David Masciotra: The Environment for Radicalization

Ken Harbaugh:

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David Masciotra:

Darwin wrote, man bears the stamp of his lowly origin. The lowly origin of Christian nationalism and the religious right was racism. And today, we see that same form of exclusionary, anti-democratic politics at the heart of their movement.

Ken Harbaugh:

I'm Ken Harbaugh, and this is Burn the Boats, a podcast about big decisions.

My guest today is David Masciotra, an author and journalist. His new book, Exurbia Now explains how exurbia, the area outside cities and their suburbs, is becoming the staging ground for radical extremists.

David, welcome to the show.

David Masciotra:

It's great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

Ken Harbaugh:

Instead of defining exactly what you mean by exurbia, can you just tell us about Crown Point, Indiana, and how it has changed over the past, say, 10 years?

David Masciotra:

What a refreshing way to begin the interview. I think every single interview I've given has begun with the question, can you define exurbia? So, I appreciate some variety today.

Crown Point, Indiana is the hub of Lake County, Indiana, and Lake County is the far most northern and western county of Indiana, the Hoosier State. So, many of the towns in Lake County are more like Chicago suburbs than what one might imagine as a small farm town of Indiana.

And Crown Point kind of borders what we would consider suburbia and exurbia, and it has a very charming, picturesque courthouse square.

If any of your viewers have seen the movie Public Enemies about John Dillinger, they filmed some scenes in Crown Point because John Dillinger spent a night in lockup in Crown Point and Johnny Depp and Michael Madden went to Crown Point to film those scenes for realistic purposes.

There's a bar in Crown Point, Indiana named the Silver Bullet Bar, which is a whole tribute to Bob Seger. Wonderful place.

And over the years, however, over the past about 10 to 20 years, while it's grown economically, the square has expanded, it has also, become much more right wing and politically extreme in that respect.

So, I opened the book with a story from the Black Lives Matter rebellion of 2020 where some college students and high school students organized a peaceful march around the square in response to the police murder of George Floyd.

And they were flanked by predominantly white men with Osama bin Laden beards, holding assault rifles. Many of these men hurled racial epithets and other insults and obscenities.

Luckily, there was no violence, but it's a story that indicates what's happening in many exurban towns, towns on the fringe of suburbia where political extremism, isolation, paranoia, prejudice, and an abundance of arms is rendering these communities hostile to democracy and the recruitment ground for the radical right wing authoritarian movement coalescing around Donald Trump. And in some respects, sweeping the country.

Ken Harbaugh:

You said, luckily there was no violence. But I think if you compare that scene in Crown Point, Indiana after the murder of George Floyd to an average day in Crown Point, Indiana 10 years earlier, the presence of those guns, the menacing nature of those men with the Osama bin Laden beards, the threat of violence feels ever present in our communities these days because of the ubiquity of guns, because of the polarization.

And obviously, we know what happens when there is a spark. Violence breaks out. We've seen that time and again.

But just the threat of violence has changed the tenor of these communities. And it's not enough to say there was no violence. The threat of violence is itself instilling fear in people all across the country.

David Masciotra:

I agree entirely, and I appreciate you adding that point. The United States military defines terrorism as the use or threat of violence intended to achieve a political objective.

So, scenes like that have a terroristic function that undermines our democracy, which depends upon the free exchange of ideas and peaceable relations.

So, I tell another story of a town called Chesterton, Indiana, not far from Crown Point, where some high school students organized a walkout of their school to honor the victims of the Parkland shooting.

And no one was visibly armed, but there were many counter protestors supporting the NRA and supporting just unfettered access to firearms who started charging these students and one was even arrested.

What this does is it discourages political participation. And we've read of officials of both parties, even Republicans resigning because of the onslaught of the death threats that they receive for countering Donald Trump, for contradicting the standard ethos of the contemporary Republican party.

And we've also, read about the hundreds and thousands even of election workers, school board members, librarians, local officials who are facing a similar avalanche of threats of violence, and it renders them understandably so reluctant to perform the duties of their job. And it renders many other citizens highly reticent to enter into the political sphere.

