The Flag and the Cross and the Little Blue Bird

Refuse Fascism The Flag and the Cross and the Little Blue Bird

Episode 137 Sun, Dec 11, 2022 4:03PM • 1:03:59

Sam Goldman 00:54

Welcome to Episode 137 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast 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 to power in the United States. In today’s episode, we’re sharing two interviews. First, we’ll share a discussion I had recently with Dr. Philip Gorski, author of The Flag and the Cross, White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy. And then, a recent conversation I had with Micah Lee, Director of Info Security at The Intercept regarding the Muskification of Twitter and the silencing of left voices.

But first, thanks to everyone who goes the extra step and rates and reviews the show on Apple podcasts, shares and comments on social media or YouTube. It helps us reach more listeners, and we read every one. After listening to today’s episode, go help us find more people who want to refuse fascism by rating and reviewing on Apple podcasts, rate on your listening platform of choice, and encouraging your friends and family who listen to do the same. Subscribe/follow so you never miss an episode. And, of course, continue all that sharing and commenting on social media.

It’s giving season, y’all, and I want to give a shout out to some recent Refuse Fascism donors. Thanks to Miller, David, Joseph, Molly, Matt, Paul B., Jay, John, Mariline, Joyce, Julian, Maasaki. Thank you for supporting this show and the work of Refuse Fascism. Lovely listeners, donate $35 and get a Refuse Fascism beanie and one to give to a friend or a loved one. Head over to RefuseFascism.org and hit that Donate button. Make sure you include your address if you want us to ship you beanies, thanks. Miriam wrote us this week in support of the Refuse Fascism beanie saying: “I can vouch for the nice warm RF ski cap. I was out protesting with the Iran movement today in Philly, where my head was nice and warm. I’m proud to be unabashedly supporting the RF logo out in the streets. Looking forward to listening to the most recent RF podcast.”

With that I want to take a moment and send love and solidarity to our siblings in Iran righteously evading fascist theocracy, and I salute everyone who was in the streets in this country standing with our siblings in Iran this past weekend.

Before we get into today’s episode, we have to talk about where we are right now in relation to this fascist threat. The Supreme Court heard two cases this week that we want to touch briefly on and which we will be sure to return to you in future episodes. First, 303 Creative LLC vs. Elenis, where a Christian fascist in Colorado is attempting to demand the right to explicitly refuse service to gay couples through the wedding website service she has yet to start. With a fascist-packed court, what the oral arguments really provide is a murky, vague preview of exactly how and to what degree a given right will be decimated by their decision.

As Moira Donegan for The Guardian points out, the Court refused to consider this case a religious discrimination suit and “in 303 Creative the court is only considering Smith’s wish to discriminate as a free speech issue. This opens a new avenue for challenges to civil rights law and provides an opportunity for right-wing lawyers to begin unraveling the laws regarding non- discrimination in public accommodations in the wake of the civil rights movement, like pulling on a loose thread to unravel a sweater.”

Alito decided to use these oral hearings to joke about hypothetical Black children wearing KKK hoods, but that shouldn’t obfuscate the fact that this case is just as much about the very real danger of whites-only lunch counters and shops posting “no dogs or Jews” as it is about gay wedding websites and the very real broad and violent fascist assault against the LGBT community.

The second case was Moore v Harper, the debunked independent state legislator theory brought forward by the North Carolina GOP, which we’ve been covering on the show because it is the most consequential case of this term; one which would legalize a future Republi-fascist coup attempt in which fake electors are made real and can’t be contested through normal constitutional means. I recommend folks check out Elie Mystal at The Nation for more on this.

One excerpt from the piece where he talks about where this stands right now: “We’ll have to wait until June, most likely, to know how the Court will rule on this case, but if the case fails, it will simply be because the nihilist wing of the Supreme Court tried to go a step too far. Remember, conservatives on the Court don’t need to adopt this cockamamie theory to ensure smooth sailing for Republican candidates in upcoming elections. The Conservatives have already allowed for state level partisan gerrymandering without any federal interference. They’ve already empowered voter suppression schemes by neutering the Voting Rights Act. And they already hold a Supreme Court veto over any liberal policies that do slip through the few cracks they’ve left for democratic self government. Conservatives don’t need the independent state legislator theory to secure additional victories for the Republican agenda. That’s my best hope for why it will be rejected. Conservatives have rigged elections well enough that they don’t have to repudiate them.”

I want to briefly add that as we’ve seen in the past, what comes out in oral arguments doesn’t necessarily show us how a final vote will be. So we’ll be continuing to cover this, and we’ll definitely be sharing more analysis on the show.

One of the recent happenings we’ve been watching is what occurred earlier in the week in Moore County, North Carolina, where more than 40,000 people were left without power when someone shot up a power station. This is noteworthy, not only because of the scale of the attack or the timing — it occurred during the same time as a drag event in the area that has been targeted for harassment — but also because this tactic of trying to shut off the power supply as part of a right-wing coup attempt was first uncovered in 2020, when an informant with a neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Group revealed this was part of an attempt to keep Trump in power. We are watching the story closely as are many of you.

Now this is not the first episode exploring what we on the show refer to as Christian fascists who have used the mantle of Christianity to rise to power and consolidate power. As we’ve spoken about on the show before this movement isn’t going to relent or just disappear. And they play a defining role in the Republi-fascist party and in society at large. As we’ve also discussed on the show, they are the spiritual, moral and political descendants, if not actual descendants of the slaveholders and segregationists.

