Behind the Bastards - Part One: How The Rich Ate Christianity

Episode Date: March 1, 2022

We sit down with Dan and Jordan from knowledge fight to discuss the plot to make Christianity capitalist.FOOTNOTES: https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/sep-keyword/garet-garrett/ https://history.princeton.edu/about/publications/one-nation-under-god-how-corporate-america-invented-christian-america https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/corporate-america-invented-religious-right-conservative-roosevelt-princeton-117030/ https://books.google.com/books?id=a74LEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT112&lpg=PT112&dq=rights+wing+the+preamble+of+the+declaration+of+independence+espouse&source=bl&ots=gNYWDAheSo&sig=ACfU3U3l-yr508beoh_e9FeK_pZbioyrqg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjpzPP7r_T1AhVpJTQIHf6DCBsQ6AF6BAgMEAM#v=onepage&q=rights%20wing%20the%20preamble%20of%20the%20declaration%20of%20independence%20espouse&f=false  https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/13361/Celestini_Carmen.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://sci-hubtw.hkvisa.net/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40488759 https://www.nytimes.com/1964/07/24/archives/rev-dr-fifield-exminister-here-plymouth-church-pastor-in-brooklyn.html  https://sojo.net/articles/when-american-christians-were-socialists https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/2297/D_Bowler_Catherine_a_201005.pdf https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/evangelical-history/new-thought-roots-prosperity-gospel/ https://newrepublic.com/article/121564/gods-and-profits-how-capitalism-and-christianity-aligned-america Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh boy, what a great day. I'm feeling so good. You know what? I'm just gonna... Oh, what's that? Sophie, there's a knock at the door. Who is it? Should we see who it is? I mean, yeah. Why, it's Dan and Jordan from Knowledge Fight.

Hey, I had to come running when I heard that weird noise come out of your mouth. Second to go. You have to come check on you. All I want to say is... Oh, thank you, thank you. Normally, it's my atonal grunting that opens the show. I don't know how you guys... You have a great song to lead you in. I don't know how you so consistently open a show without just grunting and moaning.

We do that under the theme song. The mics are turned off. We're just stretching. Before you go run a marathon, you gotta just go... Just putting out on weed. Doing heavy, heavy in-out breathing. Just pump it up. Hello.

Hi, I'm Jordan. You're Jordan. You're Dan of the podcast Knowledge Fight. And also, in Dan's case, of the legal effort to Sue Alex Jones for repeatedly doing crimes. Yeah, it's weird that maybe a credit now, I guess. Consulting expert. Yeah, consulting expert on the latest deposition that Alex did in the Texas cases. People have pointed out multiple times that on episode three or four of our show,

I made the joke that he would be involved somehow in the lawsuit. And we laughed and laughed and laughed. 700 episodes later. I remember when I first started listening to your show, because I was doing the behind the bastards episodes on Alex Jones, I was like, God, I fucking hope someone involved in the case against him knows about these guys, because they are uncovering damning stuff every week. And it should probably be involved in the case. Yeah, it finally came about.

Yeah, good times. Yeah, well, congratulations. Would you like to talk about something completely different from Alex Jones? I think that would be nice for a change. That would be a delight. So here's a spoiler. I lied. I lied to you. God damn it! It's a precursor to Alex Jones. This is a story about how the wealthy in America ate and transformed Christianity.

Ooh, that's fun. Yeah, this is a story that is adjacent to the story of the John Birch Society. They're not going to come into it much here, but they are involved. And it is a story that is adjacent to the rise of Alex Jones, because obviously he's heavily influenced by the John Birch Society. This is a precursor. We've talked on this show a bunch, and I know y'all are very well aware, that like 72-ish was the first time the religious right was like a political block in the country, right?

We've got Falwell and these people kind of welding Billy Graham, welding the right wing into a Republican coalition for the first time. But that only was able to happen because of a process that got started in the 1930s, and that's what we're going to talk about today. I mean, I would have argued that the first was the Crusades, but you know, it's very similar. Why do you got to politicize the Crusades? Sometimes people, look, people are just vibing, you know? Just dudes on horseback, couple armies of children getting sold into slavery,

not a cell phone in sight, you know? It was non-apartism. That's the important thing about it. Yeah, that's exactly right. We were able to put down all of our petty disagreements to deluge Jerusalem in a river of blood. Trickle down economics, trickle up economics, all sides. De-politicize mass killings. I like that you asked if we want to talk about something other than Alex,

and I was like, yeah, maybe something light and breezy. No, absolutely not. I thought maybe it was going to be an episode about the bagel boss. Half of this episode is going to be me reading you letters that different millionaires sent each other talking about how to destroy democracy. That sounds about right. That sounds good, yeah. You know, I'm a big advocate, fan of interested in storytelling.

I think it's probably the most powerful thing that people do. You don't get no empire or social movement or civilization gets anywhere without having a set of stories that the people who are inside that thing believe and that really, to a significant amount, determines reality, right? There's a degree to which you can kind of ignore even physical reality if the stories are strong enough, as some of our anti-vaccine friends can attest. There's limits to that, but it's a pretty powerful thing. If you can get people to believe a story, even a ridiculous one,

you can get them to do almost anything. And capitalism itself thrives because of the stories people tell about it. The reality, of course, is that capitalism is a system that was cobbled together by a handful of rich people in the 1600s and 1700s. They created the first corporations, which allowed them to pool their money, share risk and profits for risky ventures overseas. And the first things they did was go to the Spice Islands and carry out a brutal genocide in order to gain a monopoly on Nutmeg.

That was the first thing capitalism ever did. I feel like you're being unfair to the East India Company, okay? This was the Dutch East India Company. Yeah, I mean, see, they were fine. It was a nonpartisan. Yeah, nonpartisan, absolutely. And hey, capitalism's not unique. Every system human beings have developed on a large scale is a river of blood. Like, they all are, you know.

That's just the way people be. But if you tell the story of capitalism accurately, which is that it's another chapter in the history of human beings finding ways to be shitty to each other in large groups, that's not something people like to hear, right? You're not going to get a whole bunch of people rah-rah-rah over capitalism if you're just talking about how they murdered several ethnic groups for Nutmeg. You're certainly not going to get a lot of rah-rah from the people who have a lot of capital.

Yeah, exactly. And those people like to find better stories, to explain what capitalism is, and to get people to identify it enough that they'll threaten a race war if you try to amend the system at all. Which is why groups like the Acton Institute, a right-wing Christian think tank, write stuff like this, and I'm going to quote from an article titled How Christianity Created Capitalism. The people of the High Middle Ages were a gog with wonder at great mechanical clocks,

new forms of gears for windmills and watermills, improvements in wagons and carts, shoulder harnesses for beasts of burden, the ocean-going ship rudder, eyeglasses and magnifying glasses, iron smelting and ironworks, stone cutting and new architectural principles. So many new types of machines were invented and put to use by 1300 that historian Jean Gimple wrote a book in 1976 called The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages. Without the growth of capitalism, however, such technical discoveries would have been idle novelties.

They would seldom have been put in the hands of ordinary human beings through swift and easy exchange. They would not have been studied and rapidly copied and improved by eager competitors. All this was made possible by freedom for enterprise, markets and competition, and that in turn was provided by the Catholic Church. Okay, I'm going to throw this out there. Got some notes. I'm going to throw this out there. It's a little late to respond to this letter.

No, no, no. I think it's about time. Somebody has got to refute this. Okay. I think kind of the underlying words that he was saying was slaves. Nothing would have been made without slaves. You know, like free labor. Yeah. Well, and it's just, it's so comprehensively silly because it's like,

well, but during the Middle Ages, a huge amount of the most significant technological development and philosophical development and like mathematical developments were being made by the different caliphates that were in charge of the Muslim world, which were not living under a capitalist system. But they were under the Catholic Church. Yes, yes. Famously, the Addison Caliphate. Big fans of the Pope.

