Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Mollie john Fast and this is Fast Politics,
Speaker 1: where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
Speaker 1: today's best minds, and Maga, Mike Johnson's wife took down
Speaker 1: her website that compared homosexuality to beast reality and incest.
Speaker 1: We have such a fascinating show. Today, author Naomi Klein
Speaker 1: talks to us about her new book, Doppelganger, and we
Speaker 1: get into a real talk about her doppelganger, Naomi Wolf,
Speaker 1: and you get to hear.
Speaker 2: A little bit of weird personal stuff for me.
Speaker 1: Then we'll talk to author Catherine Stewart about Christian fascism
Speaker 1: in America as it's become newly relevant with the rise
Speaker 1: of our new speaker of the House, Mega Mike Johnson.
Speaker 2: But first we have the.
Speaker 1: Host of the Think Like an Economist podcast, University of Michigan,
Speaker 1: professor my friend and yours, Justin Wolfer's.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Speaker 3: Justin, Molly, I thought we agreed it was called fust economics.
Speaker 1: Now, that's right, the wildly scintillating topic of economics all
Speaker 1: day long.
Speaker 3: That's what my household's like.
Speaker 1: Because Friday we have this incredible economic news which completely disappeared.
Speaker 2: Can you explain to.
Speaker 1: Our listeners what the numbers on Friday that were released
Speaker 1: were and what they mean?
Speaker 3: Great, So what happened on Friday was the government released
Speaker 3: the latest estimate of GDP gross domestic product, which sounds terribly,
Speaker 3: terribly boring. You can imagine gross domestic product is being well,
Speaker 3: how much stuff we produce, which still sounds quite boring.
Speaker 3: I teach my students in economics one at one GDP
Speaker 3: per capita. That is, if GDP is the size of
Speaker 3: the pie, GDP per capita is the size of the
Speaker 3: average slice has another name. The other name for it
Speaker 3: is average income. It's average income because the amount we
Speaker 3: produce on average is also the same as if we
Speaker 3: buy and sell everything we produce is the same as
Speaker 3: the amount we spend. And if the dollars someone spends
Speaker 3: as a dollar of income to someone else, And so
Speaker 3: GDP's interesting. It's average income. And what we learned was
Speaker 3: it in the third quarter average income grew at an
Speaker 3: annual rate of four point nine percent, which sounds boring.
Speaker 2: Again, it's crazy high, right.
Speaker 3: It's hugely huge and highly high. Yes, it's a big number.
Speaker 3: The economy normally grows at around two percent. If it's
Speaker 3: a little sick at one percent, zero is a recession,
Speaker 3: and four point nine is more than double two. It
Speaker 3: was a Blockbunster quarter.
Speaker 2: So does this mean we're not in recession?
Speaker 3: I think the technical term for this is an anti recession.
Speaker 1: So this was really unexpected. So can you explain why
Speaker 1: and how and why?
Speaker 3: Right? So, let me now try and make it sound
Speaker 3: a little less interesting, and that's going to get us
Speaker 3: closer to the truth. It's almost always the case for
Speaker 3: any economic statistic if it sounds unusually high or in
Speaker 3: usually low, that's because in reality we don't know what's
Speaker 3: happening in the economy. All we have is imperfect measurements,
Speaker 3: and so when you see a crazy number, that likely
Speaker 3: tells you that the measurements particularly imperfect. Right now, So,
Speaker 3: do I believe that the economy was flying off the
Speaker 3: hand or recently?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 3: Do I believe that it's going extraordinarily well through twenty
Speaker 3: twenty one, twenty twenty two, and twenty twenty three. Absolutely?
Speaker 3: And then do you want to take a little bit
Speaker 3: of signal from the fact that the Q three number
Speaker 3: the third quarter of the year was particularly good? Sure,
Speaker 3: it says right now things are going great, and so
Speaker 3: the recession that everyone promised you in the second half
Speaker 3: of twenty twenty three, it's not happening.
Speaker 1: So let's sort of go a little further with this
Speaker 1: why again. I'm going to ask you a question which
Speaker 1: is like the question that has stumped everyone. Why do
Speaker 1: Americans feel the economy is bad even if it is good?
Speaker 3: Okay, so Molly, I'm going to give you two answers.
Speaker 3: So my answer, and then what I want to do
Speaker 3: in three minutes is I want you to say, Pete,
Speaker 3: what's Betsy's answer? I bet that's more compelling.
Speaker 2: Okay, who's Betsy.
Speaker 3: Betsy is Betsy Stevenson, my better half, who was also
Speaker 3: one of President Obama's economic advisors. So what's going on?
Speaker 3: I think people aren't actually that miserable. Let's start with
Speaker 3: where's the evidence that people are miserable? First of all,
Speaker 3: it all comes from public opinion.
Speaker 2: Polls, right.
Speaker 3: And if I ask you what is the state of
Speaker 3: the economy, and you're in a highly polarized world, I
Speaker 3: think the question a lot of people here is do
Speaker 3: you like the president? And that's why in a world
Speaker 3: in which we've got the unemployment rate near a fifty
Speaker 3: year low, in which GDP has never been higher, in
Speaker 3: which inflation is falling. You have a remarkable number of
Speaker 3: Republicans saying the economy is horrible. Now do I believe that?
Speaker 3: If you ask them instead, hey, how are your personal finances,
Speaker 3: they're like, oh, pretty good. Actually, we say is it
Speaker 3: easy to find a job these days? They're like, oh, yeah, sure,
Speaker 3: but the economy is terrible. Here's that's the problem. If
Speaker 3: you want to find out the state of the economy, Molly,
Speaker 3: you made a choice. You thought, I know what I'm
Speaker 3: going to do. I'm going to call an economist because
Speaker 3: they study the economy. Right, If you want to find
Speaker 3: out the state of someone's personal finances, or people's personal finances,
Speaker 3: you should call people because they know a lot about that.
Speaker 3: But you, in your everyday life, your listener is in
Speaker 3: one of hundreds of cities right now in the United States,
Speaker 3: working in one of dozens of industries, in one of
Speaker 3: hundreds of occupations for one of millions of companies. No
Speaker 3: matter how many stores you walk past in the day,
Speaker 3: you're seeing a tiny slice of the whole. You know nothing.
Speaker 3: The only way we'd figure out what's going with on
Speaker 3: with the economies by running surveys across the whole economy
Speaker 3: of how much people are spending and making and things
Speaker 3: like that. And when we do that, we find really
Speaker 3: strong numbers. And the other thing to remember is remember
Speaker 3: only around two or three percent of the population and
Speaker 3: responding to public opinion polls these days, think what sort
Speaker 3: of savage would answer their cell phone to talk to
Speaker 3: a pole start yes, and it's got to be some
Speaker 3: with a.
Speaker 5: Story to tell and an acts to grind, exactly.
Speaker 3: So there's a whole lot of access being ground being
Speaker 3: called public opinion, but it's actually minority access being ground.
Speaker 3: So I have a different approach to this. If I
Speaker 3: want to know how people out there feel about the economy,
Speaker 3: it's impossible with current polling technology to talk to all
Speaker 3: of them. So what I'm going to do instead is
Speaker 3: I'm going to watch what they do now. If the economy.
