The Scourge of Christian Nationalism with Thomas Lecaque

One of the consistencies of rightwing extremism is the intertwining of Christian ideology with hypernationalist violence. The U.S. is no stranger to this scourge, and other western nations face this danger, too. To solve a problem as deep and pervasive as this one, we need to dig in and understand it better. EJ Russo and Dr. Jay Weixelbaum unravel this topic with Dr. Thomas Lecaque, an expert in Christian Nationalism and how it worms its way into our popular culture--normalizing bigotry and continuing cycles of violence. Tune in! You don't want to miss this one. 

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00

Hey, Jay, I'm curious. Why do we call this podcast a Nazi on wall street?

Speaker 2 0:06

I'm glad you asked EJ. You know, I study history. The Nazi on wall street podcast is part of elusive films, a Nazi on wall street project, which tells the true story of how the Nazi sent a pair of spies, a German lawyer, and a beautiful diabolical bareness to recruit American corporations for the fascist cause. And only a Jewish FBI agent stood in their way.

Speaker 1 0:25

<laugh> wow. How are you going to make this story? Come to life?

Speaker 2 0:27

We are raising funds to produce a short film highlighting, just one part of the Nazi and wall street, pilot script, which showcases our team's talents and writing and production. Awesome.

Speaker 1 0:36

Where can someone go to learn more and help contribute to

Speaker 2 0:39

The cause? Chances are we're running a fundraiser right now, but regardless of when you hear this episode, you can go to elusive hyphen film slash donate to contribute to putting this highly relevant history on screen.

Speaker 1 0:50

Great. I hear there's some cool donation incentives too, like mugs totes shirts and more for yourself, or to give as a

Speaker 2 0:57

Gift. That's right. Go to elusive hyphen film slash donate to learn more now onto today's show

Speaker 1 1:06

Emmanuel macro was just reelected.

Speaker 3 1:10

Wow.

Speaker 2 1:12

On the show.

Speaker 3 1:14

God,

Speaker 2 1:15

You heard it here first as we post this two months from now.

Speaker 3 1:18

Oh, thank you.

Speaker 2 1:21

Hey.

Speaker 3 1:22

Oh, that's good news. That is, that is good news.

Speaker 1 1:25

Best podcast ever.

Speaker 3 1:28

<laugh> oh man, guys, I need, I needed this at the end of a very, very long semester. Thank you. My family members who probably vote fullness now, uh, cry themselves to sleep tonight.

Speaker 1 1:39

I'm glad that France doesn't have to join the brotherhood of steel. Welcome to a Nazi on wall street podcast because every time history repeats, the price goes up.

Speaker 2 2:02

I'm Dr. Jay Weisbaum and I study the history of American corporations doing business with Nazi Germany

Speaker 1 2:07

And I'm EJ Russo. I'm just a regular guy who has grown concerned by the recent rise of anti-democratic sentiment growing around the world and is just trying to figure out what is really happening. Jay and I created this podcast in part to help promote his project, a Nazi on wall street, but to also discuss troubling current events and give them historical context. Jay, my friend, how are you doing today?

Speaker 2 2:34

I'm good. I'm here. We're still going in the year of our Lord 2022.<laugh>

Speaker 1 2:40

Well, funny thing you bring up the Lord, right? Right, right. At the beginning of the episode, because today's topic of conversation is one that I have a plethora of opinions about and cannot wait to discuss more than Han shooting. First more than Philadelphia Eagle fans saying that Eli Manning is in the hall of Famer. Even more than carpeted bathrooms, Jay, the takeover of the Republican party by Christian nationalists without fail triggers me like no other subject

Speaker 2 3:17

Whoa. More than carpeted bathrooms. Huh?

Speaker 1 3:19

Yeah, man. Why'd do that.

Speaker 2 3:20

Yeah. I'm really glad you laid out all the controversy a ahead of time so that we can get all the aggravated star wars fans to reply to us on social media at elusive films at Twitter, Christian fundamentalism is, uh, it's a hot topic. These days. It's been a hot topic in American history. Uh, for quite some time,

Speaker 1 3:43

I was first introduced to Christian nationalism in the form of young earth creationism back in 2007, back then I had a modest YouTube channel with a respectable following that touched on topics like pro-human ideals and scientific literacy. As a result, I suddenly became aware of a, a brand of creationists who believed that the earth and its life forms were created in their present forms by the Abrahamic God, between approximately 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. And it was my naive thought at the time that if I simply refuted these claims using facts and evidence, I could somehow show these simply miseducated folks why they were wrong and they would correct their perspective. And then they would think before the trouble,

Speaker 2 4:30

It didn't work out that way. Huh?

Speaker 1 4:32

<laugh> not only was this not the outcome, Jay, but I was instead sent multiple accusatory messages of being a globalist Satanist bent on establishing a new world order.

Speaker 2 4:46

Hey, that's not fair. I'm the Jew here.<laugh>

Speaker 1 4:50

And then attached to those direct messages. I would receive a number of video links made by young earth, creationist propagandists, like Kent Hoven, Ken ham, Ray comfort, and even growing pain star Kirk, Cameron. Oh, who could forget what

Speaker 2 5:09

A, what a guy, what

Speaker 1 5:10

A guy. What I love about that show is that his best friend's name was.

Speaker 2 5:14

I, I mean, isn't that from the Bible somewhere

Speaker 1 5:16

<laugh> Zoiah begot.

Speaker 2 5:20

<laugh> I I'm pretty sure that was in my tour portion. I'm gonna have to look saying that to my family when I was 13.

Speaker 1 5:27

So I, I foolishly started to try and dissect those videos in response, by, you know, editing their claims in a video cutting to me, showing the actual science behind the theory of evolution through natural selection and a biogenesis and the big bang. And after a few videos, it was fun for a bit until an organization known as creation science, evangelism owned by Dr. Dino himself, Ken Hogan, one of the, a four mentioned young earth creationists and tax fell. And I must add that's a, a story for a different time, but he, he spent eight years incarcerated and he's about to go back right now.

Speaker 2 6:04

Oh, that's fun. And a common theme. I think he he's a fascist get in trouble for tax fraud as a tail tried and true.

Speaker 1 6:11

Yeah. And this guy had my channel shut down after filing several false DMCA or digital millennium copyright act claims against my videos citing that I stole his content. It didn't matter that his content was never copyrighted, which was a fact he flaunted at the beginning of all of his seminars, it only mattered that a disagreeable message was snuffed out. And it was there that I learned the hard way that this was a different form of Christian than what I had grown up with in my liberal Catholic church, in New Jersey. This was my first mild interaction with what I eventually came to know is Christian nationalist ideology. Yeah. My interest into this anti-science worldview started as a hobby to poke fun at some low hanging fruit. However, I learned over the years and I came to realize I was witnessing a certain perspective that was festering and poisoning the Republican party over the past few decades.

Speaker 2 7:16

This conversation really reminds me of our tagline. Every time history repeats price goes up, right. We, we say that a lot on here, but you know, history comes in ways and it's, as I was doing a little bit of reading for this discussion, I'm struck by, there's kind of this backstory, this earlier episode, back in the 1920s, the rise of fundamentalism and it kind of peaks in the twenties. You know, this is, this is the Nazi wall street podcast. So, you know, we're, we're always kinda alluding to that era of the 1930s and forties in which the I Nazi wall street story takes place. But, um, I'm not a historian religion. I was curious E especially considering what's going on now, like what led to the rise of fundamentalism and what caused it to kind of wane cuz really by the thirties, it wasn't as intense. Then, then it kind of pops back up in the forties. And um, I think you're gonna tell me a little bit more about what happens after that.

Speaker 1 8:06

Christian evangelism has been a significant force in American politics since at least the 19th century with the direction and power of this political force ebbing and flowing, like you said, the thirties, it wasn't as strong, but it started growing. And in recent history, several critical turns and factors have led the overwhelming majority of white evangelicals to move towards the modern Republican party. A big factor in this shift was the modern civil rights era, the brown versus the board of education, Supreme court decision outlawed, the segregation of public schools. And as a result, a number of white evangelical communities opened private schools as a way to oppose school desegregation, framing their hostility to brown versus board as an expression of religious freedom rather than a defense of racial segregation, elementary and secondary schools such as Jerry Falwell's Lynchburg Christian school and colleges such as Bob Jones university became known as segregation academies end quote in the wake of the civil rights bill of 1964, passing the IRS threatened to revoke the tax exempt status of these segregation academies unless they seized their discriminatory admissions. So that coupled with LBJs great society programs and the passage of the voting rights act of 1965 further altered the terrain of America's legalized racial hierarchy.

