The Dispatch Podcast - The Left, Right, and Religious

Episode Date: April 2, 2023

Author and political reporter Jon Ward joins Steve Hayes in a revealing interview to talk about his book Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed A Generation. The two discuss the religious fervor that shaped today's Christian political environment on the right. Also, stay tuned for our first episode of "High Steaks", a mini podcast series between Steve and Sarah on the 2024 presidential election. Dispatch members will have access to the full series, so subscribe today. Click here to become a Dispatch member and gain access to the full series... along with The Morning Dispatch, Kevin Williamson's Wanderland,Sarah Isgur's The Permanent Campaign and many other newsletters. If you're already a member, follow this link to get access to High Steaks. New episode coming Monday.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. www.ca.com. Did you lock the front door?

Check. Close the garage door? Yep. Installed window sensors, smoke sensors, and HD cameras with night vision? No. And you set up credit card transaction alerts, a secure VPN for a private connection and continuous monitoring for our personal info on the dark web.

Uh, I'm looking into it. Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit TELUS.com. Total Security to learn more. Conditions apply. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes, joined today by John Ward,

a senior political reporter with Yahoo News and author of testimony, a raw and deeply personal book about growing up in a fundamentalist evangelical household and ending up as a devout Christian in journalism. It's a fascinating story of growing up in a world where doubt and skepticism were discouraged and questioning certain assumptions was forbidden,

even sinful. only to emerge pursuing a career in journalism that puts a premium on asking uncomfortable questions and approaching subjects with deep skepticism. We talked about John's faith and the pressure to conform with church leadership that often didn't practice what they preached. We discussed painful periods of intense devotion to a kind of non-denominational Christianity where shame, including public self-criticism, was the point. We explored his decision to pursue a life in journalism, his years working with Tucker Carlson at the Daily Caller, the blind spots of the mainstream media

and enthusiastic embrace of most evangelicals for Donald Trump and its implications for our politics, our faith, and our world. I hope you enjoy the conversation. And when it's done, stick around for high stakes, a new miniseries hosted by me

and Sarah Esker related to a little bet that we made about the presidential election. It's a member's only feed, so in order to get access to it, you'll have to join the dispatch. If you're already a member, you can follow the link in the description

and get asked to your personal private feed. If you're not yet a member, please consider joining the dispatch for access to high stakes and to all of our work here and in our newsletters and on our website. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I read it this weekend while I was traipsing around Notre Dame,

very different religious tradition than the one that you describe, and very different from the religious tradition that I was raised. And I was raised a congregationalist in suburban Milwaukee. And it's not a congregationalist in the sort of northeastern sense that people understand congregationalism. It was a conservative, church, I would say culturally and morally, but a pretty liberal church theologically. And you came from a very different tradition, I will say. Well,

let's start at the beginning. The book is called testimony. What does testimony mean sort of to Christians broadly? And why is this book your testimony? Christians is a very broad term. So I'll just say what testimony means to the Christians that I grew up around. And then if you want to broaden it, we can go from there. But in the world, I grew up in a testimony was often something that someone did in a corporate public setting, often in a church service. And they would usually stand up or go to the microphone on the stage and talk about ways in which they had faced a challenge usually or hit a low point. um something of that nature and how god had helped them or met them through that um and so i think the way that that term applies to me is you know most clearly seen in probably the last

decade uh you know i'm thinking of of how testimony applies to my entire life but also to the last decade i think if it were if i were to say how it applies to my entire life it's kind of my story of growing up in a very intense faith culture. Feeling pretty early on, like there was something a little off about it, but never really wanting to reject it entirely, and I still feel that way. And leaving that sort of small bubble,

going out into the bigger world, learning a lot of new skills, learning a lot of new information, that I just didn't have growing up and then trying to incorporate the two. And then the last, you know, 10 years, if I were applied to that, it would be, you know, we've all lived through a lot of tumult and controversy and chaos over the last several years, decade or so. And, you know, if you kind of intensify that search to find the faith I was taught as a child

and hold on to it, that's kind of, I would say, what, what the book's about in probably the last third of it. Yeah. Yeah. Let's, well, let's, let's talk a little bit about the,

the tradition, uh, you were raised in. Um, what was a, a typical church service for you? If you, if you,

if there was a typical church service. And in what other ways was faith present? Was the church present in your life sort of between Sunday and Sunday? It's interesting because the church service that I was a part of from, you know, infancy to early teens was pretty different from the church service that I went to at the same church, when I became most intensely religious around college, which I think gives me, I had very intense, very close experiences of two different forms of non-denominational Christianity, both of which I kind of write about three different archetypes in the book.

Yeah, describe, describe that evolution. That's an interesting part of the book. So the early decade of my life, we were a church that was charismatic, non-denominational. And that has a specific Yeah, it came out of the Jesus movement. Very much, I mean, we started our own church. My parents did and their friends. And they were turning their back on, rejecting and reacting to sort of the post-war conformist model, the Catholic church, the mainline Protestant churches, which they felt were dead and lifeless and form without authenticity. And, you know, there's a movie out right now, the Jesus Revolution, which conveys some of that period, which is where they came to faith, they became born again, and they started their own church. And so for the first decade or so

my life we were in our church services were super charismatic lot of like um obviously like a lot of raising hands and praying in tongues um but other a lot of a lot of loud music oh yeah it was all definitely definitely that i mean definitely you had the drums the electric guitar the the keyboard they had brats they had like horn sections at times but they would also um have people who come up on stage and danced. They had at one point, like a troop of women who I think would wear all the same kind of color of dress. I remember red and they would come up on stage and they would do sort of, I guess, interpretive dance. And, you know, it was quasi-Pentecostal, you know, in terms of very, very intense emotional expression and experience. And to be

fair, like the charismatic forms, some of those stayed with the church for a long time in a way that a lot of evangelical churches retain some of the flavor of the Jesus movement, even today where they're, you know, they have the rock bands, they continue