Speaker 3: If you were really pessimistic about the state of the economy,
Speaker 3: if you thought it sucks right now and it's going
Speaker 3: to be terrible in the future, and you're worried you're
Speaker 3: going to lose to the job, the first thing you're
Speaker 3: going to do is cut back on spending. You're going
Speaker 3: to put as much as you can away in that
Speaker 3: rainy day fund for the terrible times. You're sure just
Speaker 3: around the corner. I just want you to stick with me, Molly.
Speaker 3: No one's doing that. What they're doing is they're spending
Speaker 3: as if they believe not only the economy is strong today,
Speaker 3: but they think it'll be strong tomorrow and the next day.
Speaker 3: And it's not just consumers that are spending, which is
Speaker 3: self perpetuating too. Absolutely, businesses are investing. And I want
Speaker 3: to tell you the big, untold story. You know, there's
Speaker 3: been an enormous burst of entrepreneurship over the last few
Speaker 3: years that we've never seen more new businesses being started.
Speaker 3: And these are real businesses that are going to employ
Speaker 3: people at rates we've simply never seen before. That is
Speaker 3: an enormous vote of confidence. So people are making choices
Speaker 3: as if they believe the economy is strong.
Speaker 2: But here's my question for you.
Speaker 1: Don't you think that with these interest rates going up,
Speaker 1: it costs more to service debt, So your mortgage rates,
Speaker 1: if you have an adjustable rate mortgage, go up, your
Speaker 1: credit card rate, those things go up, so it costs
Speaker 1: more to service debt.
Speaker 2: So isn't that reflected in GDP.
Speaker 3: Yes, And so there's two sides to a coin. The
Speaker 3: thing is, high interest rates suck when you're borrowing money,
Speaker 3: But who are you borrowing from the bank?
Speaker 2: The country?
Speaker 3: Where's the bank and its money from people who save.
Speaker 3: So there's two types of people in the American economy.
Speaker 3: There's savers and borrowers. Now, the savers are usually in
Speaker 3: the second half of their career, and the borrowers are
Speaker 3: usually those trying to get a mortgage. But the point
Speaker 3: is high interest rate hurt the borrower just as much
Speaker 3: as they help the lender. And the lender is not
Speaker 3: an anonymous bank. The lender is a person who put
Speaker 3: their money in the bank, and so it has a
Speaker 3: huge redistributional effect. So of course home buyers are really
Speaker 3: really upset right now, but homeowners who are stashing their
Speaker 3: extra money in the bank are actually kind of happy.
Speaker 1: But what about like the American government, which has quite
Speaker 1: a lot of debt.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we worry about them quite a bit, just curious.
Speaker 3: So that's a different issue. This now is the issue
Speaker 3: of government debt. The government ows a lot of money,
Speaker 3: and anyone, whether it's a family or the government, when
Speaker 3: instrates go up, it becomes a little harder because the
Speaker 3: monthly payments go up, and so you either go into
Speaker 3: more debt or you tighten your belt. Many families who
Speaker 3: owe money are tightening their belts and the government instead
Speaker 3: is going further in debt. And the big macroeconomic question
Speaker 3: is is this sustainable? And one answer is for the
Speaker 3: moment sort of kind of yes. By the way, one
Speaker 3: way to make debts much easier to repay is if
Speaker 3: you figure out a way to get a pay rise,
Speaker 3: because then it's easy to service your mortgage. Well, the
Speaker 3: same thing goes for countries, which is, if we can
Speaker 3: increase our economic growth rate, we're back to GDP growing
Speaker 3: at four point nine percent. The debt doesn't go away,
Speaker 3: becomes small relative to your income, so it becomes less
Speaker 3: of a problem. So if we can maintain robust economic growth,
Speaker 3: that might help reduce some of the concerns we have
Speaker 3: about the debt.
Speaker 1: So now I'm going to pivot to asking you something
Speaker 1: quite stupid, but you'll find it funny or interesting or
Speaker 1: you'll explain it to us. So have a new Speaker
Speaker 1: of the House.
Speaker 2: His name is Mike Johnson. We call him Maga Mike.
Speaker 1: He has decided that in order to pay for the
Speaker 1: aid to Israel, he is going to make cuts to
Speaker 1: the irs. Explain to us why he is not two
Speaker 1: and three dimensional chassis.
Speaker 3: This is like a family struggling to get by with
Speaker 3: two kids deciding that what they're going to do is
Speaker 3: cut out condoms from the family budget that will save money.
Speaker 3: It ain't gonna work. The thing is the irs. They're
Speaker 3: the guys who collect taxes. We give the irs less money,
Speaker 3: they collect less taxes. We actually lose. The government loses
Speaker 3: money by doing this. So what you learned from this is,
Speaker 3: I just by the way, Mike Johnson knows this what
Speaker 3: this is, and this isn't like all.
Speaker 1: In fact, we know he knows this because he asks
Speaker 1: the CBO not to score it right.
Speaker 3: And I want to explain that to your listeners. Normally,
Speaker 3: when you come up with a bill, you say to
Speaker 3: the independent schoolkeeper, hey, could you tell Congress how much
Speaker 3: this will save?
Speaker 2: In the Congressional Budget Office.
Speaker 3: Right, the Congressional Budget they're non part is and totally serious,
Speaker 3: wants up to their eyeballs and Excel spreadsheets, and you
Speaker 3: normally say, hey, could you tell Congress how much this
Speaker 3: will save? And then they run it through their computers
Speaker 3: and they tell Congress, oh, you'll save this many billion dollars.
Speaker 3: Johnson says, I don't want to know.
Speaker 2: We're going to say so much. Let's not tell anyone.
Speaker 3: And every time I hear that, I kind of like, no,
Speaker 3: you really really know? Now. The thing I want your
Speaker 3: listeners to know more about and to actually be angry about,
Speaker 3: is he also knows who saves when the IRS doesn't
Speaker 3: have resources. Most of your listeners have fairly simple tax returns.
Speaker 3: They feel complicated, but as far as the IRS is concerned,
Speaker 3: they're pretty simple and they don't need a lot of
Speaker 3: tax cops to make sure that you and I are
Speaker 3: paying our taxes. But these rich guys, with their four
Speaker 3: foot higher tax returns, they're the guys who aren't going
Speaker 3: to get audited, and so they're the guys who have
Speaker 3: got these very sophisticated, barely legal, maybe illegal schemes. And
Speaker 3: when there are a fewer tax police out there, it's
Speaker 3: effectively saying to those guys, here's a tax cut. Let's
Speaker 3: be clear who those guys are. It's not just they're rich,
Speaker 3: it's their.
Speaker 2: Crooks, right, people like Donald Trump.
Speaker 3: Exactly. This is like Mike Johnson saying, my first act
Speaker 3: is a tax cut. I think the American people deserve
Speaker 3: a tax cut. And I'm like, oh, I can imagine
Speaker 3: the print Republicans saying that which people rich tax cheats?
Speaker 3: You should be outraged. Even a centrist Republican should be outraged.
Speaker 3: They should want to give tax breaks to small businesses,
Speaker 3: or it's at the middle class, or even to the rich.
Speaker 3: But the rich cheats. You see they're targeting. It's insane.
Speaker 2: It's the leader of their party in his defense.
Speaker 3: And so you know, is this bad faith or worse faith? Yeah,
Speaker 3: someone in his office is like, oh, here's a hilarious trick.
