The David Knight Show - Interview: The Authoritarian Playbook: Fear, Division, Chaos, Control

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

Melissa Dalton Bradford, author of How to Save Democracy: The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook, brings 35 years of experience living across eight countries and makes the case that what America is experiencing right now follows a documented, repeatable playbook — overwhelm with fear, deepen polarization, isolate citizens from each other, and wait for them to check out. Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to https://davidknight.gold/ for great deals on physical gold/silver For 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to https://trendsjournal.com/ and enter the code “KNIGHT” For high quality made in America products go to HomeSteadProducts.shop and use promo code “Knight” for 10% off your purchases Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.com If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

All right, joining us now. Our guest is Melissa Dalton Bradford. She is an author. This is not her first rodeo or her first book, but she's got a book that I think all of you are going to be interested in. This is about the title of the book is How to Save Democracy, the anti-authoritarian playbook. And I like what you had to say, Melissa, and you said, so you don't get played.

Yeah. That's what she puts in there. Yeah, if we understand what their playbook is, it helps us to not get played. I think that is very, very important. And so she's had a lot of experience, just to give you a little bit of a background. She's had 35 plus years of experience living across eight countries. And she wrote an award-winning book, A Global Mom, A Memoir on Loss, and Living Onward. You know, I don't know the gist of that book, but I know that travel certainly does broaden the mind, I think.

And the more time you spend in the country, the more it changes your perspective. We all have a very narrow perspective, but I really do think that the solution is at the grassroots level. I'm completely aligned, completely aligned with you. I agree with that 100%. Now, your book came out on the 15th of September. Tell us a little bit as you're doing your book tour. What is the general mood that you see in the country at this point in time? It depends very much on where I am. You know, I just came from a week in California. I made the trek up the coast, the beautiful West Coast, before all of the hurricanes hit, just before that.

So I was in Los Angeles, which is its own ecosystem, isn't it? It's going to have a more outward-looking, a more inclusive, a more progressive bent. And then I went into Fresno, which is kind of a little bit of both. I didn't know this beforehand. I'm really not keen to how there are dividing lines, even in cities, between the progressive and the more conservative communities. And then I ended in the Bay Area. I was in San Francisco.

And now I'm in Utah. I'm going to spend a great deal of time here because I'm involved in some conferences here. And then I'll hand to the East Coast. But to answer your question, the response that I've been getting from people on the ground is a mixture of desperation, sometimes despair, sometimes. despair, sometimes sort of a shrugging and slumping and what do we do now, we're too far gone. And I always respond to that by saying, but of course, that is the strategy of the authoritarian playbook. The strategy is to overwhelm with fear, with polarization, with isolation from one another.

This is not new. We're in the middle of the unfolding of an authoritarian playbook. Of course we feel desperate. Of course we feel despair. And unfortunately, some people have checked out. That is the thing that we're trying to fight against you and I, is not letting ourselves or others check out. Democracy begins in our house, not in the White House. We are the authors. We are the authors, not the authoritarian. That's right. And the hallmarks of all this, I look to, when you look at your book and the table contents, I like, yeah, we check that one and we check that one or check that You're right. You're right.

We're following the playbook, aren't we? Exactly. We are. But I would be, I would have my listeners be very angry with me if we didn't talk about the difference between democracy and republic and how you see that. Of course, you're talking about democracy, I think, in the broader sense of it as being anti-authoritarian, anti-totolitarian. And certainly my listeners in this program see that and we're very concerned about that.

Talk a little bit about, you know, the Washington Post, their slogan, Democracy Dies and Darkness. I think it's getting pretty dark right now. But tell us a little bit about what you're looking at when you talk about democracy, what you're thinking of. Well, let me address that really hot topic. I'm glad that you brought that up, the difference between democracy and a constitutional republic.

You know, the roots of that debate go back to the John Birch Society. They've been revived since about 2020. And in my online work, if people ever push back on me and I say, we have to save democracy, our beautiful democracy, there will inevitably be somebody who jumps in and says, we aren't a democracy, we're a constitutional republic. That's sort of like saying, we're not a dog, we're a mammal, or we're not a parent, we're a father. You know, a constitutional republic is a subheading of democracy. And I don't want to be flippant when I respond to people, because this is the language. These are the slogans and the soundbites that they're getting.

We are not a democracy. It sounds too much like Democrats. We are a constitutional republic. It rhymes with being a Republican. I understand all of that, and I respect those different points of view. But we're talking, like you just said so well, about democracy as a larger breed, a larger grouping. And if I may, I want to not to step outside of the United States, but it's important to recognize that, threats to democracy as a general system are global now.

It's not just happening in our own country. Right. And perhaps you've already done spots with people from other countries that are saying, oh, we're seeing this where we are. As you know, I'm coming to you right now from my book tour in the U.S., but I've lived for many, many years in Germany. It's what my area of specialty is. It's what I've done undergraduate and graduate work in.

I teach and speak and write the language. So we have some threats to democracy also in Germany right now. That aside, there are several large international organizations that are watchdogs for democracy at large. And they sort of categorize democracies. There are electoral democracies, there are liberal democracies, et cetera, et cetera. Well, one of them that I've been watching really closely for about 10 years is called Varieties of Democracy.

Do you know about it? Have you heard of it? No, I've heard that. Maybe some of our audience members have. It's short for V-Dem. Everyone's going to take a moment today, and they're going to look up V-Dem. They're going to go to their website.

V-Dem is a community of lovers of democracy, scholars, teachers, writers, advocates for democracy, for many different countries. And what VEDM does is they set up a group of criteria that define what a healthy democracy is, regardless of what kind of category it's in. What defines a healthy democracy? Oh, a free press, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, equal branches of government, checks and balances, etc., etc.