Speaker 2 9:36

Oh yeah. They lost their minds.

Speaker 1 9:38

And then add in school desegregation and busing, the outlawing of legalized racial discrimination and the threat. It posed for white evangelical schools, the increased federal dollars for social welfare programs and the sharp increase in black voters largely for the democratic party. And this all changed. America's legalized racial structure. According to Jerry Falwell, the federal government was not only invading local autonomy, but was turning its back against whites and favoring African Americans and Latinos, the world. It seemed to many Christian evangelicals was turning upside down

Speaker 2 10:19

And the Asian American community, which has been growing in recent years. It's always been, uh, freedom for me, but not for the right. The, the flag stands for freedom, but it's only for the quote unquote real America and Falwell and his friends and the Republican party at large were really taking that idea and turning into policy, uh, especially by the, uh, the Reagan revolution, right. Which we we've talked about a bit on this show.

Speaker 1 10:46

It was America first and then it was America for Americans, right? Mm-hmm<affirmative> and then so on and so forth

Speaker 2 10:51

And now make America great. Again, it's the same

Speaker 1 10:53

Make it's all the same dog whistle,

Speaker 2 10:55

The same flavor, different decade, right?

Speaker 1 10:58

And Richard Nixon capitalized on this resentment, the 1960 democratic presidential nomination of Catholic John F. Kennedy and endorsement of Barry Goldwater and his antici rights platform had already intensified white Southern evangelical interests in the Republican party, coupled with anger over America's changing legal racial structure, the south was prime for the taking Nixon, then employed a Southern strategy, a subject we have discussed previously on this show. Oh yeah. Which was a campaign that harnessed this indignation of white evangelicals specifically and whites more broadly who had formally voted for the democratic party, but in this new world, the key to political success, according to Nixon in 1966, was to bring together the largest number of white ethnic prejudices into one party without fragmenting the existing coalition. And I quote the more Negroes who register as Democrats in the south Nixon's campaign strategist noted the sooner the Negro whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans end quote,

Speaker 2 12:11

That didn't happen.

Speaker 1 12:13

<laugh>

Speaker 2 12:14

I don't know what you're talking about.

Speaker 1 12:16

Democrats are the ones that created the KKK they're the slavery people,

Speaker 2 12:20

Whole chapters have been erased.

Speaker 1 12:23

So he also warned extreme racist language had to be avoided, especially when courting white converts outside the deep south mm-hmm<affirmative> when you are after political converts, start with the less extreme and wait for the extremists to come into line when their alternatives, collapse and quote, winning Republican converts in the Sunbelt, as well as the Midwest then required a tempered, more compassionate conservatism. They employed a language of morality, decency law and order normalcy, family values, and the quote concept of rugged individualism and quote. This was discourse white evangelicals understood as explicitly evangelical religious values. As the democratic party came to be identified as the party of big government and minorities of color white evangelicals began the process of almost exclusively identifying with the modern Republican party, the political mobilization of white evangelicals. And yes, we are talking mostly about white evangelicals when talking about the religious, right? Yeah, yeah. Was decades in the making Jay about a generation ago. Historians assumed that fundamentalists went underground after the scopes trial in 1925. But several important reassessments published around the 1990s made it clear that this was not the case issues pertaining to gender roles and the sexual behavior of women have been potent mobilizing forces for a long time. Going back to the birth control movement and other controversies in the first half of the 20th century.

Speaker 2 14:06

Oh yeah. They called it white slavery back then prostitution the teens into how white people needed to watch their morals or they were going to pollute humanity, Rockefeller coined that term. If I'm not Jesus mistaken,

Speaker 1 14:19

Jesus opposition to sex education in the 1960s was a salient force in politicizing many folk. And by the late 1970s, of course, abortion and homosexuality were highly effective wedge issues that mobilized many evangelicals. It was during the late 1970s and 1980s that white conservative evangelicals became fused with the G O P. The result of this merger is what we call the Christian or religious right today. This political movement was born out of fear that the removal of prayer and Bible reading in schools, the growing diversity following the immigration act of 1965, the intrusion of big government into segregated Christian academies in the south and the legalization of abortion were undermining America's uniquely Christian identity. The leaders of the Christian, right believed the best way to reclaim and restore this identity was by gaining control of all three branches of government, Jimmy Carter, a self-proclaimed born again, Christian was not championing these issues to the degree that many evangelical conservatives had wished. And as a result, white evangelicals gravitated to Ronald Reagan, a man who seemed to understand evangelical concerns or was at the very least willing to placate evangelicals.

Speaker 2 15:44

He was an actor

Speaker 1 15:45

<laugh>. So now white Christians today account for less than half of the American population, these groups, which largely make up the Republican party have come to see their status and influence under threat social scientific research highlights, how demographic changes evoke threat for many white Americans who worry that their numerical decline will likely diminish their command over American politics. These fears are directly linked not only to support for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, but also foster anti-democratic sentiments. It's in part why they want to stop abortions so that the present decline in white births can be reversed. I think that this anti-democratic behavior is kind of a natural response, to be honest with you. I mean, it was, it represents a natural physiological response rooted in the foundations of a, an us versus them mentality. Right? Sure.

Speaker 2 16:50

I mean, if you, you have majority, if you can't rule through the majority, then get rid of majority rule,

Speaker 1 16:55

Right. Exactly. Rule from the minority. Right. Yep. And I think that also helps to explain contemporary political movements from Brexit to the, the passage of Israel's recent nation state law.

Speaker 2 17:05

Yep. It's uh, it's global. It's not just the us

Speaker 1 17:08

Demographic groups that comprise the Republican party maintain a dwindling electoral advantage, and rightly recognize that they will lose it if they do not cement their power right now mm-hmm<affirmative> they are trying to rule from the minority consistent with this data shows a dramatic weakening of support for democracy and growing support for authoritarianism among Republicans in the United States. Similarly, other research documents that authoritarianism and a desire to uphold social hierarchy are strong predictors of contemporary conservatism, perhaps because of Trump's explicit overtures to white Christian America. These two physiological factors are, are strongly predicted support for Trump over both Democrat and other Republican candidates in 2016, with his view, the slogan stop, the steal is, but a means to an end for another and more important rallying cry, which is defend the majority. These statements are blatant overtures to white supremacists and Christian nationalists who feel that America is being taken from them. They also helped to explain why the extremists who stormed the capital were white supremacists carrying Christian flags.

Speaker 2 18:19

Oh yeah. I mean, was it, uh, camp Auschwitz t-shirts yeah, they had Nazi flags. They had Confederate flags. I mean, they had the whole gamut of, uh, white supremacist imagery, black and yellow, uh, libertarian colors. You know, the libertarians don't like when you point that out, but it's all there

Speaker 1 18:35

For many Americans. The 2020 election was not one between two political parties, but two opposing visions, one that craves an inclusive democracy in which all citizens, regardless of their race or creed have access to the vote and another where democratic norms are sacrificed, if doing so means preserving power for a segment of the population that perceives its status as under imminent threat, whether illustrated by Trump's continued lies about voter fraud, Senator Cruz, and Holly's willingness to embrace such an obviously fictitious narrative or the storming of the capital by insurrectionists. It's increasingly clear that for many white supremacy and Christian nationalism take precedence over allegiance to the us constitution,

Speaker 2 19:24

You know, white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and, and a fascist package, they create their own reality. That's what fascists do, right? Perception is reality. That's where you get the big lie, right? You can just repeat whatever it is you want until people believe it. What struck me a bunch of things struck me, but what you were saying, the need to bring in respectable white people, right? Quote, unquote, respectable white people that can kind of be drawn in it. Can't be too extreme on its face. You have to kind of get sucked in. And then it's like, oh, oops, you're part of the, the Christian national esteem now. And I feel like there are cases where it worked. People are kind of losing their minds right now because the game's up, but like a century ago, these folks were in the, the majority right now is a real existential threat demographically. Like you put it, but before it wasn't white, Christian Americans had very strong majorities in the, in the 1920s and into the thirties and, uh, Nazi times, uh, Nazi and wall street times. Right. I wanna talk about scopes because you mentioned scopes, but one thing I wanted to call out before that, just to make sure I get it outta my head and into the microphone here is that gold water, you know, um, gold water got destroyed in, uh, in the 1964 election. And the reason he got destroyed was not because his, his kind of anti-liberal anti-democratic, you know, white supremacist ideas didn't have resonance, especially in the context of civil rights movement. It was because he said the quiet part out loud, too much

Speaker 1 20:52

<laugh>

Speaker 2 20:53

And got wrecked by LBJ. It was one of the worst. It was one of the biggest landslides in us, electoral history, LBJ put out this amazing ad it's called the Daisy ad. It's basically like

Speaker 1 21:04

I remember this, this girl that is picking pedals off of a flower. And then all of a sudden you hear a countdown and then a big mushroom cloud.