to like do a lot of eyes closed, raising the hands. I would say speaking in tongues is more rare now and it became more rare in our church but still existed. Prophecy also, like giving people, giving words of knowledge. college, people kind of saying this is what God has told me. That became more rare, but still

exists in a lot of evangelical churches. And in the more charismatic churches, it's like the New Apostolic Reformation churches. It's like a huge part of not just their church services, but now their political engagement. But around college, our church became Calvinist. And there's a really interesting dynamic that happened in the mid-90s because there was this very intense Pentecostal slash charismatic thing that happened up in Toronto called the Toronto blessing and our church went through a period of like people going to the to the front after services falling down being prayed for it be falling down you know shaking convulsing at times all that sort of thing you describe at one point in the book you

described people's crawling around barking like dogs that never happened at our church but that was reported to have happened this is yeah in Toronto and other places maybe Brownsville, Florida as well. So right after that, though, our church became Calvinist, which was part of a large movement among a lot of Protestant churches, evangelical churches. Colin Hansen wrote a book called Young, Restless, and Reformed, John Piper, Al-Muller. A lot of these guys were at the vanguard of that movement, and I became a very intense Christian at that time.

Our pastor, C.J. Mahaney was part of a cohort of leaders. along with, you know, Mueller, Liggin Duncan, Mark Devere here in Capitol Hill, who started a conference. And so that was my experience in college. So we still had that charismatic shape of our services at times, but our theology became much more hard line. And you mentioned in passing that your parents had helped start this church. Right. So this was not a one hour on Sunday faith tradition for you. This was sort of in in all aspects of your your life on a day to day basis. Yeah. And as a kid and even as a teen, like I just would have rather been playing baseball or football. But our social, my parents' social life, certainly like all of their

friends and relationships and time was spent either at church meetings or with people from the church. And, you know, for all of the elementary school, I went to a school that was run by the church where the only people that could come were members of the church or children of members of the church and all of the teachers were members of the church. So it was cultish.

Yeah, and you described in the book at several different points, this sort of rising awareness that there was this world that you were occupying, this world that you were living in, and then sort of another world. Can you describe how did you,

like how did you have those realizations? And you talk about sort of flirting with trouble, with being among the troublemakers as sort of what are early teens maybe and wanting to play sports in ways that you weren't playing sports or hadn't played sports as a kid. How did you come to that realization that there was this other world? Yeah, it was kind of slow. Early on, it would have been mostly through sports. Those were the only kids I really knew besides kids on my street that were not from the. the church. I remember I've always been pretty into music. I remember, you know, I, I think it was Columbia music used to have this deal where they would send out eight cassettes. Yeah. For free,

you would get it in a magazine and I probably saw it in Sports Illustrated. Yeah. Which I, free in air quotes. Right. So what I would do, uh, hopefully I won't, you know, get retroactively prosecuted for this as a former minor offendee was I would, you know, send the card in, get the eight cassettes. I would record them all on a two cassette tape deck and then put them all back and re-glu the box up and send it back. So that's how I got all my music as a middle school. So you weren't the only kid who did this. I can see with some with some conviction. And in your defense and I'm only defending you here not not anybody else in this room um that's how they pitched it right that's how they pitched it did they say that yeah like money back guaranteed you know it was

all right that was sort of the the thing and then they hooked you and then they if you didn't cancel they would send you one a like one a month right i think was okay yeah that makes sense that brings it brings true yeah so i remember uh listening to don henley's end of the innocence like that sort of thing was some of the early, you know, just indications of a larger world. And then when I got into high school, the really small, narrow school that my parents were going to send me to actually closed down. And so they were kind of scrambling. And they sent me to a Baptist run school in Rockville, uh, named Montrose Christian school. Rockville, Maryland outside of D.C. Right outside of D.C. Yeah. And, uh, and it was there where like, there was a bunch of kids there who had kind of been expelled

from other schools and I fell in with some of them and one of the guys there was a guy named Brian Ryan who was my best friend's friend and he was you know a pretty legit like troublemaker who ended up but cool kid right very cool the most popular kid in the school very cool and great basketball player who ended up you know he was found in the trunk of a car like 10 15 years ago shot I think in the head or the back or something because of a drug deal gone wrong so yeah I got into a little bit of trouble, but I was always pretty straight and narrow. I was too scared of going to hell to do much, much damage. In the book, as you described those early years, I think you very helpfully describe some of the practices that would strike somebody like me

as weird, right? Sure. Speaking in tongues like the, we didn't do much of that in the congregational church in Wauotosa. But you describe it, I would say, with some charity. And people who read the book, I encourage everybody to get it, we'll see that one of the things that sort of leaps off the page throughout the entire book is this sort of sense of humility that you bring to all of it from those early years through today and all of the things that we've seen over the past 10 years. But you describe those things with a level of charity, I think genuinely trying to get somebody like me to understand what was what were they doing can you explain that to us and some of the some of the the weirder elements of charismatic Christianity what what did they think

they were doing in those moments yeah I think when you step into a world like that and you're almost almost all of your main points of contact with reality are through people in this world media from that world, et cetera. There is a closed universe sort of thing that happens. And it's not like you're not interacting with people outside this world, but it's just a majority of the inputs, right? I almost feel like I'm making it sound weirder than it is.

What I'm just trying to convey is that people when they're in this world, they really, they 100% believe, and who am I to say that they're not too, actually? But they believe, like, if they're speaking in tongues, They believe that they are expressing, there's actually variations of what you could think, but I think a lot of people feel like they are expressing prayer to God in a way that is beyond words. For mere language, yeah. Yeah, it's so deeply felt and so deeply expressed that there's no language for it. And that is kind of a poignant thing.

Like all of us experience emotions that we can't put into words. And they're just trying to, a lot of people are just trying to express it to God in a way that, you know, it does, it does come out sounding a bit strange. And I think, you know, the actual theology of it is, you know, a lot of people also feel like you speak in tongues once you've been baptized in the Holy Spirit. And that's a specific marker in your life. And it's a deeper experience of Christianity. That would be a more Pentecostal slash charismatic belief. a little more rigid, you know, but I think in real life and experience, a lot of people just feel like, well, I'm just expressing myself to God. And that's what I try to kind of convey is like, not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious.

