The Shadowy Mastermind Behind the GOP's Nihilism -
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Arthur Finkelstein is not a household name. Yet, he may be one of the most consequential political figures of the last century - he volunteered with Goldwater, grew up with Ayn Rand, helped Nixon and Reagan into the White House, and then orchestrated the ascendance of Netanyahu, the comeback of Orban, and the vilification of George Soros. He also had a hand in getting Trump over the finish line, albeit indirectly. Brad does a deep dive into the puppet master who may be the decoder ring for understanding the political nihilism of the GOP and the rise of authoritarianism across the globe.
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AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY So I think that Trump is not the only threat to our democratic institutions.
The entire Republican Party is a threat to our democracy.
This is who the Republican Party is.
They're the Republican Party of Arthur Finkelstein.
They're the Republican Party of Roger Stone and Paul Manafort.
So Trump, in many ways, was a symptom, not a cause.
That's Sarah Posner speaking in November of 2020, just a few days after the election.
Last week, I played my interview with Sarah from that time for our subscribers as bonus content.
It was a chance to kind of go back into a time capsule to see where we were at just a few days out from the most momentous election in our lifetimes.
But these words from Sarah caught my attention.
I think many of us are used to hearing the idea that Trump is a symptom and not a cause.
We've said that on this show many times.
But the way she explains it, I think, should open our eyes and illuminate a set of networks and a certain shadowy figure that may hold the key to understanding where we are in this country and globally.
She talks about a Republican party that is a threat to democracy, a party that's sowing doubt about our elections, about our institutions.
She sees a party that wants power above all else.
And then she says something really interesting.
This is the Republican party of Arthur Finkelstein.
And this is where my mind, as I re-listened to this conversation, really exploded.
Who is Arthur Finkelstein?
And why is he the explanatory key of not only Trumpism, not only the rise of Netanyahu, the authoritarian rise of Viktor Orban, but the politics of fear and negativity across the world over the last half century?
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Today I want to do a deep dive on a shadowy figure, somebody that you probably don't think much about if you've ever even heard of him.
That's Arthur Finkelstein, the man that Sarah Posner talked about last week and who I could not get out of my brain since then.
For subscribers, I have some commentary on a recent op-ed by a Christian nationalist billionaire in Texas who is trying to influence state politics at every turn.
It's classic Christian nationalist victimhood at its best.
We talked about this billionaire with rep James Tallarico a few months ago, about his subversive strategies, his desire to take over the state in the name of God, and to influence everyone from mayors to state reps.
So, if you're a subscriber, stick around.
If you're not a subscriber, now is the best time to sign up.
But here we go.
Let's jump into the life, the work, and the damage done of a man who may just be the Dakota Ring for understanding the ascendance of authoritarianism, the politics of bad faith, and the precipice of the end of democracy in the United States and around the world.
So you may remember in Unholy, where I document Orban's subsequent second rise to power, aided by an American Republican political strategist, Arthur Finkelstein, who was the mentor to many of the political strategists who ended up in Trump world, but were obviously the strategists for the broader Republican Party.
Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, people like that.
Uh, Finkelstein helped mastermind Orban's return by advising him to attack Western liberal democracy.
And so, and then once given power, Orban and his, and his, uh, and his Fidesz party basically manipulated the way that elections were run in order to basically rig the system for their party to continue to win elections and gain a majority in the parliament.
He then went on to signal to religious conservatives by, you know, having laws passed that restricted abortion and LGBTQ rights and so on.
And you're right, Orban Oversaw a complete dismantling of any kind of Western liberal democratic institutions that existed in Hungary.
And I think it's important to point out that to the extent that those institutions existed, part of what Trump was able to achieve In his one term in office was a defanging of the State Department and its pro-democracy slash civil society efforts in these post-communist young democracies in Eastern and Central Europe, just like Hungary.
And so now, It's not like Orban was a blueprint for Trump as much as there was a cross pollination between Republican political strategy and these fledgling democracies.
That was then not just a sort of a model for Trump, but evidence that that sort of attack on liberal democracy and liberal democratic institutions I get asked a lot if the rise of Donald Trump, the proto-authoritarianism and fascism we've seen take root in our country over the last years,
The question is often posed as a cause and effect.
Who made whom?
Which domino led to the fall of democracies around the world?
countries beyond the United States.
