Full Interview – Powerful Christian Nationalists in Military See Trump as Vehicle for Authoritarian Religious State – Mikey Weinstein

Christian fundamentalist nationalists in the senior ranks of the military, see Trump as an instrument of God’s plan to create an authoritarian Christian state. The military allows active proselytizing and recruitment of soldiers, contrary to the constitutional separation of church and state. Many of these officers and soldiers were involved in the events leading up to and on Jan 6th, which has been described as an attempted coup. Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news

Paul Jay

 Hi, I’m Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news. In a few seconds, I’ll be joined by Mikey Weinstein, who’s going to talk about the role of religious extremism in the U.S. military and the lead-up to the events of the storming of Capitol Hill on January 6th. Please don’t forget the donate button, subscribe, share, email list, and all the buttons.

 

In the recent book, “I Alone Can Fix It” by Washington Post journalist Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, they report that prior to January 6th, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Milley, thought a Trump coup was in progress and feared a Reichstag moment (that’s when Hitler burnt down the Reichstag as a rationale or justification for martial law). He thought this might happen on January 6th, where the protesters would be used as an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and use the military to declare martial law and stop the confirmation of Joe Biden as president.

 

I’ve reported on many other sources that shared the same concern, so I won’t go over all that again here. But in the media coverage of the events leading up to, and including, the storming of Capitol Hill, while there’s been quite a bit of talk about the far-right, white supremacists, and Nazis, even by active and retired military leaders at the highest levels, there’s not been much focus on the extent this growing movement is made up of followers of Christian religious extremists, many of whom are openly for dropping the separation of church and state and making the military an army for their version of Christ.

 

In an interview I did with Joe Wilson in 2019, in fact it would be the last interview he did before he died, I spoke to Ambassador Wilson, who was the man who exposed the Niger uranium fraud that Bush and Cheney tried to use to justify the Iraq war. In the interview, I asked about the rise of religious extremism in the U.S. Military. Here’s the quote from Wilson: “For the evangelicals, not only is it a way for them to get back to the plains of Armageddon for the last great battle of the Apocalypse, but they’ve managed to use this as a way to infiltrate the highest ranks of the military and to try and convert the military from an organization focused on the defense, national security, and the constitution of the country, to a military force fighting for their vision of Jesus Christ. They have penetrated the Chaplain Corps in ways that are absolutely disgusting. The responsibility of the Chaplains was always to minister to the needs of soldiers and their families in times of need, either in hospitals, grieving, or whatever, not to impose their view of what the right religion should be. But now, these guys do not minister. They proselytize.” Then I ask, “How successful have they been in infiltrating the military?” Wilson answers, “Way too successful. We fight that every day.” I ask, “And you’re saying at the highest levels?” And Wilson says, “Oh, yeah. We were in the middle of a fight with a brigadier general who now runs a command and it’s all about Jesus. It’s all about his vision of Jesus. And I think we’re in the middle of a legal fight with him right now.” And I say, “Who’s we?” And Wilson says, “The Military Religious Freedom Foundation. I sit on the board with, among others, Larry Wilkerson. It’s run by a guy by the name of Mikey Weinstein, who’s Jewish, and who has suffered every possible indignity you could imagine from these evangelical nuts, including having dead rabbits thrown on his property and swastika signs painted on his wall. Yes, they’re very nasty. They’re a nasty crowd.” So that was all Joe Wilson, now back to me.

 

Now joining us is Mikey Weinstein. He’s the founder and president of the seven-time Nobel Peace Prize-nominated Military Religious Freedom Foundation, the MRFF. Mikey was named one of the 100 most influential people in U.S. Defense by Defense News, which is a major publication read by just about everybody in the “defense industry.” Mikey represents nearly 75,000 active and retired reserve service members. He himself is an honor graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and formerly worked in and for the West Wing as a legal counsel in the Reagan White House. Thanks very much for joining us, Mikey.

Mikey Weinstein

Thank you, Paul. It’s an honor to be here.

Paul Jay

So before we get into the substance of what this movement is, January 6th is one of the more visible signs of, but it certainly goes beyond that, tell us more about the MRFF, what it does, why it came into being. And then we’ll get into what you think about Joe Wilson’s warning.

Mikey Weinstein

I’m happy to do that. Joe is a dear friend and brother. He was one of the longtime board members and advisory board members with us. I have to thank Mel Gibson for this, believe it or not. When he came out with his amazing movie, if you want to call it that, The Passion of the Christ, on February 4th, 2004, or as we call it here at MRFF, the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre or Freddy VS. Jesus. I had children at the Air Force Academy at that time, which is my alma mater as well. I was stunned to find out about the incredible pressure being put on the cadets, faculty, and staff, by both the cadet leadership and officer leadership there to go see this movie. You’re dealing with cognitive dissonance. I loved the academy. It was a transcendent experience for me. It wasn’t easy, but I thought something was wrong here.  I looked at the movie. The movie was unbelievably anti-Semitic. And Gibson, whatever you think about him, I don’t think a lot about him personally, but his movies are very, very violent and they have a lot of passion in them. Apocalypto, Braveheart, I could go on and on. I went to go see this movie and halfway through I stood up, I was going to say “stop beating the poor guy,” meaning Jesus. “I’ll convert.” It was like a snuff film. That was the first sign for me. When I reached out to my own children, I realized that they had been told through their cadet careers, I had one that was a freshman, or a fourth classman, and another one who was a senior, first classman, engaged to another senior. He married his classmate, Amanda, my son Casey. My younger son was Curtis. They had experienced incredible anti-Semitism at the academy, as I did in 1973 when I was a freshman, or fourth classman, or a doolie. They were being accused by their cadet chain of command, and in some cases officer chain of command, of total complicity in the execution of Jesus Christ. They had been called all of the names you might imagine for Jews, the K word, et cetera, et cetera. And I looked at this huge push and we’ve written quite a bit about this, it’s been in movies, the push to get cadets to go see this movie. And I realized something was wrong here. And it wasn’t a “Houston we have a problem” issue or challenge, this was a national security threat. It was like pulling on a thread of a sweater. Long story short, that’s when this fight began.

