Jan 6th: The Real Threat is Christian Nationalism in the Military – Mikey Weinstein

The events of Jan 6th were the last gasp of a failed Trump coup, fuelled by the power of Christian extremists in the military and Congress. Their objective is a form of Christian authoritarianism, and they are planning for an open fight in 2024 or sooner. Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news.

TRANSCRIPT

Paul Jay

Hi, welcome to theAnalysis.news, I’m Paul Jay. Please don’t forget there’s a donate button, a subscribe button, a share button, and all the buttons! We’ll be back in a few seconds to talk to Mikey Weinstein about growing Christian nationalist influence in the military, and what he says is we’re a micron away from civil war.

We just passed a few days ago, the annual one-year anniversary of the events on Capitol Hill of January 6th. And again, as I’ve been saying since that time, while the media and, to a large extent, members of Congress and the punditry class focus on the day of January 6th. I think the actual real serious events took place in the lead-up to January 6th.

I won’t get into that in detail now, but just to remind everybody, ten former secretaries of defence on January 4th published a letter in The Washington Post, essentially warning the military to stay out of the election results. This is just two days before [Joe] Biden was supposed to be confirmed, and Congress was stormed.

On the same day, Admiral [James G.] Stavridis, who was the former Supreme Commander of NATO and a Senior Executive in Carlyle Group, which is one of the largest private equity funds and a major investor in the military-industrial complex. He wrote a column in Time magazine supporting the letter of the ten former secretaries.

So here you have an important personage of the military-industrial complex, warning the military to stay out of the election results. On the same day, the Financial Times had an editorial that ends with, as bizarre as it seems, there is a coup in progress. So this is again two days before January 6th. I think now it seems pretty clear that [Donald] Trump’s pressure on the Governor of Georgia was one of the pieces of what was this attempted coup.

He expected the Governor to cave and go find him 15,000 more votes. And oddly enough, the Governor didn’t do it. The Governor didn’t do it. This is all a plan that General [Michael] Flynn, Trump’s ally, had talked about it, about having this kind of a coup. This all begins far earlier in September, the year before. Steve Bannon, a couple of months before the elections, actually calls for a ‘stop the steal’ campaign. This is before the elections were even held. Ben [Carson] is embarking. He announces this on Tucker Carlson.

Two months before the election, Bannon announces, and he’s beginning a cross country tour to start the ‘stop the steal’ campaign before there’s been an election to steal. So this plot, the plan is clearly in place. And the other thing that’s pretty clear is as we get to January 4th, the senior military leadership, including, of course, [Mark] Milley, who’s is the Chair of the Joint Chiefs; they are aware of this, and they stop it. They issue statements in support of these defence secretaries. They make it clear. And I think by the time the six rolls around, it’s pretty clear that the military is not going to intervene, at least from what I can glean.

But Trump and [Bruce] E. Toll go ahead with the January 6th events. And by this time, I think not only has the military’s most senior military leadership but also the preponderance of the elites, of the corporate elites, they want Trump gone. They love Trump. For four years, they got their tax cuts, and they got their deregulation. But they did not like the disruption to the political process. It’s not good for business.

And one hour after the doors of Congress are breached, the doors are breached at 2:04 pm or 2:10 pm, I should say. At 3:04 pm, the Association of American Manufacturers issues a statement, a press release calling on [Mike] Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and to remove Trump. This is one of the most important organizations that represent the largest corporations of America. Why? Well, because what was going on wasn’t good for business, but they were all quite happy to have Trump in office while he was there during his presidency.

But the question, I don’t think that’s being asked enough, and my next guest and I talked about this once, but we know a lot more now. Why were they so afraid of a coup in progress? If the senior military leadership, of the Joint Chiefs, if even corporate America, on the whole, not all, but on the whole had decided it was time for Trump to go, how is it that there’s such a serious threat as we lead up to the January 6th confirmation by Pence of Biden? And now to discuss and help us answer that question is Mikey Weinstein.

Mikey is the Founder and President of the seven-time Nobel Peace Prize-nominated Military Religious Freedom Foundation. They fight for members of the armed services that believe they are being essentially persecuted, denied their freedom of conscience, their freedom to choose religion by very hardcore, mostly Christian nationalists. But not only recruitment techniques and otherwise that are putting pressure on them to lockstep, join in with this Christian nationalist surge in the military.

Mikey was named one of the hundred most influential people in the U.S. defence by Defense News. Mikey represents nearly 77,000 now active retired Reserve service members. He’s a former United States Air Force Academy honour graduate himself. And many years ago, he worked in the West Wing as Legal Counsel in the [Ronald] Reagan White House. Thanks very much for joining me.

Mikey Weinstein

Appreciate it very much. Thank you, Paul.

Paul Jay

So answer the question. It can’t be 2,000 people, if whatever that march up to Congress that is such a threat on January 6th that you have such statements coming out of the senior military and political leaders. So why did they really fear there was a serious attempted coup in progress? I should have added the Financial Times on January 4th had an editorial where they said a coup was in progress.

Mikey Weinstein

I think it’s important to remember, and I think that the January 6th Commission will bring all this out. This wasn’t planned 48 hours in advance. As you mentioned, you had Bannon right after the election arguing, stop the steal, stop the steal.

Paul Jay

Before the election.

Mikey Weinstein

Before the election, right.

Paul Jay

Two months before the election.

Mikey Weinstein

Right. There’s a great movie out now called, Don’t Look Up. I’m not sure if you’ve heard about it.

Paul Jay

Oh, yeah, I’ve seen it.

Mikey Weinstein

It’s a great movie, but in many respects, it’s an analogy of the concept of “Make America Great Again,” you come up with an easy little phrase to understand where things are and the concept of fake news. If you don’t like something, you don’t hear. And remember, we have the First Amendment.

Paul Jay

Hang on, let me just quickly say something for people that don’t know the movie. Scientists are saying there’s an asteroid on its way to smash into the Earth. The end of the planet. And the President, who’s a female Trump, type, her answer to an asteroid coming is, “don’t look up.”

