Kathryn Joyce: The Ideology Behind a “Benevolent” US Theocracy

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Episode 95

Sun, 1/23

Kathryn Joyce    00:00

All of the sort of white nationalists — what used to be alt right as well — have looked to Hungary and Poland as exemplars for what they want. Part of their project is rehabilitating nationalism, finding a way to kind of give it entry into mainstream conservative politics. Part of this whole push is the idea that they are going to reassert majority rights, but their solution to that is we need to basically establish a benevolent theocracy.

Sam Goldman    00:45

Welcome to Episode 95 of the Refuse Fascism podcast. This podcast is brought to you by volunteers with refuse fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes analyzes, and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming into power in this country. My voice is a little rustier than usual, because that was screaming my head off yesterday. Yesterday was the 49th anniversary of Roe, and on Friday tens of thousands of anti abortion fanatics, feeling triumphalist, expecting this will be the last year of Roe — the last year of abortion rights nationally — flooded the streets. Their hatred for abortion rights has always been driven by their desire to control women and refasten the chains of their oppression. 

Yet, precisely at this most dangerous hour, there’s widespread capitulation by the Democrats and all too many pro choice leaders. But the enslavement of women, a` Christian fascist nightmare for all of society is nothing to capitulate, to to compromise with to downplay or prepare for. This must be fought. That’s why I braved the cold and joined with Laurie Sokol of Women’s eNews, Merle Hoffman of Choices Women’s Health Clinic, Katea Stitt, Program Director for WPFW DC, Sunsara Taylor, Strike For Choice, the New York City Rev Club and activists from DC, Ohio, New York City and as far as California, outside the Supreme Court yesterday, to announce to the world the forces gathering, coming from many different political perspectives united in our shared determination to wake up and mobilize thousands, and soon millions to fill the streets with our fury, our refusal to surrender not just for one day, but coming back day after day in acts of defiance and outrage, that wake up and rally even more people shaking all of society and making clear to the Supreme Court and everyone else that we will not surrender or back down. Abortion on demand and without apology! 

We didn’t get diverted when swarmed by young theocrats. Instead, we came back with: “We won’t back down! We won’t submit! F*** your women-hating shit!” There’s a role and a need for every single one of you listening to join. We’ve got to rely on ourselves, which means everyone’s stepping in and stepping up, learning from each other and doing this together. So I hope that everyone listening will join me next Sunday, January 30th, for a national zoom organizing conference, to prepare to go out together throughout society and reach and organize others starting now to mobilize for major nationwide marches and rallies on March 8th, International Women’s Day, in big cities and small towns and on the campuses. A link to the Zoom signup is in the show notes. 

In today’s episode, we’re sharing an in depth interview with author and investigative reporter Kathryn Joyce on the power of ideology in the fascist movement; especially how and why Hungary is a model for the GOP. But first, this week in fascism:

Sam Goldman    04:06

In case it wasn’t clear that we face a serious fascist threat this week served as a painful wake up call as fascist advanced the program on key fronts, including, but not limited to, voting rights and the assault on abortion rights. It also illustrated as W.B. Yeats put it: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” The truth we have to confront is that the Democrats can’t lead us out of this mess. They couldn’t even get their whole party to unite to get basic voting rights legislation passed. 

To really understand any of it, in my opinion, this quote that I’m going to read gives absolutely necessary background in speaking to the deepening existential crisis rocking the American empire. Revolutionary leader Bob Avakian explains: “The Republicans have certain significant advantages over the Democrats in this conflict. Democrats are committed to playing by the rules and relying on the norms of democratic capitalist dictatorship, while the Republicans are moving to tear up those norms and rule through an open and disguised capitalist dictatorship. The peculiar nature of this country, with its history of genocide, slavery and continuing white supremacy, and repeated compromises that have given disproportionate power — power greater than what is represented by their populations — to Southern states of the former Confederacy, and other states with significant rural populations of conservative leaning people, this is another advantage that the fascist Republicans have. If this battle remains on the terms of this system, not only will there be horrific consequences overall, but this could very likely lead to a triumph for the Republican fascists, which would accentuate and accelerate the looming disaster for humanity as a whole.”