 

We reached out to some of the usual civil rights organizations, the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the ADL, they’re all good organizations, but they didn’t understand the peculiarly adversarial, communal, ritualistic, and tribal nature of the military. Twenty two months later, on December 15th, 2005, after fighting all the way through, my wife and I decided we needed to fill not just a niche, but an open void, a chasm, and create something that would fight to preserve the separation of church and state, temporal and spiritual, in, technologically, the most lethal organization that our species, Homo sapiens, has ever created, which is the U.S. Military, where all the nuclear weapons are, the drones, the conventional weapons, the laser guided weapons. What we saw was out of control, fundamentalist, Christian nationalism. Not just with the Chaplains, as my dear, late friend and brother Joe Wilson said, as he knew this very well, but certainly also in the command structure. And I use the example for your readers that are old enough or if not old enough, knowledgeable enough to realize that the most famous speech ever given by President Eisenhower was his farewell speech, where he warned, Paul, the world and America, about what? You remember?

Paul Jay

Of course, the military industrial complex. Actually, originally, apparently the speech was the military industrial congressional complex and someone talked him out of using the word congressional.

Mikey Weinstein

Yes, you’re very sagacious to know that. So we tell people here what we fight at MRFF, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, is nothing less than a fundamentalist Christian, nationalist, para-church, military, corporate, congressional proselytizing complex. It is enormous and we just came out with a story the other day about the para-church organizations. There are about three dozen of them: Campus Crusade for Christ, Military Ministries, Cadence International, the Navigators, the Officers Christian Fellowship, the Christian Military Fellowship. I could go on, and on, and on. They are so inextricably intertwined into the very DNA of the Pentagon. We call it the “Pentacostalgon,” in that it’s all about something called the great commission. For those of you that are not biblical scholars, that’s one of the last things Jesus is supposed to have said to his disciples. You can see it in Mark 16:15 or Matthew 28:19. He says, “Go and make disciples of all nations.” Get them into the religious faith. Whether you believe Jesus exists or not, this is called the Great Commission. The zeal to force people into the military using the uniquely one sided relationship of a military superior to a subordinate, think Jerry Sandusky at Penn State and the little nine year old in the shower. You can’t fight back. If you’re being even gently evangelized or proselytized by your military superior, Paul, “get the hell or the F out of my face sir or ma’am is not, not, not, not an option for you. So they come to us, and we are very militant and aggressive, legally, ethically and morally, to fight back.

Paul Jay

They is referring to young soldiers being proselytized who object, but can’t speak out.

Mikey Weinstein

Soldiers, sailors, marines, coast guardsmen, guardians for the space, DoD contractors, DoD civilian personnel. My daughter works for the U.S. Army Rangers as an Army civilian. We see it there. We see it even among ROTC, OTS, and of course, Military Academy Cadets. Even down to the high school junior ROTC level, there is the incredible drive to use the military as a force multiplier to create a cudgel to bludgeon people into submission to accept this view of this version of Christ. Before people start thinking “well, there goes Mikey again, eating Christians for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for snacks in between,” we have nearly 75,000 clients now. In a few weeks will be at 75,000. About 95% of them are practitioners of the Christian faith. Three fourths are Protestant of that 95%, Paul, about one fourth are Roman Catholic. Of course, we have hundreds of Jewish personnel, Hindu, Muslim. We represent a little more than 18% of all Muslims in the military that we know of. Of course we also have, atheists, agnostics, secularists, humanists. We have 12 members of the Jedi Church. Right out of Star Wars. We don’t care what it is. All we care about is the time, place, and manner in which a member of the military, Paul, feels that they have the right to deploy their faith. Because, as I said before, your military superior is not your shift manager at Starbucks or Taco Bell. It is a very different dynamic.

 

In the military, with insubordination its not just a matter of being fired. You can go to jail for that. You can go to jail, it’s a felony. In the military, having sexual intercourse with someone other than your spouse, adultery, is a felony. Why is that? Because our U.S. Supreme Court decreed in 1974, in the case of Parker versus Levy, that the compelling governmental interest in our military is to make it as lethal as possible, which means we have to maximize good order, morale, discipline and unit cohesion. Think about what adultery does to that. But at the same time, that just elevates the status of a white person, a straight person, as opposed to a gay person or trans person or anything else, and can be denigrating to a Jewish person or a woman. How does that help unit cohesion? It doesn’t. We started this fight when George W. Bush was president, and it was terrible. We were very encouraged when Obama took over. It was still terrible. With Trump, it went out of control, and I’m very sad to say that in these first few months, while I’m glad that Biden and Lloyd Austin are the DoD secretaries, we’re not seeing any help here. We’re not seeing any letup of this right now. That’s why I wrote an open letter to the Air Force Academy and came out with an article, I think, in April. I quoted Ayn Rand, I’m not a big fan of hers, but she said “you can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.” You as a journalist and your outlet are very dedicated to making people understand that you cannot ignore the consequences of reality. That’s why I’m so delighted to be here today.

