January 17, 2024 • 42 mins
In part 1 of our series on The Daily Wire, Mia and James go back to the origins of neoliberalism to understand what makes The Daily Wire different than the Christian right before it.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome to Day It Happened Here, a podcast about I
don't know, this is coming out like Tuesday, right, maybe Wednesday.
You probably know what this podcast is about. If you don't,
it's about things falling apart putting it back together again.
I'm your host Mia Wong.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
With me is James Hi Mayh and I'm very excited
to to lend some stuff. I'm sure to be great.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Nothing, well, okay, the good news that the first guy
we're talking about died. That's that's the only good news. Great, great,
more good news. But we're doing some episodes about the
Daily Wire. You're gonna get a lot more actual stuff
about the Daily Wire in the next two episodes. This
is the this is the preliminary background information episode. But
(00:52):
you know, for people who aren't familiar with the Daily Wire,
the Daily Wire is a very large and very powerful
right wing media empire. You know, Ben Shapiro's people, Matt
Walsh is there, and they are They've become increasingly powerful
because of their ability to drive the actions and sort
of like not even really mid level, like high mid
(01:16):
high level like Republican officials, particularly at a state level,
towards you know, horrific anti trans policies stuff like that. Yep,
they've had this incredible divorced dad power of those two guys.
Like it's like a yeah, it's like a Pokemon situation,
you know, like it just it's inside, it's like shaken ball,
(01:39):
but sometimes they let it out and control their Republican
body with it. Yeah, and so okay, you know. But
in order to really sort of understand who these people
are and why they're able to sort of be like this,
we need to talk about the ways that this is new,
because you know, there's always been of writing, like Christian
(02:01):
media figures who do terrible stuff, but the way the
daily wire works is different than this stuff has worked
in the past. And in order to understand what is
different about this than these sort of like previous eras
of like Christian antiqueer violence, we need to talk about neoliberalism.
(02:22):
So this is this is not the normal starting place.
You're talking about the religious right, but if you want
to actually understand what's happening right now, you have to
go back to the origin and structure of neoliberalism so
you can understand how it's shaped. Right when Christian organizing
the last about fifty years. I want to start this
by talking about a guy who is not normally considered
(02:43):
part of the Christian right at all. In fact, he's
not even an American and his greatest influence is on
his home country of Germany. The man I'm talking I
want to talk about is Wilhelm rope Key. I've mentioned
him on this show before, but that was several years ago.
Now he is not a very well known figure, and
that's not good because he is one of the smartest
(03:07):
and one of the most dangerous neoliberals. So in order
to really get a sense of who rope Key is,
we need to talk about the beginnings of neoliberalism.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
So we need to.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Talk about Hyak and his sort of attempt to recruit
a bunch of new liberals to oppose. While mostly to
oppost communism, it later becomes about also opposing fascism. But
the problem that Hyak has is that so in the
nineteenth this is happening in the nineteen twenties and really
the nineteen thirties. The problem is that the people who
Hayak have been trying to recruit from Germany a dream
(03:38):
the thirties all joined the Nazi Party. So in Many
such cases. Yeah, it's a real issue for them.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Yeah, once again the Libs have let us down. Shocked.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Yeah. So, you know, in the in the nineteen forties
after the war, when Hyak is trying to do this again,
he turns to William rope Key instead of the original
guys who've been Nazis because Ropeke had been out of
the country for the whole Nazi things, so he kind
of had skipped out on it.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Okay, smart move on his front.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Yeah, and you know this this gets him an invite
to like Montpellier, and so the whole sort of the
origins of neoliberalism and rope Key is he's one of
the architects of what's called ordoliberalism. So the Order Liberals
are one of the factions of you know, they're one
(04:29):
of the factions of neoliberalism. What's interesting about the way
We're gonna talk a bit about what they believe. But
what's interesting about the Order Liberals is that they're not
really economists. I mean, some of them are, but it's
a lot of sociologists. And this means that the way
that they think about the world is very different than
the way that like Hayek or you know, like a
(04:50):
like von Mises or like all the you know, the
sort of like mainline like guys who are economists in
the neoliberal movement think the order. Liberal roles believe that
there is a natural capitalist hierarchy in a society that
produces stability. But they also understand that capitalism in general
and neoliberalism, like specifically the thing they're trying to bring about,
(05:13):
adamizes people. You know, it destroys social bonds, It tears
the fabric of communities apart, and it destroys the notion
of any collective self identification, replacing them with sort of
market exchange and empty consumer symbols masquerading as identity. You
know thing for example, the rise of stand culture or
i mean, god like the thing we do, which is
like it's.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Going to say streamers, you know, so that's friends on
your phone.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Yeah. So this is extremely bad, and rope Key realizes
this is a real issue for the success of neoliberalism,
because people don't actually like being completely autonomized market agents
with no real social relations other than wages and contracts.
And you know, if presented with these options, they might,
for example, turn to communism or god forbid, anarchism, yeah,
(06:06):
but Rokey, you know, Rokey is on the side of
bad and.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
The side of bad. Yeah, I think a great title
for the episode side of that me his biography God.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Rokey's conclusion from this is that you can't just rely
on the market passively coming into existence, because if markets
were supposed to passively come into existence, or if they
were you know, like the sort of like spontaneous order
thing that talks about when he's lying, like, if that
was actually true, they would just have there would be
everything would be market economies already. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
(06:52):
It's like no, like we would have had the exact
same economic and political system for the last thirty thousand years,
but we haven't. So in order to do this, you
have to make people into good neoliberal market subjects, and
this requires the intervention of the state. The product of
this is that Roki is one of the architects of
what's called structural policy. These are specific state policy things
(07:14):
that are used to create markets by you know, sometimes
it's it's there's a whole variety of ways that this happens,
but by acting on and transforming like physically people right
like what they do, what they believe, how they congregates,
like what things they're allowed not allowed to do, what
things are incentivized. This, this is structural policy. This is
(07:38):
the origin of what's later going to be called structural
or reform, which is the kind of stuff that the
IMF does to an economy to create markets by taking
food from the mouths of babies and making the babies
work to get the food.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
Yeah, it's great to see any way.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Yeah, and that part of neoliberalism broadly, a lot of
that comes from order liberalism, and it comes from people
like Roki. But rope Key realizes that, you know, there's
a problem of structural policy as an abstract concept, right,
which is that in order for it to work, you
need to a take control of the state, because again
(08:15):
this is a state, but there is a top down
state reform project, right, and be there has to be
something beyond the state to create the kind of subjectivity
you need to instill, you know, to instill in people
to make them behave quote unquote as market agents. Right,
you can't just use the state in the market to
make people behave in the way that they're supposed to,
(08:36):
you know, to be good sort of like workers for
the workers for the Great market. You need something else
is specifically, neoliberalism needs its own form of collectivity. It
needs its own thing that creates social bonds between people.
It needs its own kind of sort of identification to
combat the sort of collective society of the left. Now.
Part of Ropekey's plan, and this is something you share
(08:58):
us with the other order liberals is that they want
to do this with you know, they want to use
the patriarchal family and small businesses as like the sort
of social basis of all of their sort of routing politics.
This is very endurable routing politics stuff they also have. Weirdly,
this is one of the things. It's in the fifties
and sixties. There's a lot of sort of on every
(09:19):
side of the political aisle, like kind of romantic utopianism
ish about like the countryside. You know, this can swing
wildly between like Mao or like the Japanese fascists or
the neoliberals. They have this dream of sort of turning
rural areas into these like bastions of like reaction against
(09:41):
the left, and that did kind of happen in the US,
but it didn't happen like it happened because the rural
economy was completely annihilated and replaced with like a series
of meth labs, not because I guess technically was a
dowddream result. It's just that it didn't it. It wasn't
the sort of idyllic like good like farmer family things
(10:03):
that these people wanted.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
So yeah, yeah, they got there in an interesting way. Yeah,
with like massive agribusiness and meth labs are your two
choices in life?
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Yeah, and like and you know, so like like yes,
they this is one of these things where instead of
achieving their goals through cultural means, they achieve their goals
through like the massive uh like unbelievable economic violence. But
you know, okay, so that's that's the other thing that
that and that's all sort of standard neoliberal theory, right.
But what makes rope Key kind of unique is that
(10:38):
he's really one of the first of these people to
realize that you need another force, and that force is
the church. And this is something that people don't talk
about a lot when they talk about neoliberalism, but a
lot of these people are very very deeply Christian. Here's
Ropeke talking about his ideal society, quote rendering to the king,
(11:00):
what is owed to the king, but also giving to
God what belongs to God?
