Fast Politics with Molly Jong-FastThe Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson roasts the looting of the RNC under Lara Trump’s rule. Pivot host Kara Swisher details her new book 'Burnbook: A Tech Love Story,' while Sarah McCammon examines their new book 'The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church.
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some.
Of today's best minds.
And Tommy Tubervel called democrats as satanic cult.
We have such a great show.
Today, Pivot host Kars Wisher stops by to talk about her new book, Burn Book, a.
Tech Love Story.
Then we'll talk to Sarah McCammon about her new book, The Ex Vangelicals, Loving Living and Leaving the White Evangelical Church. But first we have the host of the Enemy's List, the Lincoln Project's own Rick Wilson.
Rick Wilson, Wally Jong Fast.
You know that I'm agitated because it is early in the morning and we've already talked.
We talked this morning, like at seven o five. Good morning this morning. But that's because you're the hardest working woman in show business and you were up at the crackass of dawn to do TV.
That's not even true.
But first I want to talk about this week. You know, one of the things you and I were talking about was whether the her hearing was this week or last week.
Because we now live in dog years and everything seems to go so.
Fast, I just think there are certain things that are getting covered and certain things that are not getting covered. And so for example, this weekend, this is gonna air on Monday, but on the weekend before Monday, when you hear this podcast, there will be in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia, at the Greenbrier, which is owned by Jim Justice, the governor of West Virginia, the richest man in West or maybe there's someone richer in West Virginia, but one of the richest men.
Was Blankenship Richard than Justice. I don't remember.
This is a rabbit hole I would love to not go down. But this guy, he's the governor of West Virginia running for the Senate. And there is a Republican congressional retreat and only about half of the Republican congress and went because they all hate each other.
It's the fire Festival of Republican retreats. It's a nightmarish healthscape. Look, the Greenbrier has traditionally been where the caucus goes. They work out any family business, and they plot and scheme. There was a superpower of the Republican Party for a very very long time, and that superpower was unity. They would say, okay, we all want to get to ex goal, and so we're all going to sit down, mid out, plot it out. But now the few are normies are confronted with the insane people like you know, Matt Gaates, Rolaur and Bobert, Martorie Taylor Green, you know, all the all the kooks, and they're thinking, is this worth my day? Is this worth my time to go out there and listen to these absolute morons rant about whatever they're going to rant it? Okay, it just it makes no sense to humans of a certain basic sanity level.
You know, Republicans have this very very tiny majority being held together by.
A speaker and glue right.
And a speaker named Mega Mike Johnson, who has at this point is decided that he's going to break up all the spending bills into as many fragments as possible in the hopes that it will distract people from.
What's actually in them.
But on Friday, Ken Buck from Colorado just left Congress because he was like.
We're not listen if you're ken Buck. And by the way, no one's going to wake up in the morning and go that liberal soro shill ken Buck. Ken Buck was a conservative stalwart as you get, but ken Buck has realized something, something really important. These people are not conservatives. They're insane. They're crazy. They're chewing up the scenery, batshit nutbar and he just said I'm done. I'm not going to play this game anymore. He doesn't want to be associated with these idiots. That leaves them now down to one. You got Santos saying he's going to get back in and run in the primary against the LOTA in New York one, which it's like, yes, Alexa, order all the popcorn. Oh my god, in the other room, she's like evena er popcorn. That also scares you how like sensitive those microphones are because the Alexa echo is in like it's like forty feet away anyway. But look, you are seeing the devolution and death of the Republican Party. This week. They put a bullet in the head of the RNC itself. They only got rid of the important parts like the political operation, the communications operation, the digital operation, the minority outreach operation, and the early voting operation. And what's left the money slews back to mar A Lago operation. It is now basically an email list. I wrote a piece yesterday for SUBSEC called the Maga mafia's bust out of the RNC. They are going to strip it, desiccate it. They're going to break it apart, suck the marrow out of every bone that's left, grind the bones up, make them into bread. And when it's done, they'll be selling off the office equipment and the furniture in the front of three ten South cap.
As they're stripping away the RNC. One of the things that I think is real interesting is that one of the people who is now in the employee of the.
RNC, Christina Bob from an.
So I mean, then get rid of everyone in fact, and there was a really interesting article about this in the New York Times this morning which was basically, they have moved in this election integrity fiasco, right, And the one thing that Trump did, or not the one, but one of the many things that Trump did, was that he is still trying to prevent free and fair elections.
What they're saying is that we're going to instead of doing early voting and mail in balloting and absentee balloting, we're going to focus only on election protection. Quote. What that means is there going to become this mothership for crack headed adult pated Republican lawyers like Christina Bob. No one, Christina Bob is like the Michael Avinatti of Elena Habbas.
She was also involved in the actions that led to the other indictment, signing a sworn Affidavid stating that the former president had turned over all classified documents in his possession.
Uh huh. And somehow she missed the sanity check on that one. And she missed the sanity check on that one because she's part of Trump's concept of my attorneys are here to lie for me. That's not how actual legal representation works. As you may have.
Heard, in early twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, Bob worked closely with Trump's top advisors on the hair brand.
And this is the New York Times Okay.
Fake electors scheme, which led to one of the two federal indictments he faced. So she could actually be in the RNC doing more crimes right now.
