Flipping Tables

In March 2026, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stood before a Pentagon worship service and prayed for "overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy", calling for the eternal damnation of America's enemies. Military commanders across every branch have been reported, in over 200 formal complaints, telling troops the Iran war is "God's plan" and that Trump was "anointed by Jesus" to trigger Armageddon. Benjamin Netanyahu has quoted 1 Samuel 15:3, the command to destroy the Amalekites, sparing "neither man nor woman, infant nor ox" to justify Israeli military operations.
This is what happens when political leaders weaponize faith to sanctify violence. And it has been happening for 1,700 years.
From Constantine's battlefield vision in 312 CE and the subsequent murder of philosopher Hypatia by a Christian mob, through Augustine's just war doctrine that gave state violence a Christian vocabulary, to Charlemagne's massacre of 4,500 Saxon prisoners at Verden for refusing baptism. We cover the First Crusade's Rhineland pogroms, where Jewish mothers drowned their children rather than see them forcibly baptized, and the Jerusalem massacre of 1099, where chroniclers described blood reaching horses' knees. We examine the Albigensian Crusade's destruction of Béziers, where the papal legate reportedly said "Kill them all, God will know his own," and the witch trials that followed, killing up to 60,000 people (80% of them women) using Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum as theological cover.
We also cover what this history did specifically to women, a thread that runs unbroken from Tertullian calling women "the devil's gateway" in 200 CE, through the rape of nuns during the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople, to the sexual violence documented in California's Spanish mission system, to the girls in Native American boarding schools whose hair was cut, languages stolen, and bodies abused under church-run federal contracts.
The only thing more dangerous than a tyrant, is one who believes God gave them permission.
SOURCES
Augustine, The City of God, c. 413–426 CE

Tertullian, De Cultu Feminarum, c. 200 CE

Socrates Scholasticus, Historia Ecclesiastica, c. 439 CE (murder of Hypatia)

Annales Regni Francorum (Charlemagne / Verden massacre)

Barbero, Alessandro — Charlemagne: Father of a Continent, UC Press, 2004

Chazan, Robert — European Jewry and the First Crusade, UC Press, 1987

Mainz Anonymous and Solomon bar Simson Chronicle (Rhineland massacres, 1096)

Raymond of Aguilers, Historia Francorum (Jerusalem, 1099)

Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, c. 1220 (Béziers)

Nicetas Choniates, Historia, c. 1206 (Fourth Crusade / Constantinople)

Brenon, Anne — Le vrai visage du catharisme, Loubatières, 1988

Kramer, Heinrich — Malleus Maleficarum, 1487 (ed. Mackay, Cambridge UP, 2006)

Levack, Brian — The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, Routledge, 4th ed., 2016

Cuneo, Michele de — Letter of October 28, 1495, trans. Samuel Eliot Morison

Díaz del Castillo, Bernal — True History of the Conquest of New Spain, c. 1568

Hassig, Ross — Mexico and the Spanish Conquest, U of Oklahoma Press, 2006

Pedro Pizarro — Relation of the Discovery and Conquest of Peru, c. 1571

Stannard, David — American Holocaust, Oxford UP, 1992

Kamen, Henry — The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, Yale UP, 1997

Jouanna, Arlette — La Saint-Barthélemy, Gallimard, 2007

Parker, Geoffrey — The Thirty Years' War, Routledge, 1997

Regan, Donald — For the Record, Harcourt Brace, 1988

Maurice, Jean-Claude — Si vous le répétez, je démentirai (Bush / Gog and Magog)

NPR — "Netanyahu's references to violent biblical passages raise alarm," Nov. 7, 2023

U.S. Dept. of the Interior — Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, 2022

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada — Final Report, 2015

Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. 543, U.S. Supreme Court, 1823

Vatican Statement repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery, March 30, 2023

My entire life I heard my Dad say "Freedom isn't free" and perhaps the best application of that is the Civil Rights Movement. It's easy from a place of comfort to not fully understand the risk and sacrifice required for... the right to vote. The right as a black person to have equal and fair access to elections, job protection, education. We are in our own Civil Rights moment now and we can learn a lot from what they didv