We saw voting rights smacked down in the Senate. In case anyone was confused about what this was all about. Mitch McConnell made it crystal clear when he said the quiet part out loud, essentially saying that black people aren’t Americans. What is the response from the leader of the free world? Vote harder. This logic runs deep into their base, where even as we tweet about breaking out of the confines of electoral politics, we get responses like: “Without Federal Voting rights protections, you are wasting your time.” It really is a kind of enslavement to the terms of this system, and learned helplessness, that all our power is in the actions of our so called representatives, and if they don’t act, we have no power to act. 

This circular reasoning is deadly. On the abortion rights front, the Supreme Court made yet another decision ensuring that SB 8 would remain intact, effectively banning abortion in Texas. This came down as tens of thousands of anti abortion fanatics and brainwashed Catholic high school students were bused into Washington DC and San Francisco for the annual March for female enslavement, aka March for Life, on the 49th anniversary of Roe, and what could very likely be the last anniversary, Biden and press secretary Psaki, could not bring themselves to say the word abortion, but promised to use all the tools at their disposal to protect Roe v. Wade, without specifying anything besides supporting congressional Democrats dead on arrival, “Women’s Health Protection Act.” The idea that this is being promoted by anyone as a viable solution, the same week that the voting rights bill got crushed, is absolutely shameful.

The “reproductive rights movement” eerily parrots, in my opinion, March for Life talking points regarding the danger of a post roe future not being so bad. Whatever their intentions, leading people to prepare for a post Roe future, to share information about the abortion pill, to help raise money for people to cross borders to get abortion, and telling us to not scare people by protesting and exposing the reality that abortion bans kill people, destroy lives, and cast a dark shadow over the position and role of women in society. Whatever their intentions, it amounts to capitulation in advance.

And lastly, with ever more damning evidence, the January 6th commission chugs along with millions waiting with bated breath, hoping something substantial actually comes with any of this before the 22 elections, which, as things stand, will almost certainly end the investigation, reverse any findings, and if the fascist GOP lives up to its promises, lead to retaliation against the commissioners. Amidst all of this, Biden held a two hour long press conference, which many hailed as a victory simply because he didn’t berate the press, have a total meltdown, or walkout. But in it, he also actually said some things worth noting, including that he did not anticipate the Republicans priority would be to stop him from accomplishing anything. This isn’t a failure to anticipate. It’s been a choice from before day one to view the fascist opposition as civil, willing to bargain, because that is the entire premise of the empire that Biden is trying so hard to maintain. He also said that he doesn’t know what they are for. It’s obvious: fascism. That is what the Republicans are for. And what the Democrats continue to consolidate and accommodate to. There is no parallel track where people can be free in this society while fascist advance. We need to fight like hell in mass relentlessly, non violently, in the streets, refusing these assaults and the fascist program they’re a part of. Now, here’s my interview with Kathryn Joyce.

Sam Goldman    09:34

I am excited to do this, particularly because of when we’re doing this interview, the day before the March for (so-called) Life and what could be the last anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

Kathryn Joyce    09:47

I just saw somebody point that out. I hadn’t realized it was the 49th.

Sam Goldman    09:50

Yeah, it’s really heavy. I am so glad to have someone to talk to today about this, especially someone so knowledgeable in our subject, and dogged in her inquiry into the Christian right, and its intersection with reactionary politics. I’m really happy to share with you a conversation that I’m going to have with Kathryn Joyce. Kathryn is an investigative reporter at Salon. She’s the author of two books: The Child Catchers: Rescue Trafficking, and The New Gospel of Adoption and Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement. So welcome, Kathryn. Thanks for joining us.

Sam Goldman    10:25

Thank you so much for having me, Sam.

Sam Goldman    10:27

Given that anniversary, I wanted to start with a question around abortion and some of the countries that you’ve been looking at as well. The Supreme Court right now is poised to gut or entirely overturn the legal right to abortion in this country, and if this happens, it would be a major turning point for the rights of women and the position of women in this society. In Poland and Hungary, the fascists have been able to go much further down this road, for a place that had far greater gender equity only a few decades ago. I was hoping that you could tell us a little bit more about what happened in Poland and Hungary and what that experience might be able to tell us about where we’re at right now in this country.

