Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the latest threats by Vladimir Putin as his embarrassment over the war in Ukraine might lead him to launch tactical nuclear weapons. They also discuss how Kanye West has inserted himself into the new world order conspiracies and how Senator Tommy Tuberville drinks from the same trough.
Jared then interviews Andrew L. Siedel, a constitutional attorney with a specialty in the first amendment and author of "American Crusade - How The Supreme Court Is Weaponizing Religious Freedom."
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I am your host, Nick Hauselmann, with my dutiful co-host, Jared Yates Sexton, on the road today, calling in.
So we need to discuss some things, even though he's out there, you know, blazing a trail throughout the country.
Jared, how's it going today?
I'm okay.
I'm in Las Vegas.
I'm getting ready to do a presentation at UNLV, which, you know, basically for me is just where Larry Johnson hangs out.
Oh, okay.
That's sort of how that works in my mind.
You can walk around making the L with your both arms if you remember that sign.
Exactly.
That's for the old Buckrakers.
But yeah, I'm good.
First time that I flew since the pandemic.
Didn't care for it.
I don't know how you feel about it.
Still a little shaky about it.
Still feels weird.
Sure.
I mean, I've flown a number of times since and, you know, mostly masked, but a couple not masked.
And, you know, it is what it is.
Also, the prices are insane as well.
They're able to gouge or whatever you want to call it.
All over the place.
Let me give you a quick example.
Flying from Madison to Chicago was twice as much as it cost me to fly from Chicago to Los Angeles.
So, figure that one out.
It makes no sense.
No sense.
Well, speaking of which, we need to talk about, you know, lands far away in Ukraine because we're having a bit of an escalation here and a bit of a dealing with a madman's authoritarian bent plus his fragile ego.
And a lot of people are probably, you know, rightfully so, very concerned that this could lead to some sort of nuclear attack on Ukrainian soil.
Jared, what do you think?
Give us a little ballpark likelihood you think that he'll actually turn to some sort of tactical nuke.
I mean, I'll tell you this.
I think the options on the table at this point, you know, what's been happening over the past week is sort of a tit-for-tat escalation.
Obviously, we had this Attack on the Crimean Bridge.
And then one thing that's been happening, and I think that this starts to explain exactly what's occurring here.
You know, we have this situation where Putin's hold over Russia is slipping.
And we've talked about that.
When this thing first happened, we said we had a bunch of shows where we were analyzing this.
We were talking about the fact that Putin's position absolutely depended on his ability to keep his subordinates terrified of him and in line.
And also control over Russian society as a whole.
What we're seeing right now, and of course over the past couple of days, we've seen a murderous barrage of missile attacks on Ukrainian cities that are targeting not just infrastructure, energy infrastructure, but also civilian targets.
I mean, just one war crime after another.
We are watching an escalation because Putin is not only losing the war, but is losing control over Russian society.
And if anybody is paying attention to what's happening in the culture, you're starting to see open questioning of Putin's regime, and not just in the streets, not just with citizens, but a lot of their commentary, a lot of the people on their television, a lot of the people on their radio and internet and websites.
And it's starting to feel like this thing is evaporating and starting to change rapidly.
The scary thing about this is that there is a legitimate concern that there could be tactical nuclear weapons, particularly against Ukraine, and that has already led to America drawing a line in the sand.
God knows what would happen if it occurred, but yeah, there is a possibility of this happening, and we're probably And I hate saying this, but we're not in a Cuban Missile Crisis, like a couple of minutes away from this thing, but we are in a situation that if a couple things go the wrong way, it could get really ugly.
You know, it's interesting because in theory, use of any kind of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, which doesn't really affect us directly at all, would in theory lead to Putin being even more of a pariah.
You know, perhaps, but let me ask you this, because people seem to think that like, you know, everyone would then drop sanctions on them.
Perhaps we would get into it and give Ukraine even, you know, more powerful weapons to strike back, you know, against Russia.
Do you think, you know, China would ultimately sanction Russia in retaliation for them using nukes?
No, I can't imagine that'd be the case.
And one of the things that we've been seeing in this is that, you know, China and Russia have been coordinating this thing very, very overtly.
I mean, you know, they have basically fallen into this sort of bipolar, you know, chain of influence under China.
And we've talked about this.
This is a larger coordinated movement.
And it's not a coincidence, of course, that we're seeing North Korea suddenly start to beat its chest.
The situation in Iran is absolutely out of control, and there's no telling what's going to occur here.
But that anti-American sort of sphere of influence that's taken place and has really cemented, I have to imagine that whatever is happening with Putin is absolutely getting the go-ahead from China one way or another.
And meanwhile, you have Putin.
And Nick, the things that intelligence analysis has been showing is this guy, at this point, is just moving from one bunker to another.
He's growing more isolated, more paranoid, and I have to imagine the only people that he's actually discussing anything with are his inner circle of advisors and trusted people, the ones he doesn't expect to kill him at this point, and probably Chinese leadership.
I mean, those are probably the only lines of communication that are there.
So you have to imagine that whatever happens here is at least going to get a tertiary heads up from China, which I have to say on this subject, I think it is a little bit hopeful in that regard, because I do not think that China is necessarily going to want this guy to go off half-cocked.
Right.
And the inner circle though is worrisome because they're most likely the people that told him, oh, you know, in three days we'll be taking control of Ukraine entirely.
And we're so off on that.
And, you know, we had talked about this.
I know I said it before it happened.
That, you know, anybody underestimating Ukrainians would be doing so at your own peril because these people are tough and they're not going to just give up.
And as they've proven, what's interesting, though, is we're kind of seeing brazen attacks on Russian soil.
Right.
And I think I even talked about that, like the movie version is you send this crack unit of Ukrainian, you know, special forces and they sneak into Russia and they start to really cause a lot of havoc.
I mean, the Crimean Bridge attack is an interesting one that certainly eliminates the ability to transfer stuff from the Russian mainland to Crimea, which is huge for them.
The killing of what was supposed to be Alexander Dugan ended up being his daughter.
I don't know if we've ever really determined if that was or not, wasn't Ukraine, but, you know, it could be.
The Nord Stream Pipeline attack, again, was it the Americans, was it Ukraine?
But these are really kind of brazen attacks against Russia in a way that these are the kind of things that in the movie version would like either bring Russia to its knees or just sort of force them to crawl back in their hole and call the whole thing off.
Yeah, you know, the hard thing in all of this is that the rational solutions are off the board.
I mean, the rational solution was never to invade Ukraine in the first place.
And Putin has surrounded himself, that inner circle that we're talking about.
Like, you don't get to get in Putin's inner circle if you are telling him what he doesn't want to hear.
You know what I mean?
Like, somebody like him is completely isolated and surrounded by people who absolutely cow-tow to him and feed and stroke his ego.
And on top of that, like, the idea to go into Ukraine, and we've talked about this in the past when we've talked about, like, American operations.
Like, there's a hubris to it, right?
And there's this idea of, we're Russian, we can do whatever, we're more powerful than everybody.
All of that is fed into, of course, by, you know, fascists and mystics like Alexander Dugan, who you were just talking about.
So they obviously thought that this was going to take place, and it was going to work out, and it would be totally, totally fine.
All of these operations that you're bringing up, these deep, deep attacks within Russian territory in places where they, you know, they shouldn't be vulnerable.
I mean, what the Ukrainians are doing here is completely rewriting the reality of the war.
