Two reasons we can’t ignore evangelicals — and two ways we can break their political power
As a “Bible-believing liberal,” I have an important gospel to preach: Christian nationalists aren’t going away.
Do not underestimate the power of the Christian evangelical nationalists movement
The Koch Supported Evangelical Republican Knight Media effort:
“Think tanks in Washington, massive “nonprofit” ministries that bring in millions of dollars, Fox News, Newsmax, QAnon, talk radio, all their current politicians in office, plus one crazy ex-president”
“The evangelical leadership, because of its vast network, is funding political campaigns, news networks and legal defense teams for Trump — through an organization called the American Center for Law and Justice — in a never-ending push to overturn Roe v. Wade and create some form of Christian theocracy. Ignore them at your political peril”
Koch is also represented at this year’s Knight Media Forum by Sarah Ruger, the director for free expression at the Charles Koch Institute, who will be speaking on how funders can address polarization.
Evangelical message of returning America to traditional Christian values is just one of the Koch organizations that supported the Daily Caller, a right-wing news website co-founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, amid its burgeoning embrace of white nationalism. And the institute recently expanded its investment in the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative law-writing organization, as it lost corporate sponsors over ties to right-wing extremism.
https://www.objectivejournalism.org/p/the-knight-foundations-ties-to-far
Mayer’s 2016 book “Dark Money” documented the right-wing weaponization of philanthropy, including the Koch network of nonprofits investing in voter suppression, climate change denialism, and white supremacist media.
To discuss public polarization, Knight invited Yuval Levin, director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Levin has previously written that anti-LGBTQ discrimination laws are unconstitutional because they prevent Christians from exercising their religious right to discriminate against gay people. He’s repeatedly stated that he believes people are born “imperfect” and “prone to vice and sin” and therefore require “formation” to be free. So when people call out oppression, he’s said, “Is this institution oppressing the weak? Or is this institution forming those in need of formation?”
Levin’s employer, AEI, is bankrolled by a network of billionaires with ties to right-wing extremism that includes brothers Charles and David Koch, the latter now deceased. New Yorker staff writer and investigative reporter Jane Mayer described AEI as a “lobbying operation disguised as a charity.”
“The issue that matters to [the Kochs] is…trying to shrink the power of the government and replace it with their own power,” Mayer told The Intercept.