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What a run. This champ is picking up speed. But they found a lane. Phenomenal launch into the air. Absolutely incredible. Air Transite. Fly the seven-time world's best leisure airline champions, Air Transat. I don't think it's healthy if the ecstatic, emotional, religious experience is the goal of your religion and the top, you know, the dominating factor because I think it sidelines a lot of other things and has a lot of downstream negative effects. And it's not the way I choose to express my faith by and large. But I do know that a lot of people come to these church services and these church congregations and they experience profound emotions and catharsis and closeness to God.

And so I just think it's really unhealthy if we look down our nose at it. I also think a lot of Charismatics think that their experience is the best form or the only true form. And so I would think it would be wrong to return the favor. So as you grow in your faith journey, you begin asking questions about a lot of what you've been taught, about the church sort of broadly understood. And this happens at a time sort of through your teens and into your early 20s when the faith as you practice it intensifies. I mean, you describe in the book, this period in your early 20s, these meetings that you

used to go to at Starbucks, things that you did elsewhere, really sort of raw and personal stories that, uh, you, I mean, there was this, to me, there was this tension in the way that you were describing the intensity of your approach to faith and at the same time, sort of distancing, growing further and further and asking more and more questions. Am I right to see that tension or am I reading something into it? No, I think you are right. I don't think I was all that serious of a kid, intellectually, but how many kids are? I mean, I was a kid. I read a lot, so there was that.

But in high school, I was not, I was, I was kind of a, it was kind of like a, a mild jackass in high school, more interested in sports and still pretty sheltered. And then in college, as you mentioned, I became very religious. But I also went to two years of community college, played some baseball there, and then I went to the University of Maryland. And at the University of Maryland, that's where my mind began to actually get awakened. I had a Shakespeare professor named Michael Olmert, who really lit my imagination and my desire for learning, really lit that flame. And I had other professors who I really enjoyed. And so, yes, at the same time that I was finding a lot of purpose and meaning and identity in a very intense pursuit of religion and church life, I was also at the same time just awakening to the worlds of literature and, you know, the whole world. And I wasn't yet at a place where I thought that, you know, news and politics were of interest to me because quite frankly, I kind of wanted to just.

you know, be a thorough type figure probably who went out into the woods or, you know, a novelist who wrote, you know, the great novel. And I thought that the news was too transient and, and kind of below me. But there was that, yeah, there was those cross currents happening right there. The writing was the point. I mean, that's how you got into journals. It wasn't necessarily because you wanted sort of narrative nonfiction or long form nonfiction storytelling. It was you just wanted write. He likes to write. I did. Yeah. And I, again, because I, I'm not, I'm not angry or bitter at my parents or even my church, you know, for, for doing this. But I, because I had so, so little exposure and resources growing up, you know, I've graduated from college and I've taught two

years of high school at the same church high school. And so I'm now 24. And my only real career direction is I want to write for a living and I have basically no contacts and no real you know I have no clips to give people I have really nothing so I just start talking to people who I do know about what kind of you know I asked them for advice and a lot of people said work right for newspapers and I happen to come into contact with somebody who I whose husband was an assistant managing editor at the Washington Times and I got an unpaid internship and then six months later became a news clerk yeah that's when I first started reading I was regular reader of the Washington Times back then you read my coverage of the the wash FM it was I don't think it was the you had this stage I think during your

internship where you you were sort of general assignment no I read I used to read the Washington Times front to back yeah so I'm sure I said you there but then you covered Maryland politics and sort of grew into international politics. What was it like working at the Washington Times? It was a conservative newspaper back in the day when I was reading it was the local alternative to the Washington Post. I read it first and then would read the Post and this was at a time when I considered the Post just this horrendous liberal rag and thought the Washington Times was a much better source of truth. What was your experience like? And was I right back then? About the Posts? And the Times. I don't know. I mean, the Times was a great, weird place. It was very old

school in a lot of ways in its journalism. A lot of people who, you know, I come in in the fall of 01, 9-11s just happened, we're about to invade Afghanistan or in Iraq. So there's a lot going on. But there's a lot of people at the paper, I would say mid-level editors who have been in journalism for at least 10 years. So that's going back to pre-internet and we're at this time where me and other young reporters are coming in and trying to help the paper move in a more digital direction, which obviously took a very long time for a lot of newspapers. So, you know, there was a lot of this old school approach to which I think is great to news gathering. And the paper did have certain, you know, clear biases. I remember the old managing editor or editor-in-chief. I can't remember his title.

But Wes Pruden, I think he was the managing editor. His father actually had been one of the community leaders who had opposed the Little Rock Nine. And so he was from the South. I remember they had the Civil War section. A lot of people called him a neoclass. Confederate because of his sympathies for the South during the Civil War. And he had this policy that we couldn't, if we were referring to same-sex marriage, marriage had to be in quotation marks.

