It Could Happen Here - Road to the Daily Wire: Neoliberalism and the Church

Episode Date: January 17, 2024

In part 1 of our series on The Daily Wire, Mia and James go back to the origins of neoliberalism to understand what makes The Daily Wire different than the Christian right before it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now

at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida.

And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. CallZone Media. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about, I mean, I don't't know this is coming out like tuesday right maybe wednesday you probably know what this podcast is about if you don't it's

about things falling apart and putting it back together again i'm your host mia wong with me is james hi ma'am i'm really excited to uh yeah to learn some stuff i'm sure it'll be great no nothing well okay the the good news that the first guy we're talking about died that's that's the only good news great great i guess it's slightly more good news but we're doing some episodes about the daily wire uh you're gonna get a lot more actual stuff about the daily wire in the next two episodes. This is the, this is the preliminary background information episode, but you know,

if people who aren't familiar with the daily wire, the daily wire is a very large and very powerful right wing media empire. They're, you know, Ben Shapiro's people, Matt Walsh is there and they are, they've become increasingly powerful because of their ability to drive the actions of sort of like not even really mid-level like high mid high level like

republican officials particularly at a state level towards you know horrific anti-trans policies stuff like that yep they've harnessed incredible divorced dad power of those two guys and like it's like a uh yeah it's like a pokemon situation you know like they're just it's inside it's like shaking ball but sometimes they let it out and uh and control the republican party with it yeah and so okay you know but in order to really sort of understand who these people are and why they're able to sort of be like this we need to talk about the ways that this is new because you know there's always been sort of right-wing like christian media figures who do terrible stuff but the way the daily wire works is different than this stuff has worked in the past and in

order to understand what is different about this than these sort of like previous eras of like christian anti-queer violence we need to talk about neoliberalism oh good so this is this is not the normal starting place you're talking about religious right. But if you want to actually understand what's happening right now, you have to go back to the origin and structure of neoliberalism. So you can understand how it shaped right-wing Christian organizing in the last about 50 years. I want to start this by talking about a guy who is not normally considered part of the Christian right at all. In fact, he's not even an American and his greatest influence is on his home country of germany the man i'm talking i want to talk about is wilhelm rope key uh i've mentioned him on this show before but that was several years ago now he is not a very well-known figure and that's not good because he is one of the smartest and one of the most dangerous neoliberals

so in order to really get a sense of who rope key is we need to talk about the beginnings of neoliberalism so we need to talk about hayek and his sort of attempt to recruit a bunch of new liberals to oppose well mostly to oppose communism it later becomes about also opposing fascism but the problem that hayek has is that so in the 19th this is happening in the 1920s like really in the 1930s the problem is that the people who hayek have been trying to recruit from germany during the 30s all joined the nazi party so many such cases yeah this is a real issue for them. Yeah, yeah. Once again, the lips have let us down. Shocked. Yeah, so, you know, in the 1940s after the war, when Hayek is trying to do this again,

he turns to William Roepke instead of the original guys who'd been Nazis because Roepke had been out of the country for the whole Nazi thing, so he kind of had skipped out on it. Okay, smart move on his part. Yeah. so he kind of had skipped out on it okay smart move on his butt yeah and you know this this gets him an invite to like montpelier and so the whole sort of the origins of neoliberalism and rope key is of he's one of the architects of what's called ordo-liberalism so the order liberals are one of the factions of you know they're one of the factions of neoliberalism. What's interesting about them, I mean, we're going to talk a bit about what they believe, but what's interesting about the order liberals is that they're not really economists.

I mean, some of them are, but it's a lot of sociologists. And this means that the way that they think about the world is very different than the way that Hayek or von Mises or the sort of mainline guys who are economists in the neoliberal movement think. The order liberals believe that there is a natural capitalist hierarchy in a society that produces stability but they also understand that capitalism in general and neoliberalism like specifically the thing they're trying to bring about atomizes people you know it destroys social bonds it tears the fabric of communities apart and it destroys the notion of any collective self-identification replacing them with sort of market exchange and empty consumer symbols masquerading as identity you know think for example the rise of stan culture or i mean god like the thing we do which is like yeah it's gonna say streamers you know so your friends are on your phone yeah so this is extremely

