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Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Moms for Liberty Is Going After Public Schools to Promote Christian Education and Undermine Students' Rights
What we are seeing in our politics today is a direct attack, from the inside, on American democracy. This attack isn't coming from just one man. The anti-democratic movement has been building over the past several decades, and this movement is intent on capturing the levers of power in the American system, destroying the institutions that have sustained our democracy, and stripping women and girls, among other groups, of our rights. I wrote the book Money, Lies, and God because I think it's important to understand the structure of this movement, who is really behind it, and how it works. As a mom in Santa Barbara, California, I witnessed a program of fundamentalist religious indoctrination force its way into my kids' public elementary school. The more I learned about the program and the people behind it, the more it became clear that the leaders of the program hated public education precisely because public schools are supposed to be nonsectarian — neither affirming nor denigrating any form of religion — and because they objected to the principles of pluralism and equality that public schools are supposed to respect. They believed that any school that does not have their reactionary version of the Christian faith as its foundation is "a consequence of evil." That was 16 years ago. As I continued to delve deeper into this topic, it soon became clear to me that the attack on public education was just one part of a broader attack on America as a modern constitutional democracy. This selection from my book, which describes my attendance at a Moms for Liberty convention, speaks to how this movement plays off the idea that it is just a group of ordinary moms fighting for their kids. But I want to convey how ideological this group really is, along with the fact that Moms for Liberty is a thoroughly partisan political operation. These "moms" aren't fighting to improve the schools; they are spreading lies and deploying the politics of outrage in order to lay the groundwork for a wholesale assault. Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take It's the late spring of 2023, I'm relaxing in Santa Barbara, and I can hear the rumble of the school board wars like distant thunder across the landscape. Books are tumbling off shelves, librarians are running scared, and a tiny population of kids who identify as nonbinary are being told they represent the greatest threat to civilization. At the center of the conflicts is a group that grandly calls itself Moms for Liberty. I learn that the Moms are planning a National Summit in Philadelphia for July. I immediately buy a ticket and pack my suitcase. Outside the Philadelphia hotel, small clumps of protesters clog the sidewalk. It's the tail end of the Pride festival, and the brand-name stores lining the streets of City Center are still festooned with colorful flags and glitter. A number of homeless people rest on the edges of the festive sidewalks, like extras from the wrong film set. The air, hazy from the Canadian wildfire plumes raging a thousand-plus miles away, parches the throat; overhead the sun appears orange. Donald Trump has just been indicted on seven counts in the classified documents probe regarding alleged mishandling of classified material. The vibe is slightly apocalyptic. The first event at the Moms for Liberty conference is an evening tour of the Museum of the American Revolution. To my astonishment, a police escort accompanies the bus that takes us there. A small but noisy group of protestors have gathered outside the museum; presumably the police and event organizers are taking no chances. The police form a protective corridor from the bus to the museum. The organizers appear to welcome the security theater. 'Thank the police officers for protecting us, okay?' says a staffer as we stream inside. The Joyful Warriors National Summit, as it is billed, properly begins the following morning in the conference center. Joining me is my friend and fellow journalist Annika Brockschmidt, the German author of Die Brand-Stifter (The Arsonists) and Amerikas Gottes-Krieger (America's Godly Warriors). A historian by training, she is tall, blond, and stylishly attired in a pale-green suit. The atmosphere in the lobby is militantly cheerful. Groups of women in four or five chat excitedly and compare notes. Every fingernail looks carefully polished, every cheek is bronzed. Dressed in flowing trouser suits or dresses with stylish heels, the women look well prepared to take on the photographers who roam the event in search of promotional material for social media channels. The origin myth of Moms for Liberty says that it all started in sun-dappled Florida during the pandemic, when three conventional suburban moms bonded over complaints about mask mandates and school closures. The reality is that the Moms had high-level connections to the Florida GOP from the beginning, and 'conventional' is not always the best way to describe them. Cofounder Bridget Ziegler is married to Christian Ziegler, the former chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, and a few months after the Philadelphia conference, it was revealed that the couple engaged in three-way sexual adventures