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Christian Nationalism vs. Democracy with Anne Nelson

The new documentary Bad Faith exposes a political effort by Christian Nationalists to weaken and destroy American democracy and promote an authoritarian vision. It also highlights how secular and interfaith leaders are working to combat the push to fascism. Journalist Anne Nelson is a featured commentator in the film, and her book Shadow Network: Media, Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right is a source for the doc. On today's show, Nelson joins host Allen Ruff to give a history of Christian Nationalism and help us understand the current moment. Bad Faith is showing today, Thursday, September 26 at 6:30 pm at Pinney Public Library (516 Cottage Grove Rd) hosted by Concerned Citizens Against Christian Nationalism and on Tuesday, October 15th at 5 pm at Barrymore Theatre (2090 Atwood Ave) hosted by the Progressive Magazine, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, Community Shares of Wisconsin and the Center for Media and Democracy. Anne Nelson is an award-winning investigative journalist who has written extensively about human rights and the defiance of totalitarian regimes. She is the author of Shadow Network, Media, Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right; the film's unprecedented exposé of the covert Council for National Policy and its top secret membership rolls was made possible by her ground-breaking investigative work. Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Broadcast on:: 26 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: other

Hi, this is Alan Ruff, the Thursday host of A Public Affair. If you have a moment and the resources, remember to support the station and if you will, head over to www.wrtfm.org to donate and to see what else is going on at the station. Good afternoon and welcome to this, the Thursday edition of A Public Affair. I'm your host for this hour. My name is Alan Ruff. What is Christian nationalism? And how do we understand its attraction among a sizable swath of the country's population? What are the forces behind the movement's growth and appeal? And how does one explain the affinity some would say the "agulation" of the movement's faithful for a far from devout figure like Donald Trump? Our guest today is Ann Nelson. Ann Nelson is a decades-long award-winning journalist presently with the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Nelson is the author of Shadow Network, Media, Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. She also is a featured commentator in the currently circulating full-length documentary Bad Faith, Christian Nationalism's Unholy War on Democracy. Ann Nelson, welcome to WRT's A Public Affair. Thank you so much, Alan. And now Ann, boilerplate descriptions for Bad Faith, the film I just mentioned in which you are featured, state that it explores how, quote, "Christian nationalism has become the most powerful anti-democratic force in the USA, that it has an unparalleled ability to destroy democracy from within." The film also tells how secular and interfaith leaders are joining forces to defend the country from this march to fascism, and that the broad public seems unaware of the threat. Ann Nelson's Bad Faith begins by stating that a galvanizing force behind the January 6th 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol was a political movement known as Christian Nationalism. That Washington, that the Washington events of January 6th were but one result or a manifestation of a long-range plan by leaders of the Christian right to seize power and impose their agenda by any means necessary. Let's start there. That is with some basics. When you speak in right of Christian nationalism, what do you mean? What are you talking about when you use the term? Well, both the film and my book Shadow Network don't talk about the movement in isolation as religious. We've had conservative Christian denominations for most of the life of the Republic. What began to change started really over 40 years ago under the Reagan administration somewhat before, where economic interests, many of them involving fossil fuel billionaires, felt that they wanted to redress two things in particular. One was the taxes that they were obliged to pay, both as corporations and high network with individuals, and the other was environmental regulations with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. These were difficult ideas to sell to the general public. David Koch, for example, ran as vice president on this platform in 1980 and got less than 1% of the vote for his ticket. What they did find was that if they joined forces with some televangelists and some Christian conservative strategists, such as Richard Vigory, Morton Blackwell, later Ralph Reed, they could exploit unengaged conservative Christians as a voting bloc and use them as a way of using these culture war issues, which were carefully formulated and presented to focus groups in branding and many times presented under false pretenses and achieved the economic ends that they were seeking. The election of Donald Trump and his policies, both on tax policy and his massive restructuring of the tax code, and the conservative cultural policies we have instilled in many states now in the Supreme Court are really the greatest success that this movement has ever known. As you