Speaker 2 21:12

That's right. That's right. Cuz because basically LBJ was like, dude, this is too crazy. You're gonna die in nuclear war. I feel like the Democrats need to go back to that. They

Speaker 1 21:21

Gotta grow some balls, man.

Speaker 2 21:22

We as Democrats need to go back to that. Not a, it's not a, they you're either on the side of the Democrats or fascists these days in my opinion. But I don't know that gets me into trouble when I say it out loud. Um, anyway,

Speaker 1 21:33

Uh, Sy speaks in absolutes.

Speaker 2 21:36

You mentioned scopes and, and the twenties and how fundamentalism went into hiding. And I feel like that's really a compelling point. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about, because people wanna ask, okay, this is terrible. There's Christian nationalists, there's white supremacists. How do we make it stop? You know? And there are these periods in history, like in the early thirties where they kind of went away. I mean, you have Charles Coghlan, which we've talked about a lot. There was kind of this peak of Christian fundamentalism in the twenties. And I think for good reason, you know, I mean, uh, in broad terms, you know, the world was really kind of topsy turvy in the twenties. You know, the post great war period, uh, was confusing and upsetting to many, lots of technological advances, things happening very fast. We had a terrible pandemic flu pandemic that had killed a lot of people just before that. And then, you know, in the United States you have the resurgence of the second clan, the clan comes back, right? And now they're not on horseback, they're in cars and, uh, birth of the nation. This film comes out, it's, you know, it's really popular film. It's kind of like white supremacy, ascendant, right. Scary times. And then meanwhile, you know, fundamentalist, Christianity is huge, right. Which is kind of in some ways, riding on the backs of the clan, right. They are Christian nationalists, but what happens and I really wanted to focus in on two court cases, kind of killed the whole fundamentalist movement. It's all about like scaring, respectable white people, right. If it goes too far, it's too extreme, it can die out. And I think that's really compelling. These two cases, one you mentioned is the famous scopes monkey trial and I'm using air quotes, even though you can't see right as state of Tennessee versus, uh, John scopes, you, you brought it up, but what do you, what do you know about that trial?

Speaker 1 23:16

Um, I, I know that, uh, the trial that I believe that the pro evolutionary scientist or the teacher that was trying to teach evolution, the theory of evolution through natural selection in class mm-hmm<affirmative> and he lost, I think

Speaker 2 23:30

John scopes. Yeah, he did lose, he was fine, but kind of pulled off on a technicality, but what was, of course the real kind of circus, the national, um, sensation of all this was that there was this crazy court case. We've talked a lot about populism on this show, probably one of the most famous populists in all of American history. William Jennings, Brian shows up on the scene, uh, Williams Jennings, Brian, probably one of the most successful third party candidates in us history. Uh, he wasn't present cuz third parties don't do well because math also probably off some people with that comment. That's okay. You know, it's the great Richard Hoffsteader has pointed out. Populism kind of continued in, in America's DNA, in America's psyche. And so it is no surprise that at this humble trial, for this science teacher, who's just trying to teach actual science, the evolution Williams Jennings Brian shows up because he needs to tell everybody that we're defiling the Bible and Christianity by daring to tell children that observable science exists. And it becomes this huge circus, but the a C L U gets involved and the very famous lawyer, Clarence Darrow gets involved to defend John scopes and, and Williams. Jenn, Brian he's actually becomes the lawyer basically prosecuting scopes, right. But then, uh, Darrow puts Brian on the stand and starts grilling him about what is the factual nature of the Bible then prove Adam and Eve is, you know, exists. I'm simplifying a lot here, but there are these moments where, of course Bryan can't prove things happen in the Bible. And he loses his mind and loses temper this fiery Bryan character. And because it's such a circus, it turns off respectable white people. It's like, you know what, maybe I don't wanna be associated with this. So that's kind of the peak of fundamentals. Now, the background of this, which I only knew a little bit about, you know, I, again, I'm not a, a historian of religion is that there's this big schism in the Presbyterian church between fundamentalism and, and modernism. And like how in this era of innovation and science can the church kind of coexist with modernists? Well, you know, take a page from Judaism. We've been working on that for a while. Of course it can. And the modernists went out in part because the scopes trial is such a circus. So the modernists are like, we don't wanna look like this. Right? The other thing that happens, this was a little lesser known. I, I mentioned the Klan is kind of the vehicle for this Christian nationalism stuff too. Right? And they were terrifying everybody. They had a huge March in DC in the middle of the twenties. This is the clan ascended birth of the nation was shown in, in the white house by Woodrow Wilson. What killed their power. This is all happening in the same time in the mid twenties. And it turns out it's another situation where like fascists only know how to escalate. We've talked a lot about that. And the same is true with the clan. Uh, David Curtis Stevenson is a name that I wanted to put out there. He was a grand dragon in the Indiana clan, a very prominent member of the second clan in the twenties. These are guys that think they can just operate with impunity, right? He's marching on Washington, their, their ascendant. Well, he decides he's impervious to everything. Uh, he can do whatever he want. He kid naps, a white woman mad. Overholtz her kid, her rapes her and murders her pretty awful, pretty horrible. He gets caught. And when he gets caught, he goes to trial. And that becomes a big sensation too, because oh, maybe these clan guys are actually pretty bad. Maybe they're a pretty terrible, and it kind of breaks the second clan because now they have this reputation, which we, every let's be real. Like they're horrible, terrifying people that go in the middle of the night and bird crosses the yes, of course they're raping and murdering. Are we shocked? But those two trials, the Stevenson trial and the scopes monkey trial that really kind of breaks Christian fundamentalism. And you know, again, in an era where there's modernism as ascendant, lots of utopians, this is the era of HG Wells, right. And war the worlds. I wanna take a page from that because I feel like today we're kind of in a similar situation where, you know, uh, we've worked our way up to make America great again. And, and we're back repeating some of the, you know, fundamentalism, ascendant situation, but like, they always want to go far. And if they go too far, they can turn off the white majority. Cause you know, I was looking for fundamentalism in the thirties. I'm like, why am I not finding that? It's like, oh yeah. That's because it really peaked. And really went down in the twenties. Now you mentioned it didn't die off because there's still these like very prominent, like business conservative types. John Foster DUS is one of them. He becomes, uh, a president of the council of churches in the fifties. These are people that are connected to wall street and lots of money, deep pockets. And this is, this is kinda the Republican Trinity, right? You know, you have kind of the movement conservatives, you have the Christian fundamentalist, you have a businessman, its long as that trio exists, at least in, in some, some harmony it can be pretty grumbling harmony, but as long as they are still working together, the Republican stool is what, um, Al Liman explained that way. It's the stool with each one of those, as long as they have each leg, it's fine. But if you pull out any one of those legs, it falls over.

Speaker 1 28:28

I kind of feel like one of those legs, the, the Christian fundamentalists are really starting to overreach their influence. The thing is, and I think Barry Goldwater said it best ironically was that, uh, once the Christian evangelicals take over the Republican party, it's gonna be bad for everybody because they don't compromise. Believe me, I've been trying to this entire time, the thing is it's, it's their way or the highway when things like facts and evidence, don't go their way. They shut down YouTube channels. Or if politics and policy and public opinion, don't go their way. They try to shut down public opinion. They try to shut down democracy. And so when that's not far enough and getting as close to a Christian theocracy, isn't far enough. I mean, there was a period of time where apocalyptic was a fad a few times. Right, right, right. And I'm curious to talk to our guest who I know knows a lot about that because there was a, a few periods where whole Christian sect believed and were enthralled by the end times. And I feel like it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that's what I'm really, really worried about.

