The Christian nationalist threat to democracy

My guest today on the American Doom podcast is Steven Monacelli, a writer and journalist in Texas who focuses on right-wing extremism there. Steven and I first met in May of 2021 when I travelled back to Dallas — where I lived for a couple of years while covering immigration and the border — to attend a QAnon conference. The event was actually called, quite ridiculously, the “For God & Country Patriot Roundup” and was held in a sad county fair-looking barn-turned event center on the edge of Dallas’ ever-depressing commercial district.

The event gained infamy when disgraced general and election denial movement leader Mike Flynn said he liked the idea of a Myanmar-style coup in the United States. Video I took of the comments went briefly viral, and Flynn’s reputation was further degraded into the dregs of American political life, where he now spends all of his time grifting on conspiracies in the name of Donald Trump.

Then, as now, Steven was covering far-right extremism in Texas. He’s something of an expert on the matter, and you can keep up here with Steven’s prolific work at the many publications he writes for, and follow him on Twitter — until he gets permanently banned for his ball-busting reporting on Elon Musk.

In this episode of the American Doom podcast, Steven and I discuss some of the bizarre Christian nationalist groups looking to further infiltrate all levels of government in order to impose their vision of a biblical nation upon all the rest of us. Not that there’s anything wrong with the idea of a Godly government or anything, I just don’t think a lot of parts of the Bible should be taken literally — and many of the folks Steven writes about absolutely do. They include a group touting itself as the “Remnant Alliance,” which is part of broader right-wing efforts to take over school board and, you know, ban books, for Christianity on people, oppress minorities and LGBTQ students, etc.

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