GOP and Twisted History / Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez
Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman get annoyed by Rand Paul's awful historical take in the New York Times but find a window into Right-Wing antidemocratic mindsets. Then, Jared welcomes Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted A Faith and Fractured A Nation author Kristin Kobes Du Mez back on the show to catch up on radicalization in the white evangelical community and where things are now.
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We have heard people, what they want, who they have wanted, who they want back on the podcast and back by popular demand on this episode.
is Kristen Kobes-Dumé, the author of Jesus and John Wayne, How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
We had a hell of a conversation earlier, so we're going to get to that in a little bit.
Before we do anything, though, I just want to do a little bit of house cleaning.
We're taking next week off!
I'm going on vacation.
I'm taking a vow of silence.
I'm not gonna tweet.
I'm not gonna do interviews.
I'm not gonna do podcasts.
I'm gonna chill out, Nick.
I'm picturing you having to be like tied down and gagged in order for you not to do that.
Well, what's gonna happen, and knock on wood that this isn't true, there's gonna be some major national catastrophe on Tuesday.
Yeah.
How about that?
How about that?
Tuesday of next week, and at that point, I'm gonna have to be strapped to a gurney.
Yeah, right.
I'm picturing, like, traction somehow on your back.
Yeah, that's gonna be the end of that, undoubtedly.
So we are gonna take a week off.
We hope that you don't miss us too much.
We would also be remiss if we didn't also say congratulations to Reality Winner, who is out in the world after being confined for way, way, way too long.
You know, it's so weird because I was just talking about her, maybe even with you, maybe off mic last week or two weeks ago.
But yeah, it seems to me that, yeah, whistleblowers, you know, the argument for her was that she didn't go through the proper whistleblowing channels.
But that said, when you saw what happened to someone who did, like Venman, You can understand why she would not have wanted to and the writing was on the wall that it was not going to be that would not go well for her in the sense that like she would have tried to do something and they would have covered it up, which was letting people know that Russia was interfering with the election.
Let's be real about this thing.
Basically, anybody who whistleblows at this point in the entire process is kind of putting their life on the line.
And, you know, their freedom, their liberty, their personal safety.
What she did was heroic and right.
And, you know, we have reached a point of odiousness where it's just completely wrong.
And anybody, by the way, who works at the NSA should be leaking things left and right.
I mean, that entire structure has been built up to infringe on the rights of the people.
So, yeah, I never I never lost a lot of sleep worrying about the moral or ethical implications in.
In this whistleblowing endeavor, but she was locked up for way too long.
This, of course, was due to good behavior.
It wasn't the government deciding that she should be free, which I think is a black mark against our government.
But I hope she gets a measure of freedom and satisfaction that she did the right thing.
I agree.
And I think that there are people, there's a movement out there that will, you know, intend to honor her for what she did.
So, uh, hopefully she'll be able to speak at some point and we'll get more information and just more of her side of the story too.
It's because I'm sure that it'll be illuminating as to, you know, the reasoning and rationale for everything.
Or if she wants to take a vow of silence and go hang out by the ocean for a little while, I think she has deserved it.
That's right.
And maybe if she's doing it alongside you, you'll get an exclusive.
Hey, you have to be really careful when you say that.
The last time anybody else just started throwing shit around, they thought I was running around the country with a Russian lawyer trying to get Donald Trump Jr.
arrested.
Oh, wow.
That led to some weird times.
Well, how is that screenplay going?
Because that should be on the screen right now.
My goodness.
Well, so the business of the moment, Nick, to pull back the curtain a little bit, and we like to do that from time to time, you came across an article today, and you are our local cosmonaut.
You like to go into the deep, dark expanses of right-wing madness and conspiracy theories and confusion.
I could tell you, you DMed me this for one of our possible topics for the show.
I could tell that you were delighted and raptured, illuminated.
And, and it comes from like a little two paragraph section from an article, uh, that came out today in the New York times.
Uh, and, and, and I think this is important, not just for the right wing mindset, but to understand the right wing alternate reality that they live within.
And, and on top of that, it's, it's, it's bad shit, crazy and stupid.
Well, here's the thing.
I kind of wanted to rejoice because for a brief instant, I feel like I finally understand Rand Paul.
It's a horrible place to be in when you understand what Rand Paul is because it really makes him terrible.
But I'll give the quote so we don't have to, you know, leave anybody on pins and needles for any longer.
Well, real fast, when we talk about Rand Paul, can we just say really, really quickly, in the power rankings of right-wing politicians and just really, really gross individuals, Rand Paul's up there at the top.
And for me, I don't know how you feel about it.
It's this...
Ugliness about him that like he is obviously so self-assured about how he feels he holds himself as an intellectual and a principled person While meanwhile just being this really repellent member of this growing fascistic movement Rand Paul is just to me is really gross.
I don't I don't know how you feel about it Well, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree perhaps.
I mean, here's the thing about Ron Paul I actually liked some of the libertarian ideas he'd have he had when he was running for president but But he was basically responsible for the Tea Party, right?
I think he's the ideological grandfather of the Tea Party.
Well, he's certainly part of it.
And he was more or less, and by the way, he gave them part of their ideology, which is, well, we probably shouldn't have made people desegregate, right?
And then, of course, Ron Paul has used that mindset, and this is the natural conclusion of it all.
He's probably on TV right now trying to bilk senior citizens into spending their social security on silver by telling them they're in danger.
So, like, go ahead and give my friends a bunch of money and we'll buy you some silver.
Well, you know, we can keep filing this under, you know, we don't want certain people to vote.
Like, this is sort of what we've heard from the Republicans.
So what we have to do here as far as understanding what's going on here is when I read this quote to you, and we'll get to handle on exactly how they feel, it's really more about, you know, I know what it is.
We're forcing them to a different kind of government, right?
We're forcing them to being into some sort of a fascistic government, right?
We saw Tucker Carlson accuse us, right?
The Democrats are going to make us be fascistic.
And this is sort of what this goes for.
And this is what it stands for.
So Rand Paul said, quote, the idea of democracy and majority rule really is what goes against our history and what the country stands for.
By the way, by the way, he's not wrong there.
That is accurate that the founding of the country was based on anti-democratic activity and institutions that were supposed to have aristocratic wealthy white men running everything.
That is accurate.
He didn't mean for it to be accurate in that means.
Right.
But he is right.
Yes.
He is.
So living in Kentucky and growing up there I suppose this is what the worldview and it shapes how you are.
That is the actual worldview of the right.
Yes.
And so here's the thing.
