Axis Live: Elon Musk, AfD, and the Global Far-Right Network Nobody's Covering

0:00What are you really? I mean, I thought you were something, but I couldn't tell. Oh, okay, I see it now. Yeah, I mean, you look white, but I thought maybe something was going on. These are comments I've got in my entire life. As a mixed race person, every time I've walked into a room, I've wondered how people would interpret me, what expectations they would have based on my appearance, and what they might miss when talking to me and thinking of a stereotype. Growing up, we weren't just mixed race. Our dad was a Buddhist whose grandparents helped to found one of the first Buddhist temples on Maui. My mom was a white woman from the south, a Christian who grew up in charismatic churches in Missouri and Tennessee. This is why I am so excited to bring you mixed, a new series from the Institute for Religion,

1:05Media, and Civic Engagement and Apari, created by my friend and colleague, Dr. Kiyati Joshi. Kiyati is a Hindu woman of Indian heritage, and she unexpectedly fell in love with a white Christian man in Jerusalem of all places. That's where the story begins, and it takes us through her journey of convincing her parents that marrying this guy was worth it, having a son who was mixed race and mixed faith, raising him to be both Hindu and Christian. She's somebody who's been studying identity for two decades, and this series is her chance to share her personal journey and the incredible wisdom she's gained along the way. Join us for a mixed, a new series that drops September 14th, 2026 on AccessMundoMedia and wherever you get your podcasts. For the first time since 1945, a far-right party that borders on Nazism has won at least

2:17some form of power in Germany. That's AFD, and we will talk all about it today on AccessLive with me, Brad Donishi, and my colleague, Matt Taylor. Good to see you, Matt. How's it going today? I am doing well, Brad. How are you? Kids are in school. My kids are in school, and you're working so much here. So we're firing on all cylinders. We're doing our best. Your kids are in school. My book is out in one week, people, and it's American Caesar, Houthia, Karats and Tech Lords, a trading American to a monarchy. If you want to know about the gospel of Peter Teal and how that relates to the Heritage Foundation and the radical traditional Catholics that JD Vance seems to idolize as well as your favorite in mind, Pete Hegseth and Doug Wilson, RJ Rushduney. This is the book for you, and there is a promotion. So we have one week until pub day, and if you order today and the rest are most of this

3:20week, Barnes and Noble will give you 25% off. So go to the show notes, and you'll get 25% off. It's a perfect chance to get that preorder in before pub day. If you want to sign copy, go to Annie Blooms in Portland, their website, and when you get the book, it will be signed by yours truly. So that's the book news. One week, people, it's exciting. Tell your friends put a sign up in your yard, whatever you need to do. All right. Here we go. A.F.D. has won some summons of power, and we'll talk about how much in Germany this over the weekend. Let me give you a clip of the A.F.D. kind of figurehead, Alice Widal, talking about the A.F.D. platform in Germany. We have the answers. Yeah, my plan. We have a future plan for Germany.

4:21Some of you aren't watching this. Let me translate. We have a plan. We have a future. We have a vision for Germany that will address its greatest needs. In the first 100 days, a government's division will go on. The borders are going to be closed. And everyone is illegal. Close the borders and reject every illegal immigrant and entrant. All the papers are going to be gone. And a clear answer to all the world, the German borders are closed. Clear message to the world that German borders are closed. Let me give you a little bit of Elon Musk telling everyone before this election, Matt, to vote for A.F.D. You know, so I think this election coming up in Germany is incredibly important. I think it could decide the entire fate of Europe, maybe the fate of the world.

5:22That is the significance of this election. So that's why it's very important to talk to your friends and family and convince them to consider voting for A.F.D. and just go with it like a train reaction. Just one friend, talk to another friend and say, guys, do you want more of the last 10 years or do you want something different? And I think the people in Germany want something different. And if you want something different, you have to vote for a different party. This is just a fact. This is logic. He's showing off his genius here, Matt. So I just want to recap that unless anyone missed it. If you want something different, you have to vote for a different party. This is just logic. So not all of us are engineers in Silicon Valley or able to code not all of us own social media sites or send rockets that explode into the air for taxpayers to pay for. So it might be hard to follow. But if you want something different, you have to vote for a different party. That's just logic. So you have the future of Germany.

6:29Make it happen. But I can't emphasize not go out there, talk to people, convince people, one board at a time. There's a need for change. It's got to be done. And this election is so important. It's extremely important. I do not say it lightly when I think the future of civilization could hang on this election. So I'm not sure that I've heard Elon talk about an election recently where he has not said that civilization hangs on it. I mean, he said this when he was like putting, pouring money into Senate races in the Midwest. He said it before the presidential election. Elon Musk just dripping with charisma in that clip, just truly a, you know, just magnetic. I mean, you know, sometimes I think JD Vance is just has an animal magnetism to him. And then I just see a minute of Elon Musk and I'm like, no competing with that guy. Oh, man, he walks into a room and just, all right.

7:30Tell us about AFD. There's people that probably know a bunch here, Matt. There's a lot of folks that have heard this. They know they should be frightened, but they don't know why. Yeah. And I don't pretend to any deep expertise in German regional politics or anything like that. So I want to give kind of the high level kind of why I think this is important. Why we should be paying attention to this. So AFD alternative for Deutschland is this far right party that is, it was formed in the 2010s. And it, I've done an axis daily brief about this, but we've talked about that there's different versions of kind of Nazi ideology or at least Nazi kind of strategy. And AFD is much more in the kind of mainstream or kind of Nazi strategy, kind of taking Nazi themes and not see ideas far right extreme far right ideas. And they can get quite extreme in the case of AFD, but trying to kind of inject those into

8:30liberal democratic politics and say, hey, can't we just have a conversation about exterminating people? Can't we just have a conversation about expelling anyone who's a migrant from our country, whether they're legal or not? Right. So it's introducing these extreme ideas, but trying to make them into a sort of mainstream. And it really had a pivot into the hard right around 2015, 2016, right around the same time as Donald Trump is emerging on the scene, right around the same time as Brexit, right, the surge of right-wing populism. And AFD has really benefited from this backlash within the German populace against mass migration. And just to think about that for a minute, mass migration is only going to increase from here because we are living through all these regional wars, civil wars and different localities. And then you add to that climate change and hold swaths of the globe are becoming virtually uninhabitable. And that creates refugee crisis, right? People need to flee across borders to save the lives of their families.