Speaker 2 29:49

We are back with special guests, Thomas ack. He is an associate professor of history out of the east L C school in Iowa. He writes about, uh, lots of things. His he's a historian studies, uh, the, uh, medieval era in France, a whole bunch of other things. He also writes a lot about video games, which is, uh, a subject near and dear to my heart. Thank you, Thomas so much for being here. We really appreciate you taking a little bit of time away from this grading season that, uh, I, I also am a little bit familiar with

Speaker 3 30:20

And thank you so very much for having me. I'm really excited to be here

Speaker 2 30:23

EJ and I have, we've discussed, uh, many things on, uh, season one of the announcing on wall street podcast. And one of the things that's come up over and over again, uh, which it is probably the unfamiliar is the idea of a Christian ultra nationalism and, uh, apocalyptic fervor. If you will, it just keeps popping up as a theme and Thomas you've, you've written, uh, extensively about this. And, uh, we're super interested to hear how we can look at the historical record. What has been left behind and try to make some inferences about the present and, and make sense at what's going on now.

Speaker 3 30:56

So I'm a crusade historian by training, and there is nothing a crusade historian wants less than to feel relevant. There is no moment that that feels good, but the group I work on is the branch. The first crusade that gets really aggressively apocalyptic really early on and then keeps that going through Jerusalem. So my grad school training was very much like deep into kind of just the medieval stuff. And the problem is is that then you exit the dissertation process with what's left of your sanity intact, and you come back out into the world and then you start seeing things, uh, say starting in 2015, uh, during the presidential camps, like this feels familiar. I don't want this to feel familiar. Why does this feel familiar? And then you realize it's that nothing has ever gone away. It doesn't die. We stop talking about it. We have this weird idea that we live in a secular age. I think that the, um, propaganda value of the enlightenment has done a real number on the way we talk about modernity. But the reason I got interested in these topics in the middle ages is because of people I grew up with in rural, Missouri, as a kid who were steeped in this kind of apocalyptic Christianity,

Speaker 2 31:52

What was that like?

Speaker 3 31:53

<laugh> um, you know, it was fine. It was just, it was the moments where you're talking to people who, you know, and love and know are completely rational human beings living in the same world you are. And then it's the little bits when you're not going to church with them on Sunday that you hear them say things. And then afterwards you're like, wait, what, what do you mean? The end is night? What do you mean that like, you are ready to die in a car crash because you'll go straight to heaven. What are, what are these weird, like Mardo narratives that you're building here. Why do you think these are the last days? And it's never at the time, because it's just such a normative part of Christianity. I mean, Christianity is an imminent ask biological movement, but it's really easy to forget in the way that we talk about Christianity, that this is all still here. We are just pretending it's not

Speaker 2 32:34

With

Speaker 1 32:34

You saying that this has always been occurring. This has always happened right now. It seems like it's just becoming more and more into the mainstream. That's that there seems to be an underlying growth of this mentality over the last like 20 years, I would say. So I'm assuming there's ebbs and there's flows throughout history. What, if any common thread has caused these ebbs and flows over the years?

Speaker 3 32:59

I think a lot of it right now is nine 11 and the way we reacted to nine 11 and the way that we made this into a full blown, completely, a historic clash of civilizations, where we refuse to learn anything about Islam, we refuse to engage with even the nearest concept of the Abrahamic faiths. I mean, we keep throwing around words like Judaeo-Christian as if that's not a super Seary idea that has no business and serious discourse, unless you're an anti-Semite in which case we know who you are and what you're doing, but we do this exact same thing with Islam. And so we build this narrative of opposing values that are really Christianity versus Islam without saying that, and then lean into that heavily. And so between that and the experiences in the multitude of wars that we've caused since then, the way Fox news in particular has built a very specific narrative about Islam that has then transferred into, uh, Christianity is under attack by who well by everyone all the time, even if that's not visible in any actual, real way, because it's not happening. So we've had, we've had a solid at this point 21 years of an unending rhetoric of Christianity under assault, which naturally amps up the already preexisting apocalyptic currents that are there. It also links it very strongly to the currents of religious violence that are also present throughout Christianity. And we've moved it back into the, into the sphere of political violence as we do over and over and over again. I think we just ignore it heavily. You know, we, we like to joke about things like Y2K, right? Which, um, from everything I've read makes the people who actually spent years fixing all the codes that there wasn't a crisis really mad and justifiably. So, but I remember that the FBI was also engaged in project Medo at the time, looking up all of the apocalyptic groups in the us and keeping tabs for fear that, you know, if Y2K went badly, they'd try to do something and then Y2K goes just fine. And they don't have that spark that leads to some kind of mass movement again. But we ignore that. I think we also ignore the fact that Ruby Ridge is being undertaken by far right, prophetic Christians. We neglect the fact that the compound at Waco is made up of the branch to videos who have a very real and clear theology that is in fact a much more imminent apocalyptic vision of other Adventist groups. But we blend that down to cult, which is a political term, not a religious term. And we ignore that entirely. And then we ignore the fact that, you know, Timothy McVay is directly inspired by these attacks on far right Christian groups to blow up the Oklahoma, the federal building in Oklahoma city. It's not that these things aren't present throughout my lifetime. It's the way we talk about them. That is starting to change.

Speaker 1 35:20

Is there a tie between the seventh day Adventists and the branch of videos?

Speaker 3 35:24

Yes. So there is an offshoot of seventh day Adventists called the DN Adventists and then the branch DN are an offshoot of that. So there are several layers of remove, but this is all like your post Millerites 19th century, good old fashioned American apocalyptic carried through into the modern day.

Speaker 1 35:40

And if no one is in, is familiar with William Miller, he was a veteran of, of war of 1812. And just forgive me I'm cause I'm not a historian. He essentially came up with this date. I don't know if he was using numerology or not.

Speaker 3 35:53

Oh, it was numerology the best time.

Speaker 2 35:55

Well, yeah, and I love that numerology

Speaker 1 35:58

And he came up with a date I'm forgetting, I'm forgetting the actual date, but he got this huge following and they all met together on this date and Jesus was supposed to come and he didn't come. And I think it was called the great disappointment. Yep. And so he is like, oh wait, no, no, no, no, it's not, it's not that day. It was, uh, October, 1844, that's it. I didn't carry the two or something like that. And then they showed up that day and it still didn't happen. They ended up becoming the seventh day Adventist, which ironically caused the creation of, I believe Kellogg's cornflakes.

Speaker 3 36:33

Yes. That little threads in the way that this all blends out are just delightful.

Speaker 2 36:37

And that's how Skyram got storm cloaks.<laugh>

Speaker 3 36:41

Ah,

Speaker 2 36:42

<laugh>,

Speaker 3 36:43

It's a little bit closer to that than

Speaker 2 36:44

I'd like, there's so many threads to pull on here because we have this, uh, Christian apocalyptic, we've got, you know, rise of fascism in the 20th century and then popular culture, the internet video games, and you know, hypers saturated reality. And all of these things are blending in really unpleasant ways. And of course we haven't yet evoked, but I will now, uh, QAN on as yet another kind of layer on, uh, conspiracy theory, numerology Christian, apocalyptic fervor, and teasing it apart has been a real challenge for us here. I mean, part of it is to E J's point, you know, what has fueled it obviously nine 11 is, is a big one. And then like what causes it to stop? If it ebbs and flows, there's gotta be a flow at some point.

Speaker 3 37:25

Do you want the miserably pessimistic answer? Or do you want me to go more hopeful here?

