What follows is the script I used for the most recent episode of Exvangelical. I deviated somewhat from it, so it is not a direct transcript. You can follow on YouTube or your favorite podcast app. I am traveling for the next two weeks for my day job, so I may not have a full interview until later next month. Stay tuned for more interviews soon.
Hello and welcome to Evangelical, a show that, for over 8 years now, explores the world inside and outside the evangelical subculture. I’m your host, Blake Chastain.
I’m recording this episode on January 20, 2025. It’s Martin Luther King Jr Day, as well as Trump’s second inauguration. The mood is very different than it was during the first inauguration. During that first go-round, there was a lot of anger and shock that someone as dishonorable, vulgar, and loose with the truth. In retrospect, it seems like a much more innocent time. In the intervening time, Trump has completely transformed the Republican Party. His first administration was prone to normalizing chaos. He stacked the Supreme Court with a conservative majority. He completely fumbled the COVID-19 pandemic. He incited an insurrection. He stole confidential documents. And throughout all this, very few people within his own party tried to hold him accountable to any measure of ethics or commitment to anything beyond himself; those that tried to were ostracized, called RINOs, and forced out of the good graces of Trump’s political machine. When he won re-election in 2024, there seemed to be a resignation to the reality, but also a quiet resolve to meet that reality.
But oddly, Trump himself is the constant here. What’s surprising is the way that the rest of our politics has molded around him. Trump has emboldened the most powerful in our society to be even more blatant about their goals. The masks are off and gathering dust. In 2022, during Elon Musk’s messy acquisition of Twitter that he tried to back out of, Elon claimed that he wanted to “upset the left and right equally.” By 2024, he Elon said he was “dark, Gothic MAGA” and spent over an estimated $250 million on Trump’s campaign. Mark Zuckerberg, who has made a concerted effort with his latest edgelord-coded rebrand—getting into MMA, streetwear, and lying up a storm on Rogan—has gone all-in, too, completely gutting the fact-checking apparatus that Meta had built to manage misinformation, and rolling back hate-speech guidelines, such as making explicit cutouts for calling LGBT people mentally ill. Meta has also decided that its apps are for politics again now that a conservative administration is in power, after downgrading what they considered “political” content during the Biden administration, and done some blatant culture-war type things like removing the transgender and queer theming options from Facebook Messenger.
It’s not just Elon and Zuck, though. The entire tech oligarchy is falling in line, paying to play by donating at least $1M to Trump’s inauguration. Companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and their respective CEOs have all lined up to play ball. While it’s not a surprise, it’s also not encouraging.
This very show has its own relationship with Trump. I released the first episode during the 2016 Republican National Convention, when Trump secured the nomination. At the time, I believed that the evangelicals who had such a formative influence on me would not give Trump their vote; history has proven otherwise, with them supporting him at a steady 80% in the three elections he has been part of.
The truth is that the most powerful factions in government, and increasingly, the corporate philosophies of some of our most influential and powerful companies, are far more palatable for and amenable to conservative white evangelical notions than it was when this show started. And I am not sure where things go from here. Over the weekend, access to TikTok was disrupted due to a law that demanded the app be sold to a US-based company or face a ban that was upheld by the Supreme Court. The ban was ostensibly due to national security concerns, though the details of those concerns have never been made available to the public. Service to TikTok was reinstated after Trump insisted he would find a solution and after TikTok’s leadership made fawning comments about Trump.
By the time this is posted, Trump will have already started taking action through a flurry of executive orders that will disrupt the American way of life. In the past, activists would take to a platform like Twitter to raise concern, organize, and develop public responses, with the opportunity to create counter publics. One thing I’m not certain about is where such counter publics can take root today, and whether they will have the same opportunity to grow as they did previously. What does it mean when the owners of so many of our supposed public squares align themselves with thin-skinned individuals like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, who show no concern for bias or altering their algorithms to whatever they dictate?
But the uncertainty of this moment also presents an opportunity. There is already some momentum behind Bluesky, the twitter alternative that began as a research project at Twitter itself that is based the AT protocol. There is an effort called Free Our Feeds that wants to build upon the same AT Protocol. Bluesky is launching its own video feed, and third party apps like Flashes are sparking a lot of interest, even as established companies like Flipboard create apps like Surf to build upon the fediverse. I’m not sure if any of these services will see mass adoption. But there is a hunger among the most online of us to have a bit more independence over our digital experiences, free from the whims of billionaires who have made a habit of showing their disdain for the people who make their networks worthwhile.
There is much more at stake than whether or not a noisy online public can find its place online. We face multiple simultaneous crises—a housing shortage, food insecurity, the changing legal status of immigrants, climate crises, and further threats to democracy here in the US and abroad, amongst others. But one of the crises we face is an information crisis—one that is only looking to get harder and harder to navigate. We will need a counterpublic, or multiple counter publics, to respond.