We've been kind of wondering when the right will just come out and say we don't want democracy.
Just like own that and we can then – maybe then we can kind of come to some agreement.
I don't know.
But the next part of the quote though becomes the idiocy.
Oh, I know what's coming and I'm already mad.
Here it is.
Quote, the Jim Crow laws came out of democracy.
That's what you get when a majority ignores the rights of others.
And remember, this is all in defense of keeping the filibuster in place as well, right?
Because he doesn't want the majority to be able to control, you know, what they were elected to do, which is, you know, pass laws, which the Senate has no desire to do at all.
Anyway, the Republican Senate doesn't want to.
Oh, Nick.
The first time I saw this, I reacted exactly like this.
The second time I read it, I felt like this.
Now I'm on like the third or fourth time and I'm still so angered by this.
Red-faced.
I would call you red-faced.
It's very, it's so fucking stupid.
Like it's so fucking stupid.
And, and, and, and there are so many different reasons why it's fucking stupid to sit there and pretend like democracy is what gave us Jim Crow.
Like let's go ahead and take this on the surface level.
He's literally telling people in no uncertain terms, you should not trust people to make decisions.
They make terrible decisions.
You should leave it to assholes like me and my dad to make decisions and we'll figure it out for you.
We know what's best.
Shut up and take it.
But then there's the historical facet to it, Nick.
And the historical facet is like a special level of stupid.
And I want to go ahead and get people up to date on this very, very quickly.
Let's do a crash course in history because this is the kind of shit that we weren't necessarily taught in schools, and this is exactly what the Republican Party doesn't want you to get taught in school, which is this.
After the Civil War, there was a period of time called Reconstruction.
And in that reconstruction period, they were trying to make it so that the freed slaves could have equal rights and representation.
And let me give you a quick little crash course on how that worked out for freed slaves.
Really well at first, They were really good at politics and organizing, and they took over so many of the legislatures and institutions of power.
Also, it's important to note that there were more of them than there were a lot of other people, and they did a fine job on their own when they were trusted with government and with power.
What ended up happening was that people like Rand Paul, who believed that those people shouldn't be trusted with power, then put on a bunch of robes and got a bunch of torches.
And they started running around and attacking people and killing them and lynching and then going after the Republicans, who, by the way, at the time, spoiler, were on the right side of history until they changed later on in the 50s and 60s.
They went around and then they went ahead and they fixed the elections.
They disenfranchised the freed black citizens.
They took away the reconstruction.
And when that happened, the minority, those those asshole white supremacist white people in the southern states, they took over the institutions of power in an anti-democratic coup and then passed things like they took over the institutions of power in an anti-democratic coup and then passed things like Jim Crow in order Which, by the way, there's a direct line from that to the disenfranchising that's happening now.
He weaponized history, he doesn't understand it, and you're exactly right.
It is a glimpse into the right-wing idiocy.
Right.
Because, I mean, think about what he's trying to insinuate here.
He's trying to make it seem like, okay, if the majority ruled and was able to make laws, that we would get Jim Crow again, basically, right?
When it's the opposite of that, and, you know, I suppose he knows what he's doing.
He knows that this is, you know, Jim Crow and he can drop these words in there and get the right to sort of get all whipped up in a frenzy about this.
But the frenzy is really, I can just picture the antebellum South and these ladies saying, oh, you know, to their servants, right?
And after the world war, after a civil war, they were, you know, Still slaves, right?
They were still basically slaves as it was.
They certainly were treated that way.
I mean, we can see it in the movies of the 50s.
What was the help perhaps that was at the movie where, you know, there was still the same kind of treatment of black people, despite the fact that they were quote unquote free in that society down in the South, at least.
So this is what we're dealing with here.
It's out in the public.
It's the refreshing, you know, white supremacists.
They're not hiding it anymore.
I really hope that that's not a compelling argument to anybody else.
And it probably will be, I suppose.
But this is probably the other result of being so completely desperate to maintain power that that's what they have to do.
The architects of Jim Crow, if you read their own words, the entire point of Jim Crow was to reduce free black Americans to as close as a level of servitude to slavery as humanly possible.
It was slavery under a different name.
And by the way, which is what the Republican Party is interested in doing right now.
They want to have the veneer of freedom while not actually having any of the actual facets of freedom.
And I want to point out, and this is really important because this is part of the Republican mindset as well, What Rand Paul is saying here is human beings are fundamentally rotten.
They're fundamentally gross people and they will take away everything if you give them even an inch.
They should not be trusted with power.
They should not be trusted with anything.
That is the Republican mindset.
And you have to use systems of power.
You have to use oppression.
You have to use violence.
Any means whatsoever.
And if you go back and read like the Federalist Papers, That's the mindset of the founding of the country.
You can't trust these people.
And they're going to ruin absolutely everything.
His using Jim Crow...
And this is part of the problem with American education.
Jim Crow's in big, big lights.
Everyone knows what Jim Crow is, but education is not filled in the spaces around Jim Crow.
What actually was Jim Crow?
How did we get to Jim Crow?
Who did Jim Crow, right?
Like, what are all these spots?
And so you get to throw this around with basically brand recognition, and you never get into the actual heart of it, which is what the Republican Party wants.
They want to be able to carry out things like Jim Crow while saying they're fighting against Jim Crow, right?
They want to put Martin Luther King quotes before their disenfranchising efforts and before their attacks on education.
They want to go ahead and take the resistance and use it against those people.
And it is, um... Man, it's odious.
It really is disgusting what this is.
And you're right.
It's an incredible glimpse into that ideology and mindset and worldview.
Sure.
Now, we've also seen the complete and utter contempt for progress on the right.
And you'll hear Tucker Carlson say this a lot, where he's like, well, we just can't move too fast.
We're going to get to these places where these people want, but you have to take 20 or 30 years to get there.
This is what they're doing with the voting stuff, because they're like, well, you know, OK, we had a pandemic, so we had to have certain voting laws changed.
But by the way, now they're kind of accepting that.
Remember, they were trying to like have these when they realized they couldn't reverse the votes because some of these laws were changed.
And even though they were done legally, They're like, no, it wasn't legislatures.
It was the court's ruling.
Now they're like, well, those are okay because, you know, we had a pandemic and the pandemic's over.
So there's no need to be having drop boxes and early voting, right?
We have to go back and they have to progress.
Meanwhile, what we realized was this is an amazing moment in our history where we had more people actually participate because we made it more accessible to everybody.
This is like a watershed moment.
And instead of actually keeping that, yes, they want to roll all this back.