And as that war starts to come home, and as Putin is having to escalate things such as, you know, Mobilizing people, possibly conscripting people, as people are starting to actually feel that this is something that is reaching home and it's actually going to have larger consequences, that grip that he has is starting to fail.
And people are sick of it and people are getting tired of it.
And there's a difference between having a dictator who, you know, maybe they're murderers and maybe they torture you and maybe, you know, your relatives can disappear.
There's a difference between having a dictator who at least there's a stability in your country and at least there's quote-unquote safety and this I mean this is when you start feeling the pressure start to reach your homeland and starting to you know reach deep deep into the country that you're supposed to be safe in weird things happen man like not just uprisings but like really really bloody revolutions and changes that otherwise would be completely unpredictable.
Oh, I agree.
It's also the manipulation of the world order, I suppose you could call it, by sort of declaring parts of Ukraine Russia now.
He's filing the paperwork, Jared, and that seems to legitimize what he's trying to do.
And that's what's kind of disgusting about this whole thing.
Then what's worse is he tries to use Hiroshima as a precedent For him being able to drop nuclear bombs in Ukraine, and I know that we pride ourselves in providing historical context to a lot of what's happening now, and I just gotta tell you, I hope that that argument carries no water with anybody in the world, but I worry that it's long enough ago that people might not understand exactly why there couldn't be a worse comparison.
No, it's awful, and you know, one of the things, Man, Russia, particularly Putinist Russia, they love taking history and twisting it around.
And basically, in the Putinist mind, or a Dugan mind, all of this is an extension of the larger sort of liberal order of the post-World War II era, right?
Everything is blamed on traitors inside, globalists around.
And as a result, it's almost as if something like a Hiroshima or a Nagasaki, which I personally believe were crimes against humanity, but that's a different conversation for a different episode, are, you know, those are reasons to be able to do whatever.
It's more or less the idea that the war never ended.
It was just part of a larger war that has sort of spiraled out and out and out, and the construction of the American hegemonic order, which, you know, is its own situation, The idea that this is just another chapter in that is, you know, like you were saying, wrapping your head around that really is the most delusional thing imaginable.
But I will point out, and I'm interested to hear what you have to say about it because The American right could not be more obviously in Putin's corner, and are trying really hard right now to give him the victory of, you know, going ahead and annexing this territory, stealing this territory, and also trying to go ahead and launder this, to give Putin an out so that he can stay in power and continue to push this sort of authoritarian movement.
I mean, we're seeing it with Obviously, the regular customers, we're seeing with Tucker Carlson, we're seeing with Elon Musk, we're seeing all these people who are desperately trying to give Putin some sort of a victory and some sort of an out so they can go ahead and avoid some sort of a nuclear confrontation.
And I don't know about you, but for me, it's so disturbing, man.
Well, I don't think it's motivated in the avoidance of a nuclear confrontation necessarily, right?
I don't think they give it, because I think we all know the Americans are not going to, we are not going to retaliate with nuclear weapons ourselves.
But I don't think that they give a shit whether or not Ukraine gets nuked.
And by the way, the most reasonable, and this is the worst use of the word reasonable, but people are saying that Putin might drop a smaller tactical nuke on an uninhabited area.
You know, to say, hey, like, you know, let him know that what he wants to do, you know, which which very well may be the plan they would ultimately have.
But still, it makes that whole entire area uninhabitable.
They've already dealt with Chernobyl in the 80s.
So I don't know.
I don't know exactly what the motivation is, other than just some sort of simpatico with a fellow authoritarian, you know, and they would like to be on his good side.
Do you agree?
I don't really know if it's some sort of humanitarian desire to protect Ukraine from fallout.
No, I don't think it's humanitarian whatsoever.
I think it's more of a strategic support.
I think it's becoming obvious that this is an unhinged warmonger.
And I think that the construction of the project that we've been documenting and reporting on for so long, it's not there yet.
I mean, it's shown, and you know, I wanted to talk about this before, and by the way, I've got an interview coming up with Andrew Seidel that I'm really excited for people to hear, so you should stick around for that.
But before we get to that, I wanted to talk about, you know, it's eye-rolling and it's so ridiculous, but You know, we're seeing this stuff with, like, the Kanye West controversy, which, Nick, I want to hear what you have to say about this, because it is so repulsive.
And, of course, what Tommy Tuberville was saying the other night in the rally.
In all of this, it's very obvious that the right is trying so hard To go ahead and get everybody on the same page.
So, you know, you see someone like an Elon Musk who is, he's been absolutely recruited into this, and rightfully so.
I mean, you know, when you're the wealthiest man supposedly in the world outside of Vladimir Putin, and you have eugenic ideas and authoritarian ideas and anti-democratic ideas, like that's where you belong.
I mean, you belong with this authoritarian movement, but it is this thing where it feels like They're not quite ready for the massive push that is coming.
It feels like they're still sort of in the gathering of forces.
It's almost like a game of Risk when you want to make sure that all of your lines are in place and you're ready for the main mission and the main push.
It feels like, it's not humanitarian, it just feels like more of, man, we really do not want Putin to jump the gun on this thing.
Okay, that sounds right to me.
And as a result, remember, they can't be wrong.
Once you drop some ideology out there, they're going to bend over backwards to maintain that position no matter what, no matter how unpopular it is, no matter how undemocratic it is across the board if you're talking about January 6th or the big lie.
So, it is a specific type of...
He's got some brain function, I suppose, that they all like to have, and it's really troubling.
And meanwhile, yeah, the Kanye stuff is just kind of, you know, par for the course, I suppose, for him.
And, you know, it's funny, he doesn't quite follow the same schedule as someone like Boebert or Marjorie Taylor Greene does, where they have to be in the news every, like, two weeks, like we talked about.
There's more time in between his bombs than he drops, but, like, you know, It had been a while, right?
And so this one's a doozy between, you know, going on Tucker Carlson, wearing a White Lives Matter shirt, and now, you know, dropping this unhinged tweet.
I take it you've read the tweet?
Have you pulled it apart yet?
Yeah, so just to go ahead and get everybody up to speed, because maybe you have, I don't know, maybe you've blocked all mention of this person.
And by the way, I want to point out, what you just said is exactly right.
Because if someone like a Bogart or a Marjorie Taylor Greene They're, like, absolutely desperate for attention, you know, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Kanye, let's be straight up, legit about this, he is an unwell person.
Much like we talked about Hershel Walker, like, when Kanye comes out and does this shit, it's because he's having, like, an episode.
He's having a problem.
What he tweeted, of course, is, quote, I'm a bit sleepy tonight, but when I wake up, I'm going DEF CON, which, by the way, is DEF CON 3 on Jewish people.
Uh, the funny thing is I actually can't be anti-Semitic because black people are actually Jews also.
You guys have toyed with me and tried to blackball anyone who ever opposes your agenda.
It's not a coincidence that he went on Tucker Carlson.
It's not a coincidence that Fox News and the Republicans and the right have absolutely embraced this guy.
It's because, much like Elon Musk, much like all of this stuff, The entire ideology, the entire narrative that they're all behind, this conspiracy theory, this anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, it is the worldview of the right.
And it is the thing that legitimizes how they feel, what they want to do, their plans, how they want to unravel these things, liberal democracy and human rights.
This is the play.
And once somebody like a Kanye West embraces it, They are going to embrace that person because they are welcoming another person into the fold.
