Fast Politics with Molly Jong-FastDemocratic strategist Tim Hogan explains his strategy to have Democratic billionaires buy TV stations to combat the right-wing media takeover. Professor Bradley Onishi tells us about his new book, Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—and What Comes Next.
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. We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean we don't have an excellent show for you today. Skidmore College Assistant professor Bradley Onishi tells us about his new book, Preparing for War, the extremist history of White Christian Nationalism and what comes next. But first we have democratic strategist Tim Hogan, who tells us about his strategy to have democratic billionaires by TV stations to combat the right wing media takeover. Welcome Tim Hogan to Fast Politics.
Thank you, it's good to be here.
So I want to talk to you about your super interesting idea.
Yeah. So we put together, over the last few months a look at the trends in media production, consumption, the ownership landscape, without really doing like a full analysis of every media trend because that would be impossible to do in eighty pages, we put together. And interestingly enough, while we're putting that together, BuzzFeed folded. But BuzzFeed News folded Vice felt for bankruptcy. They were layoffs. I've met a Twitter, NBR, ESPN, The watching Spotify Box, I mean, name like any media company, and you're seeing these rolling layoffs, and then we're continuing to see a gutting of local newspapers year over year, plummeting in circulation advertising revenue. And so it's a really meaty question of what's happening in the media space. And we don't presume to have all of the answers, but we wanted to take stock of what was happening give some directional recommendations because we initially thought, well, let's look for this document. Where does this document exist? There's this big conversation happening, but we couldn't find it.
Oh, so you decided to create it.
And so we decided to create it ourselves.
Yes.
So you know, Margaret's Alivan and from the Washington Post is like my she's not the Washington posting were now she said Guardian, but she is my mentor, and she's constantly having this conversation about what happens when you don't have local news. So I mean, were you able to sort of see what the consequences of that were.
Yeah, you see, in a lot of different markets, people are just not informed about what's happening, and there are a lot of downstream effects of that, whether that is people not voting, or an increase in corruption in local offices, or just people not being informed about what their representatives, to take a political view of it, are doing. You know, I came to this rapport from the perspective of someone who has worked at a media company, the BCPTA twenty Am in Chicago. It's an am radio station. We launched a digital newsroom. We watch what people are doing in state houses and what they're saying and what legislation they're passing. And it's stunning to watch some of this regionally in the Midwest and realize that there are no local news outlets that are able to cover what's happening, simply because they don't have the resources. So we have a debate in Wisconsin, for example, last week over access to birth control, and you've got a Republican taken in the floor saying that birth control makes women feel superior to nature, it deductive system at least proliferation of STDC Jesus, I haven't even seen that, yeah, exactly, And I'm like, is anybody else watching this? And frequently the answer is no. And so you know, from that perspective, it is just a lack of information about who's representing you, what's happening in your government.
Yeah, I mean that's crazy.
You know, it's funny because I've seen little bits of the people who took away choice trying to get involved with taking away birth control. So none of this should surprise, but it still kind of does.
Right, it's people like that. But it's also you know, we monitored a candidate in Michigan, mad Daperno, as a Republican candidate there. He's running for attorney general. He compared Plan Beat a fentanyel. We caught that We saw Georgia Governor Brian Kemp say he was open to signing legislation that would restrict access to contraception. So it's it's these little bits of information that I think paint a clearer picture sometimes of who's representing you that get missed if you don't have the resources to do it right.
It's such an interesting sort of quandary that we find ourselves in here with this. So, I mean, it's funny because it's like, I feel like one of the worst examples of it is like watching these tech bros. Right, So, like Twitter is now dominated by people like David Zax and he's a tech bro. I mean I could explain who he is, but who cares?
And Elon Mush and these people, and you see in real time, like these people do not read The New York Times like they must not, so they come up with these things. You know, David Sax was furious that there were troops in Ukraine, right, I mean, there are not supposed to be any troops in Ukraine. And this whole time, Biden has made a real point of We're not sending a single troop to Ukraine. So you know, maybe they're American contractors, maybe there are Americans, but there aren't troops. And there's so much disinformation with this crew that are all like Ivy League graduates, who are you know, at least with some things known to be quite adapt.
