, Roger Stone, is on InfoWars because that guy shouldn't have gone to jail talking about Trump using the Insurrection Act to lock up people, to take on Democratic people, to keep them from ruining the election.
Mark Levin, who last time I checked has a show on Fox News and is one of the biggest influencers on the right, is also talking about the Insurrection Act.
Nick, I don't know, man.
I really don't know.
It's getting worse and worse by the day.
Well, you also forgot to mention that he has announced that Trump had given him $250 million to launch some sort of public service advertising campaign intended to help America get back to normal.
Okay, now I can't imagine what that's going to be about.
And also, I love this notion of the deep in the bowels of the CDC.
Okay, as if this is a place... This is like Jacob's Ladder kind of stuff, right?
Where they're pushing him along into this crazy hospital and around corners into the walls.
This is... I mean, he's fringe, right?
He's pretty much fringe government, so maybe we can dismiss him on that ground?
Well, okay, so on one hand, I mean, he doesn't necessarily have Trump's ear, although I assume probably he got a call from Trump today.
There's like good work, you know, heck of a job.
And what we need to focus on here, this fantasy by Caputo, and Caputo is a French guy.
I mean, he's on our podcast.
He's, you know, he's in the A Block today.
There is an economic incentive with the Republican Party to turn the dial up on the batshit meter.
You know what I mean?
Because there's this thing that's going on with the Republicans, and there's a long history of this, which is acting like you are the persecuted group, right?
You're under fire, like the conspiracy's coming for you.
Because if the conspiracy's coming for you, what's that say about you?
That you're right.
That you're right and that you're powerful.
And they will take you down if they possibly can.
So suddenly it gives these people an opportunity to pretend like they're part of some larger movement or whatever.
Which of course, I mean, the QAnon movement gives those people the chance.
The deep state conspiracy theory gives them the chance.
This guy will probably be on Fox News either tonight or tomorrow.
And there's an economic and power incentive for people to go out and just sound off.
Just get on Facebook Live and just talk a bunch of bullshit that has absolutely no relationship whatsoever with the truth.
I mean, he'll be on, I guess, can we call him Fucker Carlson now?
Is that what we're going to change it to?
I bet they're talking to their producer right now.
Without question.
I bet Tucker Carlson's got him coming.
Great fit for that.
And by the way, maybe it's a good sign.
Maybe this desperation, and that's really all this is, is just a sign of how badly it is going for them in the reality.
And that's what they're turning to.
Oh, it's bad.
It's bad.
Now, that doesn't mean that this won't incite the violence that we're worried about because there's just enough of those people that could cause a problem if Trump loses and all these things he's describing.
But if the goal here is to have Trump not win the election, maybe this is one of those moments where we say, "Okay, this is obviously going very poorly for them." Well, okay.
So you and I are not, we're not presidential campaign advisors.
Let's put on the amateur hat, you know, the NCAA of campaign advisors.
If you wanted to win an election, what would be the most elementary election 101 thing that you would advise somebody to do?
Be likable?
Be likable!
Try and grow your base.
Try and make appeals to people who maybe didn't vote for you the first time or you don't expect to vote for you the first time.
Has Donald Trump done that?
No, it's the opposite.
It's the exact opposite.
It's almost like in Spinal Tap where they're like, no, our popularity has grown more exclusive, right?
And it's like this situation where he has made no attempt whatsoever to grow his voter base.
What's he trying to do?
All they're saying left and right is this is going to be an illegitimate election.
They know.
They have their internal polls.
I've talked to enough Republicans in the past month.
Nobody's polls show Donald Trump winning this election.
Nobody's polls.
So instead of trying to get out the vote, you now have rabble-rousers.
And by the way, real fast, Roger Stone going on InfoWars.
People need to understand this.
He's been going on that show for years and he goes on there to communicate to the fringe the ideas that start at the top and they try them out there.
They see if they can get it trending.
They see if the people on the fringe can talk about it and start conspiracy theories.
And what you do is you seed the fringe and who then picks it up?
Fox News!
All of a sudden they launder it, you know, and they bring it up and they make it legitimate.
That's what they've been doing from the very beginning, and now he's going on talking about the Insurrection Act, and then Mark Levin on Fox News is talking about doing it.
This is a cycle, and they know that they can't win this election, and so they're trying to push it to the point... I'm sorry, they're talking about dictatorial tactics.
Right.
And literally now you just made me thinking, OK, because here's the thing.
The goal apparently now is shifted in the last minute you spoke.
It's not necessarily that Trump has to lose the election.
It's because we can probably assume it's going to be a contested election.
Now we need to deal with that.
The goal now needs to be we have to win the contesting of the election.
And we have to somehow overcome what that means.
That's where it's frightening, without question.
Because you're now descending into some sort of lawless, unstructured, non-constitutional entity that's going to be decided by a couple of random people.
No.
My God, no.
Like, that's not how this is supposed to work.
I mean, who could ever imagine a situation where the Supreme Court would decide a president?
I mean, if that ever happened, if it ever put on the scion of a political dynasty, I assume that'd be really problematic.
How did that work out last time?
Yeah, how'd it work out last time, right?
This is a situation where, from the very beginning, Donald Trump has said that any election where I don't win is illegitimate.
And he has said one time after another.
I mean, he has even gone so far as to tell his followers to commit election fraud in order to muddy the water and make it look more and more like there is fraud.
It doesn't matter how they do it.
It doesn't matter how they undermine public confidence.
Dictatorial authoritarians, the way that they keep power, is that they undermine democratic institutions to the point where we will not defend them or believe in them.
And when that apathy and powerlessness takes over, that's when you're in an authoritarian society.
And that is what he's created right now.
You know, apathy is a direct result of this, especially for people who are against Trump.
But what also gives me apathy is to see the reaction of Trump followers to his lies.
That makes you just want to give up and completely, you know, not even go forward with this.
To see him ranting at this thing in Michigan, I think it was Michigan on the tarmac, right, with no masks, no nothing.
And he starts talking about the importance of patriotic education.
And it gets a huge applause.