I wanted to share some remarks from Coco Das, fellow Editorial Board member a frequent guest and frequent guest host of the show — remarks she made last spring when she was discussing fascism and Christian fascism. At a protest for abortion rights in Texas. She said: “It relies on violence, the violence of the state and the violence of a vigilante base to enforce its rule and consolidate power. It reaches into the country’s past, its prejudices, and its myths to advance a genocidal logic about who deserves to be treated like human beings and who does not. It is a complete remaking of society and government, tearing up the rulebook and the norms of civil engagement, transforming the institutions and the laws and spreading fear and hatred throughout society. And once it consolidates power, what are supposed to be civil and democratic rights are eroded. It relies on your silence, your compliance, your fear, your retreat into your private lives and your popular prejudices to prevent or wear away a coalition of the decent people to stop them. And there comes a time when the normal channels are not enough to stop them.” I recommend re- listening or re-reading her speech over at RefuseFascism.org.

I am honored to welcome on Dr. Philip Gorski. He is the Chair at the Department of Sociology at Yale University, where he is a professor of Sociology and Religious Studies. He writes on religion and politics in early modern and modern Western Europe and North America from a comparative historical perspective. He’s Co-director of the Yale Center for Comparative Research and co-runs the Religion and Politics Colloquium at the Yale MacMillan Center. His current work focuses on the history and politics of white Christian nationalism, and American civil religion. His latest book, co written by Samuel Perry, is The Flag and the Cross, White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy. And we are so glad to have him on the show. Welcome, Philip.

Dr. Phillip Gorski 09:43

Thanks a lot for having me on.

Sam Goldman 09:45

I want to start with the new reality that a topic that you’ve been studying for a long time has now become in many ways the buzzword. You see the terms “Christian nationalism” in print, in major publications, you now hear it from pundits on TV. This was never happening before. In this new situation where people are talking about Christian nationalism, what are people understanding? What are people getting right, if you will and what’s being missed? What is it not in terms of how do you see Christian nationalism being discussed?

Dr. Phillip Gorski 10:21

That is a great question, and as you mentioned, it is kind of strange to see this phrase that we wouldn’t of really heard outside of a seminar room five years ago suddenly being discussed out there in the public square. It’s kind of gratifying, but also a little bit terrifying in some ways. I think one thing, certainly, that I worry about a little bit is that people just use it as a catch-all buzzword. I think there’s a little bit of a danger of people throwing it around the way that people on the right sometimes throw around the word socialism. “Everything we don’t like — that’s socialism.” and people on the left say ~”Well, everything we don’t like is Christian nationalism.”

Another thing that worries me a little bit is people just equating Christian nationalism with the Christian right. There’s a huge overlap between the two, but there are also Christian conservatives who are anti-Trump anti-MAGA and have been from the beginning. I think right now in this fight, we need some of those folks as allies. So I think we do need to draw a distinction there too. Those are really my main two worries is that people don’t just use Christian nationalism as a description for all Christian conservatives, or they don’t just use it as a catch-all term for “everything I’m opposed to,” because it is something more specific than that, at least how we understand it.

Sam Goldman 11:35

I appreciate that clarification. There is a situation where there are coalitions that people wouldn’t have thought of being coalitions, let’s say 15 years ago, that groups of people that are working together for extreme and dangerous aims, in close, not just proximity that they’re working together, but really partnering in significant ways. That partnership, if you will, could be seen as January 6th, as an example, but could also be seen more through legislative channels, when you look at anti-abortion measures, where you have forces that are Christian nationalists, and you have forces that have nothing Christian about what’s driving them. There is whiteness, perhaps, that’s a commonality, but not Christianity.

Even as groups may work together, understanding what distinctions there are is important. And it’s in that spirit that I wanted to get your thoughts on how you see the relationship between what on the show we would call a fascist movement, a movement, who, if they were to consolidate power would eliminate democratic and civil rights in this country, and white Christian nationalism? How do you understand that relationship? How do you advocate for that connection to be correctly understood?

Dr. Phillip Gorski 12:55

It’s a really important question and one that I’ve been looking forward to batting around with you a bit, since you’re somebody who’s thought a lot about fascism and talked with a lot of people who work on fascism. I think it is a tricky question. There’s a misconception that’s out there that you really kind of need to clear out of the way before you can discuss this seriously, and that is the idea that European fascism, Nazism, Italian fascism, etc. were anti-Christian or pagan movements. That’s just not correct. It’s not to say that there weren’t some pagan, neo-pagan, anti-Christian folks, but they were never the dominant figures in those movements.

There were plenty of people who would look like very upright, churchgoing Christians, Catholics and Protestants who helped to put people like Mussolini and Hitler in power. If you look beyond those two cases, the ones that people are most familiar with, at fascist movements in other countries, Belgian fascists call themselves the Rex Kristus movement, for example, Christ the King Movement. There were movements in Central Europe, like Romania, Bulgaria, where the leaders of the fascist movements were men of the cloth. You know, we now know that Hitler also had a secret agreement with the Vatican.

The first thing you gotta do is just stop thinking that these are sort of pagan, secular movements. There always were complicated relationships with Christianity and churches. So if you see it that way, then the white Christian nationalism suddenly doesn’t look like it’s so different from fascism. Now, if you just look back in American history, and there’s some scholars of fascism, like Robert Paxton, have identified, the Ku Klux Klan is the first fascist movement. We tend to think about that often as just a racist movement or an anti-Black movement or white supremacist movement. Of course it was those things, but it was also an anti-semitic movement, it was an anti-Catholic movement, it was a nativist movement, it was the eugenicist movement.

In that sense, not so different from some of the more radical parts of the white Chrisian nationalist movement today. Of course, another sort of hallmark of fascism was the armed paramilitary and vigilante movement. Again, something that the KKK was, but I think you suddenly start to see how and why it is that movements like the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers have to be seen as part of this broader fascist spectrum. And why it is that they have sought out alliances with some of the more radical elements of conservative Christianity. I think it is a question that we really have to have our eyes open about and think seriously about. That’s not to say that every white Christian nationalist is a fascist.

