Money, Lies, And God

How can you recognize a slow-moving attack on democracy when it looks like everyday politics, church life, or school-board fuss? In this book, Katherine Stewart argues that what appears to be spontaneous culture war is in fact an engineered counterrevolution—an organized ecosystem that fuses plutocratic money, movement intellectuals, religious mobilizers, and policy operators to concentrate power in a minority faction. She contends that if you want to see it clearly, you must stop looking for a single mastermind and start tracing how roles, resources, and narratives interlock across time and geography.

The core claim is simple but far-reaching: an antidemocratic coalition—anchored by Christian nationalism yet funded and guided by secular interests as well—has built a durable machine that converts grievance into governance. This coalition invests in churches and pastor networks, legal shops and media megaphones, school-board campaigns and privatization schemes, and elite theory that lends respectability to power grabs. When you connect the dots—from Montecito fundraisers to school-board brawls, from lofty Claremont essays to local book bans—you see choreography, not chaos.

The five-part machine you can map

Stewart gives you a five-part architecture that makes motion visible: Funders, Thinkers, Sergeants, Infantry, and Power Players. Funders include high-dollar donors like Joan and James Lindsey, Betsy DeVos, the Wilks brothers, Rebekah Mercer, Jeff Yass, Harlan Crow, and Barre Seid (whose reported $1.6 billion gift fortified Leonard Leo’s legal-political network). Thinkers—from Claremont Institute figures to Federalist Society-aligned theorists (John Eastman, R. R. Reno, Adrian Vermeule)—write the intellectual briefs that justify illiberal moves.

Sergeants are the mobilizers: pastors and local activists like Chad Connelly’s Faith Wins and leaders of Moms for Liberty who translate money and talking points into turnout. Infantry are the mobilized base—congregants, homeschoolers, online communities—who show up for rallies, audits, and school-board takeovers. Power Players like Tony Perkins, Ralph Reed, and the Council for National Policy coordinate the machine, converting resources and votes into policy, nominations, and durable institutions. Follow a single grant, and you can watch it become a sermon, a viral clip, a street action, and then a bill or court case.

Religion as political identity

The book insists that “Christian nationalism” is a political identity, not a denomination. Its core dispositions—catastrophism, a persecution complex, identitarian hierarchy, and an authoritarian reflex—prime followers for emergency politics. In charismatic and neocharismatic “spirit warrior” streams (New Apostolic Reformation), leaders like Lance Wallnau, Kenneth Copeland, Julie Green, and Sean Feucht portray politics as spiritual warfare, sacralizing partisan battles and making compromise morally suspect. (Note: Stewart’s analysis aligns with scholarship that sees political religion as a substitute civic faith that organizes power and belonging.)

Schools and the state as battlegrounds

Public education becomes a strategic prize because it shapes citizens and controls significant public funds. Groups like Moms for Liberty, trained by the Leadership Institute and bankrolled by major donors (e.g., Publix heiress Julie Fancelli), use moral panic—about books, race, and gender—to fracture trust and usher in vouchers and charter growth. Privatization strategies—Hillsdale-affiliated charters, OptimaEd (Erika Donalds), and self-dealing models like Roger Bacon Academy—redirect public money into ideologically aligned pipelines. In tandem, legal agendas and policy playbooks (Project 2025/Heritage) aim to remake the administrative state, weaken restraints, and centralize discretionary power.

A global networked project

Stewart shows that this is not just American contagion: it is a transnational counterrevolution. Vehicles like the World Congress of Families, Political Network for Values, CitizenGO, and the Alliance Defending Freedom carry tactics and money into Europe, Latin America, and Africa—supporting policies like Poland’s near-total abortion ban (with Ordo Iuris), promoting “gender ideology” panics, and forging pragmatic alliances with Russian patronage (e.g., Konstantin Malofeev). Donor-advised funds (National Christian Foundation, Signatry, DonorsTrust) and legal NGOs obscure sources and knit together a cross-border moral economy of influence.

What you’ll see as you read

Across chapters, you’ll see how money builds shadow infrastructure (courts, media, pastor networks), how ideas lend cover to exceptional measures, how spiritual rhetoric intensifies loyalty and yields political obedience, and how school fights double as privatization drives. You’ll also see the tactical recipe: build an information bubble, declare a perpetual emergency, then attack the legitimacy of elections and the administrative state. The throughline is discipline: a multi-decade, institution-first strategy that treats democracy as a system to be legally hollowed out rather than openly toppled.

