Trump Purges Military Leaders And Angela Denker On The Radicalization Of White Men
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss another Friday Night Massacre by Donald Trump - this time by replacing the Joint Chiefs Of Staff with someone legally unqualified. Is this the administration's way of preparing for a coup? They also discuss the meteoric rise of Germany's Neo-Nazi AfD party and why their 2nd place finish is dangerous.
Jared then interviews Angela Denker, a pastor and author of DISCIPLES OF WHITE JESUS: The Radicalization of American Boyhood.
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Here, as always, with my friend, my co-host, my confidant, Nick Housman.
How are you doing, pal?
I'm doing well.
I'm doing well.
Another day, another Friday night news dump on our laps that we have to deal with.
Yeah, unfortunately, this crazy train never stops rolling.
We have a whole lot to get into, a lot of concerning stuff.
Also, at the end of this episode, I'm going to have an interview with Reverend Angela Dinker, whose new book, Disciples of White Jesus, The Radicalization of American Boyhood.
I think...
We all know that this is important.
I really hope people learn from this interview.
And there are things that we're going to talk about today that feed into it.
Also, a reminder, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Support the show.
Keep us editorially independent, ad-free, all that good stuff.
We appreciate your support and your faith.
These are weird times.
Nick, you spoke just a second ago about Friday night.
We had another so-called Friday night massacre.
The Trump administration carried out a military purge, including firing Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman C.Q. Brown Jr., Admiral Lisa Franchetti, who's the Chief of Naval Operations, and General James Slife, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff, not to mention a whole slew of officers and JAGs and you name it.
This thing just keeps getting worse.
You know, it also gets worse because it's some notion of DEI pushback.
You know, that's why they have to get rid of these people because they can clearly in their minds, they're not qualified.
But look who they're putting in place for all these other things.
Hegseth is in one example.
And, you know, for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, there is a legal definition for what your experience must be to hold this position of which the person that they're going to now appoint to does not have this experience.
No, that's Lieutenant General Dan Kane.
Chances are they're going to have to apply for a waiver to put in this position because he is completely unqualified and meets none of the expected qualifications.
Right.
And you know what?
I guess this waiver will happen because everything happens now, whatever they want the dear leader to have.
And, you know, listen, Kane has three stars, not four.
I don't know.
Is that a difference?
I mean, I'm sure there's a big difference between those two things.
Well, I mean, it sounds like there's a difference.
No, there's absolutely a difference.
This is a really concerning situation.
And we have a clip here from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who went on Fox to discuss what had actually happened.
And Nick, the wild thing in all of this, and I want people to think about this before this clip rolls, they have no...
No concern whatsoever about making it abundantly clear why they do the things they do.
This is Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth talking about why they got rid of all of these JAGs.
Branches.
For people who may not know, I mean, they give advice to the military about what is lawful and what isn't.
Not surprisingly, there's been some backlash to those who are worried about their removal.
One Georgetown law professor says this, Trump also firing the Army, Navy and Air Force Jags.
In some ways, that's even more chilling than firing the four stars.
It's what you do when you're planning to break the law.
You get rid of any lawyers who might try to slow you down.
Your response to her.
I don't know who Rosa is and what her hyperbole is all about.
Ultimately, we want lawyers who give sound constitutional advice and don't exist to attempt to be roadblocks to anything.
Anything that happens in their spots.
What we know about these T-Jags, they're called T-Jags inside the military.
Traditionally, they've been elected by each other or chosen by each other, which is exactly how it works often with the chairman as well.
Small group of insulated officers who perpetuate the status quo.
Well, guess what?
Status quo hasn't worked very well at the Pentagon.
It's time for fresh blood.
And there you have it, Nick, making it abundantly clear that what they're looking for are people within the military, whether or not it's at the level of Joint Chiefs of Staff or whether it's down at the JAG level, which is, I agree, the more concerning part of this.
They are currently looking for people who are not only going to play ball but are going to change the law on the whim to do whatever it is the Trump administration wants them to do and will not, as Hegseth says, create roadblocks along the way.
Well, here's the thing about this, is that those Jags who are in the military, I mean, if you're going to serve the military, I think that there's a little bit of a built-in, you know, notion of protecting the Constitution, I think, right?
Maybe more heightened just because it's a sacrifice you're doing voluntarily.
There's no more draft.
So, obviously, he's like, they get in the way, right?
These people, these lawyers and these insular little groups are getting in the way of what we want to do.
I mean, you can read a lot into that.
So the question then is, who would they possibly be able to find that would then simply be a rubber stamp for whatever they want to do?
I have to imagine it's all pointing to some version of when the election happens again and they refuse to hold elections and the army would have to step in, they will just step down.
And then no one will push back on that.
I don't know where they'd find these people.
I mean, I suppose, are you cynical enough to assume that they can find them?
I would say that they've already found them and this is one of the parts of the story that hasn't been reported or even talked about anywhere which is for the last four to six years These groups that have been planning Project 2025,
these constellations of think tanks and institutes that have put together the plan that we're currently seeing unfurling, Nick, they have been going around the country finding people within the military, within law enforcement, identifying which ones are familiar with their cause, which ones are friendly with their cause.
I have to assume that they have created an ideological map.
of people in this country who are willing to get on board with this.
And what you just brought up, I think, is what people need to pay attention to, which is we already know that they are interested in creating a structure in which if there is unrest, if there is pushback, and by the way, backlash is growing every single day.
Are they going to create a military and power structure that will go ahead and crush any type of dissent or carry out actions like taking Americans to black sites or taking them to El Salvador or taking them to Guantanamo Bay?
And a large thing that happens in situations that are coups, and let's continue to call this what it is, we're watching a coup take place in the United States of America.
The military is absolutely essential, Nick, because there's a moment of truth in which a regime that is taking power requires state power to carry out their wishes and break laws and hurt people and go ahead and herd people into camps or kill people and make examples out of them.
And one of the moments of truth is whether or not the military...
We'll carry out those actions, whether or not they're willing to pull the triggers.
And you see a lot of moments with coups and attempted revolutions where that is essentially what sort of like...