bad and ropke realizes this is a real issue for the success of neoliberalism because people don't actually like being completely autonomized market agents with no real social relations other than wages and contracts. And, you know, if presented with these options, they might, for example, turn to communism or God forbid anarchism. Yeah, but Roebke, you know, Roebke is on the side of bad and the side of bad yeah a great title for the episode neoliberalism colon it's me as biography oh god yeah ropke's conclusion from this is that you can't just rely on the market passively coming into existence because if markets were supposed to passively come into existence or if they were you know like the sort of like spontaneous order thing that hayek talks about when he's lying like

if that was actually true they would just have they there would be everything would be market economies already yeah yeah so yeah so yeah yeah it's like no like we would have had the exact same economic and political system for the last 30 000 years but we haven't so in order to do this you have to make people into good neoliberal market subjects and this requires the intervention of the state the product of this is that ropke is one of the architects of what's called structural policy and these are these are specific state policy things that are used to create markets by you know sometimes it's it's there there's a whole variety of sort of ways that this happens but it by by acting on and transforming like physically people right like what they do what they believe how they

how they congregates like what things they're allowed not allowed to do what things are incentivized this this is structural policy this is the origin of what's later going to be called structural reform which is the kind of stuff that the imf does to an economy to create markets by taking food for the mouths of babies and making the babies work to get the food yeah it's great it's the only way yeah and that part of neoliberalism broadly a lot of that comes from order liberalism and it comes from people like ropke but ropke realizes that you know there's there's a problem with structural policy as an abstract concept right which is that in order for it to work you need to a take control of the state because again this is a state but this is a top-down state reform project right and b there has to be something

beyond the state to create the kind of subjectivity you need to instill, you know, to instill in people, to make them behave, quote unquote, as market agents, right? You can't just use the state in the market to make people behave in the ways that they're supposed to, you know,

to be good sort of like workers for the workers for the great market. You need something else is specifically neoliberalism needs its own form of collectivity. It needs its own thing that creates social bonds between people it needs its own kind of sort of identification to combat the sort of collective society of the left now part of roebke's plan and this is something he shares with the other order liberals is that they want to do this with you know they want to use the patriarchal family and small businesses as like the sort of social basis of of all of their sort of right-wing politics this is very normal right-wing politics stuff they also have

weirdly this is one of the things it's in the 50s and 60s there's a lot of sort of on every side of the political aisle like kind of romantic utopianism ish about like the countryside yeah you know this can swing wildly between like mao or like the japanese fascists or the neoliberals they have this dream of sort of turning rural areas into these like bastions of like reaction against the left and that did kind of happen in the u.s but it didn't happen like... It happened because the rural economy was completely annihilated and replaced with a series of meth labs. Not because of...

Which I guess technically was a downstream result. It wasn't the sort of idyllic good farmer family things that these people wanted. So... Yeah, they got there in an interesting way yeah with like massive agribusiness and meth labs are your two choices in life yeah and like and you know so

like like yes they this is one of these things where instead of achieving their goals through cultural means they achieve their goals through like the massive uh like unbelievable economic violence but you know okay so that that's the other thing that that and that stuff's all sort of standard neoliberal theory right but what makes ropke kind of unique is that he's really one of the first of these people to realize that you need another force and that force is the church and this is something that people don't talk about a lot when they talk about neoliberalism but a lot of these people are very very deeply christian um here's ropke talking about his ideal society quote rendering to the king what is owed to the king

but also giving to god what belongs to god so what belongs to god now i'm concerned oh i mean he's it's funny because like he's taken the bible verse like he's taking the render unto caesar like what belongs to caesar render under blah blah blah but like it's he's made it enormously more alarming yeah yeah deeply like because like like the thing about the render under caesar is that that's a statement about about like living under the roman empire right right like this is just he just wants you to fucking have a king yeah yeah give shit to and then also a god who is also your king right it's not even like uh like the necessity of the state thing like you you just dumped dumped in like a pointless hereditary inbred person to give money to yeah i mean he's

not like i so okay i i should i should probably not slander him as thoroughly as i'm doing here because i don't actually quite think he literally becomes a monarchist but he does believe that there should be like i i don't know how you describe it like there should be democratic parties but that like actual economic policy shouldn't be like managed by them like you need like a supra thing above the democracy which is the imf to make sure that there's the the little the little democratic people don't like start getting any ideas about the economy you like a yeah like a technocracy like a like yeah yeah but you know but state but like the thing with the technocracy and this is this is