So, scenes like that, which I describe in Crown Point and Chesterton and news reports like the ones I've just summarized, steadily weaken our democracy and play into the hands of those who would like to transform our country into something resembling an illiberal democracy. That is a right-wing autocracy that is nominally a republic.

Ken Harbaugh:

What is exurbia so mad about? What are those guys with the Osama bin Laden beards carrying their long rifles, probably AR15s, that's the weapon of choice these days. What are they so pissed off about?

There's this trope that it's economics, they lost their job at the steel mill. That is just a fraction of the story. And how many times does a reporter parachute in and talk to the guy at the diner and get that on repeat and miss the cultural elements, the undertone of racism?

I would love for you to talk about or dispel the myth that this is an economic grievance solely.

David Masciotra:

That was a large motivation for why I wrote the book, having suffered through years and years of Trump coverage that depicted the average MAGA rally attendee as a character out of a Woody Guthrie song or the reincarnation of Tom Joad.

And one thing that separates me from many of those reporters who drop in on the parachute is that I actually live in the region that I'm writing about in this book.

And what my observations indicate, what logic and rationality indicates, and also, what all the evidence shows is that the number one driver of this dangerous right wing movement is identity and culture.

That it's a feeling that the country once belonged to white heterosexual Christians. And as the country has become more diverse, has become in many ways more progressive and in many ways more secular.

And as the country has not become utopian by any stretch of the imagination, but progressed toward a universal multiracial democracy, thanks to the successes of the Civil Rights Movement, the gay rights movement, the feminist movement, and others, the exurbanites, the Trump voter on average feels as if America is no longer their country.

So, for many years, as I write about in the book, they were able to take flight, like flight as it were. They were able to move into areas like exurbia in an effort to escape the people and the political changes that they despised or that they at least feared.

Now, there's really nowhere left to escape. So, they've entered the fight mode, (fight or flight) and the object of their fight, the target of their fight is the system that has made all of this progress possible.

Now, some of the statistical information to which I referenced a moment ago, the exurbia is the base in many respects of the Trump movement. All of the most psychotic members of Congress have predominantly exurban districts. People like Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Jim Jordan. Trump's electoral numbers are off the charts in exurbia.

The Wall Street Journal reports that median household income in exurbia is actually 15 to 20% higher than median household income across the United States.

We also have autopsies, as it were, forensic examinations of the January 6th rioters.

Robert Pape at the University of Chicago, one of the leading specialists in terrorism in the country, found that the number one characteristic common among all of those who participated in the potential insurrection of that day was residency in a county where the non-white population is growing and the black white poverty gap is shrinking.

The economic anxiety thesis that this is only anger over bad trade deals, so to speak, is something that ironically enough, the mainstream media, the so-called Enemy of the People, invented very early on, and now, it functions almost as folklore. People repeat it over and over and over again.

Norman Mailer coined the term factoid. And when he coined it, it meant something that people believe is a fact only because they've heard it so many times. The idea that the average Trump supporter is exercising economic aggrievement is a factoid.

The reality is that the primary drivers of this dangerous, hateful movement, our racial prejudice, paranoia about the diversification and secularization of the United States. And to both of those points, Christian nationalism.

Ken Harbaugh:

Can you reiterate a point that comes up in the book that we have made on this show about the income brackets and how they voted for Donald Trump? Because this puts the lie to the entire notion of this being an economically driven grievance.

David Masciotra:

Yeah, that really is key. So, Joe Biden won far more voters in the income bracket of 0 to $50,000 per year than Donald Trump. He also won more voters in the income bracket of 50,000 to $100,000 per year.

Hillary Clinton in 2016 won more voters making between 0 and $50,000 per year. And they about split evenly, the difference was negligible the 50 to a $100,000 income bracket.

Furthermore, you could go back and find that in the Republican primary of 2015, Donald Trump voters had the highest average income as compared to Trump's Republican primary opponents, people like Ted Cruz and Kasich and others.

So, even among fellow Republicans, the average Trump supporter was doing better economically.

And yet again, we have this factoid, this myth that all the Trump supporter wants is the resurrection of the manufacturing base of our economy. And that's why they're chanting things like build the wall and lock her up, and send her back, or send them back at these rallies that have really turned into fascist extravaganzas.

And I should add to your point, in 2016, Donald Trump declared the American dream was dead. In 2020, he said that he had created the greatest economy in the history of money.