Speaker 3 (11:05):
So what belongs to God?
Speaker 2 (11:08):
And now one now I'm concerned. I mean he's it's
funny because like he's taken the Bible verse like that
you're taking to the render under Caesar, like what belongs
to Caesar, render under blah blah blah blah blah. But
like it's he's made it enormously more alarming. Yeah, yeah, deeply,
(11:32):
like because like the thing about the render under Caesar
is that that's a statement about about like living under
the Roman Empire, right, right, Like this is just he
just wants you to fucking have a king. Yeah, give
shit to everyone needs to a God who is also
the king.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
Right, It's not even like like the necessity of the
state thing, like you just dump dumped in like a point,
let's hereditary, inbred person to give money to.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Yeah, I mean she's not like I So, okay, I
I should I should probably not slander him as thoroughly
as I'm doing here because I don't actually quite think
he literally becomes a monarchist. But she does believe that
there should be like I don't know, you describe it
like there should be democratic parties, but that like actual
(12:25):
economic policy shouldn't be like managed by them, Like you
need like a super a thing above the democracy, which
is the IMF, to make sure that there's the little
the little democratic people don't like start getting any ideas
about the economy.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Like technocracy like a.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Yeah, yeah, but you don't put but like the thing
with the technocracy and this is this is genuinely kind
of what has been happening in Europe is that like
living under a technocracy really sucks. Yes, like it sucks
like politically, it sucks materially, and it sucks like emotionally.
And you know, the right has been able to make
a lot out of sort of like this opposition to
(13:06):
like the global bureaucracies or whatever, which is like, okay,
like you guys made these things in the first place,
Like I, I, you know, you don't get a fucking
complain about the bureaucracies that you set up and ran,
but you know I haven't stomped him. Yeah, but but
rope key, rope key.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
You know.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
So a lot of the other order liberals become really
sort of like you know, are become obsessed with taking
over the IMF, which they do and they take over
the World Bank and they become you know, they do
that stuff. Rope Key is obsessed with using the using
religion as like another kind of social force that he
can bind the othererberal sort of movement together with. And
(13:41):
so he sets out to form like like a kind
of like reactionary Catholic international to bring neoliberalism to the world.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
That is a troubling concept.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Yeah, so it doesn't work, which is the good news. Well,
and the problem is it doesn't work. It's not that
it doesn't work because it's a bad idea. The reason
that it doesn't work is that he's trying this in
like the fifties and sixties, and it is too early
for that shit. Yea, Like you know, I mean, and
this is something I feel like I should at some
point I should actually do a deep dive into this
(14:14):
on the show. But I've talked about this a couple
of times. There is a very powerful form of kind
of like conservative Christian politics in Europe at this time.
It's like the Christian democracy movements. There's like if every
single country if you look at it like this, from
like the fifties through like the nineties, I mean, and
even to this day. In Germany, for example, like there
was a party called the Christian Democrats yea, and they
(14:36):
win like at least sixty percent of all elections, like
in Italy, they're in power for like forty years. But
the problem with Christian democracy from the perspective of someone
like Roki is that like if you sort of if
you take like these parties, right, these parties are you know,
these are these are the Christian Conservatives of this era.
(14:56):
They are way way too far left for uh, for Roki.
And that's not just a sort of like Rope, Look
got how far right Rope he is, although he is
so like if if you took Elder Moro, who's like
the great Italian Christian democratic statesman, multiple time Prime Minister
of Italy, killed in an insane web of conspiracies, like
(15:18):
if you, yeah, look i'd labor. Like if you took
Elder Morrow and you dropped him into the modern American Congress,
he would be to the He is again the leader,
he's like the leader of Italian Well he's technically from
the central left faction of the Christian Democrats, but he's
like the guy who's not a socialist or a communist,
like in terms of Italian politicians, who's not also a fascist?
(15:40):
And if you took him from like the seventies and
you plopped him into the American Congress, he would be
to the left of AOC, Like AOC is pro ceasefire
in Gaza, right, like she's she's pro ceasefire in Palestine.
Alder Morrow allowed the Popular Threat for the Liberation of Palestine,
which is the Palestinian Communist per mill terry, to operate
(16:01):
out of and carry out attacks like from Italy. Right,
like this guy you would like she is.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
Well, if you go far enough right, you might get
that as well.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
To be fair, no, but but it wouldn't be the PFLP,
though I guess I guess some of the German neo
Nazis kind of liked them. But right, yeah, like like
imagine in the US any politician being like, yeah, the
PFLP could operate out of the US or only our
only our only condition is that we like we're gonna
let you operate, but we're not gonna like protect you
(16:33):
from uh like shim Bette or whatever, like the Masad. Yeah,
like racontact you from the Masade like that. But you
know you can you can do your stuff here? Could
you imagine that shit happening? This guy was a this
guy is a conservative in Europe right in like you know,
so this is what Rope he's responding to, like the
(16:53):
the existing Christian you know, and and and you know,
to some extent, like the Christian the Christian Democrats are
very very successful stopping communism, right, They're really good at it.
They stop communism from taking hold anywhere in Europe. But
they're not like capitalist enough for ROKEI. So when we
(17:15):
come back from this thing ROKEI would have loved, which
is ad transitions, we're going to talk about more of
what Rochi was doing and how it shaped neoliberalism and
the Christian right. Woo yay, we're back. Roki is having
(17:44):
a great time in his grave. We're gonna get the
thing that makes him spin at his grave, which I'm
very excited about.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Accident.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
But okay, so you know, like as we've sort of
been talking about, the Christian Democrats are not the Christian
The Christian Democrats in a lot of countries are Catholic.
Some of them, like I think like there are Protestant
like Christian, but like yeah, but like a lot of
a lot of them are Catholic, So I mean, it's
(18:10):
it's it's a really interesting kind of like predecessor to
like modern fire right politics, where you get these like
both of the US and Latin America, where you get
these sort of like these Catholic Protestant alliances like this
is this is like Matt Walsh. You know, we're gonna
be talking about more in the next two days, Like
is a Catholic theocrat, right, but a lot of his
base are like you know, are like Baptists and like
(18:32):
the more even more feral charismatic Christians and like you know,
but but you know, but these these groups are able
to sort of work together, but they're not able. They're
not working together way that Rokey wants. So and this
is the thing that I think is very very scary
about rop Key, and and especially about the people who
(18:52):
took this model right, whether explicitly or implicitly, people who
people who figure out the same because a lot of people,
some people like kind of directly to go for Roki,
some people discover it through like I very weird readings
right wing readings of gramscy Uh, it's a whole thing.
I'll talk yeah one day I'm gonna get Eve on
(19:14):
the show and we're going to talk about that, because
it's fucking wild.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
What the Yeah wow, I think that Gramscy is not
the most like inaccessible you know, like it. You know,
there there are some like left theorists who just just
vomit words so much so you can just project a
meaning on z them, But I have not.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
I mean, they're thing their thing. This is This is
Eve Avenger's like thesis is that these people saw that
like leftist are reading Gramsey read Gramsey, and we're like,
we're going to do the right wing version of this. Okay,
yeah so now it's yeah, but you know, so so
so man, these people are rediscovering the same things that
Roki has figured out in like the fifties. But the
thing that Roki is doing is she's figured out all
(19:59):
the essential elements of the modern Christian right. You promote
neoliberalism with one hand, and then you sell the solution
to the atomization that your neoliberalism causes on the other
hand with the church and the church, yes, we will
serve as the basis of your political organization.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
Yeah, that is that is a there's a way of
doing it.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
Yeah, I mean this. It's an interesting there's a lot
of people who do this same thing. Like, at some
point I'm going to finish my I'm going to write
the thing about like this is actually what libertarianism is
to a broad extent, is that libertarians are the people
who like take the problems that the market produces and
then try to sell you a solution which is more
(20:41):
of those same problems but worded differently.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
Yeah, so with people that weed now, so it's fine.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Yeah, but but you know so, but this is this
is the Christian version of it. But again, rope Key
to a large extent is smarter than the people who
come after him because he understands that this project, this
this this sort of Christian deliberal project is a constant
struggle against atimization that and and this adamization has to
(21:10):
be actively politically combated by the church, like both politically
and socially. And if it's not like actively combatd by
the Church, this whole project is going to start to
come apart. Now rope Key is not the man who's
going to lead the mob of Christian fanatics into the
Promised Land. And part of this is also because he
is like too racist for like the sixties, which again
(21:37):
like so like in the parts of the sixties when
he's saying the really racist stuff like segregation is legal
in the US, right, like yeah, like that, this is
this is this is where we're at with this off.