say, Christian nationalism is not new, of course. What in the current era would you pinpoint as some key factors that have given the modern movement its saliency? I have the bias of a media scholar, and so I see a lot of responsibility in that sector. A lot of the people in middle America in the past relied on their hometown newspapers and the evening news on the networks, which presented these communities with fact-based journalism that was relatively nonpartisan and the whole economic structure of American journalism has gone through several upheavals, one from the internet, one from the economic crisis of 2008, where many, many of these news organizations, including newspapers in Wisconsin, have folded or have diminished to a fraction of their former circulations, then you have the advent of cable television, which actually rewards programming that is partisan, and also that is alarmist. You have the fractionalization of the audience with that, and then put on top of that the internet and this flood of information and misinformation that is confusing to people because they don't know how to discriminate between the fact-based sources and the conspiracy theories and the partisan areas. So you have people who are being sought out through digital algorithms to radicalize them and being pulled into cults like QAnon, and then you have a weakening of the institutions that they have assaulted, such as fact-based journalism, universities, public school systems, public libraries, et cetera. So that's my take on it. Talk about Christian nationalism as a political ideology. What are its main elements? Well, one of its main elements is something that those of us who are over 50 would remember as kind of a norm in the past. So as school kids, the Pledge of Allegiance was one nation under God, and there was a kind of dominant atmosphere of Protestantism, which historian Kevin Cruz has written about very effectively in his book. And of course, the country has changed since the 1950s. It's more diverse, religiously, ethnically, religiously. Christian nationalism wants to hark back to a past that is over and gone and impose concepts not just of Protestantism, but of conservative Protestantism on the entire society, arguing that the United States was founded as a Christian country, which is really playing fast and loose with history, imposing some of their moral values on a country where the majority doesn't accept them. So I think it uses a lot of the culture wars to radicalize these voting blocs and to create division in the country in a way that's really been quite tragic. People talk about Project 2025. It's a product of this movement of Christian nationalism. And what I hear traveling across the country is that there are states like Texas and Oklahoma and Louisiana where Project 2025 is being implemented here and now in extreme ways that are actually hurting American citizens. Talk about the key component that I found when I was watching the film, Bad Faith, I was struck. I hadn't thought about it before. The central component or element of their ideology is an end to the separation of church and state. Well, yeah, and see what's so tricky about that is, first of all, the establishment clause in the Constitution very specifically states that Congress shall make no law imposing religion on American citizens. And really, so much of our nation was founded with the idea that we are going to liberate ourselves from the religious wars of England and Europe that had been prevalent at the time. So that kind of neutrality and rule of law is really written into the DNA of our country. And so you have people who kind of cherry pick language and not only do they want to impose Christianity on a nation, which is ever more religiously diverse, they even want to impose a very narrow form of Christianity. So in my home state of Oklahoma, the superintendent of schools has just ruled that every public school classroom has to have a Bible in it. And of course, religion scholars will point out there are many different versions of the Bible, Catholics and Baptists and methodists have different versions of the Bible. So it's really just saying nothing of people who are Jewish or Hindu or Muslim or atheist, not wanting a religion imposed on a public school for which they pay taxes. So it's very problematic and it is really causing grave division and strife, not only in the states, but between the regions of America. When I'm in these conversations, I'm more familiar with the term white Christian nationalism. Bad faith tells us that in its present incarnation, the movement had origins as a particular response of backlash to the 1950s, 60s civil rights movement, in particularly the desegregation of public institutions, go into that some, please. Yeah, historically, the way that the people who were interested in the economic issues found their way into a voting bloc was exploiting the tensions primarily in the south around school integration. And some tell evangelists, notably Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, a few others, founded what were called segregation academies, where people could send their children to segregated schools, but the IRS ruled that any school that was segregated could not be tax exempt. So this created motivation. And by the way, the segregation academies and their partner universities were cash cows for the televangelists. They made millions