91: The Theological Dark Web, with Kristin Rawls and Jeff Eaton
With - once again - apologies for the gap between episodes, here is a very special edition in which Daniel plays host to Kristin Rawls and Jeff Eaton of the excellent Christian Rightcast podcast, to chat about the areas where their work - on the Christian Right, if the name of their show didn't tip you off - intersects with ours. Lots of laughs in this chat about depressingly awful people. Content warnings. Podcast Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 Show Notes: Christian Rightcast https://rightcast.substack.com/ CHristian Rightcast on Twitter https://twitter.com/crightcast?lang=en Kristin's Twitter https://twitter.com/kristinrawls Jeff's Twitter https://twitter.com/eaton Hbomberguy on Davis Aurini https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=hbomberguy+davis+aurini ADDENDUM by Kristin: "...[S]omething I was trying to get out yesterday didn't come through about the Reconstructionists, which is that... Yes, they think of themselves as the intellectuals of the Christian Right, but we aren't really agreeing with their assessment. And it's partly that they think charismatic/pentacostalism is "fairly tale nonsense," which is a direct quote from Rushdoony. Yes, that's racialized. But it's partly also that he thought he was better and more intellectual than institutions like Liberty because, like, he actually read books and was steeped in classics (this is where the pseudo-intellectual sheen of it comes from, which is a big thing that Wilson has carried on in starting the classical Christian school movement and a Great Books college). Those colleges are of course dead white man studies and nothing more than that, but it's kind of unusual in the Christian Right to actually read books. Which is to say, if there is any way in which their self-assessment is accurate, it's because the entire Christian Right is fundamentally anti-intellectual. This makes them unique for reading Plato. "So, it's partly that they're anti-charismatic in racialized ways (although the huge charismatic megachurches like Hillsong that get a lot of their scorn are VERY white). They also think Liberty and similar institutions are embarrassing, and they're embarrassed by "red state America" even though Wilson said "it's all we've got right now." This is about their pseudo-intellectual veneer and also has to do with classism and stereotypes about red state rednecks. It's all of a piece. They think they're better than the rest of the Christian Right and are heirs to some great Christian culture that they're going to rebuild by reconstructing all of life under "God's law." All of this is why they dovetail so easily with IDW people and racist defenders of "Western civilization.""
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe spaces.
In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
All right, and welcome to I'll speak German episode 91 and And since you're hearing my voice before Jack's, except for in the pre-recorded intro, we do pre-record that in case you can't tell.
Jack is not going to be joining us today.
Unfortunately, it being summer and COVID-19 being a thing, even in 2021, some of us have difficulties and issues and busyness that happens.
Instead of Jack being here, you have to deal with my insubstantial and substandard intro, but I do have a couple of really amazing guests who do a podcast called The Christian Right Cast, who I believe were called out on Behind the Bastards just this day as we're recording this, so
Being caught out of Behind the Bastards is how this podcast went from X to 10X listenership, so expect a similar response, by the way, hopefully.
But I am joined by two people that I'm very happy to get to meet for the first time, have been an admirer and kind of mutual Twitter followers.
I'm joined by Jeff Eaton and Christian Rawls, if I've gotten those names correct.
I think Christian, I think I'm going to say Christian.
Yeah, thank you.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Yeah, thank you for inviting us.
No, absolutely.
And hopefully, I mean, I think in the in the kind of the back channels, not to not to reveal too much, there is a ton of where we kind of work in similar spaces, but often have like kind of we cover very different things.
And so I think this will be hopefully the first of many collaborations.
Oh, thank you.
So, you know, I think except I'm very disreputable and they probably don't want to be seen with me and in public, so this will be the last time.
But we were joking around, but like the terrible people beat has a lot of overlaps, even if, you know, we're all working in different parts of it.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, I run into this.
I mean, sorry not to not to get us off track immediately, but I do run into this often in terms of like we all kind of follow like I'm kind of very much like I followed like the Daily Showa and like the Right Stuff people like very much in depth.
And so whenever there is, like, some person getting into that, they send me, like, a bunch of emails and asking questions.
And that's fine.
I'm happy to, like, share all that.
But then they start going, like, and what can you tell me about QAnon?
And it's like, I spend virtually zero time with QAnon.
Like, you know, I know what it is, and I know kind of vaguely, like, it's a thing.
Like, I understand the general dynamic, because you can't not do this, and I understand it.
But, like, in terms of actually being able to give you, like, a reasonable quote that you can, you know, use for some article, like, I'm not that guy, because, like, we do kind of have to hyper-focus.
It's like being an etymologist, you know?
You're like, no, I'm sorry.
I'm a spider guy.
You need to go talk to a tick person.
Right, exactly.
It even gets deeper than that, you know.
But yeah, so just to warm us up here, tell us a little bit about, whoever wants to answer, tell us a little bit about what the Christian Right Cast is and what you do.
You two are both like ex-evangelical Christians.
Well, yeah, but from a very long time ago.
Almost two decades ago.
And so we haven't really been, we got out and before this ex-evangelical movement kind of came about and have kind of, we know some people that are involved in that, but we're kind of,
I worked for a little while as a freelance journalist and I focused on education and that's how I kind of got into doing a little bit of reporting about the homeschooling movement and in particular the Christian homeschooling movement.
I knew some people on the fringes of that growing up and And so I sort of came to this with more expertise like in in Quiverfull and in the Christian Reconstructionist movement.
Sure.
A lot of terms there that I think would be worthy of full episodes, right?
When we started brainstorming the podcast, there was this, so, well, we have enough material.
And my answer was, let's make a spreadsheet.
Let's just, you know, cover the topics we think could work.
And very quickly, we're like, ah, okay, so there's nine columns.
And like 9,000 things.
It's like, I now have a conspiracy theory wall just for podcast topics.
No, again, again, just, just for the chat, like, you know, we started this podcast thinking, because we, Jack and I have kind of done some podcasts together about like media properties and stuff.
And we got like, you know, 200 people would listen.
And that's like huge for, you know, like, Two random white dudes sitting and talking about a movie for an hour and a half, right?
You know, like, that's a massive podcast by that standard, right?
You know, and we thought, like, and I had been working on, I've been listening to the, like, alt-right dipshits for, like, years at that point, and I've been really trying to figure out, like, how to talk about this.
Like, I really wanted to write a series of essays or, like, a book or something and, like, really try to, like, Figure out how to explain it.