Paul Jay

Let me ask you a question. So in my introduction, I quoted from The Washington Post journalist’s book, Milley apparently said to some of his staff that he feared a Reichstag moment, that the January 6th events would be used as a cause for the Insurrection Act. They were taking very seriously that there was a faction within the armed forces and that Miller, the acting Secretary of Defense, appointed by Trump, believed it was a serious enough faction that they were really worried that there would be some kind of split in the armed forces, because, clearly, Milley and some of the other top generals were opposed to any intervention by the army. But they apparently seriously feared that at some levels of the armed forces, and because Trump had appointed Miller as the acting secretary of defense, and you start getting serious people concerned that there’s a coup in progress. You have these 10 former secretaries of defense come out with their letter in The Washington Post. Admiral Stavridis, the former supreme commander of NATO supports the letter of the ten former secretaries. The Financial Times on January 4th or 5th in an editorial actually says a coup is in progress. And then a couple of weeks later, Stavridis and Time magazine and another piece talk about the infiltration of the armed forces by the far right. And he talks about Nazis, he talks about white supremacy, but he doesn’t talk about religious extremism. And nobody seems to want to talk about what is the elephant in the room, because I actually don’t believe that the Nazis and the proud boys in the armed forces, while they may be there, that isn’t where the real threats coming from. It’s from what you and Wilson are talking about.

Mikey Weinstein

Let me give you a statistic. I’m going to be off by a few little numbers, but Hitler only had 7.9%, actually, of the German populace in his national socialist movement. Stalin had something like 2.8%. With our analysis, we believe that the number of Christian nationalists, fundamentalist Christian nationalists or what are known as dominionists, you can Google Christian Dominionism, in the military is somewhere between 28 – 34%. It’s not just that shocking. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in the military, Paul, but remember, in the military, when you graduate from officer training school, officer candidate school, or a military academy, and get commissioned as a second lieutenant, the lowest ranking officer, on that day, you already outrank 90% of the military because most the military are enlisted folks. I gave a speech not that long ago at Harvard, it was pre-covid, where I asked for a show of hands for the number of people that understood the difference between a general and a sergeant. People in America do not understand anymore how the military works. So if you’re just a brand new shaved-tale, 21 or 22 year old second lieutenant, you outrank 90% of the military right then and there. So people do not want to touch Jesus. We hired a very expensive lobbyist years ago here. To her credit, after a year of paying her a lot of money, she said “Mikey, you got to fire me. They won’t touch it. Either side of the aisle, they’re afraid of losing fundamentalist Christian money and votes. They will not touch it.” We’ve given up. There’s an old saying that under Republicans, man exploits man, but under Democrats, it’s just the opposite.

 

We realized we had to do this alone. We have some good allies at places like Americans United and sometimes at the ACLU and certainly the Jewish war veterans of the United States of America, but we build ourselves to go it alone. It is not white supremacy. It is not misogyny. It is not Islamophobia, transphobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism or hatred of the Constitution. These are all part of the mothership of fundamentalist Christian nationalism. And if you touch it too much, you get 1938 with War of the Worlds with Orson Welles on the radio having people jumping out of buildings because they thought it was real. That whole concept from the movie with Tom Cruise, A Few Good Men, “you can’t handle the truth.” And I wrote something about this in the Daily Coast, and it hit number one trending, I’m not patting myself on the back, I’m saying people heard it and saw what was there. So MRFF is not against Christianity. We’re against Christian nationalism. And when you find Christian nationalism, Paul, among your local community, sewage workers, cops, firefighters, public schools or legislatures, that’s bad enough. But when you find it where all the bazookas, atomic weapons, conventional weapons, laser guided weapons are, it’s out of control. And that is what has happened here. It has been going on for a long time. Fundamentalist Christian, nationalist, para-church, military, corporate, congressional proselytizing complex. It is not uncommon that if you say “no” to a superior who says you’re going to accept my version of Jesus, we have seen unbelievable amounts of degradation, humiliation, and we’ve had people lose their lives.

Paul Jay

Give a couple of examples. We don’t need names.

Mikey Weinstein

I’ve got one right now where I have an Air Force Academy graduate who was kicked out of the military with less than 12 months in his career. Wasn’t even told he was terminated. He was Jewish. During the time he was in, he was assigned to be in charge of the unit Christmas party. To begin with, you can’t have Christmas parties. That by itself destroys good order, morale, discipline, and unit cohesion. In the Air Force, I testified before the House Armed Services Committee. We were able to get through with the help of certain people in the Air Force because of a regulation that says you can’t elevate your own faith over someone else. I mean, this is in the Constitution with tons of construing federal case law. And we can go right out to the director’s instructions and regulations at the Pentagon. But imagine being told that you’re going to be the person in charge of the Christmas party. Imagine being a Native American spiritualist and having a fundamentalist Christian proselytize you, and when you finally say no, you’re told to dress up at the unit Thanksgiving party. You’ll be the Indians. Indians, not Native Americans. We’ve had, I believe it’s now up to 14 of our clients commit suicide. We had a young kid at the Air Force Academy who was gay who hung himself. My children, who were, again, at the Air Force Academy, were told that you killed Jesus Christ. When I was at the academy in 1973 I received notes under the door of my dorm room with swastikas on them. I got beaten senseless twice within a week and they never found out who did it. I have a lot of guilt because 30 years later, this was visited upon my own children.  Our normal client is a Protestant. We have 21 different varieties of Baptists alone who are our clients. But here’s the big thing, we have admirals and generals. Are you familiar with what an SES level person is?

Paul Jay

No.

