Seth Cotlar: In April 2022 when Mike Flynn's Reawaken America tour came to Salem, this is how the Christian Nationalist chair of our local school board described what was happening. Just "church stuff" being attacked by Antifa. Her husband (a 3% militia member) was at that time the chair of the county GOP.

Highly recommend Season 2 of this excellent podcast documentary about the far right in Idaho. Episode 2 in particular clarified for me the challenges of talking about people who are "the baddies" of American democracy but who absolutely do not see themselves that way. www.npr.org/podcasts/510...

Extremely Americanwww.npr.org In Season 2 of Extremely American: Onward Christian Soldiers host Heath Druzin and James Dawson take an inside look at Christian nationalism. The movement aims to end American democracy as we know it ...

People like Roger Stone or Steve Bannon or Jack Posobiec or Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Laura Ingraham or Ann Coulter or [fill in the blanks] are 100% "the baddies" and they are 100% proud of that. They want the blood of their fellow Americans, and will savor the taste of it.

But it's inconceivable to the Christian Nationalists we meet in this podcast that they might be the baddies, even tho they seek to turn the US into a nation in which everyone is a cis het Christian like them. This involves a complete disregard and disrespect for people who are different from them.

Ex-Evangelicals have written about this dynamic at great length and I don't have anything to add to their insights, but I do think that folks interested in building civic capacity around democracy should be mindful of the space between baddies who are more vs. less knowing and willful about it.

The guy I'm writing about, Walter Huss, was an absolute baddie--an antisemitic, racist, homophobic authoritarian jerk who became the chair of the OR GOP in 1978-9. But he also thought what we call him "being a baddie" was just him "being a servant to God's truth."

Here he explains his lifelong, fascistic obsession with/hatred of Jews. "They commit the act, I simply stated the fact. If they would abide by the Judeo ethic, people wouldn't hate them so much. They force themselves upon you & take over as much as they can. They bring on their own persecution."

If you were to say to many of the fascists who Walter Huss read and admired "you're a hateful violent person," they would have said "yes, indeed I am and proud of it." If you'd said that to Huss he would have said "I hate Communism & sin, but love all of humanity which is why I fight those things."

Closed-minded & socially authoritarian forms of Christianity that claim a privileged place in American life have been with us from the start. This is not new. What's new is that the explicitly political and theocratic iterations of this tradition have a big foothold in a national political party.

Imposing a rigid orthodoxy on a congregation or even a town is bad enough...but imaging/hoping that you can do it on a national level with the help of one of the nation's two political parties is a far more dangerous proposition.

In April 2022 when Mike Flynn's Reawaken America tour came to Salem, this is how the Christian Nationalist chair of our local school board described what was happening. Just "church stuff" being attacked by Antifa. Her husband (a 3% militia member) was at that time the chair of the county GOP.

Waving away dangerously autocratic & illiberal stuff like the Reawaken America tour as just "church stuff" is how fascism comes to America with the passive assent of millions of apolitical white people who have no deep desire to be "the baddies" of American democracy. www.npr.org/2022/11/02/1...

The ReAwaken America Tour unites conservative Christians and conspiracy theoristswww.npr.org Some of the biggest proponents of conspiracy theories about vaccines and elections regularly tour the country together. Many of the speakers are closely tied to former President Donald Trump.

There's a huge proportion of the US citizenry, probably the majority who have no idea what Project 2025 is or what Doug Wilson's church in Idaho aspires to do. They neither support it, nor are they opposed to it...they just don't know and don't think they need to care about it.

Reaching such people requires one to NOT speak to them like they're Nick Fuentes fan boys who stay up late reading the Protocols of the Elders of Zion...that might be the political formation they help boost by just voting for lower taxes and less regulation, but that is not their settled intent.

Such people used to be able to be reached via the channels of what we now call "legacy media," like local newspapers or the nightly news or local news channels. But now the local stations have been bought up by the far right Sinclair network and most local newspapers are on life support or gone.

If I knew what the solution was I'd be making lots of money as a political consultant. But I don't, and I'm not. Sorry, wish I had a more uplifting way to end this thread.

It doesn't need to be uplifting to be the truth. Pointing out the problems is how we find solutions; we can't solve problems we don't know about. I don't know how to solve it either, but it's worth discussing. Some kind of grassroots network to spread information on the ground?

Break up the online advertising monopsonies. Throw the 100 richest Americans into a volcano.

We did a lot of this work 20ish years ago with deradicalization and Islamic extremists. It's messy, an absolute grind, and a lot of things don't work. But shutting down key generators of extremist content whether online or off is what works. We're not willing to do that when it's "just politics"

And if you try to tell them they don't believe you, because believing you would require them to reconsider their identity.

They always fall back on Fake News! Goddess help us.

In my experience when trying to talk to my family, it's never "fake news." It's "those people are fringe, you're blowing their threat out of proportion." "It's unfair to tar my whole party/church with the loudest angry voices." "The courts will stop it before the things you're afraid of happen."

"We aren't like THOSE Evangelicals/Republicans/Conservatives, stop trying to tie us to them." (See also John Scalzi's "you bought porn" analogy from 2016.)

Religion and dictatorship: pals forever.

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