But every time I started writing, you get two paragraphs and then realize like, I've just used four terms that I now have to explain.
And then like just figuring out how to talk about it, like where to start, how to like make it work.
And I was having so much difficulty with that.
Like, and Jack said, Hey, would it help you if we did a podcast?
And I said, yeah, let's start up a little podcast.
We'll get 200 listeners.
We'll do 10 episodes or so.
And it will help me to put my notes together.
For the more important project, and then it exploded, so you know, it happens.
Yeah, I saw a lot of overlap with this neo-fascist movement and some of the ideas they were taking from the Christian right, and I noticed that a lot of the reporting on Both on the Christian right and on neo-fascism is not really very well informed by the overlap.
And Jeff and I, I know Jeff through Twitter, we've had both spent years both reporting but also like doing very lengthy media deconstruction and criticism about like
Things like the way that people seemed shocked that Amy Coney Barrett's little Catholic community preaches women's submission and things like that.
Hold on, really?
People still do that?
Isn't it 2021?
That seems like not a thing.
Yeah, no.
Clearly.
Yeah, no.
Yeah, people just tend to be kind of uninformed on the intricacies of these things.
Yeah, that's not even an intricacy.
That's like, you know, that's the headline, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's something that, that's just like the Wikipedia entry.
There's like, there's like misogyny within like Sex of Catholicism.
That seems, you know, breaking news.
The conservative charismatic movement that she's a part of is
It's even more explicit, like it's baked into the church, but the reactionary group that she's in is obviously... So we wanted to kind of help people, we wanted to make a body of work that people who are not as familiar with these things could reference and use.
And I think, like, you know, Kristen and I talked a lot early on about, like, what, you know, what's the flavor of this, you know, podcast?
In part because, like, there's really a wave of, like, ex-evangelical, you know, podcasts and writers and media that are doing really great work, both from, like, I guess kind of an expose standpoint, but also, like, I guess a processing standpoint, like, you know, what does it mean to stop being evangelical, you know, and stuff like that.
But I think, you know, because both of us are maybe like pushing two decades out from our departure from like, you know, the evangelical or evangelical adjacent church, it felt like, you know, we had already spent a lot of time on that sort of processing and sorting out like, well, what does this mean for me?
How do I find values?
You know, where do I, you know, you know, how do I grapple with the world without that framework?
And I think both of us had spent a lot of time thinking about like, okay, well, how did these groups that we remember that we were a part of and that via old friends, loved ones, family members, we still are like a degree or two separated from in a lot of instances, you know, how do they work?
What, you know, how are they both a part of Our broader culture and the stuff that's going on.
And how are they separate and different and sort of, you know, they are like a philosophical vanguard in certain ways.
And I think as Kristen said, you know, a lot of the coverage of the religious right has usually has a very like one note quality.
It's like, you know, you get different sort of different cliches are brought out in different conversations without really taking a look at the nuances of like what, you know, what groups are involved in these conversations and how are the, you know, intersections of various clusters of ideology that make up the Christian right involved in current intersections of various clusters of ideology that make up the Christian right involved
like, you know, oh, you know, those, you know, those, you know, snake handlers or something like that.
And it's like, I was always the person in, you know, circles I ran in who would sort of like Kool-Aid man is like, actually snake handling is a very specific phenomenon in certain Pentecostal sense.
No, I was literally about to do that gag, so thank you for sparing me that.
So let's go back to the predecessor question that doesn't even get into the meat of the thing we're actually going to talk about.
All of this is preamble to the predecessor question.
What is the Christian right cast then?
Jeff, you do the tagline.
It's basically a podcast where we explain and contextualize the personalities, the groups, and the ideologies that make up the Christian right.
And particularly the authoritarianism.
Yeah, right.
We think that it is crucial for understanding the political environment and the rise of fascism in the United States now.
And this is something that, you know, sorry, sorry, even like the word evangelical as you've been using it, Like there is a kind of like lowercase e evangelical kind of thing that like means a certain thing that we could explain to you know to the audience but then really like evangelicalism as a sort of a theological construct is different from the political angle that it has been in
You know kind of kind of taken since since the rise of the moral majority in the late 70s and early 80s and the Reagan administration.
And so when we talk about like being an ex-evangelical, we're really talking about being not a part of that like kind of social community political group more so than like not being.
I mean like it's not just a theological change.
Someone that I admire a lot is Fred Clark.
He does the Slappist blog, right?
Yeah.
I've been reading him for a lot of years and he will describe himself as a kind of lowercase evangelical, like he believes in the sort of like the theological mission of evangelicalism, but like absolutely opposed to the kind of political wing of this.
And like a lot of what I think you guys are trying to do is to unpack a lot of this language and unpack a lot of this and kind of explain to people who didn't grow up in it or adjacent to it the way that I did.
And like, I'm just going to say, like, I grew up in Alabama.
I grew up I was kind of adjacent to that community.
I didn't shop at Lifeway, but everybody I knew shopped at Lifeway, if you know what I mean.
I did, but not after high school.
Maybe early college.
We had Family Christian Bookstore, aka Zondervan.
Yeah, so I grew up very much immersed in the culture, but not kind of in it.
I had a Body Piercing Saved My Life t-shirt.
I didn't have any of those t-shirts, but literally everyone at my middle school had them.
There's a way in which every church in the South is evangelical.
My dad was a United Church of Christ pastor at a liberal church, but Also had a charismatic background and my parents were pretty evangelical.
Again, a whole bunch of other terms that really need to be defined for the audience.
I follow, but just to be clear, I know this problem very well, just to be clear.
So the United Church of Christ, for instance, is very different than the Church of Christ.
Right.
Oh yeah.
Yeah, it's kind of like a liberal Calvinist liberal denomination.
It's kind of what Congregationalists are now and the Unitarian Universalists.
It's fine, it's fine.
This is how we arrived at the conspiracy theory wall when we started the podcast.
I'm just really pointing this out just to acknowledge the depth of like The depth of research that, like, we haven't even, we're not even going to go into this, right?
I just want to, but as someone who can have this conversation with the two of you and who understands this, I find that, and as someone who is very conversant with far-right bullshit, I learn things in every episode of the Christian Right cast.
So, like, you know, and I often, you two go into stuff where I'm like, I had no idea, like, you went into this place that is super important and super, like, amazing to get to see, which I had never heard of.
So I just want to, like, the highest possible recommendation for the Christian Right cast.
Thank you so much.
Yeah.