Mikey Weinstein

Right, because it’s just a concept of if you don’t like something, it’s fake news. Everybody believes in free speech until they hear something that they don’t like. This has been going on for a very long time. I believe that we’ve been prophesying about this since the early 2000s when we started. You have to also understand what Christian nationalism is. In the last 24 to 48 hours, there have been a lot of articles that have come out calling it and talking about Christian nationalism. Most people do not know what that means or what it’s about. But this was something that has been spurred on. It was the fuel for Trump from the very early on. And there’s a very large group of people in this country that really do not like the fact they hate democracy. They do not like the Constitution. What they want is basically a theocratic state based on Christian fundamentalism.

Let me make it clear. Of the 77,000 plus people, we represent, about 95% of these sailors, soldiers, marines and airmen, guardians for the space force, coast guardsmen, OTS [Officer Training School], OCS [Officer Candidate School], Academy, ROTC [Reserve Officers’ Training Corps], cadets, and then shipmen and veterans are Christians themselves. They’re being persecuted for not being Christian enough. 

Of course, we represent all religious faiths and many atheists and agnostics and secularists and humanists. But the bottom line here is that the people we’re fighting without drilling down into concepts are known as the Seven Mountains Mandate and Dispensationalism. These are people that want an America based upon fundamentalist Christianity. The way you see in certain Arabic States or Middle Eastern States where you have Sunni or Shia regimes that are focused on — [crosstalk 00:10:28].

Paul Jay

Yeah, last time I asked you what these people want, you asked me if I’d watched Handmaid’s Tale. So for those people that have, that is sort of what you’re talking about.

Mikey Weinstein

Yeah, if you haven’t seen it yet, or read the Margaret Atwood book, the Handmaid’s Tale.

Paul Jay

Atwood, yeah.

Mikey Weinstein

Right, here. Atwood and her most recent kind of sequel to the book. It takes place there’s been a civil war in America. Most of the vast majority of America, except for a few little pockets in Hawaii, are part of a new country called Gilead. And we actually had the producers of that show reach out to us several years ago. They thanked us for our activism for trying to stop the dystopian future that they’re showing, but they wanted some background material for a certain episode that would focus on the military or whatever.

But Gilead is a concept that is a country, a fictionalized country that we’re not that far away from that is focused on again, fundamentalist Christian theocracy based upon a very simple concept that I can tell you again that if you don’t accept Jesus Christ, Jesus will make sure that you have a miserable life now. But once you die, the misery you’re facing now will be nothing compared to the fact that you’ll be set aflame for eternity for not following his gospel.

I was at lunch right before we did this interview today when I had a person on the phone screaming at me. Second, Thessalonians 1:8 (chapter one, verse eight). Again, you can go to your Bible. Second, Thessalonians 1:8 (chapter one, verse eight), where God makes it clear that if you don’t accept God or follow the gospel of Jesus Christ, his Son, who’s also God or whatever you want, the same thing, the tripartite God, you’re going to be set aflame forever.

A person sent me a letter the other day. It was a three or four-page thing talking about Mickey Mantle’s last inning, and that’s when he was on his deathbed in the summer of 1995 when he finally decided to accept Jesus Christ with Bobby Richardson, another former Yankee who is now, I guess a pastor. Came to his bedside and brought him to Christ, and made it clear.

He quoted John 3:36 at the funeral for Mickey Mantle. Where it says that those who believe in Christ will have eternal life, those who don’t will have the wrath of God on them forever. It’s digital: one and zero. Why are we talking about this? This is Christian nationalism, the mothership of Islamophobia, transphobia, homophobia, antisemitism misogyny. I can go on and on and on.

And this is the engine that fuels what Trump is doing. We don’t have time to sit down with the average person who has — most Americans today have, I guess, kind of a span of attention of three to four seconds, and that’s just about it. If you’re lucky, you can’t even put a video on this one and a half minutes. That’s too long anymore.

The bottom line is that they want to make sure that you are right with Jesus Christ because Christ has created this wonderful leader in the person of Donald Trump. It doesn’t matter if he burns German Shepherd puppies every morning. It’s fine because he’s just like Silas in the Old Testament. God is using him like a hand into a hand puppet. And that’s what we’re dealing with.

We can talk all day long about what Bannon did before the election or what Ted Cruz said a few hours after January 6th last year. And then he quickly recanted when Tucker Carlson put them on the show like the coward that he is. He said, oh, no, I was stupid to say that this was a terror attack. The real patriotism happened on January 6th, and the insurrection was the election, which President Biden talked about the other day.

Paul Jay

Can I just interject something here? Because I know what I’m about to say, I’m pretty sure you agree with, but I think it needs to be said. There’s a large portion of people that would self-identify as evangelical Christians who believe in the message of Jesus as one of forgiveness, of one of love, love thy enemy. It’s one of understanding and compassion. These are not the people we’re talking about, and I don’t think that’s the Jesus that these people are talking about accepting.

Mikey Weinstein

If I had to list the top 25 human beings that I currently consider brothers and sisters, probably at least 17 or 18 would be Christians or evangelical Christians. We have evangelicals on our staff. They are clients of ours. They donate to us. Here’s the difference. You just described what we call Great Commandment Christians.

Their prime directive. If you follow Star Trek, there is a sermon on the mount. In the book of Matthew, where Jesus says, what you need to do everybody, is to love the Lord, your God with your mind, soul and heart. And then he pronounces the golden rule. Treat others the way you want to be treated, which predates the Tanakh or the Five Books of Moses, the Jewish Bible, which itself is predated by the Code of Hammurabi. So there’s nothing new in that. But this is a great commandment. The people we’re fighting are Great Commission Christians. That is something that is talked about in Mark 16:15 and Matthew 28:19. One of the last things, Paul, that Jesus is supposed to have said to his disciples, which is go and make disciples of all Nations, bring them in here, that’s your Commission.

