Book Review: Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy
by Katherine Stewart
This is an excellent resource full of rich substance in decoding why otherwise reasonable people vote for governments that take a jackhammer to the foundations of their freedoms and very livelihoods. Katherine Stewart documents in laser sharp detail the persons and organizations that have been working over multiple decades to cultivate the influence campaigns that have created an international cult of deliberate axiomatic falsehoods. Most of us have encountered media items or persons who recite with confidence simplistic tropes that are patently untrue. In this book, Stewart exposes how it happened—and, importantly, the vastness of the money and resources that are and have been executed to flood the zone with confusion and falsehood (long before that expression entered the popular lexicon). This book describes the engine run by a fascist kleptocratic oligarchy in the United States, and its internal machinations.
As the title indicates, this book is divided into describing three main components of this international theocratic influence machine—those are Money, Lies, and God (meaning the washing of right wing political and ideological objectives through a pseudo-religious context). Stewart breaks down the parts of this vast coordinated effort into funders (billionaires, donors), thinkers (think tanks), sergeants (activists, election and climate deniers), infantry (conservative voters, Trump supporters), and power players (leaders, politicians). Stewart illustrates how each of these components draws upon and feeds the others—without all legs of this stool reinforcing each other, this entire influence enterprise would not have the dominant effectiveness it currently enjoys. This goes beyond just the usual suspects—Stewart reveals several heretofore obscure persons and organizations that are having outsized influence in the growth of autocratic theocracy, and among them is a church-based operation in California, which Stewart reveals has global ministries in multiple cities across five continents.
Although strategic billionaire funding provides the backbone of resources to this informal network, individual believers such as church members and voters are routinely fleeced by several of these operatives, allowing them to live lavishly while propagating deliberate and manipulative disinformation. One tactic is the fanning of unjustified sexual anxiety (such as over any arrangement other than patriarchal heterosexuality, in which even a heterosexual wife employed in the workforce outside the home is cast as deviant)—this is a documented technique of fascist messaging. This is especially raw and manipulative in Christian nationalist propaganda, which, when combined with cult-like social pressure, results in violent intentions and resultant actions—January 6, 2021 is a well known example. Stewart notes that German observers have recognized these phenomena for what they are: the execution of an explicitly fascist playbook, the destruction from which they know so well—and thus the Germans fear for their friends in the US.
In a note of hope, Stewart identifies six principle findings, which are: non-fascists are still in the majority, the right wing is divided against itself, the separation of church and state is a good idea (we should have it), extreme levels of material inequality are eroding democracy, knowledge is power, and organization matters (and it’s time to dispense with the purity cliques). In all of these areas it’s possible to counter and neutralize the messaging of organizations peddling deliberate falsehoods—they know these are lies, and they use them for their manipulative emotional effect. For example, we must shine light on all the dark money being deployed, and help those caught in a disinformation cult to see that it’s not DEI that is pulling them back, and instead their woes are the direct result of financialization with private equity actors cannibalizing corporations for short term profit—fixing that is the key to stopping the fascists! We need to define an optimal economic and societal normalcy—FDR provided a good start in his advocacy of the New Deal of the 1930s. We can build on that advocacy base, and Stewart provides multiple indicators on how to develop a society where all are free and prosperous, both for the near term and long term—it’s time to execute those actions.