He's too racist for that. And the thing that he's
really really racist about is Rhodesia. Oh fucking hell like apearance, Yeah, yeah,
(21:58):
this is this is the Rhodesia pivot, which is that. Okay,
So the orthodox neoliberals, people like Hayak are pro Rodesia, right,
and this is Milton Friedman. These people are pro Rhodesia,
but they're smart enough to use dog whistles and talk
about it in terms of like economic terms and like
stability of gard and blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Rooke is just openly saying race war shit like I'm
(22:20):
not gonna read it, but he is effectively like the
spiritual forefadder of like the four chan mass shooter like that,
that's how racist he is. And you know, it turns
out that just again openly like open race war shit
is like too much for Hyak and he gets kicked
out of the mainsream neoliberal organizations, and tragically, tragically for
all of us. Rokey dies before you can see his
(22:42):
beloved Rhodesia reduced to a pulp by a series of
anti imperialist insurgencies. He dies before he dies, before all
of the Rhodesion or like society's fucking fuel supplies stored
in one spot blown out.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
I can say, see, if they had a more distributed
market economy, man, they wouldn't have had just just that
all their fuel in one giant bottle which they burned.
Spoiler for anyone who hasn't been following the history of Rhodesia,
not the country anymore.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
Yeah, thank Christ. I actually don't think Christ. Fuck Christ.
Christ didn't do shit.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
Yeah, thank all those people who went out there and analyst,
et cetera. Yeah, and of course all the American people
who went out to join the Rhodesian military and killed
other white Rhodesians by accident, by shooting at people who
are theoretically on their side. Yeah, shout out to them.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
We're not going to get into North Korea backing another
genocide in Zimbabwe here. That's also a fucking thing. I've
not doing. Apologies for that, because actually fucking sucked yeah,
but you know, okay, but he he dies before he
can see his beloved Rhodesia fucking eat shit die. But
what ROKEI had is a very clear version of the
(23:52):
the hierarchical, neolerbal society that he wanted to create. Right,
and he is very especially by the end of his life,
if he is very explicit about what this is. It
is a Christian, white supremacist, patriarchal world. And to build it,
the right is going to have to use the church
to stave off the alienization and adamization of capitalism. And
(24:24):
we're back now. In order to build this new world,
the world that Ropekey sort of imagines, the religious right,
the actual religious right that's going to bring this up
into fuition, sets off from a number of angles. I
think the most famous part of this is probably the
sort of moral majority infrastructure, which is this network of
like Think Tank's political advocacy Organization's TV Network's mailing lists,
(24:46):
like their own insane right wing colleges, god terrifying places.
But the fundamental social basis right, the fundamental collective space
around which the right is organized eyes was the church.
There's been a lot of sociological talk in the last
few years about like quote unquote third spaces. So the
(25:08):
third space is supposed to be this place that's like
not the home or not the workplace that people can
exist in and form bonds in. And you know, people
talk about like bridge clubs blah blah blah blah blah.
But the thing about the US is that, like the
fucking YMCA, like all of these things that people talk
about as the third space are just the church in
(25:28):
different forms, yea literally church or a bunch of church
run events.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
Yeah, especially like the more like a rural you get
like it is this and this and this is one
of these things like that this was actually like one
of the sort of rear flanks of the workers movement, right,
which is that like in large parts of Appalachia, right,
you have a bunch of really really militant like miners
unions for example.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
But then you know, but all of them are also
like are also are also Baptists. And that is fine
as long as you know you're you're you're dealing with
Baptists who are doing well. I mean, I say fine,
but like it's not an existential threat to the workers
movement when you're dealing with like like you know, like
it's easier for an arrow to like, sorry, it's easier
for a camel to walk through the head of a
(26:14):
pin than it is for a rich mandy go to
have in Baptists. But the moment that still starts flipping,
that's a very very dangerous sort of rear guard. You
see this Naian American communities where like you know, Asian
Americans generally, like the last two generations like Millennials and
gen Z are tacking really really hard left, except the
fucking Christians who are like forming this this insane rearguard.
(26:38):
Because I've complained about this before around fucking I'm doing this.
This is this is this is a Christianity episode. I
could talk about this that the thing the thing about
Asian Christians is that they're all they're almost all like
first Schenk converts, so they all have convert brain, which
means completely fucking bat shit. Yeah. So you know, and
this is one of the things that we're talking about here, right,
is that the physically the church serves this very very
(27:00):
important engine kind of kind of revolution. There's this engine
of sort of spreading reactionary politics even among groups of
people who you normally wouldn't get that kind of sort
of right wing politics from. And this is where, you know,
face with the sort of leftward shifts in the US
and the sixties and seventies globally too, face with you know,
I mean literally the specter of revolutions and not even
(27:21):
like sometimes not even specters like you know, this is
post sixty eight, right, there's been a bunch of actual uprisings. Yeah,
and they're the place that they make their move is
by trying to seize control of various pieces of church infrastructure.
We're going to take a Catholic example and a Protestant example,
and we're not going to do the obvious Orthodox example
because we'd be here for a century. So let's start
(27:44):
with Roki's beloved Catholic church. I think I don't know
if I'm gonna do a little bit of left inside baseball.
I think people on the left tend to be really
obsessed with the like liberation theology people. But the problem
with liberation theology people is that they were around for
maybe like thirty years, right, But by the time you
(28:07):
get to the end of the eighties, these people are
all dead, right, Like they're either dead or they're like
Ortega and they've become these like literally they start calling
themselves the Third Way and are like cutting all these
deals with like really right wing social groups. But so
and so this means that the dominant politics of like
(28:30):
the capital, like t Capital c. The Catholic Church is
very gets very very right wing. Well it's not even
that as much as it gets right wing, but it
is very right wing. And the stuff that they're doing
is very, very scary. One of the things that I
don't think people really realize is that so that probably
(28:52):
you've heard the term gender ideology. Yeah, yes, yeah, do
you know where that's from?
Speaker 3 (28:58):
Is it from I've fucking forgotten the place where Harry
Potter goes.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Hogwarts. Yeah. JFK is a fucking Johnny come late bastard.
Like she she she got into this game after that
ship had already started. Gender ideology is a term k rowling.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
Jfk rowling is powerful speaking like this.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
The term gender ideology comes from the Catholic Church, and
it's developed in reactions specifically to feminism, and very specifically
it's developed in reaction to to arguments from feminists that
that you know that gender is socially constructed, you know,
because in the Catholic Church's position is like, well, no,
(29:44):
that's heretical because obviously gender was assigned by God. And
because gender is asigned by God, like women are like
you know, women are like like submissive blah blah blah
blah blah. Yeah, like natural this is this is this
is the natural order. This isn't like a sociologically constructor thing.
This is the natural It's been in tusays Billy b
because they're like like unfathomably sexist.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
Is this like around there, like Elaine Pagel's beef with
the church, I'm not sure of Blaine Pagel's if with
Elaine Pagel's God the Father Got the Mother.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
I think this is a bit before my time.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
Okay, yeah, yeah, this is for World History stands at
the University of California in common topic.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Well, I think I think this is actually in the same.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
I've played videos of her to my students, and definitely
in the eighties, like the vibe is powerfully eighties.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
Yeah, So I guess that's a bit late because so
a lot of the generality, all this stuff comes out
of the early night. Well, I guess it's like early nineties. Okay,
So one of the things that happens is that a
lot of you know, in the nineties, the Catholic Church,
and they have a bunch of like rad fam allies here,
by the way, do you have this massive fight in
the un about like recognizing the right abortions and other
(31:01):
like sexual reproductive rights. And the Red Fems are pissed
off because I mean, there's a whole so they're they've
been they're aligned with the Catholic Church is like an
anti sex work thing and like an anti porn thing.
And then also like a lot of the Red Fems, well,
I gat, I got in so much trouble for saying this,
but like, holy shit, there's somebody those people are insanely
(31:22):
trenchs phobic. Yeah damn wow. But you know, but like this,
this is this, there's this massive battle inside the United
Nations between a bunch of feminists and or like feminists
who are like normal, and then like there's the shitty
radvm factions and the Catholic Church on the other side.
And Pope Benedict in particular goes like all out on
(31:43):
this stuff, both on the international level and in terms
of like local churches like goes on the offensive against
abortion and queer liberation, and meanwhile the Protestant Church is
doing like exactly the same thing. They're like pro except
like I think, I think, like even more fascist, which
is really really and I say, this is someone who
has raised Lutheran like that that is really the core
(32:04):
of Protestantism is like what if we did Catholicism but
like somehow shittier, like like Martin Luther. One day, I'm
going to do my thing on the world's greatest kind
of revolutionaries and then one of them is Martin Luther,
because oh yeah, very clear, because like like I might.
