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0:00
So, Erin, I kind of expected that
0:02
the Republicans would come for voting rights.
0:04
Yes. And, you know, civil rights. Yes.
0:06
And abortion rights. Of course. But I
0:08
did not think that they would try
0:10
to overturn the right to get divorced.
0:13
Oh, yeah. And it's not just
0:15
divorce they're targeting. So two pretty
0:17
wild things happened this week. First,
0:20
the Alabama State Supreme Court ruled
0:22
that frozen fertilized embryos, microscopic bunches
0:24
of undifferentiated cells, are legally people.
0:27
Just like me or you or
0:29
Zendaya. In
0:33
vitro fertilization, which helps people conceive, involves
0:35
retrieving and fertilizing several eggs and discarding
0:37
the resulting embryos that are either non-viable
0:40
or not implanted and carried to term.
0:43
At least one IVF clinic in Alabama,
0:45
actually the largest IVF clinic in Alabama,
0:47
has already shut down. Wow. Also
0:49
this week, Politico reported that a think
0:52
tank close to Trump is laying out
0:54
a second term agenda that would include
0:56
enshrining what it calls Christian nationalism. And
0:59
a big figure in crafting that
1:01
agenda has defined this as, among
1:03
other things, banning no-fault divorce, sex
1:05
education in schools, and surrogacy. See?
1:08
Republicans do care about women. I'm
1:13
Max Fisher. And I'm Erin Ryan. And this
1:15
is How We Got Here, a new series
1:17
where Erin and I explore a big question
1:19
behind the week's headlines and tell a story
1:21
that answers that question. Our question this
1:23
week, why does this newly
1:25
dominant faction of the GOP want to
1:27
go to war with surrogate mothers, sex
1:30
ed teachers, fertility clinics, and the concept
1:32
of divorce? So the story I
1:34
want to tell the answer to is
1:37
about that movement that you mentioned, Erin.
1:39
The rise of Christian nationalism from the
1:41
fringes of the religious right to now,
1:44
just in the last couple of years,
1:46
dominance of the Republican Party. Even
1:48
in the most doom and gloom scenarios laid out by
1:51
dejected Hillary Clinton voters on the day after the 2016
1:53
election. Not that
1:55
I would know. Not many people were
1:57
sounding the alarm that Republicans wanted to come for
1:59
divorce. divorce or IVF, but here
2:02
we are. And these are not
2:04
just little culture war flourishes. They are
2:06
part of a big unified movement, a
2:08
movement with a name and with followers
2:10
with the pockets. And if you look
2:12
at what they're proposing, this
2:14
is all just a first step toward what
2:16
they intend to be a radical transformation of
2:18
American family and private life. Okay,
2:21
Max, before we dive in, can you
2:23
just define Christian nationalism for us?
2:25
So generally it's understood to refer
2:27
to the belief that the United
2:29
States should be formally redefined as
2:32
a state of and for Christians.
2:34
There would be no separation of
2:36
church and state. All public institutions
2:38
would exist to further Christian principles.
2:41
And the Bible or interpretations of the
2:43
Bible would prevail over regular secular law.
2:46
Okay, it sounds a lot like something
2:49
that rhymes with spatriarchy, but
2:51
politically where does the movement come from?
2:53
So it's definitely that. But it
2:56
also has these very particular obsessions
2:58
and goals that
3:00
develop gradually over time in reaction to
3:03
a handful of big moments in American
3:05
life. The earliest you could
3:07
probably pin it would be
3:09
this famous speech by Billy Graham.
3:12
That's Billy Graham, the wildly influential
3:15
evangelical leader. Right, a speech by Billy
3:17
Graham that he gave pretty early in his career in
3:19
1952 about the Cold
3:21
War. I believe today that the battle is
3:24
between communism and Christianity. And
3:27
I believe the only way that we're going to
3:29
win that battle is for America
3:31
to turn back to God and back
3:33
to Christ and back to the Bible
3:36
as it are. We need a revival. That
3:38
sounds pretty familiar though. The idea that
3:40
America's enemies are also enemies of Jesus.