And to be clear, the Republican Party, Fox News, the American right, all of them, it's anti-Semitism.
It is the same conspiracy theory that goes over and over and over.
And you'll have to forgive me if I wasn't quite up to speed on what he had tweeted the other night because, well, you know, we were all in the meeting at that time and we were discussing what we were going to do next to control the world.
And, you know, it's a burden when you're part of the chosen few, you know, Jared?
It really is.
You know I have to imagine he probably got off the phone maybe he was trying to do a deal maybe the guy was like some lawyer who had a Jewish last name and he just decides I'm upset with that and now the entire Jewish race is going to be or the Jewish people are going to be under attack.
But I do find it hilarious because then he says he can't be anti-semitic because black people are actually Jew.
I don't know.
I suppose he's trying to connect the notion that Jews were slaves back in the day and black people were slaves here.
Maybe it's not worth trying to do what I'm trying to do right now.
There's an entire thing behind that that we don't have to get into.
But I will say, I think what happens, and we've seen this, there's like this I think in the past, we wanted to believe that there was some sort of
line between the the lunatic fringe and you know the quote-unquote respectable people and what we've learned in the past few years and thank God things like social media and podcast and all of this have like shown this to be untrue but if you have out there you have your Alex Jones who by the way is just peddling anti-semitic conspiracy theory bullshit everywhere and you've got Tucker Carlson who's just doing it in a you know a more cleaned up respectable way
And meanwhile, all of these people, you're Joe Rogan, you're Elon Musk, you're Tonya West, all of these people are swimming in the same cesspool.
And so you're having these conspiracy theories that are just sort of being passed around, and they almost treat it, it's almost like the way that like, and I hesitate to say this because they're obviously lines that some people would draw or narratives that they would run with, It's almost like being a member of some sort of a society like the the masons or something which is you have elevated levels of knowledge, right?
Like you start out learning this and then the further you go in the more that you're trusted you learn more secret knowledge.
And on the right, the secret knowledge is, hey, things aren't as they seem.
Here are the reasons why things are happening.
Oh, by the way, now that you're trusted, you need to understand it's not a globalist, you know, with the parentheses around them.
We're talking about Jews.
And that's what it ends up coming to.
And you have someone like a Kanye West going out and saying this.
Like, that's exactly what it is.
He has had revealed to him the secret knowledge of the right, which is everything that they talk about always goes back to these same conspiracy theories.
Right.
And it's, again, it's what the Republicans need to do to maintain, you know, people engaged with their causes.
It's got to be hatred.
It's got to be fear.
And, you know, you keep seeing, I'm sure everyone's on Twitter or whatever you see.
Maybe we'll share them in the Discord.
But like, you just keep seeing these interviews of people at these Trump rallies.
And it's so it's clear to them that that's what's kind of disarming is that how clear it is to them how all these conspiracies fit together and how they all make sense sometimes I like to hope that they get a little upset when they say it out loud and they hear it and then they realize gosh this sounds really crazy But we've kind of gotten past that too.
And so now it's like the full embrace of these things.
And that's the fundamentally broken part of the system at this point, because we can't get, you know, information.
You know, even if even if it was so crazy out there, you'd think that there was some mechanism in the brain that would say, wait a minute, I got to take a second and think about this.
And no, they literally just have embraced all of this.
And the worst part about it is, is that Trump and his ilk have figured this out.
That's the puzzle piece, right, that they solved.
And they know how now to manipulate that, how to press those buttons, how to say the right words, and they can, you know, activate the kind of electorate they never would have gotten, you know, 20 years ago.
Exactly.
And, you know, to go ahead for the people who have been listening to the show for a while, you know, we talked about this between ourselves.
We talked about this with Wajahat Ali.
We have been inching up on not just like overt racism, But like, really, really open, gleeful racism.
Everything from the embrace of Kanye West to this replacement theory bullshit that Tucker is pushing, but also this Tommy Tuberville thing where he's going out and explicitly saying that black people want reparations because they do crimes.
which is, I mean, there's not even a dog whistle there, right?
There's not even like plausible deniability behind that.
Like we really are inching up on just absolutely normalized, overt, gleeful, unvarnished racism.
And we had talked, you know, with Ali, we talked about expecting at some point for like just open slurs to be making the rounds.
I mean, things are escalating.
Living in a culture where this stuff happens.
I mean, we now are seeing like the normalization of this and the escalation of it.
And it's getting gnarly, man.
Let's listen to what Tommy said real briefly, because I think it's worth hearing real quick.
Here it is.
Some people say, well, they're soft on crime.
No, they're not soft on crime.
They're pro-crime.
They want crime.
They want crime because they want to take over what you got.
They want to control what you have.
They want reparation because they think the people that do the crime are owed that.
Bullshit!
They are not owed that.
So and you have to remember, you know, Tupperville was a college football coach.
So he was going into black people's houses, you know, in high school, recruits and promising to, you know, accept these these kids as they're, you know, like his part of his family.
And he's going to he's going to help them develop and become men and all these things.
And here he is saying, I mean, he's mixing a lot of metaphors, unfortunately, in this one.
And, you know, because the beginning is probably Democrats are the they.
But then it quickly turns.
and uh and some sort of notion I think that yeah like uh perhaps they're you know people are justified in committing crime because they really deserve reparations for being slaves whatever it is it's just the worst of the worst and then and then you have this crowd uh just cheering him on for this that that is where we're at when you can get a crowd of thousands of people to just you know get behind this kind of stuff that's what's so soul killing
Well, and because they're looking for someone to quote-unquote sell it like it is, right?
They're waiting on people to be realist or to stop bullshitting around and just say what things are.
And that's what this gathering storm is.
That's what this gathering authoritarian movement is.
It's a lot of people who live in this alternate reality where they believe that people are soft on things or they don't want to say the hard thing out loud.
And in this case, I mean, like, I don't know about you, It makes my stomach hurt.
Literally, as you played that, it made my stomach feel nauseous.
And the reason it feels nauseous is because it is straight, unvarnished hatred and bigotry.
And that's what they want.
There's a reason they're cheering.
That's very specifically what these voters want.
And I was talking about this yesterday with some friends.
It's like the gateway to that, to where he is at this point is, you know, the pronouns that people don't want to have to use and all this other stuff.
It's like, it's just too hard for me to have to adjust any kind of my thinking.
And basically what they want to do in this notion of freedom in America is they want to reserve the right to be an asshole.
And that's the gateway because then it quickly gets to being a racist, right?
But like that's sort of what they want to say.
I want to be free to say whatever I want to say.
Yeah, exactly.
nobody criticized me and nobody canceled me.
And, and, and what is wrong with, with not being an asshole or, or, or by the way, fine, you reserve the right to be an asshole and you also reserve the right to get completely piled on by everybody because you're the asshole.
That's the disconnect I think, right?
They don't want to own it.
Yeah, exactly.
And, and, you know, that's, that's the amazing thing about all of this is it really comes down to like people wanting to have the permission to literally be as grotesque and hateful as possible without any matter of consequences.
And the only way that that happens is if you have a state that is dedicated to apartheid-level policies.
Right?
I mean literally the only way you can do that is to have protected classes, is to have a group where white people basically are able to maintain control by doing whatever they want, by discriminating, I mean, we're sitting here right now.
We're recording this, you know, on Monday.
We're sitting here watching the Supreme Court.