Mikey Weinstein

That’s Senior Exectuive Service. That’s a civilian that’s at the level of a general or admiral. These are clients of ours who are afraid to do their jobs for fear that they will turn into what we call a tarantula on a wedding cake. You and I’ve probably been to lots of weddings. How long do you think the half life is of a tarantula on a beautiful wedding cake? Not very long. So they come to us. It’s not uncommon to get a call, “Mikey, in my command you got to know this is happening, that’s happening. Can you guys go get this for us?” so that they don’t face the blame, but they reach out. There are clients who will never give their name. I’d like to sit there and say, “Admiral, General, we’re not a line item in the DOD budget. Do your job.” But I understand that they fear reprisal, revenge, and retaliation.

Paul Jay

OK, so let me make a point and then ask a question. First of all, I just want to say for the record, we understand that not all evangelicals are white Christian nationalists. Apparently, as much as 20 percent of evangelicals voted for Obama and maybe even the same percentage, more or less, voted for Biden. And even in the 80 percent that might have voted for Trump, they’re not all that kind of militant nationalist either. That being said there’s certainly a very significant section of that 80 percent that voted for Trump that see Trump as a vehicle for Christian nationalism. People sometimes ask, “well, there’s not much Christian about Trump” and nobody really cares because he’s an ordained vehicle for the mission. Now, that then takes this political character, in this case, supporting Trump. Previously, I think it began really with support for Reagan, but its in much better shape with Trump. So in the military, in the context of the events of January sixth and a real serious belief that the election was stolen and all of this, how high up in the military does this whole thing full fledged go? And how close do you think it came to a real split in the military where sections might have intervened on Trump’s behalf?

Mikey Weinstein

I have lost count of the number of times that clients come to us because their commanders were directing the subordinates to vote for Trump. And whether they like Trump or not, they use the example of King Cyrus out of the Bible, who may have not been a pious individual, but it was determined by those that were religiously inclined at the point that he was a vehicle for the supreme being. Its terrifying. I wanted to address your point about evangelicals. My first book, which came out of St .Martin’s Press in New York in 2006, was called With God on Our Side: One Man’s Fight Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military. I made a mistake. I wish I could take it back. The evangelicals are our friends. We have many of them on staff. They donate to us. They come to us in droves as clients. There’s a difference between an evangelical and a fundamentalist Christian. To begin with Christianity, if I go through a very quick tutorial, there are Great Commandment Christians, those that follow the great commandment that Jesus supposedly talks about in the Sermon on the Mount, which is “love the Lord, your God with all your mind, soul and heart,” and the golden rule, which predates even the Pentateuch or the Torah, the Old Testament. It is from the Code of Hammurabi, “treat others the way you want to be treated.” The golden rule basically is just treat people the way you want to be treated and love God. That’s the Great Commandment. We call them Great Commandment Christians. Those that don’t follow that as their prime directive, to use a Star Trek analogy, their prime directive is the Great Commission, which I talked about, Mark 16:15, Matthew 28:19, “go and make disciples of all nations.” Everyone out there who does that is an evangelical. But there’s a difference. Evangelicals say, “yes, I must do that. However, I must follow the time, place, and manner constrictions in America pursuant to our US Constitution, its construing federal case law, all of the directives, instructions, and regulations of the Pentagon. It’s like driving a car. I will not drive drunk or if I’m stoned. Fundamentalist Christian nationalists go like this to that. “No, I’m free range. There is nothing about the US Constitution, its construing federal case law, or the Pentagon regulatory structure that can that can constrain me with regard to getting people into the Christian kingdom in accordance with the constraints or parameters or protocols of time, place, and manner.

 

We fight fundamentalist Christian or dominionist nationalists. None of them are good. They’re breaking the highest law of the land. If you’re an evangelical, all fundamentalist Christian nationalists are evangelicals, but not vice versa. Many evangelicals are huge supporters of ours. They donate to us, like I mentioned. They’re clients. They’re on staff. As I said before, even though they probably think that Paul Jay and Mikey Weinstein are going to burn eternally in hell, that’s their right, but they’ll fall on the sword. These are good people. They are wonderful, good people. I have goosebumps now because they’re some of the best people that I know. I don’t agree with their views. I also don’t like cheese and butter. I have a reason for that. Everybody else in my family does. That doesn’t mean they’re bad people. Everybody has a particular food. My wife doesn’t like black eyed peas. We can go on and on. However, this isn’t a question that is culinary, it’s constitutional.

 

With regard to how high it goes, looked me straight in the eyes. It goes as high as you can possibly imagine. Even with Obama. I don’t mean to knock him. I think he was a wonderful, great president. But he promised when he campaigned he was going to get rid of the Office of Faith Based Initiatives in the White House. He didn’t do that. When you tell someone in the military that they lack integrity, character, honorability, intelligence, and courage because of their particular religious faith or lack thereof, there is no difference between doing that and telling someone they’re stupid because of the color of their skin or because they were born without a penis and they’re female. It’s exactly the same thing. We view it as spiritual rape. And when you’re in the military, it’s not a nine to five job where you go into Acme Corporation or IBM or Home Depot or you work at McDonald’s. It’s a very different situation. So I can tell you without giving names or whatever, that this goes to the highest levels of the United States Army, both military and civilian, the Marine Corps, which is part of the Navy, the Navy, the space force, which is part of the Air Force, the Air Force. It goes everywhere.

Paul Jay

Do you have any sense that at those levels there was a serious motion or attempt to be part of this Trump coup?