Are you?
I'm kind of curious, though, because are you old enough to remember Roots coming out on TV?
No, Roots was before my time.
But to hear like people talk about when this came out on TV and what a seminal moment it was like, it sounds like this was like a real cultural watershed.
Well, here's the reason I bring it up because someone was sharing on Twitter screenshots of what kids learn in school now about slavery in Louisiana in textbooks.
And they frame it as if it's like these poor plantation owners now have to deal with paying their slaves and the whole life has changed.
And it was like, how do you feel about that?
It's all from their perspective.
Okay, yeah.
Yeah, no, I just want to point out that where that comes from, just to go ahead and get everybody on the same page, is eventually when you have things like Jim Crow and you have like the minority gains control over the political institutions and the national conversation, all of a sudden, what do they do?
They create their own histories.
And that's where you get the lost cause.
That's where someone like a Woodrow Wilson starts creating these mythologies of, oh, Listen, those slaves, they had it really good.
It was a paternal relationship.
And you know, right now, the new project that I'm working on, oh my God, it's, they're doing this out of the charity of their heart, Nick.
They're just, they care so much about these quote-unquote savages, right, and these barbarians.
They have no idea what they're doing, and in their natural state they're in filth, and they're just, they have no civilization.
And we're doing our best.
That's what the Slave Master's ideology was.
We're doing our best here because they need us, right?
And so Woodrow Wilson pushes that mythology, and my god, it lasted!
The lost cause!
went on for decades and became like a big part of American culture until it started being dismantled.
Until people started learning actual history through things like whether or not it's entertainments or pop cultures, or this recent enthusiasm for actual history that they're trying to tamp down.
Right.
Now, I remember watching Roots – Now, it comes out when I was five or four.
So it must have been like a rerun of it later because I, you know, my parents were crazy.
They let me watch all sorts of inappropriate things for too young.
But even still, the weight of it, having gone through that even at an early age, I think the key reason was because, like you said, we had a completely varnished version of the Civil War and slavery once you got far enough away from it.
Right.
So let's just call it You know, it's the 1864 is when the Civil War ended.
So yeah, you're getting into, you know, 1950s.
This is probably that makes sense.
You know, people were not around as much anymore from that era and had direct knowledge of what it was like.
So they had a decade's worth of reprogramming.
So to come out and see and by the way, it wasn't probably it didn't go far enough.
Roots didn't, as far as really being able to experience the slave experience of what they went through.
But at least to see it on the screen and have that feeling of it was a complete and utter mind-blowing thing for the country.
What we have to do now is go back and study what the right's response to Roots was.
I can't believe it was good at all.
The South had to have been really upset about it because they're finally showing what really happened.
That has to be the very beginning of the thawing of this notion that, you know what, the history we're learning Isn't really what we're learning and now what we're seeing is that you know, this is the pushback It's you know, it's decades in the making but they're really now trying to push back and kind of rewrite it again Well, and you got to think about this.
So this is when we throw this term culture war around a lot, right?
We've technically been in a culture war since the 1960s.
And I'm talking like and if you want to go a little step back, I'm sure you could.
You could go back to Elvis Presley, of course, in the beginnings of, you know, white mainstreamed rock and roll.
Right.
Like, you can start looking at the idea that, and we all know these apocryphal stories.
It's gonna get into the kids' heads.
It's gonna turn them into rebels.
It's gonna ruin the family.
All this stuff.
And so, it's everything from censorship of movies.
Again, here in a little bit, you're gonna hear from Kristen Kobez-Dumé with Jesus and John Wayne.
John Wayne was a cowboy who was riding into the frontier and making sure to take care of those savages, right?
Like, because they were dangerous.
Meanwhile, the real history, and I brought this up on the on the Patreon episode, which by the way, if you're not on the Patreon, you gotta be on the Patreon.
Patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
We had a real, we called this critical race theory thing right before the shit went down.
Yeah.
We taped that episode last Thursday, and then it was, that was when Florida went after it and the whole thing blew up.
By the way, Nick, I, the past week, After I wrote about that has been hell.
I have had more harassment, more threats than anything outside of my coverage of like the alt-right and white supremacy and white terrorists.
It has been non-stop.
What does it look like in your experience?
Is it tweets?
Is it emails?
It's all over the place.
It's all over the place.
It's a constant stream of things.
But I do want to point out, like, in between being called a race traitor and, you know, like people being... The amazing thing, by the way, is when they'll send something and they're like, how dare you talk about white supremacy?
It's not real.
I'm a white supremacist.
And it's like incredible mindset.
They'll start talking about Anglo-Saxon culture and the white race.
And they're like, I'm not a racist, but I mean, it's awful.
But I do want to point out, It does feel, and we've said this a few times and it's always played out pretty predictably, it's like a machine got turned on.
Do you know what I mean?
And I talked to some other people who cover this stuff and it happened to them too.
So it's a concerted effort.
This whole patriotic history push, they're putting their chips in the middle of the table.
And just to give you an idea how this stuff works, we talked about this on Friday, When I was learning about Native Americans, it was like happy settlers and frontiersmen shaking hands with Native Americans, and basically there'd be paragraphs where it's like, they lived in peace until the Native Americans became too rowdy and they had to be taken care of.
Well, I was just looking the other day, reading Thomas Jefferson, I want to say in 1803, Nick.
In 1803, Nick, in 1803, he was saying to William Henry Harrison, the governor of Indiana, hey, just so you know, we're going to be friendly with the natives until we don't have to be.
And then we're going to push them beyond the Mississippi River.
In 1803.
They lied to them, exploited them, took advantage of them.
If we learn that, That changes our perception of history and reality, as opposed to John Wayne out on the frontier defending his family and defending the red, white, and blue.
That is propaganda.
That is a mythology that is chosen for a very specific reason.
And all these politicians that are, you know, denying or trying to talk or trying to tear down critical race theory, they would prefer that.
They would prefer this ideological aversion.
And we all know people who probably have shaped their entire lives based on like the picture of their family on the mantle.
Like that's what they have to create and that's only what it can be.
But, you know, because the argument obviously can then be you hate your country.
Why do you want to bring all that up again?
That's what you just want.
All you're doing is training kids to save their country.
When in reality what you're doing is when you learn what really happened, it helps you to expect better in the present.
Right?
Now, Sarah Kensier had a nice little thread about this the other day that I saved, and it sort of has that same sentiment where this is nothing to do about hating the country.
This is all about making the country better now, knowing where we came from.