and millions of dollars from them collectively. So that became an origin, and as rental bomber, the historian points out in the film, the abortion debate came later. The organizations that drive this movement, one of them is the Council for National Policy, the subject of my book, emerged from the segregation debates. Now, I do subscribe to the old school journalism saying, "Follow the money." And to achieve their economic goals of cutting back taxes for the ultra wealthy and cutting back the public services at taxes funds, such as public education and public health. This has been a driving force in this movement, and it's really a mistake to let the financial interests get lost. So as I said, this is a point that both the book and the movie make. And if you follow the funding streams, you have the DeVos family of Michigan, the Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee, the Coke network of Wichita, and all of them are economically profiting from this movement. Now, the plans to Christianize America came about as a direct response to a complex list of grievances centered around the perceived threats to the dominant white mail order. Talk about some more of that list, a complex list of grievances. Yeah, that is a very strong strain in the movement. And there are some very worrisome organizations within it. There's a whole area of the Pacific Northwest called the readout, which an academic named Brad Onishi has written about in his book, where they're actively trying to restore some kind of white male patriarchy and deprive women of the vote. I mean, I'm serious, that's really what they urge. And again, it's a very retro vision. I mean, I guess now we're talking about some kind of 19th century order. But I also want to come back to the idea that in order to achieve their economic goals, they have to keep tapping into new pools of voters. So their big push right now appears to be with Pentecostals. And they're investing a lot in something called the new Apostolic Reformation. And my theory for which I have some evidence is that they've pretty much tapped out the white evangelical voting block, such as the Southern Baptist. And they are very aggressively going after African American voters and Hispanic voters who are disproportionately represented in the Pentecostal religious movement, which is the fastest growing religion in the United States and in the world. So when you try to describe all of it as white Christian nationalism, you run into some contradictions. They have, for example, an organization called MAGA Black, which is proselytizing in inner cities with large African American populations. They're going into African American Pentecostal and other churches with vaccine disinformation and other ways of trying to create distrust in public institutions. They're making some headway with both African American and Hispanic males in terms of their voting as reflected in the polling. So it would be a mistake to ignore this dimension of them. You're listening to Ann Nelson, a decades-long award-winning journalist presently with the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Nelson is the author of Shadow Network Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right and she's a featured commentator in the presently circulating documentary Bad Faith, Christian Nationalisms, Unholy War on Democracy. As I usually do, I'll be opening up the phone lines at half past the hour if you want to join in the conversation with Ann Nelson with an observation, a question, a comment. Give us a call at 608-256-2001. Ann Nelson, tell us about Paul Warrick, the figure that you describe as the, quote, grand architect of the modern movement to Christianize America. Who was he and why is he important? Yeah, well, yeah, Paul Warrick was actually a Catholic from Wisconsin who found the Catholic Church to be too moderate and shifted to an Orthodox denomination. He and two other colleagues met up during the Goldwater Campaign in the 1960s and had their hearts broken by the Goldwater loss in the election. So he joined with Richard Biggerie and Morton Blackwell with creating some organizations that would contest the Democrats in a more systematic way. And he was co-founder of the Council for National Policy, which is the subject of my book shadow network, as well as the Heritage Foundation, which oversaw the production of Project 2025, as well as ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which drafts extremely conservative, and in some cases, repressive laws, gets them instituted in states with favorable legal systems and then leverages them to multiple states using the initial state as the basis, so a lot of the abortion laws that you see, a lot of the environmental rollbacks you see are involved legislation drafted by ALEC. The Council for National Policy was something that why Rick and his colleagues used to strategize. So they brought together the big donors, such as the ones I mentioned, DeVos, Bradley, and people representing the Koch funding, along with the strategists, along with the media systems, such as Salem Media, which was a core member for decades, still is, and then connected them to organizations that had members running them, such as the National Rifle Association and the Susan B. Anthony, anti-abortion group, and now turning point USA, who become the foot soldiers for the movement, and what why Rick foresaw and designed