Kathryn Joyce    11:07

There’s a lot of history there and we can only touch on a little bit of it here. There has been a real conservative revolution in both of those countries, especially over the last decade, arguably for a lot longer. It’s rolled back an awful lot of things. In Hungary — as we’re speaking right now, it’s next week — Tucker Carlson from Fox News is poised to go back to Hungary after having spent a full week there last summer, just celebrating this. Hungary, and to some extent Poland, both of them have really emerged as these conservative utopias for the US Christian Right.    But also just all of the white nationalists — what used to be alt-right as well — have looked to Hungary and Poland as exemplars for what they want.

Viktor Orban proudly declares himself illiberal. His government is fairly autocratic. He’s tied a lot of things together from those two sides of the right, bringing religious right and a sort of xenophobic right together, never always far apart, but really enmeshed them. He’s advanced these pro-natalist policies, which have been something that the Christian Right in the US and around the world has been promoting for the last 20 years. He has tied them — some of these pro-natalist policies are “we will help you buy a minivan, we will help you not pay income taxes if you have more children” for the mother, which is a little bit of a moot point because probably not a lot of mothers who have four kids are going to be making a ton of income outside of the house. Orban has created all of these pro-natalist policies, ranging from subsidies to help people buy minivans if they have a certain number of children, to promising that women who have four children or more will be exempt from income taxes, which is a limited offer that can be made to people.

He doesn’t just do this to advance this long Christian Right project of trying to encourage large families, which is something that groups like the World Congress of Families have been doing for about 20 years, but he’s also tied it very explicitly to his anti-immigration and anti-refugee policies. He has said things to the effect that he thinks that Muslim refugees and immigrants are unassimilable, that multiculturalism is just an illusion. He has basically said we don’t want to import our babies, we will have our own. By which, obviously, he means “Hungarian babies,” which means white. There’s been this sort of merging there of the sort of things that appeal to the Christian right, things that appeal to the sort of America First, Hungary First activists as well.

You can also see this in how a lot of rhetoric around the Christian culture of Europe or increasingly, they’re using the same kind of language to talk about America, saying that needs to be restored. In a lot of different ways, Christian culture here is not being used in a holistic sense to describe anybody who believes in, who is, a Christian, but rather it’s being used with an emphasis on the cultural part. So basically, as a stand-in for cultural Christianity, means people of traditional European descent. So again, ultimately, this boils down to white. So I think both of those things are things that are making Hungary stand out to the US as this sort of model that they could embrace. They’re thinking about where do they go in the aftermath of Trumpism. Trumpism sort of blew up a lot of what kind of the conservative coalition used to be. A lot of them are looking to Hungary especially, but also other eastern central European countries as models.

Sam Goldman    14:36

What are the particular aspects that you think make Hungary in particular such an exemplar for what they’re going for? Is it because Orban’s been so successful? Is it because he’s still able to maintain a certain amount of legitimacy?

Kathryn Joyce    14:53

A lot of it has to do with the fact that Hungary is sort of trolling the rest of Europe and the European Union, the rest of the regulatory structure there. It has been passing all of these laws, some of which put it directly at odds with various human rights policies or standards or provisions that they are supposed to be agreeing to as members of the EU. One example is that, pretty recently, Hungary passed this law that basically bans any LGBTQ content. They would call it content that advocates LGBTQ lifestyles, or existence of LGBTQ people. They call it advocacy. Basically this applies to the existence of books that depict same sex couples and families or that talk about LGBTQ kids. That is basically being banned from schools from anywhere where minors would have direct access to it. It’s even going so far that bookstores in Hungary have had to put special labels on books saying this book depicts non-traditional content.