I mean, yeah, it's a pretty ludicrous way to look at, to argue that like, it's a pretty ludicrous description of history, I think. And we could dunk on this article all day, but it's the reality of the situation is just Christianity did not create capitalism. But there is a story, which we're going to talk about today, of how capitalism hijacked Christianity. And the specific capitalists who masterminded this shit have names and like sent letters to each other.

And we have those letters. A bunch of people have written about this. So now it's time for a fun story, guys. Hooray! Our tale starts in the decades before the Great Depression, when the massive trusts and fortunes accumulated by robber barons of the Gilded Age clashed increasingly with organized labor, right? You start to get the 1880s, 1890s workers being like,

well, what if we all formed together into a large organization and tried to compete with the people telling us that our children should mine coal until they die. Hey, fellas, do you want to stop getting murdered and work to death? Yeah? All right. Let's go! Do we feel like there's an alternative to getting machined gun by our boss when we ask for a race? Right. And then they got machined gunned by their boss. And then they absolutely did. And occasionally the US government. So this clash is happening. And while it's, you know, part of why all of these clashes are happening

is that like the late 1800s are just the recession after recession. These like economic collapses brought on by the fact that, you know, you know why they're brought on. We've all lived through a bunch of economic collapses now. Yeah, they equivalent to Bitcoin of the day. Yeah, I mean, like it was Bitcoin. We've been on Bitcoin for a while. So the left is like swelling in this period into the early 1900s because of all of these economic collapses, which as economic collapse does tends to make people go like, well, maybe capitalism's not so great. You know, maybe the system could be changed somewhat.

A lot of those rabble-rousers in this period, these like labor leaders, a lot of them were not just Christian, but Christian members of the clergy. And these folks saw the socialist ends they were fighting for as not just in line with, but demanded by their faith. This was an era in which one in every 26 workers in the United States could expect to be maimed on the job. Like that is the early 1900s. One out of every 26 workers is going to be seriously injured or killed on the job. Everybody at Amazon is like, holy shit, one out of 26.

What a glorious era. Are you fucking kidding me? Yeah, this is such a glass half empty. 25 out of 26 didn't get maimed. Yeah, see? That's almost as good as COVID. Ministers like George D. Herron were outraged by the reduction of sacred human life to an economic unit, and they actually saw what capitalists were doing in this period as like offensive to their religion.

He would not like the present day at all. Yeah. He wrote an 1890s sermon called The Message of Jesus to Men of Wealth, in which he compared the struggle between labor and capital to the story of Cain and Abel. Herron argued that Cain's choice to murder his brother was, quote, the first bald, brutal assertion of self-interest as the law of human life, an assertion always potential with murder. So he was like, literally, the owners of capital are the descendants of Cain.

Right, right. Although then in that form, Christianity did create capitalism. I mean, there's an argument if that's what he's going to argue. But you're taking it out of Judaism's block then, right? Cain enables, but they got more claim to that. Then, of course, we get to a really uncomfortable conversation when we start saying that. I'm a small-minded fellow who didn't read the Torah close enough, and that's on me. The Abrahamic religions, I guess you could say that the devil created capitalism by convincing Cain to murder his brother. That's the argument Herron's kind of making here.

Right, right. Yeah, quote, the trial in progress, and he's talking about the trial of the labor movement, is Christ versus Cain, the decision to which the times are hastening us is, shall Christ reign in our American civilization? Like, shall Christ or Cain reign in our American civilization? Sorry. So that's how Herron frames it. The struggle between labor and capital is the same as the biblical struggle between Cain and Abel, and are we going to let them murder us? And unfortunately, the answer was, yeah.

All right, first thing that's unfamiliar to me about this guy, it seems as though he has read the Bible, which is concerning to me. It does seem like he might have read the Bible. No, that's an issue for me. I don't think Christianity is allowed to do that. But I see the Middle Ages got that one right. A minister who read the Bible. Now, that doesn't seem right. So Herron stumped for Eugene V. Debs, the hero of our episode on the Pullman Strike, when he ran for president heading the Socialist Party of America.

And I want to quote now from a write-up on this in the website Sirjourners. He was not the only minister to become a socialist either. One historian estimated that between 5 and 25% of all mainline Protestant clergy were socialist party members or voted for the party in the first three decades of the 20th century. Congregationalist minister Franklin Monroe Sprague wrote, Socialism from Genesis to Revelation in 1892. John Spargo, a Methodist minister, became a socialist educator. Norman Thomas, a Presbyterian minister, ran for president of the United States

as a socialist candidate from 1928 to 1948. Charles Vail, a universalist minister, was an important socialist writer. African Americans, both outside and inside of the Socialist Party, also demanded fairer economic systems that affected other facets of life, pushing white Christians and socialists towards, quote, a new abolitionism. So there's some cool stuff happening in Christian thought in the first 30 years of the 20th century. That doesn't... Good for them.

I'm really proud of them. You know, they had a good stretch. They did have a good stretch. This is the story of how that all got fucked up horribly. But is that the prevailing attitude of Christian communities? That is a really good question. Yeah, it is not. As they said, this is...

Somewhere between 5 and 25% of ministers in this period are members of the Socialist Party. So it could be 1 and 25. Yeah. Well, it could be 5 and 25. I don't know, something like that. But there's also this, you have to assume if 15 or 20% of them are members, you've got another probably 20 or 30% who are at least sympathetic, but not quite as far left. I think mainstream Christianity, because of how popular the labor movement is, is probably

broadly sympathetic to a lot of these aims, if not as radical as the guys we just cited. It is certainly not pro-capitalist, and it is not seen by the capitalists as being pro-capitalists. Christian socialists often combined the Gospel of Jesus and what they had read in Marx. The interpretation that these guys had was that Jesus was a radical who opposed capitalism. Less common was the idea that socialism could be a foundation for a universal humanistic religion, but there were some guys who said that, who kind of went from being Christian ministers to being like, well, now I'm more of just a socialist minister. And I feel like my Christianity's wrapped up in that, but this is like socialism is the

religion, should be the religion of mankind. You get that on like, that's the fringe. I don't like legislating from the pulpit. I'll tell you that right now. That's not what I'm in for here. Also, it sounds like exactly what Alex is terrified of. Yeah, the nightmare of nightmares. And a lot of the capitalists in this period are fucking terrified of this because it's

spreading really widely. The cause of Christian socialists got a big shot in the arm in August of 1929 when the global economy collapsed and the roaring twenties yielded to the Great Depression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in 1932 on the promise of providing Americans with a new deal. This involved a bunch of banking reforms, a raft of new social programs, a jobs program, a whole bunch of stuff. Now, actual socialists like Nicole Ashoff who wrote the New Prophets of Capital saw the

New Deal as it was essentially a way for capitalists who were more reasonable and less monstrous than some of the other capitalists to keep the system limping along without a socialist revolution. The Elizabeth Warren plan. Yeah, socialists saw the New Deal as like, well, this is like a shameless compromise to keep capitalism going. And it's actually not a good thing. And then FDR was a little bit like, hey, you know they could buy a lot of people to murder

all of us, so maybe let's just chill out and just call this one. We'll call this one a wash. I'm not going to take a stance on this. Yeah. I can't even walk, man. Yeah. I can't run away. I'm not going to run away.

I'm not going to necessarily endorse that we should never have done the New Deal. We should have just let the revolution come because I don't know that that would have worked out. But that is an argument of people will make. And Nicole Ashoff writes in her book, quote, capital's ability to periodically present a new set of legitimating principles that facilitate the willing participation of society accounts for its remarkable longevity despite periodic bouts of deep crisis following Max Weber, one of the foremost social thinkers of the 20th century.

This belief system is called this belief system, which justifies and legitimates capitalism and the primacy of profit making is the spirit of capitalism. So that's like this, the term that these some of these thinkers use the spirit of capitalism for the ways in which our justifications for it change over time. And the argument here is that kind of FDR was putting a new set of principles to legitimate capitalism. So capitalism is legitimate because we also have the social safety net and we'll take care of people.