And he even says, you know what I'm talking about.
And they all are sort of in on it.
It's like that to me, I almost threw my phone into the pool.
What am I supposed to do with that?
That sounded too posh.
I almost threw my phone out my window.
I almost threw my phone into a marsh nearby.
I almost spilled my glass of wine.
I was so upset.
Dude, I have to tell you that is the fantasy of all Trump supporters.
There is some liberal guy in California sitting by his pool and he gets so triggered by Donald Trump that he throws his phone right in the pool.
It's above ground and whatever.
But how about this?
I don't know if you noticed in The Economist they did a deep dive into Trump followers and what they say.
I just got to read this to you, Jared.
I don't know if you saw this because they were interviewing them directly and it's the other thing that just makes it so ridiculous because, again, what we've said already is we laid out the dictatorial attempts they're making to turn this into a non-democracy.
But here's the quote.
Ready?
Real quick.
I'm going to read it for you.
He's done a great job.
He's got everyone back to work.
He's got everyone back to work.
Wait, who are these people?
Who's back to work?
This is an electrician who is in Ohio.
Forgive me.
These are real Ohio people who are Trump supporters and are part of unions and that kind of thing.
This is where they were interviewed.
Wait, wait.
Who's back to work?
The last time I checked, 40% of Americans are on the verge of eviction.
Oh.
I know!
And so the next sentence is, I'm pretty much 100% for him, said Kyle.
This is Kyle talking.
He shoots his mouth off, but at least that shows he's honest, says Jason, a pipefitter, who said he especially liked Mr. Trump's commitment to reducing the national debt.
Oh, that's right, because he hasn't increased it to historical levels.
He's done more for our country than the past ten presidents put together, said an older builder, Jeff.
Whoa.
Hold on.
Okay, wait.
Ten?
Than the last 10?
Put together!
Listen, that's a busy president.
That's almost a president who doesn't even take time to go and golf every day.
That's incredible.
And by the way, if you go past 10, you're getting back, you know, pre-1900, I think, right?
I mean, we're talking about Teddy Roosevelt and before that.
Okay, he goes, so Jeff, an older builder, Jeff, who should know better, as he's skimming wet concrete on a new road, he says, he's made, who is it?
China or Japan pay our farmers billions of dollars.
He got health care done.
What?
He says this.
He got health care done.
Comma.
Which the Democrats could never do.
Period.
And then you all know the next line, the last line of this is, he built the wall.
Because of course he did.
I'm sure he would have said, and Mexico paid for it.
I mean, where are we?
What is going on here?
Can I?
Okay, first of all, I wanted to comment on what you just said.
I gotta take my glasses off before I throw them at a wall.
I'm gonna back up a little bit.
I'm so glad that you read that to me because, you know, I needed a little bit more existential dread on this podcast.
So, a patriotic education.
I'll tell you what a patriotic education is.
It's a re-education camp.
Is what it is.
Except for that re-education camp sits in your town and is paid for by your tax dollars.
Right?
It is an elementary school that teaches the myth of American exceptionalism.
Which, by the way, is what I'm attacking in American Rule.
How a nation conquered the world and failed its people.
It is telling you a myth of white supremacy that is all about how to control people, keep them ignorant, and to profit off of that ignorance.
The fact that he's telling people this It is a warping of reality that allows you to say, and might I borrow from our good friend Orwell, it allows you to look at 2 plus 2 and see that it equals 5.
Last week we had Federico Finkelstein on and Federico talked about fascist control your reality through violence.
If you don't see 2 plus 2 equals 5, they will beat you until you see 2 plus 2 equals 5.
If you don't see it and you continue to refuse to, they'll declare you a terrorist and they will kill you.
Which the president says needs to be done occasionally, right?
That needs to happen occasionally.
That is not just living in a different reality.
That's like bowling with bumpers, man.
That's like not allowing any movement of thought or any sort of concrete reality to exist.
That is a cult.
There's nothing else to call it.
It is a cult.
And lest you think that, you know, oh, don't worry, he's just gonna, you know, pump up George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and really make sure that we, you know, revere them.
We already know they're trying to get rid of the 1619 Project as a reference, as a touchstone, while they're teaching slavery.
So, you have to... Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!
Slavery?
What slavery?
Was there slavery that took place in America?
Because under this new regime of patriotic education, I'm a little cloudy on this thing.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Are we talking about genocide of Native American people?
Oh, you mean those people who were on our land before us.
Okay.
That's what a patriotic education is.
It's covering up past misdeeds.
Exactly.
And taking any scientific, empirical approach and grounding it into dust.
That's what that is.
Meanwhile, it's fascist if you want to impose your ideas, Jared, all your fancy, weird stuff on other people.
You know, the kind of thing where, like, you got to make a guy, you got to make a guy, like, you know, sell a cake to a gay couple because that's really, that's the fascism right there.
It really is.
Well, and I want to say this.
Because this is something that I think is really really important and it goes into our good friend Michael Caputo who I assume has like a nine o'clock show now on Saturdays on Fox News at this point.
His idea, so he's this guy in Washington D.C.
I don't know who he is I assume he has some money because he you know is high up in the Trump administration and probably bought that position allegedly and this is a joke and parody and please do not sue me.
But this is a person in Washington, D.C.
who's a powerful person, right?
He's probably in some nice loft or whatever, some nice place in downtown D.C.
He's seeing shadows on the wall, Nick.
He's imagining left-wing kill squads who are going to take out the president because the president's so strong and so patriotic.
He's imagining the CDC sending killers.
This is all about perceived persecution.
If you actually look at power in human circles, like I've been researching this a lot recently, it's all about groups of people who have power, who believe that other people are coming to hurt them, so they have to hurt them first.
That's why they want to arrest people and put them in jail.
They're like, oh, something's wrong here because they're going to make me make a cake.
They're actually persecuting somebody by not agreeing to make them a cake, and they think that they are the ones being persecuted.
It's all about perceived persecution, and that leads to fascism.
It isn't easy, by the way.
2 plus 2 equals 4.
That's the actual equation.