It creates the difference between it working and not working.
And these people have been putting in the hours and putting in the money and putting in the time to find the people who are not just going to say, this is legal, and you can write opinions all day long that talk about torture and taking people away and violating rights and carrying out domestic abuses.
They have found those people.
The question now is whether or not it will ripple down the ranks and how many people are going to make choices when the choices come due.
Right.
And the rippling down the ranks just tends to be, you know, you have to follow orders, and that's easy to find as you get lower and lower.
You know, they're in order to do something, they're going to do it.
So I suppose that's why it's so crucial at the top to figure out who they're going to put in.
Do you feel like this is a lot more about, like, a culture war that had been, they had started across the country, but also in the military, the woke military that's been destroyed?
Like, I'm trying to picture, like, the movie The Rock, where Marines take over The Rock because, and they think that they're the real patriots here because, you know, the military has gotten soft and they're not funding it the way they were.
Everything that Trump criticizes them for, is that where they're getting?
Is this the entry?
Well, one of the things that we've seen...
You have to pay attention to this stuff.
There's so much stuff that you have had to have paid attention to for decades.
There are groups within the military that have become aggressively more zealous and more and more radical.
We've seen pushback back and forth.
There are large parts of the military that are liberal.
There are large parts of the military that are libertarian.
There's a couple of people that you couldn't even quantify what their ideology is.
And then there are groups of people within the military.
We have organized crime units in this country.
You have special operations that are carrying out drug trafficking and murdering one another.
This is one of the things that barely clips up on the radar.
So you have internal stress within the military that's been going on for years.
And I know a lot of people have a stereotype that everybody in the military is necessarily right wing or they're all on board with this.
But that's what we're watching right now with this purge and what we have seen in the military over the last few years, including whether or not people who carry out war crimes should be held accountable or be pardoned by Donald Trump.
Those questions are now coming to a pass.
There's a reason why they're going after the military and why.
And we covered this a while back during the election.
You saw all these videos about the military going woke, right?
Or the DEI stuff.
All of that is a cover for the larger fight over power and influence within the military.
And that's the question.
We don't know who's going to be on what side of what whenever the rubber hits the road.
And you feel very strongly that this is what the endgame is.
The only reason why they'd be doing this is because they need to have control over the military to then violate the Constitution.
Well, it's partly the Constitution.
I think that's the larger question.
But we have a whole lot of other things on our plate now, Nick.
We have whether or not we're going to invade Mexico.
I mean, the CIA is stepping up operations around the border with cartels.
They've been purged themselves, and they're dealing with more stuff.
Is push going to come to shove in Greenland?
What's going to happen in Europe and the Pacific?
Basically, they're trying to remake not just the world order, which we'll talk about in a second, but who is the military who's going to be carrying this stuff out?
But I do think the major focus is what's going to happen if there's an actual resistance in this country?
And looking back to what happened during the BLM protest of 2020, the difference here is that they are now creating the military that they think will carry out their orders.
But I do think it's multifaceted, but I think it's largely focused on the domestic.
Fair enough.
Certainly, if it was our side, if it was some progressive left person in the White House who wants to take a...
A chopping block to all the different kind of things in the budget.
We would want the defense budget to be cut right away in a big way.
They're now talking about doing that.
The problem is with this background and this context, it kind of feels like they want to cut the defense budget a lot so they can get more control over it and make it more malleable to their ideology, ultimately.
To take over the country.
So that is concerning.
This is not happening in a vacuum.
Because otherwise you'd say, great, like, yeah, they're just streamlining and they're making things more efficient.
They're going to save us all money, right?
But the problem is with the kind of propaganda being spewed out of the White House every hour, there isn't a lot of other ways to look at this, I would suppose, than say there's an underlying motive here that's evil.
Well, speaking of underlying motives that are evil, we're recording this on Monday, February 24th, which is the third anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine.
And Nick, we've talked about what has been happening behind the scenes when it comes to Ukraine and obviously Donald Trump and his administration now siding with Russia and Vladimir Putin.
Over the weekend, a really disturbing development, again, that hasn't been paid attention enough to.
We have talked about the deal that Trump has put in front of Ukraine, which is basically blackmailing and shaking them down to the tune of half of their minerals and resources, possibly upwards of half a trillion dollars, basically to keep them from being destroyed by Russia.
We've now heard reports that they are now leveraging...
Elon Musk's Starlink system, which is one of the main communication and strategic tools in Ukraine, the idea that if they do not accept this, not only are they not going to get aid from the United States of America, but a private individual, in this case the person who's carrying out a large portion of the coup we're talking about, is going to get rid of the technological.
Support of Ukraine.
This is a major, major moment in which a state and a private individual who is currently taking over the state are now triangulating against a supposed ally.
Right.
And it seems like in the modern fighting theater we have now, having internet is like, you know, and fast internet is a huge asset you have to have if you want to prosecute a war like this, especially with the drones and the way they're able to control them over large areas.
We've already seen Musk fuck around with this stuff where they were planning a big attack that would have really crippled the...
He turned it off and basically decided to put his finger on the scales, which he shouldn't be able to do.
Now, from their point of view...
You know, we want a deal.
We want this war to end.
They're going to look at everything at their disposal.
This would be another tool to use for negotiations.
Now, of course, this is what a tool that Russia would be using for negotiations, not some third party who is trying to make this thing all right.
And that's the problem here, and it's completely transparent what they're trying to do.
So I would expect that Starlink will stop working for Ukraine within, you know, probably by the end of the month.
Yeah, I want to make three points on this before we move forward.
First things first, you brought up Elon Musk personally turning off Starlink to keep Ukraine from attacking Russia.
When we covered that story, I said there should be consequences from this.
The idea that one person in a private capacity could do this and basically taking away state power, that there should have been repercussions.
The Biden administration, and I said this earlier when it came not just to Ukraine and Russia, the fact that they should have brokered some sort of a peace and or taken advantage of a situation in which the tide had turned.
The Biden administration...
Did not react to this.
They didn't even really comment on it.