And it's not the soulless system that we had in the decades prior. We've changed it and so it can keep going, right? And the fact that capitalism is this syncretic is seen by critics of capitalism as part of why it's so hard to fucking kill. It's kind of like, I'll change. Yeah. It'll be different this time. Yeah.

Take me back. Take me back. Come on. That's what I hear. That is what actual socialists are saying at the time. But that's not what capitalists see. So like the capitalists who are opposed to FDR see him as the literal embodiment of linen coming to burn their mansions and molest their expensive pets, right?

They don't see this as like, oh, he's keeping the system that makes us all rich alive. They see this as he's coming to tear it all down. People are dying in the streets as much. Yeah. Actually, I brought a letter from this time period because I wanted to join in. And this was written by a millionaire at, I think it was 1934. It just went. Wait, turn over the page.

Turn over the page. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Oh, you got to stop this. Yeah. That was the last. Yeah. That is an adequate summary of what these people are saying at the time and a number

of these dudes, Titans of industry guys who own companies like General Motors form an organization called the National Association of Manufacturers in 1895. I know them. Yeah. Oh, you know that, you know, Nam, the camp, the candy man was a yes, he sure did. Well, one of the founders of the John Birch Society. Yeah. Now, the NAM had been right in the thick of those gilded age recessions.

We talked about early. Like that's why this comes out in 1895. There's all these collapses and the left is rising. You know, you have these huge armed strikes and like militant workers organizing. And these people are like, well, if they're organizing with guns to stop people from bringing scabs and couldn't they organize with guns to take our stuff? You know, you know, that is that is one of the things about the organized left. So somewhat is like that that obsession with policing each other of being like, no, this

is how we protest. We only do it this way. And then if you go back in history and it's like they broke windows and threw grenades into places. They lit everything on fire. Yeah. There was not a lot of discussion about like, well, now you're making it violent. There was this discussion of like, how do we build the best grenades to throw at our

bosses? Exactly. They had nitpicking arguments about how many nails should go through the back. Yeah. Yeah. It was a different time. And so these these these businessmen get very scared of this different time and they create the NAM as a way to kind of like organize and develop a strategy to protect themselves.

So you know, Roosevelt comes to power and initially they're kind of they have a bunch of different things that they're that they're scared about. They're also really worried about like domestic industry getting flooded by foreign imports and stuff. But when Roosevelt comes to power and they actually see this big socialist legislation get passed, they start flipping out and thinking like, you know, also the thing that's happening this period is the USSR has just formed. So they're they're both seeing, okay, we had these armed workers in the streets.

They're getting more organized. They're inch the halls of power in Washington and they're going to make they're going to do what the USSR did and soon we'll all be, you know, executed and our stuff will be taken from us. So NAM put pivots to opposing the new deal. Their primary contention was that FDR sought to provide people with a sense of security and a safety net. And this was a bad idea.

This is literally what they're writing at the time. Giving people a safety net is a bad idea because if people aren't scared of dying in the street, they won't work as hard and the free market system will fail. I mean, this is absolutely true. I've seen a lot of trapeze acts and they work harder when there is not a net. Yeah, they do. There's a lot of a lot of lazy trapeze artists. That's right.

Walmart will have fewer employees if no one is going to starve to death if they don't work there. You might not be able to run Walmart the current way that it's run. People don't dance quite as fast as they do when you're shooting at their feet. Okay. Here's my plan. All right, we give everybody a social safety net, but you have to go through a gauntlet of like spiked things that are moving and like spinning.

You have to climb the agrocrack. Totally. You have to climb the agrocrack. That's the way to get to work every day. I actually think that would be dope. What if the Build Back Better plan were like, I'm going to say a trillion dollars for more agrocracks. What if it was just a better salary for Michael Malley?

Yeah. It goes 100% to Michael Malley. Some of it's got to go to Moe. Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That's what's going to split the left, Dan, is how much money goes to Moe. You see Moe or you see Malley?

What are you going to do? It's going to end like fucking Madrid in 1938, with people shooting each other in the street, banners with Moe's face, machine guns. It's insistence on paying Moe equally, it's wokeism, run amuck. Oh, God. Fantastic. You know what else is wokeism, run amuck, Dan and Jordan? What's that?

The products and services that support this podcast. Oh, shit. Unless it's the Washington State Highway Patrol. Yeah. They advertise it on your show now? They do from time to time. Jesus Christ. You're doing ads for cops.

I know. We're not doing them. They just come on the fucking feed. We're working on it, but we did an episode on the Washington State Highway Patrol recently, which they advertised on. It was like, what happened with Bloomberg? That's meta as hell. I don't think, I mean, they're wasting their money.

I don't think anyone who listens to any of these shows is going to become a Washington State Highway Patrol officer. Probably not. Probably not. I'll see like Epoch Times ads on left-wing videos I see on YouTube. It's very weird. Yeah. It's, it's, it's funny.

But you know, here's fucking probably I do that because Sophie has to bleep it. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. But the center of this story is a raspy, voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ah, we're back. Did you guys know that Blue Apron is the only food box company that runs an island off the coast of Indonesia where you can hunt children for sport? Did they buy Little Saint James? They did. They did. They bought Little Saint James too. They haven't got that one going yet.

That's down in the Bahamas. The only person I want to hunt is John Leguizamo and that's because The Pest was my favorite movie in the 90s. So that's just how it's got to go for me. I mean, I don't think any court would convict you, but that's a separate discussion. So we're talking this period where you've got the NAM who is terrified that, who starts advancing the idea that if you build a safety net, the free market system will collapse because people won't be scared enough of dying in the street.

Which is an argument you hear today. I actually just this week, Representative John Rose, a Republican from Tennessee, used this argument to explain why healthcare was not a right, why we shouldn't have universal healthcare. A quote, if you really want to be free, it can't be a right. We have to have an incentive for people to struggle to support themselves. This is when that line is invented, right? That was not always a justification that if we try to do a safety net, people won't work

hard. They're coming up with this stuff in this period. It's cool. It's good stuff. What a great scam. It is a great scam. What a really great scam to just look people dead in the eye and say, live or die, buddy. You should go to work today.

Yeah. Just amazing. If you are starving, then this whole system falls apart. It's a little insulting too in terms of saying the people who do things don't have any reason to do it other than pure survival. Yeah. I think a lot of jobs people would do it if money didn't exist in the same form. I think most of the people who were doctors would be doctors if we lived under a different

system. I think all of the people who are artists would still be artists, except for maybe Pitbull. I mean, I had to cut Dan's Achilles tendons to make sure that he stayed here, but other than that. So I'm always in this chair. Yeah, exactly. Yes.

Basically what you have to do with chickens to keep them in the woods, to keep them laying those eggs, baby. Yeah. Yeah, Dan. Come on, man. You've got to clip Dan's wings so he doesn't fly out and start another podcast. Right those coattails till I die. Can't help me going to Austin again.

The thing too that it seems weird is like this seems to imply that the people in the National Association of Manufacturers are only doing that to, they wouldn't be doing this stuff if they didn't fear for their lives. No, I mean, yeah, you are right that that is kind of, they're projecting a bit that like, yeah, literally everything you do is because you're afraid of winding up like the people you are fighting to keep struggling. So the resistance of these manufacturers to the rise and tide of socialism was at first disorganized and somewhat incoherent.

