Ep 193: Rick Perlstein: The Infernal Triangle + Christian Nationalist Project 2025

Episode 193 The Infernal Triangle + Christian Nationalist Project 2025

Sun, Mar 10, 2024 3:47PM • 1:10:03

Rick Perlstein 00:00

You have this class of agenda setting elite journalists who see politics as a game, see it as a horse race. They’re just kind of going through the motions following these rigid genre conventions, and because of where we are in our political culture and in our history, that is, in context, straight up disinformation.

Jennifer Cohn 00:19

Having studied of public perception and how propaganda works, if you don’t continue to sound the alarm on an issue, the public will perceive that the threat has gone away. The threat of Christian extremism certainly has not gone away, and isn’t going to go away anytime soon, certainly not before this next election.

Sam Goldman 00:55

Welcome to 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.

Now, fascism isn’t just a gross combination of horrific reactionary policies. It is a qualitative change in how society is governed. What is crucial to understand is that once in power, fascism essentially eliminates traditional democratic rights. Because it’s so rare to find a resource that doesn’t seek to pacify you as the Republi-fascists advance, but provides resources each week to combat the danger, after you listen to the show, be sure to share it with others. Click the Share button in your app to send this episode to a friend, or let the world know why you listen by rating and reviewing on Apple podcasts or your listening platform of choice to help reach more people during a year when refusing fascism is needed more than ever.

Today, we’re sharing an interview I did with historian Rick Perlstein, author of multiple books on the U.S. conservative movement, including ‘Nixon Land’, plus an interview with journalist Jennifer Cohn, who has been chronicling the Christian fascist movement.

But first, a couple thoughts on the events from this past week that weren’t touched on during these interviews. First, let’s recognize that during President Biden’s State of the Union speech, this Thursday, he acknowledged the country is more divided than it’s been since the Civil War. It’s true and significant that he says this from that stage, but let this be a reminder that as always, it’s up to us to provide the answer as to what to do about that, because as fiery as he may have been on that stage, the strategy that he articulated continues to be one of accommodation, one of seeking to reconcile with this fascist movement — a fully fascist party, the Republican Party.

Biden can’t resolve the divisions he’s speaking about by showing that he has and will continue to devalue, restrict, and wreck the lives of undocumented people just as effectively, if not as blatantly, as the fascists do, and we shouldn’t want him to. Same with his paternalistic demand that women take on the sisyphean task of voting even harder to win back their fundamental right to abortion — a right that he could not even get his own party to unite around to prevent the overturn of Roe — a right which he openly deems immoral, and whose name he refuses to speak aloud. Abortion. I mean, if you can’t even say the word, can you defend it? It is the fascists who continue to set the terms. There can be no reconciliation with fascism except on the terms of the fascists.

Fascism, as we’ve said many a time, and will continue to say, must be resolutely opposed. Second, to temper the optimism he projected, let’s talk about the other major news from this week, the Supreme Court’s decision to further disembowel the 14th Amendment by demanding that Colorado and every other state keep Trump on the ballot, and to delay the Trump January 6th trial even further by agreeing to hear his claim of broad immunity. This immunity decision drives back the timeline even further for the federal prosecution of Trump’s crimes on January 6th — the case that comes closest to capturing what’s at stake if he isn’t held accountable as a fascist coup leader. As it stands, that trial probably will not resume until mere weeks before the election.

There are many things to say about that, including that it underscores how essential it is that people do not stake all their hopes, energy, time and resources on the election, but to mobilize and organize against this fascist movement. Because, remember, no election, fair or fraudulent, can legitimize a fascist government. What it also illustrates is the utter bankruptcy of the establishment and the inability of the institutions to right this ship without a massive sea change. But back to the Colorado case: All nine justices supported this decision to prevent Colorado from disqualifying an “oath breaking insurrectionist” from their elections, including the liberals.

I want to shout out to the 5-4 podcast for doing a great emergency episode about this case, featuring Jay Willis, but I also think that part of their conversation illustrates a real blind spot for many across the non fascist political spectrum. There’s so much talk about why the liberal justices chose to essentially sign on to the decision, writing a weak concurrence. Talk that centers on realpolitik and trade offs, but I think people really need to consider that the liberals on the Supreme Court might believe that if they can just hold the country together a little longer, not shake the boat, that the fascist might find reason, might come to the table — that things are going to be okay. They are choosing order over justice.

As Rick Pearlstein points out later, in this episode, I’m talking about that bloodthirsty demon, Henry Kissinger: When you attempt to choose order over justice, in addition to the pure moral bankruptcy, you most likely will end up with neither order nor justice. And here, we will most likely end up with the order of fascism. At the end of the day, people need to be woken up to the reality and danger of this situation, and that’s impossible to do without dissenting and clarifying the stakes. Otherwise, you’re literally just running cover for a fascist movement that has a real shot of coming back to power even stronger in November. Beyond that, to even entertain the idea that the President is a monarch is a sign this Court has lost any remaining legitimacy that anyone should bestow on it in the modern era.

Hell no, a president doesn’t have the right to do whatever the hell he wants — kill whoever he wants, overturn any election he wants — just because he’s living in the White House. That is a fascist dictator’s rights — literally. I want to speak directly to the members of our audience who might be in the legal community. The crux of this case is the fascist assertion that the 14th Amendment clearly overrides state’s rights. And yet, the entire decade’s long project of these same fascists to overturn the Voting Rights Act hinges on their assertion that the 14th Amendment should not override state’s rights. At what point does the American legal system become illegitimate? At what point when they write into law two mutually exclusive precedents to fit their immediate needs, like they’re doing here, when they lie about the facts of the case like in their decision to allow public schools to mandate prayer, when they use Christian fascist notions of conception to override essential rights and Supreme Court precedent, like they did in Dobbs… When does the legal community step up and say enough? When will we all? With that, here is my conversation with Rick Perlstein.

It is an honor today to welcome on the pod, Rick Perlstein. If you are a regular listener of the show, you have heard me referencing his work over at The American Prospect and recommending that you sign up for his newsletter. And now here he is. Rick is an historian and journalist who has written four books covering the conservative movement in the U.S. during the 20th century, starting with Goldwater through Nixon and Reagan. His newest book will cover the contemporary era, including Trump. Welcome, Rick.

Rick Perlstein 09:32

Hi, good to be here, Sam.

Sam Goldman 09:35

Recently, you said — I’m paraphrasing here: We don’t need to worry about how many votes Trump gets, we need to worry about what his armed supporters do in the aftermath of the election. Can you talk a little bit more about this?

