Miranda Blue, editor at Right Wing Watch, tracks and archives the activities of the religious right and extremist movements
America’s religious right first emerged as a powerful political force in the mid 1970s.
Followers of televangelists, such as Pat Robertson on the Christian Broadcasting Network and Jerry Falwell with his Moral Majority, were organizing and becoming vocal opponents of pornography, abortion, homosexuality and other issues they deemed immoral.
In 1980, they propelled Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory into the White House.
Behind the movement was a new and disturbing message: There is only one right way to be a Christian, and that narrow definition of Christianity should shape public policy. You’re either with us or against us.
In 1981, in response to the growing influence of the Christian right, television producer Norman Lear (“The Jeffersons,” “All in the Family,” “Sanford and Son”), along with a bipartisan alliance of lawmakers and religious, business and civil rights leaders, founded People For the American Way.
In its early years, this Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization ran public service announcements warning against the tactics of radio and TV preachers who told their listeners that if they don’t fall in line with their political stances, they are bad Christians. In the years since, People For the American Way has sought to defend the constitutional values it perceives as under attack by factions of the far right, such as equality and freedom of speech, and it continues to fund opposition to Republican candidates and far-right judicial nominations.
It also runs a project called Right Wing Watch, where researchers archive the declarations and radical beliefs of far-right extremists.
“We used to keep all our research in a room with VHS tapes of shows we had recorded, filing cabinets of mailers and a whole library of books by these right-wing figures we had followed,” right-wing researcher Miranda Blue said.
Today, that archive is the public online news site and blog RightWingWatch.org .
Blue came to People For the American Way after working on several political campaigns, including Barack Obama’s in 2008. Before that, she wrote for Congressional Quarterly and opensecrets.org , a project of the Center for Responsive Politics. Today she’s the research editor at People For the American Way and editor at Right Wing Watch.
Blue recently spoke with Street Roots from her office in Washington, D.C., about the far-right landscape as it exists under Trump, the evangelical influence in the White House and efforts to replace mainstream media with far-right propaganda.
Emily Green: Right Wing Watch reports on the statements and efforts of some real crackpots, in some cases including what Alex Jones is saying on Info Wars and what Ann Coulter is ranting and raving about. What do we gain by learning about the ramblings of these conspiracy theorists?
Miranda Blue: I think that it’s important to know that we aren’t just repeating these things because they’re crazy. You take someone like Ann Coulter who is kind of a fringe person and says really offensive, outrageous things all the time, and that’s her shtick, and why do we listen to interviews with her? Because it comes out that she helped the Trump campaign write an immigration policy paper. We follow people who we sense have, or are going to have, influence, and who should be exposed by exposing them in their own words.
E.G.: As someone who has been researching and writing about right-wing extremist movements for some time, can you describe the current landscape as it compares to before the 2016 campaign season?
M.B.: There have been some big shifts, but I think that it’s more similar in ways that don’t necessarily get attention. For instance, we do a lot of work following the religious right, and the religious right has enormous influence in Trump’s administration – which can come as a surprise because Trump did not present himself as a Christian-right candidate at all. But you have religious right leaders invited to the White House on a regular basis, praying over Trump, and they made it a very explicit deal during the campaign that the Christian right leaders would turn out their base to elect him and he would give them their policy priorities: a Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch, who was hand-picked by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation; this recent announcement of a ban on transgender people serving in the military was a gift to the religious right; also going after abortion rights, reinstating the global gag rule and expanding it. There have been many policies like that coming out of the Trump administration.
Then, beyond the religious right, we really have seen an increase in the stature of a lot of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim groups – groups that have been working behind the scenes a long time but now see themselves in a position of power. For instance, Jeff Sessions had been a favorite of the main anti-immigration groups: Federation for American Immigration Reform and their allies. They’ve been working with him for quite a while, and now they have him in the Justice Department as attorney general.
Another example is a group called The Remembrance Project, which is a Texas-based group that whips up stories of actual Americans citizens who have been killed by undocumented immigrants. Very genuinely sad, tragic stories, but their goal is to try and create the false impression that undocumented immigrants, as a whole, are dangerous people. This was a pretty fringe group that did not have a lot of influence until Trump came along, and now they’re boasting of their connections to the Trump administration.