So there were things like that. And obviously the paper was owned by a South Korean cult leader, San Yong Moon. I'm actually not sure who owns the paper now. Do you know? Yeah. I don't. I don't. I know it's transferred hands, but I don't.

if it's out of the family. But, so, you know, the building was kind of like right by the National Arboretum. It was kind of run down. And I just learned a lot of good journalism there. Yeah, I mean, you were doing, I mean, the thing that was sort of interesting to me is you were doing sort of real old school journalism reporting. Right. I mean, described going down to was Virginia Beach and covering the trial of the D.C. sniper and to your point. Covering the sniper before that. I mean, this was like old school journalism. to your point about the Washington Post, like every day in the courtroom, both in the preliminary hearings and the actual trial of John Allen, Muhammad, the sniper, who's since been executed,

you know, I sat most days next to or close to Josh White, who was the Washington Post reporter, who I think was just like assigned to the Prince William Bureau. And that was my standard. Like I was trying to compete with the Post, and they were really damn good at that level. of reporting. And so I did, you know, year, I did like eight years at the times. And most of it, until the last couple, were just very mundane local reporting, which a lot of times I was banging my head against the wall, trying to get out of there. But a great way to learn journalism, if I can say. Yeah. And I wish I hadn't been so impatient to get out of there because there was so much good, good, just like real life to report on it. So many stories. Yeah. Yeah. So moving forward,

you sort of establish yourself. You become sort of a name that people read and look for the byline. You start covering national politics, and then you recruited and start to work in 2009 for the Daily Caller, which was this startup that Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel launched. Can you describe sort of how you came to work there and what the original intent of the Daily Caller was? Well, this office actually reminds me a lot of the original Daily Caller office. With all of our kegs and, you know. No kegs that I've seen. yet. Maybe you hide them in the kitchen, but no, just the sort of, you know, no frills. This is like a, there's newer buildings downtown. This is one of the older ones. I know

your transition housing here, but yeah, it just reminds me of that. But I came there because I'd been at the times for way too long. And I've been, I, we had had had, this was 09. So we had just had our second kid, I think. So, you know, it's the same. It's the age old story. Like, you know, you get married, you have kids, you got to make more money, and I'd been there too long anyway. So Neil and Tucker, this is in the book, but like early 2009, Tucker goes to CPAC, which used to be held at a hotel uptown. And he gives a speech about how conservatives don't do enough original journalism and how everybody might hate the New York Times, but at least the New York Times spells people's names right.

And he gets booed. But he's defiant in that moment. Yeah. He basically doesn't care that he's getting booed. He doesn't care. He does, you know, he does back off a little bit and say,

Fox News is great. Right, right. But he's standing up for, he doesn't back off the point. Old school reporting. Correct. Yeah. And he said,

and he has an amazing line, which he says, if a media outlet doesn't get its facts right, it'll fail. And so that was the original vision of the Daily Caller. It was, I think there were comparisons to Huff Post at the time. You know, a conservative Huffington Post, which is doing reporting, has a conservative worldview. I didn't really care about the worldview thing because at the times, I didn't want to be perceived as having water to carry.

And I felt the same way at the Daily Caller. But it was sort of the next adjacent move for me to make. And it was a good year and a half. It was a good year and half for me. And Tucker was actually a great boss. for the most part. Neil was a great boss. It was a good place to work. But I just saw within about six to eight months that the journalism, like to me, the way you build a real media outlet doesn't happen overnight. And if you want to, I'm not a finance guy. I'm not a business

model guy, but I know you've got to have enough money to get you where you need to go. And sometimes that takes a while. You know, you can't. And I just saw them trying to make a splash by doing stuff that wasn't necessarily accurate or as exaggerated or it was sort of, you know, just making hay out of stuff that wasn't really new. So I kind of moved on. I decided to move on. And do you think that was because of the business model? I mean, they famously raised a bunch of money and it's a great question. I mean, that was at a time back in 2009, 2010, 2011, when the presumption was that news would be free and that the way to make money on news was to, monetize scale to monetize volume and by to do that you had to get as many people come to your side as possible yeah i mean i certainly think the incentives it created these incentives which i

think did a lot to ruin journalism more broadly that you had to have a sensational outrage headlines and you had to get people to to click in to make a buck you wrote in the book that you knew that tucker wasn't serious about fact-based journalism within six months why did you know that number one and number two can you could you have imagined then the journey that we've seen tuck around since i mean i knew the the series that comes to mind was this journalist series that they did that uh they got a hold of a list serve that i think dave wigel was running with a bunch of journalists where they just discussed whatever they were working on or whatever it was. And they found things and kind of pulled them out and used them as examples of

media bias. And most of the journalists were sort of center left. Is that a fair? Yeah, that's totally fair. As are most journalists. Right. And we did a series of stories. And there were a couple that had some legitimacy, but were then exaggerated. But there was one in particular, I think it was about Michael Scherer, who is, I don't know where he's actually. I think he's at the post, yeah. Not Michael Shear, Scherer. And I think I knew him a little bit, maybe, but I just, I thought it was completely unfair and inaccurate.

And then there was also the Michael Steele, who is RNC chairman's story at the time, where we ran a bunch of stories about him, like having these, I can't even remember the deals. In my memory, there were stories about him having. parties with like uh lewd dancers or something i don't remember what it was but in retrospect i think that story was also far less than an advertised so i just began to feel uncomfortable with the level of exaggeration but it was nothing at the level of what we see now with tucker and um uh you know those text messages that were that came out in the um in the lawsuit um seemed to reveal a level of cynicism that I wasn't even sure was there, to be honest. I wasn't sure how much of his own, you know,

falsehoods he believed and how much of it was just wanting to build an empire on based on misleading people. And it seems like the latter is, is a pretty significant portion of it. Although I think, you know, we all are able to dilute ourselves that what we say and tell other people is true. We all do it to some degree. And he seems to, I'm sure that That's part of the mix in there as well. But again, I don't understand the, it can't be about money at the end of the day, because I think his family money is pretty significant. Yeah, let's move on sort of chronologically from that point.

You did a lot of reporting about the Tea Party and I found your discussion of the Tea Party in the book fascinating, mainly because I didn't agree with a lot of it. At the time or that or now? Now. I mean, well, I was much more sympathetic in my reporting on the Tea Party. I did a lot of the same. We crossed paths. We were out covering rallies, covering the 2012 campaign.

And I was pretty sympathetic to the Tea Party and what I thought the Tea Party was trying to do, which was largely sort of an ideological disruption based mostly on concerns about debt and deficits, size and scope of government. You seem to believe, and you did a ton of reporting, so I'm not, I'm not saying that what you believed is wrong here. You're quoting people in the book from the conversations that you've had. You seem to see more of a religious component in the Tea Party movement. Is that, is that fair?