Rick Perlstein 09:50

Yeah, I’ll just clarify it a little bit: We don’t only need to worry about how many votes he gets. So, in addition to worrying about how many votes he gets, we have to worry how many people out there are willing to commit violence against us to keep Trump in power, or keep some other Trump in power. This just seems to be very, very evident and very, very clear. January 6th was an extremely violent event, and one of the things you will hear — I’m sure you’ve seen lots of people say this — but if it was really an insurrection, we would have really armed up. They know what they would need to do.

I think it’s most important to understand this in the context of journalism. A lot of what I’m doing is directed at mainstream journalists who’ve been just profoundly derelict in their duty, simply by doing what they see is their duty in the same way they might have done it in — the year I’ll kind of pull out of a hat is — 1996. You turn on NPR and there’ll be a great segment on, say, the bullying of queer kids. And then the next thing will be Nikki Haley is dropping out of the race, Trump and Biden have to compete for her support — something ridiculous like that. They’re not thinking. They’re just kind of going through the motions, following these rigid genre conventions.

Because of where we are, in our political culture, and in our history, that is, in context, straight up disinformation; as useful as the kind of news a Soviet citizen would get from Pravda, because it just is not telling them the truth about the world in front of them. It’s in fact, getting them further from the truth, which is that Trump doesn’t compete for anyone’s attention or power, or support, he claims it. The idea that even Nikki Haley has distanced herself from Trump somehow represents some position of innocence where she can be persuaded by someone like Joe Biden — these are the people who are telling people what the world looks like. They set the agenda for the lesser journalists.

The fact that more and more journalists, kind of at the margins of the journalism business — and with something like Vice going out of business — these are the people who had embedded brave journalists are within right wing insurrectionist, violent white supremacist organizations. So, with these people going away, the story that people hear about the world is a really big deal about whether they see this as a fight for things that they really, really take for granted — that they can worship the way they want, or not worship the way they want, bodily autonomy.

Of course, lots of people don’t take that for granted now, because wow, they’ve woken up to what people on the left have been saying for decades, which is that they’re not just coming after abortion, they’re coming after fertilization treatment. One of these rigid genre conventions is to kind of domesticate and play down how much people on the right are committed to violence — violent rhetoric. When they talk about the Second Amendment, it doesn’t take too long to talk to someone who calls themselves a second amendment-er for them to say the reason they have guns is to fight tyranny.

Well, who are the tyrants? You know, the tyrants are the liberals, the tyrants are the Democrats, the tyrants are the the deep state people who show up at work as government bureaucrats. I say that the Republican Party has a parliamentary wing and a paramilitary wing, and a major response to the movement for Black lives was people driving their cars into protesters — using cars as a weapon of political terrorism. And that the response from a lot of state legislatures in red states was to indemnify people from punishment for running people over. If that’s not people willing to take up how weapon for a political purpose, which is called terrorism, I don’t know what is.

Sam Goldman 13:40

So much of what you were saying really resonated with me and what I think so many of our listeners, who’ve been frustrated reading the media, who have that concern on the real danger posed, and the constant minimizing and not taking seriously what we’re confronted by. Part of what I think that we’re confronted by — which I think I kind of have a different view than you on — is how difficult a way out through the normal channels is, because, and this is just me speaking, I feel like people voted, and people did that referendum where they said: No fascism, and they did it…

Rick Perlstein 14:26

In the 2020 election. Democrats won by more than five percentage points… a comfortable victory.

Sam Goldman 14:26

Yeah, it was an un-disputable — even though it’s disputed — it was an un-disputable victory. That means a couple of things, but one of them it means is that this coup has never stopped, that they have declared time and time again, and we need to start believing them, that they will not accept any loss election wise, and that they’re willing to do whatever they need to do — I’ll leave it that way — to stay in power. The other point is that we, as uncomfortable as it might be, need to think about: What haven’t we tried yet?

Rick Perlstein 15:09

Yeah, voting is necessary, but not sufficient. So what comes next?

Sam Goldman15:14

Yeah, I’m not telling people don’t vote or anything like that.

Rick Perlstein 15:17

I’m working on a column now, when they do x, what will you do? Here’s our scenario in 2025: When they arrest your neighbor and deport her, what will you do? When they arrest your daughter for getting a pill in the mail, what will you do? I mean, that’s obviously beyond voting, and I don’t have an answer to what that thing is, but you have to put it on people’s tables. People made fun of people who use the word ‘resistance’ after Trump came to power. What is the resistance? We have to look to Europe in the middle of the 20th century. What did resistance look like then? Will people be taking up arms? What does that look like? I have no idea. You know, they have all the guns.

But I one thing I do know is that we had fascism in America, in the South, and we had state terror in the South. We had something like the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, which was the Stasi for one state. And what do people do? They put their bodies on the line. Nonviolent resistance means we’re going to make it hard for those people to roll over us. We’re going to put it on TV. We’re going to raise people’s consciences. A lot of people can and are doing this now at things like school boards. A lot of it is just showing up. Like Thom Hartmann says: “Democracy is not a spectator sport.”

Political hobbyism is not enough. Tweeting is not enough. And yes, voting is not enough. Because one of the most useful ideological tools or myths that the fascists have in America is this kind of presumption — it’s a kind of intellectual and political narcissism, I’m sure you’ve seen it over and over again — that they’re in the vast majority. One kind of mind trick they play on us and themselves is when you say: Well, no, we’re in the vast majority — they’ll either say, well, it’s rigged, or they’ll say: Oh, your vast majority, they’re not really Americans at all. I mean, bodies in the streets, bodies on sidewalks, bodies in front of bodies is powerful, it’s real. And that requires leadership, and many of us will have to step up as leaders, trusted people who our neighbors respect, and say: Look, we’re standing up.

Sam Goldman 17:27

I think that that’s true. I’ve been really looking forward to a conversation that I haven’t had yet, but I’m going to have with a writer in Germany, she’s originally Turkish, and one of the things that she participated in recently, is some of the anti AfD action. One thing that she wrote, she was noting that the acting before it’s too late, that it was a positive that as soon as those meetings became disclosed, that people were mobilized, and that people came out numbers. She was noting that as a positive factor — it’s interesting.

To pivot to your column, and some of the work that you’ve been working on, and the book that you’re writing parallel to it, ‘The Infernal Triangle’. The three points of this triangle that have worked in harmony to create the mess we’re in, as you’ve outlined it, are: the fascist Republicans, the mainstream media, and then the Democrats. You’ve discussed in detail your views on Trump and Republicans in your columns, and recently an excellent interview on Democracy Now, which we will link to along with the whole book that you’re writing. I think we agree on a lot of analysis of what they’re all about, and we talk about it a lot on the show, clearly.