My argument for this is that the greatest kind of
revolutionary is the person who starts out at on on
the side of the revolution and then turns against it.
(32:26):
And so Martin Luther's thing was he was trying to
outflank the Catholic Church in the sixteen hundreds from the
right on anti Semitism. Sorry, I meant a sixteen sixteenth
century fififteen hundred and fifty hundreds, which is even worse,
fifty hundreds Catholic Church they have expelled they have like
just they have there. This is this is in the
(32:46):
period where they were like expelling all of the Jews
from Spain right, and Martin Luther's trying to like flank them,
and this is the kind of shit that's happening like
in the US at this point, which is you know,
this is this is this is the this is the
Protestant sort of following the Catholic like why and in
some ways blazing their own trail of going really hard right.
(33:08):
So probably the most famous and I think definitely one
of the most important examples of this is the right
wing seizure of the Southern Baptist Convention in nineteen seventy nine.
So for people who don't know about the Southern Baptist Convention,
they are a very very large and influential like group
of Baptist churches, and they've been kind of like they'd
(33:29):
been anti segregation, they've been sort of like trending left,
and there's this is one of the things. This is
a very very famous thing in the history like if
if you're you know, it's sort of like the history
and mythos of the right wing is like in nineteen
seventy nine, at this convention, these like there's like these
group of pastors who are like, ah, the church is
(33:50):
getting too woke or getting too left. They scrolled out
this plan like on a fucking napkin to like how
they were going to take over the church. And they
do it. They see they seek control Baptist Convention, and
they purge all of their enemies and it is very
very quickly, within a matter of like a couple of years,
it's converted into this factory for right wing violence. Yeah,
(34:13):
they they are. They ruthlessly Purgectingo sent in the churches.
A bunch of churches leave because they're like, what, who
the fuck are these people? Like just these absolutely right
wing fanatics. Is like I've taken controls. A bunch of
churches leave, but a lot of them stay. And you
know what they're what their project is is that they
start creating these sort of totalitarian micro states, like in
(34:34):
like this is this what they turn churches into, and
this is what they turn households into, because these households
become enormous centers of abuse, like just unfathomable amounts of
violence can sort of get get sort of spread out
of this stuff. And you know the way that these
things work, right is is is you may have seen
have you seen those like fucking deranged umbrella memes that
(34:57):
the Christian right makes on Twitter. No, so, okay, they're
supposed to be like these like umbrellas, and there's like's
some familiarly or the umbrella like protect you from the things.
So there's like the family and is had the family.
They're like protected by the authority of the husband. You're
protected by the authority of the church, protected by the
authority of like the theocratic state.
Speaker 3 (35:16):
Okay, no, this is like the most cursed Russian doll.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
It's awful, And this is just what these people believe, right,
and they enforce this through psychological and physical violence. These
people are they're sending out instruction manuals about how to
beat your children right and how to do it in
ways that you won't get caught, you know. And like
what I'm saying, these are like totalitarian micro states. That's
not an exaggeration that that is what these households are. Like,
(35:41):
they're unbelievably violent. You as a child or is under
constant surveillance. You are literally forced to through physical violence
to maintain their gender norms. And this is the base
of the Christian of the homophobic Christian right. These churches
are pumping out shocktroopers. And these are the shock troopers
both of neoliberalism and homophobic con transphobic violence. And when
(36:02):
I say shockstroppers, I do mean this literally. Because an
enormous number of these people, and this is part of
the reason's politics, it starts to fall apart. Like I
grew up around these people. A lot of these people
went to fucking a rock and got the absolute shit
blown out of them. But you know, these people, like
these these churches, this is you know, you can look
(36:25):
at the sort of panopoly of the people who do
right wing like homophobic violence. Right the queer basher, the
peronew kicks their kid out of their homes for being gay,
the homophobic boss who fires and abuses queer workers, the
doctor who assaults us and then denies his medical care.
These people are pumped up by the church. And what
the church is doing here is they're serving as the
equivalent of sort of of unions in the left right.
(36:47):
And when I say unions, I'm talking more like the
nineteen oh seven IWW of in like the twenty twenty
three AFLCIO. These churches are the social and organizational space
in which the right constructions its world right, it's the
sort of nexus of homophobic organizing from the beginnings of
the Hope of Home, like right through like their fight
against gay marriage. But Kaba, something happened that rope well,
(37:09):
I think rope Key might have suspected this, but something
happens that his inheritors did not expect. And that's something
is the only thing I failed to consider is what
if neoliberalism came for the church. So one of the
things that has happened in the last and I mean
literally we are talking the last ten years or ten
(37:34):
to fifteen years, really the last like ten years, church
attendants and this is also actually true well of synagogual
mosco attendants with the church tendants has been declining way more.
It used to be like you know, if if if
you're are you a member of a church? Moster synagogurea
like Gallup has been pulling this since the fucking forties.
It used to be the rate of it of being
a member of a church st Agaga mosque was it
(37:56):
was for like basically until like two thousand, it was
hovering around seventy percent. It's now forty seven. That is
a catastrophic drop. That is a rewriting of like fundamentally
what the US is. The US has been a like
(38:19):
Christian health state, like since it was created, right, Like
the US is founded by like religious extremists whose problem
is that they weren't allowed to pursue Catholics enough. So
this has been this has been a church country more
so than like most of the European countries. You did
the settling up until literally the last twenty years, and
(38:40):
the drop between twenty ten and now is like fourteen percent.
And this is this is and it's not just that
the membership rates are going down, like the actual church
attendance is going down. And so in this context where
less people are going to a church, less people belong
to a church, the political strategies that have been based
(39:04):
on using the church as like your default social network. Uh,
they don't have the kind of reach that they used to. Yeah,
and if that's your political strategy, this is a catastrophe
for you. Now, you know, we could talk that there
are like, there are lots of reasons this is happening,
part of which is sort of like the secularization of
the US. Part of this is that there's been so
(39:27):
many fucking atrocious abuse scandals in these churches that people
are just fucking leaving because that's what happens. Yeah, you know,
and one day, one day, the thing I really will
get canceled for is when I would the episode I
do about how this happened in the DSA and how
it just haulowed out the membership because you know, it
turns out wh people get abused, they just fucking leave.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
Yeah, not just the DSA, like unfortuately.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
Yes, this happens in so many organizing like this is yeah,
stuff being fucking creeps. Yeah, but like you know, yeah,
the Christian right has a particularly bad because they don't
they did there or address it, right, this is part
of their ideologies that this is good.
Speaker 3 (40:06):
Yeah, that's the problem, like at least in the left,
Like it keeps fucking happening, and we do recognize it's bad.
We sometimes just seemingly people on the lefts are prepaired
to allow it to happen because I think it's not
as bad as the alternative, but which is bullshit. But yeah,
when you have a church which actively kind of encourages it, yes, actually.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
And and and part of and the other the other
thing that's happening here, right, is that, like the other
thing that's generating this is just there is just the
neoliberal adimisation of society, like it's it's tearing apart, sort
of like social bound you know. And and I mean
one of the things I think you have to be
careful of when you talk about neoliberalism tearing about social
bonds is that not all a lot of those bonds sucked,
Like it was not good that everyone with seventy percent
(40:47):
of Americans were going to church, right, Like, not good
at all. That sucked. It was deeply evil. But you know,
it tears apart like it tears, it tears apart bonds,
not entirely without regard to ideology, but it still does
do it. And this means this context has completely reshaped
(41:08):
what right wing like anti career and anti transorganizing looks like.
And the right right now, the right solution to that
is the Daily Wire. And we will get explained that
in very great length tomorrow and the day after that,
So stay tuned.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
Does and three of the bad Guy, Well, we already
had a bad guy. I guess he's dead.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
These ones, Yeah, this is the bad guy number two, yeah, three, four,
maybe after the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention.
Speaker 3 (41:42):
Yeah, yeah, they're right up there there. They've still got
time too. You know, they're already only in their ascendancy,
so we shouldn't judge him too, Eddie.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
Yep, but yeah, this has Beennike, it happened here. Go
make these people's lives miserable.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
Yeah. Yeah, Bench Perry is miserable because I write a
peace of pop mechanics about how to tear down the
statue and he is still mad about it because he
said I can't wait for their piece about mods of
cocktails and I never wrote that as well, So Ben
Shapiro can suck it. Thank you for the career help
of Ben Shapiro.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for
listening
Also media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome to Day It Happened Here, a podcast about I
don't know, this is coming out like Tuesday, right, maybe Wednesday.