And at any moment, the Supreme Court could very well strike down a large amount of affirmative action.
Yeah.
And you're looking at the possibility of this reversing of any of this progress because they've gotten to the point where not only do they want permission to be as ugly as they possibly can, but their entire political identity, their entire identity, actually.
And this is the really frightening thing about Trumpism and this authoritarian movement.
Their entire identity becomes an angry push for that protected status, particularly based on their white identity.
I mean, it's awful.
And by the way, speaking of the Supreme Court, I really am excited for people to hear this interview with Andrew Settle.
Who has this book on the weaponizing of religious freedom in the Supreme Court, and I just think it's really illuminating.
I think people should stick around for that.
All right, everybody, you're in for a real treat.
We've got Andrew L. Seidel, who is a constitutional attorney with a specialty in the First Amendment.
He was the author of The Founding Myth Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American, which we've talked about on the show before.
It's an absolutely must read.
The new book is American Crusade, How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom.
Andrew, I can't even imagine how this is relevant.
I'm going to struggle to have this interview where we make this sound like something that our listeners should care about in present day.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, I get it.
You know, it's this esoteric thing that doesn't actually impact people's lives every single day that we haven't seen the court run roughshod over these rights in a long time.
No, it is terrifying how relevant this book became.
Like instantly.
It's been awful.
I mean, I've been, you know, I wrote the book because I've been seeing this, the culmination of this crusade coming for a number of years.
And it, yeah, I mean, it came at a terrible moment in our history.
I was curious about that, actually.
Can you tell us a little bit?
Like, I know for me, the moment that things crystallized, what was going on in the country and the direction that we were heading in and what was getting ready to happen, it crystallized for me as like, I was covering a Trump rally.
And like, I started realizing that a lot of these elements were coagulating, and we're going to be a real, real big problem.
What, for you, was the moment that you started realizing that something was happening here and that it was going to probably dominate a large part of your energy, time, passion, and probably sanity?
When did that occur for you?
That's a really good question.
The first inkling I had was in a Supreme Court case back in 2014.
It's called the town of Greece versus Galloway.
And I tell this story early in American Crusade.
And basically, it was a small thing, but it was a big thing for me.
And essentially, the Supreme Court said this town of Greece, New York, had held Exclusively, explicitly Christian prayers at every single one of their town meetings.
And the people who would give the prayers would come up and they would turn the podium that people normally speak to the city council from around to speak directly to the audience.
And that matters because when you're talking about who are these prayers for, the Supreme Court has said that that's a really important thing and whether or not this kind of prayer is okay.
And very clearly the prayer was not for the legislators, but for the citizens who were visiting.
Minor point, but the conservative bloc on the Supreme Court rewrote that fact.
Just completely changed it.
And just said, these prayers are clearly for members of the City Council.
Which, I mean, it was just fundamentally false.
It was a lie.
And that for me was the first time I saw the court really rewrite reality to reach a desired result.
And I thought, you know, this is this is a problem.
They had done things in the past that you could kind of say, well, they shouldn't have reached this decision.
It was it was maybe a fair minded decision.
They shouldn't have reached it.
And then it got worse and it got worse and it got worse.
Another another moment in that watershed for me was watching the court in the gay wedding cake case.
This is the Masterpiece Cake Shop case out of Colorado.
Essentially, what the court did in that case was say that members of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission who dedicated their civil careers to defending civil rights were bigots.
We're anti-Christian bigots, and nothing could be further from the truth.
I actually interviewed these people for the book, and one of them, for instance, got interested in civil rights when she was at George Washington as a freshman, and it happened to see Martin Luther King Jr.
give his I Have a Dream speech on the National Mall.
And that's why she got so involved in civil rights.
And that's the person that the Supreme Court is turning around and calling a religious bigot.
And the other piece of it is, for me, was that you could see the other side in this case.
The people who I call the Crusaders throughout the book.
You could see how they won the media battle, right?
That case was about a business, a limited liability corporation, discriminating against a gay couple.
And it became about this poor oppressed Christian artist who just wanted to bake his cakes and the big bad government was trampling all over his religious freedom.
And that is when I said, you know what?
I have been litigating these cases in and out of court.
I wrote briefs in the town of Greece case.
I was arguing these cases before judges and it was, I need to actually be Arguing this in the court of public opinion because I don't think you're going to get a fair hearing in front of these judges.
We have to convince the people about what is going on here and what this problem is.
And that's eventually what led to the book.
And then, I mean, this term, you know, the court was just drunk with power and just completely off the rails.
Yeah, I don't want to talk about the current term.
But before we do, I think it's important to talk a little bit about the law.
Yeah.
You know, I, you know, one of the things that I was sort of raised up with was, you know, this evangelical bullshit myth, the idea that, you know, this is all coming from the Ten Commandments.
That's what the law is.
That's what the law has always been.
This was obviously founded as a Christian country.
And that was the intention of all of it.
And then, you know, lo and behold, I actually start to do the research as an adult, and you find that the entire system of the United States of America, as flawed as it is, and it had so many problems with white supremacists, you know, sort of like, Being a system created for the white wealthy men slaveholders of this country.
At the same time, it was intentionally created to be a secular creation.
Liberal democracy and the rule of law in the United States of America was meant to come in and divide religion from secular matters because the founders looked at Europe and saw one, I don't know, massacre after another, you know, massive political tumult.
Meanwhile, We now have a situation where those walls are getting ready to be broken down and are in the process of being broken down, the walls between the secular matters and religion.
Can you talk about just the idea of law and what it's supposed to be?
What is it doing?
How should it operate?
And for the people who feel deep inside of themselves right now that something has gone terribly wrong, can you just let them know why they have that suspicion and why this is so horrific, what's actually occurring here?
Yeah, first of all, if you are feeling that, I think you are absolutely right.
And what we are seeing is not just the erosion of specific rights, but the erosion of the rule of law altogether.
And that is the thing that I think is most alarming that we've seen from this court recently.
It's the erosion of the rule of law and of human rights.
And so a couple things that you said that I definitely want to touch on.
And one is, you know, absolutely, there are huge problems with our Constitution.
But one of the things that really did make it unique and original are those secular foundations.
And these are genuine contributions that were made not just to political science and thought, but to all of humanity.
And they're really important in human history.
So our Constitution, for all its faults, was also the first to declare that power comes from the people, not gods.
So the words, we the people, are poetic, but they're also so much more, even though we've failed to reach the goal of all the people when we say we the people.
Our Constitution was also the first not to mention a god or deity.
And it was godless by choice, not by accident.
There were actually people in the founding generation who objected to that choice.
Our Constitution was the first to ban religious tests for public office in Article 6.
That was actually the only mention of religion in the original unamended document.
And it did that with some of the most clear and emphatic language in a document that's often deliberately vague, right?
It says, no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust, right?
So, the wall of separation between church and state is an American original.
It's an American invention.
Now, the idea was floating around in the Enlightenment, but it was first implemented In the American experiment.
And until then, no other nation had sought to protect the ability of its citizens to think freely by separating religion and government.
And I think that is something that we can be proud of.
And I think it's something that we can defend.
And I certainly think it's something that we shouldn't undermine with myths about, you know, a Christian founding.
But what we are seeing right now is not just the erosion of that wall of separation, but also the radical redefinition of religious freedom, religious liberty, as we've known it.
So in American Crusade, one of the things that I do is I go through and I look at all of the cases over the last decade.