Mikey Weinstein

I told people all along about the distraction of the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, and the Proud Boys. These are hooligan idiots. But when you look at a four star general, come on. Flynn was what, three stars? He has a brother that I think just got promoted to four stars. This man ran one of our seventeen national security agencies, all of which in unison determined that Vladimir Putin and Russia significantly helped and aided illegally Trump to win in 2016. It’s one thing to sit down and say, “I don’t think Biden was legitimately elected in the largest and most secure election in American history.” There’s nothing to show that whatsoever. But to show that Putin and his Russia significantly invaded our election system in 2016, all 17 of our national security agencies support that. We have hundreds of clients in the National Security Agency. I’ve had them reach out to me saying, “don’t stop what you’re doing.” When Pompeo was CIA head, we had CIA people come to us saying “help us, help us.” That involved “here’s what he’s doing. Here’s what he’s saying regarding Jesus.” That got into his confirmation hearing. We can send you a clip on when he was asked by a female senator about what Mikey Weinstein of MRFF said. He said “I don’t know what you are talking about. I have no idea.” The worst of the fundamentalist Christian para-church organizations out there, very few people have heard of. It’s called C Street, as in Washington, DC, a.k.a. the family, a.k.a. the Fellowship. Pompeo, Betsy DeVos, certainly Mike Pence, and many others were involved.

Paul Jay

I’m drawing a blank and I shouldn’t, but the new Supreme Court judge, the woman, isn’t she part of that?

Mikey Weinstein

We don’t know whether she’s in there or not. I forget her name as well, I’ll have to remember it. But she certainly is from that absolute bent of trying to create a, as we call it, quiverful, trying to get generate as many children as possible in a marriage to create Christian soldiers for Christ. Sarah Palin was absolutely part of that. She was particularly part of something called NAR, the New Apostolic Reformation or the Seven Mountains theology. These are all things that are beyond the scope of this particular interview today. I’m telling you that it has been out there and it is enormous. This is not a small thing. I’ve talked to many, many, many journalists. I did a multi-hour interview in Manhattan with Dan Rather a number of years ago. He was fabulous, by the way. He wanted to get into it and he was working for Mark Cuban at the time, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks. I really had a lot of respect for Dan. We did this interview for hours that day and it aired, but he has since left CBS. The mainstream media is afraid of this. I have spoken to journalists at Fox that were told not to interview me, not to let this come out. I got into a big fight with Bill O’Reilly a couple of times. I finally agreed to do his show once. It went OK. The second time it blew up. He cut my mic. He was denigrating me and I was throwing it right back at him. When I got off set, the first phone calls that came through on my phone were not in English, they were simply gunfire. Just gunfire. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

 

So what I’m saying is it goes up and down the chain of command. When I saw what was unfolding on January 6th, I had heard beforehand that things were going to happen. It was almost beyond my comprehension because even Pence was saying he had no power. He was just there kind of as a traffic cop to make sure they counted the electoral votes. And when it started, I’m going “oh, my God, here we go.” And it’s what we’ve talked about forever. We’ve had people on the Christian right say “Oh, Mikey Weinstein, his organization is being much like Saul of Tarsus, persecuting Christians until Christ met them on the road to Damascus with that white light. Mikey will have his time or we’ll just have to kill him” because we get threats around the clock here that are amazing. We have people praying for the women in my family to develop fast-moving, undetectable breast cancer. I could go on and on.

Paul Jay

 There’s another piece to this which I talked to Joe Wilson about. And he agreed with what I was saying and took it to another step, which is it’s not just the Christian nationalists in this form of evangelicalism, but it’s also the far right of the Catholic Church and Opus Dei. Steve Bannon is very connected to Opus Dei. I don’t know if he’s a member or not, but he coordinates with them. And Wilson was saying that at the very highest level in Washington, including members of the Supreme Court and others in Congress, Opus Dei also plays a similar kind of role with a similar kind of vision.

Mikey Weinstein

Yes, we know that every religion, including extreme Orthodox Judaism, has its fringe elements, but fringe elements are there for a reason. They can pull triggers, they can stab with knives, they can hit with hammers, and they can blow things up. And in this country we are completely fractured. We have people who get their news from Breitbart, Fox News, One America News, Newsmax and it’s all going to be one flavor. That’s it. And then the people on the other side will say that, “well, you’re just as bad with MSNBC or CNN or the Analysis”. No, it’s not true. One has facts, one doesn’t. And I’m a public figure. So are you. And if you’re a professional athlete or a professional entertainer, being a public figure can be cool. If, however, you do what I do or what you do, it can be lonely, dangerous, brutal, and expensive. As I mentioned before, my daughter in law, who is an Air Force Academy graduate and a college professor in Ohio, the mother of our three grandchildren, said “Dad, the way I tell people about you is that if you love animals, dogs, and cats, every town has a humane society. They’re wonderful. Everyone loves the Humane Society. They do bake sales and cookie sales and they help the dogs and cats. They’re wonderful. If, however, you are very, very serious about animal rights, you’re going to be with PETA. We’re PETA at MRFF in fighting for the separation of church and state in the military. Superman only has one weakness, which is kryptonite. Our military’s weakness is fear of being dragged into federal court and even worse, fear of bad press. We’re in the media with them somewhere every day. So when someone gets a call from us, most of our clients don’t ever want their name or their numbers to see the light of day. And it takes a tremendous amount of trust, whether it’s a general or admirals that we talked about a few minutes ago on your show, or a very low ranking young officer or enlisted person saying, “I need help about this.’

Paul Jay

How much do you know about the relationship between this Christian nationalism or Opus Dei, these far right Catholics and sections of the billionaire class who either believe in it themselves or use them? Like Mike Pompeo is a creation of the Koch brothers. The Trump presidency was given to him by Robert Mercer.