I mean, I think Chris, you know, Christian has talked about this and I think I've, you know, I've alluded to it, but like, I forget what the, there's a logical fallacy that got popular in like skeptic communities to refer to things as like the, I think the courtesans.
The courtesans, the courtesans response, right?
That was a Richard Dawkins thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's basically.
As a former, as a former new atheist, believe me.
Yep, yep.
It's that idea of, like, you know, you object to something that somebody says and they say, oh no, but actually I'm a West Coast post-1997, you know, follower of such and such ideology, so your point is completely invalid.
And it's very easy to, like, get into that incredibly thin splitting of hairs in, you know, like, and The, you know, but the flip side of that is to just treat this fairly diverse mix of very different little, sometimes mutually opposed ideologies that make up the Christian right as like some monolith.
And I feel like, you know, both extremes are sort of bad news because... Yeah, like, what the Christian right is like is made up of all these very disparate groups that That hate each other as much as they hate the rest of us, but have unified around a political program, for the most part.
Not totally.
They would, I mean, like once they get some of their main goals done, like outlawing abortion, they really diverge.
And the type of extremism they get into, and the type of, and the ways in which they kind of They converge with the fascist right has a lot to do with the different flavors of theology there.
Yeah, so I think, you know, no further ado, I think we should probably actually like kind of talk a little bit about the thing that really kind of brought us here and just put a whole bunch of pens on a pin board that's connected by yarn.
It's like future episodes that we can discuss together, because believe me, I can tell you that there's another podcast that covers all this stuff, but the two people doing that podcast are here with me today.
You know, like, yeah, there's a ton, there's a ton of background there.
And like, personally, I don't think you can really understand the alt-right without understanding it as in some ways a rejection of the sort of moral majority evangelical George W. Bush years era Kind of political project, although there are, there are overlaps as well.
But moving along from that, I think the thing that really kind of got, got me to, you know, really kind of push on, I'd like to have you on is, you coined this term in your most recent episode, the theological dark web.
A little tongue-in-cheek, but I think we stand by it.
Once I heard it and then went back and started looking at this guy again, because I was just watching some of his videos today and I'm like, nailed it.
Right, you know he debated Christopher Hitchens and they're sort of All right, let's back up slightly here.
We need to do the five-paragraph paper version of this first before we get into... You're right, you're right.
This is the thing.
Organization is always the hardest part of an IDSG Prep episode.
You're right.
We just went through all this, but we really... Yeah, you're right.
I'm going to recommend, we'll put the link in the show notes, to the most recent episode of the Christian Right Cast, although you should listen to every episode because they're all amazing.
But let's, who are we talking about and why is he important?
Yeah, we're talking about Doug Wilson and he is a, to explain him, I need to go back a little bit and talk about the kind of ideological framework he's using.
Doug Wilson is a guy who comes from the Christian Reconstructionist
Which was kind of started by this guy in the 60s, 70s, 80s, named Roussos John Rashtouni, who was an Armenian immigrant whose family escaped the Armenian Genocide and who, as a result, had a very, very understandably paranoid understanding of state power.
and his project was really um far-right libertarianism um econ an economic system that he got from the austrian school of economics again far-right libertarianism
right um and um informed by a very conservative calvinist uh christian theology which in which he kind of he believed that all of life uh society government culture needed to be reconstructed to come in line with biblical law as he understood it and
And by that he meant Old Testament law, and also his interpretation of the New Testament.
So, meaning, they often are kind of, they're sort of most famous for, like, he wanted the execution of gay people, women who had sex outside of marriage.
Disobedient children.
Yeah.
I mean, isn't this just the reasonable conclusion you reach just by observing the world?
Like, I mean, come on.
I think, no, I don't think any of these things.
I mean, we've mentioned on that episode that, like, in a lot of ways, he's one of those very specific kinds of people who, like, they start with a premise and they have just decided that they will follow it to what they believe are its logical conclusions.
And if they arrive somewhere monstrous, well, then the world just needs to be more monstrous.
I actually tend to, sorry not to derail again, I apologize Kristen, but I actually tend to feel like people have opinions about people they want to shut the fuck up.
And then work backwards based on whatever mechanism they need to reach that conclusion.
I kind of think that's how a lot of fascists are made.
And I don't disagree that there's a spectrum there of where you start, where you end, in which direction it goes.
But I think it's at least plausible that Rustuni just really didn't like certain things happening.
Yeah, I agree.
He would say in interviews that He didn't like those things, but that the God's law requires it.
Right.
Well, then that's how you save face for the liberal media, of course.
I'm required to hate this.
I'm sorry.
It's right there in black and white.
It's in the Bible.
It just says, you know, it just says Chelsea Manning is evil.
Like, clearly, it's right there.
It's in Kings, I think.
I just want to get this out.
Yeah, please.
Sorry.
Sorry.
I've been interrupted.
Please go ahead.
He started the Christian homeschooling movement, but he also hoped And this is kind of based on the kind of eschatology, like the beliefs about the end times that he had.
He didn't believe in like a rapture.
He called that fairytale nonsense.
You can kind of see the dark web sensibilities shaping up with him.
He would study works of classical Western thought and underline them with a ruler.
He had 40,000 texts in his personal library and he would like Kind of try to reconstruct them according to biblical law.
He thought what he was doing was creating a full system through which, that's kind of like Immanuel Kant's moral ethics, but a Christian version.
But he also drew on a lot of racist ideas.
He drew from the confederate Southern Presbyterian theologian R.L.
Dabney, who was a personal chaplain to Stonewall Jackson, We covered a little bit of this back in the Southern Nationalist episode, kind of way back when.
That's kind of the one time I really like touched on Rush Dooney.
I think Dabney came up, but certainly you kind of hear a lot of this.
I'm hoping I can do sort of a follow-up to that, get into a little bit more detail sometime in the future, because I like that's very much a, I kind of brushed over a lot of that kind of background, you know, stuff.
But Anyway, just to highlight, there is an episode where we did touch on some of this kind of back in the deep recesses, the deep stratigraphy of the ideas.
Douglas Wilson is this guy who, he has kind of a, by Christian Reconstructionist term, he kind of has a megachurch, about one or two thousand members in Idaho.
He has started his own Christian Reconstructionist denomination, the Communion of Reformed Evangelicals, and he's very famous for writing this pamphlet with the neo-con- a former board member of the League of the South, Stephen Wilkins.
It's called "Southern Slavery as it was" and it's just a full-throated defense of Southern slavery.