And if you get to 5, you have done so because somebody has led you astray because they see a way to manipulate you and gain power from that manipulation.
Right.
And let's not forget that Mr. Caputo, let's call him Mikey C. The Mikey C Show.
The Mikey C Delusional Hour.
I love it.
I mean, he's describing these scientists at the CDC as wearing sweatpants except for meetings at coffee shops.
Is it this more this sounds much more like you know some sort of sophomore in college that you probably people like you're you're teaching right now versus any of these High-minded, you know lots of letters after their name scientists at the CDC I mean, but and I have no doubt that mr. Trump is is congratulating him right now and retweeting whatever he's saying it is
It just sort of stretches the mind, like just how prevalent is this thought process is I guess the question here, and the worry.
Certainly it's gone viral enough where the New York Times has a report on it.
It's the entire American right.
Okay, so I'm an academic, right?
I know a few scientists.
I have scientists who are friends.
Cool.
Scientists are not gathering in clandestine places in smoky rooms coming up with conspiracies.
Scientists are really lovely, dorky people who get excited about really small, minute things that they study until they understand it completely.
I have one who's obsessed with a certain type of worm.
They don't have time to go after Michael Caputo, the Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs.
They're not jumping in like ninjas, Nick.
They don't have a card that describes where he goes and what he's doing.
These are people who are serious and want to do their jobs.
And this person is role-playing a perceived secret agent persecuted asshole.
And meanwhile, he's going to profit.
He'll probably have a book deal before we're done recording this podcast.
He'll probably be the head of the Department of Health and Human Services.
I'm sorry, acting, because they would never want to actually give somebody a position, right?
They just want to keep moving around and moving the chairs around.
Here's the thing that's interesting about that is that, you know, you're talking about how they get these positions, right?
It looks like this guy was like buddies with Dan Scavino.
Hey, sure, come on over and you can be in the HHS, no problem, you know, without any experience, which keeps happening.
And it's often like what we've seen right now as reported today about DeJoy.
We really haven't talked about Louis DeJoy too much, I feel like, on the pod yet.
But it's revealed now that he actually spent $600,000 giving it to the Republicans in order to get the job as Postmaster General.
In the eight weeks between when the last one steps down, they appoint him.
Meanwhile, they had been appointing their own Board of Governors members just enough so they had a majority, that Trump had a majority on there, so it would be easy to just kind of push him right through.
This is more the kind of stuff that's really, really troubling only because, you know, I'm kind of all over the place with this one, but the whole point of the post office that got them all crazy, and this is before the pandemic, before the notion of, like, you know, mail-in voting, was that it was losing money, right?
And we have to somehow get in there and change all the whole post office, the way we do things, so it makes money because it's too much of a drain.
Does that sound familiar to anything we just watched, perhaps, and talked about recently?
It feels vaguely familiar somehow or another.
Yeah, like news departments that don't make money because they're there to report the news, honestly, and not be there to try and, like, garner ratings, right?
Oh, you California liberal talking about public services next to your pool, getting triggered by all these people.
How dare you expect the post office One of the hubs of shared society to not be a corporate arm or some sort of a profit organ.
How could you be so naive?
What a commie pinko.
Well, you know, I did do a deep dive, speaking of conspiracies, because that's how my brain works.
I got to remind myself of how this all unfolded.
Because what you realize is, Is that the the machinations have been put into place a long time before DeJoy got in there to suddenly control the post office.
It could have just been, you know, a coincidence or a nice turn of events where they all happen to they COVID appeared and then they have to deal with this.
Yes, but here's the thing.
When you look at how all the other people stepped down, because remember, Trump was screaming at Bezos and Amazon, trying to get the post office to raise the rates.
And that is why the original postmaster general, Brennan, she was forced out.
Because she wouldn't raise rates because A, she couldn't.
Legally and then B it was a nice deal for both of them.
So they wouldn't want to affect that So he gets her out the a deputy a postmaster general who would have taken over Normally was also the guy who spearheaded guess what where's the music?
increasing mail-in voting across the countries This is over years of time.
Years he's been trying to do this and helping states to do this.
So he gets forced out as well before they bring in DeJoy who had to pay his whatever that's called, his penance, I guess, to get into that role.
That was a nice, smooth legal maneuver that you just... He paid a penance, right?
Not a bribe.
He didn't grease any palms.
He paid a penance, if you will.
Whatever it was called.
And by the way, we also now know that he violated FEC laws.
By making his employees donate money and then reimbursing them later, which, ironically enough, is exactly what happened to Dinesh D'Souza and who went to prison and had to get, you know, pardoned by the president.
And I have to thank DeJoy for doing that because I wasn't ever really clear about what D'Souza did until this whole thing came out and then they made all those connections.
So thanks, reporters.
Anyhow, here we are.
I just have to say that the American right is riddled through and through.
Right.
If it's not one thing, it's another.
So, for instance, it's corruption and grift and personal advancement.
That's on one hand.
On the other hand, after a cursory bit of research on our good friend, what do we call him?
Mikey C?
Mikey C. Good ol' Mikey C. He has an interesting career because here is where right-wing ideology and the grift come together.
It's really weird, Nick.
Yeah, first of all, he worked in the Reagan administration with Oliver North, so there's part of it.
But then here's the thing about it.
Our good friend Michael Caputo, who obviously is now livestreaming about left-wing hit squads and CDC ninjas coming into his house and how there's a resistance against Trump.
In sweatpants.
Sure.
In sweatpants.
Weirdly enough, so like after the Reagan administration, Michael Caputo really wanted to travel.
Like he wanted to broaden his horizons and see what was happening out there.
Sure.
Who among us wouldn't?
Absolutely.
See a little bit of the world.
A really interesting thing was taking shape in the world after the post-Soviet Union where he went over to work with our friend Boris Yeltsin.
And then it was nice enough with Boris Yeltsin that he hung around for the guy who came after him.
Wait, let me check.
Hold on one second.
Vladimir Putin?
And then, after he left from Vladimir Putin, he went and joined a media organization whose main focus was promoting Vladimir Putin.