Mikey Weinstein

Look at Erik Prince. Perfect example. His sister is Betsy DeVos. Erik Prince was behind Blackwater. There is a huge movement in this country to take control of the school boards, to get into the minds of children. Right now we’ve exposed a young twenty six year old congressional candidate who’s an Army Reserve officer claiming that he’s a chaplain. He’s not. He’s a chaplain candidate. We had senior people in the Pentagon that came to us about that. He has denigrated and inferred that Joe Biden is a pedophile, has denied him being president, says he’s just some sleepy guy who’s there. We filed the official complaint with the highest levels of the Pentagon on May 27th. So by the time this airs it was two months ago, and they still haven’t decided what to do to a lieutenant, a second lieutenant. Lloyd Austin, who says he wants to be the lodestar for racial and religious diversity in the military, is directly reporting to the president of the United States. If you can’t handle a 26 year old second lieutenant who’s violating all of the DOD regulations that we pointed out with regard to lying about his status as a reserve officer, he’s not making it clear he’s in the reserves, telling people he’s a chaplain when he’s not. When you’re a law student, you’re not a lawyer. When you’re a medical student or dental student, you’re not a doctor or dentist. When you’re an apprentice on the Paul Jay Show, you’re not Paul Jay. And so if you can’t take care of someone like that, what can you take care of? What’s happening is much, much, much worse at the highest levels. From our perspective, Trump is a mentally ill four year old, entitled, cowardly fool. But he’s kind of like a sock puppet for the Christian nationalist maniacs.

Paul Jay

I call them a buffoon tip of a fascist spear.

Mikey Weinstein

Oh, that’s an excellent visual right there. And most people don’t even understand what fascism is, the concept of an autocracy moving forward to push their own agenda. And with regards to the actual agenda of Christian nationalists, they do not want a democratic republic. They want a theocracy based on the rules of Leviticus and they want to do whatever they can to serve as an accelerant and lubricant to bring their version of fundamentalist Christian Jesus back here. And they’re promised a two hundred mile long river, four and a half feet deep, filled with nothing but the human blood of those that their version of Warrior Jesus has slaughtered at the Battle of Armageddon. A lot of that’s going to be Jewish blood. A lot of it’s going to be. But that’s a very large amount of dead people. And, of course, their view is that Jesus needs us. I mean, Jerry Boykin, the Black Hawk Down general, who’s the number two person at the Family Research Council under Tony Perkins, has made it clear that when Jesus comes back, he’ll be on a white horse carrying an AR 15.

Paul Jay

Now, Hitler, to a large extent, was the creation of big German industrialists who, at a very critical moment of the rise of the Nazi party, gave it money to survive when it was on the verge of bankruptcy. The National Socialists would never have come to power without this. To what extent is this Christian nationalism a vehicle that’s been created, nurtured, and financed by the military industrial complex?

Mikey Weinstein

We see this type of Christian nationalism with Boeing, with Northrop Grumman. We see it in every place. There’s a number of my classmates from the Air Force Academy that went directly to go work for defense contractors. And I know the ones that are Christian nationalists. They may not even know what that term means, but their view is that the Constitution is ugly. It’s just man made. Man is flawed and born with original sin. “You see that baby there? Already a sinner” Whereas their pristine version of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is not open to any sort of interpretation, it just says what it says. And I’ve had to become a biblical scholar when I go through this. I don’t begrudge anyone their beliefs, but again, time, place, and manner. You cannot scream “fire” in a crowded theater. Nor can you scream “you will accept my version of Jesus during duty hours in uniform whether you’re on a submarine, an aircraft carrier, in your military office building, in a tank, half track, or whatever to a subordinate that cannot fight back. You can’t do that.

 

Now, when we fight and when we roll in, we roll in hard and we scare them. And oftentimes it’s like a weed whacker. We knock the bad guys back for a few weeks, but the weeds come back again. We’re not talking about just mere chaplains. Chaplains like I was, judge advocates, are mere staff officers. I’m talking about commanders, people that are line officers, not the doctors, lawyers, vets, and chaplains.

Paul Jay

So what do they envision? What’s the America they want? What does that government look like?

Mikey Weinstein

Like in The Handmaid’s Tale, Gilead. They want Gilead. They want a fundamentalist, Christian nationalist country. Not ruled by democracy, they hate democracy. They want it ruled by their version of  whatever is going to support and fortify and buttress their version of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The problem with that is that the gospel of Jesus Christ is very digital. “I’m going to love you unconditionally, but there are a few conditions” from their perspective. You either get on your knees and accept Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior, in which case you can be part of our body, or not. And if you don’t do it, Second Corinthians 6:14 makes it clear that you should not, I’m paraphrasing here, “try too long to convert someone else because they’re the bad guys. What do they have in common with us? They’re darkness and we’re light. We’re right and they’re wrong.”

Paul Jay

I just want to add here, my understanding of the rise of the Christian movement is that it has very little to do with any of that kind of stuff that’s in the Bible. The early Christians, according to my understanding, was a very nonsectarian revolutionary movement against the Roman Empire. It has next to nothing to do with these things.

Mikey Weinstein

There’s a documentary called Constantine’s Sword based on the 2000 or 2001 bestseller by my friend James Carroll at the Boston Globe. And this was a documentary with the Oscar nominated director, Oren Jacoby called Constantine’s Sword. And it was about how, in the fourth century, Constantine and his mother, Helen, who became a big adherent of Christ, decided to weaponize Christianity by making it the Roman faith. And look, we have enough trouble even proving that Shakespeare ever existed. We don’t know what happened back then. We have a lot of facts to show that there was a slave rebellion, seventy years before Jesus was supposed to have been born, led by guy named Spartacus. We know his top general was Crixus, but there’s a tremendous amount of problems in trying to determine historically what are the powers that Jesus has or he doesn’t. That’s why Constantine got everybody together and said “We’re going to come up with a book. We’re going to decide exactly who this individual was, et cetera, et cetera.” And they decided what was going to be in the New Testament.