The question is often posed as a cause and effect.
Who made whom?
Which domino led to the fall of democracies around the world?
Which one was first?
I think what Sarah Posner says here reveals an interlocking web of forces, of causes, of figures, of places, of countries.
She talks in very succinct terms about the ways that Orban rose to power and yet Orban's rise to power and sustaining of power was in some ways aided by people in the U.S.
In other parts of her book, Unholy, she traces the ways that strategies used by Vladimir Putin were adopted by Orban, were adopted by Trump, and yet rhetoric used by Christian nationalists in the United States were then appropriated by Putin and others in Russia, in Orban's Hungary, and so on and so forth.
The picture we start to get is not of one cause leading to one effect.
One man, whether Bolsonaro or Trump or Putin, leading to copycats all over the world.
One country going by the way of authoritarianism and leading to copycats globally.
What we start to see is an interlocking system.
But there's one grand strategy at its heart.
And that strategy was masterminded by Arthur Finkelstein.
Arthur J. Finkelstein was born on May 18, 1945, in the East New York section of Brooklyn.
He was the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.
His father was a cabbie.
In 1967, Finkelstein earned a bachelor's degree in economics and political science from Queens College.
As a student, he sometimes shared a college radio program with Ayn Rand.
Yes, you heard that right.
Ayn Rand.
Finkelstein learned a lot from Rand and described himself later in a public speech as a true believer in Rand's libertarian laissez-faire capitalism.
In 1964, when he was 19 years old, Finkelstein volunteered in Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign.
One of the things that continues to astound me about Barry Goldwater's run for president is that it was one of the most lopsided losses in American presidential history.
It was humiliating.
And yet, the foot soldiers of his campaign have gone on to shape American politics since then.
I chronicle this in my book, and so do people like Ann Nelson in the Shadow Network and Sarah Posner.
People like Paul Weyrich, who founded the Heritage Foundation and the Council for National Policy, and Alec, Richard Vigery, Dana Rohrabacher, and Arthur Finkelstein, only to name a few.
By the time Finkelstein had graduated college, he had rubbed shoulders and learned from Ayn Rand in a personal relationship and then volunteered in Goldwater's campaign in a way that would shape his political life forever.
For example, in 1975, the National Conservative Political Action Committee was formed.
Its official founders were people like Terry Dolan and Roger Stone.
Yes, that Roger Stone.
With help from Richard Vigery.
Richard Vigery was, of course, one of the founders of the Council for National Policy, along with Paul Weyrich.
Vigery was one of the progenitors of direct mail and micro-targeting of voters and donors.
The National Conservative Political Action Committee became one of the first organizations to take advantage of a loophole Or organizations could scoot around donor limits, raise unlimited funds for candidates, and do advertising and other work independently from them that would nonetheless benefit them.
We all know about PACs today.
Millions and tens of millions of dollars going into PACs to help get people elected.
Well, Roger Stone and Richard Vigery, and you guessed it, Arthur Finkelstein, were all in on the ground of this kind of operation.
Finkelstein was associated with the National Conservative Political Action Committee, and he remained associated with Roger Stone for decades and decades.
In one of the very few public speeches recorded Arthur Finkelstein says that the first foundation of politics is money.
How much money you have to spend, how you can spread it around, and the kinds of advertising you can do with it often determine who wins an election.
He gave that speech near the end of his life, but he learned it half a century prior, working with Stone, Vigery, and everybody at the NCPAC.
But Finkelstein is best known for getting people elected, for being the man behind the curtain, the Wizard of Oz figure that you never see but who's masterminding the entire operation.
He was not on television, never named as the campaign director, never had a public facing role, but he was the one that candidates looked to, to design a program that would get them elected, even in the most unlikely of circumstances.
Finkelstein got involved with the likes of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Orrin Hatch, And many other household names in 20th century American politics.
It's estimated that he was responsible for getting more people elected to the US Senate than anyone in history.
His most consequential election, however, might have come outside of the United States.
Near the end of the 20th century, he was linked with a far-right dark horse candidate in Israel named Benjamin Netanyahu.
Netanyahu was seen as an outsider, somebody who came from the world of business and didn't have a strong chance to become prime minister in the wake of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
However, with Fickelstein at the helm, Netanyahu was victorious.
A few years later, Netanyahu made a recommendation to a friend of his, somebody looking to make a comeback in a place where he had been all but excised from political life.