Speaker 1 37:30

Well, the pessimistic answer is what you just kind of started this whole thing on, which is, it never goes

Speaker 3 37:34

Away, never goes away. The language changes, but it never ceases because QAN on is effectively taking, um, medieval blood libel legends, right? This is pure antisemitic, medieval blood libel, legends. You are mixing it with holy war and you're giving it all of the trappings of more modern conspiracies. So I think you can very easily trace back. QAN, on's kind of apocalyptic leanings to fairly standard Christian notions, but it's taking the day of the rope from how am I blanking on the, on the, you know, the

Speaker 2 38:02

Turner diary, Turner diaries,

Speaker 3 38:03

Turner diaries. So the eschatology of QAN on is the Turner diaries. It ends with the mass arrest of all of their opponents. And then the part that we don't say, we keep saying like, it's the mass arrest? It's fine. No, it's in the mass hanging. It's the mass hanging of all of their opponents. It is a day of the rope. And this is, this is your kind of very standard, worst case, reading of revelations, where of course, all of the bad people have to die in agony, but you're taking this in this very white supremacist narrative. It's also taking kind of the, um, satanic panic of the eighties, right? It is the, um, mass fear of elites, right in the kind of worst far, right. Populism kind of way. It is a deeply partisan apocalypse because what that is is everyone who is both culturally and politically against you. And then you're wrapping it up neatly with the kind of worst Pizzagate interpretation. If we remember, um, the multiple shootings at, uh, comp ping pong pizza in order to break into the non-existent basement to free the children who were never there, because there is no basement because this is a completely fictitious worldview, but it it's the idea at its core of child sacrifices. So it's again, it's, it's the kind of worst 13th, 14th century medieval blood libel legends that the elites, which you can read its cosmopolitan elites, you can read globalists. It's all, it's all a way of just not saying Jew out loud, right?

Speaker 2 39:15

Why<laugh> yeah. I

Speaker 3 39:17

Mean like how do I not come across as the Nazi? I am.

Speaker 1 39:19

We're gonna use globalists

Speaker 3 39:20

Globalists. Yeah. Um, cultural Marxism, right? It it's, it's all of the dog whistles. I think plenty of people who use this don't know what they're saying, but the people who start these trends do in fact know what they're saying? Um, George Soros funded, right? Right. Of all of all the billionaires, why George Soros? Well, we know, we know why. So the elites who are made up of the democratic party and Hollywood who are secretly kidnapping children to torture them, to drain aro for, from them to use in satanic rituals, it doesn't matter that doesn't make any sense. You are taking all of the means that you can most effectively vilify the people you already hate make it an existential conflict where the end result has to be violence.

Speaker 2 39:57

It's funny. I was thinking of the, the satanic panic bit of it is, is ironic. Considering<laugh> all the, uh, all the fascist imagery that ends up in, in D and D inspired video games.

Speaker 3 40:07

Yep. But of course, of course the cognitive, if the cognitive dissonance could have an impact, heads would have already exploded all across the country.

Speaker 2 40:13

Absolutely. Well, it's, you know, you can go back to, uh, the seventies, you know, when, when the Republican party started, uh, galvanizing the religious, right. And they had to say, it was about, uh, free loaders and, and everything else. And the social state, when really these, these groups are benefiting from the social states, they're attacking, especially, you know, in areas that were very impoverished and still are.

Speaker 1 40:35

So that was the short but pessimistic version. So what is the optimistic version? Because there's gotta be, there's gotta be a, a threshold that is reached, right. It can't just be conspiracy theorists all the way down. Right. There has to be trends, right? There's trending, there's trending up, but then there's this ideology doesn't just take over. Right. But a threshold needs to be reached. I'm just scared to death of how high that threshold may be.

Speaker 3 41:00

Yeah. I think the threshold is much higher than we'd like, because I think we are humans don't change that quickly. Evolution is a slow process. We are still BI pal murder monkeys though. I'm aware we're not monkeys. We're apes. Our brains do not change that quickly. Technology on the other hand changes very quickly and we are fundamentally as a species not ready for the impact of the internet. So I think the threshold is much higher than we'd like. I think that people spend a lot of time deeply isolated from the actual reality of their lives, but building community on the internet. And I say this with, you know, a full may of culpa, we all know I spend too much time on Twitter, but this allows you to construct an identity and construct a lived reality in opposition to everything that's actually outside of the walls of whatever room you're in, by living in a space where you can simply amp up the rhetoric to whatever degree you want and dwell in that. And we know that that has real effects. I remember, um, when Facebook had actual teams of moderators trying to censor things, they did studies and those people who were just there to call the worst things from being posted on Facebook were being radicalized by that constant exposure.

Speaker 2 42:04

Yeah. I remember reading is good. God. Yeah. Some of is hideous. And,

Speaker 3 42:08

And it's not that that use of symbolic language is new, right? We know that symbolic language is used for this effect. You could not go to a church in new England in the 18th century and not come out thinking that the natives and the Papas French were servants of the antichrist. We have read enough sermons to know that this is a constant unending stream of invective meant to amp up the apocalyptic fervor for king George's war for the seven years war it's there, it's real, it's done for an effect. And this is how you get the militia to March off to, you know, go die in the woods, heading towards Quebec over and over and over again. It's just that, it's one thing when there is a single person feeding you this once a week, and that is your exposure and it's bad enough, right. When you're putting it on broad sheets, you are adding to that. When I have a, a computer in my hand, 24 hours a day, that I am constantly plugged into an unending news cycle and an unending social media atmosphere where I am being told that these people are the enemy and they're coming for my children, they're coming for me. I don't think we are in any place to grapple with what kind of damage that does

Speaker 1 43:08

With that said, I'm surprised it's just QAN Kon. You would think that there'd be so many more like horrible, horrible organizations. I mean,

Speaker 3 43:15

There are, it's not just QAN Kon though. That's the problem. That's the part that's

Speaker 2 43:18

Really scary.<laugh> it's uh, Fox and it's, and there's still am radio out. There is, well,

Speaker 3 43:24

For me, it's the divide between QAN I and Christian nationalism. And there's so much overlap. Right. But with, with distinctive visions of what comes next, because QAN, I ends with the murder apocalypse, Christian nationalism has their own idea for what comes after that.

Speaker 2 43:37

This is where I typically in a, in a regular conversation now recorded, uh, I would flip the script and be like, you know, well, we walk on outside and there's evidence that at least some things are working, cuz everything's not on fire.

Speaker 3 43:48

The problem is how, how close we are to the point that everything is on fire. Right? Right. Are we, are we the frog and the pot they've just turned the heat on beneath us. And I don't know. I mean, we mentioned before, before the episode started, like there's a lot looking ahead that we're going to discover how quickly things that we've taken for granted rights and freedoms that are enshrined and law and get rolled back in the next couple months, you know? Yeah. You normal, you normalize fascism long enough and people stop being scared of it.

Speaker 1 44:10

Yeah. A lot of the stories that you see coming in the news with what's going on in France, but with, with everything that's going on on the 24 hour news cycle of, you know, January 6th and you know, Madison coauthor and uh, all of these people doing crazy, crazy, crazy things just 15, 10 years ago would have been absolutely unheard of. And now it barely makes a new cycle. And that's, that's where I think the, the frog doesn't realize it's getting hot. It's boiling at this point.

Speaker 3 44:37

Yeah. We've mainstreamed it in so many aspects of our lives, right? So the 24 hour news cycle thrives on this, but we're always moving on to the next story. We have just such a short attention spans like, look at this sensational thing. Oh, surely there'll be consequences. We'll move on. And then we didn't neglect the fact that there are never actual consequences. Social media has made it so that these ideas, do you remember Stormfront the Neo Nazi, uh, website, right? And so they had a, they had a guide for how you can, uh, radicalize the youth through, um, jokes and memes. Mm-hmm<affirmative> uh, from the nineties that you should, you should simply normalize the most offensive jokes possible and make sure that people think it's just a joke. And then if anyone shows enough interest, then you start trying to convert them. And if nothing else you've, you've lowered the threshold. And I remember how horrific the jokes that were told in my public school, in rural Missouri were in the nineties. I remember a number of those jokes with, with real horror at the way, we'd laugh at these things that are like literally inconceivable that we thought that this was funny, except for the fact that we were like junior high boys in an environment where this was being pushed everywhere. We've normalized it in that kind of way. We've put it in so much of our pop culture.

Speaker 2 45:35

Yeah. I mean, but if it floats around on the internet enough that it's gonna end up on the screen and everywhere else.

Speaker 3 45:40

Well, the alt-right comes out of gamer gate.

Speaker 2 45:42

Yeah. Kai. Remember that being on Twitter long enough, what a nightmare that was, if you spoke out at all, you were targeted and, and dog piled and even just to support other people who were being attacked, the gamer culture for Chan mean kind of cesspool really quickly converted to, uh, make America great again.