Listen, she has a proven track record. I would keep an eye on her for matters of defamation from the election machine, folks. Yeah, I just keep an eye out for that. I don't think she's gonna have an easy run of anything in the immediate future.
It's two things, right.
One is that she's a moron, and two is that she's very embolden.
Yeah. Look, she is like a lot of attorneys around Trump that they believe that there is no consequence to lying. They believe that what matters is that they rev up the adjic prop machine to keep the fraudental elections line running, to keep the Trump was cheated line running. And all of it is garbage. All of it is a product of a Trump culture that has brought down so many people who work for him. I mean, the whole making attorneys get attorney's joke is real.
Let us take a moment to think back to your former boss one, Rudolph Giuliani.
By the end of the year, Rudy's going to be on the street in New York selling Lucy's We.
Don't do that anymore. If only we did.
But let's talk about this which I think is worth talking about, which is Trump is effectively trying to delay.
All of his trials until after the election.
And this may have worked, it's not a pretty good job of it.
And when we.
Talk about our institutions holding, this is a really good case of where our institutions.
If you just push on them a little bit. They really don't.
Hold Yeah, And this was something that one of the National Review boys, Dan What's the baseball Crank said the other day. You know, Trump and a secondary will be constrained by guardrails and institutions. I'm thinking what guardrails? Exactly? What guardrails? What institutions? The courts? You think it's going to work out for you? And again, one of the things that just continues to absolutely row is this concept that we're both siding it still, the framing of this of like low tax Republican Donald Trump and high tax Democrat Joe Biden. Right, It's true that frame is poisonous. That is a absolute fantasy. This is autocracy versus democracy. This is insanity versus sanity. The coverage of this thing. I tweeted this on Friday morning. The people who are both sizing this do not seem to understand they're going to be up against the wall, either metaphorically or literally if Trump has a second term. They're not going to get a pass from Donald Trump and Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller and Cash Mattel and the rest of these people. If they're in power again, they keep saying it out loud. You know, well, democracy is nice, but we've got to stop the left, whatever it takes.
So as Trump seeks to lay and your processeecutors offer thirty day postponements. So that was the Alvin Bragg election interference case.
That was the only case that was.
For sure going to happen before the election has now been punted thirty days. Now again, we could argue as to why it's not entirely clear, but no one is happy, including Andrew Weissman and the marl Lago documents case.
We have Judge Cannon slow rolling it.
Nobody should be playing this game with Judge Cannon, where they saw a couple little things in her latest judgment that were like not completely in Trump's bag. Right, she is still slow rolling this case. She is still delaying this case. As we're recording this, we see that in the Fanny Willis case she gets to stay on the case, Wade has to go. This is just going to be another delay in the Georgia case. Look, the audience may not love this, but the Fanny Will's case was the internal dynamics there were sloppy and they should have known from the beginning that any kind of compromising information would come out. I wish that case had been cleanly staffed.
Yes, but now is a great opportunity to fire the guy, because a man is very much not a plan. So let's talk a little bit about what you're seeing. Ohio is having a primary that is like again, these Trump Trump has a slate of candidates and they all continue to be some of the worst candidates you've ever seen in your life. I want to talk about Ohio and North Carolina. Both primaries have benefited from enormous APO dumps recently.
If you are a hyper maga, super right wing, hyper aggressive, manly male human who thinks that we need to return to traditional gender roles and all that, and your name is Bernie Moreno, and your Trump's hand pick candidate, and you suddenly are discovered in an OPO dump to have been on a site called adult FriendFinder looking for hot mail one on one action. It's all these guys. The projection is unbelievable. It's never a drag queen. It's always a Republican Trump maga dude, who's still you know, the guy with the weird bats. You can't turn a rock over on the internet without a Democrat or without a Republican screaming that you're a pedophile or a groomor right certains out. You know, the calls are coming from inside the ouse. But yeah, look, Ohios had a couple surprises in the last two years on choice and on redistricting and some other things. And I have to tell you the opening of Trump campaigning for a guy who turns out to be another Republican weirdo. Take the win, have some fun with it.
Yeah, I mean, well, here's the big question is I would say, does he still win the primary? And if he does win the primary, do voters care? Like Ohio's very red share, od Brown is running for reelection. He's kind of once in a generation candidate that tends not to be subjected.
You know, if anyone's gonna win that seat, it's going to be shared on.
But like, I'm curious if you think this guy is going to win the primary.
So the primary is Tuesday in Ohio.
Yeah, God forbid, it should be Saturday when people can actually go.
Matt Dolan is as like a basic bitch, you know, pumpkin spice, latte ug boot Republican that you know, Dwine and Rob Portman and Mitch McConnell and all these other guys want it okay, and he's rich, he's out spending everybody else in the field. Club for Growth loves him, but Trump loves Moreno. And as we've seen in a lot of these primaries, you know you're gonna have Morenos out with jd Vance and Donald Trump and all the sort of maga world, all of our maga sort of you know, coop demo of Maga activist types are out there campaigning for Moreno. And if Dolan wins the primary, somehow those people are gonna say, meh, maybe not. Because Trump voters vote for the person Trump told them to vote for. This is the same thing you're going to see in Pennsylvania. You know, if Trump doesn't completely like blow the horn for Dave McCormick, they may shrug. The interesting part of this, there's an argument, not a big one, but an argument that even though Ohio is a red state, you end up if you've got Moreno on the top of the ticket. Who is aside from just the adult friend find herself who is a genuine whackad, He's a genuine, genuine crazy person. You end up with a situation where maybe Republican turnouts down a little bit in Ohio. Maybe Trump has to start spending money in Ohio.