Thesis in one line

You aren’t watching scattered tempests—you’re watching a professionally built machine that channels grievance and faith into state power, at home and abroad.

The closing chapters offer hope but not shortcuts: because organization built this threat, only organization can defeat it. You’re shown practical levers—from transparency in funding to civic education and local engagement—that a democratic majority can use. The message lands with urgency: pay attention to structure, not spectacle; to institutions, not headlines; and to the long game, not just the next election. (Compare to Nancy MacLean’s account of long-horizon conservative strategy; Stewart complements that lens with religion-forward and global detail.)

Stewart’s five-part architecture—Funders, Thinkers, Sergeants, Infantry, Power Players—gives you a durable map for tracking how a grievance becomes a governing agenda. It is less a hierarchy than an ecosystem: money fertilizes ideas; ideas script mobilizers; mobilizers recruit and radicalize the base; operators translate wins into law and administration. Once you learn the roles, you can “read” almost any flashpoint—school board meltdowns, election audits, pastor rallies—as the machine at work.

Funders: capital that buys infrastructure

The Funders are deep pockets with strategic patience. Stewart names Joan and James Lindsey (whose family foundation backs Faith Wins, Family Research Council, and Council for National Policy), Betsy DeVos, the Wilks brothers, Rebekah Mercer, Jeff Yass, Harlan Crow, and Barre Seid (whose reported $1.6 billion windfall was structured into Leonard Leo–aligned trusts). Donor-advised funds (National Christian Foundation, Servant Foundation, DonorsTrust, Signatry) act as stealth pipes—moving billions while shielding identity and intent.

Thinkers: elite cover for hardball

Thinkers supply a principled gloss. In Stewart’s telling, the Claremont Institute, Federalist Society affiliates, and ideologues like John Eastman, R. R. Reno, and Adrian Vermeule repackage Straussian and Schmittian ideas to normalize “exceptional” steps in emergencies. The move is subtle: by invoking classical texts and natural right, they present minority entrenchment and administrative demolition as philosophically serious, even necessary. (Note: This does not indict all conservative theory; it highlights the subset operationalized for illiberal aims.)

Sergeants: trusted local mobilizers

Sergeants are the field captains: pastors and activist leaders who convert narratives into turnout. Chad Connelly’s Faith Wins trains pastors to register congregants and spread “election integrity” scripts from the pulpit. Moms for Liberty leaders professionalize “parents’ rights” outrage for school-board victories, bolstered by the Leadership Institute’s coaching. The Sergeants’ advantage is trust: in many communities, a pastor’s word outperforms any party ad.

Infantry: the mobilized base

Infantry are the parishioners, homeschooling networks, and online followers who do the day-to-day work of movement life. They attend ReAwaken America rallies, flood school-board meetings, and canvass. Their motivation often rides on catastrophism—this is 1776 again, or 1944—and a persecution narrative that casts any regulatory or pluralist advance as an existential assault on faith and nation. That emotional fuel turns out voters reliably and can harden resistance to democratic outcomes.

Power Players: policy and personnel

Power Players—Tony Perkins, Ralph Reed, the Council for National Policy, and allied NGOs and media outfits—run the conversion machinery from mobilization to policy. They write legislative templates, build court lists, seed agencies with personnel, and coordinate media surges. Project 2025 (Heritage) exemplifies the blueprinting function: a manual for staffing and restructuring government to favor a Christian nationalist–inflected New Right agenda.

The grant-to-policy pipeline

A seven-figure gift funds a pastor network; pastors preach a crisis; media amplify clips; activists swarm local boards; elite thinkers confer dignity; policy shops draft bills; operators push votes and appointments. Stewart’s reporting fills that schematic with names, receipts, and venues.

When you watch this ecosystem repeat across issues—abortion, education, LGBTQ rights, labor—you realize the “movement” is a set of interoperable parts. Remove one and others compensate; fund one node and the whole network grows stronger. That resilience explains why temporary electoral losses don’t cripple the project. (Compare to progressive coalitions that often lack equivalent institution-building continuity.)

If you want to know who holds the steering wheel, follow the money. Stewart details a shadow infrastructure where donor-advised funds and private foundations move billions to legal shops, pastor mobilizers, media networks, and privatization ventures—with anonymity as a feature, not a bug. The scale and patience of this funding turn what might be fringe passions into mainstream policy and jurisprudence.

