Your Therapist Needs Therapy 89 - Media Complicity in the Christian Nationalist Grift

In this solo episode of Your Therapist Needs Therapy, Jeremy explores the historical and ongoing intersections of Christian nationalism, white supremacy, and the media’s complicity in spreading disinformation, particularly within right-wing spaces. He critiques the lack of accountability for wealthy elites, religious institutions, and corporate-owned media, arguing that these forces manipulate public discourse for profit and political power. Emphasizing the importance of independent journalism and local activism, he encourages listeners to stay informed, engage with their communities, and push back against systemic oppression.

I mentioned A Field Guide to White Supremacy in the show, I recommend snagging a copy!

Jeremy has all his practice info at Wellness with Jer, and you can find him on Instagram and YouTube. To show your love for the show you can pick up some merch! We appreciate support from likes, follows, and shares as well!

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Podcasts about therapy do not replace actual therapy, and listening to a podcast about therapy does not signify a therapeutic relationship.

If you or someone you know is in crisis please call or text the nationwide crisis line at 988, or text HELLO to 741741. The Trevor Project has a crisis line for LGBTQ+ young people that can be reached by texting 678678.

Transcript

Transcript

Jeremy Schumacher: What's up everybody? Welcome to another edition of Your Therapist Needs Therapy. I'm your host, Jeremy Schumacher, licensed marriage and family therapist, back with another solo episode. My release schedule and recording schedule is all sorts of janky because I've been sick and I've had a partner who's been sick and I have had kids who have been sick.  It has just been a brutally cold winter which has led to a plethora of illnesses and here I am healthy and recovered but not with any recorded episodes with any guests. So, we're just going to talk about what has been on my mind and what has been hindering my mental health in spirit with the point of the podcast which is your therapist needs therapy.

Jeremy Schumacher: and just a reminder, I do have a therapist. They're wonderful and particularly helpful. we do try and practice what I ach. Last time, speaking of preaching, we talked a little bit about neither Christian nor nationalism. It is white supremacy nivism. And it's not a new idea. It literally has been done before. and you're like, "Yeah, Ronald Reagan, he said make America great again and then ruin everything." which is true, but actually goes back into the 50s and late 40s, just with literally the white supremacy movement. And the thing that has sort of happened and I guess just a continuation from that conversation of this isn't new. There was a Christian nationalist crusade.

Jeremy Schumacher: There was an actual political part party, the Christian nationalist party. They had a platform. They ran for president and didn't do well because they were overtly racist. They were deeply tied to the clan. so is the Republican party, Like David Duke, grand wizard of the Kulux Clan, ran as a Republican and won a governorship. we haven't done a great job of limiting that. I've been talking to some older folks than I am who remember Pat Buchanan because he's a political figure I was alive for. He ran for president in '92. and I think 96 but maybe less fanfare. but it's not somebody I really remember but causes stress for the older folks who lived through that.

Jeremy Schumacher: and in reading a field guide to white supremacy which is sort of an anthology series from a lot of really great journalists and writers and people who care about being and it's constant attack under authoritarianism. one of the chapters in that book is really how sort of white supremacy went from fringe to mainstream. and it really highlights like that Pat Buchanan presidential run and the presidencies between Reagan leading to Trump that Buchanan sort of normalized and created this movement that is viewed as populist, which is what Trump runs on, lowering the cost of eggs and things that might be popular even though he has that's not what his platform actually is. He's just lying.

Jeremy Schumacher: and the white supremacist stuff like replacement theory and immigration causing crime and poor people instead of rich people taking your jobs and a lot of the class war stuff that is not talked about nearly enough because we're busy with culture war b****. And Rean did that, right? Regan was not a good human, nor did he have strong morals.  he was an actor and an opportunist. jump. but I think one of the things that people criticize, but again, miss the point.

Jeremy Schumacher: and this is not like Jeremy knows better than everyone else, but this is just like how many times I have these conversations on a weekly basis as we all are coexisting in through this time of moral injury and cultural wound and just some horrific b******* and voting isn't enough. so coming together with community is really important, but we need these communities to be having the right conversations. And one of the conversations that I think is really missing is insightful media critique. I think liberals in the American sense, which really conservatives, but not overt overt racist.

00:05:00

Jeremy Schumacher: the CNN, MSN, what the MAG movement would refer to as mainstream media really did just terrible job. And so They normalized Trump in 2016. and then they made Trump not seem like a scenile old racist terrible human in 2020 and 2024. because he gets a lot of clicks.  But again you can criticize the media u but looking through the lens of a little bit of a more historical perspective and saying how did we get here? a lot of it is a issue. Not uniquely American. there's been a move to the authoritarian right in other countries because of capitalism.