You know, like I said, the argument line they advanced is still around today, but that's not something that you're going to immediately get a lot of people on board with in order for that idea to become universal on the right. You have to lay some groundwork. So they decide to do that in a couple of different ways. They're trying sort of a shotgun approach. They have like a propaganda campaign dedicated to fighting anti-business sentiment, but people don't like big businesses ever really, like even today people on the right, nobody likes

big corporations, so that's not an easy thing to do. They do know the most important thing to do on the right is demonize giant corporations while at the same time being like, but you need to make sure they have all of your money. Yeah. I mean, like that makes sure of that. Yeah. And that's kind of why like that doesn't prove to be a very productive line for them either. When they first get their real idea of like, what's actually going to work to advance these

ideas in American society is when the red scare hits in the late 1930s and Texas Democratic Congressman Martin D's founds the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The media starts going nuts with like, there's, you know, reds coming here trying to do a USSR in the United States, all these dangerous anarchists and communists and whatnot. We need to invade Iraq. And these businessmen realize that like, well, no, the thing to do, it's not to fight anti-business sentiment. That's not going to be productive and it's not going to be to tell people they need to

struggle. It's you have to cloak this and fighting communism because people are scared of what they're hearing in the USSR and that's going to work a hell of a lot better than anything else. So D's publishes a book in 1940 called The Trojan Horse in which he claims communism is a religion that has replaced religious faith with materialism. D's warns that communists were waging a psychological invasion to conquer the American way of life. And some of the brighter guys at the NAM see this as the opportunity that it is. D's isn't saying anything about free enterprise here, but he's tying socialism in as opposed

to religion, which obviously in the USSR at least it was, you know, like they outlaw it, you know, you have all these- Endless commies. Yeah, there should have been like the far right sending up fireworks the moment he put that to paper of just like, this is the birth of a new god. Yeah, they get out there. It's like the telegram scene at the end of Independence Day. You're like, this is how this is how to do it, you know.

It's essentially a compound noun at this point, like godless communism. Totally. And some of these guys at the NAM who are not dumb men recognize that what needs to be done, D's got the germ of a good idea, but it's not enough to just say the communists are going to replace religion. You also have to tie capitalism to religion. You have to make Christianity intimately a part of capitalism, and that, that's how you fucking do this shit, right?

That's the groundwork you need to get people to believe all the shit you need them to believe if you want to keep all of the money in your hands, you know. Hey, if you want people to believe something fake, go to the people who already believe fake shit. I do apologize to our number one listener, the Pope. Jordan does not speak for everyone here. Big fan of the Pope. Not the new one.

The one who was a Nazi. Right, right, right, of course. Don't like that he was a Nazi or that he covered up a lot of sexual harassment, but he's actually, he's incredible at ping-pong, and you know, I appreciate that. Sophie's just letting this happen. Unbelievable. I can't believe that, Sophie. I've just been sitting here.

I probably would have jumped in, but I was trying to come up with a D's nuts. I've been doing the same thing. It's impossible to not think about that. Yeah. I was thinking like, can you believe how influential D's nuts are? Which D's? D's nuts? Oh, okay.

When they come up with this idea that like, okay, we need to tar the left as anti-religion, and we need to make people associate capitalism and Christianity together. When this idea is like, born, it's a pretty long, like, it's not an easy thing to do, right? For one thing, FDR is an office, and he is famous for being the first president to basically give religious sermons as speeches. A lot of his speeches, he's quoting from the Bible constantly. The National Bible Press actually publishes a chart where people can like, find on a regular

basis, and it'll like, give his speeches, and it'll list the Bible quotes that he's like paraphrasing or talking about or like, discussing. Like a bingo card? Yeah. Yeah. Because he's basically like a preacher, like that's how FDR talks to the nation. And FDR is really for all of the, you know, arguments that are very valid, you know, about him essentially stopping a socialist revolution by introducing reform.

He also really ties Christianity to anti-capitalism in his speeches. In one FDR states, quote, the money changers have fled their high seats in the temple of our civilization when he's talking about the new deal. So he's, NAM's plan to like, reverse this is they are dealing with like, this is not an easy thing, right? Today, it's obviously the left is godless and the right is Christian and capitalist. That is, they have a long road to get there at this point. They gotta basically climb the agrocrack.

Yeah. They gotta climb the agrocrack. Exactly. Right. That's the metaphor I would use. You have to hit each button along the way. You have to hit the combined capitalism with Jesus button. You have to hit that.

Yeah. A lot. What needs doing and they get delayed by a little thing you guys might have heard of. You haven't really covered it in your show. So I'm not sure if you're aware of it. World War Two, which what? Yeah. Yeah.

There was a second one. It was not as interesting. It was not as interesting. I got to go. It was less aliens and more temple of doom, you know? Yeah. Unfortunate. You hate to see, you know, a sequel that just doesn't live up to the original, but.

Saucemore Slump. Yeah. Exactly. World War Three, though. That's gonna be, that's gonna be our, that's gonna be our alien three. You know? Finally. Finally.

The good one. What? You don't, you don't like the last crusade? I like the last crusade. I think it's good. Actually, the last crusade is maybe my favorite of them. Yeah. It's so great.

Sean Connery and Harrison Ford. What more do you want? Oh, man. Sean Connery and Harrison Ford fighting Nazis. But the scene where he's got the stamp, he's got the stamp in the library and at the same time he hits the, that's just great comedy. That's just great comedy, man. It is.

It's good, good movie. So let's hope our World War Three is less alien three and more Indiana Jones and the last crusade. Fingers crossed, everybody. Absolutely. Fingers crossed. Our World War Three that may have started by the time this episode drops. Well, to be fair.

It's World War Four, according to some people, because of the Cold War, some of the people who are maybe involved in the story you're telling might do it that way. My argument is, if the Germans don't start it, it's not a World War, you know? If it's not from Champagne in France, it's not really Champagne. It's just a sparkling global conflict. Can I just say all of your laughs about the next World War? Pretty scary. Yeah, I mean, what else do you guys do?

Because they're scary laughs. We're all terrified. We're all terrified. You realize we're terrified. Yeah. It's like, Robert's not allowed to predict things, guys. So, you know, World War Two kicks off and this is bad for the NAM, both because a lot of the guys involved in the NAM were part of the America First Movement and did not want

to go to war because they were big fans of Nazi Germany. But it's also a problem because- I thought it was because they had spent too much time in NAM. Boom! Give me 50 point NAM. NAM, NAM. I gotcha. No.

We're just- All right. Everybody's got the same look, which is quiet disapproval. No one. No one. No one. I want more. I can't help you out when you yell boom and then want a high five.

I just can't help you. So during the war years, NAM's propaganda, they can't really, like, execute this plan that they've started to cobble together because the U.S. is allied with the USSR, so fear-mongering against the Reds does not work as well when you are shipping them as many tanks as you can possibly put together, you know, when you are handing as many guns as you have to the Soviets because they're the only thing standing between the world and a tide of Nazis. It's hard to get people scared about the Commies, you know? Yeah.

A little bit tough. Yeah. So they are kind of planning and thinking during this period, though. And one of the things that some of these people start to realize is that if they're really going to push this agenda through, if they're going to make Christianity and capitalism be the same thing in the minds of millions of Americans, it's not going to, a bunch of CEOs aren't going to make that happen. They need an inside man.

They need a popular, charismatic preacher who knows how to talk to other ministers and to congregations. They need an active partner who is a religious leader. And they find this partner in James W. Fifield, Jr. Now, I want to quote from a write-up in Politico by Kevin Cruz, who's done a lot of writing on this subject. In December of 1940, more than 5,000 industrialists from across the nation made their yearly pilgrimage to the Waldorf Historia Hotel in New York City, convening for the annual meeting of the National

Association of Manufacturers. The program promised an impressive slate of speakers, titans at General Motors, General Electric, Standard Oil, Mutual Life and Sears, Roebuck, popular lecturers such as etiquette expert Emily Post and renowned philosopher historian Will Durant, even FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, tucked away near the end of the program was a name few new initially. Reverend James W. Fifield, Jr. Handsome, tall, and somewhat gangly, the 41-year-old congregationalist minister bore more than a passing resemblance to Jimmy Stewart.