Vehicles of anonymity

Donor-advised funds—National Christian Foundation (NCF), Servant Foundation, DonorsTrust, and Signatry—operate like political dark matter. NCF alone disbursed around $2.1 billion in 2022, according to Stewart’s reporting. Analyses she cites estimate that from 2017–2020, roughly $272 million flowed through DAFs to Christian-right groups, with about $113 million landing at four hubs: Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), Family Research Council, Family Watch International, and Liberty Counsel. OpenDemocracy tallied at least $280 million in Christian-right global spending across five continents.

Legal and policy muscle

On the legal flank, the Federalist Society’s fellowship pipeline and Leonard Leo’s network cultivated a judiciary aligned with deregulatory and socially conservative aims. ADF’s budget reportedly surpassed $102 million in 2021–22, while its overseas spending nearly tripled from 2015 to 2020—evidence of export ambitions. These investments aren’t episodic lawsuits; they are multi-decade bets on legal doctrine (e.g., weakening agency deference) and personnel who will carry those doctrines into courts and cabinets.

Education and media endowments

Money also builds ideational supply chains. Donors fund Hillsdale College (and its charter initiatives), Claremont Institute seminars, and conservative media megaphones (EWTN, EpochTV). The result is a content-and-cadre machine: curricula for K–12, scholarly stamps for polemics, and a 24/7 narrative feed that inoculates followers against mainstream corrections. In Stewart’s map, this is how “the bubble” becomes durable: institutions produce staff, ideas, and stories faster than opponents can debunk them.

Paradox of plutocracy

Stewart notes a paradox: some donors are sincere ideologues, others pursue tax breaks or regulatory relief. But once they fund the machine, they don’t fully control it. The movement’s religious and conspiracist wings can radicalize beyond donor intent, yet the money keeps them functional. (Parenthetical: thinkers from Albert O. Hirschman to Nancy Rosenblum have warned that patronage can amplify extremes when intermediaries seek attention and loyalty.)

Why it lasts

Because the investments build organizations—not just campaigns—the returns compound. ADF trains litigators who later become judges; Heritage writes playbooks like Project 2025 that become transition manuals; pastor networks expand voter files every cycle. The left’s more episodic, coalition-based funding often can’t match this persistence. That asymmetry explains why the antidemocratic coalition can lose headlines yet win the long game: it owns the supply lines of power.

Institutional moral

Infrastructure is destiny. If you want different outcomes, fund durable institutions—legal clinics, public-interest media, civic education—not just one-off fights.

Stewart’s dollar-by-dollar portraits make the abstract tangible. When you see how a single mega-gift (Barre Seid’s reported transfer) can seed multiple fronts—judges, messaging, pastor mobilization—you understand why countering the movement requires transparency mandates for DAFs, robust enforcement of nonprofit rules, and competing institution-building over years, not news cycles.

To decode the movement’s emotional heat, you have to see religious identity functioning as political technology. Stewart shows how Christian nationalism supplies a fourfold mindset—catastrophism, persecution, identitarian hierarchy, and authoritarian reflex—that primes adherents for high-conflict politics. In its charismatic and neocharismatic “spirit warrior” forms, that mindset becomes a mobilization engine that treats elections as exorcisms and lawmaking as dominion.

Four dispositions that bind

Catastrophism declares that national collapse is imminent (“Is this 1776 or 1944?” as Chad Connelly frames it), which justifies extraordinary measures. A persecution complex recasts pluralist policy as targeted oppression—surveys cited show high shares of Christian nationalist adherents believe Christians (or whites) are the “real victims.” Identitarianism elevates a select in-group—white Christian conservatives, and allies who adopt the creed—as rightful rulers. The authoritarian reflex then seeks strongmen or theocratic order to secure that hierarchy. Together, these dispositions generate obedience to leaders who promise restoration.

Spirit warriors and the NAR

In the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) current, theology goes operational. Popularized by C. Peter Wagner, the “Seven Mountains” framework urges believers to conquer government, media, education, business, arts, family, and religion. Figures like Lance Wallnau, Kenneth Copeland, Julie Green, and Gene Bailey model “decrees” and “prophetic acts” that claim spiritual jurisdiction over public institutions. Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Channel airs prayers that echo partisan narratives; the “Watchman Decree” explicitly declares authority over civil spheres. This is not quietism—it’s a program for power.

Pastors as political sergeants

Pastor-focused operations—Faith Wins, Pastors for Trump, Watchmen on the Wall—professionalize clergy as political organizers. They register voters, distribute talking points about “election integrity,” and bless candidates onstage. The effect is potent because pastoral authority travels through intimate, trusted networks. Stewart shows how this sacralized persuasion often outruns traditional campaign work—and how it helped rationalize resistance to 2020 results in certain circles.