And yet all of the people who voted for him, or most of the people, I should say, (I can't say all) who voted for him in 2016 believing the American dream was dead, voted for him in 2020, believing he created the greatest economy in the history of currency.

And now, Donald Trump says almost nothing about economic issues. He references inflation to take a shot at Joe Biden, but he offers nothing to the American people, nothing to the middle class. It's all grievance and it's all white identity politics.

Ken Harbaugh:

And driving that grievance is a perceived loss of status. That's ultimately, what it comes down to.

You either wrote or said in a interview that Christian nationalism always had racism at its center. When we talk about loss of status, we're talking about racial animus.

David Masciotra:

That's exactly it. So, another myth that we could debunk is the idea that the religious right entered politics because of opposition to abortion or opposition to feminism and gay rights. Of course, they did and do oppose those things.

But the religious right became politically active as loyal foot soldiers and organizers for the Republican Party because they disapproved of President Carter (who had they had previously supported because they saw him as a fellow brethren of the faith) punishing private schools in mostly the south that refuse to admit non-white students.

So, many of these schools, even though they were private, received federal grants or some form of federal aid. Carter stripped that aid from those schools because they were practicing segregation after Brown versus Board.

And the religious right became so intensely angry that they could not exclude Black, Latino, Asian and Native American students from their schools that they flocked to the Republican Party.

And historians of Christianity, Professor Bonner from Dartmouth University (Robert Bonner) has written an entire book on this subject, exposes that the early leaders, the early organizers of the religious right.

So, people like Jerry Falwell, and Paul Weyrich, and later, Ralph Reed, they're brazen about this at their conventions, at their conferences, they discuss it openly. It's not even something that they try to hide.

So, ironically enough, it's a Charles Darwin line that best captures the religious right. I'm assuming Darwin's not a hero of the contemporary Christian nationalist, but Darwin wrote, man bears the stamp of his lowly origin.

The lowly origin of Christian nationalism and the religious right was racism. And today, we see that same form of exclusionary anti-democratic politics at the heart of their movement.

It's in their opposition to women's reproductive rights. It's in their hostility toward gay and transgendered Americans. And it's in their zest and zeal to ban books from schools and libraries.

And opposition to free and fair elections and to a robust democracy is kind of the overarching belief that or to which they're all striving, operating these smaller agendas.

Ken Harbaugh:

Can you help explain the growth of megachurches in exurbia?

David Masciotra:

Yeah. So, that begins very practical. Most megachurches are in exurbia. I mean, there are some exceptions, of course, like Joel Osteen's monstrosity in Houston, Texas, but the majority of megachurches are in exurbia.

And that is because it's going to be very difficult and very costly to build a church the size of a basketball arena in a city or in a densely populated suburb.

So, exurbia had the land available oftentimes at low cost, and it was close enough to the city and close enough to suburbs that the organizers of these churches could find people to fill the pews.

So, what happens very practically in the beginning now morphs into a political magnet in which the mega church attracts like-minded people to these exurban towns. And the more devout they are, the like it is that they want to live in the town that houses the institution, that gives them some sense of community belonging and purpose.

And the trouble with that is that these megachurches so often, best case scenario like Joel Osteen, they preach the prosperity gospel, which is destructive, and ridiculous, and encouraging-

Ken Harbaugh:

Yeah. If that's the best-case scenario, I can't wait to hear the worst-case scenario.

David Masciotra:

Right. And which encourages contempt for the poor. And what you find is many of these megachurches, most especially the prosperity gospel ones, have very little in the way of charity.

But worst-case scenario, these megachurches act as citadels of right wing, theocratic, anti-democratic nationalism, citadels of hate, citadels of paranoia, and conspiracy.

And in the book, I'm very careful to juxtapose my religious upbringing, attending nearly every week, a very small Lutheran church that attempted to build an organic sense of community and comradery and practice the virtues of charity and compassion with what has become the most populous and popular American churches.

And again, that is the megachurch which functions as the number one recruitment ground for Donald Trump, the MAGA movement, and authoritarian politics more broadly. And this is something I would just add that again, the mainstream media often misses.