3:43
And of course, I remember George W. Bush
3:45
saying that God told him to invade Iraq,
3:48
which God would never do since that's where
3:50
we invented him. Well,
3:53
but this is where all that comes
3:55
from. Billy Graham with this speech convinces
3:57
a big subset of American evangelicals. that
4:00
there is this divine struggle
4:02
between secular politics and Christian
4:04
politics for the future of
4:07
humanity. And it's not a
4:09
far jump to see that struggle as extending
4:11
from the Cold War to the moral enemies
4:13
at home, too. Okay, so who are these
4:15
enemies at home? Okay, so not long after
4:17
Graham's speech, there are these two big radicalizing
4:20
events back to back. The
4:22
first is that in 1962,
4:24
the Supreme Court banned school
4:26
prayer. And this was really
4:28
destabilizing for evangelicals, especially. Well,
4:31
Billy Graham just told them that America was
4:33
God's crusader on earth. And now that same
4:35
America is barring their kids from organized
4:37
prayer in school. Right, it felt
4:39
to them like their identity, America's
4:41
rightful Christian identity, was under
4:44
attack by another godless enemy, the
4:46
federal government. Well, and not
4:48
to jump ahead too much, but this entire
4:50
parental rights movement that you see today mobbing
4:53
school board meetings and trying to defund public
4:55
schools. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's
4:57
all this sense that public institutions have
4:59
been captured by secular liberals who want
5:01
to destroy the quote unquote, real American
5:03
identity of Christian conservatives, which centers around
5:06
the nuclear family, which is always headed
5:08
by a man. In other
5:10
words, they see it as a struggle between
5:12
the state and Christian men over who has
5:14
final authority. Okay, so the end of school
5:16
prayer, what was the other big radicalizing event?
5:19
So for this, I talked to a woman
5:21
named Julie Ingersoll. She's a professor of religious
5:23
studies at the University of North Florida and
5:26
an expert on this movement. And
5:28
what she said surprised me. She said
5:31
it was a reaction against school desegregation
5:33
in the fifties and sixties. There
5:35
were a whole lot of people who wanted
5:37
their kids, their white kids out of the
5:39
context of public schools where there were going
5:41
to be black kids. They didn't
5:43
want to say that. And
5:46
when the whole movement came along with
5:48
a biblical argument that public
5:50
education is actually anti biblical,
5:53
which is what these folks argue that it's
5:55
not within the purview of the authority of
5:57
the state to run education. That's a family.
6:00
responsibility and therefore it's unbiblical.
6:06
They coincided the efforts to desegregate public schools
6:08
and the effort to build an alternative education
6:10
system to replace public schools to
6:12
transform the culture in terms of a
6:14
certain version of Christianity coincided with each
6:16
other in a way that was very
6:18
effective for the critique of public schools
6:20
and the rise of Christian schools. Wow,
6:23
America just cannot quit
6:25
racism. You know, like in
6:28
Forrest Gump, when Forrest Gump is in all
6:30
those historic... I feel like every historic event
6:32
in American history, there's racism. Racism is
6:34
the Forrest Gump. Yes, in the blurry
6:36
in the background or very prominent in the
6:38
foreground, racism is there. Racism is always
6:41
running. Well, so
6:43
all of this, like this backlash and
6:45
the sense of Cold War, crusaded all
6:47
kind of swirls together into this belief
6:49
that white Christian conservatives
6:51
are the real Americans and their
6:54
rightful place on top is under
6:56
attack. And now the great enemy
6:58
of American Christendom isn't global communism
7:00
anymore. It's the state and the
7:03
schools and the courts. Yeah,
7:05
and it's also the people that
7:07
operate outside of the white patriarchal
7:09
nuclear family structure. So LGBTQ people,
7:11
single mothers, women who have sex
7:13
outside of marriage. So
7:16
the state is doing things like passing
7:18
civil rights laws or enabling access to
7:20
contraception that make it easier to live
7:22
outside of that structure. And that's a
7:24
threat to its dominance. Yeah. So
7:26
their new crusade isn't to win the
7:28
Cold War. It's a battle against all
7:30
this social change happening in America and
7:32
against the liberal secular state they
7:35
see as carrying it out. Yes, culture
7:37
wars as holy wars. So then another
7:39
two big Supreme Court rulings deep in
7:41
that sense that the white patriarchal nuclear
7:43
family structure is losing its dominance over
7:46
American life. In Griswold versus Connecticut in
7:48
1964, the Supreme Court ruled that the
7:50
government can't bar women from accessing contraception.