9:34That's an entirely reasonable thing for those people to do, but liberal democracies have a very hard time with mass migration because there's constitutional protections for migrants. And the system is built that way, but then the people who are living there can lean into nativism and nationalism. And that's what we've seen happening in Germany is the backlash to some of these waves of migration, especially from the serious civil war. We're now seeing that kind of come to fruition. And AFD, which was this party that has struggled in the past, has been pretty marginal. In this election, in this big region, got like 43% of the vote, which was like double what they've gotten in the past. And so, and if you pay attention to how figures within German politics reacted to this, it was with shock, it was with great consternation. And one of the real barriers that has been created, I think we've talked about this before here as well, there are different kinds of democracies. And one of the things that, especially in Germany, they instituted after World War II, was

10:36the measures of kind of a protective democracy. One that tries to bar these more far right forces from really asserting themselves in German politics. And so they have rules like, it's kind of more a norm within their politics. Other political parties don't cooperate with far right parties. There's kind of a ban on forming alliances with them. AFD is becoming enough of a force within German politics that those bands are starting to break down and people are starting to say, hey, well, maybe we do have to incorporate them. And so, there's a full mainstreaming of some of these ideas. And I think it also signals this broader kind of far right backlash that we are watching happen around the world. And it's not this like kind of single curve at everything is moving in the same direction. It's episodic, it moves back and forth. So you can have a good outcome in Hungary, right, in the election in Hungary this year. And Orban got displaced. And yet we see that these forces are still there and they're still mobilizing and they're

11:38operating in coordination often with each other. And so I think we really do need to recognize that the kind of liberal democratic world order that most of us had known for most of our lives, the thing that was built after World War II to try to protect against occurrences like World War II occurrences like these kind of global wars. Those things are really breaking down. And this is another one of those kind of stones in the avalanche that we should be paying attention to because I think it signals that there's greater dissolution of the democratic world order. Let me give you a couple more quotes from AFD leaders just to illustrate the kind of platform that AFD holds. So Bjorn Hoka, the head of the AFD from about a decade ago called Berlin's Holocaust Memorial Amonement of Shame and called on the country to stop at toning for its Nazi past. Alice Vidal, who I just mentioned, says that things like Berkaz, Hetzgarv, Hetzgarv's publicly

12:41supported knife men and other good for nothings will not secure our prosperity, economic growth and social state. It's kind of a reference to immigrants, Maximilian, Maximilian, anytime someone's name is Maximilian you got to pay attention. Michelin Crow, the AFD's top candidate in the 2024 European Parliament called the EU a vassal of the US and wants to replace it with a quote Confederacy of Fatherlands. There's others, I mean, we can keep going on down the line. Let's see, let me give you one more. When it comes to migrants, Christian Luth said we can always shoot them later. That's not an issue or gas them as you wish. It doesn't matter to me. Now on one hand, I want to notice something here with Germany. Germany, of course, was the place where Hitler rose to power, the site of the Nazi regime and when we think of the Holocaust, the death of 6 million people perpetrated by that government.

13:44So Germany will always have that infamous role in history. Many since then has also been a place of deep reckoning with that past, a place where in public culture, in policy, there has been a recognition of what happened and a need to prevent it from happening ever again. To me, that's different than the United States has reckoned with its own history of enslaving people of African heritage, redlining Jim Crow, Chinese exclusion. There's always this sense in this country of not really wanting to talk about it. In Germany, they have talked about it, confronted it, had a public kind of sense of needing to recognize what happened and not doing it again. Therefore, to me, A.F.D.'s rise is alarming on numerous fronts. Yes, it's Germany, but it's also a Germany that has done everything it can to make sure this doesn't happen as you've mentioned, Matt. Final thought here, if I throw back to you, is also it's striking when you read those comments from A.F.D. leaders that you could honestly find those comments on Fox News pretty

14:49much every day. Unfortunately, I think we've arrived at a place in this country where if you hear the A.F.D. platform and you're informed on what happens on Newsmax, Fox News, right wing podcasts every day, the two agendas sound pretty similar. The borders completely. If migrants come, you have the freedom to hurt them, name them, do whatever you need to in inhumane ways to get rid of them. We don't want the queer community here. We don't want globalism. We don't want global trade. We don't want an international order. It's an isolationism. Isolationism, it's a return to quote the fatherland, the homeland and so on. It's a mirror of what we see from the American right today. Further thoughts on this? Just again, to dial out to the global scale a little bit because I think this is an indicator of what's happening again at a much more global scale.

15:51There's a really important report that was published by the varieties of democracy institute which is in Sweden and they published a report on the state of democracy around the world every year. And their report for 2026 is very eye opening and very disturbing because basically what they describe is the pulling away from this kind of liberal democratic system that has more or less kind of led the world in the late 20th century. And we've had, if you talk to political scientists, the democratization happens in waves globally. And most recent wave was the third wave of democratization at the end of the 20th century, the breakup of the Soviet Union, all these new democracies being formed and yet right now what we are going through is what they call the third wave of a talk criticize. And we have fewer liberal democracies today than we had even a year ago according to their data. And one of the ones that got knocked off the list of liberal democracies because the data of 2025 was the Trump administration and the United States.