So, in all of the clamor to predict Latino voting patterns, for example, there's very little reporting that the number one predictor of how a Latino will vote is what church he or she attends.

So, the majority of Latinos are Catholic, and the majority of Latinos vote Democrat. The Latinos who vote Republican, unless they're Cubans down in Florida, which is a different case, it's a unique case, they tend to belong to megachurches.

So, they're very dangerous, but they're also, very persuasive, the megachurches that is, in their capacity to act as docents for people into the right-wing ideology and anti-democratic politics.

Ken Harbaugh:

You are the first person I've read who observes this weird overlap between the mega churches and casinos. Can you explain …

I mean, at first glance it looks coincidental, but there's a sensibility in these communities that makes them vulnerable to the growth of both megachurches and the invitation to these predatory casinos. I guess described that way, they might have more in common than you think.

David Masciotra:

Right. Yeah, it's an interesting and strange connection. Part of it is practical. There's, again, land to construct casinos in these areas.

But there's something deeper at work too, in that the typical exurban town lacks public space, lacks community venues of recreation and congregation, and is full of residents who live in relative isolation.

They're in many ways what Robert Putnam warned against in his classic analyzing social capital or lack thereof, bowling alone.

Son Volt, great rock and roll band has a song called exurbia, in which they describe exurban life as work home car road. And that's often what takes place.

Also, exurban towns lack local media. So, it's physical, social, and epistemological isolation.

So, the megachurch acts as the only functioning institution oftentimes in these towns. It's the daycare, it's the social community center, it's everything.

And then the casino acts as the only source of local recreation, but it also, in the process functions as a tax on working people and functions as yet another hindrance toward the success of small business.

So, something else that populates the exurban town is the corporate chain adding to the isolation and adding to the quality that I describe in the book, Nowhere, USA.

So, in Nowhere, USA you have the megachurch, which doesn't attempt to build an organic community, which doesn't get charitably involved in the local community.

And then you have the casino, which preys upon what functions as a facsimile of community and takes people's money and gets people potentially hooked on pathological behavior. Just as the megachurch gets people hooked on pathological ideology.

Ken Harbaugh:

Can you talk about the impact on Nowhere, USA of not having local journalism? That loss of accountability, that loss of whatever social glue the local paper once provided, what is the effect in Nowhere, USA of losing your local paper?

David Masciotra:

Yeah, this is scarier than many people realize. So, since the year 2000, 2/3 of American newspapers have shut down and we're losing newspapers every year, so that reality is only going to worsen.

And you threw a bullseye with your question. When we lose local media, we lose two things. We lose community and we lose accountability.

So, as I was saying a moment ago, Robert Putnam analyzed the consequences and costs of lack of community. And Putnam rights that where isolation lives, the politics of extremism thrive.

Well, if you're living in an exurban town and perhaps some ideas of paranoia and prejudice, if you're part of a later stage of white flight already brought you there, and your town lacks communal space, lacks recreational opportunities to actually meet people who live near you or next to you. Your subdivision often lacks sidewalks even, and you don't have local media.

You're much more susceptible to believe that your problems, your fears, the United States of America's problems are all the result of those scary people who you don't know.

So, it could be Latino immigrants, it could be gay and transgender teenagers, it could be the liberal elite, it could be college professors and journalists, it could be Black Lives Matter activists.

And without a local newspaper or some local media to spotlight people in the town who maybe fit those profiles themselves or are sympathetic to those people, Tucker Carlson becomes your local newsman.

Jesse Watters becomes your on the ground beat reporter telling you what to fear, who to despise, how to vote. And then without local media, you don't have accountability.

So, one of the most infamous and notorious examples of this is George Santos. There was a very small paper in his congressional district that reported on some of his untruthful statements and some of the questions surrounding his life.

Those reports were mainly ignored. It was a paper that only put out an issue once a week, so it was very easy for it to get buried. And there weren't any strong daily newspapers on the ground reporting on this guy's insane, ridiculous claims about himself. So, he was elected to Congress.

If you don't have local media, the town council, the mayor, the chief of police, anyone in that town is going to be free to exercise their power without restraint.

And we can broaden this conversation to look at how the right wing is placing journalism in general under attack. Donald Trump refers to the media as the enemy of the people. And we can all catalog the myriad mistakes that mainstream media institutions have made. I've referenced a few of them in this discussion.