I think there are kinds of plain vanilla varieties of white Christian nationalists: ~”Well, we just want the country to get back to whatever its traditional moral values” — meaning whatever they want it to be like it was in the 1950s, or something like that, when white guys were on top of the pecking order. But there are definitely more and more of these really hardshell hard-right Christian nationalists who are just not that far from white nationalists anymore. In case you had any doubts about this, just check up a little tete a tete that Donald Trump had with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes last week.

Sam Goldman 16:14

Then there’s the question, if someone else who says basically the same thing, who holds the same beliefs, who is less of a buffoon and more polished, who may not have a meeting like this get out — I’m thinking of DeSantis — how fundamentally does that change things? I think that is incredibly dangerous, because I think a lot of people look into Desantis and they see some kind of comforting politics as usual, something that harkens to Republicans of the past. I just think that’s not an accurate portrayal of what a fascist laboratory Florida has become under his tutelage, and what that would mean to society at large. Look at his campaign ad.

[Sarah] Posner’s piece on dissecting that ad to understand who they were speaking to, in terms of white Christian nationalism was fascinating. What made me go down that rabbit hole? Oh, anti-semitism is what made me go down that [rabbit hole]. I was thinking about how, right now, anti-semitism is having a heyday in a way that I don’t recall, in my lifetime, ever seeing anything so overt and so mainstream. Switching gears slightly, I want to talk about an aspect that is in your book that I think deserves people really talking about right now.

The trend that I see is a lot of freedom for me, not for thee amongst white Christian nationalists. We are living through a time of over 22 million women being denied access to abortion in their state, anti-trans legislation still rampant in state houses across the country, bans on gender affirming care, voter suppression, in new and often unimaginable ways that is spreading. What are your thoughts on how we should understand white Christian nationalists’ view of freedom?

Dr. Phillip Gorski 18:28

In the book, we call this the holy trinity of white Christian nationalism: freedom, order and violence. What we mean by that is kind of a libertarian freedom, freedom to do whatever I want. Order is patriarchal order, its racial order, it’s women and non-whites in their place, and it’s violence in the sense of a kind of a righteous violence when people step outside of their assigned roles. Just as an example of how this works, one that we’ve given in the book, is we compare the way in which white Christian nationalists responded to the Black Lives Matter movement and the way that they responded to the January 6th insurrection.

So, the Black Lives Matter movement, “that’s disorder, that’s the destruction of property, that’s a violation of white people’s rights, and therefore, we should send in the National Guard, but if the National Guard can’t be sent in, then we’re going to send in the Oathkeepers.” Then you see people like Kyle Rittenhouse being celebrated as these tremendous heroes. Then, the January 6th insurrection, well, those are God-fearing patriots standing up for their rights, taking back their freedom against tyranny, against a stolen election, and so on and so forth.

I think that’s a really key thing to understand is: this is the freedom for me and not for thee. The other point you raise about gerrymandering and voter suppression, I think people on the left are often scratching their heads, and then they’re especially perplexed when people on the right will claim to be standing up for defending democracy. The key thing there is you have to understand that they think of themselves as the real people, as the real Americans. You remember the way Sarah Palin and then Donald Trump reacted to Barack Obama, and I know people, my wider networks were acting the same way, like ~”there’s something weird about that guy. He doesn’t seem like a real American to me. Where is he from? He can’t have been born here, can he? He just doesn’t seem like a real American.”

Let’s be honest, a lot of that was about race. I suppose a lot of it was about culture and so resentment at such a successful black man, but it’s just this fundamental sense of what democracy for these folks means is people like us, real Americans being in control. That means that if we’re not in control then the election must have been stolen, he president must be illegitimate and we’re totally within our rights to make sure that people aren’t real Americans or illegals or whatever. Those people who are living in places like Philadelphia and Detroit and Milwaukee, there’s something fishy about those people, there’s too many of them voting.” So I think that is where that is coming from for sure.

Sam Goldman 21:15

I think that is a really helpful connection in terms of how they view freedom, and therefore what a threat or danger they pose is. If whole peoples are not people, if the people of Detroit and people of Philly aren’t people, because they are not them, they are not white, they’re not male, they’re not Christian, or they are not Christian in the way that they are Christian — I should be clear, because there could be plenty of god-loving Christians who are not white Christian nationalists — then you are subhuman, you don’t count, your voice doesn’t count. That is incredibly dangerous. We’ve seen the extent to which they will follow that through in terms of denying election results, in terms of trying to overturn an election.

Dr. Phillip Gorski 22:03

I would just add one thing to that, which is: It’s not just denying people who are different their Americanness, it’s even denying them their individuality. Trump does this all the time. A lot of people in the MAGA right do this all the time. They talk about “the Blacks,” “the gays,” “the Jews” — you’re not an individual if you’re any of those things, you’re just that group, whereas we are actual individuals with rights and values and so on. We’re not just a “the.” It really is a kind of a denial of the individuality of people we are unlike you too. It justifies denying their rights, denying their votes, even denying their humanity.

Sam Goldman 22:44

We’ve seen where such dehumanization then allows people to justify the absolutely unjustifiable, you know, whether it be acts of violence, whether it be laws stripping away people’s rights. I think that we’ve seen both. They’re open to all avenues, if you will. I wanted to take a step back for a second. This is something else that you do in your book that I think is really helpful. In the recent press coverage of Christian nationalism, including the lead up to the latest midterms, for instance, when there was work done on Dominionism, looking at Doug Mastriano and those folks, there was use of certain words, but looking at the actions of just what was happening right now; the scope being limited to maybe January 6th and forward. What should people most essentially grasp about the roots of white Christian nationalism, and how those roots can help us get what the agenda of the current day white Christian nationalists are?