Those who view that as a prime directive, they’re still not the enemy. If they believe that they can follow the Great Commission irrespective of time, place and manner, restrictions by our Constitution, it’s construing federal case law and in the military where all the nukes are. The directives, instructions and regulations of Pentagon, then it’s like saying, I don’t have to follow the rules about drinking or drugs. Or if I’m too tired when I drive a car, I can drive a car anytime I want to irrespective of time, place and manner restrictions.

If we are dealing with Christians and them again, Great Commission Christians, the ones that they’re not concerned about, the Great Commandment that I talked about. The Great Commission is going to get everybody into the nation, get them in. And there’s none of your laws that are going to be able to; I’m unfettered when I want to do this.

These are the Christians, the ones that are fuelling Trump with money and enthusiasm and an unbridled desire to rape and pillage. And that’s what I say.

Paul Jay

This is rape and pillage. This is kind of the Christianity of the crusades we’re talking about.

Mikey Weinstein

No, it’s not, kind of it is. It’s the Christianity of the Holocaust. It’s the Christianity that you see in Uganda with regard to homosexuals. But as I said before, we have the evangelical Christians that are on our staff that donate to us that we have over 700 people that work here full time, part-time volunteers and paid. And these are wonderful people that would take a bullet for me and our staff of which they are members of, in some cases, or I would take a bullet for them. They’re not the problem.

They’re trying to fight this as well. But the problem is that it’s not a problem issue or challenge. It’s a national security threat. I honestly believe, and I’m not alone in this feeling, I guarantee you that one of our Advisory Board members, one of my closest friends, Larry Wilkerson, who was Chief of Staff to a Republican.

Paul Jay

My viewers know. I interview Larry every couple of weeks. So our viewers know Larry.

Mikey Weinstein

Larry will agree with me about this and is far more sagacious about it. We are about a micron away from civil war. We are in a death spiral. I don’t know that we’re going to pull out. It’s not just that people can’t talk to friends or family or neighbours anymore. It’s the fact they’re doing something else.

I wonder whether you or your family have had this discussion. I know that we have, and that is when the time comes if the midterms go the wrong way and if the cowardly, ignorant, buffoon entitled buffoon Trump comes back in again or before. It’s time to leave.

I mean, people are talking about do we go to New Zealand? Do we go to Costa Rica? What part of Canada do we go to? Do we go to Hawaii? Because even in the Handmaid’s tale, Hawaii is still out there on its own. People are actually having these discussions.

I lost a lot of members of my family in the Holocaust. I could never understand two things: How could an advanced society, a literate and scientifically oriented, mathematically oriented society like Germany, allow a Hitler to come to where it was? And why didn’t more of my relatives get out? Now, I understand.

Paul Jay

Let’s add to that. Maybe in four or five years, a Hitler comes to power; it’s only a matter of a few years, from the time they first start marching in the streets, 1932. It didn’t take very long.

Mikey Weinstein

Between that, Kristallnacht, and the burnings of the buildings, it happened very quickly. I’m not being melodramatic. We’ve talked about this for a long time, but look; you can look at what we’re dealing with in the military.

Paul Jay

That’s where I want to just; you’re heading where I want to go. But just to clarify, when people imagine what might be coming, they’re thinking of people hunkered down in their houses with guns or going into the streets and all that. But that’s not where the real problem is. Not that it isn’t the problem. The real problem is the military. So go on.

Mikey Weinstein

Yes. When you are having a problem getting every sailor, soldier, marine, airmen, guardian, coast guard— of course, the coast guard is not in DOD [United States Department of Defence]. They’re the Department of Homeland Security. To get a shot… to get a shot, we have to have federal judges stopping what we view as a frivolous lawsuit by 35 Navy SEALs. Let me tell you a little secret. Here at MRFF [Military Religious Freedom Foundation], one of my close friends was a Navy SEAL who was killed, Glen Doherty, at the attack on Benghazi. He was one of the former Navy SEALs killed in that attack. He was a good friend and an Advisory Board member of MRFF. Do you know who replaced him? It took six months to convince him, Larry Wilkerson. 

Larry replaced Glen Doherty. Glenn is the one that told me, Mikey, the worst quantity and quality of Christian nationalism, fundamentalist Christian nationalism in the military, is right here with the Navy SEALs, with the marine raiders, the air force parachute jumpers, with the army rangers, Delta and the Green Berets. The closer you get to drawing blood at the point of the spear, the more you’re going to see this hideous unconstitutional, you’re either with us or against us, version of fundamentalist Christian nationalism. And we’re seeing it right now. 

If you’re going to have members of the military, we probably had five and a half hundred people come to us asking for us to defend them against the military. We’ve told every one of them, without a blink at them, we support the mandates. But what do you have for us? Let us look at you medically. Some of these are big names. I can’t give you their names. Some of them look at your religious views. They have a right to put their case together. But even so, it’s stunning to see the kind of power a number of these people have. 

Let’s also remember two names, two words. Charles Flynn commands the entire U.S. Army of the Pacific. He’s the beloved brother of Michael Flynn, the convicted felon. And we still haven’t determined how much Charles Flynn is complicit in what Michael Flynn said. But just a few weeks ago, Michael Flynn in that big rally in Dallas, of all the Trump people that were mostly maskless, and a bunch of them are dying off. In fact, a podcaster died today from that, an Anti-Vaxxer podcaster. Michael Flynn made it clear that we should have one religion in America, and it should be Christianity. This is the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. We only have 16 other intelligence agencies.

We have a lot of clients, not just DOD. We have clients at the VA [United States Department of Veterans Affairs] clients in most of the 17 of the intelligence agencies. So we demanded that, that Charles Flynn condemn what his brother said. That story went viral, went everywhere.

So when I say it again, you remember the military.

Paul Jay

And I’m assuming he didn’t.

Mikey Weinstein

Of course, he didn’t say anything. No, we still don’t know how complicit he was in what happened on January 6th.

Paul Jay

Is there any evidence that Charles Flynn is involved in Christian nationalism?