But without a strong fourth estate, power is free to do what it likes. And that's already happening at the local level. And if people like Donald Trump have their way, it'll happen at the national level as well.

Ken Harbaugh:

How is it that the reactionary phenomena we see it at the local level in exurbia becomes nationalized. You have things like the book bans or the anti CRT campaigns starting in exurbia.

But they don't happen in a vacuum. They end up catching fire and they end up dominating national conversation. It almost feels coordinated.

David Masciotra:

Yeah. Isn't that funny? The American right is very good at this, and the left is terrible at it. Beginning a long time ago, there was a Republican operator who pioneered direct mail by the name of Richard Viguerie.

And one of his other strategies in the 1970s when the far right movement had really reached a nadir of popularity, he came up with the idea to start winning local races.

If you elect like-minded people to sheriff, and to town council, and to the mayor of a small town, you start to build a network of power.

And that network can coalesce around a candidate for Congress, can coalesce around a candidate for governor, and eventually coalesce around candidates for the Senate and a candidate for the President.

I'm simplifying it a little bit, but that's essentially what happened. And that was a large part of the success of the so-called Reagan Revolution.

Furthermore, much more sinister groups exercise the same strategy. So, I talked to a man by the name of Christian Picciolini for the book, and he's a former neo-Nazi skinhead.

When he was a neo-

Ken Harbaugh:

I've had him on the show.

David Masciotra:

Oh yeah, he's fantastic. He's a brilliant guy and a real hero too. His story truly inspiring. But he talks about how when he was in the hate movement, they knew that some people, the excon with tattoos on his face, that was going to be the strong man of their organization.

But someone else, if someone came to a meeting and looked like you or me, they would say, “You know what? Disguise the ideology, run for your school board, or become a police officer, or run for your town council.” Trade your boots for suits, was their slogan.

Steve Bannon is now, directing his loyal adherence to do the exact same thing. He's saying, get involved in your election board, your school board, your library trustees board.

So, what happens is to energize people in exurbia and to exercise the Bannon Viguerie strategy, they find an issue like take pornography off the library shelves. We know it's not pornography, but they get people excited.

And they have very well-funded groups like Moms for Liberty, which are artificial turf organizations. They're not grassroots organizations. They receive funding from millionaires and billionaires.

And then they get amplification from Fox News and Tucker Carlson and the right wing podcast sphere, people like Steve Bannon. And that's how it goes national. And it has the appearance of something that's happening organically on the ground in towns like Crown Point, Indiana or Chesterton Indiana.

But it's very much a well-coordinated effort to excite and agitate the paranoid and prejudicial voter in exurbia, hoping that that excitement and agitation will prove successful when it comes time to vote for governor, senator, and or president.

Ken Harbaugh:

One of the great ironies from my perspective about the growth of exurbia is the fact that people flee to these areas to be surrounded by people more like them. People who look more like them, who think more like them.

And then they evolve some of the most anti-social behaviors. Like open carry, like buying giant pickup trucks to go to and from daycare. Not to operate farm machinery, but as both a status symbol and an F-you to anyone who says they should be more socially responsible.

Can you talk about the phenomenon of antisocial behavior in these communities that supposedly exist to be communities?

David Masciotra:

Yeah, I mean, one of the great things about the United States of America (and you have the flag behind you) is the notion of individuality that has given birth to so much creativity and entrepreneurship and so much diversity, not just in social category, but diversity of lifestyle.

But what often happens in right wing politics and what we see manifesting in these small exurban towns is a form of individuality that becomes very dark and dangerous because it's hostile to anything resembling a social compact.

And the two examples that I give are the ones that you named. So, first of all, the most popular vehicle in exurbia is the heavy duty pickup truck.

Now, to your earlier question about economic anxiety, most of these heavy duty pickup trucks cost between 35 and $70,000. So, you have these people suffering from so-called economic anxiety buying a $55,000 vehicle that gets the worst gas mileage of anything other than a semi-truck.

And then of course, complaining about gas prices when they start to rise and saying that's why they don't like Joe Biden. So, that computes.