Well, VDEM has in the last year and a half taken the United States, States of America, again, this beacon of democracy and has said, uh-oh, you're no longer in the top quartile of the 180 countries that we are rating all of the time. And again, they rate Korea and Norway with the same measuring stick. And they say the United States, which used to be at about place 20, has dropped. In fact, that's not even the right verb. It has plummeted to 51st place. 50 first place out of 180 countries. That's a warning sign for us. And VDEM says it's the attack on elections. It's the attack on the press. It's the shrinking of free speech, etc. So that's one thing for us to keep in mind. In my book, I do what I think

groups like VDM would really appreciate. And all of us who love liberty, freedom, a healthy constitution, what we would love. And I just look throughout modern history and I say, here are the signs of illness. Everyone who's gone to like democracy medical school, who's done their work, they've done their residency and they've studied it. They know that these are the signs of decline of illness.

And I've lined up 11 of them. And in the book, I say, here are the 11 signs of illness or rot or decline, and I'm going to give you case studies. So each of these 11 hallmarks, and we can go through those if you want to. We should go through at least three or four of them. Yeah. In each of those, I give case studies. I say, well, here's what, for instance, scapegoating minorities looked like in Weimar, Germany.

Here is what it looks like in India right now. Here's what it might have looked like under Orban in Hungary. I do three case studies, and just between you and me and all of our listeners, in every single one of those case studies, the last case study is the United States. Like you said, we check off every single hallmark in a big way, in a big way. I agree. Yeah, you know, when we talk about democracy versus republic, I'm sure there's a lot of people just. I just look at Democrat versus Republican, but, you know, at the same time, the founders were very concerned about the fact that we'd have a constitution that's going to be a rule of law that's going to be a guideline and a bar to an oppression of the majority who decide that they're going to oppress a minority. And so, you know, there's that aspect of it.

And certainly that is one of the things that concerns me is the decline of the rule of law, this idea that we're going to rule by emergency. And once I can, it is a structural flaw in our constitution and our legal system that one person can declare an emergency. Nobody can contest that. And then once that one person declares the emergency, that one person can issue any kind of order that he wants to as well. And so that is, that I think is one of the dangerous things. Well, that's chapter number three of the authoritarian hallmarks. I begin with assaulting truth. We know that autocrats or authoritarian

They assault truth. That's the foundation. They tell lies big and small. Off the cuff and well-structured. They use vagaries, et cetera. And it's not necessarily so that we will believe any particular lie, like injecting bleach is going to cure this pandemic or something like that. It's that we are left blurry-eyed.

we don't believe that truth is even accessible or that there is a common truth that we can all count on. Then the second of the hallmarks is politicizing institutions. That's clearing house, getting out of all of the experts and planting in your loyalists. This happens everywhere. But you've just talked about number three, governing by executive order. Now, executive order or emergency decrees, they're built into our system, aren't they? They're built into our system and everybody's used them. The danger is, particularly with emergency decrees, is that, and my case studies show this in different countries,

is that when they are used without a specific off-ramp, that this is a temporary measure and it literally is going to have a timeline, they end up being eternal. They go on and on. There are countries that have been living under perpetual emergency decrees. now for years and years and years. So many of these executive orders that were based on emergencies from both Republicans and Democrats, and they're still on the books, technically. Yep.

You know, I don't know that they've ended the COVID emergency technically or not. But the Insurrection Act. Yeah, the Insurrection Act is not yet tied off at the ends, right? So we need to educate ourselves about that. This is an excellent point. We need to educate ourselves and also contact a reps and say, where do you stand on having an off-ramp for any potential emergency decree or these executive orders. Now, all presidents have used executive orders to one

degree or another. But the question is, the question is the proportionality, how many executive orders, how many executive orders. To the extent that they run this thing out and run with it, you know, it is, we've seen it used for tariffs. We've seen it used for federalized policing. We've seen it used for, you name it. And they're all still there. Yeah, you're right. and they're all still there. So we need to voice our concern to our reps and say, where do you stand on this? And I want you on the record as someone who's going to push back

and who's not going to just allow this to morph into what the Germans call Daua crisis. Nice big compound German word, which just means polycrisis, crisis after crisis after crisis of crisis. And like you've said so well, they can be legit or they can be illegitimate. You have, you do by edict, you just pronounce, We are now in so much danger that we need endless National Guard people in camo and weapons patrolling the streets of Washington, D.C., for instance. That's right. That sort of danger.

Without end. Yeah, exactly. A poly crisis is a great way to describe this administration. But we got to find out who Polly is and you're out there. But, you know, from your perspective, and again, you go through in your book, you look at the history as well as contemporary example. of each of these cases that you're talking about. Tell us a little bit about that in terms of, let's just pick the very first one that you were talking about,

the assaulting the truth. We know what that looks like here in America. What are some examples that you use in other countries or in history? Well, I had to narrow. I had to narrow down my selection because there were so many. There were so many, but again, my specialty is German studies in German history. So let's just talk about that. And before I do that, can I sort of...

Yeah, thank you, the big lie. I just need to drape out this caveat. I grew up in the United States. I've spent 35 years living across many countries, as you know. And in my upbringing, the ultimate evil, the cartoon evil that anyone's, used, they picked out of the bunch was always the Nazis and Hitler. That was as far as

one could go on the spectrum of evil. So when I draw examples from that part of history, I think some people tune out, they say that's sloppy thinking, it's not the same, but I want to remind everybody that

the fall of democracy in Germany happened over a whole series of legal turns and lies. And it was long before, the collapse happened long before concentration camps and the Holocaust. We think about Nazi Germany only being the Holocaust. There was a long series of legal maneuvers that brought Germany to that point where

legally they instated a chancellor, an Austrian, Adolf Hitler, as the Fuhrer, as the dictator. So I just want to put that out there. One of the great German philosophers, I'll bet some of our audience members know her name, and you do, Hannah Arendt, great Jewish, German American philosopher, said, the ideal subject of a totalitarian state is not a convinced Nazi. and it's not a convinced communist. It's that average person for whom there is no difference between truth and lies, who can no longer distinguish between fact and fiction.