Paul Jay

Yeah, well, by that time, Christianity wasn’t a revolutionary ideology. It was the ideology of the aristocracy.

Mikey Weinstein

Yes, absolutely so. And so we don’t exactly know. And some of my dearest friends that are devout Christians and are wonderful people, their private beliefs are fine. They would never, ever try to use their position to force it on someone who can’t fight back. It’s the second category, those that say that “You can’t tell me that I can’t drive drunk or stoned or whatever. I can push the gospel whenever I want to. I don’t care what your Constitution says.”

Paul Jay

Let’s go back to these moments before January 6th where the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair and others, as I said, former secretaries of defense and so on and so on, they really think something serious is going on here. Is that what they were hoping to do with Trump? And I have to say they failed. For Trump to think that this was going to work was kind of nuts. I think all the very senior leadership were against it. Although I take your point that there’s levels of senior leadership that are part of this camp, otherwise they wouldn’t have taken it seriously.

Mikey Weinstein

I want to take a sidebar, because you raise a very important point as a journalist just now. The Trump Pentagon, those career level military people and civil servants were incredibly supportive of us, but they told us we cannot go to the political level. I was a political appointee in the Reagan White House after I left my position as an Air Force judge advocate. There was a huge Nile River, miles long, between the highest level career people and the political people. We all know that in early November, Trump fired everybody at the Pentagon and brought in Miller to be the new defense secretary. And that terrified people when miller came in. And so you had the political people there that looked down on the career civil servants or career military people because they’re going to stay there no matter what. And so you raise a very good point here. We were getting information around the clock that they were not going to take this sitting down. No one could have envisioned, I don’t think, what was going to happen on January 6th. Now, of course, we’re finding out more and more where General Milley was. A lot of us feel that his response was too tepid. There’s a movie that came out, maybe you’re old enough to remember it, called Seven Days in May, back during the Cold War. Remember that one with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas?

Paul Jay

I’m more than old enough.

Mikey Weinstein

That was an amazing movie. There were some other great Cold War movies: On the Beach with Fred Astaire and, of course, Dr. Strangelove. But Seven Days in May was about a coup.

Paul Jay

I think on the beach was Gregory Peck. Unless Fred Astaire was in it, too. It’s possible.

Mikey Weinstein

We’ll have to check that. We can check that real quickly. But I think Peck was the submarine commander maybe.

Paul Jay

Yeah, he was a submarine commander.

Mikey Weinstein

I thought Astaire was in that as well. I have to check. But if he is, I think he committed suicide in the movie because there’s been a nuclear war and all the fallout is coming down.

Paul Jay

But Seven Days in May is the closest, where you actually have an attempt at a military coup against the kind of centrist president.

Mikey Weinstein

We’ve had agents and entertainment lawyers for years. We actually now have a screenwriter with whom we’re trying to push a movie based on us and what we’re doing, this whole concept. And even that is terrifying to people. Even now with Biden in, the concept of “how do we present something like this?” I remember briefing, here in New Mexico, thanks to Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame,  a bunch of very progressive billionaires years ago about what we were about. And I remember getting a hand coming up at the end where someone said to me “Well, why do we even have to have a military in this country?” And that’s when I though “OK, forget it.” I walked out and someone came running after me and said, “hey, we want to give you twenty five hundred bucks anyway.” So what I’m saying is that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Republican, Democrat, Green, Independent, have a PhD or a GED. We’re talking about humanity here. It isn’t a question of a point of view. I’ve lost lots of friends and family members over this, all of us have. I’m sure every family has been torn by this. It’s not “why can’t you just respect my opinion?” It’s more than that. This is life. Its about when you attack someone because of the way they’re born or raised and try to deny them the right to be cooled when it’s hot out, to be heated when it’s cold, food, opportunity, advancement based on their sexual orientation or their gender or their religious faith. We’ve seen this train leave the station before in our species many times and it’s a headshot. It’s a killer, what we’re talking about on the show today. And I’m here to tell people that the United States military is massively infiltrated with this.

Mikey Weinstein

When I go and speak around the country pre-covid or over Zoom now, I’ll always have someone say “Well, I’ve been in for 16 years in the Marine Corps” or “I was in for 20 years in the Air Force. I never saw this.” I go “Great. Where are you from?” “Oh, I’m from Omaha. I’m from Los Angeles. I’m from Knoxville.” “Have you ever seen a rape or murder in Los Angeles or Omaha or Knoxville?” They go “No.” “Well, do they have them there?” “Yeah.” “Well, how can they have them if you’ve never seen it?” And it goes back to the concept of straight white male Christian privilege. Fish in an aquarium. Fish in the ocean never see the water. They don’t see the water. When they had the sexual assault scandal back in 2003 at the Air Force Academy, they had a sign up for decades at the academy that said “Bring me men” from a very famous point right below the parade ramp. “Bring me men to match my mountains. Bring me men to match my planes.” And my daughter in law, who’s a PhD and an Air Force Academy graduate, made me understand how it felt for her to see that up there. Or if you’re a person of color and you see Confederate generals up in various different places. It’s the ability to try to feel for someone else. I’m not talking about being woke. I don’t care what you call it, but as I said before, it’s bad enough when you find this type of supremacy. And white supremacy is part and parcel of fundamentalist Christian nationalism. Irrespective of whether you’re white yourself, it is there. When Jackie Robinson broke the Major League Baseball color barrier in 1947, that was not white baseball player victimization. It was white baseball player equalization. With the feminist movement of the 1970s, that wasn’t male victimization. It was male equalization. And for the civil rights movement in the sixties, it wasn’t white person victimization. You see what I’m saying?