Similarly, we’ve talked on the show about media some, for example, we had an interview with former Chicago Tribune and Sun Times editor, Marc Jacobs, about the complicity of the media, in normalizing the fascists. I was thinking about what can be more controversial for people, including some of our listeners, who recognize the danger of the fascists, and the complete inadequacy of the media, in addressing this crisis, is how the Democratic Party can play into this infernal triangle. I wanted to dig into this with you.

Rick Perlstein 19:18

One of the basic things is just the basic left-wing insight that countries need left liberal social democratic parties that protect people from the ravages of the market, that makes societies better, but it’s also politically effective. The New Deal tradition in America, which was new — the Democratic Party convention in 1924 almost split in half over whether or not to endorse the Ku Klux Klan — the Democratic Party as a vehicle of left liberalism is kind of a new phenomenon. But the New Deal tradition was all about protecting ordinary people from the ravages of the market, the ravages of arbitrary, capricious power on the job from bosses, to supporting unions.

Yes, a part of the story about the Democratic Party is how it abandoned that kind of economic democracy with things like NAFTA. When Bill Clinton signed NAFTA, he said: Oh, this is going to create 200,000 new factory jobs — and of course, it was the opposite. It destroyed hundreds of thousands of existing factory jobs. Another part of it is, there’s something about the Democratic Party and its traditions in which this idea of staying kind of aloof from the give and take and cut and thrust, the messiness of politics, has been kind of a tradition.

There’s this guy, Adlai Stevenson, who all the Liberals loved in the 1950s. He talked like a professor. One time, he was talking in this high-flown rhetoric about how America could do better on this and that and the other thing, and somebody yelled out from the crowd: Governor Stephenson you have the vote of every thinking American. You know what he said in response to that? He said “But madame, I need a majority.” It’s a very funny joke. Very aloof, he kind of like looked at the people who kind of made up the big part of the democratic coalition, those grubby union guys and said, ehhh, I’d rather have college professors.

Fast forward to 2008, we had this guy, Barack Obama, and what was the word that Barack Obama would always use, whenever he was talking about something he didn’t like in Washington? He would say the Republicans are “playing politics.” This idea that we’re going to be above politics, above the fight for power, and we’re just going to be sensible, and people will realize that it’s more sensible to be sensible than to be non sensible.

Obviously, that doesn’t work in a fascist situation, because all power and all knowledge and all truth and all meaning comes from the cult of personality. Suddenly, we have to use German words: the fuhrer principle, the leadership principle. This is absolutely what we see with Trump. We saw it with Bush too, in 2004, until he tried immigration reform, and then he lost people, and then Katrina happened. So this idea that, you know, the Democratic tradition of being kind of aloof and above politics, and the idea that the best way to win back voters we’ve lost is kind of to meet the Republicans halfway. I like to say if you meet people halfway that this makes it easier for them to punch you in the nose. The hand of fellowship makes it easier for them to spit on it.

You have someone like Chuck Schumer saying: Oh, it’s absolutely terrible that Trump [he mistakenly said George Bush] said that immigrants “poison the blood,” but, you know, Democrats are going to be much better at limiting immigration, but we’re going to do it by appealing to our values, instead of saying: Immigrants are good, we want more immigrants. Immigrants are the people who have the courage to walk 2000 miles across an entire continent, who are so desperate to succeed and do well by their families, that they’re willing to put up with just about anything to get in this country, great! Those are the best people. Those are the people who we want.

For a lot of reasons, of course, the fascists hate these people. It’s because they know that those people work harder than them. That’s why they’d stereotype them as lazy, because they’re not lazy. Democrats were traumatized by the rise of Ronald Reagan in 1980, it was a total shock. This trauma response from Democrats was: Well, maybe we’re wrong, that America can do better — that we can build a social democratic society, in which people aren’t one paycheck away from bankruptcy. That’s just a huge, huge part of the problem. And then the triangle kind of becomes kind of self-reinforcing when you get to the third part of the Democratic triangle is that you have this class of agenda setting elite journalists who see politics as a game, see it as drama criticism, see it as a horse race. They have developed this very profound distorting norm that both sides have to share equal responsibility for every problem.

So it’s biased towards the people who cheat because they’ll always get as much blame as the people who don’t cheat and act like Boy Scouts; the AdIai Stevensons of the world, the Barak Obamas of the world. The Democrats are always kind of plugging for their good favor, sucking up to — back in the previous generation, the David Broders of the world and Maggie Habermans of the world to the Dan Balzes of the world, instead of just telling the truth as they see it without fear or favor. You have the Democratic Party, it’s probably the least partisan political party in the world. It’s like they always nominate people who promise they’re not going to be partisan, yet every time they do, they’re accused of being partisan, because that’s the structure of journalism.

Jimmy Carter — I wrote about this in my book Reaganland — he would talk all the time about how the problem is there’s too much partisanship in Washington. By 1980, you think Ronald Reagan was saying, you know, we need to vote Carter out office because he’s borrowing too many of our ideas? No, he talked about like, Carter was a Bolshevik. And then in 1984, they nominated this guy, Walter Mondale, who said: Look, I’m going to tell you the truth, we need to raise taxes, we need to balance the budget. Yet people in the Democratic Party, after he lost 49 states to Ronald Reagan, they started this group called the Democratic Leadership Council, because they claimed that the Democrats had nominated someone who was too far to the left and was captive to interest groups.

Then in 1980, they nominated this guy Michael Dukakis, literally, his slogan was “Competence, not Ideology.” Then, the Republicans attacked him for belonging American Civil Liberties Union — made it seem like he was gonna let rapists out of jail. The same thing that happens over and over again. Bill Clinton does the same thing, welfare reform, criminal justice, reform all these things. He literally had a campaign event in 1992 with a group of convicts in jail jumpsuits, in chains, at Stone Mountain, Georgia, the monument to the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, because the head of the DLC said it was a great way to get white working class voters in Georgia. How did they thank him for that? They called him a murderer, they tried to impeach him for consensual sex.

So it just doesn’t work. Even when it wins, it loses, because you can’t get anything accomplished. Part of this dynamic is treating activists, who tend to be kind of younger and more ideological, with distrust and contempt. This is something you see in the way that the Nancy Pelosi’s and Chuck Schumers of the world have treated the Squad and AOC like she was just an irritation, instead of an opportunity to say “I believe that children are our future.” Instead, it’s like: Wow, these young people are really annoying, they’re telling us not to commit genocide and stuff [SG laughs]. That’s the Democratic Party.