Speaker 3 46:01

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, and it's because it, it helps with, with understanding the hoists of that slogan and that ideology. We have no idea what, what making America great. Again, means you can just fill in whatever bigotry you want into that to make it your own. But it is this exact, it is, it is meme culture in the worst kind of ways. It's all of the, um, Donald Trump as Templar riding on a horse of the American flag memes. It's every single Knight's Templar meme that gets put on the internet. These things exist. And you think it's just on the internet. And then you see that people are actually doing this person. There's um, the quote unquote people's convoy in DC had a guy dressed up as a, as a Templar. There's explained that this was a crusade. Well, he's just a white supremacist. Right, right. But he's also not wrong that you can definitely look back at some aspects of the crusades and they would, they would love these people, disorganized mobs United by their hatred of different groups. Those are the people's crusades going through the Rhineland, as they're prepared to murder every Jewish community in their path.

Speaker 2 46:51

Exactly. That's why my<laugh>, my ancestors had to move several times.

Speaker 1 46:55

I was at a funeral a couple years back. Um, my dad is a big Trump supporter. His wife is a big Trump supporter. Her dad passed away and we went to go to his funeral. And there was a, a gentleman that was, uh, was a young gentleman that was dressed in this uniform. It was almost like an all black uniform. I thought it was a Nazi uniform. And I went up to him and said, Hey, you know, what organization do you represent? And he said, he's a Knight's Templar. And I didn't know what that meant until just now. He's

Speaker 3 47:19

Not a Knight's Templar. He's not a Knight's Templar. They're gone. They all died.<laugh> they're not exciting. Every conspiracy theory that requires the Knight's Templar frustrates me greatly because we know what happens. The Knight's Templar. There's nothing sexier unique about it. None of them escape, the ones who don't die join the Knight's hospital are which last until Napoleon conquers Malta at the tail end of the 18th century. And then they go back to just running hospitals and they still exist. You could have a conspiracy theory. Why do you do this? Well, you do this because what you remember the Knight's Templar for is not for charitable works. You don't remember them for hospitals. You don't remember them for translating texts. You don't remember them for medical technology. You remember them for murdering Muslims. Mm-hmm<affirmative>. So when people dress up as Knight's Templar, now my immediate instinct is that they must really love, ands Bick.

Speaker 2 48:02

Oh gosh. For our audience here, remind people who Andrews Bick is and why love the Knights temple?

Speaker 3 48:08

Uh, Andrew's Bick, uh, in 2011 in Norway. Um, it was July, I think, July 22nd. 2011. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He detonated a van bomb in Oslo and then, um, attacked a worker's youth league summer camp for children on an island off the coast and killed 69 people there it's just under 80 people were killed total between the two attacks. He was very clearly far, right. Uh, he released a very, very long compendium of things on the internet called 2083, a European declaration of independence. If I remember correctly, which is a long form explanation of his ideology, it's very much anti-Muslim. He very much claimed that as his main motive, he also, I think, blamed feminism for the collapse of Europe in important ways throughout, he claimed to be part of the new Knight's Templar. And because he sent this out everywhere, this manifesto ends up popping up in other areas, which is really, really problematic. Now I think that the reason I questioned whether or not he was neo-Nazi at the time is that since imprisonment, he has claimed to be a fascist and a Nazi. I don't think he was before imprisonment, but he has embraced that since entering prison. He's also converted to TISM. So there's that the problem of course, with all of this is that none of these ideas ever stop, right? These ideas keep going. I mean, there's a huge American influence in the manifesto. If I remember correctly, Robert Spencer, the, um, anti isms, my, my largest Dogpile ever was, was as a result of him on Twitter. So that was, that was a time I always remember him. He was cited repeatedly throughout the manifesto. He also, if I remember correctly seemed to love lair Putin, which

Speaker 2 49:51

Of course

Speaker 3 49:52

Sounds right. More, more than you'd like, um, the Christ church murderer mentioned brev in his manifesto.

Speaker 2 49:59

Um, that's right.

Speaker 3 50:01

Yeah.

Speaker 2 50:01

I forgot about that.

Speaker 3 50:03

Yes. And, and of course the Christ church murderer, also his, his guns were also covered with these kind of, um, Neo crusading manifestos throughout his writing all over his weapons. So when people say that they're a member of the Knight's Templar, I just assume that they, that they happen to be, uh, a militant anti isms who approves of the efforts of these mass shooters. Uh, and if they're not, maybe they should make better life choices. The Knight's Templar died in the 14th century. They were never revived. There's no secret organization. You know, we can go back to the way that in the French revolution, people tried to make sense of the revolution by claiming it was the Templars curse and that the Templar were secretly causing the revolution because peasants can't of course ever complain about their treatment. This is all nonsense. We know this is all nonsense. People claiming it. Now I just assume it's a far right. Murder scape.

Speaker 2 50:48

Yikes. Well, that is, uh, depressing, but also, uh, it's

Speaker 3 50:51

Conspiracy theories all the way down.

Speaker 2 50:53

Yeah, yeah. It's conspiracy theories all the way down.

Speaker 1 50:55

So, so is this like just Christian nationalism is to blame for all of this or,

Speaker 3 51:00

Oh, I wish I wish

Speaker 2 51:01

It's. Yeah. I mean, there's more, there's always other layers.

Speaker 3 51:04

I think, I think it forms the bedrock in our culture, right? I think it's people taking specific readings of Christianity and Christian nationalist ideas and, and using them for their ends. You can find this in other context, I think what's happening in India is an excellent example of the way that it doesn't just have to be Christian nationalism that, um, religious violence and the desire to murder the religious other is unfortunately more bedrock in humanity than we'd like,

Speaker 2 51:28

Yeah, this, this bedrock, this kind of cultural loose that people are marinating in and re radicalizing radicalizing themselves. Um, and then, you know, the bits that actually manifest themselves in violence and then when it becomes violence through, uh, state levers, even more terrifying, but I wanted to get back a little bit to, okay, so we know this builds up, but you know, what goes up eventually does come down. EJ was kind of pointing at this great disappointment. Sometimes the numbers don't add up and you peel off followers and of course you can make the numbers work later and there can be another historical world historical event, like nine 11 to help start this whole circus all over again. But do these movements lose people when the prophecy fails to appear? Mm-hmm

Speaker 3 52:11

<affirmative> I think that's really a very critical question. And I think the problem this time is that I think a lot of people hoped when Trump did not magically reenter office, that people would like wake up. Right. Right. And that didn't happen. What happened instead is that Q Andon became mainstream rightwing belief, right? Not under the name of QAN on not under the weird stuff. Right. Like I love, I love looking at the weird fringe movements. I've written enough on the weird fringe movements that I, I enjoy them and by enjoy them. I mean, like they fill my nightmares. And so I write about them to deal with it,

Speaker 1 52:39

But just look at Florida now. I mean, look, what's going on there. Look, what's going on in Texas. I mean, that is QAN on yep. Ideology made public policy.

Speaker 3 52:47

Yeah. Um, Michigan, which put, uh, someone who said that they would not concede their own election. So you're taking the big line making it, not just Trump, you're making it now local. Right? The big lie has been mainstreamed. The idea that to fix America violence will be required is now mainstreamed. The P I polls on QAN on belief, which never ask about QAN on, but ask about kind of bedrock concepts find that something like 25% of evangelicals believe QAN on ideas, whether or not they know that they're QAN on. Mm. Um, I think we found that the proportion of Republicans who believe them is also starting to approach that level. And that's really scary. So QAN on as the SC of interlocking groups weaving in and out of an appreciation and belief in these cryptic messages by Q who's not real right, but this is, this is the kind of scriptural level of QAN that there are these, um, what we call QROPS rambling, nonsensical things dropped on four Chan and Aku that are supposedly from an intelligence community known as Q, which is always weird because I still associate Q with a Q source from kind of new Testament scholarship. And it just makes it more bizarre. I imagine Treky are very weirded out by Q as well, kind of worst crossover you could possibly dream of. I think new followers probably don't go back to QROPS right. I think, I think it depends on what you mean by QAN on do I mean, people who believe that there has to be a mass arrest and mass murder of their political opponents to save America on these kind of conspirator levels. I mean, that, that group doesn't seem to be diminishing in strength. If anything, that group seems to be getting stronger. The people who are desperately pouring over these rambling nonsensical prophecies of the edge, Lord known as Q I think that group's diminishing, I don't think any of the new converts care to go back to that source material because clearly those prophecies don't come

