Hey everybody welcome back to that trippy show today we have a great guest recommended to us by my good friend Bern Galvin. Catherine Stewart, author reporter, she appears regularly in the New York Times,

the New Republic, and NBC News, and she's written multiple books on the

Christian Right in America.

Her newest book, The Power Worshippers, came out last year, highly recommended.

We're here to talk about one of the key factors

in just about every election,

but especially as we look to 2022,

Christian nationalism.

Catherine, thanks for being with us.

It's great to be here.

Thanks so much for having me.

Well, you're actually, we've had two or three guests recently, Stuart Stevens and then James Fletcher, who was director of the film, the accidental president.

Both of them sort of explained how we all lack the imagination to see Trump happening in 2016.

And then still kind of lack the imagination about how far he would go and how far this is still likely to go.

And Nick O'Malley came on a few episodes ago and talked about how journalism and just sort of fragmentation of coverage out there is just sort of further making things tough to understand and seeing people go into their own niches.

And then I read, and Alex read it after Bern Clutus in of some of your pieces about how you know

obviously Christian nationalism the movement had a lot to do with what a lot of us didn't see coming

and how it's still, the scarier part was how it's still here. The scarier part was how it's still here and and how did Trump appeal to them?

How did it? What's the connection between him? This guy doesn't seem, you know, I think he seems to be not out of that value structure,

out of their value structure, but somehow was able to energize then in the way he was able to do.

Yeah, I think your guests are absolutely right

that sort of failure to imagine is correct. It's not that we fail to imagine that Trump could win.

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