#401 — Christian Nationalism and the New Right

Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So, if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Catherine Stewart. Catherine, thanks for joining me. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. So I I recently discovered you. You wrote a, an op ed in the New York Times, which they titled, Now Will We Believe What is Happening Right in Front of Us? Question mark. And I I wanna talk about what's happening right in front of us. But before we do, perhaps you can summarize your background as a journalist. Sure. I've been, an investigative journalist and reporter. My new book, Money Lies in God, Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, is my third book on the anti democratic movement, which involves the religious right, the new right, a number of kind of, features, different features. Sometimes, sort of, I would say, swimming in the same headwaters, but often with kind of different contours, each each group. Yes. So your your book comes out next week, which is probably when we're dropping this. So I think we're probably dropping this on your pub date. So your book, Money Lies in God, which, I just got the PDF of yesterday. So I I must say I have not read every word of it, but I I've read a lot of it. And we'll get into it, but we will by no means exhaust what is of interest in there. So let's find a way into this, I guess starting with the current moment politically, because it is genuinely confusing how these reactionary forces in American politics are intersecting and supporting one another. We have many allies of convenience, it seems. I mean, these people are not ideologically unified. You have Christian nationalists. You have oligarchs, you know, some of whom are Christian or nominally so, some of whom believe not much of anything, some are are quite reactionary Catholics who have been in the woodwork for, many generations it seems and seemed to be, influential on the Supreme Court and elsewhere. And it's it's a little strange to dissect all of this. It's also difficult to see how all of the summates in the person of, an orange monstrosity of Donald Trump. Let's start with your op ed, and then we'll we'll get into the book. What do you think is happening right in front of us that we should be concerned about? I mean, …