7:53
This marked a huge shift in American
7:55
culture. It brought down the stakes on
7:57
the act of sex. Its
8:00
impact on women's freedom and by extension
8:02
the quote traditional American family Seismic
8:06
and then in 1973 the supreme court
8:08
ruled on rovi wade It didn't become
8:10
a political flashpoint until a few years
8:12
later when reagan and the evangelical right
8:14
rallied against it And ever
8:16
since a driving force behind american conservatism
8:18
has been returning power over the female
8:20
body back to men where it belonged
8:24
Right, but we're trying to understand
8:26
more than just the american right
8:28
broadly here, right? We're looking for
8:30
the genesis of this very specific
8:32
movement within it christian nationalism So
8:34
all of this cultural backlash is
8:36
kind of the petri dish And
8:39
it's around this point in history
8:41
that you start to see the
8:43
first buds of something more than
8:45
just cultural conservatism Or evangelical backlash.
8:47
It's that old billy graham mandate
8:49
for a crusade but now focused
8:51
on all these agents of cultural
8:53
change Yeah, like I still remember the
8:55
first time I saw that pat robertson quote from 1992
8:59
Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands
9:01
kill their children practice witchcraft destroy capitalism
9:03
and become lesbians I've only done like
9:05
three things on that list I
9:08
thought it was a joke. I had to I had to look it
9:10
up. I just sound sick. Honestly, it's super
9:12
fun Uh, so, okay So
9:14
at this point the evangelical
9:17
and christian conservative movements want to
9:19
roll back the clock But for
9:21
the most part the mainstream gop
9:23
is not going like full Theocracy
9:25
the thing we call christian nationalism
9:27
really starts to emerge after
9:29
september 11 There's this
9:31
wave of Islamophobia across the country
9:33
and it gets championed by some
9:35
not all but definitely some evangelical
9:37
leaders Who tell people that christians
9:40
are under like? Imminent
9:42
real physical existential threat from
9:44
within I remember this well Uh
9:47
people really were convinced that liberals
9:49
and muslims were in a league
9:51
to literally bring about sharia law
9:54
It's hard to it's hard to convey to people
9:56
who were not there how crazy america got it
9:58
was literally bah And
10:00
looking back on it now, it's it's
10:02
he. The Trump Era seems nuts and
10:04
it is and will always have been
10:06
nuts. But this. Iraq. War
10:09
era paranoia was a different flavor of
10:11
months later when of flavor that became
10:13
the thing that is now with us.
10:16
So like I know it feels like
10:18
so long ago. But Trump of course
10:20
rose on his promise to fight against
10:23
that made up threat on behalf
10:25
of the you know, white christian real
10:27
Americans. and he basically presents himself as
10:29
whether he realizes doing and are not
10:32
taking up that crusade against secularism, minorities
10:34
in the courts and social progress. The
10:36
increase in nationalists believe they. Have
10:38
been losing for sixty years. There.