16:54We are no longer by their metrics of liberal democracy. And so when we see things like this happen in Germany, when we see these kind of far right movements that are ascended, that is a part of this bigger global picture. And the craziest thing or one of the craziest things in the report is they just say they say basically all the liberal democratic gains that have been that we've had since 1978 have more or less been wiped out. And so people like if you think worldwide, globally people were more free during the Ronald Reagan administration than they are right now, right? Even in the midst of the Cold War, even in the midst of the Soviet Union being this kind of force on the global stage, right now we have more autocracy, only about 7% of the global population lives in a liberal democracy. And it's 74% live in autocracy. And everyone else is kind of somewhere in those states in between. And so we are witnessing a rise of global fascism, a rise of global far right parties, reactions against migrants, reactions against LGBTQ populations, reactions against religious minorities.

17:59And that is a very, very dangerous trend. And people like Elon Musk are at the forefront of helping to push that. And I'll just note because we've talked quite a bit about Elon Musk, when JD Vance traveled to Germany in 2025, he spoke out and gave this big speech in support of AFD and basically rebuking European leaders for having these kind of bands of not cooperating with far right parties and saying we need to get rid of those. We just need to work together, people, but who are they willing to work together with? They're willing to work together with people who are Nazis. People who want to exterminate and shoot migrants. This is a, it's not a perfect synchronicity. It's not about all these alliances. Oh, they're in perfect lockstep. A lot of those people don't like Trump right now because of the stupid things that he does. But AFD is still having a moment in the sun. And if you watch the reactions of German politicians, they experience this like it was with.

19:03So I, yeah, I want to just mention, I'm glad you brought up JD Vance. So JD Vance and we won't do it today. We won't bring up the clips and everything. But we have talked about it in the past. JD Vance basically said, you know, the United States supports Europe as long as real Europeans and real European leaders are in charge and are leading the way. And that includes AFD for him. And you know, something people missed from a month ago is that the Trump administration is giving grants to far right groups in Europe to promote things like traditional values and nationalism and so on. And you know, groups like AFD are the ones that they're like basically trying to give taxpayer money to that in itself is worth a whole three hour kind of, you know, analysis and breakdown. One of the things I argue in American Caesar out in one week is that there, there is this sense of saving Western civilization and people on this channel have heard me talk about this for a long time now. But when you say you want to save Western civilization, what it provides beyond MAGA, right?

20:07And I'm curious what you think about this matter is like 10 years ago, we got MAGA. Make America great again. If you say save Western civilization and you're JD Vance or you're Elon Musk, you get a kind of, you get kind of a lateral shared ethos with people in Germany, with people with the far right in France, with, you know, whoever may be doing what they're doing across the continent. And so you can have a shared sense of what you want to accomplish. Anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-queer. It's basically the same enemies. And so that's what that provides. Everything Western civilization gives you a way to build a nexus, a network that bridges groups like AFD with the MAGA movement, with people like Elon Musk and so on. I want to zero in on Musk, but any thoughts on that before we turn to him for the last couple minutes of this segment. Yeah, I mean, I think this civilizational frame has become very popular in recent years,

21:09I think in part because it does that work of bridging between these different nationalist movements and kind of offers a shared vocabulary, right? So when Trump says make America great again and then America first, right, which he's kind of more or less abandoned to that slogan and has been picked up by Tucker Carlson and all these other people, right? What they were signaling was a kind of appeal to a sort of naked nationalism. Right. We're America, we're going to isolate ourselves, we're going to shore up the borders. The civilizational thing I think is more of an evolution within that kind of ideology because they have friends in AFD, because they have friends in Hungary, because they have friends in Russia. And they recognize that there are these places where they really do sync up and where they really do share the kind of similar racial anxieties, similar kind of at least kind of religious moralistic anxieties, cultural anxieties.

22:12And so this kind of like we're going to save Western civilization. I think the better way to translate it is we are going to save white male Christian Western dominance to the degree that we can. And they're going to calibrate that a little bit differently in the different locations. Oh, you know, people in Germany really didn't like the way that Trump was talking about Greenland. So it's not like AFD is going to go out and be all Trumpy, right? They've got to win elections within their space. But at the values level, at the agenda level, there is all this synchronicity. And by the way, one of the real backstops to that synchronicity, one of the kind of markers of who is aligned with that is support for Vladimir Putin. And then and and and tip of the to the to Ukraine and to and and support for either ending the war and just giving Ukraine to Russia or just kind of supporting Russia within the war and saying, Hey, they're within their rights to take over the stuff, right? So it is a I think it's it's a real global threat.

23:13And I think it is a but it's not it's not this kind of like neat access of powers kind of arrangement. It's more that these kind of far right movements here echoes of themselves in other places, see places opportunities for collaboration and cooperation. But the level of coordination is pretty low. And that's how like Elon Musk can dive in and be supportive or JD Vance can be supporter of this stuff. And yet it doesn't seem to harm the AFD's bottom line even as they because they don't really want to be labeled as Trumpy. Well, let's talk about Elon Musk. So here's a screenshot. And I want to just warn everyone it's a screenshot of somebody doing a kind of, you know, Nazi salute a Hyl Hitler. So just just be if you're watching, just be aware. But this is a young man from the kind of victory party the other day at at AFD's kind of post election celebration. And you know, this was all over social media. He's giving what appears to be a kind of Hyl Hitler Nazi salute motion. It's very similar to what Elon Musk did at the time of the inauguration of Donald Trump