I paraphrased her. You don't want me given her entire quote in German. Well, that's very much like what Solzhenitsyn said. When he was talking to people living under the Soviet Union, he said, don't live by lies. He goes, I understand that, you know, they control the amount of money that you have for or not you can eat, they control your housing, they control your job. And he goes, you may have to tow the line on some of this stuff. Just don't believe it yourself, you know, which is really what Orwell tells us in terms of getting people to accept double think, to accept the idea that two plus

two equals five and to actually believe it. You've got to really believe it or they don't win, you know. Yes. And the lie, and the line in 1984 is that was their most essential, the regime speaking about them. That was their most essential move was to tell you that you don't believe the evidence of your eyes or your own ears. You stop believing yourself. You lose trust in your own capacity for judgment and discernment. So this is very, very important. Another wonderful scholar that I quote quite a bit in my book is, and perhaps you've already had him on your show, but your viewers are going to know, your audience is going to know. Timothy Snyder, who wrote that great little pithy book on tyranny that should be on everyone's bedstand. There you go, Dr. Snyder, I've just

plugged you. Yale professor now teaching it at the University of Toronto, but he said this, to abandon facts is to abandon freedom. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, all is spectacle. And he says, post-truth is pre-fascism. Great line. I mean, it's kind of interesting when you say there's nothing left except spectacle, because now what we're seeing is,

we've seen now for quite some time, people come after you from both the left and the right, depending on what you have to say and that they disagree with, and they want to shut you down, they want to censor you. But we're saying something that's a little bit different now, but I think it's also very dangerous. And that is blurring the truth. I mean, can you believe your eyes when we,

you've got the ability to do very convincing deep fakes with AI. I think that's a big part of the problem. And I think that's also being basically used with a lot of people. I think that's one of the reasons that we see, yeah, you know, what Trump will do is to try to get people distracted with spectacle and put up some absurd AI stuff. It's obviously AI. But at some point, people are looking at this and saying, well, is this true or is this artificial intelligence?

And can I even believe my own eyes anymore when I see this stuff posted up on social media. That is a very dangerous thing, and I think they're going to really run with that in their playbook. It is perilous. It's perilous. So when we draw, when I draw comparisons between Weimar, Germany, so that period in the 20s, before things really got traction and took off in the 30s, I always say, we are living in two very different worlds, my friends. Weimar Germany is 20th century Germany is not 21st century journey. You had no, or 21st century America. You had no internet. You had no social media. You had no cryptocurrency. You had no AI. Right. So there are so many elements that are central to the peril in which we find ourselves

today that put us really in a different place, which is why the onus is on us to be very truthful ourselves and to educate our followers on how to see the line. How to identify literally, how do you identify a fake? How do you trace a social media post because so many people now get their news just from social media, how many just get it from Facebook? I agree. Yeah. Facebook or telegram or whatever. Yeah, I agree. Or TikTok or whatever. So how do you identify the fakes? How do you trace fake images back to their source? There are useful media literacy tools that we can share with our friends and with our followers. with our audience to say, here's how you're going to find out. But then the individual responsibility is when you know that you are seeing or hearing a lie,

when you know, because you have the facts. Let's say you're a trained epidemiologist. And you know that what is coming out of RFK Jr's mouth is counter to medical fact and scientific fact, that it's our job to speak. It's our job to counter the lie. the very first reels that I ever did, way back at the beginning of this second iteration of this administration, they were just about truth. I never talked about policy. I didn't talk about party. I didn't talk about any given political figure. I said, this is an assault on truth. And we have to sharpen our ability in a very blurry, sort of a scattershod world where we are being inundated.

not even daily but hourly with information, much of which is not true, we have to sharpen our ability to determine that. It sounds so hokey, doesn't it? But that's our job. Well, I got fired for doing that. So I absolutely agree with you. You know, when you see something like that, you have to, well, it was a situation with January the 6th and the guy who worked for was pushing the idea that there was a sting. and of course there was absolutely no way that stuff was true. No. It was just a hodgepodge of jargon that was thrown out there without an ounce of substance to it. I call that and that got me in big hot water and it got me fired.

But that was fine because I don't want to be a part of an organization that's going to do something like that. I'm never going to be a part of that. So I think it's really, you know, when we look at this and again, going back to this AI thing, because to me that is huge. You know, people talk about AI is going to be so dangerous. It already is very. dangerous. I think if they really wanted to do something to stop it, they would make a requirement that these engines that are going from an image to a video or creating a video, that they would

put some kind of a watermark on there. And that would be required. Yeah, but it's the fact that they're not doing that and the fact that they're not demanding that be done, I think is very telling that they want to use that. I think it's telling. Yeah. I think it's telling also that really where these very powerful figures are coming from, regardless of whatever the, I mean, regardless of whatever the speak is in the public forum, it's self-serving. It's self-serving. And I know that that sounds naive and altruistic on my part, but democracy depends on a certain degree of altruism that we enter public service and we glean, you know, we glean from the public's, support of our great big companies, and we give something back.

And that our role in the public sphere is to protect one another and protect the constitution. But this is all being attacked right now. But I want to just insert right here before the opportunity passes that I honor your integrity. I honor your integrity for saying the difficult thing. That's an example that everybody needs to hear. And I think that gives other people listening, that gives them courage to maybe have that difficult conversation at the family reunion even. Some people are afraid of losing their relationships because of – Talk about that because, again, that is – things have become so polarized.