Pentecostal surge, global and diverse

Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity—estimated at up to 600 million worldwide—adds scale and fluidity. In the U.S., denominations like COGIC and the Assemblies of God have grown or held steady even as mainline churches shrink. Demographically, Pentecostals skew lower-income and less formally educated, with about 44% of U.S. adherents Black and Latino—fertile terrain for both social-justice and nationalist appeals. The book notes Latino Protestants’ shift toward Trump in 2020 relative to Latino Catholics, and documents charismatic networks aiding illiberal leaders abroad (e.g., Bolsonaro’s rise in Brazil). Prosperity-preaching blends promise immediate breakthrough—a message that resonates in precarious times.

Ritual politics and non-compromise

When rallies become prayer services and policy debate becomes spiritual warfare, compromise turns into heresy. Stewart’s portraits—from Jericho-style marches to onstage exorcisms at pre–January 6 events—show how ritual collapses the distance between heaven and the ballot box. Defeat becomes demonic persecution; victory becomes divine mandate. That sacral logic explains why simple fact-checks rarely move adherents: you aren’t rebutting an argument; you’re confronting a consecrated story of destiny.

Key implication

When spiritual authority says who must rule, secular checks—courts, norms, elections—lose moral force. Politicians court these networks because they deliver votes and an aura of sacred legitimacy.

Stewart doesn’t argue that all Pentecostals or evangelicals are captured by this politics; she shows how a well-organized subset energizes a broader coalition. For you, the takeaway is to treat political religion as a strategic actor, not a backdrop—one that requires pastoral counter-voices, civic literacy inside faith spaces, and scrutiny of church-state entanglements that hide campaign machinery under clerical robes.

Public schools are where the movement’s symbolic politics meets its revenue model. Stewart argues that school wars do double duty: they rewrite the national story while routing public dollars into private, ideologically aligned systems. The tactic is consistent: inflame moral panic, exhaust local governance, then advance privatization via vouchers and charters influenced by groups like Hillsdale.

From outrage to office

Moms for Liberty (M4L) exemplifies professionalized “grassroots.” With revenues over $2 million in 2022 and major donors like Julie Fancelli, M4L trains parents through the Leadership Institute to run for school boards, orchestrate book challenges, and script confrontations around “CRT” and gender policies. Stewart describes a glossy summit in Philadelphia that functioned as both pep rally and recruitment hub—complete with talking points, legal allies, and media amplification.

Pastors as precinct captains

Pastor-mobilization outfits like Faith Wins and The Church Finds Its Voice channel church energy into local education fights. Backed by seven-figure gifts from the Lindsey Foundation, these networks aim to register every congregant, seed “biblical values” voter guides, and turn pulpits into civic command posts. This pulpit-to-policy pipeline helps propagate election-denial scripts and hardens opposition to inclusive curricula.

Privatization with ideology

After the outrage phase comes the privatization push. Stewart details Hillsdale College’s curriculum export via affiliated charters, OptimaEd’s for-profit opportunities (Erika Donalds), and the Roger Bacon Academy’s self-dealing patterns. In Oklahoma, a bid to create the first overtly sectarian charter school drew legal backlash, yet the attempt shows the strategic horizon: funnel public dollars to confessional or ideologically uniform schools. Post-2022 Supreme Court rulings have opened new legal doors for taxpayer-funded religious education, and advocates are testing every hinge.

Narratives that recruit and divide

The messaging is crafted to feel existential: schools are “grooming” kids or erasing heritage. That frame recruits anxious parents and stigmatizes educators. Stewart shows the operational details—boot camps for candidates, shared playbooks for public comment, national legal backstops—that make local fights feel orchestrated. Success in a handful of districts then becomes proof of concept for statewide voucher expansions and national talking points.

Two-step tactic

Weaponize grievance to delegitimize public schools; then privatize to redirect funds to aligned entities. Stewart calls this the movement’s most reliable local-to-state pipeline.

For you as a citizen, this battlefield is where your effort counts most. School boards are accessible, and public education undergirds civic equality. Defenses include transparent curricula processes, broad parent coalitions, legal support for librarians and teachers, and watchdogging charter governance and contracting. (Note: Stewart’s findings echo earlier warnings from education scholars about “stealth” privatization through culture war doorways.)

