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Brad welcomes author Katherine Stewart to discuss her new book, Money, Lies, and God. They break down the anti-democratic movement in the U.S., the influence of leaders and institutions like the Claremont Institute and Project 2025, and the rise of Christian nationalism. The conversation explores authoritarianism, disinformation, and how individuals can push back and ends on a hopeful note with actionable steps for defending democracy.
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AXIS Moondi AXIS Moondi Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, and today I am joined by my colleague and friend, Catherine Stewart, author of the new book, Money Lies in God, Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy.
Many of you will know Catherine from her previous book, The Power Worshippers, Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, and the documentary that's based on that book, God and Country.
She's written for The New York Times, The New Republic, Religion News Service, and many others.
In her new book, Money Lies in God, Catherine peels back the curtain on why so many Americans have turned against democracy.
She explores the leaders and institutions that are leading to a post-constitutional future.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Thanks for joining us on this Monday.
And it is a really special Monday.
I get to do so many great things.
I get to meet so many great authors.
And some weeks I get to interview not only world-class authors, but people who are my friends.
And today's one of those days.
So, Catherine Stewart, thanks for being here.
Oh, it's so great to talk with you, Brad.
Thanks so much for having me.
We've told this story before.
We're not going to do it again.
We infiltrate Gnar revivals, hang out at the bar at the Trump Hotel with all the bad guys in the world.
The creature can too, as we call it.
Yeah.
And general other things.
But today we're here to talk about your brand new book, which could not be more timely and is appearing as we speak, and that is Money, Lies, God, Inside the American Movement to Destroy Democracy.
You begin with a claim in this book.
And first of all, congratulations.
This is, of course, on the heels of the power worshipers, which so many people listening will have read.
They will have seen God and country and just been fans of yours for a long time.
But you begin this book with a claim that an anti-American idea has taken root in the United States.
And I think before we get into all of the specifics from the Claremont Foundation...
To Christopher Rufo and Project 2025 and smashing the administrative state and all of the other things that we're going to find in here.
What is the core of this anti-American idea?
What are the contours of that movement?
Thanks for that great question, Brad.
The idea is that the United States is founded not on any principles, but on a specific religion and cultural heritage.
It's the idea that America is on the brink of an apocalypse because of the rise of equality and what they call wokeness in the radical left.
It's this idea that democracy won't be able to survive, won't be able to, I should say, solve the problems that sort of equality and wokeness have created.
And it's the idea that the rules really don't apply anymore.
Because we're on this edge of absolute, you know, chaos and apocalypse.
So what we need is a strongman, an authoritarian leader who puts himself above the law and will seize the reins of power and scrap the rule of law in favor of the iron fist.
So basically, it's the idea that, you know, democracy in the sense of government is representative of the people and respecting individual rights in a pluralistic society.
It's the sense that this kind of government doesn't work, so you need to smash it up and create something new, an autocracy.
And that's sort of the contours of the idea.
So I hope I make it clear in Money Lies in God, my new book, that this is emphatically not the idea of...
Thomas Jefferson or Frederick Douglass or Abraham Lincoln or so many others who helped really create America as we know it.
This idea is as anti-American as it gets.
I can't think of anything more anti-American than a king.
You know, we can talk about things that are just not part of the American ethos.
I just can't imagine an argument where like a king would be somehow, you know, included in the American ideal.
And yet here we are.
One of the things you say is that it's not a movement that wants a seat at the table.
And it's not even a movement that wants to be like the head seat at the table.
I know you just talked about autocracy, but what does this movement want via an autocratic ruler or a monarch or something else?
This movement wants absolute power.
I mean, we can see it in the first days.
And weeks of the second Trump administration, every single move they're making is intended to consolidate as much power as possible in Trump's fingertips and also, you know, amongst his very inner circle.
You know, modern democracy really relies on specialized knowledge.
It relies on expertise.
It relies on rational accountability in order to function.
And Trump's people, the people he likes, intuitively understand that this kind of rationality is really inimical, right, to their ideas about what our country should be and their efforts to gain power.
So they've really set about destroying centers of expertise within the government and they've continued to lie and spread disinformation as vigorously as possible.