And it just seems to be a better position to be in when you have more facts, more information, more context.
But it's interesting.
It's not only that they want to deny it.
It's a violent reaction, right?
That's what's interesting about this.
This is not necessarily like, it's not for me.
I don't want to deal with learning about slavery, what it was like, right?
That's not what they say.
It is a violent reaction where they're like, you need to die or you need to be strung up, like whatever they're saying, you know, all these things.
That's what's interesting about it.
What is your take on that?
Why does that have to get to be a violent reaction like that versus anything else?
There's so much going on with that.
So like, I'll just read you a quick little thing real fast.
Oh God, it's so gross.
Jared plays with himself while thinking about white school children being demonized and beaten because of critical race theory and indoctrination.
This country is going to break soon and don't think we're going to forget who is responsible.
And that's that's like one of the few I can read over the air Wow, you know, but wait and this country is going to break soon Yes, what what is the definition of that to them?
So the and by the way, this is part of it and I'll go ahead and answer your original question while I'm doing it like The people who are doing this are accelerationists.
They do believe that democracy is a problem, right?
And most of them are avowed fascists.
Most of them are like, no, we do need to crack some skulls and we need to limit the amount of people who can vote.
And we're probably heading towards a race war and I need to be on the right side of that race war, which is why they call you a race traitor if you're not in the same program, right?
And eventually they end up pushing what Danny Bresner is now calling, I need to get him on the podcast here soon, talk about this, like imperial realism, which is just where you're like, you're goddamn right.
The United States of America interferes with elections.
Nobody does it like us because we're strong.
You know what I mean?
Like it all of a sudden starts being this different sort of a mindset.
And the real problem here isn't just the fact that like, you're exactly right.
Like it is a violent reaction to it.
But let's also point out long term, this project, the American hegemony project, hyper capitalism, white supremacy, it doesn't work.
What it actually does is it does destroy the meritocracy.
We've seen it.
It destroys innovation because that's what diversity brings.
It brings new ideas, new concepts, new angles to do things.
If you go ahead and you cut down on all that stuff, you actually have a culture that stagnates.
You actually have a country that falls apart.
You have a culture that just doesn't work anymore.
It's self-destruction.
And they always throw around these ideas of cultural suicide, like they have to somehow or another protect themselves from extermination, and then they exterminate.
And if they're successful, It's not going to work anyway.
You know what I mean?
Because you're actually going ahead and you're destroying culture and society just by trying to, quote unquote, preserve it.
Sure.
Well, you know, but it's also it's not like, you know, anybody in Texas is going to be under fear of not having any electricity anymore.
Right.
Because innovation and capitalism, that's all working great, isn't it?
But that's the incoherence of it all.
Exactly.
This is another one.
And I wish that I would have predicted this.
I wish so badly because we're seeing now that ERCOT down in Texas is telling everybody, hey, just to let you all know, our system doesn't really work that well.
And so you and your family are probably going to die from heat exhaustion in the next month.
You know, and then be careful in the winter because you'll die of exposure then too.
And what happens is when these people dominate systems, they don't work.
They just don't work.
They destroy themselves.
And in what you just said earlier, I think is really important, which is, OK, if we don't know history, how do we understand how we've gotten to the point where we've gotten right?
It's like it's like if we were a village on the shores of like a river that flooded every now and then.
You would want to understand why the river flooded.
You would want to understand when the river flooded, instead of just constantly having the river flood, killing God knows how many people and ruining your encampment, and having people be like, we don't need to understand this.
Right?
Well, no, it's worse.
They'll be like, the river doesn't flood.
Right.
The river doesn't flood.
What are you saying?
The river floods.
What are you saying?
The river regularly floods.
That's exactly right.
Yes.
So meanwhile, yeah, and so we're right back at it with this notion of like independent grids and they're able to do unfettered capitalism without having regulations or enough regulations to control this.
Yeah, it's we need to understand this so that we can then progress and get better and for everybody.
And it's this point where we're not even getting the, they're not even like giving us the words at this point of like making it sound like that's what they're trying to do.
And that's where we get into the motion.
Yeah, there is going to be some sort of revolution here or something that when these two things really clash.
I don't know when that's going to happen, but it sounds like it might happen sooner than later at this point.
I mean, I'm you know, listen, the economy might crash and it looks like indications are that it's going to happen.
And that's you can kiss the midterms goodbye.
You could probably kiss 2024 goodbye for the White House.
I thought that's when you were going to offer silver.
I thought that's where you're going to give your.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
And if you mess with my silver.
Yeah.
I mean, listen, I don't know.
I don't know how we're going to deal with that.
But the only thing I can think about is if the economy is not doing really, really, really well in twenty twenty four, it won't matter.
Trump will win again.
Well, I want to say and to give people a heads up, this conversation, of course, with Kristen Kovacs, Dume is a serious thing about white nationalism and the dangers of Christianity and evangelicalism in all of that.
It's a serious conversation, but I will also tell you this.
She has hopeful notes.
She actually does.
And I'll go ahead and I'll give you another hopeful note because, again, the past few podcasts have been rough because things are fucking rough, right?
I'll give you hope here, which is, Nick, they wouldn't be doing this shit.
They wouldn't be so open about it and so blatant about it if they weren't in trouble.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, like they actually, there's a reason why they're reacting so violently to actual history is because it's the antidote.
Information and actual history and actual empirical knowledge is the antidote to this bullshit.
So I, it makes me feel like they have to take wilder and wilder chances.
That's something to take solace from.
Right.
Real, like racists with, presented with enough information might not be so racist anymore.
And that is really threatening.
Well, white supremacy holds them down.
That's the thing is they're engaging in a system of oppression and a system of inequality that actually hurts them.
The same people, Nick, who were talking about constructing Jim Crow the way that it was, were the same people who were like, we have to have a lower class of black people to keep poor people in line.
Poor white people.
To continue their continued oppression.
Because I have to tell you, the people in charge of the Confederate States of America and Jim Crow South, it was not the poor white people who were in charge of the South.
It was the aristocratic planting class.
It was the old money from the very beginning.
And how did they get a bunch of people to go along with it?
Religion, mythology, conspiracy theories.
It's the same fucking drive-in movie over and over again.
All right.
So on that note, we're going to head on over to a conversation that I had again with Kristen Kobes-Dumé, the author of Jesus and John Wayne, How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
We'll be right back.
All right, everybody, a really special treat.
It is a return of a former guest.
We heard the demand for the return.
Of Kristen Cobes-Dumé, and just a real brief idea, Dr. Dumé is a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University.
She holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame, and her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics.
She's written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News, Religion News Service, and Christianity Today, and has been interviewed on NPR, CBS, and the BBC, among other outlets.
Her most recent book is Jesus and John Wayne, How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
I assume you all have this on your bookshelves.
You should go ahead and buy the newly released paperback version, which gets into the developments over the past couple years, and that's one of the reasons I was so excited to bring Kristen back on the podcast.
Thank you so much.
Oh, thank you for having me.
I'm such a big fan, so thanks.
Kristen, we talked a while back.
I, you know, and the thing is, like, this has been the running theme of the podcast is it's like things that we've been yelling about for the past couple of years that some people have bought into and started to understand and other people are in denial of.
I just want to talk very into the specifics.
What was it like to write this book, of course, about the white evangelical movement and the descent into a political and societal crisis?
What was it like to have this book come out and then to watch this play out in the culture at large?
Yeah.
Um, I mean, first it was, uh, just researching the book.
I kept bumping up against, uh, you know, ideas that were unsettling to me, ideas that I grew up in, in, in and out of these spaces.
And I was really taken aback by, frankly, the authoritarian tendencies I kept coming across in, popular evangelical writing, writing about gender and especially authority, just how obsessed so many conservative evangelicals were about authority, you know, the chain of command, submitting to the proper authorities.
And as I was researching and as I was writing, I kept thinking, you know, this is really anti-democratic and I'm not quite sure what to do with this.
You know, you couldn't really use certain words like authoritarian or fascist or, you know, obviously like that, those just kind of shut down conversations.
But I kept bumping up against that.
And so, you know, we finished the manuscript and then there's a long wait, kind of waiting for while the book is in production and kind of wondering where it's going to land.
We had Trump's impeachment and then we had the coronavirus pandemic.
Uh, we had the, uh, killing of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter movement.
And then, and then this book landed, uh, in the summer of 2020.
And it ended up landing at just the right moment against all odds, because by that point in time, not only was the country kind of wrestling with white evangelical, uh, support for Trump, uh, four years worth, But also the response of so many white evangelicals to mask mandates, to public health measures, to Black Lives Matter.
It really had reached that moment.
And so the book landed and spoke to that moment, I think, incredibly well, distressingly well.
And the subsequent months continued to bear that out with the 2020 election, the contested election.
And then particularly the events of January 6.
And honestly, that was a horrifying day.
I mean, for many of us watching those events unfold, for me, it was it was this this familiar sense of this is surprising, but not shocking.
It's surprising to see this unfold, especially as a U.S.
historian.
Right.
This isn't supposed to happen.
This is this isn't supposed to go on.
Not in not in this country.
Right.
And yet at the same time, the rhetoric that I had immersed myself in for years to write this book that I knew stretched back decades.
Rhetoric that, you know, where the ends will justify the means, where violence is sometimes necessary to achieve order.
Those, that messaging just rang in my ears.
And then seeing the religious symbolism on that day at the Capitol, listening to the prayers offered, not just on the floor of the Senate, but the prayer offered by the Proud Boys on the way to the Capitol.
Well, you know, I find you very pleasant.
one of Braveheart with an image of William Wallace with Trump's head on it, you know, holding a bloody severed head.
All of that just, it struck rather close to home.
And so it was honestly just distressing.
Well, you know, I find you very pleasant.
I find you a wonderful human being, but you end up in my thoughts at the worst time.
I was, we would have done this interview earlier but I had to drive across the country to go to an event and And, you know, as the country reopens, there's a strangeness, obviously, in that, but like also sort of seeing what has happened to the country over the course of the pandemic and in like very outward ways.
I think for anybody who's used to driving through the heart of the country, watching Strange signs on the side of the road, proclamations about hell and traitors and demons.
What I started to see that you popped up in my head and I wanted to talk to you about was I started to see not just fascist iconography, and we're talking of course about Punisher skulls, we're talking about mercenary iconography, the fetishization of assault rifles and guns, but I've also started to notice an additional
thing that has been added which i was waiting for and again it's like you said it was um it was it was shocking but not surprising which is the adding of the religious iconography to the fascist iconography i'm starting to see a lot of uh those punisher skulls that have a christian cross in them you're starting to see a lot of talking about smiting of american infidels you're starting to see
Particularly in my surroundings, you're starting to see a combination of those flags with giant Christian crosses in the yards.
Can you talk a little bit about what is happening there and how these things start colliding and what is the mindset and what is the worldview that makes those types of things possible?
Yeah, you know, I think that as I was writing Jesus and John Wayne, I increasingly came to see that we're talking about a cultural identity here, right?
That we are not primarily talking about a theological rubric, a set of doctrinal beliefs.
Theology plays a role here, but it really is a set of cultural identity markers, and that's where we can see some of these bonds, you know, with With secular conservatives and with more radical extremes around masculinity, around militancy, around Christian nationalism.
And so what we see is the alliances are formed not through theological common ground, because many conservative or right-wing evangelicals find little in common with, say, progressive evangelicals, or with many black Protestants, for that matter, who could check all those evangelical theological boxes.
And so there's these This kind of set of cultural identities.
And so if you are, you know, a kind of pro-distinct gender roles, this kind of militant masculinity and pro-border wall and pro-military as described in a particular kind of way, then you're on our side.
And that's how we kind of see these alliances being formed.
There's a really interesting poll that was out a week or two ago from PRI.
I don't know if you caught that on QAnon.
And one question there particularly jumped out at me, and that was kind of under this QAnon umbrella to gauge kind of how widespread these beliefs were within QAnon and within the population.
There was a question about patriots needing to, you know, perhaps resort to violence to save America.
And 24% of white evangelicals agreed with that statement, which is concerning, right?
That's a massive number.
That's a massive number.
To me, equally, if not more concerning, is the majority of white evangelicals who were not deniers.
Because there's another category, which is doubters.
And doubters are those who are like, I don't think so.
But, right, not outright deniers that no, we're not resorting to violence to save our country, according to this, you know.
And that's where my attention really is right now.
You know, not with kind of the extreme, not with the people who are actually at the Capitol on January 6th.
It's this big middle swath of mainstream folks.
Where will their sympathies ultimately lie?
Yeah, and I think that's a really interesting thing that a lot of people... I think there is a desire, of course, to quote-unquote get back to normal and pretend that the election of Joe Biden put a lot of these things to bed.
But, you know, the things that... I've been keeping my eye on what I would call patriot churches.