Spoilers.
This is not actually as it was.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, no, again, you know, just to put a pin on, we could do a whole episode just reading through and digging out, like, all the bullshit in this thing.
Published in 1996, deep connections to the League of the South.
Again, again, it goes back to the Southern Nationalist episode that we did.
Yeah.
Yeah, so you see a lot of the same kind of language feed into certain segments of what, you know, was at the time the alt-right, although they kind of like separated the kind of neo-confederate, you know, overtly racist right, yeah.
But he has supporters more in the mainstream evangelical world, like Mark Driscoll, the former pastor of Acts 29, and John Piper.
These are conservatives, but they're not thought of as neoconfederates.
Doug Wilson describes himself as a paleoconfederate.
What if I could be a paleoconservative, but even more aggressive?
Yeah, exactly.
He has a master's degree in philosophy, so of course he has a certain, he's taken on this kind of rationalist, very familiar way of speaking, and that really reminded us
When we were listening to him and preparing for our episode on him, of the way that people in the intellectual dark web will throw out some monstrous idea and be like, well, if you really think about it rationally, you know, there is some science behind.
you know, the race science or there, there is, you know, why do black people have lower IQs?
You know, that, that, that, and acting like it's perfectly reasonable and rational to, to, to throw out these things.
And then, but in a calm and sort of disarming way that.
And then to frame it as like anyone who would fault them for having this discussion quote unquote is just not able to engage in this world of thought and ideas that we find so important, you know, as, As he sits and sips a whiskey thoughtfully and chuckles, you know.
Yeah and I found just like re-watching some are kind of like I was just like my preparation for this episode was inviting the two of you on and then having watched like a couple of his videos and then I was just sitting here like eating dinner and like watching like just clicking around on the like Canon Press YouTube page and it's just again you find like it is like It's so fun for us, right?
It's so fun to find this new thing that you just like, this is a six minute video and I could spend an hour unpacking.
It's like playing Where's Waldo with existential horror.
Very much.
It's like you just click on it and go like, well, yeah, that's, that's, that's awful.
And here's the thing that's buried in that, that they don't even, that the two people on screen just agree on, because of course they do.
And if I were young and impressionable and didn't understand this stuff, or if I just didn't have a conversant, like with what's kind of buried underneath, It's very easy to kind of go along with if you're kind of willing to accept the premises.
And they do kind of, you know, in a lot of these videos, it is kind of like, well, look, we're talking from the Bible.
And if you believe in the Bible and you believe in this kind of thing, then you should You know, just kind of come along with us, and we're making a reasonable argument, and we're willing to listen to objections, but, like, we clearly have a certain level of knowledge.
We clearly have a certain level of familiarity with in terms of talking about this stuff, and I think what's important, we're not, like, preaching, like, kind of fire and brimstone.
We're not doing the kind of the big stereotypical thing of, like, the big megachurch preachers kind of going out there and being very, like, kind of Emotive or being incredibly, you know, or kind of like saying the quiet part out loud about gay people and all that sort of thing.
It's like, it's buried in there, but it's very much like meant to be something like, look, I'm a rational adult.
I'm coming to this as someone kind of seeking answers.
I'm someone really kind of like wanting to engage as a reasonable adult with like reasonable people who might have, you know, some kind of Um, help for me in my, in the problems of my life.
And I think that it's important that so many of these videos are kind of about like, here's how you deal with some particular problem in your home life.
And the answer to that problem is always like, well, the woman should just listen to the band and the man needs to be able to lead.
But it's always framed as like, this is an obligation on the man to take charge and to be, you know, but to be more responsible.
And it is like, I don't know, there's this very like.
It's the gender version of the white man's burden concept.
Once you hit that like theological dark web term, it literally just like, I have this light bulb that came up and I'm like, yes, that's exactly what's happening here.
Yeah.
They very much think of themselves as the intellectuals of the Christian right.
They think of the more emotive and expressive styles of evangelicalism as kind of embarrassing.
But they're really doing it right.
They're the ones who are able to be disinterested and calm.
Daniel, you mentioned the stereotype of the megachurch preacher, or the angry preacher on the street corner.
And of course, this gets racialized in certain ways as well.
And I want us to both ping that and also like, just not, not to not lean into it in a way, but it is a kind of racialized in certain ways that like the stereotypical, like mega church preacher that like many people will have in their heads is an African-American vision of that preacher.
Right.
You know?
So again, not that I think you were going there, but I just wanted to highlight it.
Yeah.
And it's, yeah, you've just referenced one of the unexplored clusters in our giant, you know, pins and yarns on the map of the Christian right, too, because there's even, like, long, deep divides in the Christian Pentecostal right between, like, African-American and white, like, branches of that faith, that subset.
Yeah, and breaks that Denominational schisms and things like that.
But I would say their sensibility is racialized in a way that is That is, I haven't thought about it, but yeah, racist.
Explicitly racist.
That they think, well, we're being, you know, the calm and reasonable ones.
When you write something in 1996, it's like, actually slavery was a moral good.
We could pick that apart bit by bit, but just step back.
Oh no!
Yeah, we did know it was racist, but I didn't think of the way they talk about the rest of the Christian right as You know, I just, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I was just, you know, under the hood here.
Maybe Jack cuts this out.
One of the episode 90s that I prepped in the mini episode 90s, if you listen to episode 90, you know that I was planning that for a long time and it got reformed about five times.
I was originally planning to do an episode about the Southern Baptist Convention, And it's relationship to the to the alt-right and the sort of like the internal dynamics there and like the deeper I dug into that the more I realized like this is a Christian WriteCast episode.
I should really this is I almost just dm'd you Kristen and was like are you planning to do something on this because if you are I can just you know leave I can just not do this anymore because but although maybe that's future collaboration because you know.
James Edwards is someone I've been following for a long time, and he has this highly contentious relationship with the SBC.
Well, so one thing is some of the current overlap with the alt-right has to do with the Christian Reconstructionist wing of the Southern Baptist Convention, which is like, so Baptists were originally Calvinists, and then they stopped being Calvinists, and in the 20th century they've
Sorry, the Christian Reconstruction, you know, a very significant wing of them adopted a Christian Reconstructionist perspective, and also the teachings of people like Dabney, and so I think that that is a significant but not the only place where they overlap.
And I think one of the things that's very interesting about that too is that you have the explicit connections there.