That is an example of what we found too, is that there is this explosion of options for consumers and you don't have an editorial staff outside of community notes, you know, right right, I'm not who is that. I don't even know. You've seen as a result that people just go to where they're comfortable, versus when you used to have a local newspaper or local TV station was your main way of getting the news. Now you need to have a little bit more of a motivated consumer if you really want to seek out accurate information. And so I think the question is, as a lot of these standard newspapers TV stations have struggled with a shift to digital distribution, people are going out elsewhere. How do we adapt to that type of information ecosystem. And one of the recommendations that we make in the report is that we do shift to looking more at investment in creators because they carry a certain level of credibility and they are where people are going to get their news. So what derivative content, for example, do they create from a bombshell news report. Not everyone's going to go to pro Publica right and read the intricacies of their coverage of Alito or Thomas or really good study they did in the trucking industry. So how do you get people who are already have an audience involved in helping distribute that type of content?
Is it just me or does it seem like there is a real movement from like the trusted brand of the New York Times to the trusted brand of the actual journalist.
I think that's right.
I feel like The New York.
Times a bad example because that is like the gold standard. But like if you think of the trusted brand of like Vice, which we love but has gone now rip to the trusted brand of like Jim Acosta.
Yes, and but I think that's a good like The New York Times is a very good example there because I think they as an institution are grappling with this question even more because yes, the trend is toward individuals as the brand and the trusted voice. But you do have these big institutions that weathered a lot of changes, right, But the New York Times, like the Washington Post, who did create a smart revenue model and Ben Smith writes about this in Traffic for Themselves, you know, in twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, based on subscription and not necessarily just traffic and ad revenue generated that way, so they were able to weather some of it. But the larger trend is still towards individuals. And you see someone like Ben Smith at Semaphore. He was just talking it can about how he, you know, wants to give his journalists the ability to follow things that they're curious about and build an audience that is attached to them, not necessarily to Semaphore, but Semophore is their home. And I think that's a large trend that we're seeing too.
It's so interesting because it's like, I mean, I think of my own career, right, I popped around, you know, I started at The Daily Beast, and then I went to Vogue and now I'm at Anti Fair.
So I've seen, you know, firsthand that.
Like it's interesting because it's like I almost wonder, like I come from the nineteen nineties. So in the nineties, the platform was a much bigger deal than the creator, right, and so if you had a piece in Vogue or you had a piece in the New York Times, you know, that was sort of it.
And now that's really different. I mean, it really is. Explain to me what you guys are talking about with this idea.
Of buying a.
TV local news station.
Yeah, well, I feel like that was the ghost of BuzzFeed showing up at Themophore and said, we need to really click baby headline it is. You know, we do talk about local TV in the report, and what we see that's interesting about it is that unlike newspapers, which truly have been in free fall, local broadcast TV, at least so far, has proven relatively impervious to you know, declines and employment and revenue and news production volume. And they also hit that spot of trust because we frequently see people less trusting of national institutions, national brands, but more trusting of their local for a variety of reasons. I mean, like I can name the news anchors that I grew up with in the suburb of Minneapolis. I think that is part of it. And part of it too is that they see their community reflected back to them, and we haven't really seen a huge change in local television formats right think about what it was a decade ago, two decades ago, three decades ago. It feels kind of the same. And part of that too is that they've been able to be stable with the revenue that they've brought in. They rely cyclically on political ads, that's a constant, and we're seeing record spending that's helping them keep afloat. And they're also making some money from these retransmission fees from some of their content. So that is a place that I think is underappreciated. I think we light our hair on fire when thinking about local news focused on newspapers because there's been such a decline there. But we should be looking at television too, because it's been relatively stable, very surprisingly.
Yeah, I mean I feel like a lot of this sort of came up when we saw Sinclair come into town.
Yep, go on, you talk to me about that.
From the you know, I want to say, like twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, you started to see people paying attention to them doing must runs right where you see the same talking points echoed by that video.
Is amazing, Wow, amazing. Right, So this is we're talking about a video that sint Clair.
They came up, by the way, recently was brought back to the forefront by one Elon Musk, who was criticizing it for that it was group think, but it was actually this conservative station called Sinclair had these must reads and every news anchor, no matter what if it was, you know, Michigan or Wisconsin or Florida, had these same must reads and they said the exact same thing the exact same way at the exact same time.