And then, like a lot of other people, weirdly enough, he went from helping Vladimir Putin to Ukraine.
And then somehow or another ended up back in America.
Working with the Trump Organization, and Trump Campaign, and Trump Administration.
How does that happen?
It's weird how it keeps happening.
The people who give the alleged bribes, the people who keep getting in these positions of grift, penance, and then all of a sudden, there are people, and by the way, let me tell you, patriots, one and all, who are over there helping an authoritarian dictator, who, you know, allegedly helped Donald Trump get arrested, and by the way, was investigated for Russian interference.
He worked for RT?
No, he didn't work for RT.
He worked for one of their competitors who actually was more craven about getting Vladimir Putin over.
And then all of a sudden, like all those people, it's weird how all their light bulbs went off over their heads, Nick.
And they were like, I need to get back to America and help Donald Trump.
He's a patriot.
Isn't that bizarre how that keeps happening?
I think we all... Yes.
My assumption, because I take these people in good faith, Nick.
I take them all in good faith.
I take them all in good faith.
I believe they're good patriots.
What I think happened was they were over in Russia and they were so inspired by Vlad riding shirtless across The horizon and the democracy that he carried on his back during his photo op.
I assume they got so inspired they were like, I have to go back to America and help a true patriot.
Right?
That had to have been it.
It couldn't have been money and power and grift and influence and eroding democracy around the world.
There's no way that possibly could have happened.
And there's no way that this asshole was in his apartment doing a Facebook Live post in order to push misinformation and disinformation to help Donald Trump and hurt democracy.
No way that happened.
Yeah, and there's no way to track... I'm so tired!
I'm so fucking tired, Nick.
I'm so tired.
Yeah, I'm sure there's no way to track how many of the Russian bots amplified what he was saying immediately after he recorded that, or as it's being reported.
That's pretty scary stuff, though, actually.
I did not know that.
That was breaking news.
I didn't know it either.
I was hot coming into the podcast, and now I'm just, like, boiling.
Like, it just...
It never stops.
These people, the only ideology, some of them of course are Christian Dominionists, others are bald-faced fascists.
Most of them have no ideology beyond power and wealth and corruption because those things all come together and we have to recognize that that's what this is.
That we're dealing with a new type of quote-unquote post-political world.
I just, man, these people disgust me.
Well, here's the thing, though, because, you know, ineptness is a real hallmark of this administration, and that was sort of the saving grace protecting us from a lot of their true evil intentions.
However, really quickly, and I'm glad I gave you a chance to look that up while I was babbling incoherently about my conspiracy theory about the post office, but here's what my biggest fear is, is that there is a thought process in mind, like, Okay, somebody had thought 10 steps ahead to figure out how they can get a guy like DeJoy in charge of the post office.
Now, it probably is coincidental that because of the COVID hitting, although they appointed him after COVID, oh, this is great, another level of helpfulness from him because he'll be able to shut down, you know, mail and make it tougher to get ballots out.
But, you know what I mean, there's an order of magnitude here of like just thoughtfulness that someone needed to sit down and think about ahead of time.
And that makes me nervous because it's not Trump.
It's not like Meadows.
I don't know who it is.
But I am just, that makes me really concerned because that's the guy who they need to find some dirt and turn him in.
And that would be like, Deep Throat would somehow turn him in eventually when they realize, you know what I mean, who it is.
And I can't figure that out.
Here's the sad truth of it, and this is where we are.
And by the way, we have a really good conversation coming up with Jeff Charlotte, obviously the author of The Family and a really, really incredible, important writer and thinker.
The problem is the economic incentive.
You know what I mean?
It's the economic incentive.
And by the way, Deep Throat had an economic incentive.
That's one of the reasons why Watergate got brought to the forefront.
Yeah, he was a whistleblower, but it also had to do with the fact that, like, he'd been passed over for a promotion.
He had beef.
And so you need somebody within the Republican Party.
And so far, we've seen a couple, they did it for books.
You know, I mean, you know, you had like Jeff Flake, who like, you know, had his lame book come out and take his stand or whatever.
You know, Mitt Romney had a stand.
He didn't try and cash in on it.
Maybe he had a moment of conscience.
I don't know.
John Bolton, certainly.
Bob Woodward did it, you know, waited for his book to come out to take his stand.
We need somebody who has not just a political and a conscientious moment, but an economic incentive.
And unfortunately, that is few and far between.
All right, so we're going to move to this interview.
I was really, really lucky to talk to Jeff Charlotte, the author of The Family.
We had a really, really good conversation.
There are some minor technical audio issues in this, just a little bit.
We had to work around that, but I think the conversation definitely needed to get out there.
I think we talked about some really important stuff, so hang out for a second.
We're going to talk with Jeff Charlotte.
Hey everyone, we're really lucky today.
Somebody I really admire and whose work I think is absolutely necessary and influential.
We're here with Jeff Charlotte, who is an associate professor at Dartmouth and the best-selling author of The Family, The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, and most recently, This Brilliant Darkness, A Book of Strangers.
Jeff, thank you so much for being here.
Thanks, thanks for having me.
Finally got to speak after admiring your work for a long time as well.
Well, I really appreciate that.
And one of the things, just to jump into this thing, because we unfortunately got a lot, we were talking about a lot before we even got on tape.
So let's go ahead and jump into this thing with both feet.
I say that your work is influential and necessary, because I think that you have been on the tail of something for a while now that I think most Americans are only starting to sort of understand.
And that is the confluence of faith, mythology, power and wealth and how all of those things sort of interact with one another.
And it feels like in America, a lot of people have been under the misconception or the fantasy or the spell that religion is just religion.
It's just a lot of people believing in a lot of things and, you know, it's in good faith or whatever.
But I was hoping you could talk a little bit about how you view religion and power and wealth and sort of the intersection of those things in the American experience.
Yeah, I know.
I think that that's a really good point.
And, you know, I come to it as a journalist, but having been very fortunate to have worked with a lot of religious studies scholars over the years.