So in that way, a lot of right-wing people who have been going on these pilgrimages to Hungary over the last year, year and a half, people like Rod Dreher, who was a pretty prolific conservative author, and then also a number of pretty influential, maybe not the most recognizable names of right-wing intellectuals, people who are shaping at a pretty high elite level the right-wing ideology that they’re hoping to popularize and spread, those people have been going on these fellowships, in particular to a couple of different colleges in Hungary and Poland. As they go there on these right-wing pilgrimages, they are coming and saying: You wouldn’t believe, we have drag queen story hour in our schools, but here you are doing this really protective thing of your children by banning all of this content from reaching them in schools, by requiring these sorts of labels, if they’re going to find them out in a private business, like a bookstore.

Sam Goldman    16:48

Learning about — I don’t know if network is the right word, but I’m gonna say it’s a network, and I’m gonna sound like conspiracy theorists    because I mean an international network, but there is — an international network where the Christian Right is learning from each other. There’s an exchange of: “This is how we did it here. This is what you can do in your country.” It’s always something that has struck me that they really are giving each other blueprints and working together to figure out how to spread that dynamic. I was wondering from your research, if there’s any other thoughts that you wanted to share that you think that people need to be understanding about how these fascists from around the world are learning from each other.

Kathryn Joyce    17:31

I don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory to point out that people are organizing. Organizing isn’t something that people only do on the left. The right, different sectors of it, are very good at organizing at different levels. I perhaps should have started by giving a little bit more background of what I was talking about when it comes to Hungary. I had a piece come out at the beginning of January in the New Republic, looking at basically that sort of network. A lot of my reporting was done in November when I went to this conference in Orlando of the National Conservatism Movement. This is a movement that is very much trying to reclaim, rehabilitate the term “nationalism” as a positive thing. There are a lot of right-wing intellectuals who have released books in recent years, arguing that nationalism is positive. All of the things that you associate with it that are bad, like Hitler, that was imperialism.    Nationalism is seen as scrappy, little Poland, fighting back against Hitler. That’s part of their project; rehabilitating nationalism and finding a way to give it entry into mainstream conservative politics.

Another big part of their project is they are trying to reshape a conservative alliance, in what they feel is the aftermath of the realization that liberalism (small ‘l’ liberalism) does not work. They have come to this perspective, led in large part by a number of Catholic Right intellectuals who call themselves post-liberals, or some of them call themselves Catholic Integralists, who think that small ‘l’ liberalism that focused on individual rights has basically led to a Western kind of status quo that offers people a lot of opportunities for individual decadence, but does not give them any sort of support to live virtuous lives. It’s an interesting and complicated movement. They make some appeals on economic issues that can sound appealing to left-wing audiences. They talk a lot about how the corporations around the world are behaving in imperialistic ways, but also in ways that really devalue the lives of individual workers.

There is kind of this level of trying to make some strange bedfellows alliances there, but their solution to that is really, especially in the case of the Catholic Integralists, is we need to basically establish a benevolent theocracy. We need to move beyond the idea of a country that is governed with the idea of individual rights, and we need to realize that government is always either promoting virtue in their citizens or promoting vice. So we need the government to enact all these laws that are going to shepherd people towards living virtuous lives. That common good that they keep talking about is very much defined in religious right terms. So it’s a virtuous life as defined by extremely conservative Catholics. That is sort of what they’re going towards with the post-liberal project. There’s been a lot of interesting writing about that.

So, those are two prongs of that, but where the international side of it comes in is as this aspirational model. Catholic Integralists have been publishing a lot of stuff over the last three years or so talking about how we’re going to move beyond constitutional originalism. We’re going to move towards a common good government. The people who are writing about this have really elaborate ideas of what they would like to see. They are all being kind of pooh-poohed, as this is never going to happen in America. Most Catholics would never want this to happen, let alone most of the rest of the country. So if you only have a small sliver of the 20% of Catholics who would want to implement this, this is really not a very realistic goal. Instead they are looking overseas to what they see as more reachable targets. 