Mikey Weinstein

We’ve been told many, many times that he was just like Mike Pompeo when he ran the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] over at state. But people are afraid to come forward. We provide our clients at MRFF, AARP, and not the thing you’re thinking about, but anonymity, action, results and protection. We will never give up a client’s name unless they want us to put it out there. People are afraid of becoming. You’ve probably heard me say it before, a tarantula on a wedding cake by speaking up. We’ve both been to weddings, Paul. How long do you think? What’s the half-life of a tarantula on a wedding cake? So we are built to take the abuse. So we came out with this Wreaths Across America thing. In early December, Fox News decided to make us their number one story nationally and internationally for six hours. The threats were coming in about two and a half to four and a half seconds around the clock.

Paul Jay

And tell people what that Wreaths Across America was.

Mikey Weinstein

This is an organization that is very sketchy. They claim to be a 501(c)(3), and you donate to them, and they’ll put a wreath on pretty much every grave they can possibly get a hand on. Although they claim they won’t put them on graves at veteran cemeteries if there’s a Star of David, which is bullshit. And they buy their wreaths from another company that they own. It’s a for-profit company. So they make a tremendous shitload amount of money out of this. But irrespective of that, they have the support of everybody in Congress. Private sector companies like Jersey Mike’s gave them half a million dollars. And the idea is they put a Christmas wreath on every grave.

My dad is in a VA Cemetery. He died a little over four years ago. I’ve already had a crucifix put on there. I understand I’m a public figure, and they could try to track his grave down, and I get it. In this instance, we demanded that it’s fine to put a wreath on a grave if a family, even a Jewish family, wants it. But the burden shouldn’t be on the veteran’s family, like my family. They have to go call the VA saying, don’t put anything on there. It shouldn’t be an opt-out situation. It should be opt-in,

Paul Jay

Right.

Mikey Weinstein

Because of this, Fox News, of course, and the entire right-wing echo sphere went crazy. I’d like to play it now. I don’t know if it’ll pick up a copy of just one of the voicemails we got, and I don’t know whether that’s going to work. And you know what? Let me just see if I can. Are you still there?

Paul Jay

Yeah.

Mikey Weinstein

Okay, I want your audience to listen to this. This went to our local law enforcement, and they sent it right to the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation]. Just bear with me for a second because this is the America that we have today. And this individual was stupid enough, unlike the hundreds of others that we got, not only to give his name but to spell it for anybody. So I’m going to see if I can find it. Just bear with me. Here we go. Okay, everybody, this was an example of what we’re dealing with in this country today.

Phone Recording

We are going to deport, or we are going fucking eggs out every one of you disloyal mother fuckers who is loyal to a sandbox in the Middle East. No mother fucker who has no unilateral loyalty to the United States should be permitted to vote, hold a security clearance. Every mother fucking Jews came to my country to be more fucking selfish. None of you fuckers are compatible with a Democratic form of government, which is based on Christianity, not your fucking shit you believe. And on top of that, you motherfuckers you fucking talk about antisemitism of Christians because Christians rule by fear. Fucking Semites, cause you’re a racist fucking cunt. Cause you think you’re the fucking chosen one, you’re the most discriminatory mother fucking demographic on the fucking planet.

And every one of you mother fuckers who supported Obama, I’m going to have you fucking convicted and fucking executed, and you’re bodies disposed of at sea. And you, Mikey, are completely fucked for the rest of your fucking Jew life, you disloyal fucking cunt.

Mikey Weinstein

I want you to be able to hear it. And as I said before, these were coming in somewhere between two and a half to four to five seconds just around the clock: the emails, the text, everything else. We had to have around-the-clock protection. We have a lot of security at the house. I’m not going to go into all the different kinds of security functions we have. But the point is that most people in the military, including DOD civilians in the army, navy, air force, marine corps and space force, are terrified to stand up.

They have enough trouble in the military getting someone to take a shot. If they say bomb that hill, attack that hut over there, or let’s cross this line, people think I need to sit down, and I really need to look at the science about this. I’m not really sure these vaccines are all made from aborted babies, and I’m a devout Catholic. I can’t do it. I’m a devout Protestant. I’m a devout Jewish person. I’m a devout Muslim, so we’ve had to sit here, and we’ve told people over and over again that we will help you with arguments if you have a good argument. We’ve heard zero arguments.

Paul Jay

There’s an op-ed in one of the defence magazines or newspapers today by General Dennis Laich and Larry Wilkerson, essentially describing the unwillingness to get vaccinated. A refusal as mass insubordination.

Mikey Weinstein

It is and—.

Paul Jay

Tens of thousands of soldiers involved in a mass insubordination.

Mikey Weinstein

Not just soldiers, but, of course, sailors, marines, airmen and guardians. We have this space force; they’re called guardians. Look, we have a separate military code that most of your viewers don’t know about. It’s not the regular American military code.

It’s called the UCMJ, the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I spent seven years as a judge advocate, military lawyer, both as a prosecutor, defence attorney elsewhere. Even when I was in the White House, I was a JAG for a while there, and I can tell you that in the military, the compelling governmental interest is to maximize good order, morale, discipline, unit, cohesion, and mission accomplishment. And listen carefully, everybody and Paul Jay, the health and safety of the troops. It’s not just my idea. It’s a seminal 1974 opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court. It was a six to two decision. Somebody didn’t vote. For what reason? It is still good law—Parker versus Levy. The right-wing likes to roll out the 1992, I think it was a Religious Freedom Restoration Act saying that that somehow trumps, pun intended, the Supreme Court ruling. It doesn’t.

And so, in the military, it’s a felony to have sex with someone other than your family, your wife, or your husband. If you have sex with someone other than your spouse, it obviously destroys good order, morale, discipline, unit cohesion, and that can be a felony. It can also be a felony if you’re ordered to go to the base dentist at 16:00 hours to get a tooth out or 04:00 because that’s a direct verbal order.