with other women—one of whom accused Christian of rape in another incident. (In January 2024 police cleared Christian of the rape allegation but asked prosecutors to charge him with illegally recording a sexual encounter. The state attorney general declined to pursue video voyeurism charges.) In any event, the group appears more focused on money than sex. It reported $2.1 million in total revenue in 2022, including hundreds of thousands from Publix supermarket chain heiress Julie Fancelli and the George Jenkins Foundation, of which Fancelli is the president and sole funder. (The George Jenkins Foundation also contributes substantially to reactionary and Christian nationalist groups such as Judicial Watch, Patriot Academy, and Moms for America; Fancelli was a prominent financial backer of the January 6 rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol.) The Moms funneled a portion of that rich haul to a company funded and operated by Christian Ziegler. His firm, Microtargeted Media, specializes in targeted text messages and takes in hundreds of thousands of dollars from right-wing political campaigns. Their motto: 'We do digital & go after people on their phones.' (Christian Ziegler has applied a digital strategy to his own legal defense; he used a phone video he made of himself engaging with his accuser to argue that the sex was consensual.) The framing of the Moms' activism has all the hallmarks of what author Michelle Nickerson calls 'housewife populism.' In Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton University Press, 2012), Nickerson points out that conservative women's political engagement in the postwar era was a powerful tool in the battle against communism and moral degeneracy. 'Capitalizing upon cultural assumptions about women and motherhood, they put themselves forward as representatives of local interests who battled bureaucrats for the sake of family, community, and God,' she writes. The challenge to public school policies and curricula here is based on the idea that the Moms have a unique moral authority—superior to that of professional educators and administrators (whom the Moms often deride as the 'K-12 mafia'). The photographers begin circling my friend Annika, having apparently mistaken her for a populist übermom. She ducks a bit, and they move on. The social media feeds begin to fill with images of mama-bear solidarity. The smiles are those of sisterhood and sacrifice: We're just in it for the kids. Tickets start at $249 for the three-day event, excluding transportation and lodging. All meals are catered, and several trips by bus to museums and other local attractions are included. I dip into the spread of fancy appetizers that greets us at the Museum of the American Revolution, and it is delicious. I have been attending right-wing conferences for about fifteen years, and this one is among the most lavish. These are moms with deep-pocketed sponsors. To be fair, it is very hard to know where the proselytizing ends and the profit making begins. One speaker at the event turns out to be Erika Donalds—the Florida-based education entrepreneur who happens to be the wife of Republican congressman Byron Donalds, from Florida's nineteenth congressional district. A close ally of Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump, Byron Donalds frequently speaks at right- wing conferences and events touting privatization as the cure for the nation's woes. Privatization certainly appears to enhance his own household. His wife is the founder of two for-profit companies that are sure to stand first in line for the school privatization gravy train. Her for-profit company OptimaEd is explicitly dedicated to expanding the network of schools associated with Hillsdale College, the Christian nationalist Michigan school that members of the DeSantis administration have richly praised. She has also founded Classical Schools Network Inc., a charter management company, which is poised to cash in on the Hillsdale expansion. Erika Donalds was also savvy enough to set up a nonprofit, the Optima Foundation, which, as the journalist Keira Butler reported in Mother Jones, fundraises for the same academies that her companies help manage. But the profit-making is frequently ignored when packaged in a protective layer of sanctimony, and from the podium at Moms for Liberty, Erika Donalds delivers it sweetly. 'Lord, you have elevated this organization to do your good work in this country,' she preaches. 'We're grateful that the truth is being exposed, that parents are being able to see what's really going on in education in our country.' A section of the conference area is given over to lively booths from an extraordinarily large number of right-wing organizations. I wander through and pick up a few of the resources on offer. Parents Defending Education offers free booklets and other materials with tendentious allegations about the content of public school curricula and instructions for parents on how to root it out. EpochTV, a division of the conspiracist right-wing media company the Epoch Times, which is associated with the Falun Gong religious movement, is promoting a documentary titled Gender Transformation: The Untold Pennsylvania Family Institute is hosting a 'biblical' leadership conference for teens that promises a 'unique experience of using the political process as a means of cultivating leadership