Speaker 3: And what we'll do is we'll earn the Libs because
Speaker 3: they'll turn up on their lift wing podcasts and complain
Speaker 3: about it. And I guess we're all owned. But like,
Speaker 3: what a stupid, transparent, childish gimmick. But I can tell
Speaker 3: you what I really think. You tell me it sucks.
Speaker 1: Let's get sort of further with this. So ultimately, the
Speaker 1: idea of cutting IRS enforcement costs the American people money.
Speaker 1: The American TAXI.
Speaker 3: Yes, you and me, it's not abstract. It's not the government.
Speaker 3: When a rich tax cheat doesn't pay a dollar. If
Speaker 3: the dollar is going to get spent anyway, you and
Speaker 3: I have to have to kick in for it.
Speaker 1: So what numbers are you looking at now? All the numbers,
Speaker 1: but I mean, what's coming down the pike?
Speaker 3: What am I excited about right now?
Speaker 2: Yes? What financial indicators are you excited about right now?
Speaker 3: I want to tell you some of the stories that
Speaker 3: aren't getting told. So, first story, extraordinary burst of entrepreneurship
Speaker 3: right now. The rate at which we're seeing new businesses
Speaker 3: form is something you've never seen before. The rate at
Speaker 3: which people are becoming self employed or starting businesses and
Speaker 3: employing others you've never seen before. The rate at which
Speaker 3: people are leaving bad jobs for good jobs and better
Speaker 3: careers is at an historically high rate. So this is
Speaker 3: just an extraordinary story that the administrations yet to tell.
Speaker 3: But you can see it in your communities, and you
Speaker 3: can see new businesses for me, and you can see
Speaker 3: people walking into better careers. So that's story number one.
Speaker 3: Story number two, we've seen fantastic economic growth. We've seen
Speaker 3: unemployment at a fifty year low. We've seen the economy
Speaker 3: growing at rates we have not seen in a long,
Speaker 3: long time. Here's an amazing fact about the state of
Speaker 3: the economy in twenty nineteen. You could have said, you
Speaker 3: could have done what I do and looked up the
Speaker 3: latest forecast for where will the economy be in twenty
Speaker 3: twenty three, and you would you'd write that number down,
Speaker 3: and then if you fell asleep for three years, literally
Speaker 3: just fell asleep, and then you woke up. The first
Speaker 3: thing I do upon waking up and say, can you
Speaker 3: show me the latest economic indicators? And the economy today
Speaker 3: is higher than people would have expected it to be
Speaker 3: in twenty nineteen, So you would say, oh, did I
Speaker 3: miss something while I was sleeping. People would say yes,
Speaker 3: and you say, well, I'm guessing that I missed good
Speaker 3: news because the economy is doing better than we anticipated
Speaker 3: before I fell asleep. So we've not only recovered from
Speaker 3: the global pandemic and recession, we're stronger that we anticipated
Speaker 3: being even if there'd never been one. That's an extraordinary story. Now,
Speaker 3: the third story I want to tell you is people say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: great economic growth, but of course this is all going
Speaker 3: to feed the rich and the oligarchs. You and the
Speaker 3: little guy never gets anything. This is the first time
Speaker 3: in my lifetime in which I've seen inequality decline. So
Speaker 3: wage risers are strongest for those who need it most
Speaker 3: for the first time in my lifetime. And so in fact,
Speaker 3: this is an economic recovery that's lifting everyone up, and
Speaker 3: it's particularly lifting a working class up to a degree
Speaker 3: that we're entirely unused to. Not only that, we've seen
Speaker 3: wealth grow over the last three years faster than any
Speaker 3: other three year period, and we've seen inequality of wealth
Speaker 3: decline as working in middle class people have started to
Speaker 3: accumulate wealth, they're starting to own stocks, and they're starting
Speaker 3: to own small businesses at much higher rates than we
Speaker 3: were pre pandemic.
Speaker 2: Okay, we have just two minutes.
Speaker 1: I want you to talk about labor union strikes and
Speaker 1: why what happened with the auto workers and what that
Speaker 1: means for the economy and for wealth inequality.
Speaker 3: Okay, so I'm going to disappoint many of your listeners here.
Speaker 3: The story here might be smaller than your hope.
Speaker 2: It's still a win.
Speaker 3: It's a win. So let's just go back. We want
Speaker 3: to get the main facts out, which is right now,
Speaker 3: about six or seven percent of the US private sect
Speaker 3: the labor forces unionized, So unions are a very small
Speaker 3: part of this country. That's still true. We saw the
Speaker 3: UAW stand up, and it looked like and you know,
Speaker 3: that was just after the screenwriters and the actors, and
Speaker 3: so it looked like a huge spike in the extent
Speaker 3: of industrial activity of striking. But actually it turns out
Speaker 3: most of the actors who are on strike wouldn't have
Speaker 3: been working anyway. That's the way acting works. And so
Speaker 3: the statistics, when you put it in sort of a
Speaker 3: broader context, the US still has enormously lower strike activity
Speaker 3: than most industrialized countries, and the recent uptick has barely
Speaker 3: notice Now having said that, what the auto workers got
Speaker 3: was a real important, substantial raise. In fact, they've done
Speaker 3: so well, I won't call them working class, they're our
Speaker 3: middle class workers. Is it something that others can replicate?
Speaker 3: I'm not sure. One thing to be aware of, though,
Speaker 3: is that they were kind of owed something.
Speaker 2: Right because they gave up. Can you talk about.
Speaker 3: That when the auto is tanked after the last big downturn,
Speaker 3: they were basically tiled everything shutting down unless you guys
Speaker 3: give us a lot back, And so they did. But
Speaker 3: actually this is true across the unionized workforce more generally.
Speaker 3: Remember the last three years post pandemic, we had that
Speaker 3: big run up in inflation, and that caused a lot
Speaker 3: of people to get wage rises. Well, unfortunately for the
Speaker 3: auto workers, they were covered through that entire time by
Speaker 3: a long term contract, and it was a long term
Speaker 3: contract where they'd finally dropped cost of living adjustments. And
Speaker 3: so what we've actually seen over the last three years
Speaker 3: is that non unionized workers unusually got faster pay rises
Speaker 3: than unionized workers. Union guys fell behind because they had
Speaker 3: long term contracts and haven't been able to get the
Speaker 3: extra pay rise that many of your listeners have been getting.
Speaker 3: And so I suspect we're going to see a bunch
Speaker 3: more stories that look like the UAW, which is unions
Speaker 3: getting larger wage rises. But I want you to realize
Speaker 3: that some of it says catching up, and it's catching
Speaker 3: up because those guys fell behind more than most of
Speaker 3: the rest of us did.
Speaker 2: So interesting justin well, first, I hope you'll come back.
Speaker 3: Oh wise, Molly, I love Token economics with you, and
Speaker 3: I love you listeners, And you.
Speaker 1: Have such a cute friendship with Mac Greenfield, my long
Speaker 1: suffering spems.
Speaker 3: He is quite quite quite wonderful.
Speaker 1: Naomi Klein is the author of Double Ganger.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Past Politics, Naomi.
Speaker 4: Thank you, Lilly.
Speaker 5: I've been looking forward to this conversation.
Speaker 1: Oh, I'm such a fan of yours, and I'm really
Speaker 1: excited to have you here to talk about this book,
Speaker 1: Double Ganger. I want you to first just just a
Speaker 1: little bit about like how you got here to write
Speaker 1: this book, because books like this, I mean, there's usually
Speaker 1: a thought process that goes into how you kind of
Speaker 1: decide this or did you just sort of happens into it?