Addressing the crowd of business leaders, Fifield delivered a passionate defense of the American system of free enterprise and a withering assault on its perceived enemies in Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration. Decrying the new deals encroachment upon our American freedoms, the minister listed a litany of sins committed by the Democratic government, ranging from its devaluation of currency to its disrespect for the Supreme Court. Singling out the regulatory state for condemnation, he'd announced the multitude of federal agencies attached to the executive branch and warned ominously of the menace of autocracy approaching

through bureaucracy. All right. Yeah. I have to assume Emily Post had some notes on that speech. I think she was on board. Might not have been great etiquette though. We might not want to look too much into what Emily Post believed. It's wild that you could have like someone who is an etiquette expert whose name is

still recognizable. It is. It is. It's impressive. Someone was going around now being an etiquette expert. Yeah. Is that what an influencer is ultimately? Yeah.

No. No. Well. Okay. Emily Post was an influencer. I shot my shot and I missed. And that's fine. That's fine.

She was an early influencer. I mean, she was kind of like Marie Kondo, but of being polite in dinner parties. Yeah. Try not saying go fuck yourself. Yeah. So, Feifeld's primary argument to this huge room full of the richest people in the world was that capital could only save itself from the menaces of unionism and social democracy by tying itself in religion in opposition to Soviet socialism, which was godless.

He was adamant that the clergy would be big business's strongest ally in this quest. And his speech was met with thunderous applause. So this guy is saying exactly what these dudes have been thinking. And he also seems to be proposing a way forward in this plan. Feifeld had been beating this particular drum for a while. He'd gotten his start in Michigan. His big brother was a really popular preacher who gained prominence in that area for taking over a struggling church and turning it profitable.

And Feifeld did the same thing himself, and it was so successful that he got a gig at the first congregational church in Los Angeles in 1935. And I want to quote now from a paper by Eckert Toy from the University of Washington on Feifeld's background. When Feifeld became minister of the church, he realized it had incurred a substantial debt of $750,000, which is like $13 million today. To address the church's debt, he launched a campaign to raise the profile of the church, both locally and nationally, and he instituted an adult education series called College of

Life, which employed 14 professors from universities throughout California. He began broadcasting five radio programs and initiated a speaker series club. His public relations talent soon paid off, and the church was out of debt by 1942. So this is the guy who creates the first megachurch. And he does this in a very interesting way. Because that's... His first sermon was called Sinners in the Hand of a Wealthy God. That's basically, yes, that's almost exactly what he does, because he's in LA.

This is a church in an affluent part of the city. That's like the modern equivalent of $13 million in debt. And how are you going to make $13 million heading a church? Become Elron Hubbard. Well, kind of... Wait, what? Yeah, basically. Become an influencer.

Yeah, exactly. You create a sort of cult. But instead of you being the cult leader, you create a cult where you convince all of these rich people that they are godly by virtue of being rich, and then they'll give you enough money that you can get your church out of debt, right? Do you think... Do you think he's the guy... I don't know if you've heard this, but I'm more than passingly familiar with Christianity.

But when I grew up, the explanation of the like, you can't get... It's harder for a rich man to get into heaven than a camel through an eye of the needle. Everybody had this pitch of like, the eye of the needle was actually like this really narrow bridge that they've now built. This gate that they've now built. I actually just looked into this recently, and that's nonsense. No, of course it's nonsense. But I'm wondering if this is the dude who fucking pulled that shit off.

You know what I'm saying? Yeah. I don't think so. I don't think it goes back that far, but yeah, that exists in multiple of these synoptic gospels, and the word that's used is different, so it wouldn't be like referring to a specific gate. It would have to be... No, no, no, no.

The concept. So that's nonsense. It was very clear. But I think that that came about after this period that we're talking about. Right. Okay, gotcha. I think that specifically does, but the general thing of figuring out like saying that... No, no, no, no.

Despite what everyone says about Jesus, he actually thinks, if you're a good person, you get rich. What everyone says. What the Bible says. That was violent once in his life, and it was against bankers. No, no, no, no. If there was that time, he said he liked swords. There was that.

If you time to sell your stuff and get a sword. If you read the good gospels at one point in time, he murders a kid just forgetting in his way. So... Thomas. You get Gnostic now. That's the shit. He killed dragons.

Jesus was a badass ultimate superhero. Just murdering kids left and right. That's the Jesus. Yeah. He brought him back. So he's just fucking with him? Yes. He was more fucking with the parents.

It was a better time. That is the kind of Christianity I could get on board with. So Fifield gets his church out of debt by appealing to the wealthiest people in Los Angeles, and finding ways to show them that like Christian doctrine actually says, you don't need to give money to the poor. Sources will often describe him as politically conservative, but doctrinally liberal, and what that means is that like, he was very conservative with his politics, but he was liberal in his interpretation of the Bible because it let him justify his politics.

It was loose with his interpretations. He's a fun guy. So he tweaked the Bible a lot. Cruz notes that he, quote, dismissed the many passages in the New Testament about wealth and poverty, and instead assured the elite that their worldly success was a sign of God's blessings. This is a huge hit. He, I mean, again, he makes $13 million in the space of a few years, like four years

to get his church out of debt. He is very good at this. If you've ever read Douglas Adams's, I think the fifth book in the, there's a character where Fort Prefect goes to this planet, and there is a sex worker who explains that her job is telling rich people that it's okay to be rich, and that is exactly what that guy's job is. That is literally the whole thing he's doing. The whole thing.

It's just, it's okay for you to be rich and fuck with everybody. You're good. Yeah. You don't need to give your money up in taxes, but I'll keep telling you, I'll find, I'll cut the Bible apart to make you feel like a decent person. Isn't it actually charity to get me out of this debt? Yeah. It's like diametrically opposed to the slave Bible is his Bible is the rich person Bible,

and then they cut out the different shit for the other. Yeah. Yeah. So he, he, he, this is wildly successful. Again, he makes 750 grand in like four years, you know, and donations, which is a fuckload of money. So he decides, I got to take the shit on the road, you know, like I could, this works this well in LA.

I could make this work everywhere. He founds an organization. This is comedian. Yeah. Yeah. He's going to go on tour. Yeah. That's exactly.

He founds an organization called spiritual mobilization. Their mission was to quote, arouse the ministers of all denominations in America to check the trends towards pagan statism, which would destroy our basic freedom and spiritual ideals. Pagan statism is the term you will hear a lot. It is the first cultural Marxism. It's directly in that line of lineage to like pagan statism or to, to, to where we are now. Pagan statism is kind of like the first boogey man term they come up with.

I can see why they upgraded to, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because one thing throw Pagan in front of anything and it sounds cool as hell, you know, yeah, that's true. That's true. When I hear Pagan statism, I'm thinking of like Romans getting like drunk and, and, and running around the city carrying a bull on their shoulders and shit. That's the type of thing, I hope. Yeah. Hell yeah.

So the specific way Fifield justified Christian capitalism was to argue that God had imbued people with certain rights and responsibilities. We had the right to private property and the freedom of choice, including the choice to be poor. So if the government were to take private property from the rich and give it to the poor, that is a violation of God's law. The church then has a duty to defend against this. So you're not being political by being a capitalist church.

You're actually following God's law by being a capitalist church. So not only did Christianity invent capitalism, they also created sovereign citizens. Yeah. We got it all. So the ideals Fifield was exploring eventually formed into an ideology called Christian libertarianism, which is most accurately summed up as letting rich people do whatever they want and saying that's what God wants. You know, that's the, that's the idea.

I've seen a bit of that. Yeah. In my time. You kind of spend every waking day of your life in wading through the waters of Christian libertarianism. Hey, if Elon Musk weren't great, God wouldn't have given him billions of dollars. That's right. That makes sense.

That's what everyone says about Elon Musk. One of Fifield's major supporters was Herbert Hoover, the president who had gloriously led the United States into the jaws of the Great Depression and then spent the rest of his life angry that people had voted for FDR when they'd had a chance to get him out of office in 1932. What's wrong with living in a tent? What's wrong with living in a tent? That is Hoover.

