When reading Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, it was a little uncomfortable, it hit close to home. After listening to a podcast and reading an Axios data article, it is clear that this is not going to disappear on its own.
Notes from the book:
- Pastors can't endorse politicians while keeping tax exemptions
- From the Introduction: During the Trump campaign, many pastors were surprised to find that they wielded little influence over people in the pews. What they didn't realize was they were up against a more powerful system of authority - an evengelical popular culture
- Chapter 1 starts with the masculinity of Teddy Roosevelt, continuing with Billy Sunday, then Billy Graham
- Nixon vs McGovern in '72 - McGovern booed at Wheaton college
- Evangelicals took a hard turn towards supporting violence with the Vietnam war
- Chapter 2 - Marabel Morgan's Total Woman => Anita Bryant (Bless this House) => anti-gay activism, this also explains Christian book distribution
- Another author and politician mentioned is Phyllis Schlafly, as a Catholic she was against abortion, even when evangelicals were not (to quote: as late as 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution urging states to expand access to abortion)
- Chapter 4 introduces Bill Gothard and Rousas John Rushdoony, who pushed the theory that the US was a Christian nation. Describing Rushdoony: In his view, slavery had been voluntary, and beneficial to slaves. Interesting that this book was published in 2020, before the Florida slavery reeducation issue
- Going on a theme of discipline, Dr James Dobson is introduced. He dropped out of the American Psychological Association in 1973 after they removed homosexuality from the mental disorder list.
- Chapter 5
- Tim LaHaye wrote Left Behind, his wife was connected to the DeVos/Amway family
- LaHaye's next book The Act of Marriage focused on individual actions, and was quite patriarchal (wives are responsible for satisfying their husbands' libido)
- LaHaye worked to split Christian's from rest, promoting distrust in secular media. Pushed ideas of Rushdoony
- Jerry Falwell is introduced as the Baptist torch bearer of Schafly, Dobson, and LaHaye. He started as apolitical in the late 60s to leading the moral majority a decade later. There is a podcast about Falwell and Liberty University that is related to modern times
- Chapter 6 digs into Reagan
- Evangelicals (particularly Baptist) claimed credit as "The people who put Jimmy in, put Jimmy out" (referencing Jimmy Carter), overall they didn't impact the vote as much as inflation and the Iran hostage crisis
- While Reagan gave very few domestic victories, he was popular for his foreign policies
- The chapter ends with details of how the evangelical network was supporting Reagan push military intervention in Nicaragua, and the crimes Oliver North was found guilty of (lying to Congress, destroying federal documents)
- Oliver North may have been a hero on the right due is cavalier attitude, but he had excellent timing (multiple sex scandles such as the Baker and Swaggart)
- James Dobson also had a lucrative deal selling a Where's Dad video to the US Army
- At the half-way point in this book, Fox News has its first mention, focusing on how Evangelicals were attacking the Clintons, as was the conservative network. Neither Limbaugh nor O'Reilly made their name as Christian broadcasters, but many conservative evangelicals were attracted to their masculine brand ... Within two decades, the influence of Fox News on conservative evangelicalism would be so profound that journalists and scholars alike would find it difficult to separate the two.
- Homeschooling is largely driven by evangelicals, it wasn't legal in the US 40 years ago - Laura Meckler's Homeschool Nation
- Mixed-Martial Arts and evangelicals - GodMen, Xtreme Ministries
- The author mentions her experience with "ex-Muslim terrorists", Caner example - Liberty University continues to support these narratives long after they are debunked
- Trump gave a commencement speech at Liberty University in 2012, and another speech before the 2016 election
One topic that is interwoven through the book is evangelical failures/losses - many of these could be missed by secular culture:
- Women allowed to serve in combat roles in the military in 1996
- Loss of sexual purity culture - as early as 1981, President Reagan began directing government funding to abstinence-only sex education, in this funding continue through the 1990s
- Many sexual scandals in the church, including Ted Haggard while he was head of the National Association of Evangelicals
- While many people are perplexed by Trump's support for autocrats, in 2014, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association's Decision magazine featured Putin on its cover
I recently read The Persuaders by Anand Giridharadas
- Prologue - the IRA Russian disinformation campaign in 2016 was intended to divide Americans, to make each side look irredeemable to the other
- 1st chapter starts with a story about Linda Sarsour, related to identity - she pushed to have Bernice King's blessing on naming a women's march in Washington
- Chapter 1 continues with Loretta Ross - key idea is people who agree with you:
- 90% - share your worldview, be careful not to argue over the last 10%
- 75% - these people can work together on common concerns, even if for different reasons
- 50% - likely have shared values but opposite positions
- 25% - outside your bubble - be careful about language
- 0% - bad-faith arguments, fascists. Could also be a contrarian
- identity politics: Combahee River Collective in 1977 (Boston-based black lesbians) - I can compare this to my barber's experience of his father being a professor of Africian literature, he had to teach Hemingway because he was white
- Alicia Garza of Black Lives Matter(BLM) - how to measure progress. Favorite quote: ‘do change language for comprehension, but don't change it merely for comfort'; saw this while changing "black-list" to "deny-list", and "white-list" to "allow-list" in a program
- a definition of racism: a system that ensnares everyone in society, more than individual acts
- Chapter three starts with Bernie Sanders (not me, us) - noted how infrequently he talks about himself
- Chapter 4 - we are not divided, we are disconnected