Movements need moral permission to do extraordinary things. Stewart traces how conservative intellectual currents—from Leo Strauss’s influence through Harry Jaffa to today’s Claremont Institute, and the Schmittian friend/enemy lens—supply legitimacy for illiberal strategies. The result is a discursive toolkit that can present dismantling checks and balances as philosophical necessity.

Straussians and the noble exception

Strauss’s emphasis on classical texts and “esoteric writing” (the idea that true messages can be coded) shaped a generation that reveres founders and natural right. In Stewart’s account, some Jaffa-influenced thinkers argue that liberalism has decayed so deeply that only strong remedies can recover the founding. This framing casts routine pluralism as decadence—and invites exceptions to normal democratic constraints in the name of restoration.

Schmitt’s friend/enemy politics

Carl Schmitt’s stark distinction between friends and enemies, and his concept of the “state of exception,” appear in the movement’s intellectual orbit. Writers tied to or adjacent with Claremont (e.g., Michael Anton, Adrian Vermeule’s integralist provocations nearby) deploy emergency rhetoric to justify power consolidation. The danger, Stewart notes, is that emergency becomes permanent, and the rule of law gives way to rule by faction.

From seminar to scheme

John Eastman—a Claremont-affiliated figure whom prosecutors later described as a key legal actor in efforts to overturn 2020’s results—illustrates the jump from theory to operations. Project 2025 (Heritage) packages the intellectual turn into staffing charts and agency playbooks: shrink, capture, or repurpose the administrative state; rewrite civil-service rules; align HHS, Labor, Interior, and others with a New Right–Christian nationalist fusion. Legal strategies include curtailing agency deference and empowering the executive to act unilaterally within a thin veneer of legality.

Respectability as camouflage

Highbrow journals, Latin tags, and classical citations signal seriousness to donors and journalists. Stewart warns that this “respectability effect” can disguise radicalism. When doctrines of exception migrate from essays to executive orders, it’s too late to notice the fine print. (Parenthetical: This dynamic recalls Corey Robin’s account of conservatism as a defense of hierarchy that innovates in moments of threat.)

Operational lesson

Watch the pipeline: essays beget fellowships; fellowships beget appointments; appointments beget policy that outlasts elections.

For readers, the antidote is due diligence. Ask: Which doctrines reduce pluralist bargaining? Which proposals centralize discretion and weaken neutral administration? If an idea only “works” in emergency, you should ask who defines the emergency—and who benefits from declaring it permanent.

Stewart lays out a tactical sequence that moves from narrative control to institutional domination: build an information bubble, prime perpetual crisis, then undermine elections and the administrative state while maintaining a veneer of legality. Think of it as a three-step method for capturing a democracy from within.

Step 1: Build the bubble

Alternative media ecosystems—Breitbart, Newsmax, EpochTV—and pastor-led channels create safe harbors for falsehoods. Repetition normalizes fringe claims (e.g., “cemetery votes”), even after audits like Arizona’s high-profile review confirm official results. Sergeants distribute scripts in churches and school groups; influencers convert them into clips and merch. The bubble immunizes followers against correction by framing outside sources as hostile or demonic.

Step 2: Prime the apocalypse

Catastrophism and persecution narratives raise the stakes: if this is 1776 again, only “extraordinary” remedies suffice. Faith Wins roadshows ask pastors to rescue the nation from imminent collapse by turning out “biblical” votes. Spirit-warrior rhetoric further sacralizes action—prayers, decrees, and prophetic words that portray political opponents as existential threats.

Step 3: Undermine and repurpose

With the base primed, operatives move to change rules and personnel. Train aggressive poll watchers; press for endless audits; litigate to restrict ballot access. In government, pursue “deconstruction of the administrative state”: roll back regulation, curb agency independence, and concentrate discretionary power in politically loyal hands. Attacks on doctrines like Chevron deference shift complex policymaking from expert agencies to judges and political appointees more easily captured by organized minorities.

Why it works

The sequence harnesses identity and emotion to overcome institutional inertia. By the time officials push back, the narrative has re-coded accountability as persecution. Stewart’s case studies—from Cyber Ninjas–style audits to local “election integrity” ministries—show how the veneer of process masks a project of permanent doubt. Meanwhile, policy blueprints like Project 2025 stand ready to convert a single electoral win into years of administrative reality.

Key risk

Once trust in neutral administration collapses, every decision is read as factional. That makes re-stabilizing democracy far harder than breaking it.

Your counter is structural: invest in independent election administration, rapid debunking and sanctions for organized disinformation, robust civic education, and rules that insulate career civil service from purge politics. You can’t argue a bubble away; you have to shrink its incentives and protect the institutions it targets.