And so just sort of cluing me into some really sort of simple premises within that scholarly field that I think we need to understand, you know, for the sake of our survival, religion is not just a matter of belief, but we'll pay attention.
It's a matter of practice, right?
Um, it's what people do.
They may not believe it.
It's no less religion.
So I was just talking to a friend about, you know, the state of things, uh, and, and they were asking, you know, is this, you know, is it what Trump and Pence are doing?
Would you say it's religion or politics?
Is it, is it religion masquerading as, you know, or is it politics masquerading as religion or is it religion masquerading?
And the answer is yes.
Is it religion or politics?
The answer is almost always yes.
Especially given, you know, what you've been writing about, American exceptionalism, right?
American exceptionalism is a mythological idea.
It's a religiously infused idea.
And since it shapes all of our politics, we have no politics absent religion.
So we have the First Amendment, we can separate church and state or attempt to.
But in understanding what actually happens, we always have to be sort of looking at these things in conjunction.
And when we don't, it makes no sense.
And we're prone to looking at those with whom we disagree, or those who are actually threatening our lives as well, they're just crazy.
And if they're just crazy, they're just wrong.
And then there's this little neurological ticket, they're just wrong.
Well, then That's simple, that's obvious.
Yeah, but how come they're winning, right?
Because they do have mythological religious power behind them.
Well, and I love the way you put that because, like, at its heart, politics is supposed to be where we come together in the public sphere, we look at facts, and then we decide what we're going to do with them.
It's actually, politics at its heart is actually very sort of a boring idea, right?
It's just sort of like civic duty.
You come in, you have a conversation, and then you go about your lives.
But that's not how American politics, or any politics really works.
It's about who controls mythology, right?
And who controls the storytelling.
And if you actually look at the past few decades of American history, and really the entirety of it, It's who controls that story of the mythology, right?
The civic religion of what the universe tells us and what America's place is in it.
How would you define the last few decades?
What is the dominant story?
How would you say that this mythology has been used for political and for the purposes of power?
I mean, The story this long interests me, the way I got into this, thinking about religion and politics together, was questioning that idea, and this is sort of a conventional political journalist wisdom, and even for some historians, Is the idea that the religious right is something that emerged, you know, 1976 or 1972 or 1980, you know, you can pick Roe v. Wade or you can pick Jimmy Carter, whatever and so on.
And, and so I always looked at that and I said, but wait a minute, what about that whole thing?
Way, way, way back a city on a hill.
So.
That idea has been there a long time.
And that led me to, you know, this group that I've written a lot about called the family.
Um, and I'm like, give a plug because if you're interested in knowing more about it, you don't have to buy my books.
You can just, you're probably already paying for Netflix and you can see our documentary about it called the family.
Um, and, uh, um, which went back to 1935.
Oh, she got me thinking, wait, there's a religious right.
And when it began with his real project was combating American labor.
Right.
So for a long time, there's a religious right is very effective.
at fighting organized labor.
It's not visible to us because we don't understand that as a social issue.
Well, religion speaks to things like abortion and so on.
What does it have to do with, you know, collective bargaining?
Well, as it turns out for these believers, everything.
And they're successful.
And in fact, when we ask ourselves, you want to ask yourself, why don't you have universal health care?
Well, you got to start talking about why alone among developed nations in the world, We don't have a very strong or much of a really much of an organized labor movement at all.
How did that happen?
That didn't just sort of, you know, just sort of float along.
There was a concerted effort to break a spine.
And they did.
And we're all paying that price.
So that part of the story is the idea that religious religion is a personal moral thing that plays very well to those for whom it's a totalizing world view right so they're free to muck around in economics and foreign policy and so on and no one is really paying attention or contending with them and saying okay Contending with them, by the way, both from a secular perspective or from a religious perspective.
There's a small religious left that says, no, that's right, economics is a religious issue.
And so it starts with, let's support organized labor.
Let's support people working for one another.
I think that has been the sort of the big untold story.
I'm not a pundit.
So, you know, I never, I did make and I got right as I ended my 2010 book, Sea Street, And I said, okay, so these guys who I'd written about, you know, would fall into scandal.
They're not going to be in the White House as representatives of this group called The Family in 2016, but perhaps it'll be a little-known Indiana congressman named Mike Pence.
I got pretty close, right?
Mike Pence, we all know as this religious conservative, you know, Mike and Mother Pence, as he calls his wife and so on.
But he's also a Koch brothers guy, right?
Those are not split parts of his identity.
Those are one in the same.
It's a free market kind of fundamentalism for him.
And even in this time of Trumpian populism, we're listening to the Trumpian rhetoric of populism, even while he pursues a radically deregulated market, which is the same old free market fundamentalist dream, which has been shaping American life for nearly a century now.
And it's a really amazing thing, too, right?
Which is when you are in these realms and these spheres, when you have religion supposedly on your side, whatever your opinion is, the opposite of that suddenly becomes supernaturally evil, right?
Like, I mean, there's a reason why labor unions were looped in with the Soviet Union, the evil empire, and all of this stuff.
This idea of collective bargaining or solidarity somehow or another becomes Evil, or the manifestation of some sort of supernatural incarnate, you know, of evil.
And I think there's something interesting to be said there about that sort of a la carte sort of European, suddenly becomes God's opinion, suddenly becomes the will of the universe, where all of a sudden we reach into this modern moment.
And I think you and I are frustrated in similar ways about people who continually say, how do evangelicals stand behind Trump?
He doesn't stand for what they say they believe, and I can't believe they haven't left, which is Yeah.
I don't know, I've gotten a few gray hairs listening to these continued questions.
I've thought you're reporting lately, particularly for Vanity Fair, your article of the Second Coming, of course, when you went into Trump rallies, which we're both veterans of, talking to them not just about their politics, but the idea that Trump is some sort of God sent savior or for some even a messiah. but the idea that Trump is some sort of God Can you talk a little bit about how that manifests and how the politics has created a situation where someone like Donald Trump can be seen through that lens?
Yeah.
I, you know, and I think something that drives us both crazy in some ways is having is, is this a sort of this idea, how can they stand, you know, with Trump and so on?