24:19for a second term. The thing that I want to just mention here and get your thoughts on is Elon Musk is willing to zoom in, give his speech in support of AFD. Elon Musk is willing every day to get on X and people like you and me often go check what he's saying or at least I do because I want to know. He posts some of the most vile xenophobic anti trans anti migrant stuff you'll find. He does not hiding it. He is not tiptoeing around it. He's there's no respectability politics. There's no veneer. No sheen it's gone. Elon Musk is the richest man in the world and he owns X what many of us used to know and love his Twitter. He has one of the largest platforms in the world. He has the most money of any individual in the world. He is going to pour reportedly Matt about $120 million into the GOP push for the midterms as we get into this last two months before the elections. He will be the biggest donor. He will be the most important benefactor for congressional candidates, senate candidates

25:24and so on. And yet all I hear about as somebody who consumes a lot of media to do the work we do is about Hassan Piker, the streamer. I'm not going to pretend. I don't watch Hassan Piker. I don't watch anything on Twitch. I'm just an old man who likes to read books. So I don't know what Hassan Piker says day in and day out and it's not something I've really investigated. I have ID. I have clips and things I see online and people send me. I just think it's sad that we're at a place where Hassan Piker garners 24 articles in mainstream media and it's just normal now. He said, you on musk is the largest donor to the GOP. He's in supporting the AFD in Germany. He says some of them is vile things you'll find on Twitter and it's whatever. That's just how it is. Thoughts on this phenomenon. Yeah. I also don't watch Hassan Piker. I frankly don't give a rat's ass. I just have to say about anything. I'm like, okay.

26:25He's some guy who people watch. I'm like, who cares? What is his expertise in anything? Right? It just doesn't interest me. Yet again, I think it speaks to the kind of atrophy nature of our media culture that wants to... It thrives on conflict and attention and it's our news media wants to seek out. What is new? What is conflictual here? There's big conflict around Hassan Piker and Democratic politics because he's a genuinely controversial guy who says, frankly, as far as I can tell, really stupid things a lot of the time. And then because he's talking constantly. And so there's a lot of ammo there to throw around. Elon Musk doesn't create conflict within Republican politics because people are on board with what he's doing. And yet, if I was living in universe 104 over there and was trying to...

27:28Trying to describe to you the scenario of an Elon Musk, right? Here is one of the most wealthy people in the world, arguably the most wealthy person in the world, who has serial relationships with women so that he can create more offspring that he does not support, who has not the ideas kind of that he seems to have very deeply embedded within himself at a very young age, who himself is a migrant to the US and rails against migrants to the US, who has an obsession with technology who bought his own social media company to try to control things and is now one of the largest donors to Republican politics. And yet, no one talks about him. No one writes. He is a truly fascinating and disturbing person that we should be constantly in conversation with about the news because of how important he is to the structure of US politics. But he has kind of slipped into one of those corners of American politics where because

28:32there isn't conflict around him that much other than these kind of like child kind of custody and and and alimony arguments, the media has kind of just turned a blind eye to him. Oh, well, he's not in government anymore. He's not he's not doing this doge thing. So what's the point of pain? We'll just cover him like any other tech guy. And then top of that, he's also embedded within this AI story that is completely upending our politics. And yet we I feel like we don't have the the angles and the lenses and the styles of questions that we need in our media environment to actually make legible someone like Elon Musk. But I think what you're saying is exactly right. We live, you know, one of the unfortunate things about where we are now is unless there's conflict, there's no story. And he's something that's always been the case Brad get over it. The newspapers covered conflict rate. But algorithms reward anger. They reward curiosity. They reward the bombastic.

29:34So Elon Musk is not fighting with Donald Trump right now. He's not fighting with JD Vance. He's not fighting with any Republican senators. He's not fighting with Peter Teal. He's not fighting with any of those people as you're saying. So he's a non-issue where a Sassan Piker is getting, you know, the Abdul Al-Sahead, a Hassan Piker, whatever that is, is drumming up comments from King Jeffries or other people in the Democratic Party. And so it's covered by the media. It's just incredible. I think we will look back on this era. And then people, if there are still books and there are still schools, people will say, how did you not cover Elon Musk every day all day as the biggest menace or at least in the top five to everything you talked about earlier, Matt, the Democratic liberal order, free and fair elections, living in a society where you have representation and people are held accountable under the law. Like, how did we not just pay attention to him if you're like looking back on this in a history book 50 years from now?

30:35I mean, the kids are going to wonder like my kids kids are going to be like, how was that guy not the thing you talked about nine hours a day and tried to stop? Because he was clearly one of the biggest threats. Final thoughts and then we're going to take a break and then we're going to bring in our guest Warren Throckmorton to talk about some religious liberty and something else. You know that I think this is also in part a media culture problem. And you can have a strategy for, we're going to try to really highlight what's important, what's significant, but culture eats strategy for breakfast. And so I think that the challenge that we have and I would love to talk to reporters to help them figure this out. We have to figure out ways to make what is important gain attention. And because if we, if you're just tracking what gets attention, what keeps attention, then the algorithms have pretty well sorted out our kind of mass psychology into twitch streamers and conflict and AI videos and all kinds of BS that is not actually important.

31:40AFD is important. Elon Musk is important. The global democratic order is important. The war in Ukraine is important. And if we, and the slide into American authoritarianism is important and if our media lens obscures those things, then it is failing us. I agree with that. All right, folks, I want to tell you about something going to take a break. I don't know about you, but every day I feel like I'm juggling five things at once. I'm a writer. I'm a podcaster. I'm a small business owner. I'm somebody who has two young children. My phone ringing. Emails are coming in. People are shouting from the other room. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo spelled Q-U-O. The business phone system built so that you never miss an opportunity. All your calls, texts and voicemails live in one place. So anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history and respond fast.