I think part of it is because we've given so much power to government and we've laid prostrate before government. And we've said, you know, give us this and give us that. I know that we've got the right person in there. We're going to get everything fixed. And so everybody is so invested in that, invested in a solution really from the top down, that they have so much at stake that they were starting to see all of the, you know, there's so much that is there that we put on government that people get so invested in it. It becomes so important to them that it's actually turning family members against each other. All of us have seen that to some degree or the other probably. It absolutely is. So I spoke at a large conference for women who are newly engaged in this, in civic activity. Some have had more experience than others, but that's just a description. This was primarily women, and this is really important to them, and they recognize what's going on. I can't even tell you how many came to me post my keynote speech, literally in tears. Literally, I've lost.

my sister who was my best friend. We don't speak to one another anymore. We can't. It's stressing my marriage. My parents won't talk with me. I'm estranged from my children. My neighbors, I feel alone. The sense of isolation and fear and suspicion is pervasive.

Let me go back to Hannah Arendt. I mentioned her before and her comments, her brilliant comments about truth, right? That it's not the convinced Nazi. It's not the convinced communist, who's the ideal subject of totalitarianism, is the average Joe who can't tell the difference between truth and deceit. Well, she also said that a couple of wonderful things in her book,

The Origins of Totalitarianism, she said that fear is the organizing principle of authoritarianism or autocracy totalitarianism, fear, fear of one another. Let's talk about fear for just a moment, because fear can make us go quiet, we are so afraid of what our neighbors will say. We're afraid that we're going to get fired. I mean, that's sort of on this end of the spectrum, but we're going to fear that we're going to lose our dearest and most precious relationships. And so people stay quiet. I know this from reading volumes and volumes and volumes from average people during the Weimar period or the early 30s in Germany, that fear of being seen as unpatriotic, as seen as

traitorous, the fear that you're going to lose your job, lose your family, your family's going to be endangered. Those were real fears. This is what is happening in American society right now. People are fearful in not just a vague way, but fearful to drive to work. They might be snatched by ice. They're fearful about taking their children to a bus stop. They might put their children on a bus, and they might be snatched by ice. This pervasive fear again, Hannah Avent said it is the organizing principle of authoritarianism.

She also noted in analyzing how this could have happened in Germany. She said it was the word she used was atomization. The atomization. It's the pulling apart of society. It's the isolation of people from one another. You know what I'm talking about so well. And you're talking with people all of the time about this. This is a grave concern.

It's pulling. If you think of American society as a piece of fabric, it's already been tested at the seams many, many, many times, many times. And it's gotten a little threadbare on the knees and on the elbows, right? But now what's happening is the picking apart of the fibers that hold us together, and those are neighborhoods and your college roommates and your family, your marriages being pulled apart. And that, my friends, is a strategy.

It is not a byproduct. That is the strategy. I can agree more. It's absolutely the strat. Polarization is the strategy. Of course, we've seen that. We've seen that the fear, you know, someone that I interview on a regular basis,

was on all kinds of network programs and everything, until he opposed the wars that came after 2001. And at that point, he got kicked off. And he had a lot to say, of course, about that. People should have listened to. And we saw the same thing happening in 2020. We saw, if you don't, we have one orthodoxy here, and it's almost cult-like religion. And if you don't tow the line on that, you're going to be expelled out of society or job or whatever.

And the atomization that comes there. But we always see that as the fear and there is one orthodoxy that you must toe the line. You must agree with us on everything, or you will be purged out of society. Yes, yes. And I spent some time yesterday because again, I'm in Utah. Utah is a very conservative, by and large, very conservative state. It has a Republican governor, Republican lieutenant governor, whom, by the way, I'll just slip this in. I'm going to meet with tomorrow. I'm so glad I get to talk with her. Remarkable woman. And I'm having conversations here because I live outside of this ecosystem. I've lived outside so long. And I live in Germany. So for me, it's always I feel like I'm kind of. coming as a sort of a social scientist every time I land in the U.S. And I'm watching how people interact with one another. And I had a long conversation with a very, very bright group of women yesterday who talked

about the language that defines these two camps. And as a linguist, this was fascinating for me. Let me just share simply with you. I mean, literally a communication guide, if you happen to lean a little bit left or farther left. And you want to actually talk with conservatives, listen up. Listen up. Because there's language that we use, unbeknownst to us, that just shuts down certain minds. They just completely close down the garage door and don't want anything to do with it. The language that tends to trigger resistance among those that are more conservatives are things like DEI, privilege,

systemic racism, the patriarchy, defunding, climate crisis. Can't use that word, can't use that phrase. The term socialism, obviously, is a very hot, blistering term right now. That's also not new. Identity politics. As an alternative to those, these very bright women schooled me, they said, using words like freedom. These are the words that actually speak to our more conservative friends, many of whom, by the

way, and I meet them all of the time, are saying, this right here is not what I voted for. This is not, I don't even recognize this. It's not my grandpa's GOP. Yeah, I don't hear you. Yeah, more and more people who are persuadable. So here's the language, talking about freedom and liberty, talking about safe communities, strong families, economic stability.

immediately we could say, are you concerned about the deficit? Let's talk about the deficit. This was supposed to be an economically sound presidency. So many people voted for him because he had supposedly run so many businesses. What is forgotten in that sentence is that he ran so many businesses into the ground. But we can talk about there you go. And what else? the stakes and the alcohol, whatever, the long list of those bankrupted businesses.

And we don't want him to bankrupt our beautiful republic. So we avoid the word democracy. And I held up my book and I said, holy smokes, are you kidding me? That's the cover of my book. Why didn't somebody tell me that democracy is like a bad word? And they said, oh, because it sounds like Democrat, we are a republic. Okay, I'm just getting that straight. I'm getting it straight.

fiscal responsibility, opportunity, tradition. These are words that speak to are more conservative friends, many of whom are persuadable because they are seeing that we are embroiled in a war that has no exit. They are seeing the gas prices go up. They are wondering about Epstein. They are wondering about, you know, all sorts of things that were not what they signed up for. And don't reflect in any way what republicanism means.

and if I can add something very obvious, this is not republicanism. No. This is authoritarianism. It's something else. It is a different, different breed entirely. Let me take a breath. You talk now. Yeah, I absolutely agree with you.