Dr. Phillip Gorski 23:53

Well, one thing we try to show in the book is that the roots are really, really deep. There was some earlier work on Christian nationalism, which treated it as sort of like the Christian right, or maybe it’s like Christian fundamentalism, maybe tracing it back to the Moral Majority and that in the 1970s and 80s. Or maybe we trace it back a little bit further to postwar American evangelicalism. One thing we try to show in the book is that it goes back over three centuries. We tried to show that you see it crystallizing as an ideology, or as we call it, a deep story, already in the late 17th century. This is well before the American Revolution. This is not too long after the arrival of English colonists in North America.

It is really deep, and it’s deep not just historically, it’s also really deep culturally. One part of it, to give you an example of Christian nationalism, is a kind of apocalyptic worldview that we’re in the middle of this battle between good and evil. Of course, we’re on the side of the good and we’re going to settle accounts once and for all by defeating whoever the enemy is at that moment: Native Americans, Mexicans, etc. But you find that kind of apocalypticism that used to really just be religious and theological — it’s out there in our pop culture now, think about all the post-apocalyptic movies and novels, which are exactly about this lone heroic figure in this post-apocalyptic landscape fighting against the forces of evil.

You don’t really even have to be Christian or brought up at all in this sort of tradition to have been exposed in a way to elements of white Christian nationalism. It’s also psychologically deep. For sure, there are people out there, there’s a kind of a white Christian nationalist industrial complex. People who give talks, who sell books, who record videos, who show up at conferences to push a white Christian nationalist version of American history. This is just really below the surface for a lot of people in this white, conservative Christian subculture. It’s just the way things are. It’s the lenses that you see the world through, even if you’re not really entirely aware of it. It is in all those senses really, really deep.

In a way, the most important thing to understand about it right now is that the the group that really is at the forefront, kind of the avant garde of white Christian nationalism, is changing. It’s not the first time — if you go back to around 1900, it would have been white liberal Protestant; Presbyterians, Congregationalists who would have been the most diehard white Christian nationalists. After World War II they passed the baton on to conservative white Evangelicals. What’s going on now is that baton is being passed to Pentecostals, particularly radical Pentecostals. They have a very different, and in some ways, more dangerous, way of seeing the world.

Evangelicals have this idea, “Well, you know, Jesus is coming, Jesus is coming soon, and what we need to do is save as many souls as we can and be ready when when Jesus returns.” That’s not the attitude the Pentecostals have. They think the end times are right here, right now, all around us and that in order for Jesus to return, we have to conquer society, right now, by whatever means necessary. So instead of just waiting expectantly, the idea is you’ve gotta be out there in the trenches fighting and trying to seize power. It’s a much more aggressive and political form of white Christian nationalism, and one that just doesn’t really play by the rules.

Just to give you a contrast, you think about Ralph Reed — you remember who he is, still around — he’s got his voter list and get out the vote strategy and he’s having strategy sessions with the Republican leadership, then you compare him to somebody like Michael Flynn, who’s running around the country right now holding these completely off the rails Awaken America rallies, calling people out to spiritual warfare and physical warfare if necessary, and basically saying we need some kind of a dictatorship. That’s a real radicalization that’s happened. That is one thing I think folks really need to be attuned to. Don’t look to Jerry Falwell, Jr. Nobody’s looking at him anymore for leadership after that scandal, but you really need to keep your eyes more on people like Michael Flynn and Doug Mastriano. Those who are the folks who are the cutting edge of white Christian nationalism today.

Sam Goldman 28:26

That’s really helpful. Also, a lot of people forget what has been done previously, not in the name of white Christian nationalism, because they didn’t call it that, but for the same purpose, or motivated by the same aspirations as the Doug Mastrianos and the Michael Flynns in previous times that have been underplayed or dismissed or diminished over time. The whole apparatus that was part of the Operation Rescue days — of praying and then seeking to bomb clinics — that was, in many ways, a holy word for the people that were participating.

If you go back further and read Dr. Gorski and others’ books, you’ll see that those that were justifying slavery and those that were part of all these atrocious things — not every atrocious thing was driven by white Christian nationalism, don’t twist my words, — but people were motivated by those things. I think it’s helpful for people to look at that history because it helps us understand, yes, it is changing and it is getting more aggressive and it is a totally predictable path that these folks are walking, because it is a worn path.

Things can take qualitative leaps and still follow a trajectory. This is one that is a nightmarish trajectory that leads to horrors, but I think is one that there are forefathers to the present day Michael Flynns — it’s something that I think about. I guess it’s part of a larger trend of, in my opinion, for too long, people just diminishing and dismissing the work that folks like yourself did, sounding the alarm. For a long time those folks were not taken seriously. Not only were the scholars working on it dismissed, but the power that white Christian nationalists hold was laughed off; they were mocked, they were not taken seriously.

Even after January 6th, some of these people continue to not be treated as serious or as threats. Marjorie Taylor Greene is just laughed at. Doug Mastriano was laughed at by so many people. I don’t understand why that keeps happening. I think I’ve asked this to every scholar in the past month that I’ve spoken to: Why won’t we take these folks seriously? They are saying what they will do, what they want so overtly. Why does the press refuse to take these folks seriously?

Dr. Phillip Gorski 31:12

We all have a kind of a normality bias. We just want things to be okay. I think there is just a psychological tendency that everybody has to sort of downplay threats. I mean, not everybody, obviously, there’s some people who don’t do that. I think that’s part of it. I think another piece of it is just how segregated the United States is now by just everything, so that you can be a certain kind of secular progressive who lives in a big metro area and you just might never interact with somebody like this, just in a way not be aware of their existence, in the way that somebody who was living in a small town rural area might just think everybody is just like them.