And number two, this is more further proof of why privatization is terrible.
You cannot create situations like this in which you go ahead and outsource different parts of state power.
It has created a situation where Elon Musk is not just the richest man in the world.
But essentially is now able to, on a whim, change the course of history and things at a state level.
The third thing I want to say very quickly.
We are in a new era now, Nick.
We have not just watched the American order start to change and shift.
And also, it weirdly looks a lot like what Alexander Dugan, who was the ideologue behind Vladimir Putin and the invasion of Ukraine in the first place, what he wanted to do.
We now live in a world.
In which the oligarchical class in the United States of America and Russia and around the world now have co-opted governments, the great powers of our time.
And we are now seeing a situation in which governments and their militaries and their diplomacy are all being used to extract resources and wealth from other nations.
This is a major, major sea change.
And this thing, it might seem like a little note from negotiations.
It's not just a shakedown.
This thing is an epoch.
This is a moment that we are going to need to remember for a very long time, the fact that we've gotten to this point, and everybody who created this situation should be ashamed of themselves.
Well, we've also gotten to the point now where the propaganda is so thick that they're trying to blame Ukraine for starting the war.
Yeah.
This is a concerted effort.
This is clearly from the top, from Putin.
The only source of information you're going to get on that is from Putin, from Russian propaganda, now being disseminated by all men of Republicans.
And I don't know if you know all the Sunday shows, all the shows from Friday on, it's turned.
It's like they've got the memo, and they're trying to now create this critical mass against Ukraine.
And we've seen it before where they're trying to make it seem like Zelensky is some dictator, which, again, the Constitution forbids an election during war, and that's not so.
And he even said over the weekend he would be more than happy to step down and not be president of Ukraine if we can get into NATO. Like, that was his thing.
Because they're not going to capitulate.
Ukrainians are tough people, and they've been fighting to a standstill with a huge power.
So they're not going to capitulate.
And I can just tell you right now, they're going to turn Starlink off, and then it'll be horrible for Ukraine.
I don't know how they can continue to fight without that.
But they will.
And at that point, I don't know what's going to happen short of they're going to have to just sort of, you know, Russia is going to become...
Just the monsters taking over the country.
It's a mess.
Speaking of messes, Nick, another piece of news.
This came out last night on Sunday.
And I got to tell you, you know, with everything the Trump administration does, there is a moment, much like Luca getting traded to the Lakers.
You have to wonder if this is some sort of a hoax, if you're hearing things correctly.
In a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump announced that right-wing podcaster and absolute shithead Dan Bongino.
is going to be the Deputy Director of the FBI. For people who, luckily, are not familiar with Dan Bongino, this is a former Secret Service member and New York City cop who has become a provocateur in right-wing media, first with the NRA, now doing his own thing.
This is a guy who regular comments on, quote, left-wing communist scum, and in his multiple tirades, talks about how you have to use power to wipe these people out, and you have to seize power in order to go after your enemy.
He is now going to be number two in an FBI that is already being run by another right-wing conspiracy theorist shithead.
So this is great news all the way around.
You know, another poster child for anti-steroids, if you ever saw one.
This culture sucks, man.
It's such an awful culture in general.
He's been on record.
He was the Secret Service under Obama.
And he's been on record saying that Obama was a good man and he was proud to serve that White House.
But as this happens, as the void of Rush Limbaugh was created by his death.
I suppose we call it death.
What is it called when you put him in the, hang him upside down in the coffin in the cave?
I don't know what you did to him after his soul left his body.
But nonetheless, there was a huge void, right?
And he was able to slide right into that and become, you know, basically the same version of Rush Limbaugh.
But what I think it is, and we talked about this before.
You know, Jared, you and I could kind of suddenly shift right and go way off the deep on that.
And we probably would be wealthy off of that.
You can make a lot of money.
Oh, the heel turn for the Muckrig podcast would be a huge boon for our wealth.
And not just would they love us because we turned our back on all of that stuff.
We've covered it before.
The amount of, like, invisible money that is being paid not just by right-wing billionaires in the United States of America, but through Russia and around the world with the authoritarians.
The vacuum you talked about is one of the most lucrative vacuums.
We don't know who pays these people's salaries.
We don't know who takes care of them, keeps them afloat.
And meanwhile, they are the people who have been willing to go along with this stuff, and now they're being installed in places of vacuum.
And it's probably even more lucrative for some people like us who have, we've been all the way to the other side and then we like saw the light and that they love that, right?
You know, we're not quite the exact demographic.
They love people of color.
They love minorities.
They love anybody who's gay who like suddenly becomes really right wing.
Like that's, they love that because it sort of somehow proves that maybe they're not homophobic.
They're not racist.
They're not all these things.
But I think, I think a shiny penny would be coming our way if we did that.
And it just reeks of that's what Bongino did.
I don't know who his name is.
And it just kept getting more and more...
As it built, he was encouraged more and more to go farther and farther.
And the shit he said about the election from 2020 and how that was rigged, I mean, it really got on Trump's radar as a Fox contributor.
And that's another...
Just add him to the other list.
Yeah, and him and Patel, I mean, just an absolute poisonous duo.
We now have at the Federal Bureau of Investigations the most conspiracy theory-addled, shallow thinkers that you could ever imagine.
And not just that, they're vindictive.
Both of these people have said multiple times and have been quite open about it that they want to use state power to go after their enemies.
The moment that Kash Patel, and I still can't believe this man got confirmed in the United States of America to head the FBI, the moment that he got installed and now that Bongino is going in there after him, the level of threat that we're facing is through the roof at this point.
These are two of the people that you would not want anywhere near an apparatus like the FBI, but alas, here we are.
I've just been thinking about the Republicans and how they voted for Kash Patel because, you know, it's like once they realize he had just enough votes, it's almost like they all get together, the Republicans, and say, all right, who are the two who get to pretend like they were against this?
We'll make it, you know, oh, I want this.
This is my turn to, like, vote against him even though I know it's going to pass.
These fucking cowards.
Cowards.
It's going to be – the weaponization is going to be horrible, awful.