I don't think it has anything to do with traditional republicanism. And it is amazing to me to say somebody who has been a Republican in all my life to see the Republicans just laying down and doing nothing about this because they're so afraid. I mean, we're talking about fear. that can be the general public, but it certainly can be with these people who are in a very powerful position. They're afraid of losing that position of power. And they will tow the line. Yeah, they really have become supine with all of this, whatever you want. You know, they can't criticize the leader. Right, right. Because I know he'll take recrimination against them. Yeah. Take recrimination.

Now, so we talked about several of these. As I pointed out, looking at your just a table of contents here, assaulting the truth, politicizing independent institutions, consolidating the executive. That is a huge one, I think. Silencing dissent. We've never seen this level of attack against free speech directly by a White House before in the past, scapegoating the vulnerable. But I want to go to hijacking faith because I think that speaks to a lot of people who are traditional Republicans who are looking at this president and scratching their head as to what's going

on with that. What do you see in terms of hijacking faith, co-opting religion? Well, let me just preface this all by saying, I'm a deeply devout Christian. I've done missionary work, so let's just put that out on the table. That's where I'm coming from. I'm not, I'm not a sometimes go to church. I hold, held volunteer positions in my church my entire life. So this is deeply personal for me, and I've posted quite a bit on this. And I've posted quite a bit on this. and it's telling because some people are surprised to find that someone who is trying to point out the dangers of this administration is somebody who comes from a deeply believing background. I don't know why people think that the two cannot be the same, but I digress moving forward. Christian nationalism is not a religion per se.

it's not seeking for religious authenticity. It's a ploy for power. It's a ploy for power. And the reason I can say that with assurity is because I've done the research specifically in what happened in Germany. And I've seen what has happened in Poland, what happened in Brazil, what happened in Hungary, this use of religion to draw people into a base to use a couple of things. the structure of religion, the iconography of religion, the symbols, the language of religion,

but also to use the good faith of people. Yes. So it's not only what religion it is, but it's the faithfulness of people. Their willingness to follow authority. Good tithe-paying people, good widows putting their might in the tithing box, who are completely convinced of the tithing. the danger that, quote, Christianity lies under right now and how it will be saved, how it will, you know, it will be redeemed by a particular administration. And so we'll ignore anything that this particular president, the current occupant of the Oval Office, what his history is, whether he really is a believing Christian, whether he is a felon, whether he's a convicted felon.

we'll forget all of that because you know there was David of the Old Testament and there was Cyrus of the Old Testament. All of this attempt to make sense and to excuse the usurping of Christianity, my faith, to gain political power. Now, how did it happen in Germany? Germany was a very, very faithful, faithful country. If you ever come and visit me here and you're invited or back. at home when I'm in Germany, you see churches, churches with the center of every village, prayer chapels on every mountain walkway when you go on your little walks in the mountains, a deeply, deeply believing people.

Hitler and the National Socialists knew how to manipulate that deep belief and the organization of the church specifically to their advantage. they could cause the Protestant pastors to make oaths to Hitler. The Catholic priests made oaths to the Reich, to the kingdom. And when you get those strong authority figures recognizing that the only way I'm going to save my back or continue in my job or have any power

is to align myself with this regime, then that trickles down to your parishioners. It trickles down to all of those believing widows that are putting their might in the tithing box, right? And then you couple that with this fear in Germany. It was the fear of Jews, the fear of this other. And all of that scapegoating that created a kind of an enmity, a contempt for their neighbors, of fear because not only were they the reason for World War I, the World War I failure, as was the story then, that was promulgated everywhere, but they became a threat also to Christianity. And you can understand pretty well why a deeply believing, perhaps isolated person will just go along with that. What eventually happened was the wrapping of the cross literally in the Svostika flag. And I've read stories of people going into their churches where the church, the liturgy or the meeting began with a Sikai. There was a pushback to that.

You might know the name of Martin Miemö. If you don't, you've heard first they came for the socialists. But I wasn't a socialist, so I did nothing. Well, he was part of what was called Die Bekennen the Kirche. That's the confessing church. One of those main figures was Dietrich Bonhofer. who's one of my heroes, and I write about him more than once in my book. He was someone who recognized the fearmongering, the othering that we've talked about,

the latent violence in this movement, and that they were exploiting faith. If you fuse state and church, you ruin both. Yes, yes, I agree. Because the church is serving the state, not God, and the state is serving. serving the church, not the people. They're working like that in tandem. So they decrease one another's potential power. And it robs faith in my estimation, in the estimation of many. It robs faith of its beauty, of its purity, which is to serve one another. It is to love one another. It is to do exactly what authoritarianism seeks to not do. It is to bridge our divides. It's to sacrifice for one

another. That is why I believe what I do is to follow my Savior Jesus Christ if I can just add that. And he never would have supported the violence and the othering and the killing that we see that comes out of authoritarianism. So the confessing church led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Himmuller and others came a little bit late. But still I honor them because they gave everything. Literally Bonhofer was sent to the gallows. He was killed. Because he was killed. Because he also was plotting an assassination of the mustache man. We have to mention that. I think he died unfortunately, like about a month before the war ended. Right before. Yeah. Right before the very end. Yeah. You see Jesus used as a beard and I think the phrase it really sticks with me is I can't hear what

you're saying because I see what you're doing. Yeah. That's right. That's the problem. And it's a, you know, for people who are not Christians, it's a block to them becoming a Christian and really understanding what it's about. For the people who are Christians, I see their kindness and their good nature being taken advantage of, primarily because they just can't believe that somebody would not be like them. So they're projecting, really, their morality, their system of morality, and their system of justice. They just can't believe somebody could do X, right? And so they're reluctant to attribute that, but they're using Jesus as a beard. And I've said many times you've merged politics and religion, what you wind up with is politics. And it really does

get rid of it. And I think the founders of this country understood that. And they were very clear about that because they'd come from a situation where there was an official state church. And we don't want to have that. But the thing that concerns me is to see how it's being used as a beard and how people who want to have access to big audiences who want to have access to popular politicians will basically subject that, you know, we'll suck up to this and try to give it legitimacy. And we'll see that over and over again, don't we? Absolutely. And we saw it in technicolor in Viamen, but again, we're seeing it in many other places.