Right, exactly. Hilarious, like history collapsing in on itself. But yeah, the point being, it is a trusted medium. It's not something that really ever gets looked at in terms of investment. It has a reach, it has audience that relies on it, it has high trust, and it's not a place where we really have looked. But you have seen organizations like Sinclair make investments in local TV and I think, you know, move the need probably in key markets as a result of their coverage.
I think a lot about there's this one state where it's a small New England state, New England. It's a small northeastern state where all of the local newspapers are owned by the same guy. And you know, if a conservative conglomerate AD buys them, that's it, right.
Right, It's a huge problem, and they often do so quilely. There's not a ton of pushback. And I think, you know, one thing that is frustrating sometimes when you think about political spend, and we didn't approach this just as a you know, we're Democrats and this is a political goal. But when you think about political spending and the amount of money that gets dumped into thads ads in the final two weeks of an election, and you know, maybe I'll never get work in Florida, but is it worth you know, dumping fifty million dollars in the in the final sprint for television ads, or should you invest in some actual infrastructure and look at this in a more long term way? And I think pretty clear where I would come down there.
Yeah, yeah, I mean I think that's a really good point. You do see like there's so much money going into politics, especially now that every candidate, or not every candidate, but certainly in the GOP primary, each one of these candidates has a pack, right.
They have their own money, and then they have their pack money. So you really do see that there is.
A place, for sure for some sort of thoughtful spending, right, It's.
True in the political side too. And then part of the report, we also looked at what investment looks like on just digital global digital ad spend, right even even just divorced from politics, and you've got to market where influencer sponsored content in twenty twenty two looked something like, you know, sixteen billion dollars, which sounds like a huge amount of money, but you compare it to the overall global digital ad spend of six hundred billion dollars, and it just seems like there's a bunch of efficiency there that should be should be looked at and uncovered, and I think that is one of the lessons we learned too, is where is capital going and is it being effectively spent? And then there are also questions embedded there of us for us for media models of you know what do these types of entities even look like?
Right?
Are they nonprofit newsrooms where I think we've seen an awakening of a lot of local coverage through those vehicles. Are they for profits that are our low profit you know, you no longer looking at a news or media outlet says something that you need to draw a large value from. Or are they like journalists driven or influencer driven to mediums like substack, you know that are sort of empowering journalists in a way where you can build a really loyal audience, sustain yourself. And they have some tools like you know, a substack defender, which is a legal legal shields or you know, legal access if you ever get in trouble, you know, for some of your reporting. So I think that's a big that's a big part of this report too.
Can people find this report?
Yes? How we have a really self descriptive website and it's at Media Landscape report dot org. And nobody had taken it. So we took and that's where this lives.
Yes, it is, like, I think, a really important thing to be thinking about and to be thinking about how people can get like just legitimate information that's real. Facebook and Twitter, I mean Twitter now whatever.
I think we give up on Twitter at this point.
But Facebook had this opportunity to really like they had killed local news and they could have really come in and replaced it with like actual quality news, but instead they decided not to.
Yeah, it was you know, a companied of maybe a year or so spaced apart to the metaverse, which is like a cartoon video game. Guess that is our future, right, that's the social value we're getting there, which is bobbing. But and it's also you know, for Googles, for Facebook, for other platforms you're seeing for example in Canada, Australia. California is considering legislation that would in some ways reimburse publishers for content that gets shared. But you know, I don't know, and it's a little bit out of the purview of this whether or not that's a solution for funding local journalism. It feels like the genius is out of the bottle there, and you've also got these platforms, and this is a pressure that we heard from a lot of folks who are individuals publishing their own content. They're just at the whims of these platforms, right, Like, in the world in which you are a writer, editor, and distributor of your own content, Google can change something in their algorithm and your entire model can be upended and they won't even tell you about it. I mean, Facebook, same thing, Twitter, same thing. What do the blue checks even mean anymore? It's a little bit of like a Wild West situation. And I do think part of the reason that individuals have shifted back towards email is that that feels a little bit more under control. Right, I am emailing you via substag, via ghost via medium work. You can subsproud and support me if you.
Like, right, and that you feel like there's more object permanence to email.
Right exactly.
Oh that's really really interesting. Thank you so much, Tim. I hope you'll come back.
Yeah, absolutely, this was great. Thanks for having me.
