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