Road to the Daily Wire: Neoliberalism and the Church

right wing media empire. You know, Ben Shapiro's people, Matt Walsh is there, and they are They've become increasingly powerful because of their ability to drive the actions and sort of like not even really mid level, like high mid high level like Republican officials, particularly at a state level, towards you know, horrific anti trans policies stuff like that. Yep, they've had this incredible divorced dad power of those two guys.

Like it's like a yeah, it's like a Pokemon situation, you know, like it just it's inside, it's like shaken ball, but sometimes they let it out and control their Republican

body with it. Yeah, and so okay, you know. But in order to really sort of understand who these people are and why they're able to sort of be like this, we need to talk about the ways that this is new, because you know, there's always been of writing, like Christian media figures who do terrible stuff, but the way the daily wire works is different than this stuff has worked

in the past. And in order to understand what is different about this than these sort of like previous eras of like Christian antiqueer violence, we need to talk about neoliberalism. So this is this is not the normal starting place. You're talking about the religious right, but if you want to actually understand what's happening right now, you have to go back to the origin and structure of neoliberalism so you can understand how it's shaped. Right when Christian organizing

the last about fifty years. I want to start this by talking about a guy who is not normally considered part of the Christian right at all. In fact, he's not even an American and his greatest influence is on his home country of Germany. The man I'm talking I want to talk about is Wilhelm rope Key. I've mentioned him on this show before, but that was several years ago. Now he is not a very well known figure, and that's not good because he is one of the smartest

and one of the most dangerous neoliberals. So in order to really get a sense of who rope Key is, we need to talk about the beginnings of neoliberalism.

really economists. I mean, some of them are, but it's a lot of sociologists. And this means that the way that they think about the world is very different than the way that like Hayek or you know, like a like von Mises or like all the you know, the sort of like mainline like guys who are economists in the neoliberal movement think the order. Liberal roles believe that there is a natural capitalist hierarchy in a society that

produces stability. But they also understand that capitalism in general and neoliberalism, like specifically the thing they're trying to bring about, adamizes people. You know, it destroys social bonds, It tears the fabric of communities apart, and it destroys the notion of any collective self identification, replacing them with sort of

market exchange and empty consumer symbols masquerading as identity. You know thing for example, the rise of stand culture or i mean, god like the thing we do, which is like it's.

It's like no, like we would have had the exact same economic and political system for the last thirty thousand years, but we haven't. So in order to do this, you have to make people into good neoliberal market subjects, and this requires the intervention of the state. The product of this is that Roki is one of the architects of

what's called structural policy. These are specific state policy things that are used to create markets by you know, sometimes it's it's there's a whole variety of ways that this happens, but by acting on and transforming like physically people right like what they do, what they believe, how they congregates, like what things they're allowed not allowed to do, what

things are incentivized. This, this is structural policy. This is the origin of what's later going to be called structural or reform, which is the kind of stuff that the IMF does to an economy to create markets by taking food from the mouths of babies and making the babies work to get the food.

like Roki. But rope Key realizes that, you know, there's a problem of structural policy as an abstract concept, right, which is that in order for it to work, you need to a take control of the state, because again this is a state, but there is a top down state reform project, right, and be there has to be something beyond the state to create the kind of subjectivity you need to instill, you know, to instill in people

to make them behave quote unquote as market agents. Right, you can't just use the state in the market to make people behave in the way that they're supposed to, you know, to be good sort of like workers for the workers for the Great market. You need something else is specifically, neoliberalism needs its own form of collectivity. It needs its own thing that creates social bonds between people. It needs its own kind of sort of identification to

combat the sort of collective society of the left. Now. Part of Ropekey's plan, and this is something you share us with the other order liberals is that they want to do this with you know, they want to use the patriarchal family and small businesses as like the sort of social basis of all of their sort of routing politics. This is very endurable routing politics stuff they also have. Weirdly, this is one of the things. It's in the fifties

and sixties. There's a lot of sort of on every side of the political aisle, like kind of romantic utopianism ish about like the countryside. You know, this can swing wildly between like Mao or like the Japanese fascists or

the neoliberals. They have this dream of sort of turning rural areas into these like bastions of like reaction against the left, and that did kind of happen in the US, but it didn't happen like it happened because the rural economy was completely annihilated and replaced with like a series of meth labs, not because I guess technically was a dowddream result. It's just that it didn't it. It wasn't the sort of idyllic like good like farmer family things that these people wanted.