Jeremy Schumacher: that's why because things suck because that's what happens in Late stage capitalism is the end of a civilization. The hoarding of mass wealth. we're not doing enough to slow or even stop the climate change. And so people are frustrated, people are scared. And it's really easy for authoritarianism to rise during that time. But what happens sort of a uniquely American thing is we not uniquely American Russia did this first.  which maybe we have a Russian asset as a president, so that makes a lot of sense. at least someone who has some blackmail against them from the Russian state. so we have next to no media protections in America. So other countries have a lot of consumer protections. We have very few.

Jeremy Schumacher: which ones we had before 2024 are being hacked away at because again we have a real estate mogul which is someone who has profited off of stealing land and then charging people for it. and bro Elon Musk is neither good at tech or running businesses. I don't know. we have two conmen in charge of things. and so of course they're going to run things into the ground and where other countries can step in here is one of the things that's wild with other countries like you can't advertise to children. You can't have serial commercials for kids.

Jeremy Schumacher: You can't have other things that are marketed just to children because children do not have money and therefore you cannot market to them because that they don't have money. so they're a protected class of citizen and so you can't market your s* little sugar-filled cereal to them. And other countries have consumer protections like you can't have sfilled cereal on the shelves. you can't have red 40 and everything because it causes cancer. and so the consumer protections and a lot of the media and advertising things that exist in other countries don't exist in America. And what happened is the rise of Fox entertainment as they are legally known because they don't do news. in court when push comes to shove and we talk about legal standards, they're an entertainment company, not a news company.

Jeremy Schumacher: And yet if you turn on Fox, it says Fox News in the corner still. it's such a genuinely dumb system we live in because it is driven by profit and it doesn't even look at people as resources. again, we're in late stage capitalism. They've lost the plot here on we need people to have enough money to be able to buy stuff if capitalism is going to exist. to just the meat grinder of churning people out. and so yeah, we don't have any media protections and so we have someone in Trump and we have someone in Musk who get in front of camera and lie and nothing happens.

Jeremy Schumacher: it gets a ton of media play and we've had things like TMZ and we've had other stuff but you can look at some of the media sphere in the rightwing and just see they live in an alternate reality truly yes it's dumb their media literacy is low they're deeply uninformed and misinformed there's research that came out in the 201s I don't remember but it showed empirically that you were more informed of what's going on in the world by not watching anything than if you watched Fox News actually made you less informed than if you didn't participate in consuming any news at all.

00:10:00

Jeremy Schumacher: and so again that media sphere being allowed to exist, not being sued, not being held accountable in any meaningful way for decades has led to a lot of the brain rot that has happened. and the right-wing media sphere now is just I mean objectively provably paid for by Russian money like Tim P and I think it was Steven Crowder the other one Dave Rubin all took a bunch of Russian money and they claim ignorance who knows where our funding's coming from but they're getting millions of dollars for their s** little YouTube channels so I don't

Jeremy Schumacher: other leftist YouTubers have said if we got that amount of money we would have to look into where it is because that level of money does not exist here. and the grift right so then you had the white supremacists in the 50s who were mad about segregation and you had the religious right kind of come in there because they were also mad about segregation because white supremacy and the church are intrinsically linked.  That's a stance I can very easily defend, but has a super long history. So, we're not going to get into it today. Maybe another series for another day. It's not fun to talk about this stuff. So, for my own mental health, I don't know how much time I want to spend on all of these things. so, we have the grift, right? we have the trickle down economics crowd, the corporate interests, and not even the corporate interests at this point, just like true oligarchy.

Jeremy Schumacher: because the Democrat party is corporate interests. it was corporatists versus oligarchs in 2024 in America. we don't have a leftist party. We certainly don't have a progressive party and we don't have a resistance party right now. So I don't know what to do with that. That's the dead end of where I'm take care of your mental health. and so white supremacy, Christianity are deeply linked and then the right-wing misinformation machine and Christianity also have linked up. And so you get someone who's a serial rapist like Russell Brand finding God wearing Jesus outfits leading prayers that are awkward and you can tell he doesn't know what he's talking about and it's just purely performative.

Jeremy Schumacher: same with Trump saying one Corinthians because he's never actually read the Bible and so he doesn't know how to read from the differently numbered books of the Bible and he holds the Bible upside down and he frowns in church when a bishop says the Bible says to take care of poor people and welcome aliens. and so yeah, you have this tolerance in America for lies. we have very poor protections on that and we have very weak liable laws and things like that. So you can say what you want to say and get away with it.

Jeremy Schumacher: the things I'm saying here are, I'm a small YouTube channel and a professional therapist, so not worried about being sued, but allegedly on these things, I suppose, And that's it. you just say allegedly.  And so I say this and if this video gets, 35 views on YouTube and the podcast gets, a couple hundred downloads, no one cares, I don't have ads on my podcast because my podcast is not big enough for it. so, there's some safety in being unknown, I guess.