None of this is new. What I joke about is this is kind of like what I’m writing up in my book it’s what everyone in the left or everyone kind of in the liberal left says at every party or every dinner they’ve ever had. You just spend a little time on the Republicans being crazy, a little time on the Democrats being wimpy, and a little time on the media completely being full of both sides nonsense. Add it all up and look out the window, and here we are.

Sam Goldman 26:45

I was hoping that you could explain a little bit more about what you mean when you talk about the American fascist movement and how it isn’t just a multiplication of the conservatism of the past, but something qualitatively different because I think that part of what you’re getting at is the Democrats are acting like it’s the same, and therefore, they can always do what they’ve always done.

Rick Perlstein 27:15

[Biden] has the idea that they can do what is always done: cut deals with the reasonable Republicans on things like cap and trade and health care, and all that sort of stuff. That’s a very interesting question, because America has always had fascist traditions. As you probably know, the Ku Klux Klan had millions of members in the 1920s. They ran the state of Indiana. They basically wrote the 1924 immigration bill, limiting immigration from everywhere but Western Europe, practically bringing immigration to a standstill.

The South had these kinds of little fascist fiefdoms, in which a subject population was kept in place through terror; violent terror. So it’s always been part of the American right. You always had these kind of countervailing traditions: Reagan was very sentimental about immigrants. Bush talked a lot about kind of democracy. There’s a very kind of complex phenomenon within, kind of the logic of conservatism, in which there’s a certain kind of guilty conscience built into it. The direction of history might be more and more liberty and freedom and dignity for more and more different kinds of people, like within our last lifetime talking about gays and lesbians and more recently, trans people, but before that African Americans, before that women, before that white people who didn’t own property, when they got to vote in the 1830s, and there’s always people who have been terrified by that, saying: Civilization will end if this happens.

But the reform comes into place, women get to vote — you should read the things people said about women voting, it was just like civilization was gonna collapse. Social Security — civilization is gonna collapse. Black people being able to go to the restaurants they want — civilization is gonna collapse. There’s a book about white people in the south during the Civil Rights era called There Goes my Everything. And then the reform happens and the world goes on and gets better, and they find some new thing to be terrified; Sharia law, critical race theory. In a lot of ways, that’s kind of what conservatism is. Then they’ll say: I marched with Martin Luther King, but this queer stuff, he’s going too far. My cousin is married to her wife and that’s fine, but they don’t want to say that a boy can compete on the, you know, women’s volleyball team, or whatever it is, it’s always something.

The thing that turns this kind of tradition into a different kind of tradition, in a lot of ways, is just kind of like lowering the veil and lowering the scrim. I’ve been to a lot of Republican National Conventions, since we’re talking about 2004 by example, all every speaker talked about, the one talking point they just went on again and again, again is how Bush increased minority homeownership and how Bush supported Hispanics. Then, outside, you go to the kinds of rallies that kind of for the grassroots Republicans would do, and they sounded like Trump. At the 2012 Republican Convention, Mitt Romney was, saying the same kind of stuff, and then outside they had a tent run by Citizens United, and they played a Steve Bannon film. That’s how I learned about Steve Bannon. It was all about how Occupy [Wall Street] was an attempt to take over the property of middle class white people.

So you have this kind of scrim of the respectable and irrespectable. The respectable and the irrespectable have this very complicated relationship with each other. They work together, there’s winks, there’s nods. But this is very different from the 2016 Republican convention, in which they would put the picture of a beautiful white little girl on the screen and say: Murdered by immigrants. Then you just kind of get into the Orwellian kind of forming of this hate kind of thing. The idea that, Trump starts his campaign by saying: They’re sending their rapists.

The thing that made me interested in Trump in 2015 — my editor was like: Why do you keep on writing about Trump? These other people are gonna win. Why don’t you write about Marco Rubio? There you go, the minimizing. The first thing I learned about Donald Trump, the first interesting thing, I remember Trump as like the guy who in the 80s was [on] Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous all the time. The first time I realized something very interesting was going on was the New Yorker writer Evan Osnos happened to be doing an article about white nationalists for The New Yorker at the time, and hanging out with them. He watched Trump’s announcement speech with them, and they’re like: This is our guy. He’s speaking our language.

Which you would never would have seen with Ronald Reagan. It’s interesting. It’s not that Ronald Reagan was not attractive to the fascists, who were then in power. One of the things in my book ‘Reaganland’ I found really interesting was: Wow, people were talking about a lot about the Ku Klux Klan in 1980. The Ku Klux Klan and Neo Nazis were kind of getting together, it was called Fusion politics. They were doing a lot of stuff, and they were running candidates, and those candidates were doing well. They were terrifying people. But Ronald Reagan would say: Oh, those guys have nothing to do with me. But those guys said: Oh, he has to say that, we know that he is with us. It’s not to say that they’re the same thing, and they’re just kind of talking differently, because there’s a lot of other factors, too.

Obviously, the stockpile of guns, which has been a long-gestating thing. The NRA wasn’t always the NRA. The sheer volume of vilification of any political opponent as untermenschen, as an enemy that has to be destroyed, which is hardly new. My first post, when I started blogging for a liberal group called Campaign for America’s Future in 2007, was about how I was noticing more and more people on right-wing listservs talking about any Democrat in power, as illegitimate, as having stolen their power, as not being American. So a lot of it is a question of degree, it’s not just a qualitative difference.

Once you pass that blood brain barrier, we’re not even trying to make coherent arguments anymore, we’re just sticking with our tribe. Because if we stick with our tribe, and we defeat the enemy, we will return to this magic past, in which everything was wonderful. That’s the palingenesis, and that worked great because of Sarah Palin — Palin-genesis. You suddenly find yourself the boiling frog in a new territory and a new situation, even though the threads were there and we’re building for a long time. You really respect Jeff Sharlet’s work, and he said: The thing that really kind of convinced him finally was, they had a maximum leader around which they could really build a cult of personality, which had been kind of the missing element.

Sam Goldman 27:16

He certainly made the tent bigger than ever.

Rick Perlstein 31:21

And also smaller than ever. Because think about it. It’s very interesting, because, you know, Ronald Reagan ran for president — one of the things I discovered in that book I published three years ago, Reaganland, is that they did so much research, they did so much polling, and they crafted his language so carefully, and they packaged him so carefully, to reach people in the center.

Sam Goldman 33:55

And things have shifted so much. Not just because of Trump’s doing. I want to make that clear, things have shifted in the world so much that there is an appetite that is a lot bigger than we’d like to believe. There’s also a big piece that we really don’t want to confront — not you and I but, broadly speaking, we don’t want to confront — which is that there are a ton of people for whom the idea of Black folks having power is something that they see as the world’s coming down. And that is a big thing. I don’t want to say it’s just backlash to rights being gained, but that is a big part of it, and this group of people that is constantly minimized, constantly laughed at, constantly called crazy, has more influence and more power than people want to believe, which is what I would call a Christian fascist movement. People can call it whatever they want — it’s a huge base of people.