But what we found about these pickup trucks, what we find when we look at the research is that they're very dangerous. They're the leading cause of fatalities in car accidents. That just stands to reason. If you collide with a vehicle, the larger that vehicle is, the likelier it is to maim or even kill someone in the other vehicle.

They're the leading cause of front over deaths, which is an automobile industry term for when the vehicle strikes somebody. Because oftentimes these pickup trucks, the grills are so high that the driver can't see a pedestrian.

So, this gets really tragic and ghastly to think about because we're talking about children, we're talking about elderly people. It's also, of course, even dangerous to small compact cars.

And what researchers have found, the number one reason people buy these trucks is one of image. They want to project a tough macho image because the overwhelming majority of people who buy these vehicles, I have the exact statistics in the book, I can't rattle them off right now, but I will say it's the overwhelming majority.

They don't haul equipment, they don't drive off road, they don't do anything that ostensibly these vehicles are designed for their drivers to do. So, it's this notion of individuality and individualism taken to its worst form and manifestation.

And of course, that happens with even more tragic and catastrophic results when it comes to purchasing firearms, particularly assault rifles, which of course you and your audience know were not even legal up until relatively recently.

The AR15 is the number one weapon of the mass shooting. And it's the number one reason why so many people have to live in fear when they go to the grocery store, or go to a nightclub, or a worship service.

And it's the number one reason why so many schools have active shooter drills. It's the number one reason why violence is making much of American social life a question of public safety.

And yet this idea that it's my right to own an assault rifle trumps any consideration of public health and safety.

It's one of the worst perversions of what the founding fathers intended when they wanted to enshrine certain inalienable rights for all citizens and create a bill of rights that would protect our individual freedoms against government tyranny or the tyranny of the majority.

Ken Harbaugh:

I want to end on a hopefully uplifting note. You said this recently that it's easy to believe that the transgender teenager or the Black Lives Matter activist is a threat to you if you've never met one. That I'd like to believe is the silver bullet, the antidote to so much of what ails exurbia is just proximity. The idea that if we can acquaint people with those that they're so afraid of, maybe they'll be less afraid.

David Masciotra:

Yeah. And there's so many great stories from history that prove that thesis. So, we just were talking about Christian Picciolini, that's how he got out of the movement is that he opened a record store and he had to make a living. He had children to feed.

So, if somebody black walked in the record store or a Jewish person walked in the record store, he didn't say, “Get out, I don't want your business.”

And he eventually started talking to these people and he realized they're not the enemy. They're not monsters out of a horror film. They're human beings with similar desires and dreams and fears that I have.

The story of the gay rights movement is really a story of proximity. That people who were homophobic realized that their cousin, or their coworker, or their neighbor was gay and thought I like him or I like her, so maybe I've been sold a bill of goods here.

The diversification of the United States and the onward progress of the United States is really revolutionary in a quiet way.

The country now, has more interracial friendships and interracial romantic relationships than ever before. More people work, and live, and in political movements march side by side than ever before.

And all of that is the result of the work and the effort and the activism of people who don't want to tear down democracy but want to expand and enhance it.

So, if we remain involved as voters and involved in our communities and continue to fight for social liberalism and fight for the mechanisms of democracy that protect and guard social liberalism, we’ll have a country that begins to, or that continues to live up to the promise of its foundational ideals and lives up to slogans like Land of Opportunity.

The progress that we've made on that front is already revolutionary and it can continue to be so.

And even though we've had a conversation about some pretty frightening and alarming trends taking place across the United States, I would remind everyone that the MAGA movement and the exurban political movement is not only reactionary, it's reactive.

And these people would not be so enraged right now, if the country hadn't already transformed. So, we can continue that transformation with a little commitment and a little discipline.

Ken Harbaugh:

Well, I think that is a great and uplifting note to end on. David, thank you so much for joining us today.

David Masciotra:

Thank you. It was great.

Ken Harbaugh:

Thanks for listening to Burn the Boats. If you have any feedback, please email the team at [email protected]. We're always looking to improve the show.

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Burn the Boats is a production of Evergreen Podcasts. Our producer is Declan Rohrs, and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our audio engineer. Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers, Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss.

I'm Ken Harbaugh, and this is Burn the Boats, a podcast about big decisions.