Finkelstein moved his attention from Israel to Hungary, where he took up the campaign, the comeback campaign of Viktor Orban.
Now I could go on and on today about the biographical details of Finkelstein's remarkable life.
A man who started as a young college student rubbing shoulders with Ayn Rand, volunteering for the Goldwater campaign, and somebody who was directly responsible for helping to get into power.
Figures who continue to have a determinative role in global politics.
There is no Netanyahu without Finkelstein.
There is no Orban, as we know him, without Finkelstein.
And yes, there is no Trump, as we know him, the former President of the United States and current candidate for President of the United States, without Finkelstein.
His protege, his cohorts, including Roger Stone and also Paul Manafort, directly involved in getting Trump into the White House.
What interests me today is Finkelstein's approach to electoral politics, the strategies that he used to go from working within the Republican Party to affect what I have dubbed a far-right takeover of the GOP.
I've talked many times on this show and many other commentators, historians and experts have outlined how over the last decades of the 20th century a far-right coalition of Christian pastors and politicos along with political operatives created a GOP that moved far to the right if you compare it to that of Dwight Eisenhower.
Finkelstein was directly responsible for that move, and he was so by employing a strategy of getting candidates elected that was explicitly negative, explicitly nihilist, and based on nothing but a hunger for power.
No vision for human flourishing.
No values to speak of.
No hope to instill.
Nothing but negativity, attacks, traps, and the perception of truth.
not truth itself, just its perception.
Finkelstein employed what he called a strategy of rejectionist voting.
He wanted to create a situation where voters were voting against something, an enemy, an attack, a threat.
Yes, they were choosing a candidate, but they were choosing that candidate based on their fear of what might happen if they didn't choose that candidate.
And there's something here to notice something here that we, we really have to make sure we understand.
If we think back to the very first presidential campaign of Barack Obama, which now seems so long ago, Barack Obama offered a vision of hope for the country.
Those of us who are old enough, remember the posters, the stickers, the campaign ads, hope was all around us.
Now, whatever we might think of Barack Obama and his legacy, I think it's easy to agree that when he ran for president, he was offering people a vision, something to build into, to cultivate, something we should all try for together.
When Finkelstein approached campaigns, it was the exact opposite.
It was the idea that if you don't vote for the person that we're putting in front of you, very bad things will happen to you.
That you need to reject that other candidate, because if you don't, your family will not be safe.
Your family will not be safe from the big bad other.
With Reagan, it was crime and drugs, welfare queens, crackheads, and all those people coming for the American dream, including your family.
With others, it was people coming from other places.
In one of his few public speeches given in the Czech Republic near the end of his life, he talked about the ways that when the Arab Spring happened, a time that was, for many, a sign of grassroots organizing and democratic hope in the Middle East, he saw an opportunity.
An opportunity to demonize migrants and those trying to find a safe place to live and shelter somewhere else.
Finkelstein realized that he could make the Arab Spring into an anti-Muslim campaign, whether in Orban's Hungary or back in the United States.
He directly tied unrest and calls for democracy across the world with the danger of migrants.
If you remember the ways that European governments reacted to migrants coming from the African continent in those years, that sentiment was often directly cultivated by campaigns from Arthur Finkelstein.
The best example of this fear-mongering, however, this creation of an enemy, the creation of a big bad other, came in Hungary.
In 2010, Orban was making a comeback.
He'd been voted out before, as a centrist.
Now, under the tutelage of Finkelstein and others, he was making a comeback as a right-wing candidate.
But in order to do that, Finkelstein realized there had to be an existential threat.
Something that would cause voters to reject other choices in favor of Orban.
Orban had brought on historian Maria Schmidt, according to a piece from Mondoweiss, during his first term in 2002.
She was the head of the National Memorial for the Victims of Dictatorship.
But she laid out a vision for Hungary that was quite captivating to Finkelstein.
She imagines Hungary as the innocent victim that was surrounded by enemies and steadfastly guarded its original identity, a small country being preyed upon by larger forces in Europe and all over the world.
For her, Hungary is a country that has always been occupied, whether the Turks or the Nazis or the Communists.
And now, the goal is to protect it from outside influences and to defend its borders by way of calling on its Christian heritage and values.
Finkelstein loved this vision, but he needed a bad guy.