It is this assumption that somehow evangelicals are dumber than everybody else.
They can stand with Donald Trump because they're on the one hand, you know, there's the cynical view, which is not cynical.
It's called politics.
This is what you do in the public square.
You make coalitions.
Well, this guy's really achieving a lot of what we want to achieve.
We don't like everything he does, but we are in a coalition.
And sometimes it creates the Trump evangelical block.
But there's also that That element that goes back and I think to the idea that you're forgetting if you believe God is all powerful, right?
Then this God can use who he wants.
And if we go to scripture, we see God using all sorts of figures.
So many divine agents.
So many divine agents.
So we know that in fact, for instance, for many evangelicals, a comparison for Trump is this biblical King Cyrus.
who, you know, sets the Hebrews free.
He's not a believer.
God uses him, right?
Or there's folks who are in the fold, King David.
And if you're not really too well-versed, like, well, King David, you know, King David's great.
He killed Goliath.
Things got muddy after that.
After King David, he's not a nice man.
I have to tell you, I didn't know about Constantine, who, of course, is the one who, you know, gives the Christians the keys to the Roman Empire.
And immediately after he converts, he kills his wife and his son.
And every Christian historian is just like, eh, we don't talk about that.
No, it's fine.
Don't worry about that.
Because, because look, right?
Well, sure, he did bad things.
That's not the part we're interested in is the way Constantine did that.
God used Constantine to do the good parts, right?
God uses Trump to do the good parts.
And when Trump, you know, calls a country a shithole or something like that, or has sex with a porn star, that's Trump.
The stuff we like is God.
It's an easy skip, jump, and a hop from there to, wait a minute, he's not just used by God, why did God chose him?
He must be pretty special, just the way we do with King David, right?
Um, he must be pretty special.
And that transformation is really fascinating because when Trump, remember, said, uh, you know, I'm the chosen one.
And again, a lot of people got upset.
It says he's declaring himself God.
I thought that was a tone deafness to the way in which Trump, you know, he wasn't, he was joking.
He said he was just joking.
He was on the other hand, jokes are pretty powerful and he knows that, right?
I'm going to introduce it as a joke.
And then maybe I'm not joking.
No, no, I'm just joking.
No, I'm not joking.
And then it becomes it becomes sort of solid.
And I'll say, you know, even in the time since that Vanity Fair article, which I was reporting last fall and published in spring.
And of course, QAnon played a big part of it.
Even then, I don't think I understood how rapidly QAnon was growing and that convergence of this sort of For lack of a better word, populist fundamentalism with the elite fundamentalism of the political organizations and so on.
Yeah, you know, I was trying to tell people a while back with QAnon, because like you, I, you know, I sort of had that sort of a niggling fascination with it.
You know, it was like so bizarre and such a weird esoteric thing that I was just like, you know, you get curious and you want to dive in.
You want to be like, they really believe JFK Jr.
faked his death.
OK, well, let's let's figure this out.
And eventually I started realizing when I was talking to people is that people were very quick to dismiss it, right?
And they were just like, oh, that's nonsense.
Nobody would possibly believe that.
And what we've now seen is not only the infiltration of the Republican Party, and I truly believe that eventually the Republican Party will just embrace this in totality.
You know, there'll be things that, like you said, they pick and they choose what they believe or what they'll accept and becomes orthodoxy.
They might even denounce QAnon even as they say, well, we don't QAnon, that's a bad movement.
But of course, X, Y, and Z are.
Oh, of course there's a deep state.
And of course there are these conspiracies.
And the thing that I have watched in utter horror, but also fascination, is how QAnon has slowly merged with the evangelical movement.
Because they share the same reality, which is this political fantasy that not only are they engaged in a spiritual war, But then each of them is a soldier figure.
Fighting that spiritual war.
And so they're not actually powerless, right?
They are most powerful.
They can be divine agents of God and they can be parts of that.
Can you talk a little bit about how that factors into something like Trumpism and how you see that sort of manifesting that relationship between the different fantasies and myths?
Yeah, well, I mean, I think that also goes to a really basic secular misunderstanding of Christianity, and to put any religion of peace and, you know, Jesus supposed to be like a lamb, except when he's not, except when he says, I come not to bring but the sword, you know, except when he, you know, promises to explode the tongues of the unbelievers upon his return.
And this is not to say, Oh, no, you thought Jesus was nice.
And now he's bad.
It's to say that, again, any religious belief Jesus contains The complexity of everything that you feel is within that character, that persona, or that God, if you so believe that, right?
And what people have been tone-deaf to is the ways in which people have been talking about Trump.
It's like, okay, it's time for a warrior.
There was this best-selling book in 2016 called God's Chaos Candidate by one of Trump's early evangelical advisors.
This D-lister named Lance Wallnau, who sort of rode his connection up into, you know, a lot of those folks.
Paula White.
Paula White was not part of the Christian right leadership.
Now she is, you know?
Now she's also his director of faith-based... She's a special lady.
Yes, she is.
This is a nice way of saying a crook.
An absolute wild-eyed crook.
That's the only way to put it.
That's exactly right.
But, you know, and a lot of these crooks and hustlers were able to pivot more quickly to the idea, this idea of Trump as a chaos candidate, or as Lance Wallnau would put it, he says, he's a wrecking ball.
Trump is not here.
It is not a time for unity and peace.
It's a time to smash.
It's a time to go to war.
It's a time to build the kingdom of heaven on earth.
But of course, we know from scripture, Well, that's actually a big metaphor and so on, but let's shift that aside.
So all that comes into play now, both in the embrace of Trumpism, but also, as you say, in the embrace of your own identity.
How can you be a Christian and threaten to shoot protesters at the same time?
To which that person says, how can I not?
This is what I'm called on to do.
We are in a time of spiritual war made real.
Yeah, every day.
And, which is why it's just a fucking terrible moment.
I actually think, I think, I don't know, I'm curious what you think.
I mean, I really, as much, I think it's darker and scarier than even the sort of typical sort of liberal I completely agree.