That’s where Hungary and Poland come in. They’re not Catholic Integralist countries either, but these are countries that are coming closer to their vision than probably anywhere else in at least Western society right now. So they’re looking to them. They’re looking to the ways that Viktor Orban talks up Christianity even as Hungary is actually a very secular country, but Viktor Orban keeps making all of these pronouncements that he is doing things in defense of Hungary’s historic Christian nature. They’re looking at that as: Okay, maybe we’re not going to have the empire of Guadalupe established here, but maybe we can get something closer to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. So in that way, it’s emerging as the somewhat more realistic model for them, which is terrifying for anybody who would not fit well under Viktor Orban’s autocratic, deeply anti-LGBTQ, anti-freedom of the press, anti-academic freedom, anti- so many things extremely xenophobic, quite racist. But this is what they are moving towards as their model at least. So that is why Tucker Carlson is going back there next week.

Sam Goldman    22:15

You touched on this briefly. I really appreciate the overview that you provided, and that the danger it poses that this is seen as an exemplar. You touched on what the theocratic vision is. It’s theocracy, but they’re doing it with a cultural aspect of Christianity, or how they see Christianity and not readings of Biblical scriptures or anything like that. How do you see this being expressed in this country with the goals and aims within the movement? What is them winning? What is their goal here? What are they trying to achieve? What does that look like to them?

Kathryn Joyce    22:54

Well, in reporting that piece, one thing that I really had to grapple with is that I don’t know if there’s one “them.” Conservatives in the US are very powerful right now, but amongst themselves, in November, they were expressing a lot of sense of being under seige, even. As you know, while I was there, Glenn Youngkin won in Virginia, and they had a wild party to celebrate that in the conference. But, they were really there to try to build alliances between what are actually really some divergent factions. So they’re working. Part of organizing is to find ways that they can fit together, to find ways to make a coalition when they don’t all agree with each other. I think to some extent, what they are aiming for is a bit of a work in progress. 

One of the main organizers of the conference was put on by a group called the Edmund Burke Foundation. The chair of that organization, an Israeli academic named Yoram Hazony, led one of the nights of the conference, this panel discussion, which brought together four different thinkers on the right, either academics or writers or members of think tanks. They were representing these different sides of the right. Yoram Hazony wrote a book called The Virtues of Nationalism. Another one of the speakers, a man named Sohrab Ahmari is a Catholic Integralist who sometimes uses a different term for that, but he is basically a Catholic Integralist. There was a guy there who was very much a libertarian, and then there was an old school neo-con. They were there with this really explicit purpose: Can we hash out one building block, one place to start in building this new conservative fusionism to take the place of the other one that is no longer serving us, that’s no longer really working? 

They were trying to find what is one piece of common ground that we can start on, even though two of those panelists were gay men.    One of them is working in support ideally, ultimately, of a totally Catholic-run society, the other one is an Orthodox Jew. So, people were coming from different perspectives. Yoram Hazony had proposed this idea: Why don’t we start by saying in Christian areas, we should be able to reinstate Christian Bible lessons in those schools. This is an orthodox Jew who is making this argument, so it sounds counterintuitive but he has put a lot of thought into this. This is part of his idea of what is a reasonable initial place to start in building this coalition. They were talking about that, you know, Hazony’s broader agenda there — I spoke to him for a while about this — is the idea of majority cultural rule. So, in a place where there is a majority Christian population, he’s saying Christians should be able to set the social norms. The social traditions should be respected, and multiculturalism is not going to have the same sort of sway there. Like, he said, we won’t have active persecution of minorities, but they shouldn’t expect this public square to be neutral. Because they think that is one of the places where liberalism has gone deeply astray. They think that liberalism and seeking to really protect individual rights, minority rights, that it has trampbled on the rights of the majority. 

So, part of this whole push is the idea that they are going to reassert majority rights. The unspoken part of that, I think, has some context in Israel as well, saying the majority here should be able to have their culture be dominant, be adhered to, be the norm. Minorities, we won’t maybe actively persecute them — this is the theory — but they have to understand that we’re the majority, we get to have the culture. So starting by offering this by talking about Christian communities in the US. Christians should be able to set the majority culture because they are the majority of the US. The problem with that is how do you define that? In the past year, a new poll came out from Gallup that found for the first time since Gallup has been doing polling, it’s less than half of the country that actively belongs to and attends any sort of house of worship. So, you can’t really say as a nation, we are majority Christian. That’s where they start to get a little bit creative. I’m going to talk about this a little bit more later on in the article, but they come up with this idea of cultural Christianity; that we’re not going to define these things in terms of sincere belief or a level of devotion, but we’re going to talk about it as cultural Christianity, that it’s good enough for, say, Donald Trump to go and have that photo op that he held in June 2020, where he stood in front of this church that had just been violently cleared of Black Lives Matter protesters, and held the Bible. Even though he’s holding it upside down, and he doesn’t know anything that’s in it, it’s okay, because this is an example of cultural Christianity. He’s sort of honoring the culture — this idea of America being a Christian country, even if there’s nothing really sincere behind it. 