That involve religious freedom and state church separation.
And I show that there is a deliberate attempt to take religious freedom, which we've long known as the shields to protect us, to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority, to protect minorities from Christianity being imposed on them in this country.
And it's being turned on its head and it's becoming a tool of conservative Christian privilege, a weapon for them to impose that conservative Christianity on us.
And you can see that in case after case after case over the last 10 years.
And to get to your point, one of the questions that I ask in each of these cases is, what's the worst that would have happened if this case had gone the other way?
And the answer in each of those cases is alarming, because what's the worst that happens if we allow any religiously motivated action an exemption from a law?
Because that is what the other side has been angling for and arguing for.
And the answer to that is the rule of law disappears.
And the Supreme Court actually asked and answered this question 150 years ago.
They said that every citizen would become a law unto himself.
Government could exist only in name in such circumstances.
So in a system that values an individual's right to act on any religious belief, there is no law.
There is only what that individual believes their God commands.
So we will have traded the rule of law for the rule of each conservative Christian's personal God.
And that's where we're headed.
And by the way, I don't want to get too deep in the weeds, but this is one of my more... I'm fascinated by this concept.
It was something that I was doing a lot of wrestling with as I was writing my new book, because there's something that takes place here, because the law is supposed to be the great arbiter of all of this, right?
You're exactly right.
When you talk about, you know, revelational knowledge, God told me to do this.
Well, do you have proof of this?
No, I heard it in my head and it made it happen.
That literally leads to lawlessness.
And it leads to a moment where the only way to have an order, the only way to have a nation, the only way to have a society, is that the people are able to enforce that imaginary voice or whatever it is they're claiming motivates them.
They're able to use force Either their force of numbers or the force of the state to enforce their own sort of subjective opinion of how the world should work.
And the law was put there specifically to take the place of God in the public eye.
I mean, it was literally supposed to go ahead and move away from the idea because you had people left and right who said, yeah, I massacred that person.
I did it for God.
And people are like, well, yeah, obviously.
I mean, that's that's what you do.
Right.
It's legitimately the unraveling of every institution and every foundation that we have.
I mean, that's literally the scope of what we're talking about and moving it towards an objective, hierarchical, power-based society.
I mean, that's literally what this is.
And that's the goal, to be clear.
That is actually the goal.
The goal here is to make it so that conservative white Christians are a special favored class under the law.
And everybody else are second class citizens.
And I'm happy to dive into that more.
But to get to your point a little bit, you know, one of the things that I do in the book is I try to get people to think about religious freedom more simply.
And separation of church and state more simply.
And I pose throughout the book sort of other ways of thinking about it.
And I've synthesized all this law into three basic lines.
But I also kind of touch on other ways that you can think of it.
And another way to think of what we're talking about right now is that there are two spheres of law, right?
One is religious law and one is civil law.
So religious law would be voluntary.
Civil law would be mandatory.
And sometimes you get a collision of those.
But believers have to find the courage of their convictions when that happens.
Believers have to freely burden themselves with their religion.
Religious freedom is not a right to burden somebody else with your religion, right?
Like, think of Kim Davis.
Kim Davis is free to take on the burden of believing that marriage is between a man and one woman.
Or a one man and one woman.
She can do that if she wants.
But she doesn't get to impose that burden on other people.
So, again, two systems of law.
One is mandatory, one is voluntary.
Civil law, we all have to follow.
Religious law, people can adopt or not.
And the two systems are separate.
But, if voluntary religious law can always exempt a person from the mandatory civil law, Then the mandatory civil law ceases to exist, and it's been replaced by the religious law.
And that's what the Supreme Court was talking about 150 years ago, right?
So people can add rules for their personal behavior if they desire, but they have to follow that civil law baseline.
If your religion demands more of you, and that additional burden doesn't conflict with the law, you can do more.
If your religion demands more of you and it does conflict with the law, then you have to follow the law.
And, you know, that may be a little complicated for people, and I hope not, because really what I try to do in this case, in this book, is simplify these cases.
The questions that religious freedom cases raise, because I actually think they're very, very easy.
And if you draw three simple lines, it answers almost all of the questions, and especially in those cases that came up before the Supreme Court over the last decade.
Yeah, and I think you deserve a lot of credit.
Your books are and this is one of the things we're talking about, like really, really complicated things.
I think you boil it down.
I think you communicate it very effectively.
I think somebody who isn't necessarily versed in the law can pick this up and understand what's happening.
But I also think the division between the public and sort of the machinery of the law, we are basically told, don't worry about it, don't study it, don't really spend a lot of time thinking about it.
And it's sort of one of these things that The evangelical right and the Republican Party, particularly under the tutelage of Mitch McConnell, have have taken advantage of that to a huge degree.
I mean, they have they have run laps around not just the Democratic Party, but also sort of the electorate in general.
It's something that we're not supposed to think about.
Meanwhile, the judiciary has been stalked.
I mean, the Supreme Court has been stolen with a very, very specific purpose.
It's important for us to have this conversation.
And I think it's also important for people like yourself, and I think you do this admirably, to be able to communicate this in a way that can be understood and people can get up to speed because the law, I don't know how else to say this, the law is coming for you.
Right now.
I mean, the way that this thing is taking place, people are suddenly looking up and they're like, what do you mean my rights are being taken away?
And more of their rights are going to be taken away and more of their freedom and their liberty is actually going to be infringed upon because of what is taking place here.
I think you're absolutely right.
And I think I like the way you put it.
The law is coming for you.
The Supreme Court is coming for you.
It's coming for your rights.
And I think that sometimes lawyers, legal professionals like myself, we get buried under legalese and civil procedure and judicial philosophies and levels of scrutiny and precedence.
I think sometimes we hide behind them.
And often it's better to just shed those trappings and just look at the core of the case, to get back to basics, to cut through all the bullshit that lawyers and judges build up around their profession.
Right.
And American Crusade does just that.
You know, I avoid legal jargon and case names and even legal tests.
I wrote this book so that everyone can pick it up and understand the threat and see just how radical and dangerous these crusaders and these Supreme Court opinions Truly are.
Yeah and can you, you've used it a couple times, I think crusaders is actually the the exact right term and I was very glad that you got into A brief little thing that I had to research for my book, too, which is how the actual Crusades took place and what they did.
You know, it was about building up a religious fervor and story and then sending people out to carry out the whims of certain people.
Can you talk about who are the Crusaders and who are some of the main figures behind this?
And also, I think more importantly, which is something, unfortunately, I don't think a lot of people get into, what is the purpose behind this?
Like what, like the people who are carrying this out, the people who are actually attacking these precedents and ideas, what are they trying to do?
What is it that they're personally getting out of it?
And what are we seeing emerge from their own philosophies?
Absolutely.
So there is a network.
Of well-funded, powerful Christian nationalist organizations and judges.
It's basically a billion-dollar shadow network that is really working to weaponize the First Amendment, that's seeking to turn that protection of religious freedom enjoyed by all Into a weapon of supremacy and privilege for the few.
And this network of faithful and well-funded activist groups is who I call crusaders throughout the book.
And together with conservative justices on the Supreme Court, they've been waging this crusade to weaponize religious freedom.
And it is a war of conquest.
It's not of land, but they are looking to conquer our Constitution And to remake it in their image.
They are setting out to make America a Christian nation by warping religious freedom as an attempt to bring us all under their yoke, under their rule.