We see, if I can just mention Viktor Orban, and we're glad that he's out of office. But for 16 years, 16 years, he wanted to fashion Hungary as this Christian bastion. And so predictably, he vilified Muslims. he had very strict, very ugly anti-immigration policies. And then he wanted to rewrite World War II history. Now remember, Hungary was also complicit in much of what happened in the Holocaust. But what Orban wanted to do was whitewash all of that. Whitewash all of that so that looking back,

we don't really see how Hungary was complicit in handing over its Jews, but it was this Christian bastion. aren't we glad for that? It's that longing again for that, those good old days that never really were so good at all. But Victor Orban also trying to create a Christian state. What we find out, though, when he was finally ousted from office and replaced by Peter Magia, was that he was working the system. He was, on one hand, while trying to present this image of the strong Christian state with family values and everything.

He was milking the Hungarians of their money and feeding it into super pet money, right? And he was giving these no-bid contracts to some of his best friends, making them the wealthiest people in Hungary. So there was this really mysterious. I'm glad that doesn't happen in America. Oh, never. Are you kidding? It would never happen. Speaking of reflecting pools.

That's right. Truly is amazing. Yeah, we see the same things happening. everywhere. Throughout history, it doesn't really matter in terms of the time period or the geography because human nature is human nature. And politics tends to corrupt it. You know, one of the things when you're talking about Nazi Germany, I think one of the things that was used effectively in terms of hijacking the faith was a fear of the communists because the communists were ruthlessly oppressing Christian churches there at the same time. What people don't see, I think, many times

looking at what they think are these two polar opposites of the Soviets and the Nazis. I think in many cases, we see that they play each other off. We even see that with a two-party system here in the United States. They play each other part. They get you to be more afraid of the other guy. They know that you're bad. So let's tell them how much even worse the other party is so that you'll fall in line and support us. And so I think that was a big part of that there.

There was real persecution of Christians under communism in Russia. And they could play that off against them. and say, well, now you need to run as fast as you can in the other direction to me. And yet these two philosophies take you to the same totalitarian hellhole, don't they? Yes, they do. That's very well put.

That's very well put. And it's just another form of scapegoating. It's another way of shining the spotlight on one group of people and using language. Again, the use of language is absolutely elemental to what we are talking about. Using the language of communist and not,

distinguishing that from socialism, that they are one and the same, that they are the same danger. And remember, like you've just mentioned, it was, when the parliament burned down, which was an event, this is in Germany, Vimar Germany, when the parliament burned down, the Reichstagbrandt, is what it's called, when it burned down, it was attributed, it was blamed, the national socialist, blamed it on a communist. Still, there's a great deal of debate about that, but they could use that as their big ban or the communists are coming after us, which then led to the next step. They could enact a law, which means that we can amass. This lets us have more power.

I'm just going to simplify it like that. The national socials have more power. It was called the Reichstagbrandt for ordnung. It's the law that followed the burning down of the parliament. And not very much longer after that. I mean, we're talking really weeks after that came what's called the enabling act. It's a great big German word. I don't want to bore anybody with it, but I'll just tell it to you. I'm not flexing. It's called the Ammistigungs Gazette. And that Amistigungs Gazette,

this enabling act turned, turned the chancellor then, the Adolf Hitler Chancellor, into a dictator. He was given full rights. So just a reminder that all of this was legal. It was all within the framework of what was already on the books. They just manipulated it enough. all of the time. But back to your point about this danger about communism and the conflating of terms of socialism and communism, well, we're watching that right now. And I just want to underscore, it's another form of scapegoating. We have, it's like saying, look over here, look over here, look over here, when really a grave danger is the anti-democratic technocrats that are standing behind the administration or

even working in tandem with the administration who are on the record is anti-democratic. The dark enlightenment philosophies. The Pejotel, the Curtis Yarvan, the Alex Karp, they are doing the same thing that

major philosophers at that same time in Germany that we're talking about, they did. They said, ah, democracy is a little too sluggish, you know? Democracy is just a little It's just not working for us. Can't we just kind of ramp it up and let's, oh, let's have what the Germans then did with National Socialism, a dictatorship.

But we're hearing people talk about we need a technocracy now. Well, what we need is to run the country like a business. Let's just put one of these great technocrats in the highest seat of power. Or you have the entire Project 2025 camp that says, well, really what we need is a theocracy. We need to have somebody sitting in this office. who will rule as what we've already talked about, as a Christian nationalist leader. These, I think, are the threats that we need to be.

I wonder why the founders didn't think of that, because we had a much more Christian nation at the time of the founding of this country. They had Christian principles. Why didn't they think of that and put that in? But, you know, you're talking about how they just supinely let them do whatever they want. I'll never get over hearing Mike Johnson say,

we can't do search warrants. we don't have the time for that. We've got to expedite this. There's just not enough time. We have to do something more expeditious here. Let's talk about, this is the final chapter in your book, and we're skipping over several of them. There's a lot more to the book as well, but stoking chaos. I have never seen more chaos deliberately done.

And I mean, just to the point of let me throw something out here really absurd, let me put out an offensive cartoon or something. I'll be beating up the Canadian Prime Minister. on a hockey skating thing. Let me put some down there. Just get everybody talking about this. Let me rename this lake over here. It's just constant stoking of chaos. I talk about Trump being the WWE president.

