Flipping Tables

On October 20 in Conroe, Texas, a pastor laid hands on Ken Paxton and prayed that God would "give him favor with voters." Two days later a dozen Catholic bishops were filmed praying over Donald Trump in the Oval Office with Paula White-Cain standing behind the chair. Two weeks before that, Jim Bakker died. This episode traces the idea underneath all three: that success is God's verdict on a man.

It starts with a clockmaker in Belfast, Maine, in 1838. Phineas Quimby decided disease was an error of belief, his patient Mary Baker Eddy turned that into Christian Science, and a fired editor named Emma Curtis Hopkins turned it into New Thought, ordaining twenty women in her first class in 1889 and training the founders of Unity, Divine Science, and Religious Science. Then the men moved in. Ralph Waldo Trine, Napoleon Hill (whose Carnegie meeting no archive can find), Bruce Barton's Jesus as "the founder of modern business," and Norman Vincent Peale, who married Donald and Ivana Trump in 1977 and whom Trump still calls his teacher.

Alongside it, the gospel of wealth: Russell Conwell's "it is your duty to get rich," delivered 6,152 times. The frontier panic of Turner and Roosevelt, the Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911, and Billy Sunday's war on "effeminate" Christianity, all arriving as women organized to vote. Fundamentalism, paid for by Union Oil's Lyman Stewart. And E. W. Kenyon, who learned mind-cure at a Boston elocution school and passed it, word for word, to Kenneth Hagin of McKinney, Texas, Paxton's hometown. From Hagin: Copeland, seed-faith, Osteen, Paula White, and a 2006 poll in which 61 percent of American Christians said God wants people to be rich.

Sources

Kate Bowler, Blessed (Oxford, 2013)

Beryl Satter, Each Mind a Kingdom (University of California Press, 1999)

Catherine Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit (Yale, 2007)

Gail Harley, Emma Curtis Hopkins: Forgotten Founder of New Thought (Syracuse, 2002)

Donald Meyer, The Positive Thinkers (Doubleday, 1965)

Richard Weiss, The American Myth of Success (Basic Books, 1969)

Mitch Horowitz, One Simple Idea (Crown, 2014)

D. R. McConnell, A Different Gospel (Hendrickson, 1988)

George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford, 1980)

Darren Dochuk, Anointed with Oil (Basic Books, 2019)

Kevin Kruse, One Nation Under God (Basic Books, 2015)

Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne (Liveright, 2020)

Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (Knopf, 1977)

David Edwin Harrell Jr., Oral Roberts: An American Life (Indiana, 1985)

Carol V. R. George, God's Salesman (Oxford, 1993)

David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (Penguin, 2006)

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Lectures IV–V

Russell Conwell, Acres of Diamonds; Andrew Carnegie, "Wealth," North American Review, June 1889

Ralph Waldo Trine, In Tune with the Infinite (1897); Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich (1937); Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows (1925)

Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking (1952); Oral Roberts, The Miracle of Seed-Faith (1970); Kenneth Hagin, You Can Have What You Say (1979); Kenneth Copeland, The Laws of Prosperity (1974); Marabel Morgan, The Total Woman (1973); Joel Osteen, Your Best Life Now (2004)

Matt Novak, "The Untold Story of Napoleon Hill," Gizmodo, Dec. 2016

Time, "Does God Want You to Be Rich?" Sept. 10, 2006

Texas House Resolution 2377, May 27, 2023; Texas Senate Court of Impeachment, Sept. 2023

Angela Paxton, petition for divorce, Collin County, July 10, 2025

Ballotpedia and NBC News, Texas Senate runoff results, May 26–27, 2026

Fox News, Angela Paxton at the Texas Federation of Republican Women, Sept. 23, 2026

Get out and vote tomorrow everybody!

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On This Day: History.com — Statue of Liberty dedicated | Women’s eNews — The Statue of Liberty and early feminism | EBSCO — Statue of Liberty is dedicated

Bolsonaro: CNN — Defies travel ban with flight to US | NBC News — Flees to U.S. | U.S. News/Reuters — Leaves Brazil for US | The Hill — Trump calls Brazil election “rigged” | Euronews — “Rigged” without evidence | SCMP — Bolsonaro’s party acknowledges Lula win

Israel: CNN — Record turnout live blog | Jerusalem Post — Election 2026 coverage | Times of Israel — Final polls | Al Jazeera — When will we know who won

Supreme Court / immigration: ABC News — Court declines to restore closure policy | U.S. News/Reuters — Denies judges power to shelve cases | Detroit News — Same

Phillip James: AP via U.S. News — Documents support citizen’s claim | WTOP — Same

Methane: The Hill — Loosening rules for low-producing wells | Center for Western Priorities — Rollback for all wells | Colorado Public Radio — Weeks after Colorado adopted stricter rules | Bloomberg — EPA readies bid to weaken controls