We should be a little bit concerned, I think, Jared, at some point for the things that we say on this podcast and how that might come back together.
I'm serious.
Oh, I know.
For the past 10 years that I've been saying what I've been saying, I knew at some point or another we might reach a moment like that.
I don't think that's exaggeration.
No.
Right.
But I think, luckily, we're going to be lower down.
I think people doing podcasts, even the media, are lower down.
Their targets are going to be much bigger targets that are going to be weaponized to attack them under the guise of getting back at what they did with Trump, who had gone through the whole process and had an expensive counsel.
He had a great defense team and still lost and was convicted.
But in their mind, it was all rigged and a sham, and they're going to now make it a sham.
I'll give them grist to make shit up, you know, and do all the things that they thought was happening to them when it wasn't.
There was never any evidence.
Now we got to be really concerned that they're going to start to formulate evidence and plant shit and do all sorts of horrible stuff.
Yeah, just a reminder to listeners, double-check, triple-check, quadruple-check your digital security, keep your nose clean, all that good stuff.
In another concerning matter, Nick, in a weekend election in Germany, the government has been handed over to the Conservative Party, which won.
Friedrich Merz is going to be the new chancellor, but we also saw Alternative for Deutschland, the neo-Nazi far-right party.
They doubled their support and actually took second in the election.
This is a seismic change.
I wish I could say that I'm surprised by this.
I have more thoughts on it and also some data from it that I think that we can learn from.
But Nick, what was your immediate reaction?
I mean, staving off catastrophe for the moment is something I guess we could celebrate.
The fact that conservatives can keep control.
But there is a pattern here that we've seen.
And I think what it sounds to me like is that enough...
Anti-Nazi laws over enough time somehow engender the kind of ill will from the grassroots people in Germany, especially out in the, away from the cities, that, you know, the resentfulness of this.
And it's parallel to what's going on here, where, again, the Arsler, you know, have you seen that now?
The Arsler?
Have I? You can't get away from it.
You know, and I said this on Twitter the other day, where it's like, this is just the path they're taking to get to the N-word, right?
Like, they just want to be able to say what they want to say.
We saw, by the way, and just to quickly take a diversion, J.D. Vance trying to, you know, cry about how men can't have beers together and joke anymore.
And it's like, where do they think, how do they get to the point where anybody would have said, no, you can't be sitting around joking, having beers, watching the game.
Like, that's the culture war they've been trying to do.
They're coming for your hamburgers, Nick.
What's that?
They're coming for your hamburgers.
Yeah, right.
And your stoves.
So, you know, there's a similar parallel here in Germany, but it's worse because in Germany, it is much more restrictive in terms of what you can and can't say.
For good reason, by the way.
And so all I can surmise from this is that that's the pushback, is that they're upset that they can't, you know, have these thoughts, say these things, these Nazi-leaning things out in public, and they're pushing back against that under the guise of free speech.
And it's got to be a populist, popular, you know, platform, and that's where we are.
And you have to, again, will it continue to grow?
That's what the fear is.
It will continue to grow, and the reason it will continue to grow is because neoliberalism continues to fail, and people turn away from it, and it's moving down the path the United States is going to.
I've been seeing people saying, well, it's a great thing that the conservatives won this.
Like, it shows the system worked.
No, that's not how this works.
Not at all.
The AFD doubled their support.
They are now the second leading party in Germany.
What happened here, the firewall that we talked about, I think it was in the last episode or the episode before, it got violated because the conservatives decided to work with AFD in order to gain the power that they now have.
And why did they do it?
For law and order and immigration, but actually to make the wealthy more powerful.
So this is what occurs, Nick.
It's what happened in the United States of America.
Neoliberalism fails, liberals continue to defend it, and the right wing gives the alternative, and people start flocking to it, and the conservatives work with it until they're overtaken by the far right.
The numbers, though, are really, really important in this.
The demographics, and we're going to go to the Angela Dinker interview here in a minute, and I want people to keep that in mind.
Nick, the men in Germany...
They went, not just for the conservatives, but overwhelmingly they went for Alternative for Deutschland, the neo-Nazi far-right group.
You know where women went?
They did go to the Social Democrats, but they went further and further to Die Linke, the left.
They saw gains in all of this.
And Die Linke, their entire campaign, these were the issues that they focused on, Nick.
Housing, rent, cost, and opposition to the neo-Nazi group.
That was the winning recipe to start moving people away from the liberals and start moving people more and more towards the left.
This is the recipe.
It's the secret sauce.
Will the Democratic Party learn that?
I have my doubts about how they're presently constituted.
But what we've now seen in Germany is exactly what I've been telling people for years, which is the more that you cling to neoliberalism, the more that the conservatives and the far right are going to gain power, and then the conservatives are going to give way to the far right, which is what we've seen take place in the United States of America, and which is now happening in Germany, Great Britain, and France.
All of the major Western democracies, so-called, all of the allies, you name it.
This is a disease that will continue to get worse until it finally gets addressed.
And then you add the added pressure of the threat of the U.S. backing out of NATO and not having their back anymore, too, which could then foment even more of that uprising here.
I think, you know, like you said, people could rest on their laurels and think that, thank God the conservatives won this race.
It's a lot like what happened in 2020 here, right?
We all said, oh, Biden won.
Thank goodness we're done.
And what they didn't realize was that Trump increased his electorate in that 2020 election.
And guess what?
What was the big thing that Trump said about the election in 2020?
Well, it was stolen.
Guess what they're going to say now in this one?
Oh, well, Nick, what makes it even worse is at least in 2020, the Democrats were in power.
Now you're going to have the conservatives in power in Germany, and they're saying they're going to create a coalition government with the Social Democrats.
They've already shown a willingness to work with an alternative for Deutschland.
And we're always going to be one, like, terror attack or one immigration crisis away from them going full bore.
This will not stop on its own.
Period.
It's the same thing as the United States of America.
It's the same thing for all these liberal democracies.
It is going to get worse until there is an actual alternative that's being given.
Right.