10:41
Is a statistic that I think helps explain
10:44
why of all the ideological strains and Trump
10:46
is I'm It's the christian nationalist component. It's
10:48
really asserting itself now. In
10:50
Nineteen Ninety Nine, seventy percent of Americans
10:53
belongs to a house of Worship. By
10:55
Twenty Twenty that had fallen to forty
10:57
seven percent. While I twenty Twenty Three
11:00
pulls on that, thirty percent of Americans
11:02
claim no religious affiliation, which is an
11:04
eight point jump from just two years
11:07
prior to yes, yes. So Christians in
11:09
America are no longer the majority and
11:11
they know their numbers are shrinking snow.
11:14
Obviously, most religiously observant people do not
11:16
respond to their faith becoming less popular
11:18
by becoming the reins. Theocrats rats
11:20
argue about all christians here not talking
11:23
about are really hashtag, not all crysis
11:25
letting. Her. White conservative who already believe
11:27
the your country is being taken away
11:29
the this feels like the godless settlers,
11:31
the women, the gays, the non whites
11:33
are winning the war. on america's christian
11:36
identity to so this think tank that
11:38
we mentioned at the start of the
11:40
show the one that laying out this
11:42
agenda for trump second term is called
11:45
the center for renewing america and an
11:47
or the these names sec they have
11:49
a big likes being we'll that they
11:52
turn sell a random words yes anti
11:54
to yes have a lot of the
11:56
things that they want are not obviously
11:58
linked to christian like restricting
12:01
legal immigration or dismantling
12:03
federal agencies. And that
12:05
to me is really telling, really embodies how
12:08
Christian nationalism has come to
12:10
me more than just writing
12:12
Christian morality into law. It's
12:15
come to stand for this like
12:17
holy war to put women, minorities,
12:20
LGBTQ people and secular people back
12:22
in their place and to put
12:24
white Christian men back on top,
12:26
at least according to their imagined
12:28
pasts of you know, great
12:31
white Christian male utopian dominance. Absolutely.
12:33
And there's this group called Project 2025, another Chad GPT
12:35
name, that's
12:38
linked to the Center for Renewing America
12:40
and a line in the Project 2025
12:43
manifesto, which is scary-ass reading. Yeah. If
12:46
you've ever read Stephen King's The Stand and
12:48
you were like not scary enough, you
12:50
might want to read Project 2025. There's
12:52
a line in it that spells it out.
12:54
Quote, freedom is defined by God not man.
12:57
And that that's kind of become the
12:59
core of this thing we
13:02
now call Christian nationalism. It's
13:04
really a promise for authoritarianism
13:06
on behalf of white
13:08
conservative Christians who see themselves as
13:10
both a persecuted minority and America's
13:13
rightful dominant group. So
13:16
Julie Ingersoll, the religious studies professor
13:18
who we talked to, really emphasized
13:20
this when I asked her about
13:22
the Alabama State Supreme Court decision
13:24
that banned IVF by characterizing frozen
13:26
embryos as people. Well, I think
13:29
the theocrats that we're discussing see a
13:32
patriarchal family as a basic
13:34
organizing building block of
13:36
society and policies
13:38
and practices that undermine that
13:41
and provide options for women to
13:43
make different life choices are
13:46
a threat to how they
13:48
want society to be organized. And
13:51
This movement to forcibly impose certain social hierarchies
13:53
is behind the desire to ban no-fault divorce,
13:55
too. I Have to say, when Trump was
13:57
elected, I was one of the Cassandras. Running
14:00
around with my hair on fire and
14:02
warning that this would spell the eventual
14:04
and not just abortion, but also birth
14:07
control and fertility treatments. but I did
14:09
not see it coming that a man
14:11
who has been divorced twice would usher
14:13
in a politically formidable backlash to no
14:15
fault divorce. Holiday.
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From executive producers of Succession, HBO's
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The Regime premieres March 3rd on
16:12
Max. Can
16:20
you actually explain that? The No-Fault divorce
16:22
and why that, of all things, is
16:24
in the crosshairs now? Sure.