It’s these little bubbles that we all live in. The last thing is just that secular folks want to believe that religion is going away and just assume that the problem is going to take care of itself. That’s obviously not the case. So those would be three possible reasons, but I agree with you that there has definitely been a tendency to downplay it. Just circling back a little bit to January 6th again — others may have pointed this out on the podcast, but — there was also January 5th, and on January 5th there was the Jericho March and Doug Mastriano was there, a lot of these other Christian Dominionist, Christian nationalists were there as well, blowing shofars and doing spiritual warfare and so on.

But even a lot of the stuff that happened on January 6th, proper, had a super Pentecostal vibe to it. The kinds of prayers and the kinds of rituals that they did would be very familiar to you if you spent much time in a suburban Pentecostal mega church. It just looked weird to a lot of people. So part of it is just not even knowing it when you’re seeing it, right. It’s right in front of your eyes and you think: Oh, that’s weird, what are they doing? And then you just wipe it off the table, just because you don’t know what box to put it in.

Sam Goldman 33:08

I really agree. When I think about January 6th too, I was struck that in the Commission report, Christian nationalism, white Christian nationalism didn’t really make it in there. When it was clearly there; you saw it. You saw the gallows. You saw the flags. It wasn’t just the symbols, it was also the prayers. I was struck by ~”we don’t want to even mention that,” as if that wasn’t an important component, as if the fact that people doing it in the name of God as religious warriors wasn’t significant.

Dr. Phillip Gorski 33:46

It is weird. As you probably know, a bunch of us gave written testimony and some people gave spoken testimony to the Commission, and for some reason didn’t and isn’t going to make it into the any of the kind of public reports. There’s one rumor that Liz Cheney quashed it. I really don’t know. I would be super curious to know what the calculations or arguments were in deciding to leave it out when it was so obviously a big part of what happened.

Sam Goldman 34:11

I don’t want to speculate as to why that was. I do think that it is important that people don’t forget that and that people not only don’t forget that but continue to bring that up, because that hasn’t gone away, that factor. Your point about the secular belief that religion is going away, I think people have a difficult time understanding that even if the rise of people who identify as secular goes up, that doesn’t mean that somehow those who hold religious beliefs — even the most extreme religious beliefs — go away or lose power. It’s not “there’s more of us than there are them therefore, we win.”

Dr. Phillip Gorski 34:50

Well, right, and I think two other things you really have to keep in mind when you think about the politics is that these folks are in it for the long game. You know, they think in generations, they think in decades, not just in years and an election cycle. Just witness what happened with the Supreme Court. That was a long term project, it took half a century. They achieved their goal of a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.

The other thing is that they’re incredibly well organized, and they have a kind of organizational basis in churches. There’s nothing really quite like that on the secular left. There was a time when unions played that role or when liberal churches played that role, but the power and size of those organizations is nothing like it was a half century or a century ago. Even if they’re shrinking in numbers, you shouldn’t conclude that they’re shrinking in influence. Well organized and ideologically driven minorities can run roughshod over disorganized and complicated majorities, and that’s a real danger.

Sam Goldman 35:58

Well said, and an unfortunate reality, but not one that can be changed and can be affected by our actions. I feel like this country — I’m sure all countries are — filled with mythology. I was wondering whether there’s any myths that the general public holds about America that help normalize, broadly speaking, white Christian nationalism?

Dr. Phillip Gorski 36:23

Yeah, one way that we talked about white Christian nationalism in the book is as a deep story. I talked a little bit about the ways in which that story is deep, but let me just say something about the story itself that goes roughly like this: America was founded as a Christian nation. The American founders were evangelical Christian. The founding documents are based on Biblical principles. America is kind of a chosen nation because of its religiosity, and it’s been given special power and prosperity in order to carry out a kind of divine mission to spread freedom of religion or something around the world, and the mission and the blessings are now threatened by the increasing presence of non-whites, non-Christians, non-native born people on American soil.

That’s basically the story. You can see why it’s an appealing mythology. In a weird way it kind of grandfather clauses any conservative white Christian into the American founding. I think this is one of the reasons, for example, why the 1619 Project just enrages white Christian nationalists so much, because the challenge is that story. It says, “Hey, sorry, you didn’t build this country all by yourselves.” I think it’s also why there is such an uproar around “critical race theory,” by which they just mean teaching anything about the history of racial injustice and oppression in the history of the United States. That also challenges that story, which is: “Well, maybe we made a few mistakes in the past, but it’s all good now.” I think that’s the most that a lot of these folks are willing to tolerate, because they just get such a sense of status and empowerment from believing in that mythology.

Sam Goldman 38:10

What do you think that all the decent folks who don’t want to see a theocracy and don’t want to see fascism come to power, seize power, consolidate power in the United States, what should those folks do in this moment?

Dr. Phillip Gorski 38:26

I would say two other things that are really important. One is to take a deep breath, swallow hard and be prepared to lock arms with people who you may disagree with really strongly about a lot of things that you value highly, because where we’ve got right now, we really just have to defend liberal democracy and human rights in this country, and push back against the authoritarian threat and the theocratic threat. There are conservative Christians who we’re going to really disagree strongly with, say choice, who we would agree with on the question of liberal democracy, and that’s hard.

The other thing is just to act locally. One of the superpowers of Christian nationalists and the Christian right in general, again, is just this organ of grassroots organization that they have, and we need to think about how to build something similar. There are people who are doing that. I mean, I’m aware of projects going on here, in New Haven, where I live and elsewhere in the country, where young community organizers are taking aboard wisdom and lessons from lifelong community organizers, people who were involved in the civil rights movement, people who were involved in the gay rights movement. How do you get folks to organize? Being involved in local and state politics, now when so many of the things that we care about, like voting rights and abortion rights, are basically being thrown back to the states and local government.