I mean, you know, they may not be like written on the, you know, church bulletin kinds of things, but like if you look at the topics and the themes and the ideologies and the personalities that are, you know, involved and connected to each other, you know, that connection is really explicit in certain areas.
But even in a lot of other parts of the Christian right, which I think is sort of the theme we return to a lot on the podcast, like the psychological and philosophical building blocks of what we would think of as like an alt-right mindset or like a neo-fascist authoritarian mindset.
Yeah.
are really deeply baked into a lot of, like, modern Christian fundamentalism.
Which is, again, not to say, ah, yes, modern Christian fundamentalists are Nazis.
That's not what I'm saying.
But rather, like, a bunch of the building blocks that cause those kinds of groups to be able to rise to power, even in cultures that may not immediately be on board with every one of the bullet points, are all there in the Christian right in spades.
And if you listen to a lot of the kind of modern-day white nationalists, quote unquote, the alt-right, however we want to define it, complicated terminology, I think our listeners kind of understand some of that nuance there.
But if you listen into a lot of them kind of talking about like how to convert their relatives or how to convert their friends and family, a lot of them, you know, either come out of or, you know, are kind of You know, they come out of and are opposed to the kind of, you know, Christian right, the, you know, the kind of Southern Baptist style, you know, kind of neoconservative, you know, moral majority type.
And so much of, this is a word that we said in the, This is a word that we said in the back channel that like, again, a whole galaxy of episodes, but like around the concept of Israel, like it is very difficult to for open anti-Semites to get Evangelical Christians to hate Jews in the way that they need them to hate Jews.
And they whine about this incessantly.
Like, this is a constant point of conversation is, like, how do I get my boomer dad to, like, really loves Rush Limbaugh and the church?
To hate Jews.
Like, I just can't do it.
He hates Jews in a completely different way, you see.
They don't put it that way.
They put it in a slightly different flavor of fetishized anti-Semitism.
I want angry anti-Semitism.
That is why Rush Duny is such an important figure here because He did not have this Christian Zionist perspective and shared a lot of the, you know, Nazi views about Jewish people.
And that's why he's taken up by groups like League of the South and Identity Dixie now.
And yeah, that's why he's so important in the neo-fascist Like, to touch briefly on this, I think we first got into this sort of pool in the world of the Christian right, talking about apocalyptic themes, which, you know, the Christian relationship to antisemitism is like,
That's, that's a whole like, you know, gradual.
Let's talk about 2000 years.
Let's talk about 2000 years.
But like the, the way that it, the way that The particular American evangelical relationship to the concept of Israel as a nation-state and Jewish people, it really grows out of, actually, a school that Rush Dooney and Doug Wilson were a part of.
Millennialist rapture view that had this timeline where Israel becoming a nation state again was one of these tick marks on God's plan for the end of the world.
And thus, like, Israel becoming a nation and the Jewish people having a home again, etc, etc, was like this evidence that we were right in this grand civilization scale way that no one could have ever expected.
And The relationship that, you know, fundamentalist evangelicalism has to Israel is, it's a very strange one.
You have like, you know, you know, corn fed, you know, blonde Nebraska, you know, fundamentalist kids like giving their, you know, giving their six kids like Jewish names.
And saying, oh, it's because we're we really love Jesus.
It's like without understanding that it's I mean, to a degree, it's like a co-option of Jewish identity as a way of claiming authenticity in true Christianity.
It's a very weird and tangled kind of relationship.
And a lot of it ultimately comes down to this belief that like and when the end times really play out, all of the good Jews will convert to Christianity anyways.
So that's the punchline to how much evangelicalism really loves Judaism.
It's because they think they'll eventually get with the program and be us.
But that relationship is very, very strange.
And that tension you mentioned of open, alt-right anti-Semites wanting to convert to their evangelical fundamentalist family.
That's, I would say it's probably a lot closer to what I've seen growing more and more in like the increasing alt-right directions of like open, open alt-right directions of Christian fundamentalism is that weird like You know, only Israel really gets why it's so necessary to have an ethnostate.
Yeah, they're, they're right about that, that like weird, you know, anti-semitism by word level of indirection thing.
Some of them see like the crimes of like the state of Israel, right?
Like, like the war crimes committed against the Palestinians, etc.
And say, like, why not us, you know?
Yeah, it's like, what an inspiration!
Right, and this gets into the, like, the kind of, like, screw your optics, I'm going in, you know, thing of, you know, like, you know, like, Robert Bowers, the Pittsburgh massacre shooter, you know, just believed that
He was seeing this synagogue that was working directly to import brown people into his society, and that this was something that is a project of organized Judaism, not as a religious value, but as an ethnic, that Jewish people are just programmed by their biology and by their culture to do this.
And so this gets into the darkest of dark places.
Which is why, again, we should probably move off this topic unless you have more things to say.
But this is, again, an extended conversation that we could definitely have about the tension between these two very hard right communities.
And in fact, again, communities of communities, galaxies of communities.
That are kind of working on the same thing, but in very different ways, and that have a push-pull relationship with each other, and that work within our politics currently, like, the thing that the alt-right, again, kind of that larger alt-right is trying to do, is to make it okay to be an anti-Semite by diminishing the importance of the Christian right to a certain degree.
And yeah, one of the one of the really troubling themes for me over the past probably like, well, number of years has been a growing receptivity in different parts of the Christian right.
Yep.
A sort of fetishized and reflexive defense of Israel as a nation state being like our icon of God's true power, you know, because he made all these prophecies come true again that no one thought could happen, etc, etc, etc.
The growing defensiveness around the international condemnation of the nation state of Israel's war crimes against Palestinians has put a lot of Christians on the strange side of like forming complicated and nuanced arguments in favor of a net ethno state.
And that is really interesting.
That is really interesting, and I have not seen that in so many ways.
And again, I'll put another pin right there.
We should definitely come back to that at some point.
I want to add to that that we also see a lot of this convergence happening out of the Christian homeschooling movement, where there has for a long time been An overlap with militia movements, with sovereign citizen ideology, with the kinds of right-wing prepper movements.
A lot of it does come out of homeschooling where people tend to just get it just kind of Radicalized very quickly.
I mean, I found out recently that Molly Conger outed someone that I grew up with, who grew up in the Christian homeschooling movement, who was a cop.
She found him fantasizing about murdering liberals and plotting to overthrow the government on January 6th.
And so there is definitely a lot of this comes from like the highly politicized Christian, right?
The influence of people like Alex Jones is where some of this starts.