16:26
Before No-Fault divorce was signed into law in California in
16:29
1969 by a certain governor named Ronald Reagan... I've
16:32
heard of him. Woke hero. If
16:35
a couple wanted to dissolve their marriage,
16:37
one party had to demonstrate that they'd
16:39
been wronged by the other party. That
16:42
meant proving abandonment, cruelty, bigamy, adultery, impotence,
16:44
or domestic violence. Bigamy. Bigamy.
16:47
This led to what I'm going to classify
16:49
as madcap shenanigans between couples who would falsify
16:52
spousal wrongdoing in order to break
16:54
up. For example, having one
16:56
half of the couple photographed pretending to
16:59
have an affair with a third party,
17:01
the couple had hired to prove
17:03
adultery. It's kind of a fun way to
17:05
go out, honestly. Madcap shenanigans. It's fun that you
17:07
get to share that little adventure as a way,
17:09
as a kind of denouement for your marriage. It
17:12
would be...it would make a great screwball comedy. The
17:15
entire economy of Reno, Nevada once centered
17:17
on women moving to town to establish
17:19
residency so that they could be granted
17:21
a quickie Nevada divorce. Okay, but
17:23
why would a religious nationalist
17:25
movement be so outraged by
17:27
this? No-Fault divorce
17:29
was another way that women gained a
17:32
modicum of power by making it easier
17:34
to leave unhappier, abusive marriages. Now,
17:37
somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of
17:39
divorces in the U.S. are initiated by
17:41
women, depending on who you ask. One
17:43
study found that as different states legalized
17:45
no-fault divorce, the female suicide rates in
17:47
those states would drop by an average
17:49
of 20 percent. Wow. Yeah,
17:52
there was a lot of hand-wringing in the 1980s
17:54
and 90s about how divorce was tearing the
17:56
American family apart, but in fact, the
17:58
American family was kind of a... nightmare for a
18:00
lot of women trapped inside it. Oh,
18:03
I see. So the old way of doing
18:05
divorce meant that the husband had to consent
18:07
and could withhold that consent to lock their
18:09
wives into unhappy marriages, which these numbers suggest
18:11
they were doing on a huge scale. Exactly.
18:14
Or drag his wife to court and
18:16
she would have to prove things. And
18:18
it's a lot to put somebody through,
18:20
especially if they're being subject to cruel
18:23
or inhumane treatment. And
18:25
that's why the far right hates it
18:27
when it's easy to divorce. In places
18:29
like Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, and Nebraska, in
18:31
the last year conservatives have been floating
18:33
the idea of eliminating no fault
18:35
divorce. And several influential right-wing
18:38
gadflies have seized on the cause. I'm
18:40
not going to name them because they're
18:42
annoying. They've decided the party to
18:44
blame for the destruction of the American family
18:46
is the woman who chooses to leave her
18:48
shitty husband, not the husband for being
18:50
shitty in the first place. Okay, but
18:53
even in their wildest John
18:55
McNaughton illustrated dreams, no
18:58
fault divorce isn't really going to be eliminated
19:00
in the near term, right? No, probably not.
19:03
No fault divorce is really, really popular.
19:05
I see why. But Christian nationalists are
19:07
trying another attack by introducing a new
19:09
type of marriage that makes it harder
19:11
for people to divorce by design. A
19:13
new marriage dropped. Yes. It's called covenant
19:15
marriage. And in places like Louisiana, Arkansas,
19:17
and Arizona, couples can already opt into
19:19
it. I am almost afraid to ask,
19:22
but what is a covenant marriage? Couples
19:24
opt into it to eliminate the
19:26
possibility of no-fault divorce for themselves.
19:29
They agree to premarital counseling and
19:31
to narrowed acceptable parameters for divorce.