Sam Goldman 39:47

I have a lot of unity with what you were talking about in terms of unity and the need to be working shoulder to shoulder with people that you might have never otherwise work with. You aren’t doing it as an act of friendship. You are doing it because humanity depends on it. I do have a different view on what those dividing lines are. I think that there do need to be some things that are non-negotiable because they are so connected to core civil rights.

How I understand fascism is it’s a dictatorship by brute force and violence. It operates on terror. Once it consolidates it eliminates all civil and democratic rights, the right to abortion, the right to control if and when, whether to bear a child is essential. It is whether a woman or person that can become pregnant is free, or whether they aren’t. I think that is one that for so long, so many of us were like: we’ll promote this person and we’ll work with that, even if they’re anti-choice.

The Democrats are known for doing this. Even as Roe was on the chopping block, Nancy Pelosi was out there stumping in Texas for anti-choice Democrats. So I think that strategy failed. We now have enough evidence that says subordinating the lives, futures and freedom of women, non-binary and trans folks for some larger sentiment is garbage. Not only does it not work, but it’s not right. It’s just not right. I say that because it’s completely, to me, connected to how I view democracy. I think that whether you know women can play a full role in society is essential in this fight against a fascist America.

While we want to have really broad arms, and we do need to work with all sorts of people, I think that there also does need to be difficult conversations. That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to work with you, but that we do go there with people. Because even as we unite, we need to struggle for the world that we want to achieve, to be possible. I think that struggle, if done well, if done from a place of seeking further understanding, and if done for justice, I think can be really helpful, not just in the immediate, but in the long term.

Dr. Phillip Gorski 42:18

That’s fair. I think you’re absolutely right to say that there are just fundamental connections between bodily autonomy for women and for civic equality for women. Without that, it’s really hard to imagine a liberal democracy that really grants women full citizenship, and this is definitely something that can’t just be swept under the rug anymore. I think it has been kind of interesting in the wake of Dobbs to see what “pro-life” actually means for a lot of people who have that identity. You know, there’s definitely, suddenly a lot of ifs, ands, and buts, that sort of come to the surface in people’s understandings and it was sort of easy to say that you’re pro-life when you knew that, if it came down to it, you, your daughter, your best friend, your sister — I think that has really reopened that debate. I guess that’s what the Supreme Court wanted. I’m not sure that debate is going to go the way that they imagined.

Sam Goldman 43:14

I want to thank you so much for taking the time to share your expertise, your insight, your perspective with us. For folks who want to go and read more from you, learn more about your work, where should they go?

Dr. Phillip Gorski 43:31

Well, I guess my first recommendation would be buy a copy of The Flag and the Cross. You can also follow me on Twitter @GorskiPhilip, though I must say, I’m not as active in the Musk era as I was in the pre-Musk era, kind of waiting to see how that all shakes out. But yeah, it’s been great talking with you. Thanks for having me on the show.

Sam Goldman 43:50

One thought I had coming off this interview had to do with Philip’s comment about fascist churches, and organizations being the backbone of their movement; how unions and progressive churches had once played a similar role on the liberal left side of things, but they’ve shrunk in size and power. Whole books could be written on the subject, and they likely are, but my main thought was that it’s not the size and power of such organizations, but any whiff of a political orientation to lead people to recognize and confront fascism that is fundamentally missing.

Instead, there is an overwhelming turning away, lowering of sights — a massive moral shrinking away from the world — with all that absolute deference to power regarding any issue of more than individual significance. If there was a tenth of the people funding influence of these organizations today, going towards confronting the fascist threat, we’d be in a totally different situation. This morning, Sunday morning, we woke up to Musk, the now sole owner of Twitter, having tweeted: “My pronouns are prosecute/Fauci.”

As we’ve learned from Trump, Musk doesn’t have to be a leading fascist ideologue to lead a key element of the fascist transformation of society. Twitter has played an essential role in sharing information and organizing resistance and being a digital public square for people around the world. Just consider the role it played from the Arab Spring to the movement for Black lives, to right now the uprising in Iran. While it has never been a politically neutral place, we cannot discount that the loss of Twitter or transformation into a solely fascist cesspool will make it harder for people to communicate. It’s worth considering the impact it will have on the larger political soup that we’re all being cooked in.

To help us understand a bit more on the impact of the Muskification of Twitter, we are sharing an interview with Micah Lee, info security director for The Intercept. He develops security and privacy tools such as OnionShare, DangerZone and SemiFemoral. He is the founder and former board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a member of the Distributed Denial of Secrets Advisory Board, and we’re glad to have this opportunity to get into it a bit. Here’s Micah. Thanks, Micah, for coming on. Welcome.

Micah Lee 46:18

Thank you for having me.

Sam Goldman 46:19

First, I know before we started recording, you had mentioned you’re trying to use Twitter less. Can we step back for a moment and talk about what you think the role of Twitter is before this whole Muskification?

Micah Lee 46:35

Twitter has been kind of terrible in a lot of ways for a long time, even before the Muskification, but also, like you were talking about the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter in the US and all sorts of other stuff, it’s also been kind of amazing, because in a lot of ways there’s a horizontal playing field — individual people can tweet at billionaires now, and that didn’t really used to be the case.

Twitter changed that a lot, but it’s also been bad for mental health, I think, for a very long time now, I’m kind of addicted to Twitter, and I don’t like being addicted to Twitter. I think a lot of people are addicted to Twitter. I know that there’s been various times in the last six years that I’ve had various Twitter drama, or there have been trolling campaigns and all sorts of stuff. It’s just kind of ugly, but it’s also just a wider reflection of what’s happening in society.