But what makes rope Key kind of unique is that he's really one of the first of these people to realize that you need another force, and that force is the church. And this is something that people don't talk about a lot when they talk about neoliberalism, but a lot of these people are very very deeply Christian. Here's Ropeke talking about his ideal society, quote rendering to the king, what is owed to the king, but also giving to God what belongs to God?

just wants you to fucking have a king. Yeah, give shit to everyone needs to a God who is also the king.

he literally becomes a monarchist. But she does believe that there should be like I don't know, you describe it like there should be democratic parties, but that like actual economic policy shouldn't be like managed by them, Like you need like a super a thing above the democracy, which is the IMF, to make sure that there's the little the little democratic people don't like start getting any ideas about the economy.

And you know, the right has been able to make a lot out of sort of like this opposition to like the global bureaucracies or whatever, which is like, okay, like you guys made these things in the first place, Like I, I, you know, you don't get a fucking complain about the bureaucracies that you set up and ran, but you know I haven't stomped him. Yeah, but but rope key, rope key.

of times. There is a very powerful form of kind of like conservative Christian politics in Europe at this time. It's like the Christian democracy movements. There's like if every single country if you look at it like this, from like the fifties through like the nineties, I mean, and even to this day. In Germany, for example, like there was a party called the Christian Democrats yea, and they win like at least sixty percent of all elections, like

in Italy, they're in power for like forty years. But the problem with Christian democracy from the perspective of someone like Roki is that like if you sort of if you take like these parties, right, these parties are you know, these are these are the Christian Conservatives of this era. They are way way too far left for uh, for Roki.

And that's not just a sort of like Rope, Look got how far right Rope he is, although he is so like if if you took Elder Moro, who's like the great Italian Christian democratic statesman, multiple time Prime Minister of Italy, killed in an insane web of conspiracies, like

if you, yeah, look i'd labor. Like if you took Elder Morrow and you dropped him into the modern American Congress, he would be to the He is again the leader, he's like the leader of Italian Well he's technically from the central left faction of the Christian Democrats, but he's like the guy who's not a socialist or a communist, like in terms of Italian politicians, who's not also a fascist?

And if you took him from like the seventies and you plopped him into the American Congress, he would be to the left of AOC, Like AOC is pro ceasefire in Gaza, right, like she's she's pro ceasefire in Palestine. Alder Morrow allowed the Popular Threat for the Liberation of Palestine, which is the Palestinian Communist per mill terry, to operate out of and carry out attacks like from Italy. Right, like this guy you would like she is.

know you can you can do your stuff here? Could you imagine that shit happening? This guy was a this guy is a conservative in Europe right in like you know, so this is what Rope he's responding to, like the the existing Christian you know, and and and you know, to some extent, like the Christian the Christian Democrats are very very successful stopping communism, right, They're really good at it. They stop communism from taking hold anywhere in Europe. But

they're not like capitalist enough for ROKEI. So when we come back from this thing ROKEI would have loved, which is ad transitions, we're going to talk about more of what Rochi was doing and how it shaped neoliberalism and the Christian right. Woo yay, we're back. Roki is having a great time in his grave. We're gonna get the thing that makes him spin at his grave, which I'm very excited about.

Some of them, like I think like there are Protestant like Christian, but like yeah, but like a lot of a lot of them are Catholic, So I mean, it's it's it's a really interesting kind of like predecessor to like modern fire right politics, where you get these like both of the US and Latin America, where you get these sort of like these Catholic Protestant alliances like this

is this is like Matt Walsh. You know, we're gonna be talking about more in the next two days, Like is a Catholic theocrat, right, but a lot of his base are like you know, are like Baptists and like the more even more feral charismatic Christians and like you know, but but you know, but these these groups are able to sort of work together, but they're not able. They're

not working together way that Rokey wants. So and this is the thing that I think is very very scary about rop Key, and and especially about the people who took this model right, whether explicitly or implicitly, people who people who figure out the same because a lot of people, some people like kind of directly to go for Roki, some people discover it through like I very weird readings right wing readings of gramscy Uh, it's a whole thing.