Speaker 6: Yeah, there were a couple of reasons why I wrote
Speaker 6: this book, which is not my usual type of book.
Speaker 6: I mean, I don't think all your listeners are familiar
Speaker 6: with my work, but I do tend to write more
Speaker 6: conventional nonfiction books that and this is more or creative.
Speaker 2: This is more like a memoir.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's more more, more creative nonfiction. It's a tragic,
Speaker 6: comic memoir. But the form itself is a little bit
Speaker 6: of an experiment because I use the fact that I
Speaker 6: have a doppelganger that I have been perennially confused and
Speaker 6: conflated with another Naomi nonfiction writer, your old friend Naomi Wolf. Well,
Speaker 6: but a friend of my mine, but yes, I want
Speaker 6: to hear all the stories.
Speaker 2: And someone I knew from my youth.
Speaker 6: Yes, So before I decided to write this book, I
Speaker 6: decided that I wanted to write in another way. So
Speaker 6: during the pandemic, I made this decision that I had time,
Speaker 6: for the first time in twenty five years, to take
Speaker 6: a writing course.
Speaker 2: So that's the context that's really cool.
Speaker 6: Like everyone else, I was grounded. I had a book tour, canceled,
Speaker 6: all kinds of events, and so I was kind of
Speaker 6: stuck at home and feeling a little bit speechless like
Speaker 6: many of us were. And I had this idea that
Speaker 6: maybe I could sign up for an online writing course,
Speaker 6: because a lot of the writing schools were offering, like
Speaker 6: IOWA was offering online courses. Even though I've written for
Speaker 6: all my adult life, I never had actually taken a
Speaker 6: course before. I didn't end up enrolling in one of
Speaker 6: those courses, but I did end up hiring a writing coach,
Speaker 6: a writing teacher named Harriet Clark who taught creative writing
Speaker 6: at Stanford, and we were just kind of playing with
Speaker 6: form and doing all these little writing exercises, and I
Speaker 6: was feeling like I wasn't sure what I was going
Speaker 6: to do. I was actually thinking I might even try
Speaker 6: my hand at fiction. We were just sort of playing.
Speaker 6: But at the same time, the identity confusion that I
Speaker 6: was experiencing with Naomi Wolf was really accelerating because she
Speaker 6: was becoming this vector of medical misinformation, and she was
Speaker 6: saying things that sort of reminded people of the structure
Speaker 6: of the argument in my book, The Shock Doctrine, which
Speaker 6: was about exploitation of disasters, and she was claiming that
Speaker 6: COVID was a grand conspiracy and so on and so on,
Speaker 6: and so at a certain point it just occurred to me, well,
Speaker 6: maybe this is the creative writing I should be doing. Yeah,
Speaker 6: maybe I could use this to play with form in
Speaker 6: a way that I hadn't before. Originally, it was just
Speaker 6: going to be an essay. I was thinking maybe I'd
Speaker 6: pitch it to The New Yorker or something like that.
Speaker 6: But then her political trajectory just got more and more extreme, right,
Speaker 6: she became more of a star on Steve Bannon's show
Speaker 6: and Tucker Carlson's, and so she became more of a
Speaker 6: white rabbit to lead me into this rabbit hole of
Speaker 6: conspiracy theory. So that's when it started growing, and plus
Speaker 6: conspiracy culture started impacting our lives in every possible way,
Speaker 6: I would argue, So that's how it turned into this.
Speaker 6: I don't want to call it a beast of a book.
Speaker 6: It's not my usual fare. It's something a little more
Speaker 6: playful and strange.
Speaker 1: Being playful and strange, it's so interesting because it's like,
Speaker 1: I think of myself as young. I am not, but
Speaker 1: you know, I've been around since the nineties, and you know,
Speaker 1: careers just sort of they sometimes vow and Naomi Wolf
Speaker 1: had a really interesting and I would say, pretty terrifying evolution.
Speaker 2: It's a two part thing, right.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of this misinformation disinformation, but then there's
Speaker 1: also everybody's moving really fast. Yeah, so nobody takes the
Speaker 1: time to like check your last name.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, this is the thing is I use
Speaker 6: the fact that I have this doppelganger, and I have
Speaker 6: to admit that I do because so many people confuse
Speaker 6: me with her, to look at other ways that we
Speaker 6: double ourselves, Right, Like a doppelganger is this idea that
Speaker 6: there's another you out there in the world that you
Speaker 6: could bump into at any time.
Speaker 5: Right, I personally don't see.
Speaker 6: Myself when I look at her enough other people have
Speaker 6: that it's forced me to think about this, right, because
Speaker 6: in literature, doppelgangers are always a message. They're always sort
Speaker 6: of tugging at you, telling you to pay attention to something.
Speaker 6: They're a harbinger, They're of doom if you don't pay attention.
Speaker 6: So I started paying attention to the phenomenon of doubling.
Speaker 6: But it made me realize that all of us who
Speaker 6: maintain an avatar online, you know, an image of ourselves,
Speaker 6: a brand, if you will, are kind of deliberately creating
Speaker 6: a double of ourselves. I don't know what your relationship
Speaker 6: is with the X version of you or the Instagram
Speaker 6: version of you, but I mean it's probably not really you,
Speaker 6: Like I don't know you, but I sort of feel
Speaker 6: like I know you. But do I know you because
Speaker 6: I follow you on social media.
Speaker 1: So I have this interesting pathology which I don't think
Speaker 1: most people have, which is that because my mother wrote
Speaker 1: about me my whole life, I became like a little
Speaker 1: bit crazy, and so I don't have that same kind
Speaker 1: of expectation of privacy that normal people have. And so
Speaker 1: it made me good at public facing discourse in a
Speaker 1: way that I think I would otherwise not be because
Speaker 1: I had that sort of paranoid fantasy you was happening anyway.
Speaker 6: So does that mean that you feel like the person
Speaker 6: that we see online really is you, Like you're at
Speaker 6: ease enough with the idea of a public self that
Speaker 6: that is just you.
Speaker 1: I would say, yes, it's not because I'm great by
Speaker 1: any stretchy imagination in any way. It's more because like
Speaker 1: this was the way I was able to like survive
Speaker 1: my childhood because like my old childhood, people come up
Speaker 1: to me and they'd be like, where's your twin and
Speaker 1: I'd be like, no, I don't have a twin, and
Speaker 1: they'd be like no, no, your mother has you as twins,
Speaker 1: or like I couldn't find it. But like my mother
Speaker 1: wrote about me getting my period, it was like genuinely
Speaker 1: the most horrifying thing of my life. But it like
Speaker 1: it was like I went through the matrix and I
Speaker 1: never came back.
Speaker 6: Yeah, like you either are swallowed up by shame or
Speaker 6: you just go with it. I mean I had to say, like,
Speaker 6: this is a larger conversation than maybe you and I
Speaker 6: can have over a drink sometime. Because my mom was
Speaker 6: also a second wave feminist who also used me as
Speaker 6: material and as a sort of narrative device and like
Speaker 6: one of the forms of doubling that I look at.
Speaker 6: My mom's a documentary filmmaker, not a writer, although she
Speaker 6: she has written books. But yeah, it was very humiliating
Speaker 6: for me as a kid, and it really shaped my personality.