Hoover's like, why don't you like your tents? Come on, it's a good tent. FDR won that election 472 electoral votes to 59. So Herbert Hoover is like licking his wounds. You know, he feels pretty honry about this. What were those 59? Do we look at? You can look it up.

There were a couple of states, you know, the bad ones. Nuts. Five bucks, as Tennessee is on there. I'll just throw that out. It was like, there was a union hotbed at the time, though. I don't know. Texas probably was, though. That's true.

Texas, yeah. Yeah. Texas probably. I don't know. Maybe we're getting it wrong and someone's going to get like up at us on Reddit. I have no idea who those states were. Hoover wanted to use Fifield. So they start up like a conversation and he sees Fifield as like a representative of

Protestant Christianity that he can use to snipe at FDR. In 1938 he writes to Fifield, if it would be possible for the church to make a non-biased investigation into the morals of this government, they would find everywhere the old negation of Christianity that the end justifies the means. So he's like, I want you to look into, you know, this government as an anti-Christian government because FDR gave people social security. Fifield follows Hoover's advice. Remember that year he writes and sends out a tract to more than 70,000 clergymen in

the United States and in the tract he says basically what Hoover had said and he begs his fellow ministers to follow him in opposing FDR's socialist policies. Fifield wrote, quote, we ministers have special opportunities and special responsibilities in these critical days. America's movement towards dictatorship has already eliminated checks and balances and it's concentration of powers in our chief executive. Which, you know, Jesus said the meek shall inherit the earth, but after the current rich people are already dead and their money is given away, well actually we'll see a thousand

years, maybe two thousand, three thousand years or so, the meek will totally inherit the earth. It's coming meek guys, don't worry. I promise, meek, you stay meek though, otherwise you're not going to inherit the earth. That makes perfect sense to me. That's a good point. Yeah, you got it. You do have to be a little fair here when people are talking about FDR being a dictator.

Obviously these folks are loony, but also if you are ever going to accuse a president of trying to be a dictator, FDR is a pretty good one, because like he does have a lot of power that he is centralized in himself. Totally. I mean, on the other hand, he had a lot of folk to fight against who were right next to him. There was a lot going on, you know, there was a lot going on in that period. He definitely was the president at one of the toughest times to be president, did a

lot right, did a lot wrong. Yeah. So Hoover, after Fifield sends this letter out to 70,000 clergy, Hoover notes like sends a letter back like thanking him and telling him how much he appreciates it. But all of this stuff, it's clear like sending out letters to ministers about this shit isn't enough to catch on in any meaningful way. Like Fifield may have sent this letter out, but that doesn't mean people are going to start preaching to their congregations that the FDR administration is evil.

For one thing, he's the most popular president there's ever been, you know? There is that. People, he got elected an awful lot. We like eating. Yeah. This guy's great. Very popular. And so a lot of these ministers say to Fifield basically like, I'm not going to do this.

Like everyone, the only reason my congregation haven't starved to death is this guy. What are you talking about? Yeah. And of course, there's also the fact that, you know, churches are tax-exempt, but there's ways they can lose that by lobbying directly, politically. There were. There were. There were.

There were. There were. He's got a lot to overcome. And he writes this letter, Hoover likes it, but it doesn't do anything. So Fifield on his own, you know, he's accomplished a lot in his little church. He can make rich people feel good. He's not going to change Christianity all on his own. But the NAM has the resources that might allow him to do this and kind of on their own.

They're not going to be able to make any of this, make inroads. But together, they can be an Oreo of fucking up democracy forever. Like a Voltron of shit. Like a shit Voltron. So in 1946, with the Cold War and its early days and World War II behind us, NAM's PR Department commissions a poll from the Opinion Research Corporation to determine which groups did the most to shape public opinion in the United States. Ministers topped the list.

And I'm going to quote now from a doctoral thesis by Carmen Celestini of the University of Waterloo. Quote, NAM interpreted this finding as being potentially harmful to the American people because according to NAM, ministers tended to be on the very left, both socially and fiscally. NAM members decided to take on the responsibility to halt a broader American swing to the left that was led by the clergy and influenced by the social gospel of the early 20th century. Robert Wilson, the board chairman of the Standard Oil Company at the time, wrote, unless the

practical minded men of business take the time and trouble to point out the facts of history and the serious flaws in these widely touted old world systems that have failed so miserably in practice, church leaders are likely to be swung to the left. They will hear only one side of the questions from left-wingers who do take the time to talk with them and on them. Oh my God. You lost that impression. No, I felt like he was here.

I felt like he's alive. I felt like I tried to bring him back. I tried to bring Bobby Wilson back. Look, do you know who my favorite person on SNL was? Jimmy Fallon. That was my favorite one because he never did a good job. Okay. I do.

I did like, you know, the beautiful thing about Jimmy Fallon is that it's proof that you don't need to be funny or talented or good at talking or good at anything or even legally a human being to be a popular television host. It's got to be nice. So the NAM launches a bunch of PR campaigns kind of based on Wilson's idea of trying to explain the facts of history, you know, to Americans, to counter this leftward swing of the clergy. And this is like a full court press.

By 1949, there's print, radio, TV ads, billboards, all aimed at mobilizing Americans against socialism and for Christianity. So Estini continues, quote, an initiative was led by Charles E. Wilson, general electrics president under the religion and America, an American life RIAL committee, which was a religious public relations campaign sponsored by corporations, religious leaders and the American government. As historian John P. Herzog described in this successful 10 year campaign, used celebrity endorsements to convince Americans that religious participation was a normative act.

So they're kind of trying, they're trying to like make the case in this that like socialism is anti-religion and religion, Christianity is inherently American. They're not yet saying capitalism is inherently Christian, but they are, this whole effort is sponsored by like general electric and shit, right? So you can see this stuff starting to get tied together. You got to lay the groundwork a little bit. You got to lay that groundwork. That's what they're trying to do here.

And in 1934 NAM spent $36,000 on PR. In 1937, it was $800,000 and it goes up from there. So they are like massively increasing their PR budgets to put this propaganda out there. One technique they pioneered, they're the first people to do this is they had a speakers bureau that would get speakers into public schools to talk to kids about Christianity and against socialism. They also were the first to build a press service that would provide editorial articles for newspapers to publish.

Just like, well, here's Alec, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, they're the first people doing that. And this original eventually reaches more than 7,500 newspapers in the United States that they put editorials in. This is a massive propaganda effort. Like, I understand that this is obvious and fundamentally a little naive, but like, that's not fair. It's not.

It's not. It's not. That's cute. It seems like it should be easier to convince people like of my positions on things just by telling them that because it seems so obvious that it's just like, that's not fair. Like, even if you disagree with my ultimate ends, just like, let's make that fair. Just one thing. Let's try and make one thing fair.

So it sounds like you don't like freedom. I hate it. It sounds like you don't like people's ability to speak. The freedom of a couple of dudes to place 7,500 articles in newspapers. Only freedom and oppression, man. But what is that other than speech? It sounds like you don't like the First Amendment. You know what?

It probably would have been a bad Supreme Court justice. I think we've found the pinko, Dan. I think so. Get Hoover on the foreign road. That diaper doper baby over here. You know who else will purge the Reds from our mist? Who's that? The products and services.

The products and services. Oh, I got that. Well, actually, exclusively purges children from their parents' homes and puts them on their island off the coast of Indonesia where you can hunt them for sport. And coming soon to Little St. James. Yeah, coming soon to Little St. James. It's going to be the Euro Disney of hunting children for sport. Oh, ads.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters

in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. Standing inside his hearse with like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called InSync. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So, as we've talked about this propaganda campaign that the NAM carries out has reaches a shitload of people, but it also doesn't do the trick.