And just so I'm clear, they already have now started saying that the election was so on, ballots are missing, they weren't counted, the whole thing.
And that doesn't have to be anything that will have an effect on this election that just happened.
This is the beginning of getting the groundswell support going forward.
It's a very, you know, enticing argument, which is what we saw in 2020 all the way through.
That's what helped them grow their electorate here, was that lie about the 2020 election.
They had no intention.
They had no way of proving it.
They were never going to win anything in court, but they were able to do the court of public opinion, and that's what grew it to 2024. I just want to throw one more thing on here before we get to the interview with Angela Denker, Nick, which is, does the CIA in America have a history of working with right-wing groups in order to give them power and purchase over countries?
Sure.
Oh, okay.
So maybe a CIA that's been purged in the United States of America and has been replaced with Trump loyalist and far-right ideologues.
Is there maybe a possibility that much like Russia has been interfering in elections and political environments over time, is there a possibility the United States of America will start doing that?
And have we seen our own vice president and also the richest man in the world who's carrying out a coup with the government?
Is there a possibility that we might start seeing that put a thumb on the scale?
A distinct possibility.
Okay, cool.
All right, everybody, we're going to go now to an interview with Reverend Angela Dinker talking about Disciples of White Jesus, the radicalization of American boyhood, and why we need to keep an eye on white men who are increasingly becoming more and more authoritarian.
Hey, everybody.
As promised, one of our all-time favorite guests, Reverend Angela Denker, is the author of Red State Christians and her new book, Disciples of White Jesus, The Radicalization of American Boyhood.
Angela, your books have been incredibly important in this time.
I was so happy when I heard not just that you had a new book coming out, but particularly this book, I think, that is touching on something that has been...
People talk about it a little bit.
They sit with it a little bit.
It ends up anecdotally in certain articles and analysis.
But I think the deep dive that you've done here, Disciples of White Jesus, I think is essential in understanding what's going on.
Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Glad to be back.
Okay, so I have a quote here, and I've been sitting with it.
For a while.
You're a very good writer, and I thought the way that you put this was fundamentally true and important.
You say in this book, quote, something unsavory is happening among men and boys in America.
That is both essential, true, and also an understatement that you then go into for the rest of your book.
Can you just go ahead and speak a little bit about the thesis of Disciples of White Jesus?
Yeah, thanks.
That word unsavory felt really important to me because it gets at this sense of, it's almost distasteful.
And I think it's that distaste that makes people hesitant to really talk about what's going on.
But I think for me, the through line in all of my work and from Red State Christians looking at Christian nationalism on the national level to Disciples of White Jesus, the through line is that I'm approaching it with this deep sense of love for my Subject matter and for the people and the stories that I'm covering.
So like when I was covering conservative, nationalistic Christianity and its rise, now that I'm looking at men and boys, I'm coming to it as, you know, mom of two boys, married to a man.
I'm surrounded in my work as a pastor, in my work as a sports writer by men.
And what I really want to do in this book is to...
To use a both approach to a topic that typically only gets addressed from one end or the other.
And this idea of something unsavory happening for boys and men, it gets at that sense of both.
That boys and men are dangerous.
That they do, white boys and men specifically.
Commit the majority of mass shootings, but they're also at the highest risk for suicide.
And so we have this dualistic sense of both danger directed out and danger within.
And as you say, this is sort of an anecdotal whisper conversation that I hear happening Among moms and dads and teachers and coaches and pastors.
And this isn't just happening at a Turning Point USA conference or at young Republicans gathering in rural America.
This is happening in very highly educated, privileged...
Affluent spaces and parents and teachers and coaches and pastors are surprised at what's going on.
And they're looking for a way to both help and also to address the danger that's being posed by young men and boys.
Yeah, and the way that you're talking about that, and I think one of the reasons why I found this book to be so vital is...
We have a very large problem.
I know I'm not surprising you or anyone listening to this.
We have a very large authoritarian problem in this country that is both anti-democratic but also misogynistic and deeply, deeply patriarchal and disrespectful.
And as we're watching it take place, we're watching on the national level.
The people doing the damage are acting in the most disgusting manner imaginable, right?
They're treating people with disrespect.
They're committing gleeful cruelty.
And meanwhile, they are relying on a base of young men.
And people reach out all the time and ask me because I wrote about masculinity.
They're like, what happened with men?
Why are they getting involved in this?
And there's this idea that it started at the top and then went down.
But it's actually top down down to the top.
It goes back and forth.
And I think that there has been, especially in the past decade or so, especially, and it's been going on for a while, we've seen this great toxic stew that has started to boil, more or less.
And it's affected our politics.
And I think a lot of people miss...
the larger point in this, that this is a white male-driven movement that is both powered by it, but is also powered by almost inspiring and rewarding the absolute worst instincts but is also powered by almost inspiring and rewarding the absolute worst instincts and worst behaviors of what could happen, especially in And I feel like analysis continually misses that,
And meanwhile, it seems like one of the most obvious things in the world at this point.
Well, they're working really hard to distract from that key point.
They're working really hard on a media level, on a propaganda level, on social media, on YouTube to sort of obscure that.
And one of the ways they're doing it is sort of using elements of DEI against itself.
So they're platforming anyone who is not explicitly a white man of privilege to release these messages.
So they're using women.
They're using people of color.
And it becomes this sort of circular conversation where you never get to the meat of what's really going on because you're constantly having to defend that, no, like, So like you said, this is predominantly a movement driven by privileged white men.
And I will say, you know, white men who are also using the fundamentalist Christian movement to gain power, to gain wealth.
The religion of it is all in the center of it.
But it becomes, again, really, we have to talk about the media angle of it because they're saying something to convey its very opposite.
I always go back to George Orwell's War is Peace.
And so it becomes this confusing, circular conversation.
But at the heart of it, and what I don't want to miss, too, you know, I think it becomes hard sometimes in progressive circles to talk about the fallout among men themselves and among boys and men themselves.
Because, of course, for me, as a woman, as a feminist, I want to, you know, prioritize the harm that's caused to women by things like sexual abuse, by racism to Black people.
But I also...