was really this way to coordinate these operations with basically the efficiency of a corporation. And also, you know, most of its activities took place under the radar, so a lot of the meetings of the Council for National Policy were secretive, the membership was secret, the proceedings were secret, and in a lot of cases you have people across America who are experiencing things like school board disruptions, run by Moms for Liberty, which is a project that was designed and funded and launched and sustained by these partner organizations. People think it just erupted in their community, but it's actually, you know, if you go to Council for National Policy Partners, like the Leadership Institute and Family Research Council, their websites have online training for them on how to disrupt your school board. Tell our listeners about the CNP's strategic outlook. What's its agenda? You've kind of touched on it, but by naming numbers of the organizations and affiliates and groups, what is their intent? Oh, I think their intent is in a broad sense to roll the United States back to pre-New Deal conditions. So as you as a student of American history know, a lot changed in the United States around that period where the Federal Government instituted Social Security, instituted various reforms that serve the interests of workers, serve the interests of rural populations, rural electrification, and this took tax payer money to do. And the idea was that the wealthy would pay their share for programs that would benefit the entire population. And so if you read this expression of their vision in Project 2025, it's basically canceling out a lot of this approach to government. So it's saying that the Environmental Protection Agency shouldn't be active, you don't have wildlife protection, you eliminate the Department of Education, you privatize a lot of public schools to the detriment of rural populations. It just goes on and on, and of course Project 2025 is a 920 page document of the 100+ organizations that are listed as the supporters, the majority of them get funding from the Council for National Policy and the Koch funding networks. So this is an expression of their vision and I think that their idea is that the wealthiest of Americans would garner ever greater percentages of the national output. It's quite a draconian vision for society because the bottom half of American society would do very badly indeed. And of course it taps into a centuries now long reading of history that is that the wealthy are the elect that going into Calvinism and so on. Yes, I found the kind of theology to be this kind of questionable interpretation of Calvinism and in other ways it's almost like feudalism because a lot of these individuals live not just in gated communities but in their own fiefdoms, they live in their family compounds and isolated from the problems of the little people. So if roads don't get fixed and if you have contaminated public water supplies and if the public schools and the rural communities fall apart, it just doesn't affect them. And there's this kind of apparent belief that everything that comes their way in terms of revenue should belong to them. Even though there's no corporation, there's no business that is, they're all collective efforts, right? They all have workers, they all have people who make their functioning possible but that doesn't seem to be their worldview. Your work about dealing with the CMP and the broader movement talks about a in a sense a triad of money which we've touched on, of course, media which we've touched on and ground troops talk about the role of the ground troops, that part of the popular or mass movement. Sure, and I should say that I've updated the reporting in the book with a series of articles in the Washington Spectator which are available online without a paywall and I'm really very struck by the role of the ground troops because in a lot of cases people who respond to them aren't aware that they're part of something larger. So for example, the National Rifle Association has made this appeal to gun owners and what people don't realize is that in the past the National Rifle Association was a gun safety club, right? I mean it was founded by civil war veterans who figured that Americans who use guns needed to be more accurate shots and so it served that purpose and then it was radicalized by a takeover. Susan B. Anthony, anti-abortion organization is one that was kind of growing out of the Council for National Policy circles, Phyllis Schlafly was a founding member of the CNP. So when you talk about how they operate, the example that I use is a Claire McCaskill campaign in Missouri where she was a sitting senator running against Josh Hawley and what happened was that the Democrats put their money into canvassing for McCaskill, the Republicans put their money into canvassing for Hawley and those numbers were recorded, what you had was a whole third avenue of massive canvassing, phone banking, outreach, involving just millions of interactions with Missouri voters carried out by the NRA, Susan B. Anthony group and others where it wouldn't be apparent to the naked eye that this third political activity was going on and in many cases this activity is being carried out as direct political canvassing by organizations that are 501(c)(3) tax exempt so-called non-partisan groups. They also go straight into churches, they put