genuinely kind of what has been happening in europe is that like living under a technocracy really sucks yes like it sucks like politically it sucks materially and it sucks like emotionally and you know the right has been able to make a lot out of sort of like this opposition to like the global bureaucracies or whatever which is like okay like you guys made these things in the first place like i i you don't you don't get a fucking complaint about the bureaucracies that you set up and ran but you know that hasn't stopped him yeah but rope key rope key you know so a lot of the other order liberals become really sort of like you know are become obsessed with taking over the imf which they do they take over the world bank and they become you know they do that stuff rope key is obsessed with using the using religion as like another kind of social force that he can bind to the neoliberal sort

of movement together with and so he sets out to form like like a react kind of like reactionary catholic international to bring neoliberalism to the world. That is a troubling concept. Yeah, so it doesn't work, which is the good news. The problem is, it doesn't work. It's not that it doesn't work because it's a bad idea. The reason that it doesn't work is that he's trying this in the 50s and 60s,

and it is too early for that shit. Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, I mean, and this is something i i feel like i should at some point i should actually do a deep dive into this on the show but i've talked about this a couple times there is a very powerful form of kind of like conservative christian politics in europe at this time uh it's like the christian democracy movements there's like if every single country if you look at it like this from like the 50s through like the Christian democracy movements. There's like every single country, if you look at it like this, from like the fifties through like the nineties, I mean, even to this day in Germany,

for example, like there was a party called the Christian Democrats and they win like at least 60% of all elections. Like in Italy, they're in power for like 40 years. But the problem with Christian democracy from the perspective of someone like Rokey is that like, if you sort of, if you take like these parties right these parties are you know these are these are

the christian conservatives of this era they are way way too far left for uh for rokey and that's not just a sort of like rope look at how far right rokey is although he is um so like if if you took aldo moro who's like the great italian christian democratic statesman multiple-time prime minister of italy uh killed in an insane web of conspiracies like if you took yeah look i'm not gonna name like if you took aldo moro and you dropped him into the modern american congress he would be to the left he He is, again, the leader. He's like the leader of Italian. Well, he's technically from the central left faction of the Christian Democrats, but he's

like the guy who's not a socialist or a communist, like in terms of Italian politicians, who's not also a fascist. And if you took him from like the 70s and you plopped him into the American Congress, he would be to the left of AOC. Like AOC is pro-ceasefire in Gaza, right? Like, she's pro-ceasefire in Palestine. Aldo Moro allowed the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is the Palestinian Communist paramilitary,

to operate out of and carry out attacks, like, from Italy. Right? Like, this guy, you would, like, he is... Well, if you go far enough right you might get that as well to be fair no but it wouldn't be the pflp though yeah i guess i guess some of the german neo-nazis kind of like them but right yeah yeah like like imagine in the u.s any politician being like yeah the pflp could operate out of the U.S. Our only condition is that we're going to let you operate, but we're not going to protect you from Schimbed or whatever. Not Schimbed, the Mossad.

Yeah. We're not going to protect you from the Mossad, but you can do your stuff here. Can you imagine that shit happening? This guy is a conservative in Europe, right? In the 70s. So this is what Roebke's responding to. The existing Christian...

To some extent, the Christian Democrats are very, very successful at stopping communism. They're really good at it. They stopped communism from taking hold anywhere in Europe. But they're not capitalist enough for Roepke. So, when we come back from this thing Roepke would have loved, which is ad transitions, we're going to talk about more of what Roepke was doing and how it shaped neoliberalism and the Christian right. of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Woo, yay, we're back. Rokey is having a great time in his grave we're gonna get the thing that makes him spin in his grave which i'm very excited about excellent but okay so you know like as we've sort of been talking about the christian democrats are not the christian the christian democrats in a lot of countries are catholic um some of them like i think like there are protestant like christian but like yeah but like a lot of a lot of them are catholic so i mean it's it's a really interesting kind of like predecessor to like modern far-right politics where you get these

like both in the us and in latin america where you get these sort of like these catholic protestant alliances like for this is this is like matt walsh you know we're gonna be talking about more in the next two days like is a catholic theocrat right but a lot of his base are like you know are like yeah baptists and like the more even more feral charismatic christians and like you know but but you know but these these groups are able to sort of work together but they're not but they're not working together in the way that Roebke wants. And this is the thing that I think is very, very scary about Roebke, and especially about the people who took this model,