Jeremy Schumacher: but if you're Pat McAfee or you're Joe Rogan or you're Andrew Huberman, it's another piece of s***. U, might be a lovely human, but is a huge cog in the disinformation machine. then you say these things and you throw in the word allegedly or I don't know, I'm just an idiot.  And that gets you out of any legal ramifications. Even though there's very obvious things that are going on when someone like Rogan talks about hydroxychloricquin or Ivormectin or Aaron Rogers is talking about chemtrails or RFK is I don't know. I was going to say promoting heroin and brainworms, but I guess I don't know that he's actively promoted either of those things. But both of those things do contribute a lot to explaining where he's at.

00:15:00

Jeremy Schumacher: and money, just a being born rich. so you have this right-wing media griff that's Christian, right?  So now you have Turning Point USA with Charlie Kirk and you have Crowder's outfit and you have which again it's just a bunch of sexual harassment and closeted gay guys sexually harassing each other because they have to be Christian and they're deeply unhappy and they don't understand consent because they're probably raised Christian.

Jeremy Schumacher: I don't know what they were raised, but Crowers had a bunch of issues with sexually harassing people related to penis and testicle humor in the form of, touching, groping, lashing, whatever. I went to a Christian high school and not a lot of more gay spaces than a boy's locker room in a Christian school.  We weren't even an all boy school and it was still very prevalent there because you're taking a bunch of hormonal teens and saying if you have normal natural lust you're going to hell though they act out and I'm not defending it. I'm saying it's a terrible system. Turning Point USA we have whatever Jordan Peterson is doing. I think he's working for Turning Point USA.

Jeremy Schumacher: he's lost his professorship and his ability to practice anything approaching psychotherapy. So I think he's fully in on the grift has been for a while but I think even technically anything approaching being a licensed professional has dissipated in his life. because there's true accountability when you're licensed therapist and you do something bad, you lose your license.  When you're an ordained priest and you serially rape children, you just get moved to a different parish because there's no actual accountability there. when you're a media person and you own the UFC and you punch your wife on camera, like nothing happens because there's no accountability there.

Jeremy Schumacher: when you own a professional wrestling company and your wife becomes the secretary of education and you've sexually traffked people and harassed them for decades then your case is dismissed. So you know what a fun time to be alive. So there's no accountability in these things in the church in the media ecosystem for rich people in general. and so when we put those things together, it goes quite thoroughly, right? you have some of these slight moves that build what becomes the QAnon, some of the 911 truther stuff and these documentaries that are far more based in entertainment than anything. the God's Not Dead, Fast and Furious series,

Jeremy Schumacher: that's just a joke on how many Gods Not Dead movies there are. I don't think Fast and Furious has Christian overtones. I've certainly never watched it because they look awful. and so we have stuff like this and then you get Chris Pratt sort of repping Hillong or Justin Bieber or whoever have ripped these deeply problematic megaurches and make it seem cool and Chris Pratt seems really likable and then he's like I'm going to divorce my wife because we have a kid with special needs and look at this other chick I got pregnant and she gave me healthy kids so I love her more. right, he's an awful human. and that's because there's no accountability, he just keeps making movies, right? tada.

Jeremy Schumacher: so there's this whole media machine and then there's the pop culture stuff like I'm picking on Chris Pratt here because again he has overtly said his wife that he has a child with special needs with he left so he could have healthy kids which makes him again just is out loud. a horrible thing to think or believe, let alone feel confident in yourself to say it out loud. and we have this country music stuff. try that your small town is being decimated by your Republican legislature. I don't know what to tell you why you're bad at liberalism. It is truly you voting against your own best interests.

Jeremy Schumacher: and so yeah, we just don't protect people against this stuff and then we let people who want to take advantage of people make decisions to not protect them. putting Linda McMahon in charge of the Department of Education is wild. she was the department chair of small business in Trump's first administration and didn't ruin a ton as far as I know. I don't think she's particularly effective and certainly didn't get anything useful done, but her husband owns WWF WWE now, but that's how she has her money. She's not a successful business person. she's married to a media person and a horrible one at that, right?

00:20:00

Jeremy Schumacher: a horrible person. So yeah, my point is we don't have accountability for rich people or for the church and for corporate interests that then link themselves to the church.  They want to claim persecution and so right and Christianity is a whole long millennial long run at poor us we've been persecuted the Romans put us to death in the coliseum which is factually inaccurate there's no evidence that Christians were ever persecuted or killed at any rate other than any other group of people died in the coliseum and Nero was crazy and so was Caligula and s*** happened but it

Jeremy Schumacher: was never like, " f*** Christians." if anything, Christianity has gotten a boost from politics over and over and over again, starting with Constantine and then running through the Catholic Church. And throughout that time, Christianity has been a net loss. it's been awful for society to have Christianity as an allowable thing. the Catholic Church just writ large across history, hoarding wealth, colonizing places in the name of mission work, stealing from other cultures, killing people, raping children.