Very simply, they understand that the truth is their enemy.
That's one of the reasons why lies is in the title of the book.
Of course, money first, because money is a huge part of the story, meaning that huge concentrations of wealth have really destabilized the political system in many ways.
Then, of course, we have lies or conscious disinformation, which is another big feature of this movement to destroy our democracy.
And three, God, because the most important ideological framework.
I would say the largest part of this movement is Christian nationalism.
We talk a lot about Christian nationalism on this show.
We, as a kind of cottage industry of writers and journalists and scholars, have been trying to warn people, I think, for going on a decade now.
And I think what struck me, and I've said this on the show many times over the last eight months, is that I used to hear about going back to the time when America was great.
But when you want a king...
You don't want to go back to a time when America was great.
You want to re-found the country to something it's never been, because you feel like that's your only hope for achieving your goals.
And this leads to one of the most, I think, wonderful lines in the book.
It's something you say several times, and that is, a new American fascism is more of a pathology than a program.
What does that mean?
Well, authoritarianism, or to be more like less polite fascism, really, it's best understood that it's something that happens to a political system, rather than something that starts off as a full-fledged political program that receives support from the majority of the rank and file.
So when I suggest that the anti-democratic movement is more pathology than program, what I mean is that there are a number of...
Separate pieces and different interest groups, sometimes, frankly, working for different aims.
We can talk about that, but they nevertheless end up supporting and reinforcing one another.
I would say they're rowing in the same boat, in a sense.
But the outcome of their collective actions can really be unpredictable and lead to consequences that many of the rank-and-file, at the very least, who are really lending their support to this effort with their votes.
They don't anticipate this and they wouldn't want it if they really understood it.
And sometimes they will be very surprised at the consequences.
I mean, the oligarchs funding this movement, you know, you and I have spoken at length about the funders that are just like, you know, these billionaire funders that are, you know, pouring money into different features of this movement.
They're like this one faction.
So they're pursuing what they believe to be in their best interest.
Now, in the short term, many of these sort of Trump loyalist oligarchs are going to be rewarded with policies that are going to benefit their pocketbooks.
They're going to get low taxes for the rich.
They're going to get preferential treatment in their business arrangements.
But I think we should keep two points in mind.
So first, these oligarchs depend on the support of a huge part of the population that will not benefit from their initiatives.
And if they understood properly what was going on, they wouldn't support it.
And second, I think a lot of these augerks are frankly not as smart as they think they are.
They're investing their money in the corruption and dismantling of democracy.
That's going to give them, for sure, some short-term payouts.
But in the long run, they're making lives worse for themselves, worse for their kids or grandkids if they have any.
And then there are, of course, these horrible unintended consequences.
They're sort of destroying...
The sort of stability and kind of society to which they owe their own fortunes.
So a good example of the sort of pathological aspect of this movement is incredibly performative nature.
I would say a disproportionate number of the initiatives.
Or issues that they draw attention to have nothing to do with constructive policy.
They're not about actually improving the material lives of people.
They're all about performance.
They're about dominance displays or ritual punishment of perceived enemies.
They're about scapegoating.
They're about weaponizing resentments and then playing games with those resentments and getting people to vote on these sort of often.
Fantasy resentments.
So these are examples of behavior that are not goal-oriented.
These are really reactive behaviors.
It's really interesting because this is a movement that's always talking about this glorious past that we need to get back to.
But the past that they imagine is pure fantasy.
It's not the way they're telling us.
I mean, I think that they're much more preoccupied with this idea of Targeting their perceived enemies and punishing them, making liberal tears or whatever, than they are in actually creating something new.
Who cares about the morning after?
It's all about grand explosions and look-at-me dominance displays.
The reason that your line about it being more of a pathology than a program struck me is because exactly what you said there at the beginning of your answer, which was that we should think of fascism or at least authoritarianism.
As something that happens to a political system.
And I was thinking, when you said that, I was thinking, this is something that happens to a political body.
You know, it's wintertime.
I got sick the other week.
I had a fever.
I had the chills.
And I could feel in my body something happening.