I like that math I like that too, and so we'll see what happens.
But it is interesting to see this appo go out right before the primary. There's some sort of whispers that Joe Manchin is saying he might actually now run again in West Virginia. We haven't talked that much about West Virginia, but right now, don blanket shief, he is a Democrat.
I swear to God.
Jim Justice, who's term limited out as governor, is going to run as a Republican. There's a world in which Mansion gets in there and wins.
Right Listen, if there's a Democrat who can win West Virginia, it is still Joe Manchell. Yeah, that's just real talk.
And he knows he's not going to be president.
Yeah. Look, that's why he said no to the fraudulent garbage from No Labels, Because e did Joe Manchin, a guy not exactly what we think of as a paragody moral virtue, looked at No Labels and said, Wow, this drug deal is too skanky for me.
No, thank you do you think Rick Wilson that No Labels like they clearly want all of us to think they're running a candidate, But do you think they're They're ultimately just can't find anyone.
They just can't find anybody. Everyone they've gone to and they made a big mistake, like they would say, like, well, Nikki Haley's getting out, so she's going to be a No Label's candidate, And over and over people are like, the fuck are you talking about. I have no interest in getting involved with you. They are going to have a candidate, and it's going to be some statewide official somewhere who has been retired for twenty five years, heard of no one's ever heard of in today's modern era. These are really garbage people. They're really really bad people. And you know what, the collapse of No Labels is happening fast behind the scenes. We have three or four people inside that world that are talking to us now telling us how bad and how chaotic it is. And no matter what Nancy Jacobson and Mark Penn believe their revenge fantasy against the Democratic Party would be, it's not working. It's just broken. Their whole thing is based on a series of lies. If you look at their electoral map, they say that the No Labels candidate will win in Florida and also that the No Labels candidate will beat Joe Biden in his home state of Delaware. And I'm like, y'all, crack kills. You know this from the eighties and nineties. Stop it. It's all based on a lie. It's all based on an attempt to spoil the election for Trump, and the up and that they will receive is coming and coming quick.
Thank you, Rick Wilson, You are welcome.
Kara Swisher is the host of Pivot and the author of Burn Book, a Tech Love Story.
Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Kara Swisher, Hi, how you doing good.
There's a paragraph in your book that is like, you know, I'm married to an ed tech VC, so I have for a long time been exposed to the real stupid side of Silicon Valley as well as the smart side.
So I wanted to read this paragraph. But then we have a lot I want to talk to you about.
Okay, but I love this so much because it is actually completely right. Over the years, Silicon Valley has become full of smart people working on stupid things like online laundry, food delivery apps, and weird hookup software, so much so that I've taken to describing the world they're creating is assisted living for millennials.
It's so true.
Yeah, there you go. That's why I write, because I write words that are true. I don't know what to say. Yeah, they created a lot of apps. I got a little tired of all the apps that were making like digital dry cleaning, digital cleaning service, digital you know, kombucha delivery, things like that. It's all whatever.
Good for them, but it is like PetFood, dot compats, dot com. It was during the tech boom, but it also that kind of like mushrooming continued and it still continues.
Right.
No, Actually, they're working on some very significant things around AI's it's a little more serious and so you're not seeing that out of AI right now. You know, there will be all kinds of applications and companies, but right now it's rather serious stuff.
Yeah.
No, I wasn't saying in AI, but I was saying just in general. There's still like an idea is followed and then there are multiple kind of echoes of it.
Yes, like you can see it in AI. Everyone's jumping in they were in crypto and then they jumped to this And that's the nature of Silicon Valley. You know, it's a little like Hollywood. You know, suddenly everybody's doing a monster movie or whatever happens to be what was successful.
So much of this book is about the sort of rise of tech, right, this wave of tech. The thing that I have, like as a bee in my bonnet, is just how government has an American government because in Europe there is more regulation.
You can like it or not like it.
There certainly is. I just interviewed my grade to Vestitur, who just they just brought into effect two very important acts around content moderation and also antitrusts that are very significant. And she just find Apple over two billion dollars. Before that, she had done a number of things as the competition minister there in the EU. And so yeah, they've done a ton of stuff. Europe's done a ton of stuff. So of other countries, Canada, Australia, but except the US, US has done none. So why money power influence the fact that we have such a dysfunctional government at the very time that tech becomes ascended. I suppose if this had happened during I don't know. The railroad era be everybody. Railroads would run everything in our country right because there wasn't enough of a backbone by regulators to do something. But right now they can't. You know, they can't do anything with pass legislation to ban TikTok, although I support it actually in some fashion, not the way they're doing it. Look, they can't do anything, and this is important. The legislations that are at an all time low ken Buck, very articulated. Is nothing's happening up there. They just performative dunk artists.