Refusing to get the shot, I’m trying to think of all the various different articles of the UCMJ that this violates, but there is a quote they made us memorize at the Academy from a West Point Grad named Patton, which is if you can’t get them to cut their hair when you tell them to cut their hair or to shine their shoes when you tell them to shine their shoes, how the hell can you get them to die for their country?

We’re saying get a shot. The science is there with apologies to LeBron [James]. It isn’t a cold, and it isn’t the flu; it’s COVID. It’s very serious. Only a tiny percentage of the people currently dying, or in hospitals, or on ventilators are people that are vaccinated. It’s the unvaxxed that are out there. If you can’t get a member, a United States Navy SEAL or a United States Army Green Beret or U.S. Air Force P.J., or a U.S. Marine Corps Raider— these are all the special ops special forces folks— to take the shot, what can you expect them to do? But it is a litmus test.

 If you look at the military our job is to ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes’, which is who’s going to guard the guardians? And the guardians of everything in this country is supposed to be the U.S. Military, to support our national security, to provide full constitutional rights call for everybody.

So what we don’t have, like I said, is a problem. This is way beyond that, to say nothing of the infiltration in the police departments, you know, that public school boards. And so we’re heading very, very quickly—

Paul Jay

Okay, well, let’s go back to my original question—the attempted coup, as described as I said by the Financial Times, and now General Milley, and go on. There obviously was a serious threat, but it’s not been very well described why they thought so exactly. Is there any evidence, one that this was more Christian nationalist? And two, last time we interviewed, you said you thought as much as a third of the military could have been recruited, including at senior levels. Now people were astounded at that number, my viewers.

Mikey Weinstein

Right.

Paul Jay

So how do you get to that number? And what more do we know? We just talked about Flynn. But what more do we know about this?

Mikey Weinstein

Our best estimate here at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation— we’re the only organization that focuses with laser-like precision on the military— is that we’ve got somewhere, and we talked about it last time. Between 28% and 34%, maybe 35% of the military would qualify as Christian nationalists in that their belief is that they can propagate the Great Commission again. Mark 16:15, Matthew 28:19, Jesus saying, get everybody, and that’s your prime directive, not love the Lord your God, and the Golden Rule. Get everybody in. [crosstalk 00:31:34]

Paul Jay

How do you get to that number, though? 25%-30%.

Mikey Weinstein

Just through our experience, we’ve been doing this for the better part of 20 years, and we see it everywhere. So you start just like if you ask a dentist, what is it like when you do a root canal? If you get someone right out of dental school, there’ll be a small sample. But we’ve been doing the law of big numbers. I know the names of the glitterati of people that you’ve interviewed. You’re an excellent interviewer. I’m not buttering you up. You probably weren’t this good when you started years ago, but it’s the experience of doing it over and over again.

I had to have some emergency surgery a week ago, and I asked the surgeon who was about to do the procedure how many times have you done this? He said I started when I was 25 years old. I’m 57 now. So I’ve been doing this for 22 years. I’ve done it a few thousand times. So when people look at us, when I tell you that we’ve got over 77,000 hamburgers served here, if we were McDonald’s clients that were helping and that we’ve helped all the way through, you start seeing where the trends are.

We believe that about the military chaplaincy are evangelicals. That again means that they follow the Great Commission, not the Great Commandment. About a third of those, roughly a third of the chaplains, would be considered Christian nationalists. And whether there’s a direct relationship or not. I’m just telling you, we are subject matter experts. I’ve been hired by the Pentagon before to give my expertise, and when they were trying to put together a spiritual fitness test, which, of course, would be a violation of Clause 3, Article 6 of the Constitution, which states quite clearly, we will never have a religious test for any position in the federal government.

I kept telling them that. And I said you can go put lipstick on a pig and call it something else. But the bottom line is the reason Milley was terrified is that he reports to someone called the Commander in Chief. And that is Donald Trump. I believe that Donald Trump is mentally ill. I believe that he is the same. Exactly the same. He is now as he was when he was two or three, not just petulant, mentally ill. He’s a complete coward. He’s a very stupid man, but he’s been enabled his entire life.

The problem is the daisy chain. I think we might have talked about it, and it goes like this. You stopped teaching civics in high school, and my sophomore civics teacher was a retired lawyer named Mr. Gerrard. It was a rite of passage. Poor education breeds ignorance, which gives rise to fear, which catalyzes hate, which gives birth to bigotry and prejudice, which leads to blood in the streets. We are already seeing blood in the streets.

I’m not trying to be a naysayer. I’m just trying to say that if we’re going to save this country, this means that progressives, if you want to coordinate progressives and conservatives, you get them in a room together, and they work like a hand in a glove. Like the Christian nationalist handling Trump and his folks. You get a bunch of progressives in a room together, and they’ll try to peck each other’s eyes out with a pencil.

I mean, I love Michelle Obama, but when she says, when they go low, we go high. No, Michelle, no. When they go low, we have to go low to fight them there. Otherwise, we’re going to lose. I couldn’t believe that I have lived long enough. The other day, maybe you saw it, where Karl Rove was calling out Trump and his people. Karl Rove is barely a Homosapien.

Paul Jay

Well, I did a piece. In fact, it was an interview with Larry, and I wrote the headline as The Fight between the Hard Right and the Far Right.

Mikey Weinstein

Yes. When you have Karl Rove scared about —

Paul Jay

Well, because Karl Rove’s loyalty is to corporate America, mainstream. And mainstream corporate America doesn’t like the disruption this is all causing.

Mikey Weinstein

And you know the reason why. Let’s go back to Larry, who’s one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met in my life. Larry taught me this particular word, a phrase that sounds alliterative. Just two words. It’s predatory capitalism. In this country, we have predatory capitalism. Capitalism is fine. I’m not going to talk about socialism versus capitalism, but when it becomes predatory, when it’s the dollar above everything else in the world. And we’ve seen it. We have people afraid to speak up in the military because they’re a year, a week, a month, a day away from retirement. They’ve got to be able to get that paycheck at the end. They need to get th pension. I understand that.