Sources:
U.S. Congressional Records, Joint Committee on Reconstruction, 1866 (Memphis Massacre testimony)
FBI Files on the murders of Medgar Evers, Emmett Till, and the Mississippi Burning case (MIBURN)
Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records — Mississippi Department of Archives and History (publicly available since 1998)
Department of Justice Civil Rights Division records and case files
NAACP Anti-Lynching Campaign Records — Library of Congress
Congressional Record, Senate filibuster of the Civil Rights Act, March–June 1964
Books — Scholarly and Narrative History:
Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (1988). Simon & Schuster.
Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65 (1998). Simon & Schuster.
Branch, Taylor. At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (2006). Simon & Schuster.
Berman, Ari. Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (2015). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (2016). Bloomsbury.
Anderson, Carol. One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (2018). Bloomsbury.
Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935). Harcourt, Brace.
Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986). William Morrow.
Hamer, Fannie Lou. The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is (2011). University Press of Mississippi.
Lewis, John, with Michael D'Orso. Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (1998). Simon & Schuster.
Litwack, Leon F. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (1998). Knopf.
Marable, Manning. Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006 (2007). University Press of Mississippi.
McAdam, Doug. Freedom Summer (1988). Oxford University Press.
Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014). Spiegel & Grau.
Tyson, Timothy B. The Blood of Emmett Till (2017). Simon & Schuster.
Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892). New York Age Print.
Wells-Barnett, Ida B. A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895). Donohue & Henneberry.
Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010). Random House.
Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955). Oxford University Press.
Memphis-Specific Sources:
Honey, Michael K. Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign (2007). W.W. Norton.
Mlinar, Zeljko, et al. Memphis Sanitation Strike Archives — Memphis Public Library Special Collections
Tucker, David M. Memphis Since Crump: Bossism, Blacks, and Civic Reformers, 1948–1968 (1980). University of Tennessee Press.
Wright, Sharon D. Race, Power, and Political Emergence in Memphis (2000). Garland Publishing.
Legal Cases Referenced:
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)
Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944)
Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454 (1960)
Browder v. Gayle, 352 U.S. 903 (1956)
Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013)
United States v. Price et al. (Mississippi Burning prosecutions), 383 U.S. 787 (1966)

Apologies for the lateness of the post, our dashboard encountered a technical difficulty that showed my podcasts didn't exist and had to be fixed before an upload could happen. Thanks for your patience.
After being at Montgomery last weekend I wanted to do a deep dive into what I never learned as a kid. What led to the Civil Rights movement, its danger, its courage. Part one takes us through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and part two takes us beyond.

SOURCES

U.S. Congressional Records, Joint Committee on Reconstruction, 1866 (Memphis Massacre testimony)

FBI Files on the murders of Medgar Evers, Emmett Till, and the Mississippi Burning case (MIBURN) — available through FOIA requests and the University of Mississippi's Mississippi Digital Library

Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records — Mississippi Department of Archives and History (publicly available since 1998)

Department of Justice Civil Rights Division records and case files

NAACP Anti-Lynching Campaign Records — Library of Congress

Congressional Record, Senate filibuster of the Civil Rights Act, March–June 1964

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (1988). Simon & Schuster.

Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65 (1998). Simon & Schuster.

Branch, Taylor. At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (2006). Simon & Schuster.

Berman, Ari. Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (2015). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (2016). Bloomsbury.

Anderson, Carol. One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (2018). Bloomsbury.

Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935). Harcourt, Brace.

Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986). William Morrow.

Hamer, Fannie Lou. The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is (2011). University Press of Mississippi.

Lewis, John, with Michael D'Orso. Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (1998). Simon & Schuster.

Litwack, Leon F. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (1998). Knopf.

Marable, Manning. Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006 (2007). University Press of Mississippi.

McAdam, Doug. Freedom Summer (1988). Oxford University Press.

McWhorter, Diane. Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama — The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001). Simon & Schuster.

Payne, Charles M. I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (1995). University of California Press.

Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014). Spiegel & Grau.

Tyson, Timothy B. The Blood of Emmett Till (2017). Simon & Schuster.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892). New York Age Print.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895). Donohue & Henneberry.

Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010). Random House.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955). Oxford University Press.

Honey, Michael K. Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign (2007). W.W. Norton.

Mlinar, Zeljko, et al. Memphis Sanitation Strike Archives — Memphis Public Library Special Collections

Tucker, David M. Memphis Since Crump: Bossism, Blacks, and Civic Reformers, 1948–1968 (1980). University of Tennessee Press.

Wright, Sharon D. Race, Power, and Political Emergence in Memphis (2000). Garland

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)

Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944)

Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454 (1960)

Browder v. Gayle, 352 U.S. 903 (1956)

Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013)

United States v. Price et al. 383 U.S. 787 (1966)