whether explicitly or implicitly, people who figure out the same, because a lot of people, some people kind of directly discover it from Roebke, some people discover it through like i very weird readings right wing readings of grom she uh it's a whole thing i'll talk yeah one day i'm gonna get eve on the show and we're gonna talk about that because it's fucking wild what the yeah wow i feel like gromsky is not the most like inaccessible you know like it you know there are some like left theorists who just just vomit words so much so

you can just project meaning onto them but i have not their thing their thing this is this is uh evander's like thesis is that these people saw that like leftists were reading gromsey read gromsey and were like we're going to do the right wing version to this okay yeah so now i see yeah but but you know so some of these people are rediscovering the same things that ropke's figured out in like the 50s but the thing that ropke is doing is he he's figured out all the essential elements of the modern christian right you promote neoliberalism with one hand and then you sell the solution modern Christian right. You promote neoliberalism with one hand, and then you sell the solution to the atomization that your neoliberalism causes on the other hand with the church.

And the church, yes, will serve as the basis of your political organization. Yeah, that is a way of doing it. Yeah, and it's interesting. There's a lot of people who do this same thing. At some point I'm going to finish my I'm going to write the thing about this is actually what libertarianism is

to a broad extent. Libertarians are the people who take the problems that the market produces and then try to sell you a solution which is more of those same problems but worded differently. Yeah, yeah so with people allowed to smoke weed now so it's fine yeah but but you know but this is this is the christian version of it um but again rope key to a large extent is smarter than the people who come after him because he understands that this project this this sort of christian deliverable project

is a constant struggle against atomization that and and this atomization has to be actively politically combated by the church like both politically and socially and if it's not like actively combated by the church this whole project is going to start to come apart now rope key is not the man who's going to lead the mob of christian fanatics into the promised land and part of this is also because he is like too racist for like the 60s which again is quite racist like so like in the parts of the 60s when he's saying the really racist stuff like segregation is legal in the u.s right like yeah like that this is this is this is where we're at with this stuff he's too racist for that um and the thing that he's really really racist about is rhodesia oh fucking hell

i didn't expect a rhodesia appearance yeah yeah this is this is the rhodesia pivot which is that like okay so the orthodox neoliberals, people like Hayek, are pro-Rhodesia. Milton Friedman, these people are pro-Rhodesia. But they're smart enough to use dog whistles and talk about it in terms of economic terms and stability of government.

Blah, blah, blah. Roepke is just openly saying race war shit. I'm not going to read it, but he is effectively the spiritual forefather of the 4chan mass shooter. gonna read it but he is effectively like the spiritual forefather of like the 4chan mass shooter like that that's how racist he is damn and you know it turns out that just again openly like open race war shit is like too much for hayek and he gets kicked out of the mainstream neoliberal organizations and tragically tragically for all of us romki dies before you can see his beloved Rhodesia

reduced to a pulp by a series of anti-imperialist insurgencies. He dies before the, he dies before all of the Rhodesian, or like, society's fucking

fuel supplies stored in one spot are blown up. I was going to say, see if they'd had a more distributed market economy, Mia, they would have had

just all their fuel in one giant bottle which they burned. Spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't been following the history of Rhodesia. Not a country anymore. Yeah, thank Christ. Actually, don't thank Christ. Fuck Christ.

Christ didn't do shit. Yeah, thank all those people who went out there and killed bigots. Et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, and of course all the American people who went over to join the Rhodesian military and killed other white Rhodesians by accident by shooting at people who were theoretically on their side. Yeah, shout out to them. We're not going to get into North Korea backing another genocide in Zimbabwe here. That's also a fucking thing.

I'm not doing apologies for that because that shit fucking sucked. Yeah, but he dies before he can see his beloved rodigia fucking eat shit die but what ropke had is a very clear version of the kneeler the hierarchical neoliberal society that he wanted to create right and he is very especially by the end of his life he is very explicit about what this is it is a christian white supremacist patriarchal world and to build it the right is going to have to use the church to stave off the alienization and atomization of capitalism hey i'm jack b thomas the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature.