Bradley Bonishi is an assistant professor of religion at Skidmore College and the author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian nationalism and what comes next?
Welcome to Fast Politics, Bradley.
Thanks for having me, so talk to me about your book.
Sure Preparing for War is I look at the history of white Christian nationalism basically start with the Goldwater Campaign nineteen sixty four and we end with January sixth. Then what comes next? And you know, for me, it's it's pretty personal. I converted to a church that was a white Christian nationalist church when I was fourteen.
I became a minister at twenty.
So when I watched January sixth, I thought maybe I could have been there, and that scared me.
So as a scholar religion, I wanted to lay out the.
Kind of history that led us to that point and show that, Yeah, it was definitely an aberration. It was definitely singular in American history, but there was a lot of signs throughout the last decades that that's where we might be heading as a nation.
How did you change your course?
Yeah, So when I was twenty, I was a full time minister.
I was married, I was in charge of like a couple hundred kids in a youth ministry at a megachurch.
You know, I just began reading and reading and reading.
I you know, heard all the time that if you if you let your brain, it'll lead your heart away from God. And I don't know if that's true, but I definitely had a more expansive understanding of the world. After investigating history and philosophy and theology, I went to Oxford to get a degree, and that obviously changed everything for me. So I began to realize that the faith I'd been brought into was more about a conservative political agenda and a certain myth of the United States than you know, something about a timeless faith.
And that's when things really really changed.
Was there one specific thing that did it? A book?
There was a lot of moments, but you know, one moment was really the John Carey George W. Bush election. I was convinced I was going to vote for John Carey, and I told all my elders at church, you know, look, I just think this is somebody who has a vision for the country that's just more in line with what Jesus teaches. And they said, hey, great, that sounds wonderful for you. But he is pro choice, and if you vote for someone like that, you and along with everyone else, will be responsible for the murder of millions of unborn babies. So if you want that on your conscience, then go ahead. Otherwise I would think about it a little harder. And you know, for me, that was a moment, a watershed moment, because I realized that we'd reduced some of the most complex issues of our public square, the human condition, to either or this or that. There was no nuance, there was no detail, there was no compassion, And after that whole, you know, set of events, I was really on a different path.
It's so interesting because I constantly have this argument conway about abortion, and you know, I wonder how much of it is like nurture in a way it is.
I mean, I think the trick is convincing people, as I was at one time, that life begins a conception, and that that is a fact that has been not only scientifically proven, but has been taught by the Christian Church for two thousand years. And as long as people buy that simple piece of teaching or propaganda, however we want to frame it, it's really hard to get them back from the brink because anything you say is simply, in their ears, a pro murder agenda. And that is the tragic effectiveness of that approach.
Yeah's unbelievable.
Talk to me about Goldwater, because I want to talk about Goldwater. You know, there's this chicken of the egg thing with trump Ism, like was it Trump?
Was it Nixon? Was it Goldwater?
Where did Republicans start to go wildly off the rails? Though there's an argument to be made that they were always off the rails, but yes.
Go on for sure.
And I think for me Goldwater was a nice place to start because Goldwater really appears on the scene after two decades of either a Democratic president or Dwight eis At Howard, who's famous for his Middle Way. Hey, you know, Goldwater shows up and says, look, we want it our way and we won't compromise. And you know, he's just this magnetic force. He's got a big baritone voice and a square jaw, and he's you know, supposedly a cowboy senator, and he's willing just to say bombastic and outrageous things. You know, we're gonna use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. There's no way I'm going to sign legislation for civil rights and so on. And when he accepts the nomination, you know, the most famous line in San Francisco at the GOB Convention is extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And he's basically setting the stage for the next six decades by saying, Look, we're in the midst of a decade here in the sixties, or in the midst of a time of what feels like change. If you're gonna keep your country, if you're gonna get your country back, extremism is your approach. And you know, he got destroyed in his race against Lynnon Johnson, but the foot soldiers of that campaign never forgot those lessons. You know, Paul Wirick was like a twenty one year old kid at that point, and he goes on to found the Council for National Policy, the Heritage Foundation and ALEC. So Goldwater's really for me this moment of Hey, white Christian men, if you want your country, extremism is the way to do it. And you know, there's a line from there that kind of brings us into the present from Goldwater.
Just give me a little bit trace it, keep going.