Speaker 6: For me, it went in the opposite direction. I became
Speaker 6: extremely self conscious and pretty kind of repressed. Like my books,
Speaker 6: like previous books have had almost nothing of me and
Speaker 6: them really you know, no logo had a little bit.
Speaker 5: But I think that.
Speaker 6: I worked very hard to protect like the parts of
Speaker 6: myself that I would consider personal from the public eye.
Speaker 6: That is why having Naomi wolf Is a doppelganger was
Speaker 6: a particular kind of mind fuck. Like you know, she
Speaker 6: wrote a book called Vagina a Biography, which if you know,
Speaker 6: if you were to like cook up a doppelganger in
Speaker 6: a lab that was expressly designed to like trigger my
Speaker 6: particular repressive neuroses, like that would be it. It would
Speaker 6: be like writing a book called Vagina a Biography and
Speaker 6: also making major factual errors that get exposed live on
Speaker 6: the BB see in another book like these are the
Speaker 6: things that but so I'm grateful to her in a
Speaker 6: weird way because I feel like self consciousness is a
Speaker 6: kind of narcissism, right, like, because you are still imagining
Speaker 6: that people care more than they really do about you,
Speaker 6: which if you've had some of those shaming experiences as
Speaker 6: a child where people really did care more about you
Speaker 6: than they should, it inculcates it very early, this idea
Speaker 6: that people are watching you, right, So you can either
Speaker 6: perform for the watchers or you can hide from them.
Speaker 6: But either way, your sense of self is inflated.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 6: And so the thing about having a Doppelganger gone wild
Speaker 6: is that it forces you to confront the reality that
Speaker 6: you can't control any of this. And so that's why
Speaker 6: at the end of the book I say that I've
Speaker 6: come to embrace my doppelganger is an unconventional form of
Speaker 6: Buddhism and non attachment to the self, and like, we
Speaker 6: may as well get over ourselves and and find one
Speaker 6: another and build collective power. But the other thing I
Speaker 6: was just gonna say about all that that another form
Speaker 6: of doubling that I look at in the book is
Speaker 6: the way people treat their kids as doubles of themselves,
Speaker 6: as extensions of themselves.
Speaker 2: And you write a lot about your kid, you know, I.
Speaker 6: Actually write very little about him. I write about this
Speaker 6: phenomenon because in investigating kind of some of the roots
Speaker 6: of modern day conspiracy culture, some of what we're seeing
Speaker 6: now is partially because the groundwork was laid by the
Speaker 6: autism misinformation world. Yeah, particularly the myth of a link
Speaker 6: between childhood vaccines and autism. And because I have a
Speaker 6: neuroatypical child, I have been exposed to autism parent world
Speaker 6: in ways that have been very distressing. I've met a
Speaker 6: lot of parents who are obsessed with kind of curing
Speaker 6: the autism in their children and are always looking for scapegoats.
Speaker 6: And I think that part of it is this idea
Speaker 6: that they're owed a child who is a doppelganger of them,
Speaker 6: a double of them. And I think that this idea
Speaker 6: that we have a right to treat our children has
Speaker 6: public facing material in our books and films. Honestly, I
Speaker 6: don't think we do. You know, I don't think my
Speaker 6: mom had a right to do that to me. I
Speaker 6: don't think your mom had a right to do it
Speaker 6: to you. And I don't do it to my child.
Speaker 6: I think he has a right to privacy to decide
Speaker 6: what to share. But I decided that I did have
Speaker 6: a right to write about the batshit parents I found
Speaker 6: in that world. But as far as his inner life goes,
Speaker 6: that's up to him whether he decides to share it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I generally agree with you, though I did write
Speaker 1: his piece for the Washington Post, not washingt bus for
Speaker 1: the Wall Street Journal ATBED before I went to war
Speaker 1: with them spiritually anyway, about how I had a kid
Speaker 1: who was whatever, who had disease and I almost had
Speaker 1: to have a second trimester abortion, and my kids all
Speaker 1: were like, remember when you wrote that piece about how
Speaker 1: you wanted to abort Max, And I was like, that
Speaker 1: is not what that mes. Sad, but you know, teenagers,
Speaker 1: you can't can't live with them.
Speaker 5: That's the thing about kids is they do grow up.
Speaker 5: You know, they did out.
Speaker 6: Yeah you Honestly, I think there really is this idea
Speaker 6: as parents where you're like, oh, just because they don't
Speaker 6: understand this now, they never will.
Speaker 5: It's like, we must all engage with the concept of aging.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about Steve Bannon.
Speaker 5: Let's just turn this into a parenting podcast.
Speaker 1: And let's talk about I interviewed doctor Hotez and Texas
Speaker 1: trip and like, I mean, there's so much hostility towards doctors.
Speaker 1: But I want to talk to you about Steve Bannon
Speaker 1: because I do think Steve Banner is such an important
Speaker 1: piece of the puzzle.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, and it's super related too, because you know
Speaker 6: what I write about in the book is we know
Speaker 6: why Wolfe was interested in him, right, he had a
Speaker 6: huge platform. She had basically been canceled in liberal and
Speaker 6: left circles because she'd made so many errors.
Speaker 2: This was her second chance in a way.
Speaker 6: She got everything she lost and more because when that
Speaker 6: world opened up to her, when she started talking about
Speaker 6: Biden as using COVID to stage an authoritarian coup and
Speaker 6: bring a Chinese style social credit system to the West,
Speaker 6: which is really when she took her star turn and started.
Speaker 7: Incredible stuff, Yes, continue, very good stuff. Deca Carlson became
Speaker 7: a huge fan, so did Steve Bannon. And you know
Speaker 7: what they liked about her was that she was this
Speaker 7: ex Democrat, right, I mean or claiming to still be
Speaker 7: a Democrat. But the Democrats had betrayed her, right, and
Speaker 7: so there was there would always be this big wind
Speaker 7: up of like listing all of her liberal credentials every
Speaker 7: time she.
Speaker 5: Would go in one of their shows, because she was proof.
Speaker 6: In their minds that what they were doing was not
Speaker 6: just the usual right wing thing. So there was something
Speaker 6: so important about their project that it was postpartisan, right.
Speaker 6: That's part of the narrative of what's going on now.
Speaker 6: And so it's obvious why they wanted her to come
Speaker 6: on and trash Biden, like any ex leftist or ex
Speaker 6: liberal who wanted to do that would have been welcome
Speaker 6: to do so, and lots of them have. But what
Speaker 6: is she getting out of them?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 6: And you know, she's getting everything that she lost and
Speaker 6: more in terms of audience, book sales, subscriptions for her website, substack,
Speaker 6: et cetera. But Bannon is doing more than just getting
Speaker 6: an ex liberal on his team. At one point he
Speaker 6: said that she was one of his top contestants for
Speaker 6: Women of the Year. I don't maybe I didn't know
Speaker 6: he had a Woman of the Year, but apparently he does.
Speaker 2: It's ironic.
Speaker 5: At one point, is ironic.