And so he found him in none other than George Soros.
George Soros, of course, is a billionaire, someone who was seen by conservatives as a cosmopolitan, somebody who had made a lot of money in currency trading, but for most people was not a household name, not someone they'd heard of, much less blamed for the downfall of their society, the presence of migrants or any other number of things they feel hurt them.
So who is George Soros, and why do Republicans find him so scary?
There's only one man who can answer that question.
Let's get a reality check with senior political analyst John Avalon.
Hi, John.
Hey, Ali.
So it's getting near Halloween, so I want to start by trying to scare you, OK?
Ready?
George Soros.
Does that spook you?
Well, if you're on the far right, it might.
The 88-year-old liberal billionaire has been a bogeyman for fringe groups for a long time.
But lately, conspiracy theories about Soros have moved from the outer reaches of politics to the highest reaches of government.
Earlier this month, President Trump accused Soros of funding anti-Kavanaugh protesters.
Last week, Congressman Matt Gaetz accused him of funding the migrant caravan, a baseless claim made even more explicitly by a top Republican Senate aide-turned-lobbyist, Kelly Johnston.
Now, that's not all.
Congressman Paul Gosar even blamed Soros for the violence at the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.
Finkelstein capitalized on the idea of the big bad international capitalist.
The one who holds everything in his hands.
Who pulls the strings.
Who controls the banks.
And yet, a person who was born in Hungary.
As Mondo Weiss puts it, Soros was foreign, yet familiar.
The perfect enemy.
And so the monster that we now know the right considers George Soros to be is born.
This is Finkelstein's Frankenstein.
Mondo Weiss puts it this way.
First, a picture is publicly drawn of a conspiracy against Hungary that is orchestrated by Soros.
Next, there follows a fight by the Hungarian government against the environmental advocacy organization Okotars, which is said to be controlled by Soros.
Police storm the offices of the alleged Soros lackeys, confiscating computers.
Investigations and legal proceedings go on for months.
He also says that Soros is the agent of that Western train of thought that seeks to weaken the national state and flood it with refugees.
Here, for the first time, Soros' aid for migrants is cast as part of a large conspiracy.
Every organization that Soros' Open Society Foundations has given money to is characterized as being controlled by him.
They're characterized as financial mercenaries.
These are the globalists that want to take down nations, want to disband your way of life, destroy your children's understanding of their heritage.
Today, we hear people say that globalists want open borders.
They want to advance the quote LGBTQ agenda.
They want to make sure that the rainbow flag flies over every capital in the world.
If destroying your nation by destroying its borders isn't enough, they also want to destroy the traditional family.
Orban and Putin and Netanyahu and Trump all talk about the ways that globalists want to destroy the body of your nation and the bodies of your children.
They want to disband the family that is your national identity and your literal family.
The strategy worked.
Soros not only became an enemy of Hungary, of Orban, but also somebody who is reviled across the globe.
Today, April 2024, I saw a tweet blaming what was happening on college campuses all across the United States in protest against Israel's violence against the Palestinian people as the work of George Soros.
Throughout both of Trump's campaigns, Soros has been a figure who has been caricatured as a globalist trying to ruin the national identity of the American people.
The kind of person who's trying to control your life by pulling all the strings of the financial institutions of the world behind your back.
This is of course an old and worn anti-semitic conspiracy theory.
It is a trope about the international Jew who has no home and yet tries to ruin everyone else's.
This is the creation of Arthur Finkelstein.
It was designed for Orban, but it remains with us as a traveling caricature, a traveling other, a traveling Frankenstein that any candidate can use and conjure at their bidding.
I know what some of you are thinking.
Wasn't Arthur Finkelstein Jewish?
He was.
He was also gay.
So here is a gay Jewish man creating George Soros into a monster, reviving anti-Semitic tropes from a millennium ago and putting them in place as avenues for far-right organizing and negativity across the globe.
So Finkelstein employs rejectionist voting by creating a big bad other.
In an award-winning piece titled The Finkelstein Formula by Hans Grossiger, Grossiger puts it this way.
Finkelstein's goal was to polemicize the electorate in the extreme, to inflame factions against each other.
The driving force?
Fear.
It has to be done so that it seems the danger comes from the left, he advised Nixon.
He had to establish the ideas that would induce fear in the populace.