19:34
It's not very popular. I see why. In
19:36
the states where it's an option, fewer
19:38
than 1% of couples have opted in,
19:40
but at least one famous person has,
19:42
Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. Ah,
19:45
yes. Mike Johnson, who swears that he's
19:47
not a Christian nationalist, but has a flag
19:49
in his office with the phrase Appeal
19:51
to heaven that is widely considered a Christian nationalist
19:53
motto. That Guy? Yep. That Guy. The Guy who
19:56
compared himself to Moses at a dinner where he
19:58
thought there'd be no press. Yep. The
20:00
guy wrote the Emeka Spree for the
20:02
losing side and Lawrence be Texas the
20:04
supreme court case that legalize same sex
20:06
relationships. That one. That the very
20:09
same, the Speaker of the House is
20:11
not a full throated the A crowd
20:13
is at least incredibly flirty with Chris
20:15
and nationalism. Other new not be flirting with
20:18
prisoners. From his innocence him to his as
20:20
him well they are long say probably by
20:22
season three. Hey well. Like
20:24
you said earlier, Christian nationalism is
20:27
also behind. In some ways. the
20:29
current parental rights movement to the
20:31
schools are portrayed as corrupting secular
20:34
institutions, intruding on the rightful social
20:36
order, and the answer is to
20:38
take over the schools, or even
20:41
to just completely different them in
20:43
favor of unregulated home schooling. Yeah,
20:46
it's already happening to and do you know
20:48
a childcare is so expensive in the allegedly
20:50
pro family state of Utah? Oh why.
20:52
Because there's a belief among certain conservative
20:55
state lawmakers that women should not need
20:57
daycare center, they should be staying home.
20:59
They should be looking after the kids.
21:01
They should be cooking and cleaning. They
21:03
should not have a job. And
21:06
without access to birth control or
21:08
abortion care, the assumption is that
21:10
they be looking after a lot
21:12
of kids. Have to wonder if
21:14
this is part of why initiatives
21:16
like Universal Child Care or Paid
21:18
Parental Leave which pull incredibly well
21:20
nationally across the political spectrum. Nonetheless,
21:23
keep failing at the federal level too,
21:25
so that. Is what confuses
21:27
me about the opposition to
21:29
in vitro fertilization. It's
21:31
literally a fertility treatment. To.
21:34
Help women have more babies. You have
21:36
it, is that the right type of women?
21:38
Okay, let's revisit the Alabama Supreme Court ruling
21:40
from earlier this week. The court ruled that
21:43
for the purposes of liability, destroying a human
21:45
embryo is the same thing. As
21:47
murdering a baby. It. Is
21:49
absurd on it's face and it as a ah
21:51
you're right, it's a big yikes But there are
21:53
a couple reasons that I the As is next
21:56
in the cross hairs. One is that conservatives are
21:58
coming for birth control. the been very. about
22:00
this. And in order to chip away
22:02
at contraception access, they'll need to legally
22:04
define human life as beginning at the
22:07
moment of conception because some contraception works
22:09
by interfering with the implantation of a
22:11
fertilized egg. Oh, I see. So if
22:13
a blastocyst is a child, marina
22:15
is murder. IVF might
22:18
just be collateral damage. Okay,
22:20
and IVF, of course, can also
22:22
help people who exist outside
22:24
of that idealized Christian family structure
22:27
in order to have kids, like
22:29
older moms, women becoming single moms
22:32
by choice, LGBTQ couples, and it's
22:34
also used by cancer patients
22:36
who want to have kids later on. Yeah, take that
22:38
cancer patient. More collateral damage in the battle
22:41
to take away birth control. Of course, it's
22:43
impolitic to say you want to do this
22:45
to reimpose men's control over women's bodies. So
22:48
you get things like this Heritage Foundation
22:50
speaker arguing that taking away birth control
22:52
is feminist, actually. It seems to me
22:54
that a good place to start would
22:57
be a feminist movement against the pill
22:59
and for rewilding sex, returning the danger
23:01
to sex, returning the intimacy, and really
23:03
the consequentiality to sex. And
23:05
a great deal follows from an intentional
23:10
reconnection of women's opting intentionally
23:12
to reconnect with the fullness
23:14
of our embodied nature. Did
23:16
you see rewilding sex? Did I
23:18
hear that correctly? Rewilding sex. Not
23:20
that women have been using contraception and
23:22
abortion for the entire history of human
23:25
civilization. Whatever. Even Nikki Haley,
23:27
who has tried to present herself as
23:29
a moderate on abortion, told an interviewer
23:31
this week that she too believes that
23:34
frozen embryos are human children. I mean,
23:36
embryos to me are babies. So even
23:38
those created through IVF. I
23:40
mean, I had artificial insuffination.