Speaker 6: At one point he said that, you know, all these
Speaker 6: moms are listening to doctor Naomi wolf right, and he
Speaker 6: saw her as a kind of mom in chief precisely
Speaker 6: because she was this prominent feminist. When she started talking
Speaker 6: about vaccines and masks as a kind of child abuse,
Speaker 6: then it played into this broader narrative that was going
Speaker 6: on on the right about how schools were abusing children
Speaker 6: with teaching them about their country's history or having all
Speaker 6: gender bathrooms turning them trends. So the whole narrative that
Speaker 6: she's a part of on the right is really about
Speaker 6: the child as property. It's about this idea of like,
Speaker 6: our kids are extensions of ourselves, and we get to
Speaker 6: control every single thing about them, their bodies and their minds,
Speaker 6: and they are us. So it is related to what
Speaker 6: we're talking about about what do we think children are,
Speaker 6: you know, like are they property or are they independent
Speaker 6: beings that we clothe and feed and try to keep
Speaker 6: safe for a few years?
Speaker 1: Right, I mean that is a really good point. I
Speaker 1: mean it also is like a play for homeschooling and
Speaker 1: trying to dismantle public education. I mean, they have so
Speaker 1: many different priorities, all of which dovetail I feel.
Speaker 5: Like one hundred percent.
Speaker 6: And you know, this is where I've done a lot
Speaker 6: of research about attacks on public education in the aftermath
Speaker 6: of disasters, which I started following after Hurricane Katrina, when
Speaker 6: very soon after the city was flooded and while it
Speaker 6: was still under evacuation, Milton Friedman wrote an article in
Speaker 6: The Wall Street Journal saying, this is a tragedy, it's
Speaker 6: also an opportunity, an opportunity to remake New Orleans school system.
Speaker 2: That's so dark, so dark.
Speaker 1: By the way, I am again laughing, not because it's funny,
Speaker 1: but because here are all these people who died and
Speaker 1: drowned and suffered, and Milton Freeman is saying, we can
Speaker 1: now recreate the education system.
Speaker 6: Continue sorry, And they did, and New Orleans became the
Speaker 6: most privatized school system in the US in that all
Speaker 6: of these schools that were shut down after Katrina were
Speaker 6: never reopened as public schools. Huge numbers of them were
Speaker 6: reopened as charter schools. Their unionized teachers were fired and
Speaker 6: then rehired for lower wages. So, you know, I covered
Speaker 6: the same thing after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, where
Speaker 6: there was literally a copycat invoking New Orleans to say,
Speaker 6: this is the chance. You know, hundreds of schools were
Speaker 6: closed and so on. So but COVID, there's this whist.
Speaker 6: But I think you're absolutely right, that it's the same
Speaker 6: old war on public education, but now it's using vaccines
Speaker 6: and math mandates to delegitimize public schools, to delegitimize public teachers.
Speaker 6: And once again the answer is vouchers, homeschooling, religious education,
Speaker 6: and shorters. Yeah, same old play, but just with a
Speaker 6: slight tweak in the same way that the anti vaxxers,
Speaker 6: you know, had their arguments ready, but they just did
Speaker 6: like a search and replace.
Speaker 2: It's so dark, I mean, it's so incredibly dark.
Speaker 6: I need to ask you because I've been looking forward
Speaker 6: to this conversation because even you do know her, you
Speaker 6: grew up around her, Like you know, I have this
Speaker 6: little formula in the book, this fake math formula of
Speaker 6: narcissism slash grandiosity plus social media addiction plus midlife crisis
Speaker 6: divided by public shaming equals right wing meltdown. But I
Speaker 6: want to ask you, does that resonate? Am I missing anything?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 6: You actually know her better than I do. I met
Speaker 6: her when I was in college, but let me interview her.
Speaker 1: So yeah, probably for the best. I mean, so I
Speaker 1: only knew her when I was young. I know that
Speaker 1: my mother was very fond of her for a little
Speaker 1: while I think that's right, but I haven't seen her
Speaker 1: in a long long time, so I don't really know,
Speaker 1: but I certainly think it's very Fame is a very
Speaker 1: hard thing to lose.
Speaker 5: That's yeah, that's that's very true, and.
Speaker 1: I've seen that firsthand in my family. That is incredibly
Speaker 1: painful to think your quote unquote, and again I mean
Speaker 1: this bear you know, with all of the caveats, to
Speaker 1: feel that you matter and then to feel that you
Speaker 1: don't matter. Obviously, none of this is really about mattering,
Speaker 1: but because you really matter and you know when the
Speaker 1: people around you, and not in what you know, whether
Speaker 1: or not you're on television. But I saw with my
Speaker 1: mother and my grandfather that is incredibly painful to lose fame,
Speaker 1: especially if you have narcissistic tendencies. It's soul crushing for
Speaker 1: a lot of people. So I think that ultimately is
Speaker 1: the net of it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I have a quote in the book from Gorvidal. Some
Speaker 6: people take to drink, others take to audiences, And I
Speaker 6: think that not every person who has fame is necessarily
Speaker 6: in it for the audiences. But if you really take
Speaker 6: to your audiences, then social media is like an unlocked
Speaker 6: liquor cabinet, right, Like, it's just like like we don't
Speaker 6: know what we would know about Christopher Hitchens or Gorvidal
Speaker 6: for that matter. You know, if they had had access
Speaker 6: to these incredible tools any time of day or night,
Speaker 6: you know, they didn't really you know that they missed that,
Speaker 6: and they're probably we're all lucky for it.
Speaker 5: Would I would hazard to guess.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Naomi.
Speaker 5: Thank you.
Speaker 6: It's just the beginning of a longer conversation, I hope
Speaker 6: down the road without a recorder.
Speaker 1: Catherine Stewart is the author of The Power Worshippers Inside
Speaker 1: the Dangerous Row of Religious Nationalism. Welcome to Fast Politics,
Speaker 1: Catherine Stewart.
Speaker 4: It's really good to be here. Thanks so much for
Speaker 4: having me.
Speaker 1: Mollie, So I'm so excited to have you here because
Speaker 1: you write about something very important. And also, just when
Speaker 1: we saw speaker Mike Johnson elevated, the first thought Jesse
Speaker 1: and I both had was this is Trump is a
Speaker 1: met scale, but it's also Christian fascism. Can you talk
Speaker 1: to us a little bit about what that is and
Speaker 1: where it comes from.
Speaker 4: Well, the real power behind the Republican Party today is
Speaker 4: America's Christian nationalist movement. It's an anti democratic, authoritarian movement.
Speaker 4: And Mike Johnson has built his entire career on obedience
Speaker 4: to this movement and on service to this movement, and
Speaker 4: he's going to be a Zellis crusader during his tenure
Speaker 4: as speaker. You know, a lot of people have written
Speaker 4: about some of his extremist positions, like his election denialism,
Speaker 4: his climate denialism, his anti abortion extremism. But it's really
Speaker 4: important to remember that these aren't just a laundry list
Speaker 4: of bad ideas. They don't exist apart from one another.
Speaker 4: They are part of the package of the Christian nationalist
Speaker 4: movement and its anti democratic aims. So these kinds of
Speaker 4: crazy positions are very typical of Christian Nationalism. They've sort
Speaker 4: of come together as a package.
Speaker 1: Could you sort of talk us through a little bit
Speaker 1: about the history of this movement.
Speaker 4: Well, the movement has really gained force over the past
Speaker 4: five decades as movement leaders have invested in the infrastructure
Speaker 4: of this movement. This is a leadership driven movement and
Speaker 4: also an organization driven movement. Really started when a group
Speaker 4: of leaders. In its current form started when a group
Speaker 4: of leaders calling themselves the New Right felt the Republican
Speaker 4: Party had become too soft, too soft done communism to liberal.