Once again, I just want to point out that at the top of this episode, we heard Sarah Posner saying Trump is a symptom.
That he's the symptom of a Republican party that is a threat to democracy.
And you might be used to hearing that these days.
You might be used to hearing that the support for Trump is a threat to democracy.
And that's right.
But what the example of Finkelstein illuminates for us is that there's a strategy.
There's a worldview.
There's an approach to public life that has been part of the GOP.
That has been growing within the GOP since the 1960s.
A strategy that says, if you can induce fear, if you can make people afraid, they will make a decision based on the panic and the danger that they see ahead of them.
They will reject another candidate and choose yours.
Not because you're offering them a better life.
Not because you're offering them a way to flourish.
A way to hope.
Something different.
Something revolutionary.
It's because you're offering them protection from the danger you have invented.
Hasegger continues, The main thing was to be constantly on the attack.
Whoever didn't strike first would be struck by his opponent.
And Finkelstein made it personal.
Every campaign needed an enemy that had to be vanquished.
He developed negative campaigning into a technique that he called rejectionist voting.
The idea is not to talk about the advantages of your candidate, but to project all kinds of evil onto your opponent in order to destroy the confidence of his voters.
In doing so, he was not careful about niceties.
He did his job, just as a lawyer defends a murderer.
So once again, I just want to point out.
That what we take to be normal these days, what we take to be something that is an unfortunate part of our political life, whether in this country or others, is a particular vision of how to win.
It says that what's important is nothing else but being in power.
That our goal as those who might be elected, who might be chosen to lead, Is not to make people's lives better.
Is not to solve problems.
It is to be in power.
That is the goal.
Full stop.
And if you want to get there, you have to be willing to employ any tactic necessary.
So, as we sit here in the midst of a presidential race that is only going to get more disgusting as the months go on.
As we sit here at the precipice of summer, a summer that will no doubt be much like 2016, ugly, full of unexpected events, disgusting rhetoric, all kinds of political machinations, when things like the Access Hollywood tape or other unseemly details come to light.
A summer of us that most of us are not looking forward to and will try to forget if we can.
As we face down these months, I am going to be thinking about Arthur Finkelstein.
I'm going to be thinking about the ways that Donald Trump was made in a lab to embody the vision that he created for politics.
That Donald Trump has no scruples.
He has no concerns for values or morality.
No vestiges of wanting to do good that might have been repressed in a desire for power, but nonetheless remain there somewhere buried.
No vision that he believes in.
One that might be myopic and exclusionary, like that of Mike Pence or Mike Johnson, but nonetheless a vision.
Donald Trump was made to be Finkelstein's man.
In this sense, Sarah is exactly right.
The GOP is a threat to democracy.
We could talk about the ways that it has chosen to prop up a man who incited an insurrection four years ago.
A man who is a proto-fascist, a man who has echoed Mein Kampf, a man who has repeatedly lied about our free and fair elections, a man who tried to overturn his own loss in the 2020 presidential election, who tried to get fake electors slated, who tried to find votes in Georgia, who tried to pressure public officials
A man who is now trying to figure out who will be his partner on the ticket, the potential next vice president of the United States, after his former vice president had gallows erected for him outside the Capitol during the insurrection.
But if we zoom out, the GOP is a threat to democracy because it has been a parasite on democracy for over half a century.
Democracy is built on an agreement to share power.
An agreement to abide by the will of the people.
Democracy demands faith and it demands values.
It demands that we believe in a project.
Now that project may not be perfect.
That project may be flawed.
That project may never have been achieved.
And all of that is true about the United States.
But democracy depends on a vision for what should be and an agreement that we work together to achieve it.
When Sarah Posner brings up Arthur Finkelstein, to me she's bringing up something that we cannot forget.
That there has been a chipping away, a hollowing out of that faith and of that agreement for a long time on the part of folks working to get GOP candidates elected.
That when you run on negativity and nihilism, when you run on rejectionist approaches to politics, you're running in order to gain power at all costs.
And in the case of Trump, or in the case of Orban, or in the case of Netanyahu, to hold on to power at all costs.
To overstep the bounds of the agreement.
To reject any vision or values.
To say that the very basis of democracy is not how you want to operate, even if you are technically operating within its bounds.
You can only have so many decades.
Of that kind of operation, that hollowing out from within before everything collapses on itself.
So as Sarah says, there is a threat to democracy.