32:42You can set it up in minutes on any device, keep your existing number and add teammates as you grow. No IT, no hassle. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free. Plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash swedge. That's Quo, q-u-o.com slash swedge. The U.S. decloses a 95-page rule to restrict mail-in voting. U.S.P.S. publishes a rule requiring voter lists from states or else. How the U.S. voting looks under Trump's finalized election plans. These are all headlines about a new rule from the United States Postal Service. But I'm looking at them on ground news, which provides me with a way to compare bias in different news sources, coming from liberal, conservative or centrist outlets. Ground news is a solution for getting down to the facts of important stories and understanding how different outlets are framing what's happening in our country. I use this in order to get a picture of the entire news cycle surrounding important

33:46stories in religion and politics. Go to groundnews.com slash swedge to get 40% off their unlimited access, vantage subscription. Go to groundnews.com slash swedge. Use the link to get the discount. And so they know I sent you. All right, y'all, gonna bring in Warren Throckmorton, who is a scholar of American religious history to talk about Baptist, Baptist leader Al Moller. So we're gonna bring in Warren here and, hey, Warren, how are you? How are you doing? We were just telling everyone about you and all your credentials. I have to say, whenever I talk to you Warren, I'm always jealous of your name because your name is Warren Throckmorton. Like when you walk into a room, you just have instant gravitas. You know, you are, it is impossible not to take you seriously with a name like that. Do you feel that way? Well, I guess, thank my parents.

34:48It's the best I got. Tell us about your book and then we're gonna jump into Al Moller and why you're here today. What's your book called and make sure everybody knows about it? The Christian past that wasn't debunking the Christian nationalist myths that hijack history. Wow, you put me on the spot. I'm glad I remembered all that. I was good. No, you remember the subtitle. Your publisher is gonna be happy. The subtitle is, you know, one of those things that, you know, you need one, I guess, but I'd usually just go by the Christian past that wasn't. And that's a big part of what the book's about is the idea that there was a Christian founding, but when you really look at the history, you find that that doesn't materialize. The facts just aren't there. And so I do debunk a fair amount of the stories that are used to justify this, this notion of a Christian America.

35:49Well, you're the perfect person to talk to in light of that because you've spent so much time looking into those histories, you know, all of those things you hear on right-wing media, whether it's from Mike Johnson, whether it's from David Barton, whether it's from the late Charlie Kirk, you know, telling you about how, you know, the first Bible printed in North America was this, this is what Congress did with it. That right or Deuteronomy is the most quoted book by the, the, the framers of the Constitution or we can go on down the line. You're here to talk about Al Moller. So Al Moller is the leader of the Southern Baptist Convention. He's really the figurehead to me of the Southern, of the Southern Baptist Seminary. He's really the figurehead of the Southern Baptist Convention. He's somebody who over the last decade has really sort of found himself co-zing up to what used to be a fringe movement in Christian reconstructionism. And here's a video of him appearing with Doug Wilson a couple years ago at CPAC.

36:50I want to maximize the Christian commitments of the state of the civilization. And I would call that acknowledgement. In other words, I'm not claiming that everyone in the state, every citizen is going to be a confessing Christian. I'm going to say that does not mean they're not obligated to the acknowledgement of the Christian structure of the civilization and its commitments. So he's basically saying there that I want to, he's basically saying there that everybody who's here doesn't have to be a Christian, but they have to acknowledge the Christian structure of the civilization that in which they live. This brings us to a debate that he was part of just about a month ago with Doug Wilson and, and Joe Rigny and some other people. Because part of a new book they have about debating Christian nationalism and, you know, whether debate is the right word there, more like conversation among people who largely agree that the Christian nationalism is a good idea.

37:50Paul Miller is the only one in there who has what we might call a moderating position and we can talk about him a different time and how we see his work. But here's a little bit of, of, of Al Molar talking at that debate from a couple of months ago. Particularly Christian understanding of the nation. And then of course I make a distinction, the nation state, a far more modern invention. But I want to take us back to the fact that one of the things that marks ancient Israel is of course the fact that it was clearly promised upon the fact that God had established, that God had given it birth, God had formed it, and, and God reigned over it, the sovereign God of the universe, the one true and living God. And when you see that, you come to understand that there is a legitimacy that is ontological. And so one of the key assertions I want to make it, and throughout this project is the

38:52fact that the American experiment, the American affirmations cannot exist without an ontological basis. I believe that in the Declaration of Independence there is an acknowledgement of that ontological basis, that is it has to have a basis in reality that is, that is beyond earthly reality. All right. We could, we could let that run, but we're not going to. So Warren, he basically says there are a couple of things I want to get your take on. And I want you to help people understand why a Southern Baptist wanting the United States to be a place where people must acknowledge the Christian civilization and its ontological basis is such a departure from most of Baptist history when it comes to religious freedom and liberty. But he's basically saying, a, the Declaration of Independence seems to gesture towards this ontological reality. And then he does the thing that I think all three of us have seen one million times over

39:52the last however many years we've been studying these things is he makes a one-to-one comparison and apples to apples comparison of ancient Israel and the United States as if they are similar entities that can be understood structurally as nations in the exact same way. I'm sure you have a million thoughts on this. I'll throw it to you Warren and then we'll bring in Matt to see what's cooking for you in a minute. Well, he certainly likes the word ontological. He uses it. I hope, I hope at my funeral someday people are like, you know, not much good to say about Onishi, but he did like the word ontological. So there's that. Yeah. Okay. It'll be on his tombstone, I reckon. Man, I just, I thought there must have been a drinking game at that conference. Every time Moler uses the word ontological, you know, we get to take a shot. Take a shot. Yeah. Cause you know, that's okay up there. Yeah. Well, you know, of course, ontological is to do with the nature of reality and he's saying