It is not as successful as they want it to be because it's really crude and obvious propaganda. And I'm going to quote from Kevin Cruz again here. Ultimately, though, industry self-promotion was seen as precisely that. Jim Farley, chairman of the Democratic Party, joked that another group involved in this public relations campaign, the American Liberty League, really should have been called the American Cellophane League. First, it's a DuPont product, Farley quipped, and second, you can see right through it. Even President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took his shots.

It has been said that there are two great commandments, one is to love God and the other is to love your neighbor. He noted soon after the Liberty League's creation, the two particular tenants of this new organization say you should love God and then forget your neighbor. Off the record, he joked that the name of the God they worshiped seemed to be property, which yes, absolutely. It is nice. I mean, you could have put the nail on the head with the molok, but you know, you still

crushed it. I'm still proud of him. So, this effort that the NAM is like, and the part of the NAM that kind of like Wilson is leading, they're trying to support public religion, make the active religion anti-socialist and tie that into capitalism just by the fact that it's sponsored by corporations, right? It's kind of a subtle thing compared to what Fifield is doing. Reverend Fifield wants to make Christianity capitalist and celebrate wealth as the evidence that God loves you.

And that is like, you know, there's that chunk of the NAM that's kind of going about it a different way, but there's increasingly in the 40s, a group of guys in the NAM who start to see what Fifield's doing and are like, no, no, no, no, no, this is the way. This is what's gone to fucking work. And the two men who are leading that charge at the NAM are Jasper E. Crane, who is a Dupont executive and J. Howard Pugh. Now, does that name sound familiar to you guys? Pugh?

No. Pugh doesn't mean anything to you? Pugh, Pugh, Pugh, Pugh. Well, I mean, there's that. Obviously. You've never heard of the Pugh Research Center? Listen, listen, if you expect me to know that shit, you're way off base. No, you've heard of like the Pugh polls, right?

The Pugh Research. Yeah. Well, yeah. Well, yeah. Well, yeah, this is. No shit. What did you think he came up with? Church benches?

Legitimately, 100% thought he came up with church benches. Okay. I know. You think that's a joke? Johnny Pugh. Not a joke. Everyone was just standing for centuries before Johnny Pugh. Who else would name them then?

It had to be a guy named Pugh. No. Pugh is, Pugh is the namesake of the Pugh Research Center. He and his brother are, he and his brother are both rich business guys, and they start an organization called the Pugh Charitable Trust, and in 1996 the Pugh Charitable Trust starts, so before the Pugh Research Center is the Pugh Research Center, it's owned by the Times Mirror Company, and it's doing polling through there. And in 1996, the Pugh Charitable Trust starts funding the Times Mirror Company's research

center, and it gets renamed the Pugh Research Center. So that's where the name of the Pugh polling does. He does not found Pugh polling, but it is founded like in his name by the organization that he helped to found. So J. Howard Pugh was the founder of Sun Oil Company, and one of the wealthiest men on the planet, Sonoco, right? Like that's this dude, and he has all of the money ever. Him and a Dupont.

Yeah. It was, it's literally him and a Dupont, right? Just sit around talking about how tough it is to... The oligarchy. The oligarchy you could possibly all about. Yeah. Good times. Yeah.

Definitely these guys had strong opinions on yacht racing. No questions. How are we going to fix the World Series this year? Yeah. That's what I'm... Yeah. So, J. Howard Pugh dedicated a lot of his time earlier in his life to supporting the Republican Party.

He backed a slew of anti-new deal organizations with names like Sentinels of the Republic, the Crusaders, and the Independent Coalition of American Women. When he founded his J. Howard Pugh Freedom Trust, he stated that its mission was to warn Americans about socialism, welfare statism, Marxism, fascism, and any other like forms of government intervention to acquaint the American people with the values of the free market, the dangers of inflation, the need for a stable monetary standard. And again, Pugh, like all these other guys, these are like America first types, but then fascism, you can't support fascism because about half a million Americans die fighting

it. So, fascism and Marxism are the same. Same thing. Same thing. Ignore the 20 million dead communists. Why? Why? What are you going to complain?

Get out of here. Yeah. Same thing. Yeah, and obviously, fascism only ever gets to power with the buy-in of the wealthy. But you know, that's a story for another day and a story we told a couple of years ago. Yeah, I was going to say, that's a story for literally every story you tell. Yeah, that's just a story for forever. That's just the bell story.

So, Pugh's first big attempt to culture jam his beliefs about capitalism and the mainstream religion came through his work with an organization called the Layman's Council for the National Council of Churches. So, the NCC is like this big national church organization and his goal was not to put politics in the NCC. First, he just wanted to push them to not be political because he thought the clergy was so left-wing that you could never like turn them right. So, the best you can do is get them to not talk about politics and he eventually gave

the NCC up as hopelessly liberal and when he reported back to his NAM colleagues about the fact that like, hey, we're not going to get these leftist ministers to stop talking about socialism, his buddy Jasper Crane agrees that like, the NCC is a lost cause. Now, Crane had made his millions in plastics and like Pugh, he spent them backing a variety of far-right causes, including a newspaper he called The Free Man. He was heavily involved in Princeton's theological school. Is a slave. Yeah, is a slave to me.

He's got a free man, yeah. And he kept up a bracing correspondence with different pastors. When Pugh came to him complaining about the NCC, he wrote, quote, this nation, under God, was the slogan of the National Council of Churches when it was organized and I have always felt that it was an incomplete quotation that has been improperly used in some quarters. What Lincoln said was, this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom that is sound and magnificent for liberty comes from God and freedom, its environment, is maintained by the state.

The United States of America, dedicated to freedom, affected the separation of church and state, but that in no way threw over the doctrine that this nation is under God's governance. So you see why they're one under God to be added to things, right? Because under God to them means God wants you to be free, freedom is property. So by saying this nation is under God, we are saying this nation has to be dedicated to the preservation of property rights. That's the argument he's making.

It's like an entire speech is just like shut down to just like, I feel like you guys are incapable of critical thought and they're all like, yeah, totally, you're the smartest dude I've ever met, 100% Yeah, oh boy. And Dan, we are coming up to a quote you're going to like. So I think that might be the first time I've come across an idea that is now very normative in right wing circles that like separation of state doesn't mean this isn't a Christian country and to crane into pew Christianity and capitalism were hand and glove. They very much are in agreement with Fifield about this and crane and pew exchange letters

that we have. And one of these letters crane writes that the United States was presently mired it quote with ensuing bewilderment and terror, mounting crime, juvenile delinquency, sin, suffering and sorrow as the different manifestations of socialism have spread across the world. Communism, fascism, national socialism, interventionalism, Fabian socialism, the new deal, the welfare state, the danger becomes acute, civil civilization with liberty and human dignity seems doomed. Just five more things. I do love we got a baby and you're all about Fabian socialism, Dan.

I'm all about it. I mean, I guess Alex yells about it a bit. Yeah. I learned about it from watching you and talking about Alex. Do you sound like you're talking to like, uh, dad, like, I'm doing these drugs, I learned watching. So pew and crane, you know, this is a dark hour for them. They're, they're, they convinced civilization is doomed because they're the richer being

taxed. And they could have been a great comedy duo in Britain. Pew and then great. Right. Yeah. Pew and crane. I would watch the shit out of it. So when he plays at the King and Buckingham Palace, oh, amazing.

Pew crane and the Fife. Yeah. Hey, they call them Dr. Pepper because he drinks a lot of soda. That would have been a, that would have been a better world. So yeah, they, they decide after this thing with the NCC fails and they see like the propaganda that their buddies in the NAM coming up with just does not seem to be sticking the way they want it to, they decide to invest in Reverend Fife field. Um, now Pew was well aware of Fife fields work and while he, while he admired the Christian

libertarianism that Fife field, uh, supported, he was really cynical about the hands-off approach that Fife field took to actually spreading his ideology. These like letters that he's sending ministers, Fife field mainly just like shotgun to essays and arguments out to ministers that he had on his mailing list, but he believed in leaving the details of what they should do up to the individual ministers. He didn't want to actually tell people what to do. And Pew wrote about this quote, I am frank to confess that if Dr. Fife field has developed a concrete program and knows exactly where he is going and what he expects to accomplish,

that conception has never become clearly defined in my mind. So he's kind of critical about this guy, but Pew was savvy enough to realize that NAM's propaganda has failed. One of his colleagues in the organization reported in 1945 quote, of the approximately 30 preachers with whom I have thus far talked, I have yet to find one who was unqualified Lee impressed. One of the men put it most typically for the rest when he said, the careful preparation and framework for the meetings to which we are brought to is too apparent.