And then, you know, and I think most of us have had this experience, is you're laying in bed and your fever breaks, right?
And you're sweaty and you feel something has changed in your body.
It broke.
And every time I check in on the news today, every time I check blue sky, every time I go to see what's going on, it feels more and more like a fever has come over further segments of leadership in this country, whether they are the broligarchs, whether they are the Senate Republicans, whether they are the Christian nationalists who in one moment of time might have said, I just want to get back to God and country.
Rolling back reproductive rights, stuff I don't like, but okay.
And now it's a matter of I'm holding up a mass deportation sign.
Or I saw somebody the other day say on a video that they wouldn't let Jesus in the country unless he came legally.
So the idea that this is a pathology that happens to a political body is something that I think will stay with me from your book for a long time.
You hinted at this already, but I want to get into it now.
This is a leadership-driven movement.
What does that mean?
I think a lot of folks kind of need spelling out as to the difference between a kind of organic grassroots, something that has grown throughout the country to support MAGA, or a top-down movement that's really fueled by a number of think tanks, oligarchs, and other components of this whole movement.
Absolutely.
Listen, this is a leadership-driven movement in that the agenda is set by the leadership of the movement.
It's really not driven by the rank and file.
There are different sort of categories of leadership.
There's the funders, of course, who are sort of pouring money into this movement.
There are sergeants and power players, sort of very political pastors and also strategists and big religious right leaders that are sort of leading different pieces of the organizational infrastructure of the movement.
This is, again, leadership driven, but also organization driven.
We can divide some of those organizations like into categories.
So there's this huge...
Right-wing legal sphere, there's very powerful think tanks like the Claremont Institute, Heritage Foundation.
You've got massive media and propaganda operations that are sort of spreading the messages to the rank and file.
There are data initiatives, very sophisticated data initiatives, policy groups.
There's, you know, sort of different categories of networking organizations that get different sectors of the leadership on the same page and sort of keep them in line.
So the sort of collective efforts of this movement and the leaders are really what's driving it forward.
Huge amounts of money have been poured into this movement, into that organizational infrastructure over five decades, and we're really seeing the consequences of that investment.
Now, I wouldn't say that not every single person who works at any one of those organizations would.
Could properly be described as a Christian nationalist or they wouldn't identify themselves as they wouldn't say, well, I'm a Christian nationalist, but their collective efforts are lending support to a Christian nationalist agenda.
You know, I think of Christian nationalism much as the way I often think of authoritarianism.
It's a political dynamic that afflicts political systems over time, you know, in addition to being an ideology.
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One of the leaders that emerges here is the Claremont Institute.
And friends, if you read the book, you're going to find so many characters.
And you may be wondering who we're talking about.
And you're going to find those who are trying to destroy public schools.
You're going to find the usual characters with the billions of dollars, the Kochs and the DeVosses and others.
You're going to find the foundations.
But as I was reading...
One character that stuck out to me that I think really needs some eyeballs on it and attention right now is the Claremont Institute, because this is the think tank that produced John Eastman, the kind of infamous lawyer who helped to engineer the attempt to steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump.
But the Claremont Institute is so interesting.
They're really a group of think tank nerds who kind of have their hands in everything.
They hang out with Charles Haywood, who's like a warlord.
They're helping fund sheriff fellowships for constitutional sheriffs.
They seem to be everywhere.
Can you tell us about how they emerged as one of the most important institutions in this anti-democratic phenomenon?
Thank you.
Yeah, the Claremont Institute came together in the late 1970s when some graduate students were inspired by a political philosophy professor named Harry Victor Jaffa.
It really saw its original mission as bolstering democracy.
It was always conservative, but in the beginning, they seemed sort of committed to America's founding principles.
But it's become sort of more reactionary and extreme over the years.
They have a couple of journals that they publish people and they offer a lot of fellowships.
And the thing we need to know about Claremont is first that they're very powerful.
They have a really deep network that is connected, like intimately involved in the White House at this point.
You have people like Russ Vogt and Michael Anton who are taking places in the Trump administration.
Vance is very connected to many of the Claremont folks.
So it's really not like a whingy, a fringy, I'm sorry, it's not a fringy, whingy group hanging out on the beaches of California.