We see there may be like frustration from People groups like like Adam Woffin or whatever but but we do see a lot of of people making the leaps to to becoming you know full-on fascist.
Having come out of this this movement and like there were there were a few there were some friends from the Duggar community who were spotted on January 6th.
There there really is a lot of A lot of convergence that we see, so I don't think that they are as opposed as some of the atheist types may think.
I recently learned that there are a number of people, particularly in the atheist scene, who believe that the Unite the Right people chanting, Jews will not replace us, believed that was about a religious conflict.
That to me is like the, like, I don't, I don't understand how you, like, that's like note one about understanding what was happening at that time period.
And really a key that I'm not doing my job properly because if I was, everyone would understand that basically.
Anyway, sorry, that was a bit of a subtweak there, I apologize.
So I feel like we've gotten, I'm loving this conversation by the way, and I can do this all night, but I do feel like we should get back to Wilson.
One of the things that I noted just kind of again clicking through on the on the YouTube page was sort of the production value right and like you see you know there's this kind of like the kind of the spare like he's sitting he's got a nice microphone he's got his glass of whiskey or he's got his you know kind of thing he's got this neatly trimmed beard he's kind of doing the thing And they kind of like lean into their microphones and speak very softly and talk to each other.
And they've got this like very nice lighting set up.
And I mean, it's not like a fancy, like, it's not like some crazy editing setup or whatever, but you know, the three of us are podcasters.
Game recognizes game.
Right.
You understand what production looks like, right?
At a certain point, even though we don't do video podcasting.
But there's certainly a difference between, you look at the BreadTube community and you understand the amount of Like, I looked at, like, Destiny setup.
Like, not a fan of Destiny, don't worry, but, like, I was looking into, like, he posted his, like, on Reddit, he posted, like, what it takes for him to do his livestream setup.
It's like $20,000 worth of equipment.
Yeah.
You know, like, you know, like, and that's just to do, like, live streaming of video games on a, you know, you know, and, you know, so, so you understand, like, the amount of money it takes to sort of make, like, a professional kind of YouTube production at this point, you know, and also a lot of money behind that, clearly.
Yeah.
And also, a very careful like media savvy understanding of what kind of image they are trying to project right like there's a very deliberate like cultivation and creation of like that academic Thoughtful, relaxed academics just discussing the issues of the day vibe, like Kristen talked about.
That's a set.
That's a constructed image.
Just asking questions, and yeah.
It reminded me of Brett and Heather's weird wooden room.
And honestly, that set looks much better than Brett and Heather's weird wooden room.
Really?
This is a little bit of a deep cut, but if anybody remembers Davis Orrini, one of the guys who produced The Oh, do I remember Davis Arrheni?
That very distinctive, like, sit down, take a sip of whiskey and say, well, gentlemen, we're about to talk about the issues.
That was the first thing I thought about when I saw Doug Wilson's, like, videos.
I was like, oh, but he had a budget to produce with.
90% of Western women are degenerate sluts.
Also, have I introduced you to the skull on my mantle?
We will definitely link to the H-Bomber Guy video, the 2014 H-Bomber Guy video on this topic at this point.
Anyway.
Can we talk a little bit about his son too?
Because he's doing even more of a Stealthy kind of thing.
He's written these best-selling children's books.
So I have not looked into the sun at all.
I feel really bad about doing this because normally I like to be the person bringing the heavy research.
You gotta be careful, though, because last time we did that, we're like, oh, let's look at this video.
And then, like, 45 minutes in, we're like, oh, okay, he also shields pedophiles.
That's a plot twist we weren't expecting, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I usually, I generally spend, like, six months looking into someone before I even think about doing a podcast episode.
So this is very much, I'm on my, like, this is my ramp up on this research.
So anyway, Kristen, please tell me, tell me about his son.
All right, his son N.D.
Wilson is His actual name is Nathan, I think.
Professionally.
Andy?
Andy, like Indiana Jones?
Initials, N-D.
I have that accent.
So he's written a series of best-selling children's books called 100 Coverage.
There's also a YA series and a preschool series called Hello Ninja that is in its either third or fourth season on Netflix.
He is really trying to take a lot of the ideology and kind of disarm, kind of red pill children.
The book 100 Covers, we read and talked about it a little bit.
It was Troubling, and it was like a children's invective against empathy.
Again, you unpacked this on your previous episode, so I'm just going to tell people, the difference between empathy and sympathy is a very clear thing in the Wilson mind.
Yeah, we're not going to unpack that here, but you already did that work for us.
So, Wilson, his father, has developed a whole argument against the concept of empathy.
And then the book, it's kind of like, there's no human connection or empathy that ever happens.
It's kind of like, A boy gets to really come into his true self by going on adventures, and his parents are missing, but he didn't love them anyway, so it doesn't really matter.
I think you compared it to A Wrinkle in Time in your podcast episode, which is all about the missing father and the children going and the need for empathy to defeat what... I think we could talk about Kasbataz and how it's sort of the right-wing paranoia about communism.
I think there's There is some of that, yeah.
There's a lot of that there.
But, like, it's also really a book about, like, the love of a child for her father.
What if someone wrote A Wrinkle in Time, but no one cared about each other at all?
Yeah.
And so, so there's that.
And, like, very sort of rigid gender roles in which the young boy is always going out to rescue these flighty women.
But then, so this Hello Ninja thing is... I just want to say Hello Ninja, my old friend.
Like, that's just... It's really, I mean, unsurprisingly, it's racist.
It's extremely racist.
And it's a show on Netflix!
Hold on, against, like, Asian people?
Yeah!
Oh, God.
Yeah.
The traditional plot twist is, wow, that's an anti-Semitic show about ninjas for preschoolers.
But no, it's just mostly anti-Asian.
No, it's just mostly anti-Asian.
I don't know if you got to watch Anija, but it's like, No, I'm reading Christian romance novels for our next episode.
I haven't watched it.
Oh, I'm excited for this.
I worked at a bookstore for a few years, and believe me, hold on, let me rephrase that.
I worked in a bookstore in Alabama for a few years.
So you are familiar with the prairie romance section.
I am, I am.
I had to restock it regularly, so yes.
I had those recommended to me by friends and I tried to read one and I thought they were so boring, I couldn't.
At the end of the book, the really hot stuff is like, she gets a peck on the cheek.
It's, you know, the Hallmark movies are practically X-rated in comparison.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, so like, yeah, there's it's just really overt anti-Asian racism.