I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Blacklit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

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And we're back. Now, in order to build this new world, the world that Roebke sort of imagined, so the religious right, the actual religious right that's going to bring this stuff into fruition sets off from a number of angles. I think the most famous part of this is probably the sort of moral majority infrastructure, which is this network of think tanks, political advocacy organizations, TV networks, mailing lists, their own insane right-wing colleges. Oh, yeah. God, terrifying places but the fundamental social basis right the fundamental collective space around which the right is organized was the church there's been a lot of sociological talk in the last few years about like quote-unquote third spaces so third space is supposed to be

this place that's like not the home or not the workplace that people can exist in and form bonds in and you know people talk about like bridge clubs blah blah blah blah blah but the thing about the u.s is that like the fucking ymca like all of these things that people talk about as the third space are just the church in different forms yeah literally church or a bunch of church-run events yeah well especially like the more like rural you get like it is yeah and this is and this is one of these things like this was actually like one of the sort of rear flanks of the workers movement right which is that like in large parts of appalachia right you have a bunch of really really militant like miners unions for example but then you know but all of them are also like are also

are also baptists and that is fine as long as you know you're you're you're dealing with baptists who are doing well i mean i say fine but like it's not an existential threat to the workers movement when you're dealing with like like you know like it's easier for an arrow like sorry it's easier for a camel to walk through the head of a pin than it is for a rich man to go to heaven baptists but the moment that stuff starts flipping that's a very very dangerous sort of rear guard you see this in asian american communities where like you know asian americans generally like the last two generations like millennials and gen z are tacking really really hard left except the fucking christians who are like forming this this insane rear guard because i've complained about this before i'm fucking i'm doing this this

this is a christianity episode i could fucking talk about this all right the thing the thing about asian christians is that they're all they're almost all like first-gen converts so they all have convert brain which means they're all completely fucking batshit yeah so you know and this is one of the things that we're talking about here right is that the physically the church serves as this very very important engine of kind of revolution serves this engine of sort of spreading reactionary politics even among groups of people who you normally wouldn't get that kind of sort of right wing politics from and this is where you know faced faced with the sort of leftward shifts in the US in the 60s and 70s and globally to face with, you know, I mean, literally the specter of revolutions and not even like sometimes not even specters like, you know, this is post 68, right? There's been a bunch of actual uprisings.

Yeah. And the place that they make their move is by trying to seize control of various pieces of church infrastructure. make their move is by trying to seize control of various pieces of church infrastructure um we're going to take a catholic example and a protestant example and we're not going to do the obvious orthodox example because we'd be here for a fucking century so let's start with ropke's beloved catholic church um i think i don't know if i'm going to do a little bit of left inside baseball i think people on the left tend to be really obsessed with the the like liberation theology people but the problem with liberation theology people is that they were around for maybe like 30 years right but by the time you get to the end of the 80s these people are all dead

right like they're either dead or they're like ortega and they've become these, literally they start calling themselves the Third Way and are cutting all these deals with really right-wing social groups. capital like t capital c the catholic church is very gets very very right wing well it's not even that it's much that it gets right wing but it is very right wing and the stuff that they're doing is very very scary one of the things that i don't think people really realize is that so that you've probably you've heard the term gender ideology. Yeah. Yes, I have, man. Yeah. Do you know where that's from? Is it from... I've fucking forgotten the place where Harry Potter goes.

Oh, Hogwarts? Hogwarts, yeah. Hogwarts Castle. JFK is a fucking Johnny-come-late bastard. She got into this game after that shit had already started. Gender ideology is a term developed... JFK Rowling. JFK Rowling is a powerful, powerful fucking...

No, speaking of Catholics, though. The term gender ideology comes from the Catholic Church. And it's developed in reaction specifically to feminism. And very specifically, it's developed in reaction to our to arguments from feminists that that you know that gender is socially constructed you know because in the catholic church's position is like well no that's heretical because obviously gender was assigned by god and because gender is assigned by god like women are like you know women are like like submissive blah blah blah blah yeah like natural this is this is the natural order this isn't like a sociologically constructed thing this

is the natural order it's how it's always been it's how it's always been be because they're like on like unfathomably sexist is this like around there like elaine pagel's beef with the church i'm not sure of lane pagel's if you're with el elaine pagels god the father god the mother i think this is a bit before my time uh okay yeah yeah this is uh for world history stands at the university of california and common topic well i i think i think this is actually in the same i've played videos of her to my students and definitely in the 80s. Like the vibe is powerfully 80s. Yeah. So I guess that's a bit late because a lot of the gender identity stuff comes out of the early 90s.