The bottom line is the way that we were made, whether it was by Jesus, Allah or by the Cosmos. Our bodies need liquids every few minutes. We need solid food. We need to be protected from the cold of the weather and the heat of the weather. We need companionship. We have all kinds of psychological leads. To get this, we need money. And how we get money is all about the structure of a state and a structure of a social and societal regiment.

And in this country, we have, as Larry would say, not just here alone, but particularly in America. We have predatory capitalism. We’re facing a tremendous onslaught from Russia and China. India is out there. I understand all these forces, but the one thing we have is a Constitution. We have this amazing experiment that began, as Biden said, with very flawed white guys who put this document together. But the most important thing they did is that they cleaved a Grand Canyon between temporal and spiritual, between Church and state. 

They’d seen the history of Europe where men in political power, men of the cloth had been men in political power and the savagery that had happened there. They looked at Cromwell in England, they looked at the Salem witch trials, and they said, not here. We are not going to have this be a religious Republic. Or particularly if you look at the Treaty of Tripoli. They made it very clear there. That was unanimously ratified by the U.S. Senate. It started with Washington, and I think it was [John] Adams that pushed it all the way through. We are not a Christian nation.

But we’re dealing with a lot of Americans who believe that if you take Jesus out of the country, or out of the classroom, or out of the school board, or the cops, sewage workers, fire department, and particularly out of the marine corps, navy, army, air force, and space force, then you are dooming this country. And if you support that, we want you dead. 

In the audio that I just sent you, the person says, any of you Jews and all the other words who voted for Obama, I will see you convicted, executed. We will dispose of your bodies at sea. On a scale of one to ten of the stuff we get, that was probably about a six. For the rest of it, my wife has written two books with our California publisher about this. But my point is that we are living in the belly of the beast here at MRFF. We see it. I can see where it’s going. And I’m not the only one. Larry is one of our most active Advisory Board members. He sees it, too.

Paul Jay

So let’s talk about what can be done now. Defence Secretary [Lloyd] Austin, he’s supposedly looking at extremism in the military. The thing is, not only him, even this article. There’s another article by Admiral Stavridis, who appeared in Time magazine a couple of weeks after, the one about January 6th. I should say it was even on January 4th. But he talks about extremism in the military, but they don’t want to talk about religious extremism.

Mikey Weinstein

No, no, no, no.

Paul Jay

They talk about Nazis and this and that. And I asked, Larry, why don’t they want to talk about it? And he says, well, one of the reasons is that parts of the country that have the strongest Christian nationalism are also the main place they recruit volunteer soldiers.

Mikey Weinstein

Yes, and this all comes back again to we hired an extensive lobbyist years ago, at MRFF, very significant lobbyists. To her credit, after a year, she fired herself. She said, Mikey, it doesn’t matter if I talk to Republicans or Democrats about you. They are terrified that if they get connected with anything that looks like they’re trying to limit the love of Jesus, they’re going to lose Christian votes and lose Christian money. And so they won’t touch it. And so, we made it clear over and over again.

I put out an op-ed about this that, again, the mothership. The mothership is fundamentalist Christian nationalism. And out of that comes white supremacy, misogyny, Islamophobia, antisemitism hatred of the Constitution, transphobia, all of that. But the mothership is this concept of white, straight Christian male power.

Paul Jay

Okay, but what should be done? But first of all, let me say, what should the federal and state governments that haven’t been captured by far-right Republicans, what should they be doing? And then what should people like us, what should ordinary people be doing?

Mikey Weinstein

Let me give you a quick anecdote. Norman Lear invited me out to meet with him a couple of times in Hollywood at his Act Three Productions place. He turned out to be a good donor. And he asked me the first time I was there, what did you think of Archie Bunker? And I said, well, I thought he was a bigot. He was a racist. He said, yeah, that wasn’t really what I was going for. And I said, really? He goes, yeah. He said I wanted America just to know that Archie was just somebody who was afraid of change. And I think ultimately, again, when you’ve been able to have all the toys to yourself because you’re a white, straight, Christian, and male for centuries, suddenly, the fact that you can’t have that all to yourself terrifies you. And to even express that you want to keep your toys to yourself was something that was so horrible that when Trump came out, people said, hey, I don’t have to apologize for myself anywhere anymore. The President is saying this.

What do we need to do? It’s very simple. We need people to be court marshalled. We need them to lose their liberty and to go behind bars for what they’re doing in the military. That’s what needs to happen. I’m disappointed that right now, and I’m sure Larry would agree with me, that people that are refusing to get the shot are simply being administratively chaptered out. I think most of them are getting a general discharge under honourable conditions. What the hell is honourable about that? They should be court marshalled. 

I said it before; the Romans had it right. When you cut off somebody’s head and stick it on a pole, people look at that. Well, we’re not talking about decapitating people, but we’re saying at this point, people need to be punished. You have violated the most basic aspect of the military, which you’ve been given an order. 

The head of the National Guard in Oklahoma is fighting the demand from the Pentagon that the Oklahoma National Guards may get the vaccination. That’s what they’re doing. Don’t look up. Don’t get that vax. If you get the vaccination, you’re admitting that COVID exists. And if you admit that COVID exists, you’re buying into these left-wingers like MRFF, and [Harvey] Weinstein, and all the others, Paul Jay. They only invented this to get our Lord and saviour, Donald Trump, out of the White House. And then, of course, they stole the election because we have all of these lawsuits and all of these recounts that clearly support us.

Paul Jay

The irony of all this. This is where I don’t get it. Within its own world, the irrationality of this. Trump was bragging about how quickly he got vaccinations produced. That was his big claim to fame.

Mikey Weinstein

It’s impossible to use reasonableness or rationality. I defy any of your listeners or viewers to tell me they haven’t lost a friendship or a family member over this because I certainly have. And everybody I know has lost a family member, or a neighbour, or a friendship over this. I had a guy that I was friends with for decades that I can barely stomach looking at. I’m sure he feels the same way about me. He’s a white, straight, Christian male, and not all are. I mean, there are plenty of people. There are people of colour. There are women. Look at Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert. But in the main, we’re dealing with something that you cannot; we’re past the point of being able to try to convince.