They gave a number of similar examples like that: Matteo Salvini, in Italy, going up to a rally and like swinging a rosary around, or Marine Marechal-Le Pen in France, the far right nationalist leader there, talking about how Christianity is the bedrock of the country, even though she’s divorced. Salvini is co-habitating — things that are fine, but things that are also widely condemned by Orthodox Christians. So, they’re saying, we need to make allowances for this, because on the whole their embrace of Christian symbols is positive for our cause, and can we just basically say that’s good enough, so we can make a bigger tent and bring more of these people in so that we can move forward with this agenda; this national conservative agenda, this religious and majoritarian rule agenda?

Sam Goldman    28:17

Thank you for that, Kathryn, that was really helpful. One thing that seems pretty clear from our perspective, is that what unites the various strains of American fascism is patriarchy, white supremacy, xenophobia, and the marriage between Christian fundamentalism and crass capitalism. In writing about the national conservatism conference last November, you mentioned that a significant theme of the discussion amongst the fascists is the question of what you make the right, and you were talking about that just now. My question is, to the extent that they are fractured, what keeps them from the unity that they desire? And are these alliances shifting in any meaningful way?

Kathryn Joyce    28:54

Well, I’ll give again the example of this sort of panel discussion at the conference that had that explicit goal of trying to find a starting point for coalition. As they were talking about that, you could see some of those fault lines a little bit. They are just kind of on the level of identity. If one of those people is ultimately hoping to establish a government that is run towards their understanding of the highest good as informed by their reading of Catholic doctrine, that in and of itself is a fault line between them and anybody who’s not on board with that religious interpretation of how life should be run. 

There is this division between what Yoram Hazony was terming as “national conservatives” and what he was calling “anti-Marxist liberals,” by which he means still extremely conservative people. He’s talking about right-wing activists, but he’s talking about right-wing activists who still subscribe to small ‘l’ liberalism, this idea that individual rights really need to be protected. This needs to be a guiding principle of government. Some of them are libertarian. He’s saying the anti-Marxist liberal friends; he’s not talking about folks writing at the Atlantic. He’s talking about people running right-wing podcasts and writing those columns, but just coming from a different ideological perspective. So, I think at that kind of big ideological level, that’s one of those divisions. Again, it came up in that discussion that two of those panelists are gay men. One of them was talking about me and my husband are hoping to become parents sometime soon. What you’re talking about, where do we fit into this? There was some discussion of what that would mean. What does it mean to not actively persecute minorities? 

I think, ironically, at least in my ears, Hungary came up as an example there. Hungary was offered as an example of a place where LGBTQ people are not being persecuted, because homosexuality in and of itself is not illegal, even though it’s illegal to get married or to adopt, or now to have any of your written content or other media be accessible by anybody who’s under 18. I imagine that’s the age of maturity in Hungary, but I’m actually not quite sure. What to us, I think, sounds like an extremely oppressive situation being described as one where people are not persecuted, because it’s not technically illegal to be in a same sex relationship. You just can’t have any of these other things. So, I think that those are some of the sorts of things that people are trying to hash out on the right as they’re trying to make their way towards these new coalitions.

Sam Goldman    31:19

Shifting our conversation back to what people are seeing in their every day, or what they’re seeing on the news, a lot of people have seen the wild and ever violent school board meetings where reactionary parents, objective mass mandates, to critical race theory, and people who are paying attention have probably noticed a shift from those specifics to parental rights discourse. This isn’t just new packaging for the craziness of 2021, but something deeper. Can you talk about that and how it figures into the larger Christian fascist agenda and how it’s become broader and broader; the range of what is this emphasis on parental rights and what that’s really about? To me, it’s that movement returning to its roots, but I want to know your thoughts on it?