Well, I guess it's like early 90s. Okay. So one of the things that happens is that a lot of, you know, in the 90s, the Catholic Church and they have a bunch of like rad femme allies here, by the way. have a bunch of like rad femme allies here by the way do you have this massive fight in the un about like recognizing the right to abortions and other like sexual reproductive rights and the red femmes are pissed off because i mean there's a whole so they're they've been they're aligned with the catholic church it's like an anti-sex work thing and like an anti-porn thing and then also like a lot of the red femmes well i get i got in so much trouble for saying this but like holy shit there's so

many of those people are insanely transphobic yeah damn wow but you know but like this this is this there's this massive battle inside the united nations between a bunch of feminists and or like feminists who are like normal and then like the shitty radfem factions and the catholic church on the other side and pope benedict in particular goes like all out on this stuff both on the international level and in terms of like local churches like goes on the offensive against abortion and queer liberation and meanwhile the protestant church is doing like exactly the same thing they are like except like i think i think like even more fascist which is really really and i say this is someone who was raised lutheran like that that is really the core of protestantism is like what if we did catholicism but like somehow shittier

like like martin luther one day i'm gonna do my thing on the world's greatest kind of revolutionaries and then one of them is martin luther because oh yeah very quickly because like like i my argument for this is that the greatest kind of revolutionary is the person who starts out at on on the side of the revolution and then turns against it and so martin luther's thing was he was trying to outflank the catholic church in the 1600s from the right on antiemitism sorry i meant a 16th century uh 1500 1500s which is even worse 1500s catholic church they have expelled they have like it's just they have what they're this is this is in the period where they're like expelling all of the jews from spain right and martin luther's trying to like flank them and this is the kind of shit that's happening like in the

u.s at this point which is you know this is this is this is the this is the protestant sort of following the catholic like why and in some ways blazing their own trail of of going really hard right so probably the most famous and i think definitely one of the most important examples of this is the right-wing seizure of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979. So for people who don't know about the Southern Baptist Convention, they are a very, very large and influential group of Baptist churches. And they've been kind of like they'd been anti-segregation. They'd been sort of like trending left. And this is one of the things this

is a very very famous thing in in the history like if you know in sort of like the the history and mythos of the right wing is like in 1979 at this convention these like there's like these group of pastors who are like ah the church is getting too woke or getting too left-wing it's like they scrawled out this plan like on a fucking napkin to like how they were going to take over the church and they do it they they seize they seize control of the southern baptist convention and they purge all of their enemies and it is very very quickly within a matter of like a couple of years it's converted into this factory for right-wing violence yeah they they are they ruthlessly projecting dissent in the churches a bunch of churches leave because they're like what who the fuck are these people like just these

absolute right-wing fanatics just like i've taken control so a bunch of churches leave but a lot of them stay and you know what what their what their project is is that they start creating these sort of totalitarian micro states like in like this is what they turn churches into and this is what they turn households into because these households become enormous centers of abuse like just unfathomable amounts of violence can sort of get get sort of spread out of this stuff and you know the way that these things work right is is is you may have seen have you seen those like fucking deranged umbrella memes that christian right makes on twitter no i've been so okay there's supposed to be like these like

umbrellas and there's like each person each something or the umbrella like protects you from a thing so there's like the family and has had the family they're like protected by the authority of the husband who protected by the authority of the church protected by the authority of like the theocratic state okay no this is like the most cursed russian doll it's awful and this this is what these people believe right and and they they enforce this through psychological and physical violence these people are they're sending out instruction manuals about how to beat your children right and how to do it in ways that you won't get caught the you know like when i'm saying that these are like totalitarian micro states that's not an exaggeration that is that is what

these households are like they're unbelievably violent you as a child is under constant surveillance you are literally forced to through physical violence to maintain their gender norms and this is the base of the christian of the homophobic christian right these churches are pumping out shock troopers and these are the shock tro the Christian of the homophobic Christian, right? These churches are pumping out shock troopers. And these are the shock troopers, both of neoliberalism and homophobic and transphobic violence. And when I say shock troopers, I do mean this literally because an enormous number of these people,