I'll talk yeah one day I'm gonna get Eve on the show and we're going to talk about that, because it's fucking wild.

the essential elements of the modern Christian right. You promote neoliberalism with one hand, and then you sell the solution to the atomization that your neoliberalism causes on the other hand with the church and the church, yes, we will serve as the basis of your political organization.

and socially. And if it's not like actively combatd by the Church, this whole project is going to start to come apart. Now rope Key is not the man who's going to lead the mob of Christian fanatics into the

Promised Land. And part of this is also because he is like too racist for like the sixties, which again like so like in the parts of the sixties when he's saying the really racist stuff like segregation is legal in the US, right, like yeah, like that, this is this is this is where we're at with this off. He's too racist for that. And the thing that he's really really racist about is Rhodesia. Oh fucking hell like apearance, Yeah, yeah,

this is this is the Rhodesia pivot, which is that. Okay, So the orthodox neoliberals, people like Hayak are pro Rodesia, right, and this is Milton Friedman. These people are pro Rhodesia, but they're smart enough to use dog whistles and talk about it in terms of like economic terms and like stability of gard and blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Rooke is just openly saying race war shit like I'm not gonna read it, but he is effectively like the spiritual forefadder of like the four chan mass shooter like that, that's how racist he is. And you know, it turns out that just again openly like open race war shit is like too much for Hyak and he gets kicked out of the mainsream neoliberal organizations, and tragically, tragically for all of us. Rokey dies before you can see his beloved Rhodesia reduced to a pulp by a series of

anti imperialist insurgencies. He dies before he dies, before all of the Rhodesion or like society's fucking fuel supplies stored in one spot blown out.

is a Christian, white supremacist, patriarchal world. And to build it, the right is going to have to use the church to stave off the alienization and adamization of capitalism. And we're back now. In order to build this new world, the world that Ropekey sort of imagines, the religious right, the actual religious right that's going to bring this up

into fuition, sets off from a number of angles. I think the most famous part of this is probably the sort of moral majority infrastructure, which is this network of like Think Tank's political advocacy Organization's TV Network's mailing lists, like their own insane right wing colleges, god terrifying places. But the fundamental social basis right, the fundamental collective space around which the right is organized eyes was the church. There's been a lot of sociological talk in the last

few years about like quote unquote third spaces. So the third space is supposed to be this place that's like not the home or not the workplace that people can exist in and form bonds in. And you know, people talk about like bridge clubs blah blah blah blah blah. But the thing about the US is that, like the fucking YMCA, like all of these things that people talk about as the third space are just the church in different forms, yea literally church or a bunch of church run events.

have in Baptists. But the moment that still starts flipping, that's a very very dangerous sort of rear guard. You see this Naian American communities where like you know, Asian Americans generally, like the last two generations like Millennials and gen Z are tacking really really hard left, except the fucking Christians who are like forming this this insane rearguard. Because I've complained about this before around fucking I'm doing this.

This is this is this is a Christianity episode. I could talk about this that the thing the thing about Asian Christians is that they're all they're almost all like first Schenk converts, so they all have convert brain, which means completely fucking bat shit. Yeah. So you know, and this is one of the things that we're talking about here, right, is that the physically the church serves this very very

important engine kind of kind of revolution. There's this engine of sort of spreading reactionary politics even among groups of people who you normally wouldn't get that kind of sort of right wing politics from. And this is where, you know, face with the sort of leftward shifts in the US and the sixties and seventies globally too, face with you know, I mean literally the specter of revolutions and not even like sometimes not even specters like you know, this is

post sixty eight, right, there's been a bunch of actual uprisings. Yeah, and they're the place that they make their move is by trying to seize control of various pieces of church infrastructure. We're going to take a Catholic example and a Protestant example, and we're not going to do the obvious Orthodox example because we'd be here for a century. So let's start with Roki's beloved Catholic church. I think I don't know if I'm gonna do a little bit of left inside baseball.