Sam Goldman 47:26

I wanted to thank you for writing your piece detailing the fascist accounts that have been restored by Twitter by Elon Musk after being banned previously. I was hoping you could give listeners a nutshell account of this. Who should we be aware of that’s being restored? And how is Elon being guided to those decisions?

Micah Lee 47:47

I don’t know that everyone has been restored to Twitter, but some of the big accounts are obviously Donald Trump — he’s actually broken Twitter rules over and over and over and over. For many years, Twitter kind of bent over backwards making exceptions for him, but then after the January 6th insurrection, that was the final straw where they, along with Facebook, decided to permanently ban him. Then Elon Musk restored him and it really seems this was Elon’s primary reason for wanting to buy Twitter, just bring Trump back, so it’s hilarious that Trump is refusing to tweet.

But also Marjorie Taylor Greene was suspended in, I think 2021, for COVID misinformation. She kept doing it getting temporarily suspended over and over and over. Then they permanently suspended her, and she’s back. Project Veritas is this kind of fascist propaganda group, they were suspended. I think the rule that they officially broke was publishing private information about someone, and I think it was a Facebook executive, but they’re back. I don’t have a complete list, but I think a lot of other people have been back, including various alt right people that were suspended years and years and years ago are also… [SG: Like the guy that heads the Daily Stormer.]

Yeah, it’s interesting because Elon Musk’s says he’s a free speech “absolutist,” but the only accounts that they’re restoring at all are accounts that are just on the far right. Doing a Twitter poll about “Should I give amnesty to all the suspended accounts?” It’s still just people on the far right. I think that’s his definition of free speech, that you’re allowed to use hate speech. A big proportion of people suspended are people caught up in automated moderation things because they’re Muslim, and the algorithm thinks that they might be a terrorist or sex worker or things like that, and the only people that are getting their accounts restored are right-wing extremists.

Sam Goldman 49:38

How is he really making these decisions? How are they really being guided from what you can garner? Obviously, it’s not happening via these fake polls that he puts out on Twitter. He puts them out because he’s already going to do something. How is he guiding his decisions? Are there certain people that are influencing him?

Micah Lee 49:38

I think it’s pretty clear that the people who are influencing him, just by watching what he’s tweeting, are a lot of prominent fascists that he’s sitting there responding to and giving him complaints. He’s like: “Oh, yeah, I’ll deal with that for you.” I think there’s a little bit more details. It’s not about who is getting their accounts restored, but it’s about who’s getting banned now. Despite the legit free speech absolutism Twitter has been banning a lot of accounts including a lot of explicitly anti-fascist accounts, and also not reversing the ban of big accounts that were banned in the previous Twitter regime.

A good example of the very recent bans are @chadloder, they’re an anti-fascist researcher with a big following, and also Vishal Pratap Singh, who is another. They both live in Los Angeles, they’re both very prominent, have big followings and do a lot of anti-fascism research. They were both just recently permanently suspended. And there are also a few others like a few groups: the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club is an armed defense group that has been doing defense for LGBTQ events in Texas. They just got permanently suspended. And so did @crimethinc, which is an anarchist application that’s been around since the 1990s. It makes zines, it publishes books and podcasts and all sorts of stuff.

All four of those accounts were banned, basically just in public at the request of Andy Ngo. Andy Ngo, is this very prominent fascist on Twitter, he has like a million followers. He is kind of the main far right person that invented the Antifa Boogeyman. There’s all of these Antifa domestic terrorists; they’re out to get you everywhere. So those are all recent Twitter suspensions. I think some of those are definitely very clearly Elon Musk who was asked by someone that he kind of admires to ban someone. So we just banned them even though they didn’t violate any rules.

I think the bigger issue is that, now that the Twitter Trust and Safety Team doesn’t exist anymore, they’re pretty much only relying on automation for making all these decisions, so what happens is there are these organized campaigns of people making lists of leftists or people they don’t like, and then mass reporting them. Then Twitter’s system automatically flags it and suspends them and there’s no one there to look at it and be like: Oh, this was platform manipulation. Platform manipulation is — at least before Elon Musk — was against Twitter’s rules, but there’s no one to enforce it. It’s just automation now. There aren’t really humans in the loop anymore, and I think that it’s a lot easier to just game the system now. And that’s what people are doing.

Sam Goldman 52:25

There was a list that, before they were suspended, the… [ML: The Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club]. Yeah. They had shared a list that they had found on some telegram group that [ML: The 5000 ANTIFA] that spread. That included Joe Biden, Cardi B, Britney Spears, Refuse Fascism, and then like all these journalists, they just copied and pasted a couple people’s follower lists and put them together.

Micah Lee 52:54

Very badly done and very badly targeted, but there were also some other similar things that were better done. I found a Substack post that someone had posted with detailed instructions on how to go about getting Anti-Fascists banned, including things like: Use Twitter’s advanced search for their name and this series of words, like kill or whatever. They showed a tweet where someone said the word “kill,” but it was completely out of context. Then they all use it as threatened violence to report it. That’s one of the techniques that they use to just mass report people and get the algorithm to be, “Oh, this person is maybe violent, we’re going to suspend their account until a human can review it,” which will never happen.

Sam Goldman 53:31

You also covered the fact that Twitter is still censoring the website Distributed Denial of Secrets, which became even more relevant as Elon tried to make a huge deal out of the fact that Hunter Biden’s dick pictures were removed from Twitter. The posting of which is also clearly a violation of Twitter’s Terms of Service. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Micah Lee 53:52

Yeah, for everyone who doesn’t know about Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoS secrets. It’s a transparency organization. It kind of took over the torch from WikiLeaks, but I feel is much more ethical in a lot of ways. It publishes leaks and half datasets and distributes them to journalists. Sometimes the datasets are just like limited distribution. So if it’s full of private information, they don’t make it public directly. They just share it with specific researchers and journalists. They have been permanently banned from Twitter since the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, because they published a dataset called Blue Lakes, which I covered extensively, and so did hundreds of other journalists around the country.