skills.' The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and the Southeastern Legal Foundation are giving away guidebooks and other tools for 'saving America's Public Schools.' The California-based organization Protect Our Kids, which adheres to the 'biblical truth which teaches that God created mankind in His image, male and female,' offers detailed instruction on how to force schools to allow parents to 'observe and volunteer' in classrooms, examine curriculum materials, and access student records and policy materials, as well as opt out of 'anti-bullying' lessons. Everywhere, parents are urged to submit open records requests, inspect instructional materials for any hint of critical race theory (CRT), complain volubly and disruptively if schools take issue with any of their findings, and threaten legal action. In short, it's a school administrator's nightmare. In the main conference room at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, the speakers begin beating their drums. Public schools have become gender distortion academies, or so everyone here seems to believe. They exist to turn girls into boys and boys into freaks, all for the pleasure of a sick, woke elite. Another repeated talking point, it soon becomes clear, is that we are all supposed to be joyful. The people out there—the speakers keep gesturing toward the streets, which are presumably crawling with leftover Pride marchers—may think that we are angry, bigoted fanatics. But we are joyful! So keep smiling. Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue Check out more Teen Vogue education coverage: Affirmative Action Benefits White Women Most How Our Obsession With Trauma Took Over College Essays So Many People With Student Debt Never Graduated College The Modern American University Is a Right-Wing Institution
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The New Far-Right Coalition That's Out to Destroy American Democracy
Few Americans, if any, had ever heard of John Eastman before the events of January 6, 2021. The legal architect of Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election was hardly a high-profile name, even for those steeped in covering American politics. He was, in many ways, an unknown, pulled by the events and the aftermath of January 6 into the riptides of American history. A handful of analysts and investigators tracing the contours of the American far right, however, knew of Eastman's work long before the events of January 6, and of the kind of churning, burning illiberalism that brought him into Trump's orbit. One of those was Katherine Stewart, whose new book, Money, Lies, and God, threads the diffuse movements that have congealed into the authoritarianism at the core of Trumpism. Stewart first intersected with Eastman not in the aftermath of Trump's failed insurrection but in 2019, when she tracked him to a tony, rarefied conclave in, of all places, Verona, Italy. Eastman was speaking at the annual conference of the World Congress of Families—a far-right, Russian-American organization dedicated to the abolition of abortion and the buttressing of so-called 'traditional values'—regaling his audience with tales of 'how secularism, liberalism, and gender confusion are destroying everything good in the world.' The speech, as Stewart writes, revealed Eastman to be 'a committed ally of the theocrats.' But there was also 'some foundation other than biblical literalism,' Stewart sensed, propelling him and cementing the kinds of illiberal alliances crucial to Trump's reign. The search for the broader foundations of Eastman's and his allies' beliefs is at the center of Money, Lies, and God, the follow-up to Stewart's critically acclaimed 2020 The Power Worshippers. That book explored the dogmatism at the core of the American religious right, and how such forces drew American evangelicals further and further into the illiberal abyss. It was, at the time, a signal flare of just how willingly such professedly godly groups could embrace a figure like Trump. Stewart's newest book is a continuation of that theme. But after the events of January 6, it was clear that the right had changed. This movement—with all the ideological allies, deep-pocketed donors, and misogynists massing around Eastman, joining him in this antidemocratic fight—presents a new face of the American far right. And it is that edifice that Stewart masterfully details in her new book, explaining not only why these pro-Trump forces have already attempted to drive a stake through the heart of American democracy, but how they will try to do so once on-the-ground conversations, part sociological analysis, Money, Lies, and God is a convincing tour of the mutually reinforcing elements of American reaction: 'apostles' of Jesus, atheist billionaires, reactionary Catholic theologians, pseudo-Platonic intellectuals, woman-hating opponents of 'the gynocracy,' high-powered evangelical networkers, Jewish devotees of Ayn Rand, pronatalists preoccupied with a dearth of (white) babies, COVID truthers, and battalions of 'spirit warriors' who appear to be inventing a new style of religion even as they set about undermining democracy at its foundations. Trumpism is hardly one thing, even if it is overly reliant on Trump himself. Instead, Stewart uses her deep familiarity with the American far right to chart out what are, by the mid-2020s, the major elements of Trump's political