That was something I've been thinking a lot about through so many of these sort of hearings, it would seem like there are easy places to start with tech regulation.
So if you were the American government, where would you start?
I wrote a column god back way long time ago twenty eighteen, called it the Internet Bill of Rights and put up ten ideas for it. One would be the National Privacy Bill, it's almost too late now. The other would be a bill to algorithm transparency and new antitrust regulations, to update anti trust regulations, anti hiking disclosure laws, child protection. There is one right now. We'll see where it goes. It's been problematic, but a good one. Actually, we could do one two a tax bill, tax the rich, that kind of thing. There's a dozen that I would pass.
Explain does what the net issue here?
Is it privacy or is it protection for online people?
It's anything like what's the issue when you're regulating planes, radars? It's safety, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's just everything. Every other major industry is regulated in numerous aspects, and this one is not at all. And the legislation that does exist protects it Section two thirty for most of it. You can't sue them either, so there's no liability. It's a perfect storm in so many ways.
I mean two thirty is like one of these things that is a constant, like talking about it forever. And people on one side believe that if you repeal it, then you have a shit storm that is created from that. People on another side believe you have to repeal it. Where do you come down on two thirday?
You can't repeal it. No, it's again, it's not reductive like that. You can't like repeal it. It will cause like unlimited damage, and so you have to figure out a way to be able to sue these companies, like those parents who show their pictures to Mark Zuckerberg can't sue him. They can't sue them unless it's for copyright violation. They should be able to sue him on something they might lose. But there should be an ability to sue these companies for their practices, just like you can sue anybody else for their practices. And you might not like lawyers, but they don't have to deal with them in any way at all. I mean a little bit for things, but not in the way other companies have to.
When it comes to the anonymity issue, do you think trying to create less anonymity on the Internet it would solve problems?
Or now?
No, you know, I don't think that's really at the center of our problems. They're gonna have that on the Internet no matter how you slice it, and it's already baked in, so it doesn't matter at this point. I guess real names are better. You know, we know Elon's Musk's name on the Internet. He doesn't behave any better, so I don't know why that would.
Solve the problem.
Are you surprised about what Elon Musk has become or not really.
Well, yeah, of course I am. He was different and now he's not. You know, people change. I guess I don't know what to say. You know, I think incredible wealth seeing him ounts of wealth and the kind of need for him to have affirmation in a quantum way is and COVID and you know, you've read about some of his issues at Wall Street Channel around drug use. You know, I think it all comes together. When you get treated like he does, you're in desperate need of that constantly.
He has so much control, not just Twitter, but but SpaceX.
And you know, yeah, he does, he has control. You know, you know he's going to face real challenges at Tesla that's already're already seeing that because competitors and there's not enough consumer demand right now because given how many competitors there are, there will be and he's far ahead, but he's far had in the market that is slowing down rather considerably. That's one SpaceX obviously is going to go public. That'll give him a lot of money. That said, there's going to be a lot more competition and some challenges from the government if he keeps, you know, up his antics and they determine that you know that he can't have his clearances, but that's already it could be run by someone else, Fine, he'll still own it. And then there's Twitter, which seems to occupy a lot of his time, although apparently he doesn't sleep, which is another issue. He should sleep. And so you know, Twitter has really ruined his reputation in so many ways with people who really were admirers.
It didn't solve anything. If anything, it made his life much more difficult.
He made his life much more difficult. It didn't make his life more difficult, but being famous, Yeah, no, I mean I think he's changed too. I think he's I think people who know him. I just had an interesting conversation with the Sam Altman at one of my book events, and you know, we talked about that. He said, I like the old Elon, and so do I. I didn't like him as much as Sam did.
But it seems like a lot of people on the Republican side would love him to get more into Yeah.
I don't think he cares about anything. He'll screw them just like he screws whoever. He just doesn't have any loyalty to any except himself. He's loyal to himself.
You don't think he secures trump'sponder.
He might. He might, I don't know. If it amuses him, he will. One of the things that was really interesting was like, was he like this this right wing? I was like, I didn't know what his politics were. I honestly didn't. I did know what a lot of other people's, but he didn't know. You know, he had voted for I know, he liked Obama. He got mad at Biden because Biden didn't invite him to some car contact that he had, And that was the heart of this, that's at the heart of this. He's Janesee and he got picked last at basketball, you know, that kind of thing. And he was pissed at this right word shift. You know, a lot of people have become especially mad, had become radicalized by online conspiracy stuffs, and there he is. He's not like different than anybody else. I don't know. I think he'd screw them just as much as joined with them. Whatever he needs, he will do. That's what it is. It is in his self interest. He will do it. If he needs to use Trump to protect himself at SpaceX wherever, he'll do that. But he certainly he has no commitments to end eating that you would that are actually principal. He says he does free speech, he's reach free speech, but then he like bands people and stuff, So honestly.
It's not really about free speech, right or he thinks it is.
No, what's about Elon Musk. Let's just be clear, like whatever's good for him is what he'll do. And he talks a big launchline on free speech and that he acts differently, so you know that's what he does. He's not a serious person, as we say on succession, he's not a serious person.
I want to ask you about the Claudian gay stuff because that strikes short as like a moment when tech bros decided It does seem to me like a lot of these tech guys sort of feel that they know better.