- dealing with the other side when you win - AOC's response: Not long ago 'Black Lives Matter' was "also" a rallying cry for justice that politicians worried polled too poorly, was too 'divisive' & required 'too much explanation'. Now Mitt Romney is saying it. Progress is progress
- Brand New Congress - push both "vs them" and "us" in this race is about people verses money
- ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) was created in 2003 with the legislation for the Iraq war. Prior to this we had Immigration & Naturalization services which weren't militarized
- shift the Overton window - present an extreme idea to shift discussion towards a less-extreme idea, examples
- AOC mentions a tax rate of 70% for every dollar over $10 million in 2019, for the 2020 democratic debate all candidates support some kind of tax on the wealthy
- Promoting decency when John McCain passed away
- the rebel in collaborative circles is similar to this window shift
- Messaging in chapter 5 - a discussion with Anat Shenker-Osorio
- for a given issue, normal breakdown of supporters is 20% on one side, 20% on the other, and 60% undecided. An example in the book, given a choice between a burger and pizza, 20% would commit to a burger, 20% to pizza, and 60% undecided
- Offering a pizza burger would get 0%
- many of these undecided can be labeled as "good point, but also ... good point" - the burger is hot, but the pizza is from Chicago
- priming has a strong impact on the undecided
- A message people can get behind is the utopia you want to create, not the dystopia you want to prevent
- Shenker-Osorio: sell the brownie, not the recipe
- chapter 6 - in response to the war on terror --Diane Benscoter (former Moonie, expert at extracting cult members): ''tens of thousands of troops cannot stop extremism, it is time we stopped, looking for some vague enemy called "evil" - which we will never find - and start looking for the real cause of extremism and human vulnerability.'' Stopping the people who spread lies may not work as well as inoculating the people who would fall prey to them
- Why presenting facts don't change peoples' minds: To make people feel stupid is to play back to them a version of themselves they don't recognize. But to appeal to them as critical thinkers who deserve to know how they were misled - this has the potential to work
- John Cook - author of "Cranky Uncle vs. Climate Change" - principles of science denial:
- Fake experts
- Logical fallacies
- Impossible expectations
- Cherry picking
- Conspiracy theories
reading Battling the Big Lie by Dan Pfeiffer
- pg 58 - Reagan abolishing the FCC fairness doctrine in ‘87, a reference is confirmed in Reagan's library - makes one wonder if it wouldn't have been vetoed, would it have stopped Alex Jones from attacking the Sandy Hook victims
- pg 67 - Trump: he is more likely to fire you than fight for you
- pg 79 - in the section of Bannon's "flood the media", the first Trump impeachment was caused by his threat of losing the military assistance necessary to ward off a Russian invasion - since the book was published in 2022-June, it seemed like there was fast work to update this section, curious what they use for that
- pg 86 - references Kate Steinle on MM - interesting how the name changes to Katie Steinle, depending on who references it
- pg 96 - LOOK UP Chris Lehane 332 page memo on conservative media from the 90s
- pg 101 _Similar to Trumping Democracy this links Trump to the Mercer family
- pg 121 - when discussing Roger Ailes early work on the Vietnam War: ''The goal was convincing people to watch "news" produced by Nixon aides without being able to differentiate it from "traditional news"
- pg 149 - Why Sinclair is a bigger threat than Fox News
- pg 238 - political communications is not public relations
- pg 254 - major media outlets are increasingly owned by the world's largest corporations and wealthiest individuals creates a conflict of interest... - recent news shows the same
- Action items:
- don't feed the trolls, screen shot instead
- be funny
- look for persuade-able
- Pg264 - how to rebuild media trust - one easy step to increase transparency is the reinstatement of the ombudsman and public editor roles. Example media companies:
Similar to Trumping Democracy, the Mueller report is focusing on the facts. While I haven't read all 448 pages of the original, Mueller's summary 1 and 2 provide the high-level details. Several things were surprising to me:
- The report explicitly says: we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of "collusion." - The no collusion tweets are irrelevant.
- Russia's Internet Research Agency (IRA) sent agents to the US as early as 2014, their:
- Posted misinformation to divide US citizens where divisions existed
- Organized rallies, sometimes planning for opposing groups for the same time and place to create chaos.
- Trump Tower Moscow was papers were signed in 2015.
- Russia wanted control of Eastern Ukraine and worked with Paul Manafort, a cyber security firm confirmed Russian hackers accessed the DNC's opposition research. The summary has the interesting line: "Manafort had caused internal polling data to be shared".
- Meetings continued after the election - Erik Prince and Michael Flynn.
- Besides the list of Trump's campaign staff who have lied to Congress, the summary lists that some of their leads invoked the 5th, deleted relevant communications was also common.
- The obstruction of justice summary list two cases where Trump's request are not done to minimize damage (not firing Comey or Sessions), however that is still obstruction.
- There is also a magazine version which goes through the history and provides a more human view of the victims.
Another interesting source is https://www.lawfareblog.com/. Politico's view of Mueller's hearing was quite positive.
Recently I watched Edward Bailey's Trumping Democracy. It was a "just the facts" report of the 2016 election, with practically no speculation. For example the statement: "First recorded payment to Cambridge analytical on July 29" is based on the public campaign documents, there is no hint of "the first recorded payment ...". The movie focuses on how Robert Mercer went from supporting Ted Cruz to Trump, and how he populated his cabinet. Due to the fact that this was released in 2017, there is little to no mention to the Russian investigation or Trump's behavior, example of why this may not be relevant