Speaker 1 54:31

True. Yeah. I follow on, uh, Reddit, a subreddit known as, uh, Q and on casualties. And there's a number of people who are there from the beginning that are just they've wasted all of their money. They've alienated all of their entire family. They're horribly depressed. They've seen their spouse die of COVID because they all believe that, you know, the vaccine and the was poison and, and all this stuff. Like I I've seen these stories of people like, yeah, my, my dad or my uncle or my entire mom's side of the family, they're all, they're all crazy depressed, but I don't feel like these, these stories that I'm seeing on these subreddits that describe personal accounts of people who follow Q who still follow QAN on or the, the ideals of QAN on. Yeah. Um, but they're, I don't know if it's, they're going through withdrawal or, you know, there's, you definitely see a number of these stories where they're just completely in denial, but a lot more stories are, are coming up where they're just completely depressed and they're just lost all desire to do it, but they don't really still believe in it. Yeah. So depressing as it sounds is that part of the process of them weaning themselves off of this, because you go on a drug for so long and then all of a sudden you cut yourself off. There is that depression period. Yeah. Obviously we're, we're discussing that these theories are starting to become mainstream, but facts are facts. And are they, I mean, they are, you can't keep on just relying on conspiracy theories because the whole fascist right. Wing populist, conspiracy theory, ideology, I mean, it starts fragmenting. You saw Trump and DeSantis start going at it. You, they start eating each other, like at some point there's gotta be, uh, an implosion. Right, right. Mm-hmm

Speaker 3 56:09

<affirmative> yes. I just don't know what it is. So I think, I think you're kind of your oldest true cures, right? The people who are there from the beginning, the people who are really there for the Q drops, I think those people are in for a continuing world of hurt and I want to be sympathetic, but I'm not right.<laugh> you built yourself a nonsensical scripture on a basis of violence. And now you're having to reconcile the fact that all of your prophecies are false. Great. I hope it hurts you. I hope it eats you alive. Those groups are failing some of the weirder fringes. So I, I far too many pieces on the, um, Michael Portman's, uh, negative 48 group, the ones who are the very big JFK's JFK junior once, gosh, that group is collapsing in numbers. Now they keep showing up to Trump rallies, which gives them a huge amount of free publicity and allows them to act like their ideas are mainstream. I think if I can get enough grading done this week, this is the next piece I'm writing is that you have to stop interviewing them. Right. It's important to point out that they have destroyed people's lives. This group has destroyed people's lives, but they're down to somewhere like 40 to 50 people total out of the hundreds that were originally there. And the thing we need to focus on is like the people who are still there, their families are in agony and we have to get these people out. Right. But every time we interview them as if this is mainstream, and then every time that, you know, one of the big Twitter accounts, I suppose, like, look at what all of the Trumpers believe. No, they're like 50 of them left that group's collapsing the ones that rely on prophecy eventually that comes, that that's shown to be false often up that they collapse. The problem is that we've moved so far from the QRO prophetic model that I don't know what it's going to take.

Speaker 1 57:32

The mainstream Christian nationalist that holds office in the house of representatives or in your municipal government or as a Senator or governor. I mean, these are the people that believe in that last world, emperor in Donald Trump as the bringer of the kingdom of heaven, or yeah. What we call the apocalypse, but what they think. Yeah. That is the hope that, that they wake up in the morning and that's what drives them. Yes. You and I, we have our kids, we have that first cup of coffee. Like we have that video game, you know, that we wanna play, we have that football game that we wanna watch. You know, those are the things that keep us going as normal Americans, but these people have taken the character because he's not a real person. Yeah. The character of Donald Trump. And they have put this identity on him as the savior, even though he is not perfect, as they say. Right. Yeah. And he is going to bring about the second coming. Yeah. That's what we have to worry about. I think not QAN on that. We have to worry about it's that

Speaker 3 58:35

QAN on is just part of it. Right. Honestly, QAN, on's just saying the quiet part out loud. That's the part that I think is really scary. The problem with the last world emperor legend is that it gets used over and over and over again. And when one guy is ANED you just move it on to the next person. Right. Right. So Trump is, is being taken as kind of the very worst model David kingship, where he is beloved by God, but he's a flawed human and his flaws are important part of his redemption story because you know, what is, David's fundamental sin. It is raping Beth Sheba and murdering her husband. Yeah. And he is punished for this and he is punished for this and then goes on to be a great and wise king later on. Now, I don't know why if they think that Donald Trump is going to live to the age of the Thula or something, I feel like time has run out for him to stop being such a monster of a human. But the problem is that when it's not Trump, it's gonna be the next person. Right? The, the goal, the goal is always seeking Gilead. And I mean, Gilead in the most handmaids tale kind of sense, this is what QAN on wants. Right? How do you get Gilead? You murder Congress. That's the backstory in the Handmaid's tale and that's January 6th. Right. And I don't think it's because they read, I don't think it's because they're drawing this from a literary model. I also just think that that's because someone, uh, told Margaret Atwood about the Turner diaries, and then she put it into the BA the bedrock of this that's, that's where it's coming from. And that idea is late seventies onwards.

Speaker 2 59:44

Yeah. Obviously on a Nazi on wall street podcast, we pull a lot of our historical reflections from the 1940s and the apocalypse of world war II and to knowledge of the Holocaust. And I guess one of the flip sides of that is like, we spent a lot of time talking about Charles Coghlan. We spend a lot of time thinking about, you know, Lindberg and like fascism mixed with, with Christianity, apocalyptic Catholicism, and then world war II happens. Knowledge of the Holocaust becomes global and some of this quiets down, but I think you're right. I think it transfers to something else and it becomes the McCarthy era and this kind of like frothy anti communist movements. So there's still these people who are, who feel like they're on a mission from God to destroy their enemies. But now it's, it's just a different enemy and the energy's redirected somewhere else.

Speaker 3 1:00:26

We always like to use Nazis as the kind of, uh, well, we're not there, there, there are Nazis, but like, that's, that's what fascism is. We definitely don't have it here. And I, I think that, you know, that's why we look at things like, um, when George Lincoln Rockwell, um, founding the American Nazi, party's like, well, okay. Yeah, they're, they're Nazis, but like, they're weird. And they're fringe, even though they're not weird and they're not fringe for me, like using the Lindberg and the Coff on those examples, you know, the second clan, the second clan is a fascist organization. It's just an aggressively Christian national swim. Have you read Kelly Baker's gospel according to the Klan?

Speaker 2 1:00:56

No, I, I don't believe I have.

Speaker 3 1:00:57

It is my favorite book, uh, on American history of any book I have assigned it in a staggering number of classes. It is right here on my shelf because I always keep it at hand the gospel, according to the Klan, by Kelly Baker, university of press of Kansas, it all about kind of how the KKK is making an explicit appeal to Protestant America from 1915 to 1930, using their own sources and their own language to really focus on the fact that this is an aggressively Christian nationalist organization under an aggressively Protestant rhetoric that we like to pretend isn't happening. Wow. None of that goes away. I would argue that the thing about the fascism after world war II, is that okay, fine. We defeat the Nazis and we defeat Mo Salini, but American fascism just becomes bedrock in this country. You just focus it against other targets, right? It's not that we have suddenly become better about race relations in this country, in the late 1940s. It's not that we're not busy, um, ramping up our oppression of communists. It's not that the attacks on gay Americans don't amp up at the same time that we're doing the red scare. Right. Right. We simply construct new rhetoric to ignore the fact that all of these things are happening simultaneously.

Speaker 2 1:02:03

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 1:02:04

So I know that historians are notorious at being very poor prognosticators.

Speaker 2 1:02:09

What do you say in EJ?