I think people on the left tend to be really obsessed with the like liberation theology people. But the problem with liberation theology people is that they were around for maybe like thirty years, right, But by the time you get to the end of the eighties, these people are all dead, right, Like they're either dead or they're like Ortega and they've become these like literally they start calling themselves the Third Way and are like cutting all these

deals with like really right wing social groups. But so and so this means that the dominant politics of like the capital, like t Capital c. The Catholic Church is very gets very very right wing. Well it's not even that as much as it gets right wing, but it is very right wing. And the stuff that they're doing is very, very scary. One of the things that I don't think people really realize is that so that probably

you've heard the term gender ideology. Yeah, yes, yeah, do you know where that's from?

blah blah. Yeah, like natural this is this is this is the natural order. This isn't like a sociologically constructor thing. This is the natural It's been in tusays Billy b because they're like like unfathomably sexist.

like sexual reproductive rights. And the Red Fems are pissed off because I mean, there's a whole so they're they've been they're aligned with the Catholic Church is like an anti sex work thing and like an anti porn thing. And then also like a lot of the Red Fems, well, I gat, I got in so much trouble for saying this, but like, holy shit, there's somebody those people are insanely

trenchs phobic. Yeah damn wow. But you know, but like this, this is this, there's this massive battle inside the United Nations between a bunch of feminists and or like feminists who are like normal, and then like there's the shitty radvm factions and the Catholic Church on the other side.

And Pope Benedict in particular goes like all out on this stuff, both on the international level and in terms of like local churches like goes on the offensive against abortion and queer liberation, and meanwhile the Protestant Church is

doing like exactly the same thing. They're like pro except like I think, I think, like even more fascist, which is really really and I say, this is someone who has raised Lutheran like that that is really the core of Protestantism is like what if we did Catholicism but like somehow shittier, like like Martin Luther. One day, I'm going to do my thing on the world's greatest kind of revolutionaries and then one of them is Martin Luther, because oh yeah, very clear, because like like I might.

My argument for this is that the greatest kind of revolutionary is the person who starts out at on on the side of the revolution and then turns against it. And so Martin Luther's thing was he was trying to outflank the Catholic Church in the sixteen hundreds from the right on anti Semitism. Sorry, I meant a sixteen sixteenth century fififteen hundred and fifty hundreds, which is even worse, fifty hundreds Catholic Church they have expelled they have like

just they have there. This is this is in the period where they were like expelling all of the Jews from Spain right, and Martin Luther's trying to like flank them, and this is the kind of shit that's happening like in the US at this point, which is you know, this is this is this is the this is the Protestant sort of following the Catholic like why and in some ways blazing their own trail of going really hard right.

So probably the most famous and I think definitely one of the most important examples of this is the right wing seizure of the Southern Baptist Convention in nineteen seventy nine. So for people who don't know about the Southern Baptist Convention, they are a very very large and influential like group of Baptist churches, and they've been kind of like they'd been anti segregation, they've been sort of like trending left,

and there's this is one of the things. This is a very very famous thing in the history like if if you're you know, it's sort of like the history and mythos of the right wing is like in nineteen seventy nine, at this convention, these like there's like these group of pastors who are like, ah, the church is getting too woke or getting too left. They scrolled out this plan like on a fucking napkin to like how they were going to take over the church. And they

do it. They see they seek control Baptist Convention, and they purge all of their enemies and it is very very quickly, within a matter of like a couple of years, it's converted into this factory for right wing violence. Yeah, they they are. They ruthlessly Purgectingo sent in the churches. A bunch of churches leave because they're like, what, who the fuck are these people? Like just these absolutely right wing fanatics. Is like I've taken controls. A bunch of

churches leave, but a lot of them stay. And you know what they're what their project is is that they start creating these sort of totalitarian micro states, like in like this is this what they turn churches into, and this is what they turn households into, because these households become enormous centers of abuse, like just unfathomable amounts of violence can sort of get get sort of spread out

of this stuff. And you know the way that these things work, right is is is you may have seen have you seen those like fucking deranged umbrella memes that the Christian right makes on Twitter. No, so, okay, they're supposed to be like these like umbrellas, and there's like's some familiarly or the umbrella like protect you from the things. So there's like the family and is had the family.