You probably know what this podcast is about. If you don't,
it's about things falling apart putting it back together again.
I'm your host Mia Wong.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
With me is James Hi Mayh and I'm very excited
to to lend some stuff. I'm sure to be great.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Nothing, well, okay, the good news that the first guy
we're talking about died. That's that's the only good news. Great, great,
more good news. But we're doing some episodes about the
Daily Wire. You're gonna get a lot more actual stuff
about the Daily Wire in the next two episodes. This
is the this is the preliminary background information episode. But
(00:52):
you know, for people who aren't familiar with the Daily Wire,
the Daily Wire is a very large and very powerful
right wing media empire. You know, Ben Shapiro's people, Matt
Walsh is there, and they are They've become increasingly powerful
because of their ability to drive the actions and sort
of like not even really mid level, like high mid
(01:16):
high level like Republican officials, particularly at a state level,
towards you know, horrific anti trans policies stuff like that. Yep,
they've had this incredible divorced dad power of those two guys.
Like it's like a yeah, it's like a Pokemon situation,
you know, like it just it's inside, it's like shaken ball,
(01:39):
but sometimes they let it out and control their Republican
body with it. Yeah, and so okay, you know. But
in order to really sort of understand who these people
are and why they're able to sort of be like this,
we need to talk about the ways that this is new,
because you know, there's always been of writing, like Christian
(02:01):
media figures who do terrible stuff, but the way the
daily wire works is different than this stuff has worked
in the past. And in order to understand what is
different about this than these sort of like previous eras
of like Christian antiqueer violence, we need to talk about neoliberalism.
(02:22):
So this is this is not the normal starting place.
You're talking about the religious right, but if you want
to actually understand what's happening right now, you have to
go back to the origin and structure of neoliberalism so
you can understand how it's shaped. Right when Christian organizing
the last about fifty years. I want to start this
by talking about a guy who is not normally considered
(02:43):
part of the Christian right at all. In fact, he's
not even an American and his greatest influence is on
his home country of Germany. The man I'm talking I
want to talk about is Wilhelm rope Key. I've mentioned
him on this show before, but that was several years ago.
Now he is not a very well known figure, and
that's not good because he is one of the smartest
(03:07):
and one of the most dangerous neoliberals. So in order
to really get a sense of who rope Key is,
we need to talk about the beginnings of neoliberalism.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
So we need to.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Talk about Hyak and his sort of attempt to recruit
a bunch of new liberals to oppose. While mostly to
oppost communism, it later becomes about also opposing fascism. But
the problem that Hyak has is that so in the
nineteenth this is happening in the nineteen twenties and really
the nineteen thirties. The problem is that the people who
Hayak have been trying to recruit from Germany a dream
(03:38):
the thirties all joined the Nazi Party. So in Many
such cases. Yeah, it's a real issue for them.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Yeah, once again the Libs have let us down. Shocked.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Yeah. So, you know, in the in the nineteen forties
after the war, when Hyak is trying to do this again,
he turns to William rope Key instead of the original
guys who've been Nazis because Ropeke had been out of
the country for the whole Nazi things, so he kind
of had skipped out on it.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Okay, smart move on his front.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Yeah, and you know this this gets him an invite
to like Montpellier, and so the whole sort of the
origins of neoliberalism and rope Key is he's one of
the architects of what's called ordoliberalism. So the Order Liberals
are one of the factions of you know, they're one
(04:29):
of the factions of neoliberalism. What's interesting about the way
We're gonna talk a bit about what they believe. But
what's interesting about the Order Liberals is that they're not
really economists. I mean, some of them are, but it's
a lot of sociologists. And this means that the way
that they think about the world is very different than
the way that like Hayek or you know, like a
(04:50):
like von Mises or like all the you know, the
sort of like mainline like guys who are economists in
the neoliberal movement think the order. Liberal roles believe that
there is a natural capitalist hierarchy in a society that
produces stability. But they also understand that capitalism in general
and neoliberalism, like specifically the thing they're trying to bring about,
(05:13):
adamizes people. You know, it destroys social bonds, It tears
the fabric of communities apart, and it destroys the notion
of any collective self identification, replacing them with sort of
market exchange and empty consumer symbols masquerading as identity. You
know thing for example, the rise of stand culture or
i mean, god like the thing we do, which is
like it's.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Going to say streamers, you know, so that's friends on
your phone.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Yeah. So this is extremely bad, and rope Key realizes
this is a real issue for the success of neoliberalism,
because people don't actually like being completely autonomized market agents
with no real social relations other than wages and contracts.
And you know, if presented with these options, they might,
for example, turn to communism or god forbid, anarchism, yeah,
(06:06):
but Rokey, you know, Rokey is on the side of
bad and.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
The side of bad. Yeah, I think a great title
for the episode side of that me his biography God.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Rokey's conclusion from this is that you can't just rely
on the market passively coming into existence, because if markets
were supposed to passively come into existence, or if they
were you know, like the sort of like spontaneous order
thing that talks about when he's lying, like, if that
was actually true, they would just have there would be
everything would be market economies already. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
(06:52):
It's like no, like we would have had the exact
same economic and political system for the last thirty thousand years,
but we haven't. So in order to do this, you
have to make people into good neoliberal market subjects, and
this requires the intervention of the state. The product of
this is that Roki is one of the architects of
what's called structural policy. These are specific state policy things
(07:14):
that are used to create markets by you know, sometimes
it's it's there's a whole variety of ways that this happens,
but by acting on and transforming like physically people right
like what they do, what they believe, how they congregates,
like what things they're allowed not allowed to do, what
things are incentivized. This, this is structural policy. This is
(07:38):
the origin of what's later going to be called structural
or reform, which is the kind of stuff that the
IMF does to an economy to create markets by taking
food from the mouths of babies and making the babies
work to get the food.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
Yeah, it's great to see any way.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Yeah, and that part of neoliberalism broadly, a lot of
that comes from order liberalism, and it comes from people
like Roki. But rope Key realizes that, you know, there's
a problem of structural policy as an abstract concept, right,
which is that in order for it to work, you
need to a take control of the state, because again
(08:15):
this is a state, but there is a top down
state reform project, right, and be there has to be
something beyond the state to create the kind of subjectivity
you need to instill, you know, to instill in people
to make them behave quote unquote as market agents. Right,
you can't just use the state in the market to
make people behave in the way that they're supposed to,
(08:36):
you know, to be good sort of like workers for
the workers for the Great market. You need something else
is specifically, neoliberalism needs its own form of collectivity. It
needs its own thing that creates social bonds between people.
It needs its own kind of sort of identification to
combat the sort of collective society of the left. Now.
Part of Ropekey's plan, and this is something you share
(08:58):
us with the other order liberals is that they want
to do this with you know, they want to use
the patriarchal family and small businesses as like the sort
of social basis of all of their sort of routing politics.
This is very endurable routing politics stuff they also have. Weirdly,
this is one of the things. It's in the fifties
and sixties. There's a lot of sort of on every
(09:19):
side of the political aisle, like kind of romantic utopianism
ish about like the countryside. You know, this can swing
wildly between like Mao or like the Japanese fascists or
the neoliberals. They have this dream of sort of turning
rural areas into these like bastions of like reaction against
(09:41):
the left, and that did kind of happen in the US,
but it didn't happen like it happened because the rural
economy was completely annihilated and replaced with like a series
of meth labs, not because I guess technically was a
dowddream result. It's just that it didn't it. It wasn't
the sort of idyllic like good like farmer family things
(10:03):
that these people wanted.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
So yeah, yeah, they got there in an interesting way. Yeah,
with like massive agribusiness and meth labs are your two
choices in life?
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Yeah, and like and you know, so like like yes,
they this is one of these things where instead of
achieving their goals through cultural means, they achieve their goals
through like the massive uh like unbelievable economic violence. But
you know, okay, so that's that's the other thing that
that and that's all sort of standard neoliberal theory, right.
But what makes rope Key kind of unique is that
(10:38):
he's really one of the first of these people to
realize that you need another force, and that force is
the church. And this is something that people don't talk
about a lot when they talk about neoliberalism, but a
lot of these people are very very deeply Christian. Here's
Ropeke talking about his ideal society, quote rendering to the king,
(11:00):
what is owed to the king, but also giving to
God what belongs to God?
Speaker 3 (11:05):
So what belongs to God?