And, you know, I really do mean they are weaponizing religious freedom.
I mean, they are litigating the legal meaning of religious freedom as a constitutional right in case after case after case, and in the process, redefining that protection.
It'll melt your brain if you spend too long with it.
The Crusaders are groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty, First Liberty Institute, excuse me, First Liberty Institute and Liberty Council.
Their names are this Orwellian word salad that gets all mixed up.
It'll melt your brain if you spend too long with it.
It's terrible.
It really will.
And I tell the story of each of these groups and where they came from in the chapter where we first encounter them.
But also, not just these groups that are litigating it, because they're tied into Congress, and they're tied into the courts, and they're tied especially into Leonard Leo's Federalist Society and the other groups that he has orchestrated, right?
I mean, you've mentioned already the hostile takeover of the Supreme Court, and I think that's crucial to this story.
I tell the little vignette of a former employee of Leonard Leo's who said this about Leo's mission.
He figured out 20 years ago that conservatives had lost the culture.
Abortion, gay rights, contraception.
Conservatives didn't have a chance if public opinion prevailed, so they needed to stack the courts.
And that's what they did, but notice that, right, the anti-democratic admission and goal that's inherent in that quote, right?
If they didn't stack the court, the majority would rule.
Democracy would work.
So we have to figure out a way to subvert democracy.
And overall, Leo's groups spent $540 million packing the court from 2014 to 2020.
And this summer, just a couple months ago.
Oh, this is...
Yeah.
It's crazy, right?
So the news broke that Leo's new group had raised $1.6 billion.
That's a billion with a B. With a B. With a B. In one donation.
And that's more than a billion than he spent capturing the court.
And, you know, I mean, I actually I had to do an update for American Crusade already.
It's and it's available for free to people on the website so they get a chance to read it.
But you'll learn all about that in American Crusade.
You'll learn that Leo's job was described when it came to picking federal judges as, quote, the monitor of the nominee's ideological purity.
Just rolls off the tongue.
It doesn't sound upsetting at all, does it?
No, it really does.
Like, that's something I totally want to be happening for when we're talking about impartial jurists who are supposed to be deciding whether or not we have rights.
That sounds great to me, right?
And all told, we know, we know, we know that Leo is responsible for the confirmation of Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.
Thomas is an old friend of him.
There's Hopious videos of the two of them joking around on stage about how Leo is the third most powerful man in America.
So, and all six of those justices were members of the Federalists, or are members of the Federalist Society.
So that's six votes on the Supreme Court, and Leo personally chose five of them for their ideology, a crusader ideology.
And I think that's a really hard truth for a lot of people to swallow.
The conservative justices on this Supreme Court are crusaders.
Yeah, and Leonard Leo is one of those figures, you know, he's been on my radar for years, but it's not a name that you've heard until Roe v Wade got overturned, you know, like really out in the culture writ large, like, all of a sudden, it's like, how did this happen?
And then suddenly, you know, a couple of experts come forward and they say, hey, you need to know about Leonard Leo.
He was undoubtedly one of the most consequential figures in modern American history that, again, no one knows about.
He just got this recent in excess of a $1 billion donation, the money for the Federalist Society.
And I think this is important because on one hand, yes, we're talking about religion, but the religion part of it is sort of a cover over all of this.
Right?
It's sort of the story.
It's like the poor Christians who are being martyred, who are being persecuted.
They're not able to live their religious laws or principles because society is oppressing them.
But meanwhile, the reason he's getting this money is because these things are incredibly useful cudgels.
For going ahead and cutting out laws that the wealthy and the powerful don't want their regulations that they don't want their originalism in and of itself.
I mean, I can't even imagine what it must be like to be a lawyer, watching the Federalist Society do what it does, having to like, Even pretend that originalism is like an actual political or legal theory.
I'd love to hear what you have to say about that.
But all of this stuff, I mean, it's such an incredible bullshit cover for what's actually occurring.
Yeah, I mean, originalism is bullshit.
Oh, it's insane.
It completely is.
And you're right in a sense that the crusade is really... The crusade isn't... I talk about weaponizing religious freedom.
They want this weapon because it is powerful, because it cuts across every law.
It's the Trump card, the silver bullet, the golden ticket, you know, choose whichever metaphor you want.
It sounds a lot better than, let's go ahead and make sure that I can make more money.
Right?
They're coming for you.
They're coming for your guns.
They're coming for your family.
It's all the Christian persecuted mindset.
Absolutely.
And the point of it is that it trumps other rights, and this is the most important part, other people's rights, which is historically never what religious freedom meant.
And it's because it's part of the First Amendment.
That is where they are trying to graft it onto.
And the weapon's exclusive.
We think of, and historically religious freedom was, something that enshrines equality.
They think of it as theirs.
Right.
You can wield this weapon if you're the right kind of religion, if you're a conservative Christian.
And that gets to your question about, you know, why do we have this crusade?
Why are we seeing this?
And I think that is a crucial question.
And I also think it's Possibly a reason to have a little bit of hope in this moment.
I'll briefly answer what it's like to be a lawyer fighting in this environment.
I am not, right?
I've stopped litigating these cases.
I'm still a lawyer, but my job now is I'm not a litigator because there's no point in having these arguments in court.
That's the decision that I've arrived at.
I left the practice of law.
I still talk about it publicly.
I'm a legal communicator now.
But why the crusade?
The answer is, it is a backlash against equality realized.
So Christianity, especially conservative Christianity, was once able to discriminate on the basis of race, and now that's largely unthinkable.
Conservative Christianity was once able to legally subjugate half the population.
Not so now.
Christianity was once able to discriminate against LGBTQ people not so long ago, but now it's not.
And as more people realize the rights due to them by virtue of being human, the sphere of religious imposition shrinks.
And the crusade is out to reclaim that lost ground.
That is what this is really about.
And you know, you, I mean, you hit the nail on the head, right?
White Christian Americans are facing equality and they're acting like martyrs that are suffering for their faith.
They feel that these expansions violate their rights, but, but parity is not oppression.
So, you know, what they are really after is privilege and supremacy.
And I mean, I get into this really early in the book because it's absolutely crucial.
They feel threatened.
And there are all of these markers that we're seeing, you know, demographic markers.
You know, so in 2014, white Christians ceased being the majority in America.
Sometime in the 2040s, white people are no longer going to be the majority.
We had our first black president.
We now have a female black vice president.
The nuns, N-O-N-E-S, the rise of the non-religious we're seeing all over.
So they are feeling threatened.
And they are increasingly turning to anti-democratic, un-American, and unconstitutional means to reclaim that dominant status.
And perverting the hallowed constitutional protection of religious freedom has been their most successful one to date.
And I just have to say, too, because the organization that I work for is called Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
And it brings together people of all religions and of none to fight in the courts and in the legislatures and in the public square for freedom without favor and equality without exception.
And if you are like, if you're listening to us chat and are scared, I would really encourage you to go join Americans United at AU.org.
We are in this fight and building power and we're going to win in the long run.
It's going to be a long haul, but we're going to do it.
And you know, I say that as well.
Like, I understand, I get a little bit of a reputation for being a pessimistic, you know, prophet of doom, but I feel the same way.
And I feel, in part, that is also built on the fact that, and this is important to say this, there are Christians who recognize that this is bullshit.
Oh, absolutely.