Speaker 1 1:02:11

<laugh>? You know, that's what I was told. I, I forget who

Speaker 2 1:02:13

Told me that? I think it

Speaker 1 1:02:14

Was me. Was it you, I, I always try to at least ask this question to each and every historian that we have as a guest here on the pod, and that is knowing what we know leading up to today. And we know that there's a lot of things that are going to happen, not just today with the election in France, but with the next couple of months and then the election and the midterms and things going on. How do you personally view the next years

Speaker 3 1:02:40

It's going to get worse? That's I mean, that is my most honest answer. It's going to get worse. And I like to think after that it'll get better, but it really depends on how much worse it gets. I think that all of the trends that we keep looking at that are coming out of the Supreme court are going to get significantly worse than they think they, we think they are. And by, by we, I very much mean white dudes sitting in middle America, which is where I am right now. There are things that we used to talk about as being settled and that we moved on from. And that was insane on our part, we made a grievous mistake thinking that anything was settled on was not going to be revoked. And I think that now that they control the Supreme court and by day, I mean, Christian nationalists, we are about to see an unprecedented assault on things that we thought had fundamentally changed in America. Things don't change. You know, you have waves. This is going to be a bad wave. I am very much not excited for the midterms. I would love to be wrong. God, I would, I'm a crusade historian. I would always love to be wrong. I would love to see things that like seem familiar to me and be like, Nope, I'm wrong. This is all wrong. Everything's fine. I think climate change, as it, as it continues to get worse, will amp up the worst aspects, uh, far right violence and fascism and rhetoric in this country. I think it's also going to amp up the worst aspects of Christian nationalism. I keep a short list of people who made comments after hurricane Katrina, because I do not forgive them. And I do not forget. I was, I was going to school at Tula when hurricane Katrina happened, I was on my way down for my junior year. So I, I keep a short list of far right. Christian preachers, who said things after hurricane Katrina. And, uh, whenever they leave this mortal coil, I take a day to celebrate. I am not a kind, man. I am not a patient man. I do not forgive. I think as we see more natural disasters, this rhetoric is going to be amped up except instead of being fringe figures or figures, we choose to see as fringe because we keep pretending that religion is not still a dominant force in America, that it is not still a bedrock in people's identity that the enlightenment happened. And we keep ignoring the fact that the immediate reaction to the enlightenment was romanticism, where it's like, no, let's bring all of this back, but like, make it a little more racist, Ivanhoe, the impact of Ivanhoe and the Waverly novels in the American south, which is a fun topic. If you ever want to, uh, talk about why literature at literature and pop culture actually matter, I think it's gonna get worse. Uh, I hope on the other side of that, it'll get better, but I think we're gonna go through a much Bleaker time than I'd like before it does.

Speaker 1 1:04:55

But there are periods in American history where Christian nationalists owned pretty much all political power in the United States. Those

Speaker 3 1:05:02

Periods were really bad. Those are really bad periods of time.

Speaker 1 1:05:06

Yeah. But democracy survived.

Speaker 3 1:05:07

Yes. I am, uh, less confident that today's Christian nationalists believe that democracy and Christian nationalism can coexist. And I think that's the part that scares me the most is that previously, because they controlled all of the levers of oppression and wielded them so effectively, they never really felt that their power and dominion was going to be challenged within a democratic system. I think the current wave of incredibly violent rhetoric identity and politics is at least partially based on the idea that they cannot simply blindly assume that they will have the unrivaled ability to oppress everyone who is not them in the foreseeable future. If democracy remains intact.

Speaker 1 1:05:44

Well, I mean, just to punch this doom party in its face, I mean, let's say Mager Republicans, you know, they do cause that red wave in November, and then they win the presidency in 2024 with say, I don't know, DeSantis. They then control the Supreme court. They control the house, they control the Senate and the presidency. I mean, what will that country look like after that? I mean, what will our, our day to day look like? Will things basically be the same for you and I, or will the country break apart? Do I need to move to Canada? Do I need to hoard guns? I mean, what exactly are we talking about? I

Speaker 3 1:06:13

Recommend not moving to Canada. Canada already has a seller colonial problem that we don't need to add to. I think, I think I grew up thinking Canada was our, our friendly neighbor to the north. And, uh, one of the beauties of the internet is that you can discover that no Canada's oppression is largely focused on the indigenous communities of Canada and with the same excessive violence that the us uses against African American communities everywhere Canada does that, uh, to their indigenous communities. And the S who I always used to associate with that cute red uniform are simply the unending state violence against indigenous communities aspect. So I wouldn't go to Canada. I think we're screwed, man. Like, I mean, you, you want the honest answer yeah. Between my Twitter presence and the fact that I'm a, I'm a history professor in America. Yeah. I kind of think I'm in trouble. If, if I end up in, uh, DeSantis America, my job is definitely gone. The universities are gone. Public education is gone. Uh, the ability to vote in meaningful ways that would allow us to overturn by democratic. It does. It's not great. Okay. I don't, I don't wanna, I don't wanna be a doom speaker<laugh>

Speaker 2 1:07:07

Because I

Speaker 3 1:07:07

Don't think we're getting there.

Speaker 2 1:07:08

We've got a lot of challenge ahead of us. And I think that's why everybody's watching Ukraine so closely because here's like where it actually plays out on the battlefield. Yeah. Like who is gonna win. Fortunately Putin is losing right now and let's keep our fingers crossed. That continues. But the thing that really struck me, cuz I read your tweets sadly on Twitter. And so I'm well aware of your position on this, but then just either a little last night or this morning you were tweeting about your students. Why teach at all? If there's no hope, right. Uh, tell us a little bit about what you were feeling at that moment.

Speaker 3 1:07:35

So I am lucky enough that I also get to teach a class in the honors program and the classes on, uh, society and community. And it's, it's kind of the, the second of the big seminars they take. And we have a lot of freedom to choose our books. And it's been a rough couple years, right? Yeah. We're having, we're having a hard time. We're in a pandemic. It feels like fundamental notions that we believe governs society are collapsing. And it's really hard to see a way out. And I hadn't, I hadn't taught the class in a year and I had been teaching it, um, at, with dystopian texts as kind of the bedrock, the back end of the class, to talk about these kind of antithesis of a positive society and what we can learn from this vision. I didn't wanna do that this time. I built a class for me because every, I think when you're, when you are asking your students to give of themselves, you as professor have to give as well. Right? And when you want to make your students engage with really heavy, dark, hard topics, you have to be willing to give to. So I built a class on the fundamental question of when everything seems darkest, how do you keep going right in the midst of despair? How do you find hope? And it was a question for me, right? This, this is the thing is that we're all in the middle of it. This is a question for me. And I, I assumed if I was feeling this, my students probably were too. So the books I chose were apocalyptic books. I'm along with some of the required readings, but the, the goal is that the world is always ending. The world is always ending. I was born I'm I'm, you know, I'm, I'm relatively young. I was born in 1985. I lived the first two years of my life in Bulgaria, where my parents were teaching at the time the Berlin wall falls and the Soviet union collapses. And that's the end of a world mm-hmm<affirmative> right. I was heading down for my junior year when Katrina hit new Orleans. And that, that was the end of my world. That was absolutely the end of my world when the levies broke. Um, and I didn't know how I was going to put myself back together and I didn't do it a great job of it. You know, 2007, 2008, that was the end of the world for my entire generation. Every dream we'd ever been told of trying to live, uh, a life, uh, material comfort better than our parents. Those dreams died very quickly. The pandemic, the world ended nine 11. The world ended, right? You don't go backwards in time. We experienced time in a linear current, and the world that we thought we lived in is constantly collapsing and we have to build something new. So I wanted to talk to my students about the fact that the only thing you have is hope. Yeah, that's really, I mean, you know, we can, we can make it. Star wars. Rebellions are built on hope, but life, life is built on hope. We don't get to know what comes next. We only get to control ourselves and remembering that in the end, you have to take that next step, right? You don't have to know where you're going, but you just, you take that next step that humans will endure in the bleakest of times that when disasters strike humans, don't instinctively strive to be their most monstrous. If a building is burning and voices are inside, perfect. Strangers will rush inside to save whoever's left and there at the cost of their own life. If a child is drowning in a river, people who have never interacted with them before will throw themselves in to get them out. Every time there is a calamity. What we see is that yes, there are people who choose the worst, but there are so many people who will at great personal cost or the loss of their own life, try to save other people. The human capacity for love is endless the human capacity to find the faintest Ray of light in the middle of the bleakest darkness is infinite. And so I built a syllabus on the premise that it's important to remember that no matter how bad things are people as individuals or humanity in general will carry on. And that what matters is figuring out what it is for you, whatever it is for you, that that helps you find that that tiniest thread of hope to pull on until you can get out to the next place of peace.

Speaker 4 1:11:11

My only response to that is for every world that ends another one begins

Speaker 5 1:11:23

A Nazi on wall street is brought to you by elusive films maker of the, a Nazi on wall Street's film and television series. It was recorded and edited by EJ Russo. Original music was written and performed by Joseph Maholin. We can't bring these stories to life on screen without your support. So please consider donating to our crowdfunding campaign@elusive-films.com. That's elusive hyphen films.com for Jason Wexel I'm EJ Russo. Thank you. And we will see you next episode.