I think that we're not going to ever get to the solution if we don't look at the ruined men and boys who've been impacted by this movement.
And I think you can put Donald Trump and Elon Musk on that list.
These are not happy, well-adjusted men who are thriving in their relationships.
So I think we have to really look at what the endgame is for the men and boys themselves who are embroiled in these movements and what their lives and relationships really look like.
You know, that reminds me, and as you were saying that, I got a little bit of a chill thinking about it.
Like, after my book on masculinity came out, I had a lot of people reach out to me.
A lot of mothers, right?
A lot of mothers, a lot of daughters, a lot of partners of people.
And the mothers especially, they said to me, I don't know how to raise a good boy in this environment.
I don't know how to raise a boy to a man in this environment.
And I'm talking specifically about the social movements around Me Too.
And how do I necessarily raise a boy to be a good man?
And also who are going to be the leaders who are going to help with that that are going to be good examples?
And, you know, now looking back on it, where we are now, it is abundantly clear that the quote-unquote leaders that were going to show them how to be a man were the toxic individuals within the manosphere.
It was Elon Musk.
It was Donald Trump.
It was really it really hinged on a bunch of people who took advantage of insecurity and fear and self-doubt in young white men and saw the opportunity to not just make a ton of money off of them.
Everyone from Andrew Tate to, you know, all the supplemental businesses and pickup artists and you name it.
Major pastors.
Exactly.
And so I couldn't even begin to imagine how much money was made off of those appeals.
But it was almost inevitable, the fact that we didn't...
We didn't have a cultural conversation about that, that what you just brought up about the other side of these behaviors, that that wasn't really discussed, that it left a vacuum that allowed fascistic, authoritarian, white supremacist, nationalistic, you know, evil forces to start sweeping in and take advantage of this.
And quite frankly...
It created its own socio-political echo chamber that if we're going to get past this thing, it's going to have to get broken.
Well, and I think what I loved about your work around masculinity and where it contributed to my book is that you were really clear about, you know, which shouldn't be a controversial statement, but that it's okay to have empathy for how young boys and men are doing.
And it's okay to want to nurture empathy in this population.
And that doesn't mean that you are a misogynist.
But if you, I think if we don't do that, if we just say, well, boys and men have to get over it, that's kind of the same messaging that they're getting from the manosphere.
So cultivating this space for empathy, which for me is really connected to my work in faith and my work as a pastor and my belief in the way of Jesus.
Cultivating that space, I think, is the beginning for a lot of this.
And I think that's really central to the stories that I lift up in my book.
I do believe that opening a way to empathy through story and through stories of men and boys and men and boys who've made different choices than going headlong into these misogynistic spaces, into these nationalistic spaces.
That's a really beautiful story and there are stories out there like that that we need to lift up.
Well, I want to talk about the religious element of this because I think you're all over it and I think you're dead on.
When I was doing research on the move into liberal democracy, the move away from sort of monarchical structures that were backed by a religious sort of world controlling element, one of the things that I started to notice was that there were extremist elements within Christianity and certainly other major world religions.
That we're at the periphery, that we're constantly telling men, specifically white men, that what was rightfully theirs had been taken away, that there had been a conspiracy against them.
And of course, there's all kinds of interlocking conspiracies.
The idea that, you know, Jewish cabals were taking away the rightful place of the patriarch at the head of the table and the head of the household and the head of the country.
And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about something.
Yeah, I remember when I first started working on this book, I would have people come, because the title was originally something different, and people would come to me and say, When they heard I was writing about white boys and men, they said, well, are you going to talk about white Jesus?
And this was from people who weren't Christians, weren't churchgoers, but had the sense that this idea and this construct of white Jesus was central to the conversation around masculinity in America.
And we saw white Jesus predominantly on social media.
We saw it in news stories.
When Donald Trump was in court, and there were lots of images being produced of Trump sitting in court with Jesus sort of on his shoulder.
And not just any Jesus, you know, not the historical Middle Eastern, dark skin, dark hair Jesus, but a Jesus who instead looks much more Northern European, a blonde Jesus.
This is the same Jesus that many of us, including me, White Christians grew up with in our churches, in our religious iconography.
And the scary part of, well, maybe not scary, but the humbling part about all of this is that part of this work of detaching from white Jesus involves sort of looking in the mirror and realizing for many of us, certainly for me as a blonde, white, Scandinavian American, that Jesus didn't look like me.
And I think, as a woman, of course, I knew that on some level for most of my life.
But for a lot of young white Christian men and boys, that sense that, well, Jesus looks like me, Jesus is there for me, is sort of a background-held belief for a long time.
And it becomes central to a sort of Christian identity, that Jesus is for me.
As a white American man.
And so any truth that challenges that idea challenges one's identity, one's sense of power.
And we've seen through the Me Too movement, through clergy sexual abuse movements, even through, you know, movements like civil rights and the women's movement, that notion that God is for me.
Certainly in a civil rights movement that was led by Black.
And we've seen those around Trump today and in the lead up to sort of the conservative Christian takeover of the Republican Party that began in the 80s, we saw a pushback against that message and a reclaiming of, no, Jesus has to be white.
I certainly hear that in pushback in religious circles of when churches want to say, well, we have slaveholders in our stained glass and we want to take down their images.
There's this sense that if we detach the idea that Jesus is a white American, we lose our entire faith.
And it's really central to, you know, you see this religious affectation for Trump, specifically among white Christians, specifically among white men.
And it's tied directly to this idea.
That Jesus is actually a white American man.
And what I started to see in the lead up to the election, especially, is that it became less about Jesus being white and it really became almost more like Trump himself was merging with Jesus.
And we started to see imagery of Trump as savior and language around Trump as savior.
Trump is saving us.
Protected by God from an assassination.
Oh, that...
Was huge.
Yes.
Huge.
And the media, including, you know, traditional media, certainly played into that narrative around the assassination.
But so we saw, and I said this to audiences leading up to the election, we saw white Jesus being obscured by Trump himself and Trump really moving into that central place in American salvific ideology.