This is, of course, Christian nationalism, but there's also A radicalization that's happening, of course, where you start having QAnon ideas that are interwoven within the preaching, but they're not called QAnon.
It's just an assumption that the parishioners just believe it.
And what I've been seeing is this Strange thing and and and really when you study these types of movements It's not that strange but to watch it happening and to watch it occurs is really off-putting You have a lot of people who will come to these sort of regional gatherings of the these things conferences or groupings and And they'll get up and they'll say, my church is not taking this as seriously as you are.
And they're being told, well, you need to leave your church because your church is not preaching the true gospel.
You need to find more people like yourself.
And so those people are sort of self-segregating.
But we also know that those ideas, like you were saying, there's that middle ground of people who like either hold some of the beliefs, or maybe they don't even know that they're QAnon beliefs, maybe they don't even understand where they come from, but they are soaking in and they are sort of affecting them, correct?
Yeah.
Oh yeah, and I think what we're seeing, what we have been seeing the last five years or so, is really that the limited authority of even pastors in this scenario, right?
This is a A populist movement and many evangelicals, conservative Christians are getting their ideas, not necessarily from the pulpit.
I mean, you'll find churches where this is preached in the patriot churches and so on.
You'll have churches where, you know, their pastors are influenced by this.
But, you know, they're on Facebook and they're over on Newsmax and Fox News and, you know, just in their social media echo chambers.
And that's shaping their belief system much more so than necessarily what they're going to hear on any Sunday morning.
And so I've spoken with so many pastors who are just at a loss because they realize they have no power to redirect here.
And when they try, they find they'll be out of a job.
And so it's this kind of dilemma of their self-interest, not wanting to be out of a job.
But there's also the fear of, if I go, who's going to replace me?
And, you know, I might still have a chance here to direct or to shepherd the flock, the language that they like to use, but it's not working, right?
This is, again, a populist movement, and, you know, if you're not out in front of it, you have no leadership ability.
And so that's, I think, what's happening across the board.
And then also the fact that, you know, when People on the inside of these communities try to speak out against, you know, if there is an institution or organization that is moving in that direction.
So often, too, they find that they're, if it's, you know, an organization, they're fired.
If it's a church, they're kind of forced out or it's just not welcome anymore.
And so we have many individuals who are leaving these spaces or who are resisting.
But when I'm looking at organizations, institutions, and that's where often when you have the dissenters who end up leaving, You know, the resistors who do that, that ends up leaving a more radicalized community behind.
So those are also some of the things that I'm watching right now, some of the trends and some of the things that really concern me.
You know, I think you do an excellent job in your work of sort of tracing how these things have happened and sort of the forces, both cognizant and uncognizant, that have led to this situation.
When you talk to, I guess I would call them embattled pastors, right?
They're looking around and And maybe these are pastors who in the past, I mean, it's a wonderful recruiting tool to talk about apocalyptic threats.
It's a wonderful recruiting tool to talk about martyrdom, which has been at the heart of the spreading of evangelicalism since its very beginning.
Is there a growing sense among some of these embattled pastors that maybe something somewhere along the way has taken a wrong turn?
Are they starting to grapple with the political and social ramifications?
What's that look like?
What's that sound like?
It varies.
There are among many, I think, you know, so, and not just pastors, uh, other leaders and just ordinary evangelicals.
Uh, you know, Jesus and John Wayne released almost a year ago and immediately I started getting letters from evangelicals themselves.
I still get several a day, so it's, it's probably well over a thousand now.
And, uh, it's, it's, you know, people who say this is a story of my life and I had no idea how all these pieces fit together.
And then for a lot, it's acknowledging their own complicity in this.
It is acknowledging that they benefited from this system.
It's acknowledging, you know, on the one hand, they say, I had no idea.
And then they ask the next all important question.
Why did I not have any idea?
You know, why, why could I remain oblivious to the dark side of what this movement was doing?
Uh, you know, and examining their own privilege and examining their own participation in that.
And I see that some pastors are doing that as well.
Some leaders are doing that.
Beth Moore is an example.
She read Jesus and John Wayne, and it was a deeply emotional experience for her.
And to her credit, she immediately turned to examine her own complicity, to say, I did this, right, as a leading complementarian woman, kind of propping up the system.
Even as she's been, you know, kicked out, essentially, as she's been forced out of the SBC, and she's one of the people looked up to as the resister, right?
She acknowledges that she also participated in that.
I haven't seen as many male leaders.
I've seen more rank and file, just ordinary folks, men and women.
I haven't heard the same awareness or examination of complicity that I'm kind of looking for in terms of leadership in evangelical spaces still.
There still is a sense, I think, with the Never Trump folks.
The idea that, you know, that's not me.
That, you know, that's not, you know, I didn't, I'm separate.
I'm, instead of, you know, what history is going to, should force them to do is realize how, you know, just because you're here jumping off at this very last moment that you didn't, you know, help really steer the train all the way up to this moment.
And I think that more introspection is in order for some.
Yeah, I was part of a project not too long ago where Frank Schaeffer, who is the son of Francis Schaeffer, and for those who aren't aware, maybe if you want to like ruin your weekend, go watch Francis Schaeffer's documentaries that animated like the modern evangelical right, and basically told them everything is on the board, including violence, societal disruption, the overthrow of the government, and the establishment of a theocratic state, that those things are both
Those things are both understandable, but also necessary to stave off inevitable evil decline and destruction.
And Frank, in a way, for his part, and he definitely played a role in it, seems haunted by it.
Yes.
It seems like looking into the abyss and sort of looking at what he hath wrought.
And it seems to me that there is almost a I don't know, there's a fright there.
And the closest that I felt to that, because I grew up in this stuff, and I grew up definitely enmeshed in that sort of white supremacist, evangelical, right-wing, sort of neo-Confederate tradition.
The moment that did it for me, and I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about this, I've been waiting to talk to you about this.
Was the moment, of course, during the George Floyd protest in Washington, D.C., where the square was cleared out via force and oppression, so that Donald Trump—and again, I mean, you can't even have metaphors anymore.
He comes out and he stands in front of St.
John's.
He holds a Bible upside down.
And for me, it was so bone-chillingly Obvious what was happening, but also that programming in my mind.
I had been prepared for that my entire childhood.
A president to come out and say, I am a leader of this Christian sort of a mission crusade for law and order.
This is what's happening.
I'd be interested to see what your feelings were from that and what that made you think about this particular moment.
Oh, yeah, you know, I view it as an American citizen, as a historian, and as the author of Jesus and John Wade, right?
Kind of in different lenses.
