{"id":96874,"date":"2025-02-19T06:14:53","date_gmt":"2025-02-19T06:14:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/activist\/knowing-what-were-up-against\/"},"modified":"2025-02-19T06:14:53","modified_gmt":"2025-02-19T06:14:53","slug":"knowing-what-were-up-against","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=96874","title":{"rendered":"Knowing What We\u2019re Up Against"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<br \/><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/progressive.org\/downloads\/21455\/download\/CapitolBuildingDark.jpg?cb=41d56d51c917706ec6554cbca59dc020\" \/><\/p>\n<div>\n<p class=\"lead\">Katherine Stewart has spent more than fifteen years studying the U.S. right and has attended countless conferences, lectures, and meetings on topics ranging from ending legal abortion to promoting Christian nationalism in the public sphere.<\/p>\n<p>Her eyewitness accounts are riveting, and her latest book,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomsbury.com\/us\/money-lies-and-god-9781635578546\/\" target=\"_blank\" aria-label=\"Link opens in new window (None)\"><em>Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy<\/em><\/a>, is a sobering assessment of the movement\u2019s many twists and turns.<\/p>\n<p>The book divides the principal players of the religious and secular right into five categories: Funders, Thinkers, Sergeants, Infantry, and Power Players. And while schisms exist between the different constituencies\u2014and can perhaps be utilized by folks organizing against their racist, sexist, homophobic, and antidemocratic agendas\u2014she cautions against assuming that the right will crumble under the weight of ideological disagreements.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\n&#13;<\/p>\n<p>By Katherine Stewart\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\n&#13;<\/p>\n<p>Bloomsbury Publishing, 352 pages<\/p>\n<p>&#13;<br \/>\n&#13;<\/p>\n<p>Release date: February 18, 2025<\/p>\n<p>&#13;\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Instead, she urges us to take Christian nationalism seriously for the partisan political activism it promotes.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe desired end of Christian nationalism today is neither to win a majority nor to secure a seat at the table in a pluralistic democracy,\u201d she writes, \u201cbut to entrench minority rule under the facade of democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Moreover, she notes that the right is relying on an established four-step playbook that starts with the building of \u201can information bubble\u201d\u2014think\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.breitbart.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" aria-label=\"Link opens in new window (Breitbart)\">Breitbart<\/a><\/em>,<a href=\"https:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" aria-label=\"Link opens in new window (&#xA0;Fox News)\">\u00a0Fox News<\/a>,\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailysignal.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" aria-label=\"Link opens in new window (The Daily Signal)\">The Daily Signal<\/a><\/em>, and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newsmax.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" aria-label=\"Link opens in new window (Newsmax)\">Newsmax<\/a>\u2014to skew the \u201cwho, what, when, where, why, and how\u201d of the information that reaches readers and viewers.<\/p>\n<p>Step two, Stewart explains, requires the accentuation of imminent catastrophe: \u201cThe important thing to believe is that the end is nigh and that the bad guys always look like liberals,\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n<p>Next comes the transfer of \u201cpolitical legitimacy from democratic processes like elections and law enforcement mechanisms to higher authorities that allegedly represent the true spirit of the nation,\u201d enshrining a small inner circle with the power to run almost everything.<\/p>\n<p>The final step, she writes, is the relentless undermining of democracy by sowing distrust in elections, journalism, public education, public health, and the rule of law.<\/p>\n<p>As November\u2019s presidential election revealed, it\u2019s an effective combination. Thanks to well-funded think tanks, reams of policy papers are created, circulated, and promoted by astroturf groups and rightwing media to create an echo chamber of coordinated messaging: Climate change is a hoax; Christians are being persecuted; abortion is murder; critical race theory will destroy society; Planned Parenthood is enemy number one; school vouchers will restore parental control over children\u2019s education; LGBTQ+ people aim to destroy the nuclear family; mainstream Democrats are socialists and communists; immigrants will take your jobs; and restoring school prayer is imperative.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cScholarly\u201d groups have a heightened role in stoking rightwing fervor on these issues. Take the California-based\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.claremont.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" aria-label=\"Link opens in new window (Claremont Institute)\">Claremont Institute<\/a>, for example. The virtually all-male organization publishes an online magazine,\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/americanmind.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" aria-label=\"Link opens in new window (The American Mind)\">The American Mind<\/a><\/em>, and Stewart reports that articles have advocated armed resistance: \u201cGiven the promise of tyranny,\u201d one author in the journal\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/americanmind.org\/features\/the-constitution-citizenship-and-the-new-right\/\" target=\"_blank\" aria-label=\"Link opens in new window (writes)\">writes<\/a>, \u201cconservative intellectuals must openly ally with the AR-15 crowd.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The upshot, Stewart writes, is that well-funded groups like Claremont are working with others to \u201cmobilize racial, gender, and sex-related anxieties in support of an authoritarian political project.\u201d The goal, she concludes, is to \u201cgather up the grievances and resentments that many people have concerning race, family arrangements, and sexual order, and then offer to crush their perceived malefactors with an iron fist.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Donald Trump\u2019s victory at the polls underscores this observation, at least for now, but Stewart does not believe the right\u2019s dominance has to be long-lasting. As she sees it, if progressives can create and sustain multipronged educational, social welfare, and policy institutions and build broad-based coalitions to promote human and civil rights, then they will have the strong foundation needed to take on the right.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe new American fascism is more a political pathology than a political program,\u201d she writes. Knowing this may be the key to dismantling its appeal.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Katherine Stewart has spent more than fifteen years studying the U.S. right and has attended countless conferences, lectures, and meetings on topics ranging from ending legal abortion to promoting Christian nationalism in the public sphere. Her eyewitness accounts are riveting, and her latest book,\u00a0Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":96875,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12022],"tags":[3726,45718,30405,32115,42433,17399,2083,33852],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-96874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-activist","tag-book-review","tag-christian-nationalism","tag-eleanor-j-bader","tag-far-right","tag-february-march-2025","tag-knowing","tag-magazine","tag-rightwing"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Knowing What We\u2019re Up Against - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=96874\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Knowing What We\u2019re Up Against - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Katherine Stewart has spent more than fifteen years studying the U.S. right and has attended countless conferences, lectures, and meetings on topics ranging from ending legal abortion to promoting Christian nationalism in the public sphere. 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