It is one that goes beyond Donald Trump.
And the hope that we have is as simple as this.
It's a rejection of rejectionism.
It's a willingness to say together that we will not allow fear, we will not allow nihilism to govern us.
We will not be governed by the tyrants of fear, but we will have a voice as people.
We will continue the agreement.
We will continue the experiment.
We will continue to have a vision for what things should be.
Thanks for listening today.
Thanks for being part of this community.
Thanks for helping me figure out what's pressing to talk about, pushing back on my ideas, and sending me great questions.
If you're a subscriber, stick around.
We're going to talk about what's happening in Texas and a classic case of Christian nationalism victimhood.
All right, y'all.
Thanks for sticking around.
Let's talk about Tim Dunn, billionaire from Texas.
If you listened to my interview with Representative James Tallarico from January, you know about Tim Dunn.
He's a billionaire in Texas who wants to have a direct and overwhelming influence on Texas politics.
He, according to the Texas Monthly in an article by Russell Gold is somebody who's given millions and millions and millions of dollars to a PAC that is trying to basically be a bank account for candidates he deems sufficiently conservative and in line with his vision.
Here's a quote from Gold's article at Texas Monthly.
For Dunn, politics, work, and religion all run together.
I have very deliberately unsegmented my life, he said in 2022, on a podcast hosted by Ken Harrison, chair of Promise Keepers.
I don't have one approach in business and another approach in ministry and another approach in church.
I work for God and God has given me a bunch of jobs to do.
One of the things that it seems that Dunn also does is to give money to candidates based on a rating.
He has what Gold calls a very simple method.
A Dunn-affiliated organization lets lawmakers know how it wants them to vote on key issues of the legislative session.
So basically, somebody from Dunn's organization will let somebody in the state legislature, lawmaker, know that they want them to vote this way on Texas bill about chaplains in schools or about abortion or whatever.
After the session, it assigns a number from 0 to 100 to each lawmaker based on these votes.
Republicans who score high in the 80s or 90s are likely to remain in Dunn's good graces, but those who see their scores drift down to the 70s or 60s who, I don't know, legislate independently, their fate is easy to predict.
They'll face a primary opponent, Often someone little known in the community whose campaign bank account is filled by donations from Dunn and his allies.
So you see how the playbook works.
I talked about this not only with Representative James Tallarico, but also with the Tacketts, a couple who is doing great activist work in Texas and who I interviewed in January as well.
Well, you would never know it because Don wrote an opinion piece in the Midland Times saying that he can't believe people would think these things about him.
He says, I'm a political observer and activist, and I'm accustomed to others' efforts to label their opponents.
It's standard practice.
A recent disparagement is a claim that I support and am a leader in something called Christian nationalism, a made-up label that conflicts with biblical teaching.
All labels are made up.
They're all made up.
That's why we label things.
They're all made up.
The label is us giving a category, linguistically, to something.
They're all made up.
So, you can say that it's made up.
Christian is made up.
There's no Christian in the Bible.
Christian is a made-up label.
Try to find the word Christian in the New Testament.
Not gonna find it.
You know why?
Made-up label.
Because it's a category of a person who follows Christ.
There you go.
So you can say that Christian nationalism is a made-up label that conflicts with biblical teaching.
Great.
All labels are made up.
Thank you for coming to my professor talk.
Dunn goes on.
Our primary identity as believers is as a member in the body of Christ.
This is an expression of plurality, with each person being a unique part of the body, united by one head, who is Christ.
Alright, Dunn's basically saying here, y'all, I'm a Christian.
I love God.
What's wrong with that?
Yeah, I'm an American, but I'm a Christian.
That's, that's, that's, that's all that I need to be.
Here's what he says later.
Embracing a spiritual identity as a Christian something is to make the something preeminent over Christ.
That conflicts with the core tenets of Christianity.
So, in a way, he's doing the Marjorie Taylor Greene thing where he's like, well, I'm a Christian and I'm an American.
If that's Christian Nationalists, well, I don't know what the big deal is.
I don't know why you think you need to be calling me names.
I'm just a Christian and everything I do is saturated with God.
And then he does this thing where he's like, and the left is equating the term Christian Nationalism with authoritarianism.
I'm equating Christian Nationalists who support authoritarianism with authoritarianism.
That's what I'm doing, okay?