Rick Perlstein 34:56

Yeah, and they were actually by the way exactly the same. If you look at what Jerry Falwell was saying in 1980: “A homosexual will just as soon kill you as look at you.” That’s a quote before thousands of people at a rally to reverse the civil rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida. If you don’t know that, “You don’t know the enemy.” This guy was joined at the hip with Ronald Reagan. So, stuff about the family, stuff about the body, stuff about gender. With the race piece, it’s obviously that people don’t want people who are not like them, people who are outsiders, people are seen as kind of dirty and disgusting, having power.

Right-wing identity often comes from the sense of unfair dispossession. So this idea that white privilege was really wonderful. You could be pretty lazy and didn’t have to work that hard, didn’t have to get much of an education, it was a pretty sweet little thumb you had on the scale then. When that kind of starts going away, that can cause some very, very, very weird anger. And let’s not also forget the role of America being at permanent war in the Middle East for a good number of decades — people coming back traumatized, and there’s no space on our culture to say: Well, maybe if we had less of these wars, America will be a better place. Instead, it’s: I’m traumatized, there’s no space for me to say: Wow, I’m going to really get to work electing someone who doesn’t want to solve America’s problems by “projecting force.”

You get marinated in these communities in which this kind of this fetishization of militaristic values and violence, so people kind of double down to the thing that caused them trauma in the first place. When I drive to our cabin out in the woods in Illinois, we pass by this town that has something called the Middle East conflict wall — so trippy, I never write about this — it’s the names of everyone who died in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It’s in this little town. It kind of looks like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but it’s so sad and forlorn, because it’s like, there are all these people who feel like they’re part of this culture that sacrificed for the country and the country did nothing for them. And, they didn’t sacrifice for the country.

These are kind of forbidden things, you gotta be careful what you say, but people were lied to, they sacrificed for a lie. Instead of saying: Wow, the Republicans really fed this lie, but you know what, the Democrats fed the lie too — you get to this basic sense that you can’t trust anyone, you can’t trust your neighbors. It does harm to your sense of bodily integrity, your sense of psychic integrity, your sense of spiritual integrity, and you just get lower on the scale of hierarchy of needs — you become less a self- realized person. The more a person who is worried about bodily survival, is worried about family survival — your circle of concern shrinks down to that of a tribe. All these things just kind of work together and this infernal machine.

One of the things intellectuals and kind of media people and popular culture, even, kind of understood after World War II, because it was kind of in the air, was that people are very vulnerable to demagogues in times of anomie, and alienation — even if you see like episodes of something like TheTwilight Zone, or a movie like A Face in the Crowd, or this movie about Huey Long, from the 1950s called All the King’s Men — this idea that the most dangerous thing in the world is someone who knows that all it takes to get people to follow them in a cult like way is to weaponize and animate those feelings of fear and hatred.

One of the interesting things that happened with Reagan was, I think people thought he was going to be that guy, and when the world kind of survived, and he seemed to be kind of charming and went to the right parties, and he knew which fork to use, and one of the reasons he wasn’t a disaster was because he outsourced what he did to experienced, competent people — he really was, in a lot of ways, kind of an actor who was directed by other people — they were like: Oh, we’d have to really worry about that anymore. There was a lot of fear in that election that America would fall to fascism — Reagan’s worst instincts would not be contained. A lot of what is happening is what people knew was always possible, always a vulnerability of people. And a lot of it was just kind of like a culture that said, you don’t do this; a politician doesn’t do this. A politician after what we saw at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, after what we saw in Germany, after what we saw, even in South America with the dirty wars in the 1970s.

A lot of it is the generation that remembered World War II passing from the scene — people who had seen what happened to Europe and said, never again, in a certain way. It’s one of those things where the canary in the coal mine, really saw the mine collapse, and people don’t know that this could end in a cataclysm. I think when Ron Elving of NPR is saying: Well, now Trump and Biden have to compete for Nikki Haley’s votes, we’ll see what happens on Super Tuesday. And, like every channel runs, live feed of the results in from the Nevada caucus, where Trump was 90%, what kind of waste of airspace is that?

They’re not seeing that they could play a role in stopping what we saw happen, at the price of millions dead. It’s tragic, it makes me tear my hair out, because I know the institutions are powerful. I know institutions have the power to kind of magnify bad things and magnify good things. Right now they’re magnifying bad things like treating Trump like they’re normal, like treating the Republican Party like It’s normal, and that it is not a political function that more resembles you know, the IRA — it has terrorists and has people who do politics.

Sam Goldman 40:33

You’ve written recently about another evil figure with a tremendously outsized role in shaping the world order, none other than Henry Kissinger. According to Walter Isaacson’s biography, Kissinger is said to have repeatedly paraphrased Goethe that he would choose order over justice. This choice between order and justice is posing itself ever more sharply for people. What can you say with the knowledge of history you have, to reassure people that justice is the right choice to make, knowing that order often seems safer?

Rick Perlstein 41:09

It’s not a choice, because you cannot just kind of say, let’s create order. I’m sure that the generals in the Israeli Defense Forces think that they’re creating order by getting rid of Hamas. They don’t realize that they’re doing exactly what we did in Vietnam, which was just creating more insurgents, more terrorists, more people who’ve seen their families die in front of them and are going to create more disorder. That’s why I was so careful to say in my article about Henry Kissinger that all the things he thought he was doing to create order, like: Oh, if I just get China on board with America, and Russia, on board with America, and then they can kind of work together to tell Vietnam to not fight America. This idea of all these balance of forces, and yadda, the kind of hubris of that, the tragedy of that was: Well, if I have to look the other way for this massacre, or that massacre, at least we’ll have order down the road, and we’ll have a peaceful equilibrium.

But you can’t out a catalog. Order comes through justice. Order comes from people believing that they have a stake in society, the society works for them and not just the powerful, a sense of trust and mutual respect — which is an aspect of justice — that the justice system works. I’m sure that every Trump-ie thinks that they’re creating a more ordered society. But the fact that they’re doing it by saying justice doesn’t matter, this guy doesn’t have to go to justice, anyone can do anything as long as they’re our guy, and as long as they’re creating the right hierarchy, all that does is create disorder. I would say that order is an after effect of a just and reasonable and respectful society.