project, which she describes as the Funders, Power Players, Infantry, Sergeants, and Thinkers. The 'Funders' are those within the billionaire class bankrolling the forces below them, using access to effectively bottomless pots of wealth to guide American politics. Some of these names are increasingly familiar, like Leonard Leo, the benefactor who helped steer the Supreme Court picks during Trump's first term, building out Trumpist allies on the highest court of the land and helping rule in favor of things like all-encompassing presidential immunity, a position once ridiculed when espoused by figures like disgraced Richard Nixon. Leo serves as the chair of CRC Advisors, which, as Stewart writes, 'directs over $1 billion in right-wing funding toward reactionary causes.' Nor is Leo alone. There is Carl Anderson, head of the Knights of Columbus, who helps bankroll think tanks and media outlets. There are even organizations like Opus Dei, a far-right Catholic group that does not publicize its membership rolls. All of them together have access to, and help direct, a greater pile of money than anything hard-right forces in America have ever known. 'The decisive development in the first decades of the 21st century was not the alliance between Team Money and Team God but the simple fact that, thanks to escalating inequality, the big money got a lot bigger,' Stewart notes. 'What was new was the number of zeroes in the checks—and the extremism of the thinking guiding the money people.' Elsewhere, the 'Power Players' Stewart identifies are those just underneath the 'Funders,' helping direct some of the ocean of money flooding pro-Trump, pro-authoritarian movements. These managerial types comprise a 'tiny elite' who 'amass tremendous personal power by mobilizing others around their agendas.' Many of these are well-established figures, 'super-lobbyists' like the Faith and Freedom Coalition's Ralph Reed or Family Research Council's Tony Perkins, who act as both organizers and mouthpieces for pro-Trump policies. These, Stewart says, are the 'operational masterminds of the antidemocratic movement,' putting the funding into action through sponsoring conferences, conclaves, and publications. They are, in effect, middlemen—a kind of managerial class directing America's antidemocratic turn. The 'Infantry,' meanwhile, is made up of the rank-and-file Trump voters who lap up the kinds of antidemocratic rhetoric spilling out of everything from conspiratorial social media feeds to, now, the White House itself. These are the militias, the Tea Party turned Trumpers, and the assorted flotsam of Trump supporters who launched an attempted insurrection on January 6—and who were all recently pardoned by Trump. They are those who Stewart writes about meeting in Las Vegas in 2023. Alongside a German documentary crew, Stewart joins a swell of Trump backers at the ReAwaken America Tour, a pro-Trump conference-cum-revival that gathers an audience of QAnon supporters, antivaxxers, racists, and conspiracy theorists. Stewart finds the crowd descending into increasing mania, with speakers not only regurgitating the most malign conspiracies they can find but even calling for 'Nuremberg trials' for Trump's enemies, leaving one of the German team members to ask Stewart, 'Are we safe here?' For those tracing America's descent into authoritarianism, some of these faces are well known; figures like Reed and Perkins have both been peddling illiberal policies for years, long predating the rise of Trump, and it's hardly news that Trump's base is comprised of conspiratorial racists. In that sense, Stewart's book is treading familiar ground. But it sets itself apart in describing the two remaining groups—the 'Sergeants' and the 'Thinkers'—and how these two now buttress not just Trump but modern Christian nationalism itself. The 'Sergeants' are primarily pastors and related church officials, many of whom have accelerated their rightward lurch in recent years. These groups have ominous, vaguely militaristic names, including things like the Black Robe Regiment and the Watchmen on the Wall. These are the followers of the vengeful God of the Old Testament, believers in the efficacy of retribution. 'There is little room for the old 'Love the sinner, hate the sin' trope here,' Stewart writes. Instead, they embody a Christian nationalism that 'is not a policy program; it is perhaps best understood as a political mindset.' It is a political proclivity that 'includes four basic dispositions: catastrophism; a persecution complex; identitarianism; and an authoritarian reflex.' All of it comprises the kind of kindling from which opposition to democracy, and even support for fascism, can emerge. Many of these 'spirit warriors' found their way to the so-called 'Jericho March' in Washington on January 5, 2021. A 'combination of nationalism, conspiracism, and demon obsession,' according to Stewart, the rally featured a range of pastors trying to outdo one another in their antediluvian rhetoric. One, Greg Bramlage, claimed they were engaged in a 'spiritual battle,' while another, Bishop Leon Benjamin, called for followers to 'kill' unspecified 'demons.' Another pastor, the Reverend Kevin Jessip, described the rally as a 'strategic gathering of men in this hour to dispel the Kingdom of Darkness.' Twenty-four hours later, as Stewart notes, many who prayed under these 'Sergeants' took up arms and took the