Paul Jay

We just have a few minutes left, so what do you think’s happening now? Trump still very much seems in control of the Republican Party, meaning Trump is also still the vehicle for the forces you’re talking about. In many, many states, the Democrats are afraid to take this force on and don’t even want to talk about it. How do you see this going forward in 2022, 2024, especially with the focus on how this affects what was going on in the military. Are there two real factions at war in the military?

Mikey Weinstein

People often ask “Mikey, what is it that you want?” We want people that violate their oath to the Constitution, which includes the separation of church and state, to be court martialed vigorously and publicly, visibly, and sent to jail behind bars. Because it’s amazing when someone gets disciplined and they see what happens. And in reverse, if Bill Cosby gets released, look what happens to the whole concept of the Me Too movement. The concern is that it’s no good to have a speed limit of 75 miles an hour on your freeway if you routinely turn the other way when people are going 125 miles an hour. And so we have to be able to stop this. Democrats, I’ve seen, do not seem willing to fight and get down and dirty in the way that the Republicans are. And the Republicans are horrible. So many of them are. I have a son who’s a state legislator and he’s a Democrat. And he tries to work with both sides, but its difficult with the grip that Trump has, and I don’t want to give him credit, its not that he’s so intelligent, he just shoots off a particular frequency that basically allows people to practice their worst moments and their worst behavior and to continue doing that. And he’s made that OK to do among those people. There’s no middle ground here. When someone tells you today’s Tuesday and you give them one hundred thousand reasons why it’s actually Friday, it’s not going to work. There’s actually studies that show that when you give incontrovertible evidence to those that hold a view contrary to the evidence, it actually just fortifies their bad views. So the bottom line here is that we’re going to have to fight to keep this democracy. We’re going to have to stand up and fight and fight hard. And we’re going to have to use the laws that are out there, and they’re there, to punish people. If you can’t punish a 26 year old lieutenant, a first lieutenant who says he’s a chaplain when he’s not and infers that the president of the United States, Joe Biden, is a pedophile and that he’s not rightfully president, what’s left?

 

I mentioned at the early part of this great interview with you today, good order, morale, discipline and unit cohesion. Those are the constituent aspects of the veins, the arteries, the musculature, the skeleton, and the skin of the body corporate of the US military. If those are torn asunder by elevating white, straight, Christian, male people over anyone else, irrespective of whether or not the people that adhere to that might themselves not be white, straight, Christian, or male, then as I said before, it’s not just that we have a problem, this is a national security threat internally to our country every bit as much, if not more than a resurgent Taliban, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Boko Haram, the Mujahideen, you name it.

Paul Jay

So just finally, Biden’s Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, he must be aware of what we’re talking about. Is he doing anything about it?

Mikey Weinstein

He is a former four star general. I have enormous respect for him. Every time we put a press release out, we have the email addresses of his staff, his most senior people, they see everything. And as I said before, he said “I am going to be the lodestar,” his word, not mine, “for religious and racial diversity at the DOD.” We’re not seeing it. And we’re kind of like the miners’ canary and we don’t really see this yet. I mean, the concept of Bibles on POW MIA tables, some of them bolted down. We’re currently suing the Veterans Administration for that. I can go on and on about the concept of having a Christian chaplain around Easter, on a DOD website, I think it was the department of the Army website, state “You Jews killed Jesus. And now we want you to say you’re sorry.” I can’t make this crap up, Paul. It’s like the 13th stroke theory, which litigators talk about. The 13th stroke of a crazy clock that cast doubt not only upon that hour, but all that precede it. If these are the things, and I can’t even go into some of the other horrible things that are happening right now because we don’t have permission from the clients, but if you go to our website, MilitaryReligiousFreedom.org, you will see it all. My wife has written two books, with the assistance of our publisher in Los Angeles, just from the hate mail we get. And both of them have gone to number one on Amazon in multiple categories because I think it’s like seeing a NASCAR race. People want to see things blow up. You can’t believe the amount of hideous threats that we get against my family, my kids, my grandkids, my parents, our staff. We have to work with the US Secret Service. We recently had a threat that came in against the Vice President and President from someone that was talking about shooting me. We go around the clock. We have our own professional security. We have highly expensive, well-trained attack dogs. We have a lot of guns and cameras. And we work very closely with our local SWAT and the other law enforcement organizations, FBI, U.S. Secret Service. We’re not going to be deterred doing this, but it’s not easy to do it. And that’s why today, I’m glad to be on with an august journalist such as yourself.

Paul Jay

I don’t know about august, but anyway.

Mikey Weinstein

That’s one of my favorite months and it certainly applies.

Paul Jay

I’m born in August. That’s probably what you meant.

Mikey Weinstein

All three of my kids were born in August. So this is a way we can get out and try to get people to understand, but you have to be able to keep an open mind. But if the push behind this is “We want to pull the curtain on this world and get Jesus to destroy it and bring it back. And we’re going to use anything we can, anything that’s around to make it happen,” well, that’s what we’re fighting against. And that’s a tough fight. And most of our staff, over 80 percent of our staff here, of well over 630 people, are Christians. Half my family is Christian. And 95% of our clients are Christians that have realized “We’re not that type of Christian. We’re not Christian nationalists.” We don’t combat Christianity. We combat Christian nationalism.

Paul Jay

All right. Thanks very much. We’ll do this again. We’ll get into some other parts of the story. But thanks for now, Mikey, and thank you for joining us on theAnalysis.news. Please don’t forget the donate button, subscribe, and all this because without your financial support, we can’t do this.

Mikey Weinstein

Thank you, Paul.

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