There's like this, there's this Asian
grandmother character who is very stereotypical and talks in this kind of offensive asian-y american accent but and and is always saying stuff like to be a wise ninja to these white well one white child one biracial child to be a wise ninja you have to take on the you know the the strength of the jaguar and like just like really just
Orientalist tropes all over it.
And I think... And not ironically, right?
Like this is not subverted at all, right?
No, not at all.
So not quite to the level of like, we love you long time, but you know, yeah.
Definitely, definitely.
Especially right now.
There's like a Chinese dragon character.
who's so, you know, it's really, it's kind of like this, like almost noble savage imagery, I think.
And so N.D. was, Wilson is kind of, he's still a member in good standing at his dad's church.
His wife has been interviewed in their local Idaho newspaper talking about how they've been persecuted for their faith in a Allegedly liberal town.
I think that their college town voted like 50% for Hillary Clinton or something.
So that's like, that's a communist town for that, you know.
Right there.
They might as well be like, Mao Zedong might as well be like running the place.
Because as someone who now knows some leftists, there's nothing communists love more than Hillary Clinton.
Yeah, so N.D.
Wilson worries me because he's best-selling, he's just churning out constant content.
Very popular with secular children's audiences, who I don't think are able to pick apart the Some of the reactionary ideology in some of the things.
And the fact that I've been a Netflix subscriber for, I mean, I used to just get the discs from Netflix.
That's how long I've been using Netflix, right?
Like, you know, I've been a Netflix person forever.
And honestly, I would cancel this if my wife watches a bunch of it.
So, you know, I, you know, I hardly ever, like, sit down and watch, like, oh, listen, watch a bunch of Netflix.
But the fact that, like, I've never heard of these things.
And then, like, You're you know the fact that there's like four seasons of this on Netflix and the fact that like the the Man Rampant show which um you know uh what was kind of I think that was on Netflix or was that uh no that was just yeah that was Amazon yeah you can buy it on Amazon um yeah um anyway sorry sorry that's a different thing but the uh the fact that like this is on Netflix the fact that this is getting like mainstream
You know, at least within this kind of, like, evangelical Christian subculture.
The fact that it's completely, like, below the radar of, sort of, like, cultural commentators, like, because it is being kind of fed to, like, you don't see, like, reviews in the Atlantic or whatever about this show, you know?
No one seems to know, and his, I mean, even though his books have been best-selling, His breakout book was 100 Cupboards, and yeah, that was a Kirkus starred review book.
They have all been very... I also don't really follow children's entertainment that much, but I feel like people who are My, my, my, my wife watches a lot of Disney Channel and stuff.
Like my wife kind of likes this sort of like, you know, watching a lot of that kind of stuff.
And I've not seen anything like show up in her feed.
And that tells me that tells me I should ask her about it actually.
But it tells me a lot about like kind of the way that the algorithms of the tech companies are sort of feeding this stuff into directions.
Oh, interesting.
Where it should go, right?
You know, and I feel like that's sort of a very much a theme that I didn't think we were going to kind of discover on this podcast.
Like, clearly, the way that the tech industry interacts with this stuff is super important.
But I thought it was kind of kind of be kind of a buried lead.
But like, increasingly, it becomes clear that like, if you're not kind of understanding the way that the algorithms of the You know, the big, like, five tech companies are creating these kind of, like, sub-communities that can then, like, fester.
Then you're not kind of telling the full story.
And that's something that, you know... The best case scenario here is, like, 10 years from now, a bunch of, like, teenagers have, like, an, oh, wow, Orson Scott Card is a huge homophobe experience about Bendy Wright and, like, you know, the Reconstructionist ideology.
But the worst case scenario is, like, You know, there's this growing ecosystem of, like, children's literature that goes on a spectrum from, oh, it's a show about ninjas with Asian stereotypes to, like, oh, wow, this is, like, really dark reconstructionist alt history.
Like, it's very easy to, like, see that kind of ecosystem evolving out of this.
Well, Hay and Jenkins sold like, what, 60 million copies of their Children's Left Behind series?
Yeah, 17 books in that series.
Yeah, yeah.
Fred Clark will not live long enough to finish that review, unfortunately.
This stuff is not, I want to be clear, this stuff is not getting that kind of scrutiny because it is not marketed as religious or it doesn't mention God or Jesus.
It's like I said, more stealthy.
The morals are kind of like, you shouldn't really care very much about people.
That's not a manly thing to do, and it's not something that a boy should really be doing.
And like, I mean, caring about people.
What do you have a vagina?
Like, yeah.
How much soy did you have?
But like, I think this is also where that like, Conceptual building block overlap that we were talking about, it really comes into play because Doug Wilson, in all of his YouTube videos and the Man Rampant stuff, half of it isn't even talking about Reconstructionism.
It's just him making a case that caring about humans is a chump's move and God is against it and you shouldn't.
So much of the stuff that's coming through thematically is really about like, you know, male strength and domination is a positive ideal and, you know, male stoicism is a positive ideal and, you know, inherit social hierarchy and, quote, tribalism, which, you know, Rush Dooney was big on as a, you know, way to appeal to.
Tribalism, another word that there's a galaxy of podcast episodes that we can do.
Doug Wilson opens up his Man Rampant series with a discussion about how tribalism works.
And it's like, okay, hold on.
I've been down this path before.
He's basically trying to figure out how to explain racism is good, but with some new nouns.
Racism with more steps, that's what it is.
But those building blocks that can feel, if they're not looked at too closely, can feel just like traditionalism.
You know, like, oh, this feels old-timey, and it's sort of a, you know, this, you know, golden-tinged vision of what, you know, an old-timey, out-in-the-Midwest, you know, life for a young boy looked like, and stuff like that.
Yeah.
But, like, it's not just a soft selling of Reconstructionism.
That's where, like, the distinctions between a lot of, like, you know,
um you know neo-fascist like traditionalist ideology of like return to the old ways and you know the you know my wife should stay home and be a trad wife and be you know a a good caretaker for the home while I go out and like hunt mammoth or whatever like the the language that's being used at that surface level engagement is like indistinguishable yeah yeah yeah
And in the book 100 Cupboards, the every time a girl or a woman makes a decision to try and go help somebody, it's like, like it's it's seen as naive or
And the woman always gets into horrible trouble and needs to be rescued by this boy who's growing in his masculinity, becoming stronger and braver, or the new father figure he takes on.
Yeah, it's normalizing this trad wife kind of thing.