fight directly to the Capitol itself—bringing with them a 'large wooden cross,' a separate 'flag with a cross,' and banners blaring, 'Jesus Saves.' It is the Claremont Institute where the 'erstwhile reverence for America's founders has been transfigured, with the help of political theorists purloined from Germany's fascist period, into material support' for Trumpism. It is the final group, the 'Thinkers,' that presents arguably Stewart's most insightful sections. These are the figures like Eastman and his allies who posit themselves as the ideological, intellectual class crafting the contours of Trumpism—and identifying the kinds of legal cover Trump can use to dismantle American democracy. Much of this cohort can trace directly back to the Claremont Institute, the California-based organization where Eastman remains a senior fellow. As Stewart points out, it is the Claremont Institute where the 'erstwhile reverence for America's founders has been transfigured, with the help of political theorists purloined from Germany's fascist period, into material support' for Trumpism. The institute's modus vivendi centers on the 'Straussian man in action'—the man who bends history to his own ends, regardless of the consequence and regardless of democratic legitimacy. Stewart writes: His mission is to save the republic. He must tell a few lies, yet he is nonetheless a noble liar, at least in his own mind. He acts in the political world, where natural right reigns, and not merely in the legal world where lawyers are supposed to toil. Aware of the crooked timber from which humanity is made, he is prepared to break off whatever branches are needed for the bonfire of liberty. This core Claremont belief leads to the yearning for a so-called 'Red Caesar'—a masculine leader untrammeled by anything like democratic oversight or political pushback, grabbing a society by the throat and forcing it back into a world in which men, and especially white men, are once more restored to the top of America's sociopolitical hierarchy. Indeed, there is an almost obsessive approach at Claremont to restoring supposed masculinity within American society. Stewart traces this belief system at Claremont—where, she says, all of the board members 'appear to be male'—to Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., who wrote a 2006 book called Manliness and 'counts as nobility among Claremont's extended family.' As Mansfield argued, 'gender stereotypes are all true'—including, bizarrely, that women would make bad soldiers because 'they fear spiders.' As Stewart details, Mansfield was 'far too sophisticated to openly argue for stripping American women of the rights they have fought for over the past two centuries—but in the private sphere, 'those highly accurate stereotypes should reign triumphant.' This belief has seeped into Claremont's bones and manifested itself at Claremont many times over. There is a Claremont Fellow named Jack Murphy who once said that 'feminists need rape.' There was another Claremont official who gave a talk titled, 'Does Feminism Undermine the Nation?' There is the promotion of work by an author named Coston Alamariu—better known by his nom de plume 'Bronze Age Pervert'—who oozes undiluted misogyny and rails against 'the gynocracy.' As Alamariu wrote, 'It took 100 years of women in public life for them to almost totally destroy a civilization'—and the only way forward is to 'use Trump as a model of success.' These Claremont-based 'Thinkers' also include figures like Curtis Yarvin, who has contributed to the Claremont publication American Mind and 'appeared as an honored guest on Claremont podcasts.' Yarvin's affections for despotism have been widely reported elsewhere, but it is his historical ignorance that highlights just how shallow the Claremont men's pretensions at intellectualism truly are. Not only does Yarvin preposterously believe that 'European civilization' wasn't responsible for any genocides before the Holocaust—as if genocides in places like the Africa, North America, or even Ireland and Ukraine never existed—but he further maintains that America now needs to collapse into dictatorship in order to rebuild. The 'men of Claremont frame their not-so-hidden longing for revenge as a series of ruminations about the rise of an American Caesar,' Stewart writes. 'And when that 'Red Caesar' arrives, he can thank the oligarchs for funding his rise, and he can thank the rank and file of the movement for supporting him in the name of 'authenticity.' But he would owe at least as large a debt of gratitude to the unhappy men of Claremont, those spurned would-be members of the intellectual elite … for explaining just who he is, and why he should go ahead and blow the whole place up.'Taken together, Money, Lies, and God paints not only a devastating picture of the state of American democracy (as if one was needed) but one that also contributes texture and context to understanding the current American political moment. The book convincingly argues that, when it comes to figures like Eastman or Leo or any of the men affiliated with the Claremont Institute, calls for dialogue and civility are futile. 'In earlier times this may have been sage advice,' Stewart writes. 