Speaker 2 (11:08):
And now one now I'm concerned. I mean he's it's
funny because like he's taken the Bible verse like that
you're taking to the render under Caesar, like what belongs
to Caesar, render under blah blah blah blah blah. But
like it's he's made it enormously more alarming. Yeah, yeah, deeply,
(11:32):
like because like the thing about the render under Caesar
is that that's a statement about about like living under
the Roman Empire, right, right, Like this is just he
just wants you to fucking have a king. Yeah, give
shit to everyone needs to a God who is also
the king.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
Right, It's not even like like the necessity of the
state thing, like you just dump dumped in like a point,
let's hereditary, inbred person to give money to.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Yeah, I mean she's not like I So, okay, I
I should I should probably not slander him as thoroughly
as I'm doing here because I don't actually quite think
he literally becomes a monarchist. But she does believe that
there should be like I don't know, you describe it
like there should be democratic parties, but that like actual
(12:25):
economic policy shouldn't be like managed by them, Like you
need like a super a thing above the democracy, which
is the IMF, to make sure that there's the little
the little democratic people don't like start getting any ideas
about the economy.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Like technocracy like a.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Yeah, yeah, but you don't put but like the thing
with the technocracy and this is this is genuinely kind
of what has been happening in Europe is that like
living under a technocracy really sucks. Yes, like it sucks
like politically, it sucks materially, and it sucks like emotionally.
And you know, the right has been able to make
a lot out of sort of like this opposition to
(13:06):
like the global bureaucracies or whatever, which is like, okay,
like you guys made these things in the first place,
Like I, I, you know, you don't get a fucking
complain about the bureaucracies that you set up and ran,
but you know I haven't stomped him. Yeah, but but
rope key, rope key.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
You know.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
So a lot of the other order liberals become really
sort of like you know, are become obsessed with taking
over the IMF, which they do and they take over
the World Bank and they become you know, they do
that stuff. Rope Key is obsessed with using the using
religion as like another kind of social force that he
can bind the othererberal sort of movement together with. And
(13:41):
so he sets out to form like like a kind
of like reactionary Catholic international to bring neoliberalism to the world.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
That is a troubling concept.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Yeah, so it doesn't work, which is the good news. Well,
and the problem is it doesn't work. It's not that
it doesn't work because it's a bad idea. The reason
that it doesn't work is that he's trying this in
like the fifties and sixties, and it is too early
for that shit. Yea, Like you know, I mean, and
this is something I feel like I should at some
point I should actually do a deep dive into this
(14:14):
on the show. But I've talked about this a couple
of times. There is a very powerful form of kind
of like conservative Christian politics in Europe at this time.
It's like the Christian democracy movements. There's like if every
single country if you look at it like this, from
like the fifties through like the nineties, I mean, and
even to this day. In Germany, for example, like there
was a party called the Christian Democrats yea, and they
(14:36):
win like at least sixty percent of all elections, like
in Italy, they're in power for like forty years. But
the problem with Christian democracy from the perspective of someone
like Roki is that like if you sort of if
you take like these parties, right, these parties are you know,
these are these are the Christian Conservatives of this era.
(14:56):
They are way way too far left for uh, for Roki.
And that's not just a sort of like Rope, Look
got how far right Rope he is, although he is
so like if if you took Elder Moro, who's like
the great Italian Christian democratic statesman, multiple time Prime Minister
of Italy, killed in an insane web of conspiracies, like
(15:18):
if you, yeah, look i'd labor. Like if you took
Elder Morrow and you dropped him into the modern American Congress,
he would be to the He is again the leader,
he's like the leader of Italian Well he's technically from
the central left faction of the Christian Democrats, but he's
like the guy who's not a socialist or a communist,
like in terms of Italian politicians, who's not also a fascist?
(15:40):
And if you took him from like the seventies and
you plopped him into the American Congress, he would be
to the left of AOC, Like AOC is pro ceasefire
in Gaza, right, like she's she's pro ceasefire in Palestine.
Alder Morrow allowed the Popular Threat for the Liberation of Palestine,
which is the Palestinian Communist per mill terry, to operate
(16:01):
out of and carry out attacks like from Italy. Right,
like this guy you would like she is.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
Well, if you go far enough right, you might get
that as well.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
To be fair, no, but but it wouldn't be the PFLP,
though I guess I guess some of the German neo
Nazis kind of liked them. But right, yeah, like like
imagine in the US any politician being like, yeah, the
PFLP could operate out of the US or only our
only our only condition is that we like we're gonna
let you operate, but we're not gonna like protect you
(16:33):
from uh like shim Bette or whatever, like the Masad. Yeah,
like racontact you from the Masade like that. But you
know you can you can do your stuff here? Could
you imagine that shit happening? This guy was a this
guy is a conservative in Europe right in like you know,
so this is what Rope he's responding to, like the
(16:53):
the existing Christian you know, and and and you know,
to some extent, like the Christian the Christian Democrats are
very very successful stopping communism, right, They're really good at it.
They stop communism from taking hold anywhere in Europe. But
they're not like capitalist enough for ROKEI. So when we
(17:15):
come back from this thing ROKEI would have loved, which
is ad transitions, we're going to talk about more of
what Rochi was doing and how it shaped neoliberalism and
the Christian right. Woo yay, we're back. Roki is having
(17:44):
a great time in his grave. We're gonna get the
thing that makes him spin at his grave, which I'm
very excited about.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Accident.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
But okay, so you know, like as we've sort of
been talking about, the Christian Democrats are not the Christian
The Christian Democrats in a lot of countries are Catholic.
Some of them, like I think like there are Protestant
like Christian, but like yeah, but like a lot of
a lot of them are Catholic, So I mean, it's
(18:10):
it's it's a really interesting kind of like predecessor to
like modern fire right politics, where you get these like
both of the US and Latin America, where you get
these sort of like these Catholic Protestant alliances like this
is this is like Matt Walsh. You know, we're gonna
be talking about more in the next two days, Like
is a Catholic theocrat, right, but a lot of his
base are like you know, are like Baptists and like
(18:32):
the more even more feral charismatic Christians and like you know,
but but you know, but these these groups are able
to sort of work together, but they're not able. They're
not working together way that Rokey wants. So and this
is the thing that I think is very very scary
about rop Key, and and especially about the people who
(18:52):
took this model right, whether explicitly or implicitly, people who
people who figure out the same because a lot of people,
some people like kind of directly to go for Roki,
some people discover it through like I very weird readings
right wing readings of gramscy Uh, it's a whole thing.
I'll talk yeah one day I'm gonna get Eve on
(19:14):
the show and we're going to talk about that, because
it's fucking wild.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
What the Yeah wow, I think that Gramscy is not
the most like inaccessible you know, like it. You know,
there there are some like left theorists who just just
vomit words so much so you can just project a
meaning on z them, But I have not.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
I mean, they're thing their thing. This is This is
Eve Avenger's like thesis is that these people saw that
like leftist are reading Gramsey read Gramsey, and we're like,
we're going to do the right wing version of this. Okay,
yeah so now it's yeah, but you know, so so
so man, these people are rediscovering the same things that
Roki has figured out in like the fifties. But the
thing that Roki is doing is she's figured out all
(19:59):
the essential elements of the modern Christian right. You promote
neoliberalism with one hand, and then you sell the solution
to the atomization that your neoliberalism causes on the other
hand with the church and the church, yes, we will
serve as the basis of your political organization.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
Yeah, that is that is a there's a way of
doing it.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
Yeah, I mean this. It's an interesting there's a lot
of people who do this same thing. Like, at some
point I'm going to finish my I'm going to write
the thing about like this is actually what libertarianism is
to a broad extent, is that libertarians are the people
who like take the problems that the market produces and
then try to sell you a solution which is more
(20:41):
of those same problems but worded differently.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
Yeah, so with people that weed now, so it's fine.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Yeah, but but you know so, but this is this
is the Christian version of it. But again, rope Key
to a large extent is smarter than the people who
come after him because he understands that this project, this
this this sort of Christian deliberal project is a constant
struggle against atimization that and and this adamization has to
(21:10):
be actively politically combated by the church, like both politically
and socially. And if it's not like actively combatd by
the Church, this whole project is going to start to
come apart. Now rope Key is not the man who's
going to lead the mob of Christian fanatics into the
Promised Land. And part of this is also because he
is like too racist for like the sixties, which again
(21:37):
like so like in the parts of the sixties when
he's saying the really racist stuff like segregation is legal
in the US, right, like yeah, like that, this is
this is this is where we're at with this off.