23:42
That's how I had my son. So when
23:44
you look at, you know, one thing is
23:46
to have, to say, sperm or
23:49
to save eggs. But when you talk
23:51
about an embryo, you are talking about,
23:53
to me, that's a life. So
23:55
I would really like to write all
23:57
this off as like nutty fringe stuff.
24:00
that has no chance of becoming law.
24:03
But a survey last year found that 21% of
24:06
self-identified Republicans now adhere to the
24:08
core principles of Christian nationalism, even
24:10
if they don't call themselves that,
24:13
and another 33% are sympathetic to
24:15
those principles. And this
24:17
sort of Christian nationalist ethos is trickling
24:19
into mainstream culture too. If
24:22
you go on TikTok lately, you'll see all these
24:24
videos of what's called Tradwife content. Oh, yeah, I've
24:26
heard of this. Which depicts the life of a
24:28
stay-at-home mom as one of leisure and ease. Usually
24:31
a beautiful, skinny white woman with perfectly
24:33
well-behaved, clean children, doing things that most
24:36
stay-at-home moms rarely have time to do,
24:38
like making bread from scratch. Can
24:40
we hear one? Embrace yourself.
24:43
So prep my man's lunch with
24:45
me. I'm gonna show you guys
24:47
a great tuna pasta salad recipe. That's what
24:49
he's getting. And a piece of
24:52
pumpkin bread. I made it yesterday. It's on my
24:54
channel as well. So let's get
24:56
cooking. So the promise of Christian nationalism is
24:58
give up all your eggs, but you get
25:00
a tuna sandwich? You
25:03
get a tuna salad and pumpkin bread.
25:05
Everybody knows pumpkin and tuna go great
25:07
together. I hope
25:09
she's got a nice pack for that lunchbox because
25:11
her man is about to get a stomach
25:14
bug. The
25:16
message is that quitting the workforce
25:18
is not the economically treacherous decision
25:20
that study after study has shown
25:22
it is. And actually
25:24
that spending all day, every day and taking
25:26
care of children is automatically the most fulfilling
25:29
thing any woman could be doing with her
25:31
body and her brain. Enforced
25:33
female subservience is an important tenet of
25:35
Christian nationalism. And these TikTok creators, whether
25:38
they realize it or not, are just
25:40
a new soft power avenue to promote
25:42
it. Well, and you're now
25:44
hearing prominent Republicans just call themselves Christian
25:46
nationalists now. Like here is our pal
25:48
friend of the show, Marjorie Taylor Greene,
25:51
a couple of years ago. We need
25:53
to be the party of nationalism. And
25:56
I'm a Christian and I say it proudly. We should
25:58
be Christian nationalists. If
26:00
the Republicans learn to represent most of
26:02
the people that vote for them, then
26:04
we will be the party that continues
26:07
to grow without having to chase down
26:09
certain identities or chase down certain segments
26:11
of people. Trump has clearly picked
26:14
up on all of this. In
26:16
a way that he really was not in 2016 or
26:18
even in 2020, is really now bending himself to
26:23
the winds of Christian nationalism and bending
26:25
himself to its influence within the party.