40:56that the constitution really didn't have a basis in reality unless it's based on Christianity. As if, you know, well, then what were they doing, I guess? You know, what was happening there in Philadelphia? Was that not real? Did they not have anything that they were basing the constitution on? They certainly seemed to work pretty hard at it and they, you know, came from somewhere. And in fact, they were even presented with an opportunity in the constitutional convention to do something a little more religious. And Franklin, of all people gave him a chance to do that and they declined to do that. It wasn't just that they made a mistake. Oops, we forgot to put the Christ in there. They actively said, no, we're not going to do it that way. In fact, we're going to put a clause in here that says, you can't really have a religious

42:01nation or a Christian nation because there's no religious test that will be allowed for people who are elected to this government. There was a, you know, an ontological reality of sorts. It's just not the one he liked. And he said that in the declaration, you know, there was a basis on something other, you know, than the reality of the declaration by including God words. But I hate to break it to the guy. Nature's God was not Jehovah. He wants to make the references to God in the declaration of independence his God, you know, his view of Orthodox Christian God, but, you know, Thomas Jefferson, the people who wrote the, and even made the corrections, they were not Orthodox Christians. So if he wants that to be the ontological foundation of the nation and reconstruct the

43:03Constitution with that in mind, he's talking about a enlightenment God, that he doesn't recognize. And so there's so many, you said I had a million thoughts, well, I actually two million. And so I don't know where to stop exactly. Well, there's a lot of problems in what he had to say there in Moscow. Question or comment from you, Matt. What's on your mind? I mean, it seems to me what Mueller is trying to do is, I mean, you've got the, the, like David Bartons of the world who want to say, I can read all kinds of Bible verses into the declaration of independence in the Constitution. Right. So therefore these, these documents are soaked in the Bible. And if you don't understand the Bible, you don't understand the, these documents. And then everyone looks at those references, you're like, that doesn't make any sense to me. And then you have people, I think some more honest of these, like, hardline, reformed guys, like Rush Duney who are like, yeah, there God's not in the Constitution there. And that's why the Constitution's deficient.

44:04Yeah. Right. And we need, that's why we need to either modify the Constitution and put much more God in there or we need to scrap this Constitution and start over. I feel like what, what Mueller's trying to do is, is maybe try to straddle those two positions and say, well, there's an ontological assumption here. Yeah. And so therefore we can have a de facto religious test. We can say that, that anyone who holds public office needs to acknowledge these things. And, and that just becomes then another version of a blasphemy law, right? That, that if you want to hold public office, you have to acknowledge Christian dominance and Christian power over society. You have to acknowledge our narratives of history. And if you don't, then we were going to bar you from holding office and screw the Constitution if it disagrees. Is there any daylight between these people, or is it all just kind of, they're all basically making the same Christian nationalist, imposing the same Christian nationalist logic on the American founding and then finding slightly different ways to calibrate how to insert

45:09that into modern life? Well, I think there are some differences, but it just highlights the improbability or impracticality of their ever governing. How in the world could you get these guys in a room and get some kind of, you know, way they're going to actually put this into practice? Moeller, you know, some of them want to make actual blasphemy illegal. You know, you say something naughty against Jesus or God, and then you get, you know, whipped or thrown into jail or something. Moeller wants to, you know, I guess you can do that. You can blaspheme the living God he said. If you say America's not founded as a Christian nation on Christian principles, I don't know, he hadn't said yet what they're going to do to you. I just want, I just want the bottom bunk in the gulag.

46:09That's all I hope for. And I'm pretty sure my, good, you can have it because I fall out of bed. So I'm pretty sure that my book will be banished. So you know, let me just put a plug in, buy it now because with these guys getting power, none of our books are going to be available, right? So get all our books now because when those guys get in power, they're going to be all banished. And they have it. Let me, let me touch on this religious liberty idea and maybe sort of provide a hypothesis as to why someone like Moeller would be publishing a book with someone like Doug Wilson. Historically, Baptists have been and there's many different kinds of Baptists, but on the whole, Baptists have been dissenters. You know, if you look at the England, the Baptists are the dissenters against the Church of England and so on. I attended Regis Park College at Oxford. They're very proud of their Baptist dissenting heritage, right?

47:12Here in the United States, the idea of religious liberty to the Baptists has traditionally been something that's been welcomed because when you separate government from church, the Baptist says you can actually practice Christianity, how it's supposed to be practiced without the government telling you what it is. My hypothesis would be that figures like Moeller over the last 10 to 15 years have looked at the United States in the declining religiosity and participation rates. The rise of the nuns, people who identify as not really religious, the rise in non-Christian faiths, especially in public view. He sort of said, you know, all that religious liberty stuff is great when you're the majority and when most people around you are, are quote unquote, Christian. But when they're not, you kind of got to read the tea leaves a little bit and Doug Wilson and his ideas about blasphemy laws, not allowing Muslims to practice their religion in public, punishing people for not going to church on Sunday.

48:14You might need that because we're no longer the majority. We're no longer, you know, there is no more majority as Paul Weirich wrote in 1999. What are how that hits you Warren, just given the wide historical lens you have on all of these debates surrounding religious freedom in the United States? Well, you know, the founders, several of them, Franklin Madison, said that if you're a religion, then you need to state self. You're not much of a religion. That is in fact a sign, you know, Franklin said, it's a sign to me that your religion isn't very strong or it's not a very good one if you need to state self. And you know, intuitively make some sense if your religion is actually divine, if it has any supernatural, you know, anything supernatural about it, why would you need natural help? Why would you need the state self? You know, and the other thing I thought as you were talking is that I went to a Baptist

49:15college for undergraduate. I went to Cedarville College, was college then, university now. And we all had to take a course. It was a required course for everybody. It was called Baptist History. We called it Baptist Misery. It wasn't the most popular course on campus. I was a fairly newly converted Christian at the time and I remember being fascinated by something called soul liberty and the distinctives of Baptist as distinct from others. Another one was separation of church and state. And that was taught to us very, very clearly that a free church and a free state, that was a Baptist distinctive. And my old professor Don Parvin is rolling over in his grave at the way Baptist carry on these days. You know, I think that there is such a departure among many of the Baptist leaders to want

50:23help. And I think you're right. I think they see the ascendance of other religions, the no religion. And it just scares them. And I talk about this in my book is that this fear is a psychological factor that drives this will to power and that brings people to nationalism as a remedy. You know, it's not just that people wake up and think, I love my country so much, I want to make it all Christian. It's just, it's a remedy to a problem that they see. But it's a false remedy, of course. It's false politically, but it's also false religiously. Matt, how do you, you've talked about this in the past, but you know, you have a really insightful understanding to me of the place Southern Baptist Convention plays in American, in the American religious landscape at the moment. You know, someone like Molar is kind of the figurehead of the largest Protestant denomination in the country.