Henry Kissinger thought he was creating order in Iran by giving the Shah as many weapons as he wanted to keep fighting the communists. If he’s using some of those weapons against his own people, well, maybe he’s creating more order in Iran too. Well, the Iranian Revolution created the movement for you know, Islamic terror around the world. And you know, we reap the whirlwind of Kissinger’s hubristic sense that he knew what order was and how to achieve it. So I would say, as a good kind of University Chicago undergraduate theorist: Order is a second order phenomenon that’s created by a sense of justice. I never thought that before you just brought me to a new insight.

Sam Goldman 41:19

I want to thank you so much for chatting with me, for sharing your stories, your experience, your expertise, if you will, and your time.

Rick Perlstein 43:32

Yeah, let’s check back in a few months, maybe.

Sam Goldman 43:34

Yeah, most importantly, your writing, you know, it’s a tremendous resource for everyone.

Rick Perlstein 43:38

Yeah, and if you go to prospect.org, you can sign up to get my column every week.

Sam Goldman 43:42

Yes, absolutely. It’s going to be in the show notes. So you’re gonna want to check it. Is there any other place that you want to direct people to?

Rick Perlstein 43:50

Well, all my Facebook spots are filled up. Unfortunately, you know, I’m the only person in the world who likes Elon Musk’s Twitter who’s not a fascist, because, I like seeing what’s out there. I get to look under the rock without lifting up the rock. So I do do Twitter. So @RickPerlstein at Twitter.

Sam Goldman 44:05

Thanks so much.

Rick Perlstein 44:06

Thanks, Sam.

Sam Goldman 44:07

As spoken to on previous episodes (see the show notes), Project 2025 has four key pillars: A nearly 900 page policy agenda, a Presidential Personnel database of vetted loyalists to the fascist project, a Presidential Administration Academy to train those to realize the Project 2025 policy agenda, and a 180 day playbook, which is what they hope to achieve in the first 100 days, if Trump or someone else in his place takes the White House in January 2025.

As our guest Jennifer Cohn has written: “Approximately 100 right wing organizations have signed on to Project 2025, an expansive plan for controlling, and in some cases, dismantling federal agencies in the event that Trump or another Republican wins the presidential election this year.” It is nothing short of a blueprint for fascist consolidation and a handbook for American Christian theocracy, that includes a sweeping and targeted goal of removing or rolling back federal policies deemed to be examples of “leftist wokeism,” including but not limited to programs to support gender and LGBTQ+ civil rights, along with diversity, equity and inclusion.

Project 2025 rejects the constitutional separation of church and state, instead privileging religious beliefs over civil laws. And let’s be clear a very specific set of religious beliefs as well. For more, we are linking again to the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism’s breakdown on Project 2025. But we want to lift up just a few examples of Project 2025 aims as they relate to abortion rights, women’s rights and LGBTQ rights: Eliminate the Department of Education, which enforces civil rights law, including laws that prohibit sex discrimination in education. They seek to prohibit Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds and allow states to defund Planned Parenthood in their state Medicaid plans. To reverse FDA approval of mifepristone, or at least go back to the pre 2016 limitation and prohibit the mailing of abortion pills, is something that they’re after. To prohibit stem cell research and stop “The development and testing of the COVID-19 vaccine with aborted fetal cell lines.”

Project 2025 outlines aims to affirm “rights of conscience,” to deny medical care. They hope to declare that abortion is not healthcare. Project 2025 seeks to reverse the Biden administration’s interpretation of them refusing medical treatment and the [Emergency Meical Treatment and] Active Labor Act that requires treatment of women miscarrying. Project 2025 outlines plans to block gender affirming health care, and to reverse the Biden administration’s redefinition of “sex” to include gender identity, sexual orientation and pregnancy status. Project 2025 condemns single motherhood and same sex marriage.

To get into this more, I’m glad to welcome on Jennifer Cohn. Jenny is a co creator and writer for the Christian Right Observer Weekly, CROW, Substack. CROW is a newsletter for people who want to learn more about the growing threat of Christian extremist movements in order to educate, organize and mobilize counter movements and actions opposed to their anti-democratic and theocratic endgame. Jenny is a former lawyer of 20 years and current political writer whose work has focused on Christian nationalism, right wing extremism, election security and disinformation. She has a column with the Bucks County Beacon, which is an independent media site in Pennsylvania. I recorded this interview with Jenny before her essential exposure linking Project 2025 to “the Statement on Christian Nationalism.” It’s a manifesto which seeks to implement a scripture based system of government whereby Christ ordained “civil magistrates” exercise authority over the American public. You can find that essential reading in the show notes, read it, share it, let’s talk about it. Now, here is my interview with Jenny.

Welcome. Thanks for coming on.

Jennifer Cohn 48:29

Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Sam Goldman 48:31

I want to go deeper into some of the very urgent questions that our listeners have been asking. We had put out a survey, I guess now, a few months back, and asked what do people need more resources on, what are people wanting to understand? What kept coming up were some of the topics that you spend a lot of time researching and writing about, which was things relating to Christian nationalism, Project 2025, and what is at stake around abortion rights and beyond abortion, birth control, and IVF. So, I’m so glad that we have this opportunity to speak. I wanted to get your thoughts on what motivated you, what compelled you to start CROW?

Jennifer Cohn 49:22

Actually the CROW was the idea of my editor at The Beacon, and he had reached out to me to do the Beacon based on my reporting on Christian nationalism. The Beacon is focused on Pennsylvania, and I think he saw over the course of my reporting would sometimes not be necessarily limited just to Pennsylvania, it was more nationwide — I actually live in California. He had the idea of doing a nationwide newsletter, and he asked both me and Cyril [Mychalejko], whose work I had featured extensively in one of my pieces on Pennsylvania, to join him in doing the newsletter, and I thought it was a really good idea; something that was needed.

I should say the other reason why I think it’s really needed is that I think even when the mainstream, legacy media covers these issues, it tends to do it on sort of a one off basis, and this is a persistent problem that I think requires persistent coverage, and warrants persistent coverage because having studied sort of public perception and how propaganda works, if you don’t continue to sound the alarm on an issue, the public will perceive that the threat has gone away. And the threat of Christian extremism certainly has not gone away and isn’t going to go away anytime soon. Certainly not before this next election.

Sam Goldman 50:32

I wanted to talk about Project 2025 with you. Everyone needs to know about it. We’ve talked about it on the show, somewhat, within several previous episodes, especially as they apply to the gutting of the “administrative state,” and replacing federal government workers with loyalists and things along those lines. I wanted to speak with you about the theocracy that is really being enshrined through this plan. I know that, in particular, you’ve been looking at Project 2025’s plans regarding abortion and birth control. So I just wanted to start there.