'Today it is a delusion. American democracy is failing because it is under direct attack, and the attack is not coming equally from both sides. The movement described in this book isn't looking for a seat at the noisy table of American democracy; it wants to burn down the house.' American democracy isn't simply dying. It is, as Stewart observes, being murdered. Another revelation from the book, however, is not nearly as ominous. Because the movement comprises so many moving parts, there's no guarantee that such a constellation of forces can last. Trump remains the glue that holds such a coalition together, with each group—the billionaires and the bullies in the pulpits, the keyboard conspiracists and the misogynists trying to put an intellectual sheen on it all—each seeing, and often getting, what they want with him. But once Trump goes, there's every reason to suspect that such a coalition will splinter, undone by competing claims. Wide cleavages remain on subjects from China to health care to tax cuts, bridged only through Trump's person and persona. This is cold comfort for those hoping for a resuscitation of American democracy anytime soon. Trump has spent the first months in his second term sprinting toward a constitutional crisis, cheered on by the allies he's found along the way—not least the supposed 'Thinkers' claiming intellectual leadership of the movement. For figures like Eastman, it's not an executive run amok that presents a threat to the core of American democracy but, rather, those who would stand in Trump's way. The Democratic Party, Eastman said in 2023, is 'an existential threat to the very survivability, not just of our nation, but of the example that our nation, properly understood, provides to the world. That's the stakes.' From his lips to God's—or at least Trump's—ears.
Washington Post
28-02-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
‘Money, Lies, and God' looks at the creation of MAGA's ‘grass roots'
In the wake of Donald Trump's victory, there has been much anguished discussion among the commentariat about the supposed change in the cultural winds. 'Trump's cultural victory has lapped his political victory,' wrote the New York Times's Ezra Klein in a recent op-ed. 'The election was close, but the vibes have been a rout.' Other (and in my opinion, savvier) commentators have homed in on a subtler point. In their view, what matters is not that the content of the vibes has changed — if there even is such a thing as a vibe — but that there has been a significant shift in focus, away from the gritty business of politics and to the vagaries of feelings. Our era 'favors 'vibe' and 'mood' over anything conceptual,' journalist John Ganz wrote in a prescient Substack post nearly three years ago. I can think of no better characterization of the curiously anti-political politics of a president who makes a show of his populism even as he empowers the world's richest man to gut the social safety net. But how did we go so fully from policy to performance, from strategy to symbolism? The libidinal energy of a Trump rally is flashy, but it obscures the decades of unsexy organizing and politicking that made the frenzy possible. As journalist Katherine Stewart writes in her new book, 'Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy,' 'a stadium crowded with resentments would not add up to a political program without a tremendous amount of financial and organizational support.' In other words, the vibes don't shift themselves: It takes a lot of politics to render politics obsolete. Much of 'Money, Lies, and God' is an attempt to debunk the myth that Trumpism is an organic movement, a product of a spontaneous outburst of disaffection. Take the case of Moms for Liberty, one of the most powerful groups in the MAGA universe. Although its founders are in the habit of pretending that they are just 'three conventional suburban moms,' Stewart writes, 'the Moms had high-level connections to the Florida GOP from the beginning.' Indeed, one of the group's nominally relatable founders is married to the former chairman of the Republican Party of Florida. Nor are the various parents recruited by Moms for Liberty entirely free agents. Though they often act as if they simply happened upon books with LGBTQ characters in school and public libraries, they have in fact been trained by websites like The Kitchen Table Activist, which teaches 'conservative activists how to identify books they label as pornography and get them banned from their school district.' The movement that 'Money, Lies, and God' chronicles, then, is antidemocratic in two senses: in its aims, naturally, but also in its methods. The ascendant American right is not solely a reflection of preexisting popular sentiment but also a factory for producing outrage. As Stewart puts it, with a touch more restraint, 'This is a leadership-driven movement, not merely a social phenomenon.' 