It was a hack of police websites, most of them are law enforcement fusion centers, which are where local police and federal law enforcement agencies collaborate and share information. This happened in the middle of Black Lives Matter and so there was so much information about a lot of police misconduct in there, including a lot of spying on protesters. My local fusion center near the northern California Regional Intelligence Center was sending a twice-daily email to 16,000 local cops across California, listing all of the Black Lives Matter protests in California; it was constantly being updated with more information.

This was covered widely by all major media, and Twitter used its policy against hacked material against posting once-hacked material to block the DDoSecrets. So they suspended the DDoSecrets account, but then they also basically used the system that Twitter uses to prevent malicious links to websites that give you viruses to just say that the whole DDoSecrets.com is a malicious website. Since then, I think June 2020, no one has been able to tweet a link to the DDoSecrets website. No one’s been able to even send DDoSecrets, links and DMS or anything like that, and the DDoSecrets is still permanently suspended; the links are still blocked.

This hacked material policy was the same policy that Twitter used to take down the New York Post article when the Hunter Biden laptop story was published. They used the whole malicious links thing to block that article for about two days. Then conservatives were freaking out, and then they unlocked it. Now the new Republican- controlled Congress is wanting to hold Congressional hearings about Twitter censoring the New York Post thing for two days. Meanwhile DDoSecrets is still being censored.

In the period of time that has been censored, DDoSecrets has published so many huge important datasets that have been covered by tons of journalists, including a scrape of everything from Parler before it got kicked off AWS, including all of the videos in Trump’s second impeachment inquiry came from that dataset: Oathkeepers’ membership lists that showed that the Oathkeepers membership is full of former and current law enforcement officers and military and some government officials.

After the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, hacktivists went on this hacking spree and hacked dozens of Russian government agencies, Russian companies and basically dumped tons of email and other documents. All of that has been hosted and I’m part of this international collaboration with newsrooms around the world doing reporting on those documents. All of this is the work that DDoSecrets is doing now, and they’ve been blocked from Twitter this entire time.

Sam Goldman 57:12

I really appreciate you walking through both why they’re significant, and also the impact that their blog has, because I don’t think that people know how much data journalists rely on, and they in turn rely on from this source. Then, what impact it has for people to not be able to share it.

Micah Lee 57:34

One interesting thing about the whole hacked material policy is that Wikileaks has never been subject to it, even though you can go to WikiLeaks and download the Hillary Clinton emails and also CIA documents. It’s just incredibly unequal enforcement of this policy. Now it seems like policies are out the door. It’s just whatever whims Elon Musk has, or whatever fascists tell him.

Sam Goldman 57:34

This is all concrete evidence of the extremely right-wing bias that is guiding the one-man show that is Twitter management these days — as you talked about all departments being completely gutted. I also know from friends that the experience on Twitter has changed for just about everyone, with lots more random fascists or just irrelevant content showing up in people’s feeds. I know someone who doesn’t follow anyone on Twitter was suddenly only seeing purely fascist content in their feed. Lots of people have theories about why this is happening. Why Musk got loans from the Saudis to own Twitter, firing people, selling Tesla stock to keep it going. What’s your theory? What’s your thinking about what’s going on?

Micah Lee 58:46

I don’t think that there’s a master plan. I think that Elon Musk is, “well, everybody knows that I’m a genius. I can tell from the media bubble that I’m in, that conservatives are constantly being censored, and that just isn’t fair, so I’m just gonna buy Twitter and fix it.” I think he didn’t realize that it’s more complicated than that, and I think that he still doesn’t really realize that it’s more complicated than that, but I don’t think that he cares all that much. His whole commitment to free speech is not a commitment to free speech, it’s a commitment to anti-cancel culture, or something like that.

I don’t think that there’s a master plan, and I think everything that’s going on is just on a whim. He probably didn’t really even consider the whole getting rid of verification stuff until after he was forced by a court, basically, to go through with buying Twitter. And then he’s like, “okay, fine, I’ll do it, And then like, how do I fix that? I know, I’ll get rid of verification and charge people $8 for it, then immediately reverse that.” Like all the changes have just been immediately reversed because they’ve all been disasters. He still thinks that he’s brilliant and the smartest person there and can solve any problem without actually consulting any of the research that’s gone into this. That’s my opinion, is that there is no plan.

Sam Goldman 59:58

Yeah, I think that there is the reality that you can be just a total chaotic narcissistic mess and it not be neutral. I don’t think that he has a whole calculated fascist master plan. And yet his chaos is serving those who do.

Micah Lee 1:00:20

I think that what’s happening is that we’re seeing him publicly get red-pilled.

Sam Goldman 1:00:25

It is, not only horrifying, but very strange to see this kind of transformation, so public, and in real time.

Micah Lee 1:00:33

It’s very Trumplike in the use of Twitter to do all of this. If there was more of a plan and if this was more of an intentional evil plot, he wouldn’t just be asking fascists which Antifa accounts he should ban on Twitter, but that’s what he’s doing.

Sam Goldman 1:00:46

I want to thank you, Micah, for coming on and sharing your time, your perspective, your insight, your expertise with us. If people want to read more, learn more from you, where should they go?

Micah Lee 1:01:02

I am on Mastodon at InfoSec.exchange/@MicahFLee. I’m also on Twitter @MicahFLee and if you go to The Intercept’s website and you look at the staff profiles, and you find me, then you can read all the reporting on The Intercept that I write about. I also have a website MicahFLee.com.

Sam Goldman 1:01:20

Awesome. Thanks so much, Micah.

Micah Lee 1:01:22

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Sam Goldman 1:01:24

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