51:23Yeah. What do you make of the Southern Baptist in light of this kind of theological turn from him? Yeah, you know, this connects somewhat of the conversation we were having before Warren joined us, Brad, because we were talking about media lenses and how the media kind of interprets and understands things. And I, I don't know about you, Warren, but I am just baffled a lot of time by the media coverage that Al Molar gets because it'll be this, like, the New York Times will decide, oh, we got to do our episodic story about evangelicalism. And so we're going to analyze some new trend going on in evangelicalism that really doesn't often have much to do with the Baptist at all, but let's make sure we interview Al Molar and get his take on this because he's kind of the barometer or the bell weather that we can use to understand what's going on. My read on what's going on in evangelicalism in the United States is there's this mass radicalization in multiple directions at once, right? Many people are running into these kind of non-denominational, especially charismatic, especially kind of NAR aligned kind of churches and mega churches.

52:25Those are the people shown up in all the photos with Trump. And those are the people that got real juice within the administration. And then there's a bunch of other Protestants who are running hard in the direction of Doug Wilson and this kind of hard line reform camp. And those are the new centers of gravity that are pulling kind of evangelicals in one of those two directions. And frankly, they're kind of pulling them in the same direction because it's all Christian nationalism, all Christians supremacy all the time. And so the Southern Baptist, to me, are they're the battlefield, right? They're the people getting pulled. They're the people who are in a bunch of a movement kind of more and more non-denominational, more and more charismatic and a bunch of more and more hard line reform. And then, but here's the gap. With Al Molar changes his own position. When the bell weather that all the media wants to cover and say, this is the person who really has a beat on what's going on in evangelicalism, would he changes his functional position on the separation of church and state, one of the hallmarks of the Baptist tradition? It's covered on Warren Throckmorton's sub-stack, but you know what's seen in New York Times

53:25reporters jumping in here. Why is it that we have these habits of turning to a guy like Al Molar, making him into some sort of a mainstream figure, and yet when he himself moves in this more radical and hard line direction, hey, I guess he just has a different opinion today than he had yesterday. Yeah, it may be to preserve the source. I don't know. I've had hard time figuring out what reporters do. Why they cover what they do. That's been a lifelong, well adult lifelong curiosity of mine is why they do what they do. But in this case, maybe because he is such a source for comment and they have propped them up in the way you describe, I've seen that as well, doing a story about him in a way that could look somewhat uncomplimentary.

54:26Maybe there's a distance incentive to do that. But it's a great story, and it is a story. That's why I keep writing about it. I can't believe it hasn't been covered even by Christian media. I think they'll get around to it, religion, news, services, and all that. But I want them to ask, Al, for instance, why are the penalties? Okay, so we three, we get our books banned. Well do we get a jail? Do we get put in stocks? Find? I'd like to know what the consequences are. Because obviously if you're going to get accused, or if you're guilty of blasphemy, which, and by the way, most every historian will clearly be in trouble, because not many of them believe that the founding was uniquely or distinctly based on the holy Trinity or the

55:29veracity of the old and new testaments. How would, how did Thomas Jefferson get to be president after all? He didn't believe in any of that stuff. So if that's a test for holding office or not blaspheming, what's going to happen to us? He's even in one of his statements said, citizens would be required to affirm this. What do we lose our citizenship? He needs to be pressed on these statements. Can you make these things as the president of the biggest Baptist school in the country? Maybe the world, I don't know. And nobody asks you anything about it. I just, it's hard to believe. So let me, let me throw one more thing at you all before we go is, is, I agree that he needs to be pressed on this. If you look at the people he's sharing his stage with, Joe Rigny, Doug Wilson, Jared Longshund,

56:32Sure. These are people that think the 19th Amendment should be repealed. These are people who think that mass deportation is, is what God wants. I mean, we could go on down the line. Joe Rigny, some of you watching or listening or members of the man who wrote the sin of empathy, he's sort of in the top crop of people who think empathy is a bad thing. What's the point? I think for Mueller, and this is just me psychologizing now and you all can take this for what you want. But, you know, Matt, if I think of Baptist as caught between two new centers of gravity in American Protestantism, the New Apostolic Reformation and the Theobro ultra reformed reconstruction as Doug Wilson kind of camp, there are many Baptist who have gone to the charismatic kind of edges, right? The, the Baptochosticles. But did I say that wrong? Baptochosticles. It sounded like I just said some sort of, or I should not be saying in front of my five

57:33year old. So, you know, and Mike Johnson, we could put in there, you know, we could put John Hagey in there, we can, we can, we can sort of look at all the people that would fit. I think Al Mueller is too patriarchal for that. I think he looks over there and there's like, you got women on stage, you got women preaching? No. And I'm Al Mueller. I'm an intellectual. You know, which sure you are, whatever, you're an ontological, okay? Keep you in that word. And so those folks, those charismatic folks, they're not intellectual for me. They don't write books, they do prophecy. They don't do theology. They do apostolic word from God. I'm not going over there. Women on stage and that, no, no, no, no, I need to be over here. At least these reformed guys are really into the reformers. They're really into Calvin, they're really into books. They're really into these pedantic arguments about eschatology, ecclesiology, satariology. So I'm going that way. I don't know. You know, maybe it doesn't matter, but that's my take as to why he'd rather hang out