voter guides into the church bulletins, they access church directories and cross-reference them with voter files and then figure out which votes and which church votes they want to discourage and which ones they're going to register and provide, you know, a ride to the polls. So it's really a way of weaponizing a lot of churches, including churches where the pastors would much rather stay neutral, I mean, there's just a tremendous amount of pressure on a lot of these churches, especially the rural churches, the mega churches and the non-denominational churches. Again, you're listening to Ann Nelson, we're talking today about Christian nationalism, give us a call at 608-256-2001 if you want to join in the conversation, have a question, a comment and observation, again, 608-256-2001, you know, while we still have time, I want to announce, of course, I've been asked to announce that there will be two Madison's area screenings of bad faith, Christian nationalism's unholy war on democracy. The first will be this evening, Thursday, September 26 at 6.30 p.m. that's at the Penny Public Library, 516 Cottage Grove Road in Madison, that's sponsored by Madison's, Madison Concerned Citizens Against Christian Nationalism. A second screening will take place on Tuesday, October 15 at 5 p.m. at the Barrymore Theatre 2090 atwood Avenue in Madison. That's showing we'll be followed by a discussion with special guests, historian Nancy McLean, author of Democracy in Chains. That's a ticketed event sponsored by the Progressive magazine, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, community shares of Wisconsin, and the Center for Media and Democracy. 608-256-2001. I want to, so much we could discuss, I mean, get two historians together and... Yeah, I know, abandon hope. Yeah, so, but there's so much we could discuss, but I want to allow some time to discuss the Christian rights embrace of Trump in no stretch of the imagination a man of God, how do you, how do we begin to explain it? Well, there were mechanics involved, and I lay them out in the book, the, this movement that I described, the C and P and the leadership, they preferred Ted Cruz, I believe that Marco Rubio was their second choice, and some of them were never Trumpers. Trump, partly because of his fame as a reality TV star, won the primaries, they had to deal with that. And so they assembled a thousand evangelical leaders to New York City and presented Trump as their guy having cut a deal with him. And they offered him their war chest, their strategists, and their ground game in return for their nominations for the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts, and their control of his religious advisory council and their ability to write the social platforms for the Republican National Convention. But Trump, who had, you know, no war chest, no ground game, no strategists, and no policies of his own, shook hands on the deal. And so what they found was that Trump's transactional nature and lack of interest in any of the above served their purposes much better than, say, people of faith who would question different aspects of their platform. I mean, George W. Bush was not somebody who just went down the road with them, much less Jimmy Carter, you know, both of them evangelicals, whereas Donald Trump, the businessman, who is very familiar with compromise and greed, got the deal. So the way they sold it to their masses initially was to call him the equivalent of King Cyrus in the Bible, who was in Persia, he was not a man of God, but he was an instrument of God. And they minted coins, they gave sermons. Now, over time, this movement has gotten more extreme and have started describing Trump in more Messiah-like language. And that actually disturbs a lot of evangelical Christians who find that somewhat heretical. But people who are inside the media bubble involved with this, which includes QAnon, have gone down that road. He's described in two ways, one I believe you describe him as the wrecking ball, an instrument of the movement, but also as a vessel, this vessel theology, I believe it's called, that talks about him as a man chosen by God to do God's work here in the United States of America. Yeah, I think that once you have people who want to prove that point, they'll find religious language to apply to it. I mean, I will say that there are many Christians and many evangelicals who are puzzled and troubled by this, but I think that as an historian, we know that religious extremism has existed in most eras, in most parts of the world. So I think this is another manifestation. Jack is telling me that we do have a caller on the line, "Hello, calling around the air." Hi, Alan, you're doing a great job on this show, and actually I think you just addressed the question. So maybe we don't need to talk about it, it's really interesting that as I'm breaking this question, to try to write it up, that you're right there. I mean, at least, you know, is there a connection between your guests' work on Christian nationalism and Zionism and the war in Gaza right now, and you've connected it to Trump already right now. So maybe, I don't know if there's more to say. I don't think you can hear, but I think that you're there in terms of addressing my interest. Thanks. That's a Gil Halsted local journalist. Thank you much, Gil. You know, you actually broke a question that came to me, as I was preparing for this