You know, that's what he has thrived on. He sees that heels and heroes thing. He knows how well that works, and it really does work on the public, make this into something of a circus. Talk a little bit about that in history. Well, it's the 11th and the cold. of these 11 hallmarks. We start with assault and truth.

We work through all the other ones. And I ended specifically on this because it actually sets me up for the next chapter, which isn't a hallmark of authoritarianism, but I read an entire big fat chapter on nonviolent resistance. And then after that, I end with hope. So actually the closing chapter is about hope, folks. So don't do anything rash. We are going to end with hope.

But let's get back to this idea of stoking violence or chaos. joking chaos and inciting violence. It does a number of things. And you described it so well. If your nervous system can only digest and metabolize so much. So if we flood the zone, and that's just because we're human and we're wired that way, and it's important that we recognize our limits for digesting and metabolizing schlock and offense and outrage. What happens is a number of responses, right?

we can we respond exactly the way Steve Bannon hoped that we would respond when he said the first time around I'm going to flood the zone people who were in a flood

just barely, barely, barely, are dog paddling, just keeping their nose above the water. That's right. So flooding the zone with these outlandish, outrageous, offensive, sometimes just so brain-numbing

some of these things, that makes us tune out. It makes this tune out. It also can create this ambient sense of, of, I'm always on the defensive or I'm always on the offensive. You want to attack. I've had days where I've wanted to throw a heavy American refrigerator through a concrete wall. Your system can only take so much, right? But what it also does is it creates an atmosphere that is perfect for a savior. Let me describe that. I think a lot of us out here have seen the picture of Vladimir Putin on a horse, bare-chested.

That's right. Right. Well, I don't know whether the current occupant of the White House is going to do something similar. But in a sense, this idea of... He'd have to make it so that it doesn't quite as heavy in his age. I don't want to think of that image. But it creates a situation where people are so exhausted and they feel fear coming in from every possible direction.

People who are scared and exhausted and isolated, remember, this polarization is essential that we keep in mind, that we're atomized, we're pulled apart from each other. People who are exhausted who are afraid, who are isolated, will sign anything. And they'll say, I just don't have it in me. take care of it. So they're looking for his savior. And then when somebody comes

and literally says, I am the chosen one, they'll say, good, you take care of it. That is handing our precious republic into the hands of an authoritarian. That's what it is, but that's what they want. You exhaust the people.

I agree. You confuse them and you isolate them. That is why I use that as the last of the 11 hallmarks, because all of these things we've talked about in the previous 10 accumulate. It's like an avalanche. It's like a landslide and it ends up with violence and a third point. There's nothing that would justify an emergency decree or an executive order like people going to war with each other. Right? We get angry enough with one another

and finally people just pull out the ammo and they're and they're fighting with one another. We cannot be enemies. We cannot look at one another with such suspicious, suspicion and contempt that we're ready to cause harm to one another. If we do that, we are playing right into the hands of the authoritarian. You've got to believe me. That's exactly what they want. We'll get people fighting with each other. I agree. Yeah. I've said this before. When I look at Trump, the things that he does, it makes me think back to, it's hard day's night. It's a hard day's night. I think it was the Beatles movie is black and white. One of the guys had an uncle, and his whole thing was just to get people fighting with each other.

He enjoyed that. But, of course, there's more than just the enjoyment that I think that Trump gets out of it. I think it really is a tactic of control. And it's important for people to understand that. So as you pointed out, the purpose of that chaos is just to get you to surrender and say, okay, well, you take it from this. So what is the antithesis of that? It's for us to not surrender and to do what? It is nonviolent resistance, and I use an entire chapter to describe it.

But I've also talked about it already in the course of our really valuable time together. I've said there's language that we can use that will either shut down our counterpart, our much more conservative counterpart, or open up doors. It starts, so much of this starts with language being sensitive, asking questions, not going in for the kill, not going in to win an argument, but just say, help me understand. Help me understand where you are and why. Help me understand the sources.

Let me know where you're getting your information. Oh, let's sit down for a moment. Guess what? Did you know, and don't take this personally, Antilles, but you know that source that you're watching all day long and around. Did you know that that's not, that can't even be categorized as a news platform? Because they were sued so many times for telling laws

and you know which platform I'm talking about, they had to change their categorization to entertainment because they don't meet certain journalistic standards. And then you say, here's this other source that gives me kind of a different point of view. Look, we are living in many ways on different planets because we are accessing different information systems. Your Aunt Tilly, who's only accessing

one propagandistic platform doesn't even know. I was stunned. I was stunned to watch and listen to interviews with diehard Trump supporters who had never seen January 6th footage. Never. And so they thought it was all concocted. And then somebody kindly, lovingly, thoughtfully,

safely sat them down and said you need to watch this whole thing. It was world tipping for them. To realize they had and to watch the cogs in their mind say whoa whoa whoa if my government can lie about that

domino domino domino domino domino domino domino so there are practical things we can do it begins with language it begins with refusing the lie I'll just give three points here refusing to participate in the lie.

When you see a lie, when you hear a lie, you call it out. It's going to cost you. Do it kindly. Do it firmly. Don't back down. The other one is rebuild the we. Whoever you can rebuild a relationship with and talk in terms of we are concerned about our community.

We are concerned about our immigrant brothers and sisters. We are concerned about keeping our faith pure and unaltered by government. We are the people. And then the other one is just to reject violence, reject violence and be loud about it. It is not okay for my president to use that violent language. It's not okay. It's not okay, right? It's not okay for them to allow that people at a rally say he should be shot.