It's like a group that really has the, it's taking power in Washington, D.C. And, you know, I would say the simplest way to understand them is to see them today as, I hate to make this comparison, but it's like an updated version of early 20th century fascism.
Some of their main intellectual sources actually come from that period.
Some of them are admirers of the Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt.
And the idea basically is that they believe we're in a state of emergency.
You know, we're standing on the edge of an apocalypse because of wokeness and equality and female empowerment.
And they think that the people or the vogue, right, need a leader who's above the law.
A red Caesar sometimes is how he's referred to.
You know, do we want a blue Caesar or a red Caesar?
You know, might be a combination of Hillary and Pol Pot, or it could be.
Trump, right?
So they believe as a matter of intellectual conviction that politics is frankly the art of lying and domination and deceit.
So they really participate very eagerly in spreading misinformation and at the same time reserving a kind of esoteric truth for themselves and their small clique.
I mean, you have people like...
And if you read...
Yeah, go ahead.
Sorry.
I'm sorry.
Go on.
Go on.
I was going to say Laura Ingraham, Ben Shapiro, these are all...
Absolutely.
And so many others.
And if you read their journals, oh my gosh, some of the people they publish are so unbelievably extreme.
You know, you have this guy named Raw Egg Nationalist who's been published there a bunch of times, who says terrible things about women.
Then he says, maybe men and women shouldn't work together in the same spaces.
I mean, this is like Taliban-level stuff.
You know?
Yeah.
And that's one of the polite ones, by the way.
I mean, there are some others who are far worse.
Yeah, it's very strange to live in a moment where the Claremont Institute has any kind of political legitimacy, much less is not considered to be in line with the John Birch side of a past era, because it's really gone that far in terms of its conspiracy theories, its misogyny, its racism.
And I think something you said earlier, though, is really important is that the reverence for Carl Schmitt means a reverence for political philosophy that says politics is war, it's friend or enemy, and you cannot have a democracy where we're supposed to negotiate, where we're supposed to share power, where we're supposed to live with difference.
If you think that politics is simply dominate or be dominated, destroy or be destroyed, those two are not coherent.
And you can see that in their approach.
As your book makes out, anti-democratic to the core.
It's true.
I mean, their sort of view, or at least in what they say, you know, they're coming up with all these kinds of crazy fantasies about this because it's not true.
But what they say is America is so broken and so certain to collapse that any intervention at all is justified and we need to set aside laws and break institutions that get in the way.
But, you know...
I think, really, they're always bashing woke elites, but really what they want is power for themselves and their political allies.
They want to be a new elite, and they're getting it in the second Trump administration.
Let's connect this to Project 2025.
We've mentioned the Claremont Institute, but Project 2025 came from the Heritage Foundation, but it was obviously a work that was the amalgamation of many conservative, might be the wrong word, but conservative forces in this country.
How is Project 2025 part of the anti-democratic movement trying to destroy our democracy?
Well, Project 2025, as we anticipated it, has really become a kind of blueprint of the movement and for the new administration.
So, you know, Trump's promises on the campaign trail.
That he would not implement Project 2025 are absolutely false.
It represents a fusion of Christian nationalist ideology and a new right ideology.
But I would say its most important working elements right now are on the side of the new right.
The part of the program that's having the biggest impact now in the earliest weeks of the incoming Trump administration and the things he's trying to do now, I would say, of the most significant...
I would count as the smashing of the administrative state or deconstruction of the administrative state.
We've seen this in his multiple trying to slim down or get rid of these different agencies, making things unworkable, suspending the Constitution for different sort of measures that he wants, just violating the law left and right.
So I argue in my book, and what they understand fundamentally, It's delusional.
You know, it comes down to little more than simple distrust of expertise and destruction of vital government functions.
So, again, it's political performance at the expense of actual governance.
Unfortunately, the bill for this kind of destruction will come due over time.
The full bill, you know, it's causing pain now.
It's going to cause a lot more in the future.
And in the meantime, there's going to be a lot of suffering.
So the smashing of the administrative state, you know, is one of their big goals of Project 2025. And we're seeing this happen in real time.