Than they do that all the time they do that, they talk about things they have no knowledge of. In this case, it was Bill Ackman, who's you know, right up in the grill with them. You know, they're they're like in a cuddle puddle of toxicness together. Black's perfect. He's a really rich guy who gave money to Harvard and thinks he's an expert on diversity inclusion. Well, you know I has been joking on this book tour that I'm going to do a ninety parts series on hedge fund investing, about which I know nothing, But that does not going to stop me from hang angry about my wife, the hedge fun person whatever, I don't. You know they do that. They're like pontificating on Ukraine or you know, geopolitics. It's laughable. It's laughable. There's ridiculous rich people who have a lot of time on their hands, who you know, because they're good at one thing, they think they're good at another and they're not. They're just not. They're incompetent.
But Ackman created a belief among a certain group of people. And again, I'm not at Harvard, and so I am not read in enough.
Look, they have problems at Harvard. We're not dismissing the problems at Harvard. But honestly, why are we talking about Harvard this much like everyone wants to get into Harvard and they hate Harvard, but let's stop talking about Harvard. There are serious issues about speech on campus we should addressed, and it's an important issue. I'm not dismissing as an issue. It's just that you know, in this case. You know, they had a gotcha on her and she had been sloppy and she got caught. You know, she's in the wrong place at the right time, are the right place at the wrong time. Whatever, you know, she got caught in it and sort of was a mob. It was a mob because she didn't answer it quite the way they wanted to, and she did answer badly. So if you're at that high level, you have to answer well. So that's too bad for her. I feel bad for her. But honestly, if you take that job, you got to really know how to do that job.
It was an interesting moment that testimony because it was one of the few times you really saw Republicans just get lucky, right, I mean, at least Stephonic.
No, it wasn't lucky. They just well, yeah, she's a terrible person. Whatever.
But she had this moment where if she asked this question, and obviously, you know, anyone who has a soul knows that anti Semitism is bad, just like Islamophobia is bad.
And they just couldn't answer the question. They have been like, I don't know why they couldn't. I think they were trying. They had been prepared from a legal point of view and were trying to like cross all their t's. I don't know, you know, they didn't understand that it was a PR stunt by police, staphonic and they should have said, of course, we hate hate just like you, at least not really. I might have made a reference to Donald Trump at that moment, go well, at least just like what he said about this, you know, just like we don't think Mexican's are rapists, you know, like some people do. Just like we don't think you know, this and this and this, we think this is terrible too. That's would have been the answer.
It did seem like corporate speak versus like just actual speak.
Right people in Congress have no interest in actually doing anything of significance right now. So that's where we are with them, and so that's what they'll do. You know. She's obviously trying out for vice president of the United States, which let's let's see, she gets it. He's not.
She's not when you get she's a really low someme care.
She's you know, when they said, you know, you hate to say this, but she's really unpleasant, like as a person, what man or woman, you know, she's you know, Barack Obama justifiably got in pillory for saying, you know, Hillary Clinton was likable enough, but it struck home for some people, of course, But she's just unlikable as a man or a woman. You can't be unlikable if you want to have everybody vote.
When you look at this TikTok bill, basically they didn't have any lobbyists, right, And I mean that's what they know.
They completely did, They completely did. It's it's just it's an emotional argument, and it's actually a real one. Four or five, six years ago, I can't remember, I wrote a column saying I love TikTok. It's the best new app right when it got started to get popular. But I use it on a burner phone because Chinese Communist Party CCP, and it's there are national security concerns. They just the government has to make the case for it in that regard and then point out very pertinent things is our social media sites can't operate in China. They're not allowed there. It's a different site in China. We have to be able not just to prove that they're manipulating propaganda and they're doing surveillance or Propaganda's enough any one of them is enough, which they are. I'm sorry they are, just you can see it on the site. But that they're doing it in a systemic way, that's another issue, and that why should we let them do this. We can't own the Washington Post, they can't own CNN, they're not allowed. Why are they allowed to use a service that media media company. It's an entertainment company that has one hundred and seventy million people using it. Just we don't let foreign ownership, you know, neither can the Germans own it whatever. So I don't know. I just feel like it's kind of we sh have to focus in on the fact that we're not allowed to operate in China in the same way they're allowed to operate here, and it's a potential. I cannot imagine they're not using it the way we think they're using it, and that needs to be proven by our government.
Kar Swisher, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you.
Sarah McCammon is a national political correspondent for MPR and author of the x Vangelicals, Loving Living and Leaving the White Evangelical Church Welcome Too Fast Politics.
Sarah, thanks so much for having me.
Molly you're a politics supporter at MPR. Why did you decide to write this book?
Well, mostly because I had this weird and sometimes uncomfortable and kind of unexpected clash rise between my personal backstory as somebody who grew up in the evangelical movement in the eighties and nineties and my professional life covering the Trump campaign in twenty sixteen and everything since. You know, in some ways I got into journalism to try to get away from all of that. And that might sound contradictory, but I didn't want to work in like an ideological space. I really just wanted to be in a space where I could ask questions and it was okay to ask questions, because growing up I felt like there were a lot of answers but not a lot of questions.
So I covered all kinds of things.