The project Stewart describes is borderless. U.S. actors export tactics, money, and legal blueprints to allied movements abroad, while foreign patrons and networks feed resources and legitimacy back into U.S. fights. Think of it as a counterrevolutionary franchise system—same scripts, local accents.

Vehicles and brokers

The World Congress of Families (WCF), Political Network for Values (PNfV), CitizenGO, and the International Organization for the Family convene activists, legislators, and donors across continents. U.S. figures like Allan Carlson and Brian S. Brown (National Organization for Marriage) appear alongside European and Russian intermediaries—Ignacio Arsuaga (CitizenGO), Konstantin Malofeev, Alexey Komov—who host summits and seed campaigns. Legal groups such as ADF expand overseas budgets and casework to support restrictive laws and anti-LGBTQ+ initiatives.

Copy-paste campaigns

The tactics travel well: “gender ideology” becomes the umbrella scare, used to attack sex education in Costa Rica (where minister Leonardo Garnier faced orchestrated protests), to influence discourse in Argentina (via authors Agustín Laje and Nicolás Márquez), and to entrench illiberal policy in Poland (with Ordo Iuris aiding a near-total abortion ban). Training manuals, media kits, and legal briefs move across borders with little translation required.

Money that crosses oceans

Funding analyses cited in the book point to hundreds of millions moving internationally. One European Parliamentary Forum study estimated $707.2 million supporting anti-gender initiatives, with notable U.S. and Russian contributions. Donor-advised funds and faith-based grantmakers provide the anonymity that insulates campaigns from domestic scrutiny. The “who paid?” question becomes a dead end by design.

Why this matters at home

International coordination enlarges the repertoire of ideas and normalizes extremism: if a harsh policy prevails in Hungary or Poland, it becomes a sales pitch for adoption elsewhere. U.S. lawmakers and activists cite foreign “successes” to validate domestic proposals; foreign leaders tout American partners to attract funding and prestige. The loop accelerates policy diffusion and hardens a global narrative of sovereign, religiously inflected nationalism.

Lesson for defenders

You need transnational counter-infrastructure: funding transparency across borders, shared legal expertise, and rapid-response media that exposes coordinated campaigns rather than treating them as local quirks.

Stewart’s global lens reframes domestic vigilance: immigration debates, education fights, and court strategies in your town might be nodes in a network that spans five continents. Recognizing the pattern is step one; building cross-border democratic alliances is step two.

Stewart closes with pragmatic counsel: you are likely in the majority, but majorities only win when they organize. The antidote to a disciplined counterrevolution is disciplined democratic renewal—legal transparency, civic education, local power-building, and long-horizon institution-making that matches the opposition’s patience.

Use your majority, widen your tent

Most Americans reject theocratic politics. That numerical advantage matters only if you build coalitions that welcome skeptics and cross-pressured voters. Stewart urges structural reforms that unrig the game: stronger voting rights, reconsideration of the Electoral College’s distortions, and court ethics and term-limit measures to reduce partisan capture. (Note: She frames these not as partisan wins but as democracy hygiene.)

Exploit their contradictions

The coalition Stewart maps is internally incoherent—oligarchs promise relief to the “forgotten man” while advancing policies that funnel wealth upward and hollow out public goods. Expose the gap between promises and outcomes: privatization that enriches insiders; “parents’ rights” that shrink options for most families; “religious liberty” that privileges one creed over many. Contradictions are pressure points in campaigns and hearings.

Policy shields and civic muscle

Target the machinery: mandate transparency for donor-advised funds; strengthen IRS oversight of politicized nonprofits; invest in independent local news; expand civic and media literacy in schools; and safeguard public education financing and governance. Reduce the material anxieties the movement exploits—through healthcare access, unions, and community supports—so catastrophism finds less purchase.

Match institution with institution

Build the bench: legal clinics that defend rights, teacher and librarian defense funds, public-interest fellowships for state agencies, and candidate pipelines for school boards and election administration. Houses of worship can be bulwarks against political religion; equip faith leaders with resources to resist capture. Local civic groups—PTAs, precinct committees, library boards—are not small: they are the system’s load-bearing walls.

Operating principle

Out-organize, don’t just out-argue. Structure beats spectacle. If the other side funds long-term infrastructure, so must you.

Stewart’s final note is neither despairing nor naïve. The threats are real and coordinated; so is the democratic capacity to beat them. Your leverage lies in numbers, norms, and neighborhoods—if you choose to use them consistently over years, not weeks.