Jennifer Cohn 51:17

One thing that I’ve learned through a couple of years really intensively studying the Christian right in America is that it, pretty much without exception, is a an extremist movement, and that it has infiltrated the GOP beyond what I even had realized. I used to think maybe it was like 30% were extremists — I now think it’s almost all of them. [For] almost all of them, truth seems to apply to almost every major Republican or they call “conservative” initiative. I put it in air quotes, because I don’t think there’s anything conservative about radical religious extremism.

I had my suspicions from early on about Project 2025, that pretty much it was mostly being reported as an authoritarian grab, which is bad enough, and a means for Trump to exert retribution against his enemies, which is also plenty bad. But I had my concerns about its Christian extremist underpinnings and so I started looking into what the people promoting it believed, and who were the organizations that were pushing it, and I started looking specifically into the Heritage Foundation, which is the lead organizer, a project 2025, and looking for videos posted online of what their president had to say, and what his views were on social issues.

I think that the social issues may very well decide the election. By social issues, I mean, issues involving LGBTQ rights, as well as abortion access, as well as birth control access. I don’t mean just the IUD, which is clearly under assault, I mean, also hormonal birth control, which I believe is also under assault, and also IVF. This was even before the Alabama court’s ruling that I was looking at this and saying like: Oh, my gosh, these groups seem to oppose IVF. The Heritage Foundation President is Kevin Roberts, who is a Catholic fundamentalist, and had been described as a cowboy Catholic in a report by The New York Times years ago, when he was the president of an orthodox Catholic college that had refused federal funding due to its objections concerning the requirement in the Affordable Health Care Act that ensures employers provide insurance that covers birth control.

You might think: Alright, well, maybe requiring someone with a religious objection to birth control, arguably, maybe is understandable, but my concern was: Well, might they have a plan and a means to implement it beyond just having Orthodox Christians, fundamentalist Christians, not included in their health care plans? Might they ban it entirely? And sure enough, when I started looking at it, I noticed that all of these sort of high profile influencers were messaging that pre control is toxic and carcinogenic. And it occurred to me that project 2025 wants to take over all of our federal agencies and destroy some of them, but the ones that it keeps, it wants to preside over them, and that would include the FDA which is responsible for approving and withdrawing approval of drugs, which would include hormonal birth control.

So if they take over the FDA, they could effectively eliminate birth control from the market without needing to resort to the courts, just by getting some scientists who align with them to claim that it’s unreasonably dangerous, unreasonably toxic, unreasonably carcinogenic, and that messaging is really quite common. Elon Musk — I don’t think I doubt that he’s particularly religious, but he aligns with all the people on the far right, including the Christian right, and — he he even chimed in on this issue after I was already looking at the messaging on hormonal birth control. Certainly, hormonal birth control is in the crosshairs.

As a fundamentalist Catholic, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation has said that they oppose it and that it’s maybe one of the more difficult teachings of the Catholic Church but they agree with it. “They love it” is how he put it. He opposes all contraception, except maybe like the rhythm method. He also says that abortion is always morally wrong, according to his Catholic fundamentalist teachings, and so that would mean no exceptions for rape or incest or anything. And then on IVF, a woman works for his Betsy DeVos Center at the Heritage Foundation, and even before the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that made IVF impracticable by ruling that human life begins at fertilization, which is conception, even before that, she had published an article for the Heritage Foundation calling IVF and surrogacy “killing technologies.”

Then after the Alabama Supreme Court decision came out, they took a victory lap about it, they were happy about it. The Family Research Council, which is another top partner of Project 2025, a very, very influential, prominent Christian right organization, also celebrated the Alabama IVF decision. These are the people who really pull the strings of the GOP, so I was not surprised that despite some Republicans pretending that they wanted to make an exception to their life at conception proclamations that they had been making for years, that they wanted to make an IVF exception to that. I strongly suspected that they would not go through with it, and sure enough, they didn’t go through with it. Because the people who are pulling the strings, this network, this shadow network, that is the Christian right — and it’s an expansive, well funded, highly influential, duplicitous web of nonprofits that really are kingmakers — they decide who wins the elections within the Republican Party.

Project 2025, through its control of the FDA — I think that is an underappreciated aspect of Project 2025 — that any drugs that it decides it opposes for moral or other reasons can be removed from the market. And I think that would also apply, for example, to COVID vaccines or any other vaccines. We’re seeing that now in Florida, I think it was their surgeon general in Florida, they’re talking about removing funding, I think, for public schools that require vaccinations for things like measles and polio. At a national scale that can be incredibly dangerous.

Sam Goldman 57:01

From the work that you’ve done studying this array of Christian theocratic forces, are there other ways that you see this movement going for controlling women beyond the sites of abortion and birth control?

Jennifer Cohn 57:22

Well, yes. For years, it’s been standard in the Christian right to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment. In fact, they did oppose the Equal Rights Amendment, and it failed — that’s to give women equal rights. And they did that under the auspices that it was really supposedly a gateway drug to facilitating abortion, which they opposed, obviously, but I think it’s also more than abortion within Christian fundamentalist culture, there’s a very strong tendency, and it may even be the predominant tendency, to organize families and society sort of in a patriarchal, hierarchical order where women and children are expected to submit to their husbands.

We’re increasingly hearing open talk among Christian, so called, conservatives that that maybe the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote should be repealed. I don’t think it would happen immediately, because it’d be too much of an outcry, but the Christian right continues moving the Overton Window further and further to the right, really off the grid, that I wouldn’t say it’s impossible at all within the next five to 10 years. By the way, I should have mentioned LGBTQ rights with Project 2025, gender affirming care, and all they would have to do is just come out against it, and I think it would really end gender affirming care, even for adults across the country. Something else that just occurred to me by the way: One way that they could make access to abortion even more difficult and possibly pave the way to having women charged with murder for getting abortions is to have a proclamation at Health and Human Services about when life begins, it begins at conception. And this obviously also has been ramifications for IVF, because what do you do with the spare embryos, which are just fertilized eggs that haven’t been implanted?

Honestly, I think that even under the Christian right’s reasoning, freezing the eggs could be considered child abuse. You have to bring these babies to fruition otherwise, it’s abusive, because they’re human babies — they have rights. They believe they have the same rights as children. They could do things like that with broad proclamations about when life begins to make abortion less accessible, and the consequences of having one more onerous.

Sam Goldman 59:22

I wanted to pivot a little bit to dive a little bit deeper into who’s come together around these goals. You’ve started talking some about key players involved. What strikes me time and time again, when I think about Project 2025, is the unprecedented and dangerous unity amongst fire right and fascist think tanks, lobbyists, legal organizations and more. I’m hoping you can tell us more about some of the organizations involved here, what some of their various goals are and kind of how they’ve come together.