Or at least that that was part of what animated that movement? That's a tough. That's a tough one. I don't know. I'm wondering if I gave a misimpression by focusing on the Glenn Beck rally. I do think that debt and deficit were a huge part of the Tea Party. And I think I told the Glenn Beck Rally story because I wanted to get into, I wanted to use it probably more as foreshadowing of what was coming. So I don't know if I felt like religion was a huge part of it at the time.

I think the point I was trying to make was that a lot of people who were talking about these issues of debt. and deficit, unless not, I can't, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the fact that I think in retrospect, a lot of the reaction in 09 and 10 had a lot to do with electing the first black president. And I, you know, I'll just put that out there. I think that was a part of the mix as well. Far more than I had thought at the time. Yeah. I mean, I was, I remember there were, there was controversy. I can't remember there was a controversy. Was it Maxine Waters, who was, somebody was alleged to have spit on her and Breitbart replayed the video and it didn't happen or it was, I was offended on behalf of many people in the Tea Party.

Again, some of whom I knew pretty well, many of whom I'd interviewed and thought they were just sort of normal Americans frustrated with the size and scope of government. And it turns out, I think, I saw in part what I wanted to see. I was this was mirror imaging on my part but this is what I cared about yeah with the debt and deficits and I sort of projected that on on them maybe more and I wonder maybe that explains part of the the religious component of the tea party that you saw coming out of the tradition that you had at the time I was pretty close to you in a lot of ways I was I interviewed Paul Ryan for the first time, probably 09 or 10, and you and Paul, you know, did a lot of

work, you know, you interviewed him a lot and wrote about him a lot. You know, you're probably one of the few people who wrote about him more than I did. I wrote about him a lot. And so at the time I was thinking about that a lot, the debt and the deficit. But I think the point I was trying to make in the book probably is that a lot of these people that were talking about these issues were some of the same people who were going to church involved in these evangelical or charismatic settings and we're going to in the future kind of transition into a more religious flavored

form of political engagement. I think that's the point I was trying to make. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, it was very interesting in reading the book and I mean, your introduction is rife with discussions about the truth, about the pursuit of inquiry, about asking questions about being open-minded that I just found myself nodding my head along the entire time. I mean, I think you and I, I'm not surprising probably to people that you and I see journalism, I think, in the same way in many respects.

But it's interesting to me that if you go back and you read, and it should be clear that you don't sort of take credit for this in the book, but you do seed throughout this as you build the narrative toward the Trump presidency and everything that we've seen over the past. seven, eight years, you do sort of drop crumbs and say like, well, maybe we ought to have seen some of this a little bit earlier with this, this eagerness to sort of simply assert knowledge and the sense of certainty that some people on the right had that wasn't sort of consistent with asking questions. And, you know, you talk about that in the faith context throughout your

your childhood and growing up. And then it's sort of there in the political context as you describe your evolution as a journalist. I mean, life, it seems to me in my mid-40s now is just one series of one series after another of events and occurrences that the main message is just to slow down. I mean, the amount of times I have been wrong in my assumptions. And, you know, kind of wish casting out there into the world. What I hope to be the truth is, or just, like, wrong about part of it or missing a significant component of it. There's just, so it's not just that we're always wrong. It's just that we're often almost entirely, almost entirely all the time.

We just don't see the full picture. So that is probably a more accurate way to say it rather than we're wrong. Right. Because we all also see parts of the truth. right or of reality so you you talk about the the sort of growing distrust that evangelicals have for our institutions or broadly for journalism in particular and I wonder as you're sort of thinking through this to what extent are and I'm thinking here of journalism in particular to what extent are journalists do they share some responsibility there because it seems to me that the exact

kind of certainty that you describe sort of animating the beliefs in the political evolution of many. And it should be clear to note that you're not making blanket statements here. You're not saying all evangelicals this, all evangelical is that. But you ascribe a sense of certainty to the evangelical movement, that political movement that we've seen over the past seven, eight years. And I wonder if you see in journalists the same thing. I mean, it seems to me that a lot of coverage of religion, evangelicals,

in particular, there really wasn't this, they didn't start out with the same intellectual curiosity or the desire to understand first. Many journalists who are not, who are secular, or not come from a faith tradition, did seem to make assumptions about evangelicals, about Christians more broadly. Did you see that as you moved? sort of through journalism, you went from the Daily Caller to the Huffington Post, you're now Yahoo News. Is it fair for evangelicals to say, hey, they didn't really try to understand us either? Yeah, I think it is. I mean, people often from religious cultures will, over the years, I've just gotten the question probably more than most others from that group, from religious

conservatives, often young people, and they'll ask, is it hard to be a Christian in media or in journalism. And that question to me has always struck me as a bit off because it's not in my, in my view. I think every single human being on earth is searching for meaning and transcendence even. And so I think that's a pretty common ground that we all have. And I, you know, find many ways to to reach that common ground in relationship or conversation with other journalists and other, you know, people in, in various aspects of life in D.C. But I, you know, when it comes to the media's approach towards religious conservatives, um, two factors, I think, drive the dynamic you're describing. One would be that most

people don't come from that world in media. And the second is that, uh, the incentives of media over the last 20 years, especially have been to speed up and to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, do more volume rather than to slow down and to do more quality. Right. And so that is a reductionist force. I also have thought since the Hugh Hewitt interview a lot about what it means to be intellectual and what it means to be anti-intellectual. So Hugh Hewitt, just to bring our audience in, Hugh Hewitt, prominent talk radio host,

interviewed John a couple weeks ago about the book. Interview might be a generous way of describing it. And he sort of asked you a single question at the outset of the conversation, then proceeded to tell you what you had written and what he wished you had written. It was a curious interview. Anyway. Yeah. So I make the point in the book that there's a lot of anti-intellectualism in evangelicalism.