Speaker 4: They felt like they were dependent on elevating the voices
Speaker 4: of liberal theologians, and they really wanted to ignite hyper
Speaker 4: conservative counter revolution. So we're talking about people like Paul Wyrick,
Speaker 4: Philish Laughley, Howard Phillips, and others, and so they united
Speaker 4: their movement. They knew that if you can get people
Speaker 4: to vote on two or three issues, you can control
Speaker 4: their vote. So they highlighted these cultural war issues like abortion,
Speaker 4: which prior to the New Right, most Republican Protestants actually
Speaker 4: supported abortion rights. Southern Baptist Convention actually passed resolutions affirming
Speaker 4: support for liberalization of abortion laws.
Speaker 2: This is called Christo fascism.
Speaker 4: Well, I used terms like authoritarianism. If you look at
Speaker 4: the authoritarian or the fascist checklist, does it reject democratic elections, Yes,
Speaker 4: Does it want to impose minority rule on most Americans
Speaker 4: and make them adhere to policies that they don't like. Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 4: It's a kind of strain of FA.
Speaker 1: But it's steeped in a kind of Christianity and theocracy
Speaker 1: that I think is really dangerous. And I mean the
Speaker 1: thing I was struck by was when Mike Johnson was
Speaker 1: asked about his worldview, he said, pick up a Bible.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, you know what's really interesting about his worldview
Speaker 4: is that he is a big admirer of David Barton,
Speaker 4: who's the political propagandist who poses as a historian to
Speaker 4: spread the distortions of like an alternate Christian nationalist history.
Speaker 4: So for over three decades, David Barton has peddled this
Speaker 4: falsification of the America's founding. His fall theories have been
Speaker 4: thoroughly debunked over and over. But Johnson has said that
Speaker 4: David Barton has had a profound influence. He said, quote
Speaker 4: a profound influence on me and my work and my
Speaker 4: life and everything I do. And Barton, in turn, has
Speaker 4: celebrated Johnson's elevation as a turning point in the Christian right.
Speaker 4: And Barton is a kind of key myth maker of
Speaker 4: the Christian nationalist movement. And he's also extremely politically active.
Speaker 4: And so when you hear what Johnson has to say,
Speaker 4: you know, his rejection the separation of church and state,
Speaker 4: he's basically parroting David Barton's talking points.
Speaker 1: Right, I want you to explain to us these talking points.
Speaker 1: You know, it's a sort of return to a time
Speaker 1: when women and people of color and LGBTQ had less rights, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's the fundamental issue.
Speaker 4: He's actually praised what he calls eighteenth century values, right
Speaker 4: when slavery was legal. So let's just you know, review
Speaker 4: a few of his positions. He was instrumental in advancing
Speaker 4: Donald Trump's attempted coup against the US government, and that's
Speaker 4: really important because it shows, you know, he wasn't just
Speaker 4: doing this for political expediency. He was reflecting a movement
Speaker 4: that is explicitly anti democratic. Now, he wasn't just the
Speaker 4: legal muscle for there's this Young Earth creationist outfit calls
Speaker 4: answers in genesis. They believe the Earth was created what's
Speaker 4: six thousand years old or something. He provided the legal
Speaker 4: muscle for that outfit, But he didn't just do that.
Speaker 4: He also blogged on the organization's website, and he spoke
Speaker 4: at a conference they hosted in twenty twenty two. He
Speaker 4: doesn't believe in human caused climate change, and he actually
Speaker 4: opposes the development of the clean energy sector, which could
Speaker 4: be a tremendous driver of economic growth, especially in Red States.
Speaker 4: He's bashed democracy and his speeches he's literally said in
Speaker 4: one of his speeches, we don't live in a democracy
Speaker 4: and referred to democracy as some sort of chaotic thing
Speaker 4: that you don't want. He's not a Seven Mountains dominionist.
Speaker 4: You know what a demanionism is, right, the idea that
Speaker 4: the right kinds of Christians, not all Christians, just the
Speaker 4: right kinds should take over the key levers of government
Speaker 4: and society. Now, he's actually not affiliated in any I
Speaker 4: would say official sense with that movement, but he has
Speaker 4: praised Seven Mountain Domanionists like Jim Garlow. He's spoken at
Speaker 4: their events and their conferences, and he's referred to his
Speaker 4: work in Congress as part of a quote spiritual battle.
Speaker 4: So he uses the language of dominionism. He has blamed
Speaker 4: gool shootings on birth control and abortion. I saw that
Speaker 4: through that wonderful piece that you wrote for a fan,
Speaker 4: you started to see Carmona. He's proposed cuts in social
Speaker 4: security and Medicare and medicates so severe that they'll leave
Speaker 4: millions of Americans in misery. And he's advocated for the
Speaker 4: criminalization of gay sex. So the key point here is
Speaker 4: really that all these positions, aren't They're just again not
Speaker 4: like they don't just exist independent of one another. They're
Speaker 4: all part of this package of extreme Christian nationalism.
Speaker 1: I just am curious. So basically this is a continuation
Speaker 1: of that.
Speaker 2: Even though Trump is.
Speaker 1: Rice married, adulter, or paid off a porn star, they
Speaker 1: don't care because it gets them where they need to be,
Speaker 1: and so they just will go along with anyone if
Speaker 1: that person's wards their rights, their desires.
Speaker 4: Trump remains the overwhelming favorite in the Republican field, and
Speaker 4: what that's telling us, unfortunately, is that the republic electorate
Speaker 4: is in love not just with one man, but with
Speaker 4: the politics of hate and unreason that he represents. So
Speaker 4: when you look down the list, also you've got people
Speaker 4: like Ramaswami and DeSantis, and they're doing what they can
Speaker 4: to be as trumpy as possible in order to elevate
Speaker 4: their own careers. And given that Trump is the clear
Speaker 4: GOP favorite, I think we can say that the party
Speaker 4: has largely abandoned conservatism and is now refashioning itself as
Speaker 4: a revolutionary party. I think the a sector of the
Speaker 4: party doesn't even particularly care about solid governance. They really
Speaker 4: want to blow up the system and take control of
Speaker 4: whatever remains. Look at Matt Gates. He said something to
Speaker 4: the effect of, look at Johnson. This is what the
Speaker 4: Republican Party is right now, and it's a part of
Speaker 4: that disdains and is hostile to democracy.
Speaker 1: But the larger issue here with Johnson, he wants to
Speaker 1: still kind of make the federal government small enough to
Speaker 1: drown in a batha, right or does he want to
Speaker 1: sort of do there's no like because we're pro life
Speaker 1: quote unquote, we believe in like helping people with the
Speaker 1: free breakfast and stuff like that.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, you're right about that. I mean, this is
Speaker 4: the ironic shift about the Republican parties. It's pretending to
Speaker 4: align itself with the working class. Pretending is the occur word,
Speaker 4: because all they're really offering is culture war red meat
Speaker 4: to the end of time, instead of policies that are
Speaker 4: actually going to improve the lives of most working Americas. Now,
Speaker 4: this is a part of the claims to stand for
Speaker 4: family values, but it's driving support for politicians whose policies
Speaker 4: are making it so much harder for American families to
Speaker 4: succeed and intensifying record levels of inequality.
Speaker 1: I was hoping you could do like a minute or
Speaker 1: two on Israel. Like obviously Johnson is super interested in Israel,
Speaker 1: but maybe not for the reasons. We think there is
Speaker 1: an obsession there with Israel, right, like with the funding package,
Speaker 1: and it's evangelical right.