Paul Jay

Let me interject something sort of like what I did earlier. There are people that don’t agree with getting vaccinated who are not Christian nationalists, correct. And people, if they look around, they can see who they are. Now, I don’t agree with them, but not all anti-vaxxers are, and I would assume not all evangelicals are anti-vaxxers either, but a lot of them are most. 

Mikey Weinstein

Remember, we got to be careful. Evangelicals are our friends.

Paul Jay

But is anti-vax a tenant of the Christian nationalist?

Mikey Weinstein

Yeah, absolutely it is. There’s just no way you can argue that it isn’t. As I said before, if I’m a subject matter expert, it’s because we see it around the clock. My workday generally starts at seven in the morning and ends at ten at night every day. That’s 15 hours a day. Fox News blew that up, saying it’s impossible, though it’s not impossible. Ask anyone who knows me. Ask my wife or whatever. That’s the way it goes. And oftentimes, it’s more. It’s going to be more today, I guarantee you.

Paul Jay

Let me ask another question. Something like 74-75 million people voted for Trump. Not all of them are Christian nationalists. In fact, a significant number of them had previously voted for Obama, which is an interesting stratum of that Trump vote.

Mikey Weinstein

Right.

Paul Jay

Do you have any idea what percentage of that vote is Christian nationalist?

Mikey Weinstein

You can talk to a large number of analysts about this, and you’re going to get a variety of different answers. What I can tell you is that Christian, and there’s a logic diagram you can put up here. If you are a Christian nationalist, the chances that you voted for anyone other than Trump are; it’s something north of zero, but not much further than zero if you’re a Christian nationalist.

Of course, as I told you, there are plenty of people: African Americans, there are Native Americans, there are Hispanic Americans, there are gay Americans, there are many Jewish Americans, atheist Americans that all voted for Trump. They’re not all Christian nationalists, but in the main, as the articles that came out in the last 48 hours, the fuel of the engine are not those people. The fuel that actuates this hatred, this prejudice, this discrimination, this lust and greed for power— as the President said yesterday, I must get ahead by pushing you down— is Christian nationalism. 

Sarah Palin represented a good example of this. The idea that we want a Christian nation. I wish you could see my mail for one day. The voicemail that I sent you, which you can certainly use, it came to us on December 14th. The only reason is that I didn’t answer that call. The guy left the entire voicemail there. That’s a very good example. The chances of that person not being a Christian nationalist, again, not zero, but probably not much further than that. But even though it actuates it, it’s the primary fuel.

Let me just say it to you this way. You can eat your Wheaties in the morning with warm water, but it’s better with milk. And the milk, the mother’s milk for the bigotry, and hatred, and the evil of Trump and his followers is Christian nationalism.

Paul Jay

Are you able now, or will you be able to actually name relatively senior people in the armed forces that are Christian nationalists?

Mikey Weinstein

Well, we’re always asked that. Part of the problem is the answer is unclear. We’ve done that in the past. People like, who was the guy that was at Blackhawk Down? I can’t remember his name now—long lists of people that are now out, some that are in. We already looked at Charles Flynn. He commands the entire U.S. Army for the Pacific.

We have to be careful by outing them with specific evidence because some of that evidence could only come from staffers. And there’s a limited number of those you could point to unless we have the approval of our clients who are giving us the evidence, we can’t do it. And too often, they’ll be in the immediate area of collateral damage. But it’s just not that hard when you have a commander that decides that they want to make it clear that you have a ‘Merry Christmas’ sign out in front of their base. It may seem like a small thing, but that belongs on the chapel grounds. Can you imagine if it said ‘Merry Kwanzaa’, or ‘Happy Eid’, or whatever? If it pushed an Islamic concept, or if there was a POW MIA table that only had the Quran on it, people’s throats would be cut. We’re already suing the VA. We find it all the time because they put Christian Bibles on POW MIA tables. 

The answer to your question is we’ve already given many names to people in the past, but they won’t do anything. What we’re looking for now, and that’s why we’re saying the vaccination situation is easy. Of course, not everyone that is anti-vax is a fundamentalist Christian nationalist. Aaron Rogers is anti-vax. He is in no way, shape or form, a fundamentalist Christian nationalist. I think there are some integrity problems with the quibbling lies that he told the media, but that’s a good example. But as I said before, yes, you can put soy sauce, you can put Kool-Aid, and you can put water on your Wheaties, but what goes best with it? Milk, whole milk.

Paul Jay

So what do you see? Why do you use this phrase at the very beginning? We’re a micron away from civil war. We only have a few minutes left. But, how does this play out? And why do you think we’re so close?

Mikey Weinstein

When you look at, in the past, whether it was Pearl Harbor or what was the Spanish American War? The ship that was set on fire in Cuba begins with an A. I forget the name of it now. Or remember the Alamo or certainly the Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam. One incident away is how I view it at this point. 

My father used to have a hobby flying radio-controlled airplanes. The concept when he flew those was, say, three mistakes high. So that three mistakes, you can save the plane, not crash your radio-controlled airplane model. I think we’re one incident away from it right now, sparking it. One incident away. I speak to you as a subject matter expert. I don’t know what that would look like. There’s probably a plethora of things we could talk about, but I think we’re one incident away.

Paul Jay

What is away from what? What does it look like?

Mikey Weinstein

Blood in the streets. Blood in the streets. People taking their guns, people taking their knives, people closing the doors. Tulsa and whatever it was when Tulsa had the race riots, which most of us weren’t even taught about. I think about it every day. Have you not actually, personally, your people, talking about if it’s time to get out of this country, where do we go?

Paul Jay

I have no intention of ever leaving because I’m right now in Canada. Everybody I talk to says, when can I come to Canada? So I have to say to the Canadians listening to this, when Trump just barely touched the Canadian trade going into the United States, it caused hysteria in Canada.