And then, finally, you have the “alt-right,” which has been brewing off in the worst corners of the internet for a while that has really come into its own in the Trump administration, and that’s an area that’s newer for us and that we’re trying to do more work on – discovering who they are and what they’re up to.
E.G.: You already touched on this a little, but I want to talk more about the evangelical influence on Trump. This morning you published an article about how the mega-church pastor Robert Jeffress gave Trump God’s permission to take out North Korea.
Are you seeing that some of these evangelical leaders – are they exploiting his narcissistic tendencies, or do you think they really believe God has sent him to push through their policies?
M.B.: It’s hard to see into somebody’s heart, but I think it’s a combination of both. I’m not going to say that these people don’t believe what they’re saying about God sending Trump, but I think that part of that genuine belief comes from this idea that was propagated (during) the Obama administration that the United States was persecuting Christians, and Trump caught on to that during his campaign. He told the religious right, “You won’t be persecuted anymore in America. You can say Merry Christmas.” So we’re seeing a lot of religious right leaders saying, “The Trump administration may not be perfect, but it’s given us a reprieve. Hillary Clinton would have doomed Christianity in America forever, but Trump has given us some breathing room to rebuild the church and rebuild our influence.”
I also think they’ve realized that Trump is very susceptible to flattery. And I can’t imagine that he minds having people telling him that he was picked by God to save America.
E.G.: There appears to be a multifaceted effort to replace the mainstream media with a combination of extreme right and state-sponsored media, for example Breitbart, increasingly Fox News and, most recently, Trump’s own self-propagating news channel broadcast out of Trump Tower. Where do you see this effort heading?
M.B.: I think I have my head a little bit in the sand about this because it’s one of the more troubling trends happening in politics as a whole. I think that it’s been a long time coming, as the right-wing media has consistently said that the mainstream media is telling lies, and people have been siloed into hearing the news from people that they already agree with. The rise of fake news and Trump blurring the line between what is fake news and what is reality has really exploded this dynamic. I wish I could say that is not the direction things are heading in, but Breitbart is now living in its own universe. If you visit Breitbart, you’re in an entirely different news universe than if you visit The New York Times, and Breitbart is able to shape people’s opinions in ways that are favorable to the Trump administration and favorable to some of his most toxic policies, and that’s a really disturbing trend. I don’t know where it goes.
FURTHER READING: ‘Distracted and distractible’: The rise of propaganda
E.G.: In an age of Google, with all the information we need at our fingertips, how would you explain the willful suspension of disbelief that’s required to continue to take Trump at his word, or to continue to believe whatever Alex Jones or Glenn Beck say when they go on these tirades?
M.B.: I think that the availability of information at our fingertips works both ways, in that you can easily find reliable accurate information, but you can also easily find bogus fake information. And increasingly, there’s been a willful effort to keep people from telling the difference between those two. That’s how if you Google “immigration” and you land on Breitbart, you’ll get a very different idea of the facts than if you look at The New York Times or The Washington Post or reports from reliable think tanks.
E.G.: There seems to be a lot of Russian ties that go beyond the current investigation into collusion. For example, how American activists played a role in Russia’s anti-gay laws, similarities between Putin’s and Trump’s approaches to media, and even more ties explored in your colleague Casey Michel’s report on Right Wing Watch. What do you see happening with the relationship between the Kremlin and American right-wing extremists?
M.B.: One thing that we’ve been seeing as this whole drama over the Trump campaign and Russia unfolds is that a lot of parts of the American right are already inclined to not make a big deal of it. But they are partly unconcerned because there has been a trend among certain factions of the right to actually admire Putin and admire what he’s doing in Russia.
When Putin was launching his crackdown on LGBT people, we saw activists in the American religious right cheering him on. Brian Brown, who’s the head of the National Organization for Marriage, traveled to Russia to speak in front of the duma in support of a law that would restrict adoptions to LGBT people. There was support from people in the (American) religious right for this anti-LGBT crackdown without looking at what Putin was using that crackdown as propaganda for – or without minding.
There is this idea in parts of the right that Putin was this macho Christian leader that Obama wasn’t, and that idea stuck around. So it’s been interesting to watch this Trump story play out with that dynamic in the background.
E.G.: Coming from a place of looking at money in politics in the past, where do you think we’re seeing some connections between corporate influence and money to be made and some of these right-wing extremist agendas? Immigration reform efforts and private prisons, for example.