Speaker 4: Well, the funny thing about the funding package is that
Speaker 4: they want to commit I think some fourteen thirteen or
Speaker 4: fourteen billion to funding Israel, but they want to tie
Speaker 4: it to cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act and other
Speaker 4: policies they're actually going to help working Americans. So they
Speaker 4: say they want small government, and they certainly want to
Speaker 4: shrink government help for people who need it. They want
Speaker 4: to blow up the institutions like public education, public transport, libraries,
Speaker 4: and things like that. So when it comes to those things,
Speaker 4: they say they want small government, but imposing their values
Speaker 4: on all Americans. There's nothing small government about that. About
Speaker 4: banning birth control and banning abortion, banning same sex meriage.
Speaker 2: Do you think that's where this eventually goes? Banning birth control.
Speaker 4: I think that they have already classified different forms of
Speaker 4: birth control as abortion. I mean, the way I do
Speaker 4: a lot of my research, Molley is I go to
Speaker 4: right wing conferences and strategy gatherings and seminars, and many
Speaker 4: members of the movement call birth control pills and some
Speaker 4: forms of iug these very popular forms of birth control,
Speaker 4: they call them chemical abortion. So you know, they're not
Speaker 4: going to ban probably condoms things like that, but the
Speaker 4: most popular and frankly most effective forms of birth control. Yes,
Speaker 4: I do believe that they're coming after that. They say
Speaker 4: they're coming after that.
Speaker 1: What does that look like? More regulation? Regulation at the
Speaker 1: state level. Does it go to the Supreme Court? I mean,
Speaker 1: how does that work.
Speaker 4: Given the way that they have done this. Look, they
Speaker 4: talked about the end of row versus way is just
Speaker 4: to start for a long time. They sort of lied
Speaker 4: to the public and said, oh, this should be a
Speaker 4: matter of states rights. And now they're talking about going
Speaker 4: after public highways. They're saying, you know, they've actually done this,
Speaker 4: I believe, in six counties in Texas, and they're planning
Speaker 4: to do more where you're not allowed to travel on
Speaker 4: a highway from one district to another in order to
Speaker 4: obtain what they call an abortion. They've talked about abanning
Speaker 4: abortion from the moment of they say fertilization. Nobody knows
Speaker 4: when an egg is fertilized even the you know, all
Speaker 4: the medical groups say it's implantation, but there are a
Speaker 4: lot of forms of birth control that actually prevent implantation
Speaker 4: but not fertilization, like brick control pills. I don't know.
Speaker 4: I'm not a medical expression, right, and I know that
Speaker 4: some of them do that, so they talk about going
Speaker 4: after that by reclassifying it as a form of abortion.
Speaker 2: I mean, it seems as if this Christian nationalism, this
Speaker 2: Christian authoritarianism, is the kind of next step of trump Ism. Right.
Speaker 1: It's anti democracy, but it's also very much rooted in
Speaker 1: a kind of religious puritanism that we've seen in this
Speaker 1: country from a long time ago. I'm just curious, like,
Speaker 1: do you think that they can sell those to the
Speaker 1: American people.
Speaker 4: I think they can impose it on the American people.
Speaker 4: It doesn't take a majority to take over a country.
Speaker 4: It just takes a very very empowered, organized minority. I
Speaker 4: was speaking to somebody recently in Oklahoma where state leadership,
Speaker 4: some of the state leaders are really trying to blow
Speaker 4: up public educations through these various means, and she said,
Speaker 4: you know, most Oklahomas do not support this at all,
Speaker 4: but if you get the courts, you can get the country. Look,
Speaker 4: abortion rights, for instance, are very popular even among Republicans.
Speaker 4: But if you seize control of the courts. Let's not
Speaker 4: forget we have a grotesquely unrepresentative Supreme Court. So if
Speaker 4: you get control of the courts, you can pass laws
Speaker 4: that most Americans don't like. I want to say, like,
Speaker 4: you know, people ask what do they want, and I
Speaker 4: want to say, broadly speaking, there are going to be
Speaker 4: privileged groups in society, those who adhere to the supposedly
Speaker 4: correct religious and political viewpoints, and those who are despised
Speaker 4: and disfavored. And you know, if we're looking through the
Speaker 4: thirty thousand foot view, we can see that they really
Speaker 4: want to impose a culture of majoritarian fear, where if
Speaker 4: you don't conform to a certain prototypical expectation and are
Speaker 4: not part of the in group, then you're going to
Speaker 4: feel out of place and they have difficulty in the
Speaker 4: society that you're living in, and it's sort of that
Speaker 4: pressure to conform. Actually isn't a happy place, even for
Speaker 4: those in the majoritarian view. It's not a happy society.
Speaker 4: We have examples around the world of theocracies. I wouldn't
Speaker 4: want to live in any one of them, you know.
Speaker 4: So if you're a member of the disfavored groups, your
Speaker 4: most important life decisions could be out of control. Your
Speaker 4: vote may be marginalized, a large share of your tax
Speaker 4: dollars will be funding other people's religion. Your child won't
Speaker 4: be able to attend like a well funded, non sectarian
Speaker 4: public school, and things like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they seem to be very furious with public schools.
Speaker 1: Can you just give us We're almost out of time,
Speaker 1: but just give us two seconds on that.
Speaker 4: Well, the religious right has long taken aim at public education.
Speaker 4: Public schools are non sectarian. They neither promote doors nor
Speaker 4: disfavor any religion. They teach kids how to get along
Speaker 4: with others, including those who are different. But this the
Speaker 4: religious right has long been hostile to these principles of
Speaker 4: equality and pluralism that the best of public education represents.
Speaker 4: I mean, Jerry Follwell laid out the agenda nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 4: He said, I hope to see the day when there
Speaker 4: are no more public schools. Churches will have taken them
Speaker 4: over and Christians will be running them. And today in
Speaker 4: America we're just getting closer to that goal. Thanks to
Speaker 4: voucher and religious charter schemes in Oklahoma, they're trying to
Speaker 4: establish a publicly funded religious charter school, which is direct
Speaker 4: funding of a faith school. And that's very much like
Speaker 4: the separation of church and school is really crumbling.
Speaker 2: So interesting. Thank you so so much, Catherine.
Speaker 4: It's been a pleasure to speak with you. Molly. Thank
Speaker 4: you so much for having me.
Speaker 2: No moment, pet Jesse Cannon.
Speaker 3: Molly drunk fast. I can't tell you how unhappy I am.
Speaker 3: Anytime Josh Holy is a part of our moment of fuckery.
Speaker 3: Tell me what you saw today.
Speaker 2: He's often a part of our moment of fuckery.
Speaker 1: So today Josh Holly was interviewing secretary of my Orkus
Speaker 1: and he was chastising him about something.
Speaker 2: And I've never.
Speaker 1: Seen in the secretary like this. Usually he's really very quiet.
Speaker 1: And he just went off and explained to him that
Speaker 1: he was the child of all Acount survivors and just
Speaker 1: he talked about that, and you know, you can be
Speaker 1: a Jewish liberal and you can behave in a way
Speaker 1: that is honorable to both your Judaism and yourliberalism. It
Speaker 1: was just a very powerful moment. And also anytime that
Speaker 1: you can make Josh Holly look like the jerky is.
Speaker 2: That is our moment of fuckery.
Speaker 1: That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
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