'Money, Lies, and God' is a bit of a grab bag. It does not advance an argument or defend a thesis so much as it takes readers on a whirlwind tour of the contemporary right. We encounter wealthy patrons, among them heirs to the Pepsi fortune who fund an organization 'intended to mobilize pastors at conservative churches in swing states to bring out the pro-Trump Republican vote'; we meet intellectuals who helped to lay the philosophical foundations of the MAGA movement, such as the Silicon Valley blogger who argued that the country should be run like a start-up (with a CEO like a king), and academics affiliated with the far-right Claremont Institute, home of some of the earliest alarmists to complain about the 'administrative state.' We are not even spared the company of celebrity pastors like Sean Feucht, who campaigned for far-right Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and who rages against vaccination on X. There is not much in 'Money, Lies, and God' that will surprise news obsessives, connoisseurs of conservatism, or fans of the excellent and illuminating podcast 'Know Your Enemy,' which delves into the history and intellectual underpinnings of conservatism. Still, Stewart succeeds in weaving the disparate threads together, and the result is an informative if discursive primer on the pathologies and paranoias of the coalition governing our country. Yet there are drawbacks to an approach that focuses so prominently on the movement's elites. It is true that Trumpism is, to some extent, the brainchild of an expansive network of think tanks and billionaire funders, not an expression of unmediated public will. But what political program is really any different? Whenever disparate dissatisfactions coalesce into a movement, it is because rigorous organizing has bound them together. Even if public support for Trump was hard-earned, partly even manufactured, it was ultimately earned. The president has amassed die-hard supporters among everyday Americans, not all of whom are dupes — and the grievances so effectively channeled by groups like Moms for Liberty have long been simmering. Stewart, by training her gaze on the movers, shakers and billionaires, risks suggesting that workaday Trump supporters are mere pawns in the hands of the powerful, that they do not have agency or political reasons of their own. Two things, however, can be true at once: Trumpism would not have been possible without decades of groundwork and billions in donations, and Trumpism is a movement that has come to instill and thereby reflect widespread and genuinely held sentiments, however unsavory. Indeed, precisely because the right is so good at winning constituents over, the left can learn from its tactics. For one thing, conservatives have spent years developing an extensive organizational structure, often exploiting the apparatus of Evangelicalism. Christian nationalism is a particularly useful ideology in part because religious institutions are well-suited to mobilization. In an increasingly atomized society, churches are some of the last remaining bastions of community, and their hierarchical format leaves their members uniquely susceptible to pressure and persuasion. As Stewart writes, pastors have 'millions of churchgoers at their disposal every Sunday.' Perhaps more important, the right has an admirably strong stomach for uncomfortable coalitions. 'Moderates, liberals, and progressives can learn something here from the right,' Stewart wisely observes. 'Their tent includes lots of people who really should not be getting along with one another.' On the left, it is not uncommon to see Marxists of even slightly different persuasions at one another's throats, conversations devolving into fusillades of recrimination. The right suffers from few such hang-ups. Stewart's book follows what she calls 'a rowdy mix of personalities: 'apostles' of Jesus, atheistic billionaires, reactionary Catholic theologians, pseudo-Platonic intellectuals, woman-hating opponents of 'the gynocracy,' high-powered evangelical networkers, Jewish devotees of Ayn Rand, pronatalists preoccupied with a dearth of (white) babies, covid truthers, and battalions of 'spirit warriors.'' These factions have different and frequently conflicting agendas. They want 'things that cannot go together — like 'small government' and also a government big enough to control the most private acts in which people engage; like the total deregulation of corporate monopolies and also a better deal for the workforce.' Yet they managed to come together, at least long enough to install Trump in office again. Mercifully, now that it is time to govern, cracks in the coalition are already beginning to form. The traditionalists and anti-tech humanists cannot fail to be disgusted by the machinations of techno-utopians from Silicon Valley; Stephen K. Bannon recently called Elon Musk a 'parasitic illegal immigrant.' At some point, the populists will come to blows with the billionaires. As these feuds tear the right apart, one can only hope that the left will muster some much-needed solidarity. If we survive this era intact, there will be plenty of time for the Marxists to try to make peace among themselves. For now, only together can we wrest culture back from the ethereal haze of vibes and return it to the proper realm of politics: material reality. Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post and the author of 'All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess.' Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy By Katherine Stewart. Bloomsbury. 338 pp. $29.99
New York Times
19-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
How Trump Rode a Wave of ‘Reactionary Nihilism' to the White House