He should be shot over and over again in the RNC, right? We cannot permit that. And then again in my book, I spent an entire, METI chapter mapping out practical things you do. And then one of the things that is valuable about my book, and I wish that somebody would have written my book 10 years ago, so I could have used it. So I'm writing it now and I'm giving it to you is that throughout the book, there are action plans. In each of those case studies, I give you action plans. I say, you got 10 minutes? Here's what you're going to do. You've got three hours. Here's what you're going to do. You have a little more time. Here's what you can do.

in a sustainable way. And it stings as easy as download the Five Calls app. Download your voting app. Check that you're registered. And I build throughout the book, throughout these action plans. So no one has an excuse. I've given you a field guide.

The other thing that I do is that I strongly recommend and I give a game plan for developing your own democracy defense pod. It sounds so cheesy. But I'll bet you're never going to forget it. It's your DDP. It's your Peps. It's three people. You're going to hold one another accountable.

You're going to buy the chips and salsa together. You're going to go to the town hall meeting together. And you are going to be actively engaged in your community. That's what your DDP is. There's like a 20-page appendix that gives all of us a guide for doing exactly that. Again, we come back to where we started. Really. Politics is local. And so you end with, you know, nonviolent resistance, which, again, correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding was a key issue when the wall came down in Germany was you had a group of people who kept meeting at a church. And then one day they go in mass and they just passively go to the area where they're not supposed to go because of the guards and that type of thing. And what is it that gives people that kind of strength, I think, to do that? it really is your final chapter there, hope.

You know, when I talked to the fellow from Israel that had found a way to have a peaceful relationship with their Muslim neighbors that were there, they were both at each other's throats, and they found a way, he called it the path to peace and hope. And I think that is the key thing. You know, when we look at that, and as Christians, we should always have that hope, that hope that gives us courage to even stand up against a gun that is pointed at as Vonhofer did, as people in East Germany did as well. What do you mean by Hope's Stone?

That is the final chapter there. What is the stone? I'm so glad you asked that. For those of us who've studied Martin Luther King, Jr., and we know his, I have a dream speech, he says, out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. Okay. And a lot of us, now we're back to the very beginning of our time together,

people who are despairing, who are despondent, who are shrugging, giving up. he talks about scaling this mountain of despair. We are going to have despair. We will not escape fear. We will not escape war and unrest in this world. We won't. This is what mortality is about.

This is the challenge. And so having hope is not to ignore that mountain of despair. It's to climb it and to feel it under our souls of our feet and in our souls. The despair around us. And to look, when we get on that mountain of despair, this is how I envision it. I look backwards and I look forwards. Behind me, I see legions, legions of people who have given so much for my right to be free, who have given life and limb and time and resources, and I want to honor them with how I live now, period.

When I look forward, I look at my children, they're adult children now, my one grandchild. What is the world that they will inherit? Remember, Victor Frankel in Buchanwald, he said, you've read his wonderful work, Man Search for Meaning. And the thing that kept him alive was this vision of his wife, the image of his wife that she would be waiting for him. She had long since died. But knowing that his beloved was waiting for him and needed him

was the thing that kept his soul striving. Madeline Albright said, she had a refugee childhood in Czechoslovakia, ended up being UN Secretary of State. Right. And she said, I was taught that striving is the way to keep faith and hope. Just the act of striving. So it's climbing up on that despair and then having the stone of hope. You know, some people like to kind of mix hope and optimism. I see them as two very different things. Optimism, you might have been born with that personality, good for you. Lucky you. You're bubbly. You're bubbly. You're yellow. You're joie de vivre. Okay, but optimism is carbonated. It's these air bubbles that float to the top. And that'll get us through when we're underwater for a while. While optimism is carbonation, hope is carbon.

It is dense. It is the substrata. It has been carved out in the veil of grief and loss. And all these people behind me have been sustained because they still, strove. They were still striving. That's what I see out of hope. It is heavy. It anchors us. That's what it is. And for our Christian listeners, we understand that. We understand this language of hope being an anchor to the soul. It is not a come and go feeling. It is a moral discipline. I am going to keep on moving. I'm going to keep on scaling. You've experienced, you know, being fired for speaking truth. That must have been.

a moment of great despair for you and anger and doubt and what was that for. But here you are and look at the good that you are doing, continuing to speak truth and educate people about these things that are valuable for everyone. That's what I mean by hopes. Yeah. And when we talk about hope as Christians, we talk about confident expectation. We know how this turns out. And we will frequently, as Christians, will talk about the difference between happiness and joy, you know. Happiness is dependent on what's happening to you. If you're pointing out the bubbles, that come up or the things that come into our life, we don't have any control over that,

over the circumstances of our life. But if we have that confident expectation, that gives us a deep joy and it gives us an anchor, doesn't it? That does. That does. And we glean strength from that and we glean strength from one another. I'm gonna just insert right here really quickly. You asked about my previous books.

So Global Mom was really well received. I was so humbled that people even wanted to hear that. story, but in the middle of that book, we lose our eldest son at the age of 18 to a tragic accident where he was trying to save someone else's life. I don't insert that here to try and, you know, garner any pity or poor woman or anything like that. What I want to say is I know what it's like to have zero hope in the future and that there will never be joy and that will never be purpose again. How can my life continue when I've lost the thing most precious to me? It was my love for other people that continued my life.

I never thought I would ever write again, speak again, certainly not be sitting on your podcast. I never imagined that when I saw my son's beautiful body go into the ground. But it has been that deep faith and also my commitment to other people, my profound love for other people and my desire to see other people experience joy and freedom and stability and everything that, human dignity means. That's also in my writing and in my thinking. Well, thank you so much. It's a pleasure talking to you. Again, folks, we're talking to Melissa Dalton Bradford. And her book that just came out is How to Save Democracy, the Anti-Athoritarian Playbook, so that we don't get

played. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. It's been a wonderful honor. Thank you. Enjoy it. Thank you. Bye-bye. Thank you.