Like, why does someone like Russ Vogt, a bona fide Christian nationalist and architect of Project 2025, why does he want to destroy the administrative apparatus that holds everything in place from air traffic control to national parks to, you know, VA suicide hotlines to research grants?
So, again, it's that hatred of expertise.
One of the things I want to try to help people understand is, I think we've all been frustrated in the past, and you write about this in the book, with the red tape.
I need to go to the DMV to do this, and it took three hours.
I need to do something at the Social Security office.
My baby was born.
I need to get them a Social Security number.
I need to do things that...
Involve the government and take too long.
Could be with the VA. It could be with any number of things.
I think we can all understand that.
Why, however, is there a war on expertise?
I think a lot of people are going to be wondering that soon when the regulations around our airspace, around our food supply, around our national parks, around the air that we breathe are taken away.
Why do these men, and they're almost all men, but there are women in there, just confirmed, why are they so convinced that expertise is part of the woke agenda that has destroyed America?
I think they've projected their own anxieties and frustrations with the culture onto a demonic Borg, right?
They use that term, Borg, and they've convinced...
That they simply need to slay this beast.
They just treat government as a synonym for oppressive bureaucracy.
Their ideology valorizes pure, unreasoned exercises of what they see as masculine powers.
It really doesn't leave any space for professional and accountable government that a modern democracy needs.
Unfortunately, we've had a first Trump administration and that provided plenty of examples of this kind of ideology and operation.
We had incompetent and unqualified and fanatical appointees wreaking havoc on multiple institutions.
But now we're seeing the same approach being pushed on a massive scale and with much more planning and sort of much more thought going into it.
You know, they really don't want experts that might interfere with their rule.
It's really kind of astonishing if you think about somebody like RFK Jr. taking over the public health.
This is a guy who's promised to fire all, would you say, food scientists or something?
Or food safety inspectors?
Really?
What you just said there is something I said the other day on Blue Sky, which is they don't want to govern, but they do want to rule.
And you get this strange phenomenon where you destroy government.
Because you think government is the enemy.
But the lived experience of the citizen is for the government to grow and expand into their lives because you have a ruler and not a liberal democracy.
So what am I talking about?
Well, we now have the federal government saying, by executive order, that there are only two genders.
We have all of these examples of ways they're going to limit personal freedoms in the name of what they take to be the good way to rule.
And so they're going to destroy government.
And yet somehow your officials are going to have more of a role in your home and in your bedroom and in your medicine cabinet and in your family choices and your family structure, the people you love and so on, even though they've destroyed everything that makes those things livable.
A clean food supply, clean air, clean water, anything else.
Right.
And so to me, that seems like where we're headed.
If you repeal the 20th century, then you're going to end up living in the 19th, and that seems to be something that is on the horizon.
According to Turning Point Action, you know, faith outreach director Lucas Miles, they want to take religion back before the 17th century, which he said is when things started to go wrong with the, you know, with the social gospel.
I mean, he literally said that at Turning Point, I'm sorry, at America Fest last December.
They really have the sort of fantasy of the past and idealize it in a way.
But it's very adolescent in a way.
It's really kind of, it's all about performance and destruction and fantasy.
It's not really about making the world.
world better for people.
But there are so many inconsistencies, as you note, Brad, and I think those inconsistencies can and should be highlighted every day by people who would like to sort of, you know, bring us some sanity back into our system and improve bring us some sanity back into our system and improve life for everyday Americans.
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What are ways Catherine folks can keep up with you as you talk about Money, Lies, and God, your new book?
And all the places you'll be here in the coming months to talk and share about what's in the book.
Well, thank you so much.
My website is CatherineStewart.me.
I am on Blue Sky.
I think it's CatherineStewart at Blue Sky something something.
And then I'm still on Twitter.
Not terribly active, but I'm still on it.
So you can find me there too.
Yeah.
Well, thank you for being here.
Thank you for...
Writing another timely book that I'm sure so many folks are going to find helpful in trying to figure out what's going on.
As always, friends, you can find us back here on Wednesday with It's in the Code, Friday with the weekly roundup.
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