Kathryn Joyce    32:08

I think a lot of people who pay attention to education, have been noticing for a while how parental rights has been becoming this theme on the right. There’s a wonderful journalist named Jennifer Berkshire, who had a great column in The Nation back in the fall, which was one of the first places I saw somebody writing about that, just to give credit there. She was talking about Mike Pompeo seemingly doing some 2024 exploratory touring in New Hampshire last year. In one of the events, he went and started talking about the idea of parental rights, that schools should be teaching children what parents want them to learn, which not that long ago, I think would have been a bit of a more radical statement than it is right now, because now this is just becoming this drumbeat message among Republicans. A lot of that is thanks to what happened in Virginia in the race that Glenn Youngkin won where he really made a lot of hay out of the fact that his opponent weighed in to these right-wing accusations around the idea of critical race theory by saying what parents want kids to learn is not the only thing that kids should learn. 

Critical race theory, as probably anyone who’s been paying attention over the last year knows, is this debate that really emerged so rapidly over the course of a few months. A lot of that is thanks to a right-wing think tank called Manhattan Institute that really did a lot to turn this into the right’s new boogeyman; that Critical Race Theory is lining up children and dividing them into groups of oppressors or oppressed, that they are making white children cry by telling them that they’re oppressors, just tons and tons of rhetoric that came out and then was just repeated nonstop on right-wing media to the point where this became a huge media issue, and then, unsurprisingly, started sparking some of this grassroots or sometimes astroturf activism of parents going and confronting school boards. The way that this story gets told on the right is that with the pandemic, and with a lot of kids learning online, parents started seeing what their kids had been learning all along, and they rose up organically in anger. I don’t think that happened or anything like that. I think this was a very concerted, very organized propaganda push to make parents fear something was happening, that is not actually happening. 

Also, just this very elastic definition started being used to talk about what Critical Race Theory is. One of the pieces I wrote for Salon last week was about a new series of videos that Focus on the Family, the Christian right parachurch ministry group put out for parents. It’s got this    PSA, “The More You Know” feel to it, and it’s this self-directed educational course for parents to learn more about Critical Race Theory, so they know what to do about it and how to talk to their kids about it. In it, they’ve got three conservative leaders, one of whom was the speaker, actually, at the National Conservatism Conference that I went through, talking about their perspective on CRT and just kind of presenting this as the academic actual truth. One of them is saying you might not encounter CRT labeled as CRT. They might use words like diversity or inclusion instead. So it’s that kind of a little bit of an illustration of how anything that speaks to non-discrimination practices in schools can get relabeled as Critical Race Theory, since Critical Race Theory in and of itself is not being taught in those schools. 

There’s just an awful lot going on there. Parents Rights is definitely used as part of the right-wing argument about that. It certainly was also used in terms of framing parents’ opposition to vaccine mandates for students returning to schools or mask mandates for kids in their schools. This has been framed as an issue of parents medical rights. One thing that’s sort of interesting is how much some of the groups that are now expanding on that call. As parents rights is moving beyond being a single issue thing, it’s not just about CRT, it’s not just about masks and vaccines, but as this whole sort of organizing principle, we’re starting to see the rise of these demands for Parents’ Bill of Rights; either an amendment at the federal level or at numerous states around the country. These bills are being proposed to pass the Parents’ Bill of Rights, and some of them have passed. In Florida, Ron DeSantis signed one back in June and it went into effect in July. It got used then as the basis of Ron DeSantis banning any school district from having mask mandates for students who are returning. 

So, there’s a lot of different things going on with that. But in some of the reporting that I did for a piece last week for Salon, I talked about how one of the main groups that has been helping push these Parents’ Bill of Rights around the country is a group that has been basically pushing that same language for decades. They are a group that was founded originally by one of the most right-wing Christian homeschooling leaders out there, this guy Michael Farris, who also founded Patrick Henry College, the Home School Legal Defense Association, groups that have been very much on the Christian right for a very long time. Now it’s almost as though they have found their moment. He proposed a federal Parents’ Bill of Rights a long time ago, and that sort of language is now being used. It’s finally caught on and found its moment.