program, and that is the significant, that Ann Nelson can address, I hope, and that is the significance of the change of Israel's capital to Jerusalem and what that meant for the Christian right. So that was something that was very much on their shopping list for a long time. And you saw their influence in the appointment of various cabinet members, not just Betsy DeVos in Department of Education, but also Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, who oversaw the transfer of the capital of, I mean, the U.S. Embassy as related to Jerusalem. And you know, in my book, I have a citation of Mike Pompeo talking to people in Kansas about the Rapture. So there's a long-standing relationship between this narrow branch of Christianity. And let's say to the Israeli right, it's a very major economic relationship where there's been a great deal of investment that has gone along. In Israel plays this unique role in their theology having to do with their complicated prophecy around the Rapture where certain events have to occur in Israel that they would like to influence and so on. And when I'm talking to my Jewish friends, I say, "This is not good for the Jews." I'll attest to that. 608-256-2001, we have a little bit of time if you want to get in with a question in the comments and observation again, 608-256-2001. It's on to me, again, in just preparing my notes for today, that in essence, Christian nationalism or at least the organizations in the structure, the architecture of Christian nationalism brought us the Trump presidency, that an anti-democratic movement based upon frightening a percentage of the population to believing that there is something someone out there and enemies, Satan and his minions, has been successful in bringing the rest of us something that we should be actually feared. Yeah, and for me, it's nothing short of tragic. I have attended some of their events and I hear things that would be patent nonsense if it weren't so harmful. So they perpetrate the idea that there are school nurses who perform transsexual surgery in their school offices, right, and tell people that they have to pull their kids out of public schools and they vilify the teachers and this is just terrible. I mean, so much of our history is built on the virtues of public education and to attack it is just unconscionable and to attack it in such terms is, you know, I find it hard to believe it if I hadn't sat there and listened to them myself. Another tale they perpetrate is that Democrats believe that it's acceptable to execute healthy newborn babies. And because people are inside these media silos, they actually believe this. So it's a movement that depends on the breakdown of our media systems and a breakdown in our communities. I get the sense that a lot of people in these communities who believe otherwise are not really in daily contact with these conspiracy bubbles and they need to be, people need to be talking common sense. And I just also wanted to give a shout out to Nancy McLean, whose book Democracy in Chains was absolutely foundational to so many of us in terms of research. You're so lucky to have her speaking there because she's an incredibly dynamic speaker and also to the Center for Media and Democracy, which is in Madison and I've worked with their researchers, their first rate, and they've really made this enormous contribution to our knowledge and understanding of these movements. And Nelson, toward the end of bad faith, the film, you say that democracy is more fragile than we think and must be defended. That whether Trump wins or loses comes November, you note that the machinery, the infrastructure that the CNP setup has its own staying power and will remain a lasting threat to our democracy. Talk about that a little bit. We tend to focus on leaders. We tend to focus on Trump or whomever if leaders is the correct, we use the word there. But these institutions have their own staying power, especially when they're well-funded and well-organized. Yeah, you know, I think a lot of people, myself included, thought after January 6 that the country would wake up and say, "This is not a movement that's interested in playing by the rules of a democracy." They have proven that there's a video record of their incursion and their violence. And then you had all of the indictments of Trump where you felt that surely the accusations and then the legal convictions would mount to a repudiation of him in the movement. And what you saw instead were these armies of their lawyers and their donors and their media people rushing to patch up the holes. And now, after all of that, we have a close election in November for someone who is not recognizable to the traditional Republican Party that we knew in the 20th century. So I think that that establishes that premise and these organizations are better-funded than ever. They're more... They learn from their mistakes, several of them, including the Leonard Leo, radically right Catholic, connected to Opus Dave, now heavily-funded, are going into media acquisitions. So when they lose around, they don't give up. They double down. Jack is telling me that we do have a caller who will squeeze in here before the end of the hour. Hello, caller. You're on the air. Thank you. I need to be corrected, I think, because unless I was not listening carefully, I didn't hear many references to the racial aspects of Christian