Given that 'Money, Lies, and God' was mostly written before the November 2024 election, the book reads as an eerily prescient guide to the phantasmagoria of our political moment. But it's a measure of the upheavals of the last few weeks that even the book's author, the journalist Katherine Stewart, failed to anticipate some of the early surprises of the second Trump term. Stewart makes passing mention of Darren Beattie, a White House speechwriter who left his post in 2018 after news reports revealed that he spoke at a conference attended by white nationalists. 'Beattie was too far out even for the Trump administration,' she writes — a plausible observation that was nevertheless committed to print too soon. A couple of weeks ago, Trump tapped Beattie for a top job at the State Department, putting him in charge of the country's public diplomacy a mere four months after Beattie declared, on X, 'Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.' Stewart's previous book, 'The Power Worshippers' (2020) traced the rise of Christian nationalism; 'Money, Lies, and God' expands the story to encompass the right-wing 'movement to destroy American democracy.' Beattie is just one figure in a bulging cast of characters that Stewart handily divides into five main categories: Funders, Thinkers, Sergeants, Infantry and Power Players. These groups don't always have one another's best interests at heart, nor do they always get along. But as Stewart shows, this fractious movement has lined up under the banner of MAGA and Donald Trump. They speak the language of democracy while practicing the authoritarian politics of coercion and exclusion. What they all share, Stewart says, is an attitude of 'reactionary nihilism.' They denounce tolerance and pluralism as a catastrophic change to their preferred political order. Reactionary nihilists presume a world that is 'devoid of value, impervious to reason and governable only through brutal acts of will.' Stewart should know — she has spent plenty of time with reactionary nihilists, whether in person or on the page. Her book gives us a tour through a raucous Christian nationalist event in Las Vegas and a fancy Moms for Liberty fund-raiser in Philadelphia. She offers a brisk intellectual history that includes the high-toned, illiberal musings of the Harvard legal scholar Adrian Vermeule and the gutter misogyny of the internet personality Bronze Age Pervert — a Yale philosophy Ph.D. An adolescent boy's preoccupation with 'manliness' turns out to be a common denominator among the thinkers on the right. Rational deliberation gets derided as a tool of liberal democracy, which they somehow depict as both tyrannical and toothless. All the strategies they offer boil down to domination. 'Money, Lies, and God' covers a lot of terrain, but it's Stewart's exploration of right-wing ideas that makes her book stand out. A chapter called 'Smashing the Administrative State' explains the radical right's longstanding plans to replace the public administration of government services with a 'privately controlled, corporate-managed' regime. Another chapter on the Claremont Institute, the right-wing California think tank, examines the influence of the political philosopher Leo Strauss and the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. Yet Stewart is also careful not to overstate this movement's intellectual depth. So many of the ideas espoused by the cutting-edge figures on the far right are reflexively contrarian and fundamentally empty. Its leading intellectuals are Ivy League graduates who persist in being obsessed with the campus squabbles of the Ivy League. Stewart argues that their elaborate theories are constructed from feelings of elite entitlement and petty resentment: 'When they talk about sticking it to the administrative state or fantasize about having their dictator buddy manhandle the libs, they seem to be dreaming about revenge on the people down the hall.' This is a book with a decidedly strong point of view, even if Stewart maintains that she gathered her facts with an open mind. 'As a reporter, I like to look first and theorize later,' she writes in her introduction. 'I am interested in facts, not polemics.' After spending a lot of time with the facts, Stewart has developed her theory of the case. The Funders and Thinkers, she says, have worked out their own symbiotic ecosystem, with the Funders supplying the money that helps the Thinkers churn out the ideas that justify the Funders' power to make ever more money. Just don't tell that to the Infantry — those millions of lower- and middle-income Americans who turned out for Trump. Stewart explains that the only real role for the Infantry is to supply the votes. They might think they're voting for cheaper eggs, when what they're more likely to get are fewer meat inspectors and an expansionist war: 'Satisfying the economic and emotional needs of this group is always the ostensible source of legitimacy of the antidemocratic movement, but it is never the actual goal.' As an antidote to so much cynicism, Stewart ends her book with some recommendations, calling for building coalitions and pursuing a 'progressive system of taxation.' It's the kind of noble, hopeful conclusion that nevertheless highlights the discrepancy between the incessant churn of the Trumpian news cycle and the more languid pace of what might be called 'book time.' But Stewart maintains a commitment to deliberation — not just as an activity but as an essential principle. The far right, she points out, seeks to 'demolish the very possibility of reasonable discussion' by treating politics as an extension of war by other means. Books like hers function not as weapons but as maps, navigating a way around the edges of the abyss.