26:28
Here he is at a rally in
26:30
Iowa in December. Upon taking
26:32
office, I will create a new
26:34
federal task force on fighting anti-Christian
26:37
bias to be led
26:39
by a fully reformed Department of
26:41
Justice that's fair and equitable.
26:43
Its mission will be to
26:46
investigate all forms of illegal
26:48
discrimination, harassment, and persecution against
26:51
Christians in America. They are
26:53
going after Christians
26:56
in America. Who can believe all
26:58
this stuff? Oh,
27:03
you love the Bible so much, name five books.
27:07
Name five books in the Bible and they
27:09
can't be the New Testament like ones named
27:11
after. I didn't say old one and new one. No,
27:14
those are just sections. See, again.
27:16
Well, you're the Christian nationalist here. So
27:20
all of this really clarifies how
27:22
a serial philandering, clearly non-believing Trump
27:24
can become the standard bearer for
27:27
Christian nationalism. And why
27:29
you see right wing evangelical leaders praising him
27:31
as leading America in a great religious struggle
27:33
against the forces of evil. And why so
27:36
many of the January 6th rioters waved like
27:38
placards of Jesus wearing a MAGA hat. Yeah,
27:41
it makes sense of a lot
27:43
in retrospect. And it's not that
27:46
these people's religious beliefs are insincere.
27:48
It's that this movement has kind
27:50
of Infused this besieged,
27:52
crusading, holy War American Christianity with
27:54
also a very deep hatred of
27:57
social progress and a desire to...
27:59
to overturn it. And if Trump
28:01
delivers on that, then to them
28:04
he must be a holy man.
28:07
Okay, well it's not your imagination
28:09
and it's not an accident. There
28:11
really are a lot of seriously
28:13
retrograde things happening right now and
28:16
loot. a combination of a decades
28:18
long movement which is now a
28:20
powerful and well money group that
28:22
believes. God. Has chosen
28:24
them. To. Control the future of
28:27
this country. Whether this country actually
28:29
wants any of it or not,
28:31
it's not a hypothetical future scenario.
28:34
Christian nationalism has become the driving
28:36
political force, one of our two
28:38
major political parties. Today.
28:41
And they're already getting some real victories
28:43
on the state level. But. I'm.
28:45
A go along get along Santa guys. So I
28:47
think I'm not only in intuit, I'm gonna pull
28:49
up tic toc and I think I'm just going
28:52
to your driveway. You're going to go travel. I,
28:54
you know what is that? The future? I would
28:56
rather sit and and conformists. In boy I
28:58
think you're actually a boat rocker boys
29:00
gives. Advice to. I'm
29:03
bringing a gender equality to the tried right
29:05
moment to have an ear and tips for
29:07
meaning as checker less. Throw to tic Tac
29:10
sign. It's an
29:12
I use it isn't isn't that insists that woman
29:14
says density to do all the things that man
29:16
is. This is a distortion. And it's his. Men
29:19
has never has to prove that they
29:22
can tunnels attention to why such as
29:24
them into the mess with a to
29:26
this woman in and ought to be
29:29
judged as quickly as a synonym for
29:31
it is in his eminently if they
29:33
participate in humans is a movie has
29:36
some cases of has this. Would
29:51
It is how we got years media. Exposure
29:56
Aaron Producers: is
30:00
our associate producer. Evan Sattin is our
30:02
sound editor. Kyle Seglund, Charlotte Landis, and
30:05
Vassilis Fotopoulos who engineered the show. Production
30:07
support from Leo Sessa, Itsy
30:09
Quintanilla, Raven Yawamoto, Natalie Bettendorf,
30:12
and Adrian Hill. And
30:14
special thanks to one-a-day hosts, Trevel Anderson,
30:16
Priyank Garabindi, Josie Duffy-Royce, and Juanita Tolliver
30:18
for welcoming us to the family. As
30:30
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Cookware. Each pan they make isn't just designed
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