So if Canadians think they’re going to be exempt from this, they’re in for a big surprise. If you have this kind of government in the U.S., they’re just going to use access to the American market to overthrow any Canadian government that doesn’t at the very least comply in some way.

Mikey Weinstein

Trump, in his demented, ignorant, cowardly mind, views Canada as the 51st State. It’s as simple as that. There’s no sanctuary there. If you want to go to New Zealand, the bottom line is that you have to stand and fight here, in my opinion. I don’t know exactly how bad it’s going to be, but since we’ve had the windows shot out of our house twice. I’ve mentioned innocent animals beheaded and disembowelled and left on the front of it. We’ve had swastikas on our house. Now that’s me as a public figure, civil rights activist.

To answer your question 45 seconds ago, I think it’ll be like that for everybody, and we can’t let it happen. We have got to stop it. And that means that when they go low, Michelle Obama, whom I respect, we need to go low in order to fight them on whatever plane they’re in because their playbook realizes that we and those on the other side appear to be weak, to appear to have a lack of resolve, that if you get punched in the nose, and you suddenly see blood, you’re going to run. That’s what they depend on. Their mother’s milk is the weaponized version of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, their view of one and zero. You’re either with us or against us, which, by the way, there’s also a statement in there, I think, that contributed to Jesus in the New Testament. Those who are not with me are against me. I want to make it clear that about 84% of our staff are Christians. Half my own family is Christian. Ninety-five percent of our 77,000 plus clients are Christian, and a bunch of our allies are Christians. They’re wonderful people, and they’ve been with us every step of the way. However, they are not fundamentalist Christian nationalists. That is the enemy. That is the engine that is the gasoline for that actuation of trying to bring about a fundamental Christian Gilead in accordance with the Handmaid’s tale.

Paul Jay

This section of the society that’s Christian nationalist it’s not new. It was recruited. We were talking off-camera before, but that kind of alliance with the Republican Party really got energized during Reagan’s time. He very deliberately went out and made these kinds of alliances.

Mikey Weinstein

I was in the White House during that time.

Paul Jay

But, they were relatively still marginal in terms of the effect on the whole of society. And some people critique the Democratic Party. They get called the corporate Democrats. That they so ignored rural America and that people’s lives simply didn’t get better when the Democratic Party recently, certainly since Clinton, their lives didn’t get better. And this helped create the conditions for this to grow. Do you agree with that?

Mikey Weinstein

That’s a very good question. I think it can also be applied to the Republican Party.

Paul Jay

No doubt, no doubt. In theory, the Democratic Party is supposed to stand, not for big business and all that.

Mikey Weinstein

But of course, it was the Republican Party of [Abraham] Lincoln that got rid of slavery, et cetera, et cetera. So the bottom line, as I said before, is that we have these corporeal forms that need sustenance, liquid and solid sustenance, and we need social support. We need protection from the elements. Honestly, we do on an actual minute-by-minute basis.

And so when you look at Maslow’s hierarchy, who’s going to help me get my social security? Who’s going to make sure I have a job? Who’s going to make sure that my children can be educated and that if something bad happens, I can call the police, and I can trust the police?

We could do a whole show just on the infiltration of Christian nationalism in police departments. We had threats coming to us from on-duty police officers in their uniforms a few years ago. I was about to speak at a Christian University a couple of years ago when my security team went up there a week ahead of time to plan out our security. The next day, I got a threat from a member of that University’s security team that was in this thing.

So what I’m trying to say is that I’m not going to place generalized blame on one party or another. There are wonderful people that, I can tell you that the Reagan that I knew in the White House and the people that I’m still very close with my colleagues there, I don’t know a single one of them that supports what Trump has done. But I can tell you that I saw this coming even when Reagan was there. But I want to believe that Reagan and his wife, Nancy [Reagan], would be beyond appalled by what they’re seeing right now. But in many respects, I believe they left the door wide open for it.

Oliver North was a good example of someone that supports this type of I don’t care what he would say in response to this. It supports this type of Christian nationalism, and it’s everywhere, and it’s omnipresent now, and they are very carefully directing this. It is fueling the gerrymandering in the districts and the voter’s rights. Changes that you’re seeing in an attempt to take over. Hopefully, the Senate, if not the House, in what, another eight, or nine, or ten months and to set the stage for what’s going to happen in 2024.

What we hear at MRFF, over and over again, is we’re going to come get you after the midterms. And by the time Trump comes back again, this time, we’re not going to be dicking around. We’re going to have the gallows out. We’re going to execute. We’re going to execute people over and over again. Listen carefully to the voicemail I’m going to send you. We did put that out to people. A lot of people were shocked by it. But Ilhan Omar played one of those voicemails she got after she was attacked by Lauren Boebert. I’m not going to say which is worse. Listen to hers. Then listen to what ours was. And remember that’s representative of hundreds or thousands of others that have come in. But Americans can still do something. They have to vote. They have to keep their minds open. But at this point, as I said, I don’t know what you can do with all the arguments being made. You have one group of Americans being informed by American News Now, and Newsmax, and Breitbart, and Fox, and the rest of these hideous news organizations. And they all believe that MSNBC, ABC, CBS and CNN are all on the far-left. The truth is that this is not true. And you can argue all day long that if you put your hand over an open flame and a candle, that your hand won’t burn. But that’s like, don’t look up because it’s going to burn. We don’t want our democracy to burn.

And it’s just like what Benjamin Franklin said at the end of the Constitutional Convention. He was the rock star of his day when they walked out. He was being surrounded by Americans, American colonists, others saying, Dr. Franklin, Dr. Franklin, what type of government have you bequeathed to us? And he said, a Republic. If you can keep it, that’s what he said. A Republic if you can keep it, please, everybody help us keep our Constitution and our Republic. Thank you, Paul, for this opportunity today.

Paul Jay

All right. Thanks a lot, Mikey.

Mikey Weinstein

Great.

Paul Jay

And thank you for joining us on theAnalysis.news. Please don’t forget again there’s a donate button, a share, and a subscribe. Get on our email list and see you again soon.

END