CLAN: We saw something happen last Friday night!

MONDAY, APRIL 15, 2024

All tangled up in Blue: We thought of Michael Corleone again, late this past Friday night.

We thought about what he saw in the streets of Havana on the eve of Batista's fall.

"I saw an interesting thing happen today," he tells a group of associates on a sundrenched hotel patio. When he describes what he saw, Hyman Roth takes him aside and tells him he blabbed too much.

What did we see on Friday night? As MSNBC concluded its broadcast day, we saw a lengthy discussion of Christian nationalism.

The discussion started at 11:31 p.m. With only one commercial break, it consumed the rest of the show.

Stephanie Ruhle had assembled "some fantastic experts," she said as she introduced her guests. In Ruhle's description, the panel included "my old friend, Peter Wehner." 

"There is a new force in American politics that is becoming more visible and way more vocal," Ruhle said at the start of the segments. 

"This is such an important conversation," she said. "People don't realize what's happening."

LET'S GET SMARTER, her chyron had said at the start of the hourlong program. If you want to watch the entire discussion in question, you can start by clicking this. Or you can go to the Ruhle website and see the bulk of what was said.

To do so, just click here.

The lengthy discussion consumed half the show. It was a perfectly sensible topic.

The fantastic experts in question were these. Nothing was obviously "wrong" with any one of the three:

The Eleventh Hour with Stephanie Ruhle
Friday, April 12, 2024

Anthea Butler: Religious Studies professor at Penn; an MSNBC columnist
Peter Wehner: Senior writer at The Atlantic; senior fellow, the Trinity Forum
Catherine Stewart: Investigative reporter and author

Wehner is an anti-Trump former Republican White House official. In that sense, the panel was presumably bipartisan in the narrow political sense.

At any rate, those were the experts. There was nothing "wrong" with any of them.  The important conversation began, with quite a few claims advanced.

We aren't experts on Christian nationalism; there's a good chance you aren't either.  Among the many claims we heard, these claims emerged:

Christian nationalism is "a malignant movement" built on "a fear of losing white power"—and especially, on the fear of a loss of "white male power."

Christian nationalists "don't want immigrants" (apparently, none at all). According to Ruhle and Professor Butler, "we women would be home raising our children" if Christian nationalists had their druthers. "We would be in our kitchens. We would be nice trad-wives."

We were told that "this political moment that we're in right now" is "drawing so many people into the movement. It represents "almost a Nietzschean will to power," Wehner said, adding that the movement's adherents "want power to inflict real harm on the people they disagree with." 

At that point, the commercial break arrived. After the commercial break, the panel discussed the way Donald J. Trump is seen as a literal savior by (some) Christian nationalists.

"Right-wing conspiracy theories have never more bloodthirsty," viewers were told. The movement is growing "more prominent, more powerful," Ruhle's viewers were additionally told.

Claims were advanced about various organized groups, and about the role of Christian nationalists in the events of January 6. Eventually, some of the organized groups were actually named, accompanied by refences to QAnon, the Great Replacement Theory. and the Jericho Marches.

Eventually it had to happen! It came to sweeping claims about having to get parental permission slips to teach about Black history in Florida.

The claim struck us as very broad. But that's where it goes within clans.

On our own, we don't know much of anything about this particular movement. We weren't sure that we'd learned anything new—indeed, that we'd learned anything at all—after we watched this discussion.

Why made such thoughts pop into our heads? We'll offer two quick points:

For starters, no one from within this alleged movement was interviewed, or even quoted, during the course of this show. Nor was there jany indication that any such people had been asked to take part in the show.

Also, no one on the panel seemed to sympathize in any way with any part of this particular movement. Tim Alberta might have been there, but that very sane non-Christian nationalist wasn't present this night.

Instead, there were claims about bloodthirsty beliefs, but also and about the desire to do great harm.

That was our first observation. As is routinely the case in today's "cable news," everyone who sat on the panel seemed to agree, in every possible way, with everybody else. 

That was our first observation But also, when Saturday morning came, we searched for an Associated Press report which had been shown on screen at the start of the long discussion.

When we found the AP report, its headline was exactly as had been shown. That said, the report in question was two years old and, among other things, it said such things as this:

Christian nationalism on the rise in some GOP campaigns
The Associated Press, May 29, 2022

[...]

In the book, Whitehead and co-author Samuel Perry measured rates of Christian nationalism by drawing on a 2017 Baylor University survey. It gauged opinions on such things as America’s role in God’s plan and whether the U.S. should be declared a Christian nation, advance biblical values and allow school prayer and religious displays in public places.

Their research found about one in five Americans align with many of those views. That’s down from nearly one in four a decade earlier, just as Americans have become less religious overall. But Whitehead said Christian nationalists, who are more numerous among Republicans, can be expected to maintain their fervor.

[...]

Elizabeth Neumann, chief strategy officer for Moonshot, a tech company that aims to counter online violent extremism, disinformation and other harms, said Christian nationalism began picking up steam around 2015 amid a rising narrative of purported persecution of Christians.

Neumann, who served in the George W. Bush and Trump administrations and grew up in an evangelical Christian household, called the movement “heretical and idolatry” and an “apocalyptic vision (that) very often leads to violence.” Many pastors are pushing back against it, she added.

“I see Christian nationalism as the gasping, dying breath of the older generation in America that is afraid that Christians are going to be replaced,” she said.

That was the end of the Ruhle program's sole identified journalistic source. The headline Ruhle's producers displayed referred to (a few) political campaigns which were underway two years ago—campaigns which eventually failed. 

Even then, the report said that Christian nationalism was in a relative state of decline. Also, the norms by which Whitehead and Perry had established a 20 percent membership class were a good deal more tame than the claims we'd heard on Ruhle's program.

For ourselves, we don't support "prayer in the [public] schools" or "religious displays in public places" (depending on what kind of "public places" you mean). But those criteria are pale before the claim that bloodthirsty imagery is leading adherents to want to "inflict real harm on the people they disagree with." 

"Many pastors are pushing back against it," one of the AP's experts had said. Two years ago, she said she saw the movement “as the gasping, dying breath of the older generation in America."

She might have been right and she might have been wrong, but that assessment came from the Ruhle program's primary journalistic document. No such possibility was identified or evaluated as Ruhle and her panel of experts assured us that the movement, "right now," was coming on very strong.

On balance, we aren't fans of Ruhle's work. In our view, her physical poses on the air were horrible right from the start. 

In our view, the nightly recitation of her program's slogan—LET'S GET SMARTER [with our all-star panel]—is a nightly insult to her viewers' intelligence.

That slogan strikes us as an insult to basic human intelligence. Could the same thing have been true about the way she, and/or her producers, assembled this "important conversation?"

We thought again of Michael Corleone after we watched this program. For perhaps the ten millionth time, we thought we'd seen an interesting thing happen on a major "cable news" program.

We also thought we'd learned nothing at all, except about the dominant role in human affairs long played by the existence of ingroups, described at one point in the Iliad as "clans."

Final point, and very important:

Trust in a clan isn't trust in the "Klan." That was a brutal and murderous group, but also a spelling error.

Tomorrow: Clans describe the trial