And it's one of those things that it's really hard to explain to people who don't have a background in it.
You know, who haven't studied it, or they didn't grow up in it, or what these things are.
I mean, you know, I was raised in an evangelical cult.
And from the very beginning, it was about war.
It was always about war.
It was about being prepared for war, being radicalized for war.
And I think people I think the American mythology of what Christianity is and what it means to America and what American exceptionalism is has created this false view of the orthodoxy of Christianity.
It's a loving religion.
People get together on Sundays and they have a potluck dinner or whatever.
But when you actually look at how it's applied, People who are looking for power and domination.
And by the way, some are crooks and some literally want the end of the world.
Some of them literally want a theocratic society.
Like, that's not an exaggeration.
Many are, and some are both.
And I think that's the, we're always tempted into is this person sincere?
Or do they really believe?
You know, are they really believe this is that conversation?
You know, Islam is a religion of peace.
And then the Islamophobes saying, No, it's a religion of war.
And, you know, the answer there is, yes, it's a religion, right?
So it's going if it's big, and these are big religions, it's going to anything you can imagine doing is going to be there reflected in that religion.
And so I actually find I don't like it when lefties say, that's not true Christianity.
It's one of them.
It's one of them.
And we don't want to get on those terms.
That's meeting them on, because the right wingers are saying to everybody else, unless you are in for Trump, it's not true Christianity.
That's not the fight we want to be in.
I think it's a cultural bias because what you just said is exactly right.
Like, and of course we're speaking today on the unfortunate anniversary of September 11th.
And so as an American culture, We of course have this view of Islam that is fraught with all kinds of different perspectives on it and certain amounts of fear-mongering with it and vilification of it.
But people, I think, are really hesitant, particularly because of the history of America and the mythology of it, to understand that This is an aspect of Christianity as well.
It's the other side of the coin.
We go completely out of our way not to connect the dots and understand that white supremacy, white terrorism, and Christianity, and radicalization is just the other side of that fundamentalist coin.
And I think that that cultural bias or cultural blindness, I think, has led us not only to this point, but I think makes it a real possibility that really terrible things could follow.
I mean, the game board is set for it.
And that's the really, truly frightening part of it, I think.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's not the other side of that coin.
We minted that coin.
That's right.
That's right.
We put that out.
It's a commemorative coin.
Well, you know, of course, you know, we use fundamentalism in this colloquial way.
It is a Christian term, it was created, you know, it was coined with the fundamentals, this pamphlet, which was seeking to take, and it was always interesting to me, because I think so many secular people see fundamentalism as an anti-modern reaction.
And in fact, fundamentalism begins from this idea of like, wait a minute, there's all these principles of science They must apply to scripture too.
So like when we see laying on of hands, right?
If electricity flows, the spirit must flow.
It must work the same way.
I can have a lightning rod.
I can call the spirit down, right?
If only it was an anti-modern reaction, then that game board might not be set because it might be people backing away from the game board.
But these are folks who understand themselves as contending not just for religion, but they don't see themselves as anti-science.
They see themselves as contending for a kind of a truer science.
I mean, the question, right, is the game board set or is it?
I think of this like, I don't know if you when you do interviews, I mean, when you when you are interviewed about your work and you probably experience as people say, you know, do you think there will be violence?
And I'm like, what do you mean by will?
Right.
I don't know.
Last I checked, we were at 60 car attacks on protesters since May.
That was a month and a half ago, so whatever it is now.
We are in a low simmer civil war.
Kyle Rittenhouse's lawyer, you probably saw this, declared his killings as the first shot.
And, you know, the only thing more terrifying than that, and I realize that wasn't the first.
This is ongoing and escalating.
I don't think I don't think we can't, I don't think it's, I don't think we're doomed to this.
I don't think it's inevitable.
And I think that's a kind of nihilism.
I do think we have to engage with this political imagination that goes beyond, um, you're marching in the streets with guns.
Cool.
We'll march in the streets with guns.
Which is also so, it just drives me, I feel the same way.
If you study the right, so fundamentally, the right knows it's naive.
Anyone who thinks about, wait a minute, state power.
No, it's naive.
You know, your John Brown gun club, which is lefty gun club, is not going to fight the Marines.
It's just not.
It's not going to fight a small city police force.
And we don't want it to.
Our imagination should be bigger than violence.
We don't imagine meeting their violence with other violence.
Well, we have to with self-defense.
No, no.
Self-defense is getting out of violence.
I don't know.
I feel a little preachy now, but... I know.
I think you're dead on because it's... The lack of imagination, I think, is one of the biggest plagues in this country.
Like, we can't imagine a country where we're not in a position of austerity because we're throwing all of our money at imagined threats around the world, right?
Or, you know, we can't imagine some sort of apocalyptic-like showdown with Donald Trump because that language and fantasy has defined American reality for generations.
And I feel like the conversation we're having, and I assume our listeners, because they obviously think about this stuff and we talk about this stuff all the time, our listeners understand that this is an imagined reality, an imagined artificial situation.
But I think a lot of Americans, unfortunately, think that this artificial situation is just simple reality, but it's this fantasy that has been constructed and has been given to us in the pursuit of power.
And I think that's a really hard thing for people to understand sometimes, because I think from what you were saying earlier, it's like, you know, whether they've been duped and what it means to be duped, what it means to have been misled by your leaders and the people that you have built your personalities and identities around.
I mean, Trump supporters are all in on Trump.
They are defined as Trump supporters.
There's a reason why everything they have is Trump and that they constantly wear MAGA hats and all this stuff.
Like, they have chosen their group of people, they identify themselves as a Trump person.
It's really hard to wake up one day and realize not only have you been misled, but you've been dangerously misled.
And by the way, that is a religious aspect.
That's the very essence of religions and cults.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you've been to Trump rallies too, so you know I think that sometimes it's hard for people to understand.
It's an ecstatic experience for those who are in it.
And they say they're just sitting there hating everybody.
They're also dancing, having fun, doing some hating.
What they're doing actually is having a pretty broad range of emotions together, right?