Mark Nileau wrote a seminal book in 1995, former Notre Dame professor, called the scandal of the evangelical mind. That's one of many markers. Hugh took offense at that and said there's a lot of people who he knows in evangelicalism who are intellectual. So I've thought a lot about what is intellectual mean, what is anti-intellectual mean since then. And I think to be anti-intellectual means that you very, very rarely do you say I could be wrong and very rarely do you kind of take the approach that you don't have all the answers or, you know, you don't have a full handle of the truth.

And there was another part of it that I've now forgotten, of course. But I don't know. That was the other statement. And in thinking about that, I thought the other place besides church, where I've felt almost like a physical resistance to those two statements is a TV studio. Yeah. I don't know. I could be wrong.

And so it was an interesting, you know, a moment to think about how, network TV, cable TV has also a pretty strong strain of that flavor of anti-intellectualism. And so I think that's another reductionist force. I'm a huge Neil Postman fan. Yeah. His book Amusing Ourselves to Death has been a big impact, has made a big impact on me. Likewise. Very, very interesting book.

I think I've mentioned it on this podcast probably. I have a dozen times. Once you read it, you can't stop talking about it. It becomes obnoxious even to yourself. That's right. the um i was you know i did fox news on on the well i did a lot of things on on fox news but my i was on most regularly with brett bear the six o'clock show on on his panel i think brett does that that show and that kind of discussion he needs that kind of discussion as well as

anybody in the business um but we had a we had a thing we used to do it um you know was we would make predictions on the panel and Brett would go, you know, say, is this likely to happen or this? Is this likely to happen or resist? And he did it for fun. Brett did it for fun. He was sort of like, winking at his audience. Like he knew this, we shouldn't take these predictions very seriously. But as often as not, I would say, I don't know. Or I would say, well, I can see it this way or that way. And he would always roll his eyes. It became sort of a thing because he was, he rolled his eyes at me like, really? You can't just tell us what your guess is. you know. But it was that same impulse that you're describing where I didn't want to make a bold

prediction. Even now I'm thinking about like if you're on a panel discussion that has nothing to do a television, it's at a university or something. If you go up there and say, I don't know or I could be wrong a lot, like that's not really serving the audience. And so these are, this is not a universal judgment on TV. It's just the fact that TV it's on all the time and it's driving so much of the conversation. Right. And it does push people. The medium rewards it. The medium rewards certainty and authority. Right. And if you can say something really wrong, but be bold and assertive as you say it. Yeah. And then there's the program and centers of the business model, which is all about, you know, make sure the eyeballs stay on the screen. Right. Right. Right. So I know we're running on time. I have

many, many more questions, but let me just get to a couple in closing. You know, One of the things that struck me as I read the book was you sort of saw some of the evangelical enthusiasm for Trump coming. You didn't, you know, again, you're not claiming credit for having predicted it, but I think the book sort of seeds in the reader's mind, hey, this thing is common and there's a reason that evangelical will be as supportive of Trump as they are. Again, that's not my tradition, and I found it shocking. It was out of the blue, didn't understand it, blind spot for me. And I used to speak at a, every year at a conference of, more than all evangelicals,

but religious conservatives, four or five hundred, a wonderful conference. I loved going to it. Met some really terrific people. And I remember appearing there in January of 2016, right before the Iowa caucuses in the New Hampshire primary. And I was given a talk. It was a fireside chat and I gave a little talk about some of the reporting I'd done on Benghazi. And then the Q&A session turned toward contemporary politics, like what was happening in the presidential race. And I was asked a question about Donald Trump and I did then as I do the time. I just told people what I thought. And I assumed in this room,

probably 100, 150 people, that everybody was in the same place. Right. I remember the moment very distinctly. Senator Jeff Sessions was in the back of the room. And as I spoke, very critical of Trump, he looked like sort of an old-school cartoon character with his face turning red and steam coming out of his ears. I could see that he was frustrated with what I was saying.

And he was flirting publicly at that. point with endorsing Trump, but what really surprised me was there was a group, turned out to be a presizable group, maybe a couple dozen in the audience to the, right in front of the podium to my left, absolutely furious. Couldn't believe that I was critical. I'm observing this from the stage and they're shouting. They're angry. And, you know, I had conversations throughout the rest the weekend about this and the extent to which people were making an affirmative case for him. Why did it not surprise you the way that it surprised me? You know, again, with the with the Glenn Beck thing, I didn't mean to give the impression

that I saw this coming. I think it was more an issue of me writing the book in a way that was retrospectively. Yeah, no, and I want to be very clear on that point. You're not you're not using the book to say like, everybody should have listened to me. I knew it was coming. I'm smarter than everybody else. Not at all. Yeah. But I think like it surprised you a lot less than it's surprised me. I don't know. I feel like throughout even like into the spring of 2016, I was still thinking, you know, evangelicals were going to, you know, vote with with principle. Yeah. And I, and I kind of remember even on election night in 2016 being surprised at the 81% number. Yeah. So I'm not sure I was surprised a whole lot less than you were. And even now, you know, I feel like I've been, I've been wrong on a lot of the stuff. And so it creates a weird dynamic moving forward because I want to say, well, the same thing's going to happen in 24. But maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe evangelicals are not going to go with Trump this time. I have no idea. We can look at polling numbers. We can look at anecdotal stuff. And Tim Abbott just wrote a person.

piece. I do feel like a lot of the stuff about Trump now is, again, wish casting. Like, oh, it's, you know, we don't want them to be the nominee or president, so it can't happen. Right. And I've, I definitely feel like I'm inoculating myself against that and just saying, like, yeah, it sure can happen again. Yeah. Um, well, I may be guilty of that myself. Um, the, maybe, maybe, maybe I'm not phrasing the, the question quite the right way. Because you convey in the book that you were, I was surprised might be the best word about it. This wasn't exactly what you had expected,

but when you talk about the kinds of things that you'd seen growing up, the lack of questioning, the assertions, the certitude, and the increasing sort of political tenor of these discussions tracing up through you know, Gary Bauer and

Rolf Reed. It seems to me that it was all there for the seeing. And maybe this is sort of a gradual epiphany on your part. I think a lot of the pieces came together in the writing of the book. Looking back at the last couple years, reflecting on it, doing some research and just writing it down. I think a lot of the pieces came together. One of the big things that wasn't just from writing the book, but that became clear is just how important primaries are. Because my experience with my family was the most up-close, you know, test case I had. And they didn't like Trump early on. They wanted somebody else. And then when it became clear that he was a nominee, there was this process of sort of grieving, coming to terms, rationalizing, and then locking in.