So just watching it play out, you know, such a cringeworthy moment.
It just seemed so silted.
It seemed so horrifying.
And if you listen to the speech he gave right before heading out as well, just, you know, chilling, really.
Particularly, so my outside field in graduate school was 20th century Germany with a focus on Holocaust studies and propaganda and the Nazi Christian movement and or the German Christian movement in Nazism.
And so just to see that imagery, to see him parade with his awkward gait and, you know, flanked on either side by security and by members of the military and stuff.
It just seemed, it seemed really kitschy, right?
It just seemed like this is, can't even be, and how, you know, like, can't you, you do better with this?
You know, a little bit more subtle maybe?
Or, you know, like, nobody's gonna fall for this, right?
And then violently clears the protesters.
And stands on the steps of the church and holds the Bible so awkwardly and upside down and all of that.
And it just seems like, uh, this is right.
This is too far, isn't it?
And it's not, it's never too far.
It's never too far for his supporters.
It's never, you know, I was looking at, uh, you know, spaces online, social media, folks that, you know, good Christian conservative evangelicals that, okay, come on, this is sacrilege, right?
This is not cool.
This is, there's some problem here.
No.
It played just fine.
It played extremely well.
It did what they wanted it to do.
It was exactly right.
And so it was just one more of those examples of, you know, I think I understand what's going on.
I shouldn't be surprised.
And at the same time, like, really?
That's where we are?
And yes, that's where we are.
Yeah, you know, Ansh, we're like going back to the idea of being prepared for this sort of apocalyptic moment because that's what it was.
It was a it was a evangelical apocalyptic sort of a moment of truth.
Right.
It was like the forces of good versus the forces of evil.
And I think you're right.
It was so on the nose, which it kind of reminds me a little bit of watching some of the films that are put out within this space, right, where it's very, very on the nose, very recognizable what's happening.
There's no subtlety, no nuance.
But that is actually what a lot of these people are looking for.
And the fact that Trump was able to sort of create it, like you said, I think it played into exactly What these people wanted, and in a way, and again, I don't like throwing water on people's parade, but him as a martyr having an election stolen from him by evil forces is exactly the story that these people were looking for.
Does that check with you?
Yeah, yeah.
You know, short of victory.
Victory is always great.
He likes to win.
Then, yes, having this stolen, having further evidence of corruption.
You cannot trust the media.
You cannot trust the Democrats.
You cannot trust your fellow citizens.
Yes, it's deeply concerning.
Now, I will say, the one thing that gives me hope in this moment is that I'm wondering how long this can be sustained.
Particularly because, you know, Trump himself, clearly he entered at a specific moment in history and resonated so powerfully because of this history, because of what he was tapping into.
But then he was also this charismatic figure, right, that was able to mobilize his base in unique ways.
And one of the most powerful things that he did was he was powerful, right?
So he could grant favors and he just looked powerful and he was there in the Oval Office and, you know, flanked by Secret Service all the time.
And it was, it worked.
He's not there anymore.
He's not even on Twitter anymore.
He's not, you know, he doesn't have the backdrop of the White House anymore.
And so that's, that's one thing I'm kind of looking to, at what point Does, um, does this fall apart?
Um, if he, he doesn't have power anymore to grant and he still is charismatic, but he just, it just, all of this pales in comparison to who he was six months ago.
I said, are we six months out almost feels like a lifetime in some ways.
But, uh, you know, so, so that's what I'm looking for because his, his real appeal was he could wield power.
On behalf of white evangelicals.
And if he doesn't have that to wield at a certain point, are things going to start to unravel?
That's my source of hope right now.
No real signs of that at this point.
And, you know, we have midterms coming up too soon, and we'll see where things go.
Yeah, I'll be honest with you.
There was a moment, and you want to talk about like small little glimpses of hope, when the Jerry Falwell Jr.
controversy happened.
I don't know how you felt about it, but I thought he would survive it.
And I thought that it would just sort of, you know, just be one long, embarrassing scandal after another.
I was actually sort of shocked that they sort of moved him out and pushed him out and that there were consequences to that.
So there are parts of this, and you know, and your book gets into this and a lot of the study gets into it, like how much of this has to do with the enterprise of it, the money-making industry of all this.
It feels at times like maybe the saving grace, to borrow a pun here, might actually be at what point do some of these people who are behind the scenes and sort of running this machine, do they realize that they can't have open fascism, they can't have the scandals and the obvious grossness.
So there have been times where I've kind of hoped that maybe that would almost undercut it a little bit, but at the same time I remain skeptical.
Right.
It's so hard to know, right, with the Falwell Jr.
narrative.
I mean, part of it, yeah, he had become a liability.
He had become a liability.
But as we now know, he had been careening out of control for quite some time.
And so I think those close to him knew even more of how much a liability he was.
And at a certain point, this just couldn't be sustained anymore.
So you're right.
He's no longer in power.
And there are people at Liberty, some of them left, but some still are there, you know, who who were just waiting for this moment when he was too powerful to take down.
But now, you know, calling for accountability.
And at the same time, I don't know that we have full accountability.
Well, we certainly don't in terms of the board, the board that enabled his behavior for so long and gave him cover.
So even though he's out, You know, I don't think there's the whole scale house cleaning that should be required at this point.
And yeah, it's kind of the same kind of calculation of, you know, did he cross too many lines or was he just, we can't trust him anymore with this leadership?
He's just so volatile that this isn't working for us anymore.
You know, so what was it that pushed him just beyond the pale?
So yeah, a little hopeful maybe, but also somewhat skeptical.
That just seems like such a bizarre situation when all of that information came out.
I mean, for me, my primary response to that particular scandal was personal, because I think the very next day or day of, I had to go on the BBC and try to describe The whole scenario, and I thought, what has become of my life?
This is not what I was set out to do.
You had to describe the photograph, which I just love having to sort of have to transfer over the visual, because when I first saw the visual, I was like, this is not a thousand words.
I mean, this is at least 10, if not 20,000 words.
Yes, so to how to concisely convey this is what we're looking at, guys.
And yeah, it was it was a lot.
And yet this was it was an open secret, right?
This was the kind of behavior he had been he had been known for for years within within his community.
Well, I want to end on this, because, you know, we deal with things on this podcast and I deal with this stuff in my research that can be, it's rough.
I mean, this is a rough situation.
And I think if we don't admit that we're in the middle of a political crisis, I think we're allowing some really dangerous actors a lot of room to operate.
And I will say, though, that books like yours have made me feel hope.