I covered like water issues in Nebraska and wind farms and the coast. And then all of a sudden, I'm recruited to NPR in twenty fifteen to cover the twenty sixteen campaign. I'm assigned to the Republican primary. And who am I covering ultimately? But Donald Trump? And what's the big story? It's what are white evangelicals going to do about this guy. So I've spent a lot of time thinking about that ever since, and I get a lot of questions about it, and I decided to write a book to kind of try to answer some of those questions.
Talk to us about your own experience with the evangelical church.
I was born about two weeks after Ronald Reagan was first sworn in, So I'm like an old, old millennial when I was growing up, you know, I was not everybody's evangelical experience is the same, but for me, I was absolutely ensconced in an evangelical world. And I think a lot of the evangelical kids of my time were two because you know, this was a time when the moral majority was rising, when the sort of political machine was being built around the evangelical Christian movement. There were Christian schools and homeschooling were huge trends, and you know, I was educated entirely in Christian school. We went to church every Sunday. Most of the entertainment and information that came into our house, much of it was curated through an evangelical lens. So we're talking like a special teen magazine for evangelical kids. Produced by Focus on the Family, Christian Radio Christian TV. I had some exposure to the outside world, but it was all kind of carefully curated, and I was protected from a lot of things. A lot of things were seen as bad influences, and we were also taught that we were expected to try to, you know, save the world and evangelize with that. There was a clear sort of political project that was increasingly aligned throughout my childhood with that theological belief system.
God.
Did your parents grow up that way or did they convert?
Neither one of them really did.
I mean, my mom was raised Lutheran, like all of her ancestors. Her people were like German Lutheran immigrants, and so that was a pretty conservative tradition. But like it was also just kind of the culture. My dad's family was really not very religious. I think they sometimes attended like a mainline church on occasion, but it wasn't a big part of their lives. I think they both kind of got caught up in the Jesus movement in the seventies, and you know, this was a time when young people who were you know, baby boomers were young at the time, right, were really influenced by the Jesus movement.
There was a lot of sort of youth group activity.
From what I understand of their story, they had an experience that evangelicals describe as getting saved, giving their lives to Jesus through experiences they had with other Christian teens in youth groups and Bible studies and things like that, and it totally changed the direction of their lives and shaped everything about the way that they would raise their family.
Wow.
I mean, it's a really common story, but it is just really meaningful.
Tell our listeners a little bit.
About how you kind of came away from that and broke out of that, and do you have siblings and are they still in it.
I do have siblings, They're in or out to various degrees.
And I interviewed my brother for the book, who talked a lot about just the stress that we both felt because of this pressure to sort of convert everyone make sure everyone was saved. A central character in the book is my grandfather, who was one of very few people we knew who wasn't an evangelical, wasn't a Christian of any kind, and we would pray for his soul at dinner almost.
Every night before we as we prayed over the.
Spaghetti or the lasagna. We'd also pray that Grandpa would get saved. And you know, for me, that was a huge source of cognitive dissonance. It was something that always presented a real foil to the things I was being taught and forced me to reckon with the fact that there were people who were different. I talk about learning a little bit later in my childhood that my grandpa also had come out as gay after my grandmother passed away, and so that added an extra layer of excitement tension to the family dynamic. But you know, one of the things I sort of discovered and that prompted me to write this book was that there were lots of people sort of of my generation, a little older, some a little younger, some who had grown up in this evangelical world, had been shaped by this subculture and were also in many cases in the wake of sort of the Trump moment that forced such a reckoning with what it meant to be an evangelical. But there were other people who were having conversations about these experiences. Many times in social media spaces, in podcasts, people were using hashtags like exvangelical to describe you know, what it was like to once be part of that subculture and then to in one way or another sort of reckon with it and deconstruct it, think it through and come out the other side.
Do you think that Trump made a lot of evangelicals leave the party or Now.
That's hard to say.
I mean, there are so many different things happening at once when I look at the data around that question. On the one hand, white evangelicalism is shrinking and has been for a long time, and so you can't attribute all of that to Donald Trump. The country is becoming less religious overall, the group of people. You probably saw that study that got a lot of attention, and it should because it's important. You know, the Pew study recently that found that people who identify as nothing at all, the nuns in onees are now a larger share of the population than white evangelicals, which some of those I guarantee were once white evangelicals or came from a white evangelical background when you consider just the size of that demographic in the country, So there's a lot of shifting going on. There's also some interesting data from a few years ago that suggests that some people, even as you know, white evangelicalism in white Christianity decline as a share of the population. That some people are newly identifying as evangelical because of Trump, because they like that message. And so, you know, from my research and from talking to people, the sense that I come away with is that evangelical increasingly has It's always had kind of a political connotation my whole life, but increasingly that is front and center. And so if people use that word more often than not, that means they are, you know, fairly right wing Republican. There are exceptions, It's not one hundred percent, but there's just an increasing alignment between those terms.
And so I think for people who who retain.
Some kind of faith or Christian belief or what have you, who don't subscribe to the rest of that, you see people the people I've talked to sort of wrestling with what to call themselves and where they go next.
There aren't a critical mass of white evangelicals who were so turned off by Trump that they became Biden voters.