We cannot help but see that it is expertly designed propaganda and that there must be big money behind it. We easily become suspicious. So like what you're doing is obvious. So all right, all right, bail on the ministers. Now we got to go for the kids. Okay. I'm not smart enough to cut through our bullshit.

So let's convince that they're, they're children to support capital. I do like the after the kids. Yeah. Yeah. That's the plan. I also, I also like the idea that there's that, that realization of like this propaganda is too good. Yeah.

No one's going to fall for it. Yeah. It's so obviously well-funded. It's really shamefully obvious. Oh my God. This is when these Twitter accounts. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's one of these things, you know, what these guys are doing is very self-serving, obviously, and it's, it's very cynical and it's easy to believe that they're kind of like doing it cynically. But I don't, I think these guys are believers. I think they really believe what they are saying about Christianity and capitalism. I don't think they're doing this as sort of like a cold act of culture jamming. I think they are, they are trying to get their sincere beliefs out into the mainstream. That feels generous.

Yeah. Let me, let me, I'm going to read a letter to you that Crane wrote to Wilbur Leroux, a prominent Presbyterian in 1947 about spiritual mobilization, Fifield's group, because it gives you an insight into how Crane's thinking about things. They spiritual mobilization have simply stood for liberty of man as a son of God, created as a free being in the image of God. Now the insistence on liberty as a fundamental principle for mankind may be termed controversial because it is a revolutionary concept.

So is Christianity. Liberty is being attacked and called lots of things which it is not by the fellow travelers and even by many who lack understanding of the truth and indulgent idolatry of the state, a pagan philosophy. So that's, that's, he's, he's making like a pretty nuanced theological argument that liberty is property. Having property is a revolutionary concept because it means overthrowing the state. But you have to overthrow the state as a Christian because the state is a pagan philosophy.

It is an idol that's anti God. Like that's what this, I think he believes what he's saying. That is a question of, I mean, people believed a lot of crazy shit. Yeah. I mean, that doesn't make it okay. People still believe a lot of crazy shit. That is the question of like, are these millionaires trying to like exploit capitalism? Are they doing it cynically or are they doing it because that's what they believe about

the world? It is, it is like a question of cynicism. Yeah. I mean, I think it gets to the ultimate like stupid V evil continuum. Yeah. Like, yeah, of course you're stupid, but where on the evil continuum side are you if you're capable of like analyzing how evil your own actions are? Yeah.

Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah. And that is, yeah, that is the question. And obviously I don't, I don't purport to have an absolute answer to that, but I kind of feel like these guys were believers and I don't know, I feel like if you get a million dollars, the only thing you believe in is million dollars. You know what I'm saying? Well, but you also, you're going to find a way to justify that.

If you're a DuPont. Yeah. Well, yeah. That's kind of what I like. Your, your core belief is I would like more than a million dollars and then everything that spirals out from there. Yeah. But also if you're, if the belief system you live in is Christianity, your core belief

isn't just I want to have more money. Your core belief might be Jesus wants me to have more money, you know, like, that's true. It's a debatable point. I'm going to read a quote by Eckerd Toy writing for Pacific Northwest Quarterly again, kind of about. Is this, is this Eckhart Tolle? No, no, Eckhart Toy. Okay.

Okay. So far still an inspirational person in 1947, a five field and spiritual mobilization planned a program called freedom in peril. The plan was to send out the manuscripts of more than 15,000 copies of sermons on the subject of freedom. Ministers across the country were to preach them in October that year. All they had to sign was a return postcard indicating their willingness to preach on the subject of freedom.

There were built in incentives incentives in the plan. If they preached one of the sermons on a specific date, ministers would be entered into a contest for substantial prizes in a telegram dated October 13th, 1947. Fifield wrote to Crane that 25,000 pastors from a wide spectrum of denominations had preached his sermon on the perils to freedom as a part of spiritual mobilizations crusade. So now we have, Fifield is taking their money and he has shifted his tactics. Now he is trying, he is specifically trying to get people to do a thing. He's not just trying to convince them of something.

He's saying, Hey, I want you to write, I want you to write like a sermon. I've like, or I've written a sermon. I want you to, I want you to give this to your, your, your, your, yeah. If you do, you'll be entered into a lottery. And yeah, you can win money if you read this sermon. That's shady. And like if you could write a sermon, if it's the best sermon on the subject of freedom, we could like, yeah, you could, you could call it the shameless manipulation of faith

for corrupted venal ins. But Fifield also is a true believer. We have, or at least I think so. We have the correspondence these guys wrote out and Fifield feels like he's being sincere in what he says. In 1948, he sent this letter to Crane about their next move, I am believing more and more that we will not win our fight for liberty by laying the principal emphasis on the material accomplishments of our American civilization.

We must stress the spiritual and cultural accomplishments, the greater justice and the increase in the solution of social problems. The results of voluntary cooperation should be set forth as against the dire consequences of compulsion. The argument is clinched by the amazing material wealth, the aesthetic enjoyments and the greater opportunity for the pursuit of happiness. I think following this line of thought, we are in a stronger position to combat the attack of the collectivists.

Do you see what he's saying there? I think if everybody has a microwave, they'll be a lot happier. Yeah, if everyone has a microwave and we say, hey, you have that microwave because of Christian libertarianism. Exactly. And if you were to get healthcare, for example, maybe we don't get microwaves anymore. And celebrating the possession of that microwave is godliness in some form. Let's remember Jesus as parable of the servants and the talents.

The master gave one servant one talent and said, bet it on this and you might win a microwave. And then everybody, you know, didn't win a microwave, but that's what hope is. That's what hope is, that you might win a microwave. So yeah, by the late 1940s, you can see all of the pieces for the, what we've got going on now on the Christian right. Like you can see all of the pieces are there. They haven't quite been put together yet, but everything's in line. And when we come back in part two, we're going to talk about how Fifield Pew and the other

plutocrats at NAM struck back at the collectivists. Like this is now, they've built this machine and it is raring to go. But you know what else is raring to go? Before you get to that also, Hoover mostly was Pennsylvania. Sorry. I looked that up during one of the breaks and I wanted to make sure people didn't tweet it at you. Okay.

That's what it is. Hoover won Pennsylvania. That was most. God damn it. God damn it. God damn it. At knowledge underscore fight. Don't tweet anything about Pennsylvania.

God damn it. Yeah. Just get out ahead of that. Fucking Hoover. Speaking of Herbert Hoover, he's a big fan of your podcast, Knowledge Fight, which people can find at knowledgefight.com or wherever podcasts are in existence. Yeah. It's some of those places.

Yeah. I've heard of that. Yeah. We're not on some things though. We're not on a lot of things. No, that's true. We're not on happiness. We're not on the Stitcher.

Stitcher. We're not on that. Yeah. Impersonate Dan and Jordan and download all of their episodes and upload them on Stitcher. Do it. Yeah. You could do it. It'll only take you 1,100 hours.

Yeah. It would take you years of your life. All right, Dan, Jordan, any other plugs you want to throw out? No, I think we're good. I mean, you got a novel, Jordan. Oh, I do. Yeah. That was a while back.

People have been uninterested in that. I mean, you know, I'm working on another one. I'll tell people about that when it's done. All right. All right. Well, that's going to do it for us here at Behind the Bastards until Thursday when we'll come back and I'll make you guys sadder than you are right now. Yay!

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