Jeremy Schumacher: if you can name a club that has sexually assaulted hundreds of thousand children in the last decade and continues to exist in every major metropolis and most small towns in America, that list is It's the Catholic Church and maybe other religious groups, right? there's not the Catholic Church doesn't have a strangle hold on this. pick a denomination and Google sex scandal and just filter for recent results and you're going to get them right within the past month or two. but certainly within the last year.

Jeremy Schumacher: So again just no accountability there and defaulting for these things and then claiming that you're the persecuted group, So that's the Darvo, attack, reverse victim and offender, that's what people who are abusing people do. they claim to be the victims.  And that's just sort of what America is right now. we're in an abusive relationship with wealthy people. We're in an abusive relationship with the church. and that's what Christian nationalism is. not your average mega person in Kentucky. they're poor. They're being victimized by  that the people who are running the show and have really orchestrated the movement very intentionally to include religious aspects because it is convenient for their cause because it's baked in.

Jeremy Schumacher: people who are religious have been primed to accept an abusive leader because they've been accepting it in their bishops and arch dascese and preachers and gremlin who has a s* ton of money. I'm not limiting it by saying a gremlin pastor who has Kenneth Copeland. but pick a mega pastor, right? Joel Austin. you Billy Graham, he's dead. But lots of people. Not Billy Graham. No, I'm thinking of the Superstar Billy Graham's pro wrestler. Who is the 700 Club guy? You guys know who I'm talking about. so I don't know.

Jeremy Schumacher: Yeah, the media is complicit. I think people are missing the point that the media is pretty unregulated and owned by corporate interests, you can look at Bezos buying Washington Post recently and that's a very easy obvious example, but other ones have existed. Most media has been owned by about five corporations since the 90s. So this is not a new phenomenon. because it's not new or interesting or headline grabbing, we just sort of skip over that part that it shouldn't be allowable for people to lie and get away with it with no consequences. There isn't any accountability in media. there's not accountability for wealthy people. There's not accountability for the church.

00:25:00

Jeremy Schumacher: And so when we have a movement that is tying a predominantly online mediadriven movement of wealthy people who are using Christianity yep there's no accountability there. We saw that with the legal system failing. We see that with places giving money to political movements that they shouldn't be. Places that are untaxed spending their money on political capital. it's just a general lack of accountability and we think somehow that the media provides that accountability when the media is not just complicit in it but is part of what creates that lack of accountability. So be aware of your sources.

Jeremy Schumacher: I don't have, the problem with talking about this stuff that's going on currently is there isn't a nice, clean, easy wrap-up. I don't have the answer, obviously. it's a systematic dismantling of things over decades. And so, there isn't a nice, neat, easy answer.  support independent journalism and be wary of your own implicit biases in media consumption and don't trust the algorithms because they're owned and they're manipulated. just being aware of some of that stuff and supporting people who are doing good independent journalism is really your local TV station is owned by Sinclair broadcasting big percentage highly statistically likely likely that that's true and that means you're not getting actual reporting or journalism.

Jeremy Schumacher: So being aware of where you're getting your information I think is the bare minimum and if you are resourced to support places that are interested in holding or creating some level of accountability even for content creators right there's an accountability network that content creators can join and that's good and I'm a licensed professional there's accountability there because my license can be revoked for things. so yeah, be wary of places where there isn't accountability, like your church. I don't know the people who go to church are listening to my podcast, like your family members churches and your former church. Go to your local town hall when you're politicians host them and yell at them because that's a little bit of accountability if not a lot. Go to local protests.

Jeremy Schumacher: There's good organizing going on. Connect to your community. Let's There are more of us than there are of these**, awful people ruining things and making life difficult for marginalized communities. We do need to Find your local organization. I don't know about posting that stuff in the show notes. I'm not opposed to it. I don't know how much I want to help organize and help people get there. And also we're, at that stage of fascism of deporting protesters.  So take care of yourselves. When I end the show and say take care of yourself, take some care of someone else, I usually mean in a mental health perspective, but make sure you're plugged into your local community and that you're safe and that people in your community are also Take care of somebody else. We'll be back with a more regular schedule soon. Not immediately, but soon.

Jeremy Schumacher: We'll be back on track with guests and some light-hearted content But maybe it's just all going to be how do we survive horrific times. So, look forward to that. All right, y'all. Take care. Peace.

Meeting ended after 00:29:35 👋

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