WMO: WMO — Greenhouse gas levels once again reach record high | UPI — CO2, other emissions record high in 2025 | SCMP — Impact will last centuries

El Niño: Raw Story/Guardian — Monster El Niño bears down on storm watchers Trump gutted | inkl/Guardian — “Cascade” of El Niño dangers | Rep. Amo — 41 lawmakers call for NOAA to prepare | Weather.com — Historic super El Niño ahead

AI term: The Hill — Trump says he will ban term | Forbes — Latest push for “Super Intelligence” | Mediaite — “In all relevant documents, and everything else”

Malfoid: Just the News — Education Department joins Malfoid trend | Know Your Meme — Malfoid / female Draco Malfoy | Yahoo — What is Malfoid

Heckler: CNN — Protester interrupts Trump rally | Mediaite — “Shove that ballroom” | IBTimes — Protester removed at Mississippi rally

Trump Jr.: Forbes — Hunted in Mongolia with oligarch who bankrolled his wedding | New Republic — Closer to Putin ally than we knew | Daily Beast — Hunting trip with Umar Kremlev | UNITED24 — Counterintelligence warning

Pretti: CNN — Family says feds stonewalling | MPR News — Parents speak on his killing | Star Tribune — Family news conference | WVTM/CNN — No answers nine months later

Tennessee escape: CNN — Escaped through fence, fled in stolen truck | NBC News — Manhunt for convicted killer | Washington Post — Search underway | WREG — Stole truck after escape

Bundy: KSTP/AP — Linked to another Utah teen’s 1974 murder | Fox 8 — Connected to another 1970s homicide | PBS — April Laura Aime DNA match

Swalwell: Yahoo/CNN — FBI raids billionaire’s mansion | Newsweek — Mansion raided | NewsNation — Investigation update | Signal — Swalwell ends bid, resigns (April)

Brand: NBC News — Appears in court for trial | Variety — Trial begins | ABC7 — Six women testify

UN Gaza report: CBC — Commission says genocide continued since truce | ABC Australia — Continued after truce | Al Jazeera — “Extermination” in West Bank

Good news: Good Good Good — Nurses secure first countywide 12-week paid parental leave | PublicSource — Compromise amendments | WPXI — Supporters rally at courthouse

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Description coming soon

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Reminder: I will be in Scotland for my birthday next week! Libras UNITE! Yesterday's news will still be coming out leading into midterms, but the time of day may change slightly, I will have a few days that I take off completely from being online, but I will announce those.

SOURCES

On This Day: JFK Library — October 16, 1962 | Office of the Historian — Cuban Missile Crisis

UChicago: Chicago Sun-Times — Group cheered as woman was assaulted | Block Club Chicago — Person of interest identified, banned | The Week — Echoes of Cornell

Cornell: CNN — 16 found responsible, two expelled | Chronicle of Higher Education — Why the Cornell men wrote essays | NBC News — Records on one accused student

Execution: CNN — Trump calls off livestream | NBC News — No livestream | Al Jazeera — Trump’s post, Obama reference | The Hill — Trump cancels Hegseth’s plan | Mediaite — Patel’s “From Russia, with Love”

Press access: Axios — Judge orders access reinstated until litigation concludes | ABC News — Preliminary injunction | Washington Post — Another blow to media bans

Ukraine: KRDO/CNN — Ukraine runs out of Patriot missiles | Al Jazeera — “Massive” attack kills at least nine | Kyiv Post — Strikes after Trump’s truce | Kyiv Independent — Moscow says scope unclear | Ukrinform — Supermarket logistics center destroyed | RNZ — Trump admin silent as Russia hits U.S. businesses | CBS News — U.S. may have withheld warnings | RFE/RL — Uncertainty over U.S. intelligence | CNBC — Musk: Trump “ultimately” responsible for Starshield curbs | Forbes — Ukraine says SpaceX restricting Starlink | CNN — Starlink restriction, early warning

Refugees: Boston Globe/AP — Deadline cut to contest status termination | Latin Times — 10 days to challenge

Omar: Al Jazeera — Administration seeks to strip citizenship, WSJ | Newsweek — Phone seized, citizenship targeted | CBS News — Home searched

Salazar v. Paramount: SCOTUSblog — Court appears likely to allow suit | ABC News/AP — Blockbuster-era law gets fresh look | The Record — Facebook pixel case

Blackburn: Billboard — “Not Like Us” AI video slammed | The National Desk — Blasted over AI video

Harris: Mediaite — “You are rude!” | Newsweek — Scolds crowd for laughing | New Republic — Tried to get journalist arrested | The Banner — What led to the press conference

Data centers: Texas Tribune — Crackdown exposes limits of state law | Axios — Abbott: data centers “dug their own grave” | CNBC — Texas turning blue may hinge on data center opposition | CNN — Death threats over data centers | Texas Politics Project — Poll