M.B.: That’s a great example. The private prisons have been working behind the scenes for a long time to stop criminal justice reform and stop policies that cut down on the incarceration of undocumented immigrants.
FURTHER READING: The multibillion-dollar immigrant detention industry
The Sessions Justice Department is a great boon for them, and he is, in a lot of ways, stopping the progress that we were seeing on criminal justice reform.
I think that one under-recognized story is the traditional corporate players – the Koch brothers, the Chamber of Commerce and their think tank allies have a friend in the White House. Trump’s White House is talking about major tax cuts, so that dynamic is still happening; it’s just overshadowed by the Trump show.
E.G.: There seem to be a lot of different right-wing factions – from the pro-life and anti-LGBTQ movement to the militias, white nationalists and anti-immigrant movements. Are you seeing that these groups are coming together in a cohesive way, or are we still looking at a bunch of splintered fringe groups?
M.B.: I don’t know that they’re all still fringe groups. Political alliances can always be a little strange, and I think that, for instance, the alliance between the pro-life movement and the anti-immigration movement has always been kind of weird in that they have very different values – but they’ve found the same politicians to champion them.
I think they’re coming together in new ways. Everyone still has their areas of priority, but you see Christian right leaders or evangelical leaders who have been, up until now, all about virtue in the public square, backing Trump and de facto allying themselves with vicious racist movements that are also backing Trump. These people might not see eye to eye, but they’ve found common ground in a president who has promised to help them and advance their goals.
E.G.: Are there any right-wing players or organizations that you think have more potential for damage than they’re getting credit for right now in the media? Are we underestimating any potential threats?
M.B.: Where to begin! The influence of conservative evangelicals has been reported, but I don’t think it’s fully understood how much influence they have in that Trump has handed over some major areas to the movement. He’s basically promised these folks, who have been working to remake the federal courts, that he’ll remake the federal courts with people who are not only friendly to corporate causes, but hostile to LGBTQ rights and hostile to reproductive rights. That’s one of the biggest influences a president can have, and he’s mostly ceded that to the religious right.
It’s also worth keeping an eye on the anti-immigration movements. There are a handful of groups founded by a Michigan activist named John Tanton, who has expressed some white nationalist thoughts, expressed interest in eugenics, and he created the anti-immigration movement as it exists today. These groups are happy with some of what Trump’s done, but they are really pushing hard for him to end the DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). I think that’s something to keep an eye on – that these groups aren’t going to let Trump get away with not doing that.
(Tanton founded and funded the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies and U.S. Inc. These groups have strong ties to local anti-immigrant group, Oregonians for Immigration Reform. You can read more about them in the 2016 report “The Anti-Immigrant Lobby: The White Nationalist Roots of the Organizations Fighting Immigration,” at rightwingwatch.org.)
E.G.: I wanted to ask you about your report “Return to Wichita.” You examined the return of the rescue movement, a pro-life organization known as Operation Save America, 25 years after it drew 25,000 people to a pro-life rally in Wichita, Kan. (That rally was followed by abortion clinic bombings and assassinations.) You wrote: “Whereas the 1991 Summer of Mercy paralyzed the city of Wichita, the 2016 protests often dissipated by lunchtime.” Why is it that while the rescue movement’s numbers are shrinking, its political influence appears to be increasing at the same time?
M.B.: Operation Save America had its big national event this year in Louisville, Ky., where there is one remaining abortion clinic in the state. They protested in front of this clinic and actually tried to block its doors to keep people from entering, but they also have been working behind the scenes to talk with state lawmakers in a number of states. They met privately with Matt Bevin, who is the governor of Kentucky, to push this idea that state governments should just ignore federal laws on abortion rights. There’s no evidence that Bevin has listened to them, in taking it that far, but he has also been working on his end to try and close this remaining clinic through the enforcement of TRAP laws: targeted restriction on abortion providers.
I think you see that dynamic happening in a lot of places where you have these more outwardly extreme people protesting in front of the clinics, making a scene and making it really uncomfortable for women going into the clinics, but you also have legislators who are trying to close down abortion providers in using targeted legislation and the courts. They are two sides of one coin. I don’t know if I’d say the rescue movement has become more influential over recent years, but I’d say that it’s seeing some of its goals being achieved, whether or not they’re the ones who are making the difference.
Email staff reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org . Follow on Twitter @GreenWrites .