nationalism. And I guess I'm reflecting on the Mark Robinson fiasco in, I think it's North Carolina, that kind of thing, a black man who repudiates blackness and identifies with ultra-racial kinds of movements from the mid-20th century. I was wondering if your guests could comment on the fact that many of us think of Christian nationalism as essentially a white movement. This was, of course, discussed earlier, but Ann Nelson. Well, I will say that in really, at least in the last decade and maybe longer than that, they have tried to pull in black representatives. So Martin Luther King's niece, Alvita King, is a longtime member of the Council for National Policy and somebody that they use to try to recruit black voters. Candace Owen is part of their network, and people are probably familiar with her and her work with Turning Point USA, which is a full CNP-based operation. So they can't afford at this moment in history to write off black voters. In terms of Mark Robinson, I would need to be a psychiatrist to unpack his political history. And Jack tells me that, of course, as is so often getting down to the end of the hour, but we do have one more call or waiting with a question or comment. Hello, caller. You're on the air. I was just wondering what tools might be effective against this, and I'm just thinking of, like, the IRS or maybe the dismantling of media bubbles or just convincing Evangelicals that we've got the Antichrist here instead of, like, you know, a tool of God? Well, I certainly think addressing the media question is urgent. And I write in the book a lot about the role of radio. Now Wisconsin has a new radio operation that's promising, but we need to restore the function of the hometown newspapers, even if we can't revive those newspapers again, but get people more oriented towards fact-based reporting on whatever platform. That's critical. I think we need to really reach out to young people and students and get them to be less cynical about politics and more engaged. And that takes deep and lengthy conversations and informing people. But again, if they're getting all of their information from random people on TikTok, the media is another piece of this. So civic engagement in the broad sense, but certainly putting practical support, perhaps even government funding towards fact-based journalism, reaching these communities. And, of course, as is the case, we have one more crawler that we're going to get in. Hello, caller. You're on the air. Are you addressing Steve? Yeah. Go ahead, Steve. Hey. Yeah, Ms. Nelson, extremist groups such as the German Nazis have frequently sought to craft written intellectual treatises in order to validate their movement in the eyes of the mainstream body politic. Does the current evangelical movement have such a theoretical document that's kind of sloppy wording, but maybe you understand? Thank you. Well, sure. Yeah. That's a great question. The film talks about the Weirick Manifesto, which kind of laid out the overall plan. And they also have this whole semi-quasi academic infrastructure, such as Hillsdale College, which has massive online learning, which is very ideologically oriented, and they publish in Primus, which is an ideologically oriented law journal, and so on and so forth. They even have David Barton, who is a best-selling American historian whose historiography is shall we say, deeply flawed, and in some cases made up of a whole cloth. So yeah, they do indeed. I want to, we're almost getting down to the end of the Weir and the hour, excuse me, and Nelson, a final word for our listeners. Well, yes. You know, when I spoke about my book five years ago at the Wisconsin Book Festival, there were people who said that, you know, when they went canvassing, that the Democratic Party hadn't even given them folders to pass out, that they had been neglected. And it also seemed as though there was this big disconnect between the urban and academic areas of Wisconsin and the rural areas. And I see that across the country, and if I had one wish for the country, it would be that we would reestablish those connections, reinforce them with sympathetic listening, but also an encouragement to move towards a more fact-based environment. And that's not just for the short term, it's for the long term. I wanted to announce before we run out of time entirely that there are two Madison area screenings of bad faith Christian nationalisms on Holy War on democracy. The first is this evening. That is Thursday, September 26th at 6.30 p.m. at the Pinni Public Library, 5.16, Cottage Grove Road in Madison, sponsored by Madison, concerned citizens against Christian nationalism. A second screening will take place on Tuesday, October 15th at 5 p.m. at the Barrymore Theatre in 2090 atwood Avenue Madison. That showing will be followed by a discussion with special guest historian Nancy McLean, author of Democracy in Chains. That's a ticketed event sponsored by the Progressive magazine, Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, community shares of Wisconsin, and the Center for Media and Democracy. And Nelson, I want to thank you ever so much. I learned a lot just in prepping for this program, so I want to thank you for that. I also want to thank Jack for engineering, for Jade producing, and you, our listeners and callers. I've been your host for this hour. My name is Alan Ruff, and I'll be speaking with you next week. [Music]