You know, you have a quote here on the on the cover from Chrissy Stroop, who is obviously, she has been an open voice about abuses that have taken place in the church.
I know through this podcast and my work, I have been able to form relationships with people who were in the evangelical community who were either abused or put through trauma or radicalized through it.
I feel like having these conversations is a new sort of a phenomenon, almost, because for a very long time it's very closed door, we don't talk about that, you're ostracized, that's the end of it, all of it.
How are you feeling about The reaction to both the book, the evangelical community, this absolute descent into madness.
Do you feel like conversations about it are having an effect?
Do you feel like reform is taking place?
Long-term view, how are you seeing these things sort of align themselves?
Yeah, I think that the conversations around this book have been really phenomenal.
I never expected This book to be embraced by so many conservative evangelicals themselves, or former evangelicals, people who knew these stories intimately, but again, never really understood what they were participating in, bigger picture.
And so I would also say that the landscape has really changed because of social media over the last few years.
As you said, you know, it was possible before to be kind of isolated, to have some of these things bubble up and then they just kind of get covered up and then they disappear.
And now it's much harder to keep things under wraps.
And it just takes one person in one space to bring it to social media, to bring these stories, or to put it on a blog, to call it abuses.
And, you know, in the last few years, and particularly in the wake of the Me Too and Church Too movement, there's just, you know, those of us who are working to shine a light on these abuses, we've found each other.
And so we can amplify each other's work.
That's what has happened to Jesus and John Wayne.
It has been promoted at the grassroots within evangelical spaces by pastors, by just lay readers, by, you know, I'm doing adult Sunday school Zooms at evangelical churches, which I did not think was going to be a thing for this church.
So many book clubs and so many podcasts, so many podcasts hosted by evangelical pastors, evangelical men.
They love podcasts.
I love doing them.
And so the book is getting into those spaces.
But what I see happening is this is a democratizing impulse, right?
Because the old school gatekeepers.
Uh, you know, Lifeway Christian Books, the Gospel Coalition, you know, the SBC writ large, the, um, uh, you know, Christianity Today, even, you know, you, you don't need a great review at Christianity Today, which I did not get, you know, to, to reach evangelical readers anymore.
There's this grassroots network.
And so it is, it is, uh, destabilizing to the power structures and is democratizing.
And that's where this book has lived in those spaces.
And so, yes, as far as hope, I hear so many stories from readers who are deeply enmeshed in these spaces, who totally bought in, and they remind me daily that people can change, right?
And that people who can embrace these really toxic theologies and dangerous teachings, they can change.
And often they are the, you know, they're incredibly powerful spokespeople now, like, to raise awareness.
So hopeful, yes.
I see so much individual change.
Again, on the institutional level, that's where I'm not seeing the change.
Not yet.
Because institutions tend to defend the status quo.
Particularly these institutions.
Particularly these institutions.
And, you know, where's the donor money coming from?
And which direction are the major donors pulling?
And I've just seen so many examples where there are really good people, courageous people inside Very conservative organization saying, hey, we need to change.
We need to challenge this.
We need to.
And they fail.
They fail miserably.
Well, Dr. Dume, you are a national treasure.
And I don't think those of us who are touched by this book can recommend it enough.
It is Jesus and John Wayne available now in paperback.
You should get this for you and all five, six, seven, eight dozen of your friends.
Thank you so much.
Where can the good people find you?
Thank you.
I am on Twitter at KKDumez.
That's at K-K-D-U-M-E-Z, like Dumez.
I'm there way too much, about every five minutes.
And I also have a Facebook page, also at KKDumez, and a website, KristenDumez.com.
Wonderful.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
All right.
And again, that was Kristen Kobes Dumez, the author of Jesus and John Wayne, How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
The muckrake community demanded Big Kristen come back on the podcast, and I have to tell you she did not disappoint.
Really good information in terms of what's happening in this country.
One thing that we talked about, and I just want to put on everybody's radar to keep some eyes and ears out, which is that the fascist iconography is spreading in this country.
We're starting to see, Nick, we haven't talked about this yet, so I'm interested to hear your reaction, which is that a lot of Trump flags, a lot of thin blue line flags, are suddenly becoming, it seems like, Confederate no-quarter flags, which means take no prisoners.
Something is brewing in this country, but I do have hope.
I do have hope.
Right.
I think we were all hoping that Trump would fade away.
Yeah.
And, and what you learn through it, I learned this in even, you know, through coaching is sometimes when you just try and put it away and it's just gonna go away, don't worry about it.
It festers and it hangs around and it comes back to bite you every time if you don't Finish it and end it.
Get it done.
Which is why, again, all the stuff that's happening around Trump is really important as far as illegal stuff.
But I said it before, I'm just going to tell you, he's going to get caught on the tax stuff.
He's going to pay a fine.
He won't pay it.
His supporters will.
And he'll move on.
I mean, I don't see much of the jailable stuff yet, but we shall find out.
Yeah, I think even him getting caught on taxes is slightly optimistic.
We do not see, again, white wealthy men in this country being held accountable, but knock on wood, something happens.
Al Capone.
There you go, Al Capone.
So maybe that happens, you know.
And then Al, can we just, maybe we should end every episode with, fuck Bill Barr.
Can we just like say that?
Just fuck Bill Barr.
Can you believe that?
That man is walking around free after the damage that he did and that he can go places and do things.
Just fuck Bill Barr.
And now saying he had no idea about these subpoenas for Schiff spying on congressmen.
I'm anxious to hear what's going to come out of those hearings.
Yeah, I was planning on us talking about that on our Friday Weekender episode, and probably talking about some Nixon, because we called it, man.
We said it.
We said whatever you can imagine Trump doing, whatever laws, whatever surveillance, whatever corruption, he's doing it.
If you can come up with it, if you can imagine it, so we'll talk about that.
Well, no, when he accuses somebody else of it.
Oh, it's a hundred percent.
He's doing it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we're going to talk about that on our Friday episode.
Again, that is for patrons only.
And to get access to that, as well as the Muckrake community, just go over to patreon.com slash muckrake podcast.
Everybody has been showing up big.
We've been getting more and more supporters and we depend on it.
We are ad free.
We have editorial independence.
The only way that happens is with your support.
And we are so, so grateful for you.
So again, we'll be back on Friday with the Weekender bonus episode.
Next week, baby, Valve Silence.
The summer of the muckrake goes into the Valve Silence.
I'm ready for it.
I'm going to come back all guns blazing.
Wow.
I hope I can hang on till then.
Okay, so everybody, if you need us until then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