and this is part of part of the reasons politics starts to fall apart. Like I grew up around these people. A lot of these people went to fucking Iraq and got the absolute shit blown out of them. But you know, these of these people went to fucking iraq and got the absolute shit blown out of them but you know these these people like these these churches this is you know you you can you can look at the sort of panoply of of the people who do right-wing like homophobic violence right the queer basher the parent who kicks their kid out of their homes for being gay the homophobic boss who fires and abuses queer workers,

the doctor who assaults us and then denies his medical care. These people are pumped up by the church. And what the church is doing here is they're serving as the equivalent of sort of unions in the left, right? And when I say unions, I'm talking more like the 1907 IWW, even like the 2023 AFL-CIO. These churches are the social and organizational space in which the right constructs its world right it's it's a sort of nexus of homophobic organizing from the beginnings

of the homophobic right through like their fight against gay marriage but come on something happened that rope well i think rope key might have suspected this but something happened that his inheritors did not expect and that's something is i i the only thing i failed to consider is what if neoliberalism came for the church so one of the things that has happened in the last and i mean literally we are talking the last 10 years or 10 to 15 years really the last like 10 years church attendance and this is also actually true well of synagogue and mosque attendance although church tenants have been declining way more it used to be like you know if you're are you a member of a church mosque or synagogue right like gallup has been pulling this since the fucking 40s it used to be the the rate

of it of being a member of a church synagogue or mosque was, it was for like, basically until like 2000, it was hovering around 70%. It's now 47. That is a catastrophic drop. That is a rewriting of like fundamentally what the u.s is the u.s has been a like christian hell state like since it was created right like the u.s is founded by like religious extremists whose problem is that they weren't allowed to pursue catholics enough so this has been this has been a a church country more so than like most of the european countries who did the settling up until literally the last 20 years and the drop between 2010 and now is like 14 percent and this is this is and it's not just that the membership rates are going down like the actual

actual church attendance is going down and so and so in in this context where less people are going to a church less people belong to a church the political strategies that have been based on using the church as like your default social network uh they don't have the kind of reach that they used to yeah and if if if that's your political strategy this is a catastrophe for you now you know we can talk there are like there are lots of reasons this is happening part of which is sort of like the secularization of the u.s part of this is that there's been so many fucking atrocious abuse scandals in these churches that people are just fucking leaving because that's what happens yeah you know one day one day the thing i really will

get canceled for is when i'm gonna the episode i do about the how this happened in the dsa and how it just hollowed out the membership because you know it turns out when people get abused they just fucking leave yeah not just the dsa like unfortunately yeah this happens in so many organizing like this is far too often on the left yeah stop being fucking creeps yeah but like you know fellow cis dudes yeah the christian right has a particularly bad because they don't they will never address it right this is part of their ideology said this is good yeah that's the problem like at least in the left like it keeps fucking happening we do recognize it's bad we sometimes just seemingly people on the left are prepared to allow it to happen because they think it's not as bad as the alternative but which

is bullshit but yeah when you have a church which actively kind of encourages it that's bad actually and and and part of and the other the other thing that's happening here right is that like the other thing that's generating this is just the is just the neoliberal atomization of society like it's it's tearing apart the social bound. And one of the things I think you have to be careful of when you talk about neoliberalism tearing about social bonds is that a lot of those bonds sucked. It was not good that everyone with 70% of Americans were going to church, right?

Like, not good at all. That sucked. It was deeply evil. But, you know, it tears apart like it tears it tears apart bonds not entirely without regard to ideology but it still does do it and this means this context has completely reshaped what right-wing like anti-queer and anti-trans organizing looks like and the right right now the right solution to that is the daily wire and we will get explained that in very great length tomorrow and the day after that so stay

tuned and three of the bad guy well we already had a bad guy i guess he's dead these ones yeah this is the bad guy number two yeah three four maybe after the catholic church and the southern baptist convention yeah yeah they're right up there though i mean they've still got time too you know they're really only in their ascendancy so we shouldn't judge them too early yep but yeah this has been it could happen here uh go make these people's lives miserable yeah yeah ben shapiro is miserable uh because i wrote a piece of plot mechanics about how to tear down a statue and he is still mad about it because he said i can't wait for their piece about molotov cocktails and i wrote that as well so ben shapiro can suck it uh thank you for the

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