Sam Goldman    37:23

Yeah, I completely agree that it’s found its moment. And it’s found this moment in carving out space to further project, in my opinion, the most vicious white supremacy and also anti-science lunacy, in my opinion, under the guise of wanting to be involved in their child’s education. Those are just my opinions, but that’s a little bit of how I see it. As we close out our conversation, which I’ve appreciated and really enjoyed, we really narrowly, I think, averted. I think we can agree on this, what would have been a catastrophe of last year around this time, instead of Biden coming into power Trump had remained, and so good that didn’t happen. Nonetheless, here we are a year later, and we’re seeing the evisceration of voting rights, of abortion rights on the chopping block, of the most revenge-fueled white rage. How do you see the big picture of what I would call American fascism, I think you would probably call it the conservative movement in the United States? How do you see this right now? What do you think people need to pay attention to that they may not be paying attention to? How are you seeing this?

Kathryn Joyce    38:40

Such a hard question. I frequently feel overwhelmed by it in a way that I think most people do. Looking at it frequently, definitely doesn’t make me feel less that way. I think there are so many things we have to be paying attention to at once that both feels overwhelming to me and also makes me feel like the overwhelm is exactly the feeling that’s being driven for, because it’s easy to feel powerless. I think that this parental rights has proven to be an effective organizing tool for them. I think they are going to flog that pretty hard in the coming year. I think I’m far from the only person pointing that out or pointing out that it’s going to drive a lot of local activism. The sort of stuff that’s happening at the local level is pretty surprising. 

One of the school board members in a Texas school district that got a lot of attention last year made some headlines last week, because this is one of this new class of reactionary parents rights-affiliated school board members made comments in a school board session that really seemed to be saying the fact that one district has more Black teachers is correlated with lower test scores. We’re seeing that openly racist rhetoric being introduced, not just in national politics or state politics, at this super-local level. School board meetings used to be more boring than they are now. They’re not used to having this rhetoric be flying around. I think the stuff that’s happening at a local level in those settings, and I’m sure at election board sort of positions as well, I think it’s something to pay attention to. There is an awful lot of envelope pushing. 

On the far right, white nationalist actors are getting involved in local politics as well. I just had a piece come out this week that was drawing attention really to the reporting done by another researcher named Ben Lorber at Political Research Associates, who had this amazing investigation come out that found one of the gubernatorial candidates in Texas, Don Huffines, has an open white nationalist, a guy who was deeply involved in Nick Fuentes’ America First/Groyper Movement on his staff, and all this reporting came out about it. And he’s not firing the guy. He said that to fire the guy would be participating in cancel culture. It just seems to be indicative of the way that this stuff is being normalized all the time. I think we have to be paying attention on a lot of different levels at once, because stuff is happening at different levels all at once. It’s always important, it can seem a little esoteric, to pay attention to the stuff that’s happening in the intellectual corners of the movement. 

People who pay attention, I think, know better than to write off the right as being stupid or uneducated. Some of these people are highly educated, very smart, and they are making what are coherent arguments within their worldview for the direction they would like to take things in. These are the people — it’s a much more polite face of radical right activism than the people who are screaming racial slurs or storming the capitol, for that matter, but these are the people — who are staffing to think tanks and writing the magazines and publishing the books that fuel a lot of this movement, a couple of stages up. So it’s important to pay attention to them.

Sam Goldman    38:42

I really agree and I thank you so much for sharing your expertise and perspective with us. I also think that we are lucky that in a moment where we have to be paying attention to so much that we have people digging deeper and investigating some aspects of this so that we can understand what we’re up against, because if we don’t understand it, we can’t stop it. So I want to thank you again, and listeners can find more from Kathryn by checking out the show notes, and you can read the latest from Kathryn salon.com and follow her on Twitter at @KathrynAJoyce.

Kathryn Joyce    42:34

Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me.

Sam Goldman    42:37

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