He's too racist for that. And the thing that he's
really really racist about is Rhodesia. Oh fucking hell like apearance, Yeah, yeah,
(21:58):
this is this is the Rhodesia pivot, which is that. Okay,
So the orthodox neoliberals, people like Hayak are pro Rodesia, right,
and this is Milton Friedman. These people are pro Rhodesia,
but they're smart enough to use dog whistles and talk
about it in terms of like economic terms and like
stability of gard and blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Rooke is just openly saying race war shit like I'm
(22:20):
not gonna read it, but he is effectively like the
spiritual forefadder of like the four chan mass shooter like that,
that's how racist he is. And you know, it turns
out that just again openly like open race war shit
is like too much for Hyak and he gets kicked
out of the mainsream neoliberal organizations, and tragically, tragically for
all of us. Rokey dies before you can see his
(22:42):
beloved Rhodesia reduced to a pulp by a series of
anti imperialist insurgencies. He dies before he dies, before all
of the Rhodesion or like society's fucking fuel supplies stored
in one spot blown out.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
I can say, see, if they had a more distributed
market economy, man, they wouldn't have had just just that
all their fuel in one giant bottle which they burned.
Spoiler for anyone who hasn't been following the history of Rhodesia,
not the country anymore.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
Yeah, thank Christ. I actually don't think Christ. Fuck Christ.
Christ didn't do shit.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
Yeah, thank all those people who went out there and analyst,
et cetera. Yeah, and of course all the American people
who went out to join the Rhodesian military and killed
other white Rhodesians by accident, by shooting at people who
are theoretically on their side. Yeah, shout out to them.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
We're not going to get into North Korea backing another
genocide in Zimbabwe here. That's also a fucking thing. I've
not doing. Apologies for that, because actually fucking sucked yeah,
but you know, okay, but he he dies before he
can see his beloved Rhodesia fucking eat shit die. But
what ROKEI had is a very clear version of the
(23:52):
the hierarchical, neolerbal society that he wanted to create. Right,
and he is very especially by the end of his life,
if he is very explicit about what this is. It
is a Christian, white supremacist, patriarchal world. And to build it,
the right is going to have to use the church
to stave off the alienization and adamization of capitalism. And
(24:24):
we're back now. In order to build this new world,
the world that Ropekey sort of imagines, the religious right,
the actual religious right that's going to bring this up
into fuition, sets off from a number of angles. I
think the most famous part of this is probably the
sort of moral majority infrastructure, which is this network of
like Think Tank's political advocacy Organization's TV Network's mailing lists,
(24:46):
like their own insane right wing colleges, god terrifying places.
But the fundamental social basis right, the fundamental collective space
around which the right is organized eyes was the church.
There's been a lot of sociological talk in the last
few years about like quote unquote third spaces. So the
(25:08):
third space is supposed to be this place that's like
not the home or not the workplace that people can
exist in and form bonds in. And you know, people
talk about like bridge clubs blah blah blah blah blah.
But the thing about the US is that, like the
fucking YMCA, like all of these things that people talk
about as the third space are just the church in
(25:28):
different forms, yea literally church or a bunch of church
run events.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
Yeah, especially like the more like a rural you get
like it is this and this and this is one
of these things like that this was actually like one
of the sort of rear flanks of the workers movement, right,
which is that like in large parts of Appalachia, right,
you have a bunch of really really militant like miners
unions for example.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
But then you know, but all of them are also
like are also are also Baptists. And that is fine
as long as you know you're you're you're dealing with
Baptists who are doing well. I mean, I say fine,
but like it's not an existential threat to the workers
movement when you're dealing with like like you know, like
it's easier for an arrow to like, sorry, it's easier
for a camel to walk through the head of a
(26:14):
pin than it is for a rich mandy go to
have in Baptists. But the moment that still starts flipping,
that's a very very dangerous sort of rear guard. You
see this Naian American communities where like you know, Asian
Americans generally, like the last two generations like Millennials and
gen Z are tacking really really hard left, except the
fucking Christians who are like forming this this insane rearguard.
(26:38):
Because I've complained about this before around fucking I'm doing this.
This is this is this is a Christianity episode. I
could talk about this that the thing the thing about
Asian Christians is that they're all they're almost all like
first Schenk converts, so they all have convert brain, which
means completely fucking bat shit. Yeah. So you know, and
this is one of the things that we're talking about here, right,
is that the physically the church serves this very very
(27:00):
important engine kind of kind of revolution. There's this engine
of sort of spreading reactionary politics even among groups of
people who you normally wouldn't get that kind of sort
of right wing politics from. And this is where, you know,
face with the sort of leftward shifts in the US
and the sixties and seventies globally too, face with you know,
I mean literally the specter of revolutions and not even
(27:21):
like sometimes not even specters like you know, this is
post sixty eight, right, there's been a bunch of actual uprisings. Yeah,
and they're the place that they make their move is
by trying to seize control of various pieces of church infrastructure.
We're going to take a Catholic example and a Protestant example,
and we're not going to do the obvious Orthodox example
because we'd be here for a century. So let's start
(27:44):
with Roki's beloved Catholic church. I think I don't know
if I'm gonna do a little bit of left inside baseball.
I think people on the left tend to be really
obsessed with the like liberation theology people. But the problem
with liberation theology people is that they were around for
maybe like thirty years, right, But by the time you
(28:07):
get to the end of the eighties, these people are
all dead, right, Like they're either dead or they're like
Ortega and they've become these like literally they start calling
themselves the Third Way and are like cutting all these
deals with like really right wing social groups. But so
and so this means that the dominant politics of like
(28:30):
the capital, like t Capital c. The Catholic Church is
very gets very very right wing. Well it's not even
that as much as it gets right wing, but it
is very right wing. And the stuff that they're doing
is very, very scary. One of the things that I
don't think people really realize is that so that probably
(28:52):
you've heard the term gender ideology. Yeah, yes, yeah, do
you know where that's from?
Speaker 3 (28:58):
Is it from I've fucking forgotten the place where Harry
Potter goes.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Hogwarts. Yeah. JFK is a fucking Johnny come late bastard.
Like she she she got into this game after that
ship had already started. Gender ideology is a term k rowling.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
Jfk rowling is powerful speaking like this.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
The term gender ideology comes from the Catholic Church, and
it's developed in reactions specifically to feminism, and very specifically
it's developed in reaction to to arguments from feminists that
that you know that gender is socially constructed, you know,
because in the Catholic Church's position is like, well, no,
(29:44):
that's heretical because obviously gender was assigned by God. And
because gender is asigned by God, like women are like
you know, women are like like submissive blah blah blah
blah blah. Yeah, like natural this is this is this
is the natural order. This isn't like a sociologically constructor thing.
This is the natural It's been in tusays Billy b
because they're like like unfathomably sexist.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
Is this like around there, like Elaine Pagel's beef with
the church, I'm not sure of Blaine Pagel's if with
Elaine Pagel's God the Father Got the Mother.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
I think this is a bit before my time.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
Okay, yeah, yeah, this is for World History stands at
the University of California in common topic.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Well, I think I think this is actually in the same.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
I've played videos of her to my students, and definitely
in the eighties, like the vibe is powerfully eighties.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
Yeah, So I guess that's a bit late because so
a lot of the generality, all this stuff comes out
of the early night. Well, I guess it's like early nineties. Okay,
So one of the things that happens is that a
lot of you know, in the nineties, the Catholic Church,
and they have a bunch of like rad fam allies here,
by the way, do you have this massive fight in
the un about like recognizing the right abortions and other
(31:01):
like sexual reproductive rights. And the Red Fems are pissed
off because I mean, there's a whole so they're they've
been they're aligned with the Catholic Church is like an
anti sex work thing and like an anti porn thing.
And then also like a lot of the Red Fems, well,
I gat, I got in so much trouble for saying this,
but like, holy shit, there's somebody those people are insanely
(31:22):
trenchs phobic. Yeah damn wow. But you know, but like this,
this is this, there's this massive battle inside the United
Nations between a bunch of feminists and or like feminists
who are like normal, and then like there's the shitty
radvm factions and the Catholic Church on the other side.
And Pope Benedict in particular goes like all out on
(31:43):
this stuff, both on the international level and in terms
of like local churches like goes on the offensive against
abortion and queer liberation, and meanwhile the Protestant Church is
doing like exactly the same thing. They're like pro except
like I think, I think, like even more fascist, which
is really really and I say, this is someone who
has raised Lutheran like that that is really the core
(32:04):
of Protestantism is like what if we did Catholicism but
like somehow shittier, like like Martin Luther. One day, I'm
going to do my thing on the world's greatest kind
of revolutionaries and then one of them is Martin Luther,
because oh yeah, very clear, because like like I might.