Yeah, and, you know, that was something I had a really hard time explaining to people at that time, and especially, you know, going back a decade ago whenever MAGA first emerged, you know, a lot of the people who cover this stuff...
Maybe they're – I would say religious.
I don't want to question their faith, but it's very much a lot of cultural sort of social circles type of thing.
Like they're culturally Christian or culturally Catholic.
And I tried to explain for a while that there are different pockets of religion for people.
Religion can be a way of organizing your life and making yourself a better person, obviously.
Obviously, and you talk about this in the book, the idea of Jesus Christ being a kind sort of figure that cares about the downtrodden, right, and practices empathy, versus what it has become, which is a muscular, conquering warrior, right?
And the stories that are told in this regard, they have more power than, you know, the price And they merge with that and they sort of take over.
And what I realized very quickly when I started to see Christian nationalism on the rise, and then I started paying attention to people like J.D. Vance and Steve Bannon converting to Catholicism and starting to push against the Pope.
And all of a sudden you start to see all these elements coming together.
You start to realize the story is what gives permission.
The idea that you don't have to pay attention to elections, you don't have to pay attention to constitutions, you don't have to pay attention to people's rights and protections and liberties because you have God on your side.
And if you have God on your side, what you're actually dealing with is a situation where, just to paraphrase the current president of the United States of America, he who saves the country breaks no laws, right?
And so what we've actually seen, it is a heresy that actually has been repeated over and over again in other authoritarian regimes that have trampled rights and taken over countries and caused untold amounts of damage.
And what actually occurs is that the political movement comes to merge with the religion and use it to influence people and gain support.
And over time, what actually occurs, because it's very cult-like, it always works with the same dynamics of a cult, eventually the leader...
It merges with the religious figure and eventually overtakes and overshadows the religious figure.
And I think that's one of the things that we've seen take place over the past few years.
Yes, yes.
And you're definitely seeing it with, I see it with the rhetoric in megachurches themselves, in Christian movements themselves.
I was just talking to a pastor friend of mine who was at the National Prayer Breakfast, and he said, you know, the lead up to it was pretty normal.
You've got a lot of sort of...
What Martin Luther King Jr. would have called sort of the white moderates, Christians, people who are not going to be espousing Christian nationalist rhetoric, people who were probably late to join the Trump movement.
But he said when Trump took the stage at the National Prayer Breakfast, the first time president's been there in four years, the place erupted.
And it was all these people who he had been talking to for the last few days that he thought were sort of mainstream white Christians, you know, doing charity type work.
But when Trump came on that stage, he took on the mantle of savior.
And I do think that it's deeply tied to these assassination attempts and the media coverage of it, which again is really central to this whole narrative and this inability of traditional media organizations to see the religious power which again is really central to this whole narrative and this inability of traditional There's just been such an inability to capture it.
As you said, you know, this is a more powerful argument than the price of eggs.
And Democrats have just been so unwilling to really address it or talk about it.
Yeah.
And I think just on that note, when it comes to the politics of it, I don't actually think that the Democratic Party understands any of this.
I, you know, the.
When it comes to the division in the country, whether it's geographical, socioeconomic, or even just the realities that they live, I do think one of the reasons why the culture of so-called middle America, where we're from and what we see and what we experience, I think it feels so alien that the idea that any of these narratives could catch hold, that they could actually motivate people, you know, I see all the time, you know.
Donald Trump is a buffoon.
He is a clown and he is transparent.
If you know what you're looking for, you see it.
It's right there.
But I really don't think that they understand that there are a lot of people that the things that we're talking about are part of their everyday lives and existences and reality.
And they have been searching for this.
And not just have they been searching for it.
They've been told by leaders.
And so, as a result...
All of a sudden this comes along and you have a complete and utter crook who's happy to capitalize on it, an entire media structure that's happy to profit off of it and trumpet it.
Eventually at some point it does take hold unless you're able to explain it and go after it, but it doesn't seem like the Democratic Party has even the beginnings of an understanding of what's happening with this.
Well, and the religious teaching of it is such a key piece.
You know, when you talk about how people have been brought up in these ideas, you know, the teaching of an authoritarian God in American churches, the idea that the Christian God is an authoritarian, white-bearded man, you know, that is still the concept that the majority of people were raised with.
And I think even though we have, you know, historic numbers of folks not going to church, And that sense of...
Allegiance to authoritarianism, both first from God and then as I sort of impact in my book, how Jesus becomes this militant male figure really in the 90s, 2000s, pastors like Mark Driscoll.
There's so much groundwork that's been laid for this movement that's invisible to a lot of the leadership and power brokers in media and politics in our country, but that you and I know really well.
That laid the groundwork for this.
It didn't come just out of the ether where people are like, oh, all of a sudden we like Trump.
It was a groundwork laying of authoritarian male leadership as a pushback.
And as you write about really powerfully in your books, too, as a response to a working class, middle class betrayal financially and economically of a lot of people in this country.
Yeah, and I mean, that's the other part.
If you haven't been within it, you don't understand that the churches that we're discussing that laid this foundation, it wasn't just within the building.
It was within the community.
It was within the families.
So a lot of the people who are both leading this movement and profiting off of this movement, but the ones who are currently being drawn into it, this is what they have experienced their entire lives.
It makes me feel nauseous to even talk about it, but it's like when Tucker Carlson, of course, gave us a couple of speeches where he was like, Daddy's home and you've been a very bad girl, right?
And really there are elements here.
Of deep, deep-rooted trauma, family dynamics, communal dynamics, abuse that has happened within these authoritarian churches and within these authoritarian communities, that it's natural for them to start transferring that allegiance and that belief over to a person who, Although he is foreign to this stuff, Donald Trump, you know, any sort of relationship he had with Christianity was power of positive thinking, Norman Vincent Peale stuff.
But what we're actually talking about is someone who's more than willing to say the things, behave the same ways.
And he has all of the people that we've been discussing who laid the foundation in the first place to go ahead and vouch for him because they're in a reciprocal relationship.
So you have individuals that are primed and programmed, and it's all that they've basically known that this has come forward.