And then he goes on and he says, this is unbiblical.
So he's saying, look, I am not an authoritarian.
And this is a really smart move.
He talks about e pluribus unum.
He quotes Martin Luther King Jr.
He makes sure that we know we're not a Holy Roman Empire.
No, I'm just an American who believes in democracy and the rule of law.
Actually, I'm for the biblical concept of rule of law, which is a weird idea to introduce.
Nonetheless, he says that rule of law is granted in God's command to love, and Martin Luther King Jr.
placed loving our enemies at the center of the civil rights movement.
I encourage believers to risk any Christian something labels.
I proclaim simply, I'm a Christian.
That's great.
Now, here's the thing.
Here's the thing, man.
Here's the thing.
It's great that you're simply a Christian.
That doesn't mean good.
It doesn't mean harmless.
It doesn't mean Anything that I don't have to be scared of just by dint of being a Christian.
You being a Christian might mean I need to be scared.
The end of the article says Tim Dunn is a father of six children and grandfather of 20.
So what?
I don't care!
Just because you're a Christian father-grandfather doesn't mean, like, that you're not trying to do things that could harm people.
So here's the thrust of the op-ed.
I'm a Christian.
That's it.
Nothing else.
Okay.
But here's the thing.
The book of James teaches me that actions are more important than words.
That faith is dead without works.
That's what James says in the book of James.
Probably not James who wrote it.
Nonetheless, that's what it says.
So tell me about Tim Dunn.
Well, here is a piece at the San Antonio Current by Sanford Nolan.
And the piece is from April 5th, 2024, three weeks ago.
First line.
San Antonio Politico Joe Strauss, a former Republican Speaker of the Texas House, told the Texas Tribune that oil billionaire Tim Dunn, one of the state's most powerful Republican donors, once advised him that only Christians should hold leadership positions in the legislature's lower chamber.
Strauss, who's Jewish, told Tribune CEO Evan Smith about the encounter Thursday, appearing publicly to confirm for the first time an anecdote Texas Monthly reported in 2018.
So you say, I'm just a Christian.
That's it.
So I'm going to say, what kind of Christian are you?
And it seems from this reporting that you're the kind of Christian who thinks that only Christians should be in leadership.
Well, okay, that's a Christian Nationalist.
I'm making up that label.
I'm creating a category.
I'm saying that you're a Christian Nationalist because you think the nation should only be led by Christians.
So you can say to yourself, I'm just a Christian and I'm saying the kind of Christian you seem to be is the one That thinks only Christians should be in leadership.
What kind of Christian is that?
Because not all Christians are like that, Tim.
Oh, Christian Nationalists, that seems like a good label.
If I'm trying to describe things.
What, if you're just a Christian, if you're just doing God's work, what are the other things that being a Christian and nothing else means to you?
Here's Russ Gold back again at the Texas Monthly.
Dunn's influence goes well beyond campaign and politics.
His resume is lengthy.
He's vice chairman of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank located near the Capitol in Texas.
The foundation generates policy proposals from severe property tax cuts to bills that impede the growth of renewable energy that are often taken up by the Texas legislature.
So if you're doing that just as a Christian, now I know you're the kind of Christian who thinks we should cut property taxes and impede the growth of renewable energy.
He served for years on the board of the First Liberty Institute, a legal powerhouse that has won Supreme Court cases to advance Christianity's role in public life.
It seems, for Don, being just a Christian means having a lot of control over the public sphere.
It means that we might live in a pluralist society, but the goal is to gain as much power in that society as you can, so that you can impose your vision on everyone else.
You may not believe me, but let me jog your memory.
Here's part of a conversation between Representative James Tallarico of Texas, who represents a district in San Antonio, and me back a couple of months ago.
So Tim Dunn and Ferris Wilkes are two billionaires from West Texas.
And for context, for those that are not from Texas, we don't have any campaign contribution limits in the state.
You can literally give a candidate for office the million dollar check And that is not against the law.
And so these two billionaires have poured more than $100 million into our politics.
Every Republican state senator in Texas has taken their money.
More than half of Republican House members in Texas have taken their money.
For some Republicans, more than half of their total contributions come from these two billionaires.
And it's not just buying politicians.
They also fund a sprawling network of think tanks, advocacy organizations, legal organizations, media outlets.
They've created this ecosystem to push an extreme Christian nationalist agenda.