My argument for this is that the greatest kind of
revolutionary is the person who starts out at on on
the side of the revolution and then turns against it.
(32:26):
And so Martin Luther's thing was he was trying to
outflank the Catholic Church in the sixteen hundreds from the
right on anti Semitism. Sorry, I meant a sixteen sixteenth
century fififteen hundred and fifty hundreds, which is even worse,
fifty hundreds Catholic Church they have expelled they have like
just they have there. This is this is in the
(32:46):
period where they were like expelling all of the Jews
from Spain right, and Martin Luther's trying to like flank them,
and this is the kind of shit that's happening like
in the US at this point, which is you know,
this is this is this is the this is the
Protestant sort of following the Catholic like why and in
some ways blazing their own trail of going really hard right.
(33:08):
So probably the most famous and I think definitely one
of the most important examples of this is the right
wing seizure of the Southern Baptist Convention in nineteen seventy nine.
So for people who don't know about the Southern Baptist Convention,
they are a very very large and influential like group
of Baptist churches, and they've been kind of like they'd
(33:29):
been anti segregation, they've been sort of like trending left,
and there's this is one of the things. This is
a very very famous thing in the history like if
if you're you know, it's sort of like the history
and mythos of the right wing is like in nineteen
seventy nine, at this convention, these like there's like these
group of pastors who are like, ah, the church is
(33:50):
getting too woke or getting too left. They scrolled out
this plan like on a fucking napkin to like how
they were going to take over the church. And they
do it. They see they seek control Baptist Convention, and
they purge all of their enemies and it is very
very quickly, within a matter of like a couple of years,
it's converted into this factory for right wing violence. Yeah,
(34:13):
they they are. They ruthlessly Purgectingo sent in the churches.
A bunch of churches leave because they're like, what, who
the fuck are these people? Like just these absolutely right
wing fanatics. Is like I've taken controls. A bunch of
churches leave, but a lot of them stay. And you
know what they're what their project is is that they
start creating these sort of totalitarian micro states, like in
(34:34):
like this is this what they turn churches into, and
this is what they turn households into, because these households
become enormous centers of abuse, like just unfathomable amounts of
violence can sort of get get sort of spread out
of this stuff. And you know the way that these
things work, right is is is you may have seen
have you seen those like fucking deranged umbrella memes that
(34:57):
the Christian right makes on Twitter. No, so, okay, they're
supposed to be like these like umbrellas, and there's like's
some familiarly or the umbrella like protect you from the things.
So there's like the family and is had the family.
They're like protected by the authority of the husband. You're
protected by the authority of the church, protected by the
authority of like the theocratic state.
Speaker 3 (35:16):
Okay, no, this is like the most cursed Russian doll.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
It's awful, And this is just what these people believe, right,
and they enforce this through psychological and physical violence. These
people are they're sending out instruction manuals about how to
beat your children right and how to do it in
ways that you won't get caught, you know. And like
what I'm saying, these are like totalitarian micro states. That's
not an exaggeration that that is what these households are. Like,
(35:41):
they're unbelievably violent. You as a child or is under
constant surveillance. You are literally forced to through physical violence
to maintain their gender norms. And this is the base
of the Christian of the homophobic Christian right. These churches
are pumping out shocktroopers. And these are the shock troopers
both of neoliberalism and homophobic con transphobic violence. And when
(36:02):
I say shockstroppers, I do mean this literally. Because an
enormous number of these people, and this is part of
the reason's politics, it starts to fall apart. Like I
grew up around these people. A lot of these people
went to fucking a rock and got the absolute shit
blown out of them. But you know, these people, like
these these churches, this is you know, you can look
(36:25):
at the sort of panopoly of the people who do
right wing like homophobic violence. Right the queer basher, the
peronew kicks their kid out of their homes for being gay,
the homophobic boss who fires and abuses queer workers, the
doctor who assaults us and then denies his medical care.
These people are pumped up by the church. And what
the church is doing here is they're serving as the
equivalent of sort of of unions in the left right.
(36:47):
And when I say unions, I'm talking more like the
nineteen oh seven IWW of in like the twenty twenty
three AFLCIO. These churches are the social and organizational space
in which the right constructions its world right, it's the
sort of nexus of homophobic organizing from the beginnings of
the Hope of Home, like right through like their fight
against gay marriage. But Kaba, something happened that rope well,
(37:09):
I think rope Key might have suspected this, but something
happens that his inheritors did not expect. And that's something
is the only thing I failed to consider is what
if neoliberalism came for the church. So one of the
things that has happened in the last and I mean
literally we are talking the last ten years or ten
(37:34):
to fifteen years, really the last like ten years, church
attendants and this is also actually true well of synagogual
mosco attendants with the church tendants has been declining way more.
It used to be like you know, if if if
you're are you a member of a church? Moster synagogurea
like Gallup has been pulling this since the fucking forties.
It used to be the rate of it of being
a member of a church st Agaga mosque was it
(37:56):
was for like basically until like two thousand, it was
hovering around seventy percent. It's now forty seven. That is
a catastrophic drop. That is a rewriting of like fundamentally
what the US is. The US has been a like
(38:19):
Christian health state, like since it was created, right, Like
the US is founded by like religious extremists whose problem
is that they weren't allowed to pursue Catholics enough. So
this has been this has been a church country more
so than like most of the European countries. You did
the settling up until literally the last twenty years, and
(38:40):
the drop between twenty ten and now is like fourteen percent.
And this is this is and it's not just that
the membership rates are going down, like the actual church
attendance is going down. And so in this context where
less people are going to a church, less people belong
to a church, the political strategies that have been based
(39:04):
on using the church as like your default social network. Uh,
they don't have the kind of reach that they used to. Yeah,
and if that's your political strategy, this is a catastrophe
for you. Now, you know, we could talk that there
are like, there are lots of reasons this is happening,
part of which is sort of like the secularization of
the US. Part of this is that there's been so
(39:27):
many fucking atrocious abuse scandals in these churches that people
are just fucking leaving because that's what happens. Yeah, you know,
and one day, one day, the thing I really will
get canceled for is when I would the episode I
do about how this happened in the DSA and how
it just haulowed out the membership because you know, it
turns out wh people get abused, they just fucking leave.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
Yeah, not just the DSA, like unfortuately.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
Yes, this happens in so many organizing like this is yeah,
stuff being fucking creeps. Yeah, but like you know, yeah,
the Christian right has a particularly bad because they don't
they did there or address it, right, this is part
of their ideologies that this is good.
Speaker 3 (40:06):
Yeah, that's the problem, like at least in the left,
Like it keeps fucking happening, and we do recognize it's bad.
We sometimes just seemingly people on the lefts are prepaired
to allow it to happen because I think it's not
as bad as the alternative, but which is bullshit. But yeah,
when you have a church which actively kind of encourages it, yes, actually.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
And and and part of and the other the other
thing that's happening here, right, is that, like the other
thing that's generating this is just there is just the
neoliberal adimisation of society, like it's it's tearing apart, sort
of like social bound you know. And and I mean
one of the things I think you have to be
careful of when you talk about neoliberalism tearing about social
bonds is that not all a lot of those bonds sucked,
Like it was not good that everyone with seventy percent
(40:47):
of Americans were going to church, right, Like, not good
at all. That sucked. It was deeply evil. But you know,
it tears apart like it tears, it tears apart bonds,
not entirely without regard to ideology, but it still does
do it. And this means this context has completely reshaped
(41:08):
what right wing like anti career and anti transorganizing looks like.
And the right right now, the right solution to that
is the Daily Wire. And we will get explained that
in very great length tomorrow and the day after that,
So stay tuned.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
Does and three of the bad Guy, Well, we already
had a bad guy. I guess he's dead.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
These ones, Yeah, this is the bad guy number two, yeah, three, four,
maybe after the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention.
Speaker 3 (41:42):
Yeah, yeah, they're right up there there. They've still got
time too. You know, they're already only in their ascendancy,
so we shouldn't judge him too, Eddie.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
Yep, but yeah, this has Beennike, it happened here. Go
make these people's lives miserable.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
Yeah. Yeah, Bench Perry is miserable because I write a
peace of pop mechanics about how to tear down the
statue and he is still mad about it because he
said I can't wait for their piece about mods of
cocktails and I never wrote that as well, So Ben
Shapiro can suck it. Thank you for the career help
of Ben Shapiro.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
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listening
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Garrison Davis
James Stout
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