And then doubling down. And I think the primary, the reason I mentioned that is because once it locks into a R versus D, that's when a lot of nuance goes out the window and people just sort of put on the jersey. And it's an identity thing in a lot of ways. So I didn't really see that at the time. I thought that reason and like appeal could work and it didn't really. And I think the thing now that I keep with me is like things, as much, as we've talked about not being certain, a lot of things when it come to Trump, it's hard

not to be certain about stuff regarding him. And there are things in life, you know, apart from Trump and politics that, you know, you do still feel pretty certain about. And I just think the whole Trump and political thing has been a really humbling reminder that as much as you think you can see things pretty clearly, there are other people who may have even even agree with part of what you say or think, but they have a different point of view. And that's humbling to me because I guess the point is I can't do anything about it. And there's a song lyric by Jenny Lewis that helped me come to grips with this. And she just, you know, she says something like, who do you think you're changing?

you know, why, basically the message is, why are you trying to change people's minds? So as a journalist, my desire is to serve people by giving them as much of the truth as I can get. And I've had to, over the last couple of years, just realized that, you know, you do that, and then it's out of your hands. Right. Well, you did that very well in this book. I absolutely loved reading it, found it both interesting and eye-opening in many different ways, and I hope people won't go out, get it. Thanks for joining us. Thank you, Steve. It's been great to talk to you. Appreciate everything. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

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Conditions supply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. Hey, Steve. Sarah, how are you? Well, I wanted to check in on our little high stakes bet, if you, will. I just, first of all, let's level set here. Let's make sure we still agree on the bet. My understanding of the bet is that I said if Trump runs, which is now we can get that part out of the way because he is running. So that was if Trump runs, that I said he would be the Republican nominee. And at some point, then we doubled down on that. So now it's a two-stake

dinner about Trump winning the nomination. Is that correct? So I had a slightly different understanding of the bet, but I'll let's see. Let's go with yours. Let's go with yours. No, now I'm curious. So my understanding was that the first part of the bet was exactly as you described. Okay. Maybe I'm forgetting the not.

Yeah. Trump is Trump will not be the Republican nominee. But then in a moment, a fit of boldness before the 2022 midterms, I believe I doubled down by saying that Joe Biden would not be the nominee for the Democratic Party. Oh, I think you're right. I have to be honest about that. I feel not so great about that part of the bed right now. But there's a lot. There's a long time.

Could happen. There is. Anything could happen. Okay. So I just wanted to check in on how you're feeling about it. So let's just take it one party at a time here. How are you feeling about the Republican side of the bet? The Republican side of the bet, I'm sort of where I was.

Certainly we've seen Donald Trump have much better polling in the past several weeks. and, you know, to the extent that that we thought irresponsibly this far out that it could possibly be a two-person race between Donald Trump and Ronda Santis. Ron DeSantis, Ron DeSantis has lost some altitude. His polling has declined over the past couple weeks, but this was always a long-term bet. My view is the more people become reacquainted with Donald Trump, the less they're going to like him. I said that at the time, being fully aware that I had said the same thing in 2016, and turned out to have been wrong about that. Maybe my faith in Republican primary voters is misplaced,

but I have a hard time still believing that they're going to renominate Donald Trump. I also think it's relevant that this is a bet on what we think will happen, not on what we want to happen. For sure. And I often, like, I'm an, I'm a catastrophizer. Like, I always plan for sort of the worst case scenario. I ever told you that one time, it's never happened before you plan.

Anytime you're about to have an uncomfortable conversation with someone, I just, like, go through it in my head for hours and hours. Like, that's my personality. But there's one time it actually was exactly what I prepared for in my catastrophizing. And it's really relevant to this conversation, which is I had to interview for my job at the Department of Justice, which, you know, it's the director of public affairs, so it's not a not senior position, but it's still like it's not the attorney general and it's not the deputy attorney general. And Donald Trump may become the Oval Office to have a job interview with him for that job.

And my catastrophizing version was that he would go through all of the things I had ever said about him on cable news in the run up to the 2016 election. And as I was standing there in front of the Resolute desk in the Oval Office on a beautiful January day, that's exactly what happened. Is it really? He had a folder. He had a folder. And he opened the folder and just started reading. He's like, you said on whatever October date that I was smart, but a bad person morally.

Like it went on from there. So I'm feeling concerningly good about my. side of the bet. I think that there's obviously a path for Ron DeSantis or even a Ron DeSantis, if you will. But history is on my side. Donald Trump is the clear frontrunner has been, that's not going to, I have a hard time imagining that's going to change in the next three months. And if that's the case, those six months of polling have been pretty predictive, you know, about 50%. And we haven't even seen someone who's this far ahead, even if you go back to 2008 with the Hillary Clinton Barack Obama polling, you know, Hillary Clinton, I don't think,

was this far ahead of Barack Obama, really. And so Donald Trump is maintaining his lead. And it does remind me of 2016 in the sense that we're all like, yeah, but it can't continue. And it did. Yeah. No, I think you're right. And I think you're right to be confident about it at this point. it's let me ask you the question assuming Donald Trump runs the way that he has started his campaign so in the in the immediate weeks after he announced right after the 2020 midterms he was still looking backwards he was focused on the election I was feeling much worse about the bet in November yeah much worse I was feeling pretty good about the bet in November in November notice how we've started having these conversations now right yeah oh good point did you just now decide that we should check in on the yeah for sure i like seeing you squirm but isn't it i mean setting setting aside the the fact that um i was wrong about this in 2016 and very similar dynamics yeah could could be at play again here