And so if you're not a Texan and you're trying to figure out why this matters to you, two billionaires are trying to destroy democracy in the second largest state in the Union.
I think this is the biggest story in American politics and not enough people are talking about it.
The important thing to realize about these two is that they are not just billionaires.
They're not just oil and gas oligarchs.
They are also Christian nationalist pastors.
And I know billionaire pastor sounds like an oxymoron, but on Sunday mornings, these two billionaires are preaching at far-right churches And if you listen to their sermons, they don't preach a theology of universal love.
They preach a theology of power and control and domination.
They think climate change is God's will.
They compare homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia.
And they believe that only Christians have a right to serve in public office.
In fact, they told the former Republican Speaker of the Texas House, Joe Strauss, that he didn't have a right to serve as Speaker because he's Jewish.
And so the scariest part is that they are turning this toxic theology into law in the second largest state in the country.
And we should all be incredibly alarmed by this development and what it means for the rest of the country.
So as somebody who's not a Texan, but who has done his best to learn and read and invest in these issues, from afar, it looks like two men can spend $100 million, which means that they are able to, I will just say diplomatically, highly influence our Who is elected in terms of Republican reps and senators in the state legislature.
And then they can basically tell those elected officials, here are the ways you should vote if you want our continued support.
And if you don't get our continued support, it's very unlikely you'll be reelected.
And or we will primary you.
And therefore, our vision for society, which just happens to be, as you say, a hardcore Christian nationalist vision of society that means if you're Jewish, you don't get to be speaker.
If you are queer, you are somehow akin to committing bestiality.
They are able, in essence, to tilt the scales in a way that feels very undemocratic.
And it's having an undue influence on our school system because these are the kinds of men, and correct me if I'm wrong, that would tell you the public schools are full of sin and evil because they're teaching things like DEI, or there are gay characters in some of the books in that library, or woke ideology is taking or there are gay characters in some of the books in I mean, as somebody who's not there, please correct me, please expand.
You're absolutely right.
And I just want to say, it's not that they believe these things about public schools.
They have created the narrative that you just encapsulated.
So they've always had two steps in their plan to dismantle public education, which, as you mentioned, the investigative reporting by CNN and other outlets, Suggest that that is their ultimate goal, is replacing public education with private Christian schooling.
And to do that, they have two steps.
One is to discredit public schools.
The second is to defund public schools.
And you have to do the first one, because as we talked about, People love their public schools, right?
People across Texas love their neighborhood schools and their neighborhood public school teachers, and they owe a lot to those public schools.
And so, if you're going to defund them, if you're going to close them, you've got to discredit them first.
And that's why you've seen these book bans, accusing our librarians of grooming students.
It's why you've seen the CRT hysteria and the historical whitewashing, accusing our teachers of indoctrination.
It's why you've seen the largest public school district in the state, Houston ISD, being taken over.
Even though they have improved their academic performance over the last few years, all of these things are connected.
And it's a coordinated campaign to discredit public education as a societal project and paving the way for voucher scams that will defund and close our neighborhood schools.
Here's my takeaway from today.
When I read an op-ed like this one from Dunn, I'm willing to say, okay, you're just a Christian.
But what I want you to know is that if you're the kind of Christian, and there are kinds of Christians, there are different Christianities, if you're the kind of Christian who thinks that homosexuality is akin to bestiality and pedophilia, if you're the kind of Christian who thinks Jewish Folks should not be leaders in the state legislature.
If you think you need to be a certain religion to hold a certain leadership position in the country for the kind of Christian who wants to control our public square, who wants to use immense power to overtake the policies and the laws that are at play in your state, even though they're unpopular, even though most Texans don't want them, even though it will hurt people.
Then I'm happy to call you a Christian.
I just don't think I'm going to call you good.
The two don't go hand in hand.
So you can say that I'm a Christian, a father, a grandfather, a preacher, and I'm going to say so what?
That in itself does not mean you're safe, does not mean that you're good, and it does not mean that you believe in the American experiment in good faith.
It means you might want to use it against itself in order to take as much power as you can get in a way that belies the spirit of the law, if not the letter.
Of it.
Thanks for listening today, y'all.
Thanks for your support.
Thanks for making this show possible.
I appreciate all of you.
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If you want to be in touch, straightwhiteamericanjesus at gmail.com.