And it looks like their communities, their families have now more or less taken over the country.
And in a way they have, but it's being done for this authoritarian sort of grift.
It's a really strange connection that I don't think most people know how to wrap their heads around.
No, not at all.
And as people who've been covering it for many, many years now, it does get tiresome.
That's a way to put it.
It does get tiresome.
Well, I wanted to ask you one last thing before we got out of here.
Something you wrote in here struck me as correct as we're looking for solutions.
And as we're talking about that sort of abuse and trauma that is at the root of this, and you put it in a very succinct way, and this is something I've been working on trying to communicate, but I thought you nailed it.
You had said that Christianity offers strength outside of the individual.
When in fact what they need to look for is strength inside.
A sort of almost like a healing of the self.
And what we know is that this is buttressed and founded on a lot of insecurity.
Male insecurity that if you know what to look for, you see it every time Musk or Trump or any of these people open their mouths.
We know that these are deeply, deeply fragile, wounded, insecure people.
Can you talk a little bit about that concept?
Because I think it's integral to anything that's going to amount to an actual resistance to this thing.
Yeah, I do think that's so central and not talked enough.
And I do.
I mean, I... There is that mom part of me that when I see Donald Trump acting sometimes, I feel like, oh, this is a wounded little boy.
But it's a wounded little boy with the nuclear codes.
So I want to share a story about my husband recently that I think captures sort of what's going on for me like that.
You know, my husband grew up in Missouri from a conservative family.
You know, very, his parents were the...
First generation college graduates.
He now works as an engineer.
He recently was doing one of those, you know, corporate work studies of tells you what kind of leader you are in a corporate space.
And he was talking about the answers he had given.
And there were questions on there, again, about empathy and about how you interact with others.
And I've known my husband for a long time.
We started dating when I was 19. He's a feeler.
He is someone who really has deep empathy for others.
He coaches, you know, little boys basketball, and he's constantly worried about which boys are getting to play and if they're not playing enough and how they're doing internally.
And I see it with, you know, his co-workers and these younger men who he's mentoring, and if they're having mental health struggles, I see how deeply it affects him on a feeling level.
But he tells me, he took this test, and he says, yeah, I said I don't have any empathy.
Like, over and over again, every time he's responding, no, I don't have any empathy.
No, I'm not affected by how other people feel.
And I think we've taught boys this for a very long time, that it is weak to care how others feel, when the reality is...
They're human beings.
Many of them feel just as deeply, if not more than girls in some cases, you know.
But they have this sense that if I show that, if I show that I care about others, or if I'm affected by how others are doing, then I'm now weak and I'm vulnerable.
And so we have a bunch of men and boys who are internally conflicted about their own identity.
And constantly on guard against anyone seeing their real identity.
That is a toxic stew recipe for authoritarianism to take hold.
It's a toxic stew recipe for being manipulated and being brought into grifts and being convinced to sign up to follow.
Authoritarian leaders, whether it be pastors, whether it be corporate leaders, whether it be.
And what I see instead is this opportunity when I was able to sort of talk to my husband about this and he was able to see, oh, some of this empathy is a strength.
Some of it affects the way I coach, the way I work in the workplace, the way I am in my relationship.
I mean, I told him we would not be married if you had no empathy.
But I think it really starts with helping boys and young teenagers to really be able to see themselves clearly and to pour some energy into that identity foundation and being able to see who they are and be okay with it.
You wrote about that in your books, in your relationship with your dad, that there was this thing that broke open when you were able to see who you are and be okay with it.
So I do think there is a lot of that work to be done.
And that work to be done does start with who I think a lot of my audience is going to be, you know, white moms of boys.
And how do we do this with our boys?
And how do we not go to that place of, well, you should be okay.
You shouldn't cry.
You shouldn't.
I do think a lot of it starts in parenting, in the home, in coaching, in school.
Schools are a huge place where this needs to happen.
And that is pointing to these stories of men who've chosen otherwise.
The book is Disciples of White Jesus, The Radicalization of American Boyhood.
Angela, you are the absolute best.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough.
Can you tell the good people where to find you?
Yes, I'm on Substack, so just Angela Denker.
I'm listening.
That's a great place to keep up with me.
I'm posting there all the time on news, on Bible, on what's happening in Christian nationalism.
I'm also over on Blue Sky, and you can find my columns in the Minnesota Star Tribune.
All right, everybody.
That was Reverend Angela Dinker.
Again, the book is Disciples of White Jesus, The Radicalization of American Boyhood.
I highly recommend it.
Nick, this is going to be a problem that is going to get a lot worse until we do something about it.
We have to talk about the radicalization of young white men, which we see taking place in the United States of America and changing our politics and culture.
We can't continue to not address this because otherwise this thing is just going to continue to get worse.
I agree.
And that's what the Republicans have figured out from a little while ago was that they can control that.
They can control the way, you know, this sort of masculine outcry or they're putting us down.
That is a, you know, that is a compelling argument, unfortunately.
And instead of talking about people being nicer to each other and treating people with respect and moving forward in society.
They want the opposite, right?
And they want segmented.
They want everyone against each other, and they can get more control that way.
Yeah, you have to talk about how all of our fates are interdependent.
That's the answer.
It's not dividing people based on electoral lines.
It's talking about how we're all in on this together instead of the zero-sum shit that we're dealing with.
Absolutely.
And there's lots of places to point that started that in a way that didn't seem like a big deal at the time.
Like, for instance, George Bush paying everybody the surplus we had in 2000 to vote for him.
You know, little things like that matter and they grow.
And yeah, you think that we were beyond that.
You think that like in a Christian nation where people want to care about each other, we're all part of a community.
And maybe there was that.
Maybe we were moving towards that slowly or something.
You can't even get like a cartoon on Saturday morning.
That would be, you know, teaching kids to accept everybody.
That won't even get on the air anymore.
Yeah, it's changing in a real hurry.
All right, everybody.
We will be back with the Weekender Edition on Friday.
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In the meantime, you can find Nick on Blue Sky at Nick House when you can find me at Joe Isayston.