I think that people tend to not call themselves evangelical anymore if that's where they're at. I mean, there's always been about twenty percent of the white evangelical base that hasn't voted for Trump. But I think you know, I covered the Nicki Haley campaign, so I met some people in that category. I mean, all sorts of religious backgrounds or otherwise. But there's just not a huge market for it. But you know what I think is interesting is as we go forward and we see these shifts continue to happen, where the country becomes more diverse and also less religious, which are two separate trends. I should be clear not to say that more diverse people are religious, because often some of the growth in Christianity is really in the more diverse churches. I'm really curious about what that means for our politics, right because of white evangelicalism has been such a huge voting block for the Republican Party. You know what I say in the book is we're seeing a lot of shifts, a lot of cross currents, shifts in the way that people describe themselves, shifts in religious identification. And you know, at some point, I don't think that the white, even deelible base is going to be the reliable mobilizing force for the Republican Party that it has been in the past.
When that tipping point occurs.
I don't know, but I think that, you know, some of these conversations are part of that picture, that bigger picture.
A lot of times we'll talk about white evangelical voters voting for Trump, and we'll talk about how they kind of made a deal with Trump for the judges and the policy right, that they took policy over personality versus everyone else who voted for Trump who took personality over policy. Also, do you think that a that that's true and b that they feel they got a good deal.
I think it's true that they made a deal with Trump, but I think the reluctance with which that deal was made has been somewhat exaggerated. I think there's a misconception that, you know, Trump sort of hijacked the evangelical movement, that it's like this host parasite relationship. But I think it's much more of a partnership than that. I mean, I certainly met many conservative Christian voters in twenty sixteen who would say things like I'm going to have to hold my nose and vote for Trump.
You know, I don't really like the way he tweets.
I wish he wouldn't tweet so much, but you know, he's the guy who aligns with my policies.
And I get that. I mean, there's a logic to that, I.
Suppose, But I think when you fast forward and you see in twenty twenty four that white evangelicals were a huge force once again in the Republican primary, and I'm sure you saw the same exapoles I did, instrumental in the early voting states and making Trump the presumptive nominee.
I don't get the sense that there.
You know, there have been so many articles written about like, when is the evangelical movement going to move away from Trump?
Is there a fracturing? There's really not.
I think all that's happened is that the people who aren't of that mindset just don't use that label anymore. And that label just means increasingly it means Trump isn't. I don't think it's what a lot of people would like it to mean, but it does increasingly have that association. Do they like the deal that they got? I think by and large yes. I mean, the reality is that Trump made promises. Trump needed a voting block, he needed a base. Evangelicals needed someone to carry forward their agenda. It was kind of a match. I don't want to say made in heaven.
No, but I get it.
I get what you're saying that it was as much they are doing as it was his.
Yeah, and you know, he crafted his messaging to them, He courted evangelical leaders, and he made promises, which many of which he kept to evangelicals. Right, he was instrumental in the overturning of Roe Vade. So I think they're by and large very happy with that. And again, I think that's reflected in the in the exit polling we've seen so far this year.
Yeah, I mean, who knows, but yes, they definitely are an exit polls I do think are way more accurate than regular polls.
But I do think that's a really good point.
And I always sort of think of evangelicals as having a little less agency, But what you're saying makes a lot of sense.
And look, I mean they want right. I mean, a.
Very small group of the country decided that they got real overturned and now they control the Supreme Court.
So that is kind of amazing.
And what I try to show in my book is that it's it shouldn't really be a surprise. This was part of a longstanding effort to build a political coalition around these issues, and Trump was sort of the vehicle for it, and I think continues to be. But to write, evangelicals are a shrinking minority of the country, and you know, one of the things that Polster, Robbie Jones and others have argued really well is the idea that that those two ideas are correlated. That the fact that white evangelicals see their cultural power on the decline as their numbers decline. And I've been seeing that for decades, but it's very precipitous today. That in part explains the alliance with Trump, because you know, Trump talked about when he said make America great again, in some ways that sounded like things that evangelicals were hearing from their pastors, this idea that you know, the country was once great and is now in moral decline as it becomes more secularized and more diverse and more progressive. And so I think in many ways he was speaking, though he did it in a way that maybe evangelicals wouldn't have chosen, he was nonetheless speaking to something that they felt right.
That's such an interesting point as you look towards this election, what do you think the lesson that can take from Trump's relationship with the evangelicals.
I mean, do you think that they.
Are as energized to vote for him as they were before? Do you think that having gotten what they wanted now means they're less committed? Do you think they feel they owe him for this? I mean, do you think they're loyal? I mean, what's your sense of this voting block which is really his base, and they really do at this point control a lot of the legislature that we're legislating that Republicans are doing.
It seems like the sort of Christian, nationalist minded portion of the evangelical movement, which I don't think is everybody, but they seem to feel in and empowered. I'm seeing more and more rhetoric around people openly saying, yes, this should be a Christian nation. Yes, Christianity is right, so let's let's make laws based on it, rather than, you know, a commitment yeah, rather than a commitment to pluralism.
I don't think that's everyone, though.