There are Christian, I'm being contacted constantly by pastors and preachers who look up one day and suddenly they realize that their entire congregation has been Q-pilled to the gills.
And suddenly, Christian nationalism has like taken hold, you know, in their communities and they're starting to move into towards more extremism.
And I wanted to talk to you.
About this, because I enjoy having these conversations with the people who are swimming in this sphere that we're in.
I'm really glad that the threat of Christian nationalism just passed over.
I'm really glad that we don't have to worry about it, that it hasn't become a regular thing, that it hasn't taken over the Republican Party, and it hasn't become a dominant, not just religious, but a political and social force.
Aren't you relieved on that front?
I wish I could say the same.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm one of those sad people who... I mean, my first book, the subtitle is Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American, and it came out in 2019.
I'd been working on it for eight years, right?
So, like, I saw this nightmare coming for a long time.
You know, there's this moment after the book came out I was in Vegas at the Religion Newswriters Association conference.
And I was on a panel called Christian Nationalism in the Age of Trump, and I was speaking to religion reporters, a room full of like 250 of them.
And Catherine Stewart was on the panel with me, author of The Power Worshippers, fantastic book.
Jack Jenkins, who had done some early reporting on Christian nationalism and how Trump had kind of used it to tap into this passion of this electorate.
And I remember telling the room full of reporters that I said something like this, Christian nationalism is an existential threat to a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.
It was just crickets.
And, you know, I mean, these people are the experts in this area.
And, you know, since then, you know, pretty soon after the book came out, they ran out and tried to prove me right by assaulting the Capitol, trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election.
And to your point about many Christians standing up against Christian nationalism, that's absolutely correct.
You know, I partnered with the Baptist Joint Committee and Christians Against Christian Nationalism to Write a report with some of the leading experts in the country, including Catherine Stewart, Jamar Tisby, Anthea Butler, Andrew Whitehead, Sam Perry, documenting the role that Christian nationalism played in the January 6th insurrection.
And most of those authors are Christians who care about stopping Christian nationalism.
And some of them care about it because they feel like it's unchristian, but all of them care about it because it is Anti-democratic and fundamentally un-American and a threat to the republic and we have to face it down if or authoritarianism is here.
Yeah, I think Christian nationalism, and I, I've always felt very, I don't wanna say close to it, that sounds awful.
But I have, you know, because I was raised in a, in a, in like a proto-Christian nationalistic church.
And, you know, what it came down to, it's a message that I think, going back to the idea of law, like, law is something that is like, supposed to be very, very concrete in the measure of order in a society.
But in times of war and emergencies, it gets a little It gets a little movable, gets a little malleable.
All of a sudden, some civil liberties, some rights start to fall by the wayside.
You know, you find yourself in internment camps in California.
And in all of this, like the message behind it, and this goes to what we're talking about, The people who are crusading, the people who are adding the violence and the passion in this fight, they truly believe that there's an apocalyptic emergency.
They truly believe that gay people being able to get married and gay people even being able to live openly as gay people or trans people or, you know, even in some cases, and they would Have a hard time admitting this.
Even people of color having equal rights.
Women having equal rights.
That amounts to literally an apocalyptic emergency.
You have pissed off God, and you are leading towards an apocalypse that could destroy everybody.
And as a result, the law should be superseded.
Their rights should be superseded.
It's an emergency.
And all of the ingredients are there with Christian nationalism.
And that's the really frightening thing is it's not just the apocalyptic idea.
It's not just the notions of violence and emergency.
I mean, the movement is so well equipped to tap into the framework of people like myself, the people who grew up with that, the people who grew up in that cultural milieu of the 1980s and 90s.
I completely agree.
It is an existential threat.
And if this experiment falls apart, I think it'll be the vehicle that gets us there.
I think that's right.
I think that's right.
And I do still have hope that we'll survive.
But you're right.
And it's important, too, I think, for everybody to understand.
There have been previous waves of Christian nationalism throughout American history.
And I think you're identifying the beginning of this particular wave that's essentially crashing over the country right now.
You know, we had other waves in the 1950s, in the run-up to the Civil War, we had some, and I document some of those in the founding myth.
And to your larger point about the law, you know, one of the things that I really, that I have struggled with, and it's sort of been my come to Jesus, if you will, moment with my chosen profession, is
The law is not what we think of it as, you know, and really I try to say, I think I say this early in the book, that we have to unshackle our minds from the myth of the Supreme Court as a defender of the downtrodden, as a defender of minority rights, as an impartial arbiter of truth and justice, because the crusade depends on people believing this myth.
And Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump and Leonard Leo, as you already pointed out, they cheated and they stole and they packed the courts to put their collaborators in place, not because those collaborators would administer justice even handedly.
But because they wouldn't.
And historically, the Supreme Court has always been a deeply, deeply conservative body.
Really an agent of retrogression, not of change.
You know, I mean, there are a couple bright spots you can point to that are the exception that proves the rule, the Warren Court.
But really, this is the court of Plessy versus Ferguson.
And separate is equal, of Dred Scott and fugitive slave laws, of trying to suffocate the New Deal in its cradle, of gutting the power of the 14th Amendment that we won during the Civil War, of Japanese internment camps, of Muslim bans, of billionaires and corporations and political gerrymandering and vote suppression, and now of abolishing abortion and reproductive freedom.
They've been on the wrong side more than they've been on the right.
Absolutely.
And I think we have not We've not been taught that.
We've not been raised to think that.
And if you are a legal professional, I think that is a Kool-Aid we are served often.
In law school.
And my, you know, when we get, when I get to the solutions at the end of American Crusade, I find that the people who are most resistant to the obvious solution, which is expanding the Supreme Court, the people, they tend to be institutionalists, you know, lawyers, judges, law professors, who are most resistant to that idea because they've been, they've been drinking this Kool-Aid for so long.
So I remain optimistic as well.
I've got my own particular sort of reasons, historical trends and cycles and the way these things have played out.
I'd be interested because, and I'd love for you to touch on a little bit in terms of the solutions, but I also, the idea, because what you're saying is something that has been rattling around in my head for a while.
We're taught to treat the Supreme Court like it's a priest class.
Like, these are literal priests who are so pure of soul that they could never be biased whatsoever.
We were just talking on the taping of the podcast about John Roberts basically knocking on every door, begging people to see them as legitimate, you know, because that's where the power comes from.
What do you see playing out here?
What are the consequences of this obvious illegitimacy, but also like these trends, the cycles, all of this, the optimism for you, what does it look like?
How do you see this possibly playing out if things work out?
What, like, because I'm sorry, but we're going to see things rolled back.
We just are.
And I keep telling people, I'm optimistic that things are going to get hairy as hell for a while.
Yes, things are going to get worse before they get better.
And I will I will answer that.
But I am going to I am going to just take the opportunity to to be an iconoclast and go after that priestly cast for just a moment, because you're right, nothing more.
I mean, and John Roberts, I think, is a good example because a lot of people sort of see him as, you know, this moderate wrongly.
So as I point out in the book, you know, he he's also a crusader.
Right.
So when he was in the first Bush's Department of Justice alongside Ken Starr, He wrote briefs arguing that public schools can impose religion on children at graduation ceremonies, and that Christian Bible clubs can use public schools to organize.
When he was in the Reagan White House, he supported a constitutional amendment that would allow public schools to impose Christian prayer on school children.