The Wheatfield girl, ultimately.
Yeah.
Which brings us back to Christian prairie romances.
Yeah, yeah it does.
Jeanette Oak, right?
Jeanette Oak.
That's who I was, that's who was recommended to me.
I was like, I just, this is more boring than Little House on the Prairie.
I cannot do this.
Yeah, the famous Christian-- - Not exactly one-handed reading, if you get my tricks.
No need to respond to that as good respectable people.
It's fine.
You're laughing because you don't understand the reference.
I'm sure that's how this works.
Anyway, we are over an hour at this point, and we can talk forever, and believe me, I hope we can do this again and come back, and I can sit here until I collapse in my chair talking about this stuff, I'm sure.
Are there any kind of like closing thoughts?
I know we kind of like danced around on a lot of stuff, but is there anything that we kind of hit on that you'd like to cover before we before we wrap up here?
I mean, I'll dive in and at least take a first stab.
I would say that for people who are interested in and concerned about the rise of the alt-right, I think that frustration on behalf of the alt-right, that it's so hard to sell the Christian people we know on hating the Jews, darn it, at a surface level,
There's a lot of opposition to open antagonistic neo-fascism amongst Christians, but on the Christian right, all of the building blocks are there, and the heavy lifting being done by personalities like Doug Wilson and a lot of his contemporaries, and it's their selling their message.
But they're also selling the core foundational building blocks of the alt-right movement and, you know, neo-fascism too, and that's really... Well, and they share the same enemies, right?
Yeah.
That's ultimately kind of the key is, you know, like, who are your enemies?
And that's where you can see a lot of... The alt-right are going to say the Jews, and the kind of Christian nationalists are going to say, you know, the liberals or whatever, but they ultimately mean kind of the same people.
And they may literally be meaning the same people when they say those things too.
Yeah, and that's why we keep seeing so much overlap and so many people that really go all in becoming fascists.
It's easy if you sort of stay in the mainstream conservative evangelical movement to miss that, but the ones who go all in tend to kind of have been isolated from The larger society, a lot of it does happen in the Christian homeschooling movement, and they are, a lot of those people are either they're getting out or they're becoming Nazis in a lot of cases.
And the Nazis are very happy to make that happen, and I'm trying to track that as it goes.
And I think it has to do with the fact that the ideologies are not that distinct from each other.
I mean, ultimately it's a toggle switch, right?
Sorry, not to use like a computer metaphor, but it is like, you know, you change a few words around.
Like there was this incident like years ago in which James Edwards, who does the Political Cesspool podcast, who was an explicit white nationalist, Southern Nationalist, Neo-Confederate, etc, etc.
He's had, you know, every white nationalist you've ever heard of who isn't like Explicitly using the N word with the hard R on every single, in every single sentence on his podcast.
Over the course of the last 16 years or 17 years now, there was, he wrote an article, he wrote like a blog post where he was like talking about like the Jews doing this, the Jews doing that, et cetera, et cetera.
And then like, it sort of got like flagged, like, like people started talking about it and a little bit just did like a search and replace and they replaced Jew with liberal.
And then suddenly it was fine, you know?
And so there is this kind of the alt-right, the kind of remnants of the alt-right, the white nationalist right, the people that I follow when I wasn't doing mostly IDW stuff.
I'm getting back into the Nazis very soon, I promise.
But like what they're trying to do is to like convert liberal to Jew, right?
Right.
But ultimately, in order to make the, because they see that as like not far enough, but also these people share the same ultimate political goals in many cases.
Right.
Yeah, but that's what Alex Jones is doing with Globalist, and he has a very large evangelical audience.
And he's given Nick Fuentes a show on his net.
Believe me, believe me, I'm on top of that.
Yeah, it does have, there is more overlap than a lot of the evangelicals would like to admit.
That's what, yeah, that's kind of why I thought we needed a podcast.
Yeah, so we should definitely do this again.
Sorry, not trying to, not trying to cut you off there, but tell us where we could, tell my audience where they need to go to A, listen to you, and B, give you money.
We're on all the podcast listening apps.
Christian, Rightcast.
Rightcast is one more.
There'll be links in the show notes for sure.
Yeah, rightcast.substack.com is where you can give us money.
We would really appreciate that.
And if you want to talk to us, we're at CWriteCast on Twitter, but we are more active on our individual Twitter pages.
I'm at Kristen Rawls, K-R-I-S-T-I-N-R-A-W-L-S, and Jeff is at Eaton, E-A-T-O-N, much simpler than mine.
Because he shares a name with a manufacturing company.
So I am congratulated on my green power initiatives with some regularity.
So that's where to find us.
We really appreciate it.
And we really appreciate coming on.
One thing that I thought when we were preparing the most recent episodes that, oh, this is This is very familiar, based on what you've been covering recently on the Alexa Dark Web.
This all sounds, yeah.
Yeah, one of the things you run into is that like, the longer you follow these, the longer you follow these dipshits, the more you realize that it is kind of just this morass and like, we, you know, those of us doing this, you know, really pride ourselves on kind of pulling apart the differences and understanding the nuances and Really getting at the details of where these people disagree, but ultimately it's a blob.
They're all moving in the same direction.
This racism has nutty notes of perhaps deconstructionism.
We're the one-of-files of, you know.
Yeah, racism, you know, like, yeah, there's a little bit of, there's a little bit of Christian identity here, although I suspect a slight bit of rush-tuning as well, huh?
Oh, that sounds interesting, yeah.
No, um.
But I think it's good to know it, because that's, otherwise it's hard to pick out what's going on.
You can't confront it without knowing what's going on inside, and ultimately, I mean, you know, One of the ways you combat it is to get them to fight each other, and understanding the details of how they disagree, and letting journalists understand that.
I have enormous respect for ground-level journalists doing this, because they approach this and go, I have to file a story in seven hours, and I need to understand the whole of the Christian right well enough to I don't have time to figure out what was happening in 600 A.D., so you're just going to have to, you know.
I don't need to understand the details of like a Twitter feud that happened like four years ago about, you know, an episode of a podcast.
I need someone to go to who will explain this to me.
And that's kind of what, that's kind of part of what we do here.
So, yeah.
So thank you both for coming on.
It's been a pleasure.
And again, this has been a lot of fun for me.
Hopefully I have not made an asshole of myself and we can do this again sometime.
So thank you so much.
That was I Don't Speak German.
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This show is associated with Eruditorum Press, where you can find more details about it.