I mean I talked to some pastors in Iowa when I was there covering the caucuses, you know, one of whom was really concerned about what he described as kind of a messianic language around Trump, and he said, you know, the people talk about Trump like he's a chosen one. And this was a conservative guy, conservative Christian pastor, but he just said, you know, I don't like hearing that kind of language applied to a political leader.
And another pastor I talked to, who's also a state.
Lawmaker there, talked about, you know, the idea that we have to have a commitment to pluralism. People have to choose religious ideas for themselves and it can't be imposed through the government. That can get really dangerous for everybody really fast. Right when you start saying my religion is right and I'm going to use the government to implement it, Well, all you have to do is get on the wrong side of that, and it gets nasty really quickly, which history teaches us, and which are Founding fathers, for all of their imperfections recognized when they set up this country with freedom of religion. So I don't think that all evangelicals want that, but I think there is sort of a growing extremism on the right wing, and a lot of it has religious I don't even want to say undertones.
A lot of it is pretty explicitly religious.
Yeah, there definitely was a thinking that when these people got what they wanted, they wouldn't be so embold in. But in fact they're ten times more embold than.
It's hard to say for sure, I mean, look at what happened with IVF right in Alabama. There are certainly many people who oppose abortion who believe quite literally that life begins at conception, that embryos have moral significance. At the same time, most Republicans don't support banning IVF, and people I've talked to some of them have kind of complicated feelings about the morality of all of that, but they generally want people to be able to get in vitro fertilization. But there is a segment of the Christian right, and that this exists within evangelicalism and catholosis. I should say that does see IVF at least the disposal of embryos is morally equivalent.
To and don't want it now. I think it's a small percentage.
But the problem is the legislation they do is so poorly written that even in a state like Alabama, which then wrote legislation to protect IVF, they still ultimately all of this is written with this idea of embryonic person.
Huh.
And it's a real problem for Republicans politically, and it's also seems to be a challenge legislatively because, as you said, once you start legislating around some of these issues, it gets really messy, really fast. And I don't think that the majority even of Republicans want to ban IVF, but as we have seen, a small minority, because of the way our system is set up, can sometimes gain power and achieve more than you would expect.
Yeah, and that's what we're living through right now. Sarah, Thank you so much, so interesting.
Thank you so much for having me.
Were no spone.
Rick Wilson, My moment of fuckery involves the incredible inability of the mainstream media to fucking cover the vice president. Okay, she went to Planned Parenthood in Minnesota on Thursday. It was the first time that a president or vice president has ever gone to a clinic that performs abortions. What I think is meaningful is that a Planned Parenthood is a huge network of clinics right that does everything from STI care to pre cancer screenings for some people.
It's a primary care place. It's really important.
I think to take a moment to compare them to like pregnancy crisis centers that religious organizations prop up to try to trick women.
The ones that the Cate of Florida pays thirty million dollars a year.
Two Right, the ones that where you go for a pregnancy test and they tell you you need Jesus.
This is the opposite of that. Right.
You go in there and they say, let's scan you for STDs and let's check you for get a papshmir so we can make sure you don't have cervical cancer.
This is the opposite.
Right, This is like doctors treating women for health problems. And again, like what we see again and again is that abortion is healthcare. Right, tell the woman who has been sent to sit in her car to bleed out her miscarriage that abortion isn't healthcare. So we have the highest elected woman, black, white, or you know, of any race or ethnicity, she is going to an abortion clinic and healthcare clinic. To highlight the Republican war on choice. And and by the way, in Iowa, they're shopping another embryonic personhood bill. So the legislation these Republican legislators are not stopping right. They are going to make IVF completely impossible, legally impossible, because if you kill a frozen embryo, you are a murderer. And here we have this really good historic vice president going to highlight it and it gets very little coverage. And that is my fucking moment of fuckery.
You know what, Molly, that is a pretty damn good moment of fuckery. The moment of fuckery for me this week is one of the secret sugar daddies of the right. It's a guy named woe Win Yee. This guy is a Chinese billionaire who has spent years and years now shoveling tens of millions of dollars into the law of every eager little bird in the right wing Steve Bannon, Jason Miller, Getter, all these scams, all these people that are out there in the right wing media space are dependent on the largesse not of the Koch brothers, but of a Chinese billionaire.
Because there's only one Coke brother. Now it's Coke.
Well, that's true, I know, rip all that, but this guy is the sugar daddy's It was his yacht on which Steve Bannon was arrested right, this is a guy who is a figure in American political wife without you knowing it. And if your podcast or my podcast was being underwritten by a Chinese billionaire, what do you think the reaction would be on Fox? What do you think the reaction would be in the Wall Street Journal? What do you think the reaction would be across the whole maga social media world? And this guy has funded all of these weird ass epic times hype epoch epoch excuse me, epic epocha. It's not apic, it's epic bullshit. But he's just somebody nobody knows, and he's declared bankruptcy now. And this entire Rosetta Stone of all these things he's done inside the Republican universe is coming to fruition, and God bless people who want to use their money for things. But as usual with the Republicans, it's the weird hypocritical nature of the thing. Where you got Steve Bannon out screaming about influence from foreign powers on American elections, and yet here he is taking money from a guy who is a turns out to be kind of a weird pyramid skene grifter. But b also turns out to be the sugar daddy of some of the craziest right wing crap that's out here.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.