Wait, Andrew, I'm not going to sit here on my podcast while you sit here and talk about good Republicans like Bush and Reagan.
I mean, this all started with Trump.
I don't I don't even know what to say at this point.
So listen to this.
OK, and this to me is the capper because we have a legal memo that Roberts wrote.
And this is a phrase from it.
We still have an uphill battle to return prayer to schools.
We battle return prayer to schools, right?
That is the language of a crusader.
Now, you can make the argument that he's just doing that because, you know, that was his job.
Go read it.
It does not read like that.
This reads like somebody who is a believer.
The idea of these justices, and some of them can shed it probably on important issues, but if you listen to them talk about how important religion is to everything, you'll also maybe understand why.
They can't do it there.
But, okay, why do I have hope?
So, there wins, the Christian Nationalists wins, the Crusaders wins, John Roberts wins, right?
In the abortion case, in the case of the praying coach that we saw, the coach imposing prayer on other people's kids, in all of the cases I detail in American Crusade, Their wins swell our ranks.
And that is creating an actual feedback loop that almost guarantees our victory.
Because remember, the whole reason they are waging this crusade in the first place is demographics.
So white Christian nationalists are working to privilege the chosen few.
Every legislative victory, every legal victory, they notch alienates more people, wakes more people up to the danger.
You don't put you don't put your chips all in on minoritarian institutions if you're planning on winning elections.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So I mean, and this is also why they're going after the Voting Rights Act and gerrymandering and all that, which I also get into the book, but you know, their power hungry aggression is effectively growing the opposition to their movement.
And, you know, I mean, They are crusading because we are working to meet those unmet promises in the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, right?
The self-evident truth that all are equal, that we the people means all the people.
Previous generations have failed to realize those aspirations and they've left it to their children to contend with human tragedies like slavery and segregation and the subjugation of women and discrimination against LGBTQ people and now the climate crisis.
But as we continue to march toward progress, Christian nationalists are fighting harder than ever against it.
They're not going to go gently.
They're going to rage, rage against the dying of their privilege, and they're going to do, as you pointed out, massive damage.
But we will win in the end, because they are fighting only for themselves.
And where they are selfish, we are selfless.
We are fighting for we the people.
And I mean, I really, so that's why I really do believe in the end that we're going to triumph.
I do caution people every time I give these talks, I get questions about, you know, Well, how can we fix it?
And people want this quick, easy solution.
They want the immediate gratification and none of the solutions to what we are facing are quick or easy.
You have got to adjust your expectations.
The Crusaders played a long game.
They captured the highest court in the land over the course of four decades.
Now that court is drunk on power.
We have to expect a very long fight to first win and then to heal the damage that they are causing.
And that means, above all, organizing and messaging in ways that build power.
And that's what I try to do with American Crusade.
And that's what Americans United for Separation of Church and State does every single day.
Well, and I think you've been incredibly successful.
The book is American Crusade, How the Supreme Court Weaponizes Religious Freedom.
An excellent, excellent book.
Again, could not be more timely to what's happening now.
We've been talking with Andrew L. Seidel, who is fantastic.
Where can good people find you, Andrew?
I'm Andrew L. Seidel on all of the social things.
AU.org is my organization.
Please, if you are interested in the book, please do pick up a copy.
Get it from your library.
My publisher hates when I say I don't care if you buy it, I just want you to read it.
For those of you who are like the bibliophiles out there like me, and you like have to have a signed copy, I actually partnered with one of the coolest local bookstores in the country, A Room of One's Own, and you can get signed copies.
They're shipping them out anywhere in the country.
So if you go to bit.ly slash signed AC, like signed American Crusade, signed AC, you can get a signed copy of the book for yourself or for the bibliophile in your network.
And I couldn't recommend the book enough for anybody who wants to understand how this has occurred, what is happening, but also wants something that is accessible.
I think that's a huge, huge feather in your hat that you were able to do that.
I know this is a hard thing to boil down, but excellent work and congratulations.
Thank you so much.
I really appreciate it, my friend.
Alright everybody, that was my conversation with Andrew Seidel.
I was really glad to be able to talk with Andrew about, just to get deep in the weeds about what the law is.
And that's like a weird thing, Nick.
I know that it's weird to say that, but like, it's gone from being something that we just sort of assumed was out there, and just sort of operated almost like it was a force of nature, But to really get into the political reality that this was meant to be a means of getting religion out of the public sphere for people to have their individual rights, at least to a certain degree, particularly through property.
But yeah, I think we've had to really reconsider what the law is, what the courts are, what law enforcement is, and I think that entire reconsideration is I think it's really good.
I think it was necessary and needed.
It's unfortunate, though, that we're in the middle of this political crisis to have that happen.
Well, it's also completely mind-numbing to figure that we have to follow laws that were written 200 years ago and have to somehow figure out what the language means since it's evolved so significantly since then.
That is what drives me nuts.
Yeah, exactly.
And it should drive you nuts.
I mean, basically what we're trying to do right now at this point is, and this is happening on the right, and this is happening with people who are questioning everything and looking for some sort of a positive change, right?
Some sort of a more egalitarian system.
Now is the time to have a bigger conversation about what the law should be or how it should work.
Or, you know, as Andrew made points in this, you know, we have to point out where the United States was aspirational and where it didn't meet those aspirations and how we can possibly sort of start to make strides towards that as opposed to going backwards.
And that's the problem is it's a legitimate struggle right now.
Like it's something that we're going to have to deal with and until we deal with it, until we get it figured out, things are not going to be great.
They're going to be...
They're going to be declining.
There's really no other way to put it.
Absolutely.
Well, Jared, I hope that you have a safe rest of your trip back from the... What's the town?
It's a Satan town, I suppose, to some people in our country.
It's Sin City.
By the way, real fast on that note, what's your gamble of choice?
Are you putting money down at a sports book?
Are you doing a roulette wheel?
What are you doing?
Are you a swash guy, Nick?
What's your deal?
Blackjack.
I do blackjack.
That's what I do.
It's some of the better odds.
But please don't do... the worst odds are craps, I think.
Is that the worst odds or roulette?
One of those is the worst.
Listen, I stay away from the games of chance.
I want to have at least a little bit of an opportunity for skill to take over.
I don't understand craps.
I don't know how people win craps.
I'm not going to do roulette.
The most I'm probably going to do is maybe a hand of poker and yeah, that's about it.
Otherwise, I don't want to go home in a barrel and suspenders.
That's a good idea.
And then stay away from Niagara Falls with that barrel and the suspenders.
Anyhow, we'll be back again on Thursday with our Patreon exclusive with a, you know, a short version on the normal podcast areas and then you can also go over there and subscribe at patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
What are you waiting for?
Definitely get over there with a great conversation and then we'll be back there and you'll be, I think, back in the studio with me at that point.
I will not sound terrible.
Here's the thing, Nick.
One, I will not sound terrible.
I will have a better mic.
I'm not going to be on my phone.
Apologies for terrible sound.
But number two, I'm looking for the cricket.
I just want to let people know, I'm looking for the cricket.
I'm going to get the cricket.
I'm going to remove the cricket.
I'm going to save the cricket.
But the cricket has to go.
Let's just be open about that.
It does.
It does.
Well, make that happen.
Be safe out there.
And as far as everybody else, if you need to get Jared first before Thursday, you can always find him on Twitter at JY Sexton.
And if you want to reach me, it is at CanYouHearMeSMH.