58:35with Doug Wilson than Paul, Paul White or Lance Walnell. Either of you want to jump in on that? Does that make sense or does it matter? I think that's, I think that's as close as anything. I do think Moller as a seminary professor and just how he sees himself, views himself as, you know, aware of history, aware of the place that he and his movement fits in history. And yeah, there's other movements are kind of, you know, lightweight when it comes to the intellectual side of things. I think it also, and Warren did has done a really good job through his sub-stack and even calling attention to this. Is it the Baptist faith and message? Is the document that was created? That's right. There's a, like this very important statement of faith within the Southern Baptist Convention written in 2000 by Moller himself, right?

59:37He was on the committee. That's right. And it is explicit that there needs to be separation of church and state. Very much in line with Baptist history and that, the whole legacy that we've laid out here. And yet Moller who helps to write the thing is now the one openly contradicting it, both in print and in his commentary. And I think that that also signals this drift that we're seeing, right? That they're all drifting in the direction of Christian nationalism, right? And they might land in slightly different places in terms of exactly what the penalties will be. And oh, maybe Al Moller has a very nuanced position on the 19th Amendment. And maybe he can see some good in women voting or something like that. He's not a dog willess, right? And yet he's ending up in this adjacent territory that says, well, you know, if you don't affirm the trinitarian nature of the American founding, then you're just not a real American, right?

1:00:43And so the drift is consistent even as you can find these shatings and these nuances among them. But this is that thing. It's pulling evangelicalism that direction, right? The centers of gravity are moving that direction. And yet we, if you go and read, I'm sure Christianity today is coverage of this. If they even have the gall to cover it, it will be well. But he's really different than Doug Wilson, right? I'm not so sure anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And that's the near term problem is, I mean, I doubt any of us are going to have our books banned or go to jail in our lifetime. Now, I don't know about our grandkids, but depending on how this goes, but the polarization in society is already bad enough. And if you've got, you know, people, he's training over there at the seminary, they're

1:01:48going out in communities and Baptist churches and, you know, they're leading people even further toward the Doug Wilson side of the world. That's where you have the real damage on the ground. And I'm very concerned about that. Again, why I'm trying to call attention to it because I think that he is much more influential than he's well, than, then, you know, he's getting media credit for. He's, as you said, I think it's a great point. He's really influential when they want to quote about trends in evangelicalism. When he's part of the trend, we're not seeing anything about it. Well, you know, just to close you, I want to pick up on what you said there were. Okay. So, so if you're a young Baptist minister, and I've known dozens of these in my life, right? People who are 23 years old just finished undergrad at a Baptist, you know, college, they want

1:02:49to go into ministry. They're going to go to seminary. They're 23. They're 25. They're 27. They're 28. And you see, you see Al Molar as the figurehead of the Baptist, Southern Baptist Convention, the leader of the seminary hanging with Doug Wilson. What that signals to me is that there's probably a pipeline where those books, Doug Wilson's mirror, you know, what's he call it, mirror Christian, Christian, them, you know, the Stephen Wolf book, the case for Christian nationalism, the Joe Rigny book, the sin of empathy. Those are reformed, reconstructionist tinted books that are probably making their way downstream into that seminarian space, into that young pastor space, into that place where I'm 27, I'm trying to find my footing as a leader. Who should I be reading? Who should I be looking to? This is what I did when I was an evangelical minister. I was, I read every minute, I could get my hands on back then, it was Rick Warren. And now you're telling me I should go read the case for Christian nationalism or mirror Christian, or the sin of empathy.

1:03:50That to me is, is one of the things that's important about Al Molar hanging out with Ken and press and Moscow Idaho is the Southern Baptist leaders who are not going to go to the charismatic side are going to go to the reformed Theobro side because of these kinds of events. And I think that's worth noticing too. So all right, Warren, tell us one more time about your book and then make sure people know your sub stack because this is where you're covering, you know, is what is your sub stack called, ontological musings or something or what's it? Yeah, maybe it should be. Therock Warren's ontological musing. The, the, the thread, it's, I like the born initiative movies, you know, so it's the Throchmorton initiative. Okay. It's what it's called. Warren Throchmorton.substack.com. And the book is the Christian past that wasn't. Good stuff, Matt. Tell us about your sub stack and defying tyrants, which comes out in a month. My sub stack is Matthew Detailer's reckoning. The book is defying tyrants following Jesus in a world of Christian antichrace.

1:04:54And I'm not sure that Warren's accurate, but I'm not sure any of our books are going to get banned in our lifetime because I'm going for it with this one. All right. Let's go. And as we mentioned today, friends, my book is American Caesar. It's out in one week from today. If you order from Barnes and Noble, this week you'll get 25% off. So you can find that in the show notes. We'd love your support getting the word out. If you like a signed copy, go to any blooms.com or any blooms in Portland at their website. And you'll send you a signed copy. There's a full American Caesar book tour list at accessmoondy.us or straight white American Jesus.com. You can also go to bradonishi.com and find out where I'll be. But appreciate your support. We are here every Tuesday at 130 here every Friday at 130 Eastern. We bring you the Sunday interview on the weekends and so much more. Check out accessmoondy.us for more info. If you'd like to subscribe and help us keep this work going, you can find it at our substack accessmoondy.network.

1:05:57Thanks for being here. We'll catch you next time. All right, y'all. Just a reminder to go to groundnews.com slash swedge. To get 40% off, they're unlimited access, vantage subscription. Make sure you use the link so they know I sent you.