Jennifer Cohn 59:54

Sure. There are now 100 Different organizations have signed on to project 2025, and I have not looked at all of them, I’ve skimmed the list. My intuition is that most or all of them really champion extreme, out of the mainstream, religious beliefs. And that’s something that I just don’t think the American public has quite grasped yet — that where the public is, even where their Republican voters are, and even where Christian Republican voters are is, I believe, quite different than where the Christian right is. I keep coming back to the Family Research Council because they have been such an influential organization over the years, and Tony Perkins, who’s the president of the Family Research Council met regularly with Trump during the Trump administration. I think he even introduced him during the RNC in 2016, so he’s a very influential figure.

Another organization that has received recent media attention is the Center for Renewing America. That was the subject of a blockbuster report by Heidi [Przybyla], she goes by @HeidiReports on Twitter/X. The report was published by Politico, and it had to do with the founder of the Center for renewing America. Russ Vought is a former Trump official also previously worked for the Heritage Foundation, the lead organizer of Project 2025. According to this Politico report, there was an internal memo drafted by his organization, the Center for Renewing America, in which it included a bullet pointed list of what their priorities were for a second Trump term, and one of those bullet points said “Christian nationalism.”

I think that must have been a leaked document that Politico somehow got their hands on. Then as she further reported Russ Vought, who again is the founder of this organization, had previously tweeted that he was proud to be collaborating with another former Trump official who’d also worked at Heritage Foundation, named William Wolf, on formulating a “sound Christian nationalism.” This was a really a bombshell report that got a lot of traction. The report also noted that William Wolfe — he actually was, was a visiting fellow until very recently, perhaps until after the Politico report came out. He was a visiting fellow with the Center for renewing America, again, a project 2025 partner, and he had tweeted that the way to improve American society — he had several bullet points of his own on Twitter, and it included ending no fault divorce, which I believe most of the public is not in favor of, and included reducing access to contraception, and of course, it included ending all abortion.

So Heidi had all of this in her report and it got a lot of traction, it got her an interview on MSNBC, and apparently that interview went viral because this was really the first time that major publication had tied project 2025 to Christian extremism. And rather than distance themselves from Russ Vought and William Wolfe, who are the subject of her report, and had these very out of the mainstream views, the Christian right organizations leading Project 2025 — in particular, Tony Perkins, at the Family Research Council — have launched a very seemingly coordinated campaign against Heidi for her report. And they did it because what she said in the interview, which was true, is that Christian nationalists believe that their rights come from God.

But the Family Research Council then took that statement as a smear on mainstream Christianity, Christianity as a whole, and demanded an apology from her, because I guess there are people who aren’t Christian nationalists who might also have that belief. But they didn’t claim that anything she said was untrue, and she certainly wasn’t smearing all of Christianity as being Christian nationalists. But they launched this campaign to deflect, I think, really, from what she had unearthed about William Wolfe and Russ Vought. It’s really been, I think, terrifying to observe, because there have been all of these publications that maybe are kind of small and I’d never heard of. But if you do a Google search, they all would pop up talking about how horrible Heidi is, and how this woman is an anti-Christian bigot, and they even got a Catholic bishop to denounce her in a video on Twitter — really not making any effort that I’ve seen to disavow or distance themselves from the express Christian nationalism championed by Vought and William Wolfe.

The Family Research Council is very prominent, the Center for Renewing America is very prominent, the Heritage Foundation has also piled onto the attacks against Heidi. I’d say probably many of the organizations who sign on to Project 2025 have also jumped on to it. It’s really been scary, and I think it’s really telling. It’s a perfect example of how the Christian right has actually managed to get as far as it has with its really unpopular agenda. Because whenever somebody thinks about calling it out, they’re afraid of being labeled an anti Christian bigot, and having this sort of the shadow network machine launched against them, and we’re witnessing it in real time.

The January 6th committee, for example, was well aware that Christian nationalist played a large role in January 6th — there’s even been a report by the Freedom From Religion Foundation and another organization whose name I forget, but I think it’s a Christian organization detailing Christian nationalists involved MIT and January 6th, and calling it out and the January 6th committee — it might have mentioned at once. It did not mention it more than once. It made a purposeful decision to not mention it, reportedly because Liz Cheney said that she didn’t want to risk implying that all Christians are white Christian nationalists. Which, of course, is not what it would have done. And of course, it’s not what Heidi did, but we’re seeing that there’s some legitimacy to the fear that there would be in an effort to portray it that way. So I think it’s really important that we shut this down because it’s everything.

Sam Goldman 1:05:29

I want to thank you, Jenny, so much for coming on and sharing your insight and your expertise in studying this and we’re gonna put a link to the newsletter in there — where else that people want to learn more about your work or read more from you or connect with you, where should they go?

Jennifer Cohn 1:05:29

Bucks County Beacon is a good place. There’s even a section which has all of my articles there. And then the CROW newsletter, Christian Right Observer Weekly on Substack. I do tweet very frequently on Twitter, where I’m @JennyCohn1. I have accounts on other social media platforms, but honestly, I just haven’t had the time to keep up with them. So I have some of those listed in my profile on Twitter — Twitter is the best place to find me on a regular basis.

Sam Goldman 1:06:15

Perfect. Thanks so much.

Jennifer Cohn 1:06:16

All right, thank you so much.

Sam Goldman 1:06:18

A lot can happen — a lot is happening and will happen over the next eight months, including events so wild, we could even envision a scenario in which the election doesn’t happen. Some people who understand the danger of Trumpism/fascism have translated that understanding into the act of browbeating those who are standing on principle and protesting and calling for an end to the unchecked U.S. support and the arming of Israel, as if the danger of fascism is going to be solved by people of conscience silencing themselves about a crime against humanity. But as mentioned earlier, the events of the past week show the institutions will not self correct, the justice that we seek will not be delivered if we do not pursue it. So I am so glad to be with you on this journey to pursue this justice to refuse fascism, building community and resources for anyone who wants to see a future free of this fascist threat. If we have to be in this fight, I am so honored to be standing shoulder to shoulder with you.

Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism. Got thoughts or questions off this episode? We want to hear ’em. Ideas for topics or guests? Yes, please. Send them to us. Have a skill you think could help? We want to know all about it. Connect with us on social media over at Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, we’re also on Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky and YouTube. Even though that’s not really social media, we’re on it @RefuseFascism. So follow us, like us, connect with us there — subscribe if it’s YouTube. Or leave a voicemail — see the show notes for the button. Reach me over on Twitter @SamBGoldman or you can drop me a line at [email protected]. Or on TikTok, reach out, connect @SamgoldmanRF.

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