They're like protected by the authority of the husband. You're protected by the authority of the church, protected by the authority of like the theocratic state.

constant surveillance. You are literally forced to through physical violence to maintain their gender norms. And this is the base of the Christian of the homophobic Christian right. These churches are pumping out shocktroopers. And these are the shock troopers both of neoliberalism and homophobic con transphobic violence. And when I say shockstroppers, I do mean this literally. Because an enormous number of these people, and this is part of the reason's politics, it starts to fall apart. Like I

grew up around these people. A lot of these people went to fucking a rock and got the absolute shit blown out of them. But you know, these people, like these these churches, this is you know, you can look at the sort of panopoly of the people who do right wing like homophobic violence. Right the queer basher, the peronew kicks their kid out of their homes for being gay, the homophobic boss who fires and abuses queer workers, the doctor who assaults us and then denies his medical care.

These people are pumped up by the church. And what the church is doing here is they're serving as the equivalent of sort of of unions in the left right. And when I say unions, I'm talking more like the nineteen oh seven IWW of in like the twenty twenty three AFLCIO. These churches are the social and organizational space in which the right constructions its world right, it's the sort of nexus of homophobic organizing from the beginnings of the Hope of Home, like right through like their fight

against gay marriage. But Kaba, something happened that rope well, I think rope Key might have suspected this, but something happens that his inheritors did not expect. And that's something is the only thing I failed to consider is what

if neoliberalism came for the church. So one of the things that has happened in the last and I mean literally we are talking the last ten years or ten to fifteen years, really the last like ten years, church attendants and this is also actually true well of synagogual mosco attendants with the church tendants has been declining way more. It used to be like you know, if if if you're are you a member of a church? Moster synagogurea like Gallup has been pulling this since the fucking forties.

It used to be the rate of it of being a member of a church st Agaga mosque was it was for like basically until like two thousand, it was hovering around seventy percent. It's now forty seven. That is a catastrophic drop. That is a rewriting of like fundamentally what the US is. The US has been a like Christian health state, like since it was created, right, Like the US is founded by like religious extremists whose problem

is that they weren't allowed to pursue Catholics enough. So this has been this has been a church country more so than like most of the European countries. You did the settling up until literally the last twenty years, and the drop between twenty ten and now is like fourteen percent. And this is this is and it's not just that the membership rates are going down, like the actual church

attendance is going down. And so in this context where less people are going to a church, less people belong to a church, the political strategies that have been based on using the church as like your default social network. Uh, they don't have the kind of reach that they used to. Yeah, and if that's your political strategy, this is a catastrophe

for you. Now, you know, we could talk that there are like, there are lots of reasons this is happening, part of which is sort of like the secularization of the US. Part of this is that there's been so many fucking atrocious abuse scandals in these churches that people

are just fucking leaving because that's what happens. Yeah, you know, and one day, one day, the thing I really will get canceled for is when I would the episode I do about how this happened in the DSA and how it just haulowed out the membership because you know, it turns out wh people get abused, they just fucking leave.

of like social bound you know. And and I mean one of the things I think you have to be careful of when you talk about neoliberalism tearing about social bonds is that not all a lot of those bonds sucked, Like it was not good that everyone with seventy percent of Americans were going to church, right, Like, not good at all. That sucked. It was deeply evil. But you know, it tears apart like it tears, it tears apart bonds, not entirely without regard to ideology, but it still does

do it. And this means this context has completely reshaped what right wing like anti career and anti transorganizing looks like. And the right right now, the right solution to that is the Daily Wire. And we will get explained that in very great length tomorrow and the day after that, So stay tuned.