Isn't it hard for you to believe, given everything that we've seen about Donald Trump and notwithstanding the polling? I mean, there's now incontrovertible evidence that the guy effectively tried to commit a soft coup. There's no evidence to support his claims that the election was stolen from him. We've seen in 2018, 2020 and 2022 that he's a bad, he's not just a drag on the Republican Party. he's a bad, bad drag on the Republican Party. And it strikes me as virtually inconceivable that he could win a general election, given his deep unpopularity over the broader electorate. Don't Republican voters at some point, even if they don't have a problem or maybe some of them believe the election denialism, I think it's about a 50-50 split according to Nick's latest newsletter. don't they say like hey we want to win and this guy's been a loser he's been a loser for us for three

cycles in a row so let me make your best case case to me which is none of those things although i wish it were um the part that gives me pause is that the polling is really hard for primaries where we know the order of the states and it doesn't really matter even what likely primary voters think because it's Iowa and that momentum carries to New Hampshire and that momentum carries to South Carolina and it's impossible to capture that in polling. So if you then chuck out the polling and instead look at some of the squishier metrics, how he's doing with crowds, what attention he's getting from the media for saying different things, that doesn't look at all like 2016.

That does look, actually it looks worse than Hillary Clinton did in 2008. By those qualitative metrics, Donald Trump doesn't look very strong. And so the polling informs that a little bit. But, you know, whether it's CPAC or his attacks on Ron DeSantis, which seemed to be having maybe some effect on Ron DeSantis. Maybe that's why his poll numbers are dropping. And we'll see if the DeSantis team, once they're, kicked into actual high gear here can can counter those um but all that's all that you really need

to have happen is that iowa picks desantis over trump or somebody else and or sure but i'm just desantis is my fill in for right now and that um that um that like catastrophe for don't trump then wildly cuts off his momentum heading into new hampshire you have desantis again i'm using him as the, you know, fill in here, wins New Hampshire. And then this whole thing's kind of over and it doesn't matter that 35% of Republican primary voters wanted Trump because they're going to see him as too weak to make it and they're all fine with Ron DeSantis and that's going to be the ballgame. I think that's your path. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think if you look at some of those other sort of soft metrics or even the intangibles, clearly look at the polling on

whether Republican, likely Republican voters consider themselves first Trump supporters or Republicans. We've seen that essentially invert with two-thirds of them, depending on your poll, considering themselves Republicans before they consider themselves Trump voters. And I think you've seen even among Republican elected officials, there was this call that the Trump campaign or the free Trump campaign put out in the days before the 2022 midterms in the days before he launched his his reelection campaign or his new election campaign, I guess, asking for members of Congress to come out and endorse him early to send a message to the field that he was big and tough and strong and maybe unbeatable. And what did he get? You know, eight or ten? It seems to me that we're beyond the point finally at which Republicans are afraid to criticize Donald Trump. Now,

We haven't seen that much from his fellow candidates, but I think we're likely to see more of it. And certainly there will be other Republican elected officials who will be taking shots at him and criticizing him, both in terms of his electability and in terms of his accomplishments or lack thereof, even if they don't go as far as I would like and say he's a liar and a soft coup plotter. All right. So let's move to the Democratic side because this one's really pretty quick and easy. and it applies to the Republican side. I'm feeling obviously very good on the Democratic side. Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee but for an act of God,

which with two candidates at this age, and I, by the way, spent way too much time on the Social Security Administration's actuarial tables page to look at what the real odds were. They're not great for either of these two guys. now, of course, you're not factoring in any of their specifics, right? But you are factoring that they've made it to this age. How likely is it that they will make it to the, you know, in Joe Biden's case,

I was looking at through, you know, from 82 years old. If an 82 year old is alive today, what's the likelihood that he lives to 86? But look, the actuarial tables to make it through the next year and a half are pretty good. Yeah, I guess I think, well, To make this a darker conversation. Yeah, I mean, it is a pretty dark conversation to be sure. The reason that I thought originally Biden was not likely to be the Democratic nominee was because he had been saying privately to people that the 2022 midterm elections, you know, weren't really a referendum on his presidency and, you know, people shouldn't shouldn't see him as stronger week. based on the results of that.

I think he was obviously anticipating a much stronger day for Republicans. And so were members of his party. You had Democratic elected officials, Democratic members of Congress, were speaking out and saying that they thought Joe Biden should give someone else a turn, that it was someone else's time. The election happens, and immediately Joe Biden is telling everybody who will listen to him. This was definitely a referendum on my presidency so far, and it's been a pretty darn successful presidency.

People like me. People don't like the Republicans. I think that's an overread of the 2022 results, but I think he's justified to a certain extent in making the argument that he's making. I don't think we have to think about Joe Biden potentially not making it to the point where he's the Democratic nominee. I think there are any of a number of other sort of age-related factors that could enter in before then that would leave him very vulnerable. you know, if he has a gaff or he has, you know, a series of these moments on stage or in a speech where he, you know, ends up in these verbal cul-de-sacs, which he sometimes does. Or he has a trip on the stairs of Air Force one. You can imagine a number of different things that would create sort of an oh-shit moment for Democrats. You're already seeing, by the way, even as Joe Biden looks, you know, the likely Democratic nominee, you're still seeing people talking about making creative plans that they're floating about another vice president or different running made.

Greg Craig, who's, you know, sort of an avatar of the Democratic establishment in Washington, D.C. Word for the Clinton and Obama White House has had a, I don't know if I'd call it clever. New York Times op-ed about the way that the vice president should be picked, given Joe Biden's advanced stage. The conversations that have been taking place behind the scenes for a couple years now seem to be taking place more and more in public, and that will accelerate if there's a problem. Fair enough. All right. Well, next time we check in, we can dive into where we're going to go, even though we don't know who's picking up the check, because it's important to decide that okay i have an idea table it i'll hold it yeah hold it next time it's a good one

all right uh have a great weekend steve you too thanks bye see yeah