Yeah, for sure, I'm from southern California and Goldwater is a place where he gets just a ton of support from that part of the country. But you know, Goldwater sets the stage for a Republican party that embraces extremism, that sees moderation as something to be avoided as a vice. And he sort of inspires a whole generation of a Republican party that understands something. And this is where Wyrick and his cohorts and the Council for National Policy really were genius. If they can combine what is an essence, a right wing libertarian agenda, with the voting power of millions of white conservative Christians, then they can occupy the GOP and eventually occupy the country.
And that's what they do.
And so if we go from Goldwater all the way fifteen years later to the Carter Reagan election, we see another foreshadowing of Trump. Jimmy Carter is like built in a lab. If you're a white Christian, you know he's your guy.
He's a Southern.
Baptist by birds right, Yeah, your rural Georgia peanut farmer, Mary's his high school sweetheart, goes into the Milletary. I mean, what else do you want from this man? If you're a white Christian to vote for him? And yet who do they vote for? They vote for the divorce Hollywood actor who at one point was pretty good, you know, into abortion as the governor of California.
Right, he was the guy.
Who ended no fault divorces, which is one of the most progressive legislations.
Weirdly, right, it's wild. It's absolutely wild to think of, you know, Reagan as the golden child of the religious right and the Council for National Policy and everyone we're talking about. But they chose power over piety, right. You know, so when you go from Goldwater to that and you start looking at Trump, you're like, wow, I see a lot of Goldwater and a lot of Reagan in this man who eventually becomes worse than all of them. But it's no accident, you know, it's not like there was no historical precedent for this.
Right. So interesting, I mean, it's funny because it's like you really.
Do see that the difference between Reagan and Carter, right, the guy who's so right, and then the difference between Trump and Biden, right, Biden, who like was the poorest senator, it speaks to really, you know, the sort of hypocrisy of the Republican Party.
It's repeating itself in the sense that you know, Biden. And I know everyone's going to have their different views on this, whether good or bad. But Biden's like one of the most religious presidents. I mean, the man goes the Mass numerous times per week.
You know, he is very inter religion.
Yeah, and then you know Josh Holly and the folks are saying if if you bring up God on the left, they laugh at you. And it's like, and again, I I'm not here to debate whether it's good or bad. Biden's so religious. I'm just here to say it's the same thing playing out of again for sure.
Yeah, as someone who is not religious, who grew up not religious. My family Jewish, atheist, communists. But you do really see that Biden is quite religious. I mean it speaks to this idea. And again I don't love this, but it is it's worth mentioning. Is that there was always you know, this anxiety I think underlying anxiety that Trump was actually I mean, he's obviously not. I mean, if you think about who has probably had more experience in our lives with abortion, Trump or Biden. So you got out, you became an academic, Tell me a little bit more about your story.
Sure, I'd become somebody who studies religion from a historical perspective, from a sociological perspective, and during the Trump years, I wanted to kind of find a way to help people decode how all this happened from a religious perspective. And so we started our show Straight Wide American Jesus. And we don't think Jesus was straight white or American, but we want to know why so many people do and why they see the image of Jesus and Trump and what we offer. And I think for me, this is what I I'm always sort of telling folks is I've lived this. I've been on the inside, and I can help you understand that. And I've now spent twenty years studying it from the outside, and so we can give the long historical view, we can also give the insider view. And so yeah, I spent the last five years basically every waking hour analyzing their every corner of the religious bride and Christian nationalism in a country and basically trying to warn folks about what I take to be a proto fascist movement.
What is the single sort of scariest thing that you think when you think of this proto fascist.
Movement Democracy is not a sacred value to this group. Democracy is not the goal, the goal's power. The goal is to have dominion over the United States, and if democracy needs to be done away with in order for that to happen, they're completely fine with that. And I can show you the evidence. I mean, democracy is a problem, not a solution for many of the folks that I that I'm talking about, and that's overwhelmingly scary. And the tentacles of that position just sort of go every where in terms of dehumanizing migrants, dehumanizing trans folks, in terms of being willing to follow an authoritarian leader, being willing to write a rough shot over democratic norms and processes. So if democracy is a problem and not a solution for you, then it's really hard to have a public square that is healthy or safe at all. And I think for me that's what it comes down to.
So interesting, Bradley, I hope you.
Will come back, of course, anytime.
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.