We met the carefully curated Ronald Reagan in part 1. We saw the Hollywood grin, the borrowed cowboy myth, the astrologer in the basement, the informant and the corporate lackey. In Part 2, we follow the money. The sale of a new economic dream for Americans during a time of desperate stagflation, unemployment and uncertainty. And what it sold has cost this country more than any single presidency in modern American history.
Reaganomics was pitched to Americans as common sense. The government takes too much, thats the problem. Taxes on "job creators" choke the economy, corporations are going to run if you tax them you know. Cut taxes, slash regulation, trust the market — and a tide of prosperity will lift every boat. Cut off the welfare queen and free the small business owner. Trust the rich. Trust the men in suits who already had everything to know what was best for the woman scrubbing the floor at the hospital. He sold it the way only Reagan could, with a tear in his eye, a flag behind him, and a story about a Cadillac driving welfare cheat in Chicago who statistically did not exist.
In this episode, we trace what actually happened next.
The top income tax rate fell from 70 percent to 28 percent. The estate tax was gutted and capital gains were slashed. Corporate rates collapsed. All the ways the wealthiest among us make wealth were unleashed while the rest of us stayed tethered, shouldering more than our share of the burden. Union membership crashed from one in four American workers to roughly one in ten. Wages stopped tracking productivity. The federal minimum wage was frozen in time. Wall Street was deregulated, manufacturing was offshored, and the bottom half of the country watched its share of national wealth fall from 4 percent to barely 2.5, while the top 1 percent's share doubled. All while the national debt tripled. The mental health system was hollowed out, causing homelessness to explode. And every Republican economic platform since has been some version of do that again. Even Democratic leaders have allied themselves with this ideology in some way.
We also dismantle the lie at the heart of it all, that spending on people is waste. Because every credible economist who has actually run the numbers has found the opposite. Every dollar invested in SNAP generates up to $1.80 in economic activity. Every dollar spent on early childhood education returns $7 to $12. Public transit returns roughly $4 to $1. WIC saves $3 in future Medicaid costs for every dollar it spends. Universal preschool, paid family leave, Medicaid expansion, infrastructure, these aren't handouts. They are the highest-return investments any government can make. The math has been clear for forty years. We were just told not to look.
Reaganomics were one expensive lie for the American people. In this episode we talk about why we bought it, who profited, who's still paying — and what this country would actually look like if we ran the numbers instead of the mythology.

Three decades before the White House, Ronald Reagan was being assembled in plain sight. This episode traces the apprenticeship most highlight reels skip: the New Deal Democrat who became FBI informant "T-10," the B-list actor who turned a corporate speaking tour into a political movement, and the lapsed Midwestern kid who would one day broker the marriage of the Republican Party and white evangelical America.
In postwar Hollywood, where Reagan, as Screen Actors Guild president, simultaneously fed names to the FBI and lent SAG's institutional cover to the blacklist. His October 1947 HUAC testimony was polite; the private file was not. Careers ended on the strength of "fraternal" reports.
Then in 1954, General Electric Theater, and eight years on the GE plant circuit under Lemuel Boulware, the hardline VP who handed Reagan a reading list of Hayek and Hazlitt and turned his pep talks into a portable free market gospel. Corporations were buying preachers and performers to sell their "anti-union, low regulation" gospel. By 1962 GE had cut him loose, but "The Speech" was finished and in 1964 it launched Goldwater and, with him, Reagan himself.
Finally, the wedding of cross and capital. Reagan, never a churchgoing adult, became the indispensable broker between corporate donors and a politically homeless evangelical electorate. In Dallas, August 1980, he closed the deal with one line: "I know you can't endorse me, but I want you to know I endorse you." That coalition outlived him still runs our country. In Part 2 we talk about the longterm staggering impact of Reaganomics.

References
Balmer, R. (2021). Bad faith: Race and the rise of the religious right. Eerdmans.
Cannon, L. (2000). President Reagan: The role of a lifetime. PublicAffairs.
Crespino, J. (2007). The new right and the southern strategy. Journal of Southern History, 73(4), 895–924.
Critchlow, D. T. (2005). Phyllis Schlafly and grassroots conservatism: A woman’s crusade. Princeton University Press.
Dochuk, D. (2011). From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain‑folk religion, grassroots politics, and the rise of evangelical conservatism. W. W. Norton.
FitzGerald, F. (2017). The evangelicals: The struggle to shape America. Simon & Schuster.
Hancock, A. (2004). The politics of disgust: The public identity of the welfare queen. New York University Press.
Kohler‑Hausmann, J. (2017). Getting tough: Welfare and imprisonment in 1970s America. Princeton University Press.
Kruse, K. M. (2015). One nation under God: How corporate America invented Christian America. Basic Books.
Levin, J. (2019). The queen: The forgotten life behind an American myth. Little, Brown and Company.
Mittelstadt, J. (2005). From welfare to workfare: The unintended consequences of liberal reform, 1945–1965. University of North Carolina Press.
Nadasen, P. (2005). Welfare warriors: The welfare rights movement in the United States. Routledge.
Nickerson, M. M. (2012). The Reagan administration’s response to the gender gap. Journal of Policy History, 24(1), 115–140.
Perlstein, R. (2020). Reaganland: America’s right turn 1976–1980. Simon & Schuster.
Reagan, R. (1986, February 15). Radio address to the nation on welfare reform [Speech transcript]. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/radio-address-nation-welfare-reform
Rich, C. G. (2020). The “welfare queen” goes to the polls: Race‑based fractures in gender politics. Georgetown Law Journal, 108(4), 1–67.
Shilts, R. (1987). And the band played on: Politics, people, and the AIDS epidemic. St. Martin’s Press.
Sick, G. (1991). October surprise: America’s hostages in Iran and the election of Ronald Reagan. Times Books.
Troy, G. (2009). The great communicator: Media and the Reagan image. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 39(3), 458–470.
Unger, C. (2024). Den of spies: Reagan, Carter, and the secret history of the treason that stole the White House. Mariner Books.
Wilentz, S. (2008). The age of Reagan: A history, 1974–2008. HarperCollins.