I mean, that's what you can do in this sort of scriptural religious sense.
And then they're turning around to the rest of us and saying, you want to fight, right?
And so many people are saying like, nah, I'll stand for freedom.
I won't back down.
The imagination thing is like, no, I'm going to, I'm actually not going to, you want to have a fist fight?
No.
Think of what, I just sort of want everyone to sort of start with it.
What would you do if someone came up to you and said you want to fist fight?
Most of us were saying like, I would walk away because that's stupid.
Um, And in that walking away is a momentary sense of powerlessness.
And that's what I think is so frightening about, even if we recognize, look, this nightmare is not our nightmare, but we're in it, is to say, okay, I'm not gonna wrestle for control of this nightmare, because I can't get it.
I can't get it.
I'm gonna walk away from it.
And that means there's gonna be a moment where I don't know, what can I do to build something else?
Anything else is to enter into the religion of Trumpism.
And, you know, we're talking about Christianity, but I almost think we yet to see how big a world force Trumpism will be.
But when you see things like in Germany now, German right wing protesters holding up pictures of Trump, you start to see an idea that's transcending Trump, whether Trump comes or goes or whatever and so on.
Well, and I, you know, what you just said about the Trump rallies, there may get churches.
That's the name that we can like Constantine, right?
And how do you imagine yourself out of that instead of contending within it?
Well, and I, you know, what you just said about the Trump rallies, there may get churches.
You go into a building, you have a man on stage who is a charismatic preacher who is telling you we are in a battle and it is going to end in the destruction of our enemy who is evil and supernatural.
And don't worry, we're going to do it.
And you have to be ready to fight and you have to be ready to do this.
And then you leave and it's a renewal of faith.
And you're exactly right.
We're in a Trumpian age, which people don't want to admit.
Like, you know, if you are a critic of Trump, you understand that he is completely in over his head.
He is.
complete oaf.
There's a black hole of personhood there, a shrieking nothingness, if you will.
But the people who see him, they really do believe that this is the personification of something larger than himself, which I think is a really hard thing to communicate to people who don't live in that community.
They don't necessarily have the vocabulary or the view of what faith is or what faith can do, I think.
Are you familiar with a book called The Book of Falwell by an anthropologist named Susan Friend Harding?
Yeah, absolutely.
I love that book because, you know, she goes down and starts spending time in, not Jerry Falwell Jr., but Jerry Falwell Sr.' 's church.
And she's like, what's going on?
And, you know, he tells stories week after week and they contradict themselves.
And she slowly comes to realize that people understand that he's lying sometimes.
And so we say, well, then why don't they just say, you, sir, are lying and walk out.
She understands, wait a minute, that actually opens this kind of interactive door in which they are not entirely dependent on him.
He is the facilitator, right?
But it takes whatever the 10 or 20,000 other people, or the half of 40 million people, or more, whatever it is, to collectively create that.
And You know, it's the ways in which terms like creativity, right?
Creativity has come to have such a positive connotation to us that I think those of us in liberals and left and so on think it belongs to us.
We think it has a positive term.
You know, it's like the right-winger saying, I think the answer is a gun.
You know, guns don't kill people.
People do.
Guns are neutral.
Same with creativity, right?
A Trump rally is a great creative expression.
I mean, great as in big.
Calling it creative does not mean I'm being positive about it any more than I always get into arguments about this.
I think Trump is a brilliant orator.
That guy can't even string a sentence together.
You've seen him work a crowd.
It's actually kind of hard to understand not live in person because it is so back and forth.
He's like an improv comedian.
Sometimes his timing is off.
But when he gets it, and he can get a crowd laughing at a line they've heard, that kind of collaboration, all the words we think of as good words, are happening there.
When we can recognize that, all right, we can't dismiss it as stupid, we can dismiss it as wicked, hateful, bigoted, all those things.
But that is going to require a creative collaboration on our own.
I mean, I just keep hitting that drumbeat because I'm scared.
Well, I am too, and I have to tell you, you know, not to blow smoke here, but I think you're doing absolute necessary work, and like a lot of our listeners, I am just very grateful for that fact.
We've been talking with Jeff Charlotte, who is an associate professor at Dartmouth and the best-selling author of The Family, The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, and most recently, This Brilliant Darkness, A Book of Strangers.
Jeff, where can the people find you?
I guess I'm on Twitter.
I guess we're all on Twitter.
I guess we're all on Twitter and you can find me in the Merc.
We're all there in the dark together and trying to publish actually lately.
I've got another piece coming out.
I've been doing these short dispatches.
I'm trying to Trying to read the language of Trumpism.
Just published a piece actually on Trump flags.
I'm so fascinated by the fact that we've got, you know, instead of the yard signs, we've got flags, which is a sign of, we live in a proliferation of flags.
We've got another piece coming out too, just sort of what we're talking about today.
And I'm sure I'll be reading your book very soon and talking about that too.
So this conversation is going to continue, I think.
Well, thank you so much, Jeff.
All right.
Thank you, Jared.
All right, everybody.
That was Jeff Charlotte, author of The Family.
I hope you enjoyed that conversation.
Audio technical difficulties aside, I think he's a really important guy.
And I think he's one of the few who has actually called this what it is, that what we're talking about, the confluence of power between religion, power and economics and greed.
And I think this is something we need to keep our eye on.
I cannot believe this Caputo bullshit.
I'm sorry.
Like, I'm still... Nick, I just... It's one of those things.
It's just... It never stops.
Oh, I know.
You know what I mean?
It's gonna be... Next week we'll be talking about something worse, so don't worry about it.
Isn't that terrible?
Isn't that just awful?
Well, in the meantime, before next week, for our Patreon subscribers, we're going to have a live chat this week, Wednesday at 8 p.m.
Eastern.
You can come hang out with us, ask questions.
We're going to send out a call for questions and topics that you'd like us to talk about.
If you want to join, you can go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Five dollars a month, you'll get access to all this stuff and a little bit more, other perks, all that good stuff.
In the meantime, you can find Nick over at Can You Hear Me?