Marshall: MS NOW/AP — Sought funding; project could benefit his ranch | Yahoo/Independent — Railed against waste, sought $4.2M

Guilfoyle: CNBC — Resigns at White House’s request | Axios — Forced out | NBC News — Resigns amid misconduct allegations | Daily Beast — “Burn book” report

Zacharia: NBC News — Watchdog seeks investigation of legal résumé | SF Chronicle — Not licensed to practice law in U.S. | The Hill — Complaint filed with California bar

White powder: NBC News — Letters sent to election offices in 3 states | CP24/CNN — Multiple states | Forbes — Letters to Capitol Hill, election offices

Pope: CNBC — Diagnosed with cancer, lobe removed | CBS News — Recovering “as expected” | U.S. News/AP — Chicago Catholics rally for prayer | CNN — Pope’s first message

Cameroon: KDH News/AP — Killings spur protests, demands for laws | Human Rights Watch — Cameroon grapples with femicides | IBTimes — Teacher’s death, planned law

Israeli prisons: Washington Post/AP — Surge in inmates shot with rubber bullets |

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Misspoke: There is a podcast episode this week, not next week.
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On This Day: History.com— Chilean miners rescued after 69 days | TechCrunch — Most-watched Ustream event ever

Gates / Yandex: France 24/AFP — Gates warns cyberattacks most imminent AI threat | Euronews — Did strikes on Yandex cause bot activity to plummet? | Yahoo — Yandex bot traffic nearly eliminated | TVP World — Bot traffic plummets

Diesel / ceasefire: The Hill — Backlash grows against Russia diesel deal | The Hill — Fitzpatrick bill | NBC News — Trump claims “energy ceasefire”; Ukraine says strikes continue | RFE/RL — House Republicans move to block deal

Omar: CBS News — Home searched by HSI | Axios — Search in immigration probe | CNN — Federal officers carry out search | ABC News — DOJ statement

Ads ruling: CNBC — Judge orders ads stopped immediately | CNN — Order with hours left | NBC News — Ads off air immediately

East Potomac: Washington Post — Judge halts tree removal after 500 trees fall | FOX 5 — 500 trees cut | WUSA9 — 150 trees, administration defends work

Allentown radio: Post-Gazette/AP — Spanish-language radio show overflows with frustration | Local10/AP — Same

Early voting: CNN — Democratic gains in Ohio’s most Trump-friendly counties | NBC News — Early vote analysis | Santa Fe New Mexican — New Mexico early voting | MS NOW — “Red undertow”

Talarico: The Bulwark — Conspiracy implodes | Baptist News — Republicans falsely claim | Daily Wire — Campaign and hospital deny | Primetimer — Suspended account allegation

Execution: The Hill — Mullin: “restoring American values” | Al Jazeera — Mullin sees no “risk” | CBS News — Only 2 countries held public executions last year | CBS News — Livestream plan sparks backlash | CNN — Hegseth gets backlash | Wikipedia — Execution of Mohsen Shekari

Guilfoyle: Washington Post/AP — Trump, Rubio weigh firing envoy | The Hill — Job uncertainty | HuffPost — Mounting reports

Measles: Stateline — 4,080 cases, highest in decades | ABC News — Surpasses 4,000 in 45 states | The Hill — A quarter from Pennsylvania | CDC — Cases and outbreaks

SNAP: WISN — Enrollment sinks to 19.8 million households | PBS — 1.2 million children lost SNAP | UPI — Fewer Americans getting help | WWNO — Louisiana enrollment nosedives

FDA: Yahoo — Proposal widens exemption for chemicals added to food | The Hill — Kennedy looks to close loophole | Sen. Markey — Ensuring Safe and Toxic-Free Foods Act

Zacharia: NBC News — Zacharia will be next press secretary | CNBC — Trump Media adviser named | Newsweek — Who is Katie Zacharia | Wikipedia — Tricia McLaughlin (DHS succession)

Isaias: FOX 10 — Nearly 396,000 without power | NPR — At least 4 deaths | CBS News — Cleanup continues

The word “gossip” started out as something sacred. In Old English it was godsibb, literally “God-sibling,” the name for a godparent or anyone who stood with you at a baptism and became spiritual kin. By the Middle Ages the meaning had loosened to cover any close friend or companion, and in particular the circle of women who gathered in the birthing room to help a mother through labor. Those long hours of waiting were filled with talk, and the “gossips” became known as much for their conversation as for their support.

Men, fearful and suspicious of women in community without men supervising began to demonize women gathering publicly or speaking to each other. Male writers of the 1500s and 1600s sneered at “gossips” as idle, chattering women, and by the 1800s the verb “to gossip” meant exactly what it does today. It was uniquely WOMAN sin and was built to isolate a woman from network. Then... they added it to the Bible.

Sources 

Wulfstan, Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, c. 1014 (CCCC MS 419). The Fox and the Wolf, c. 1275 (Bodleian Digby 86). Chaucer, Wife of Bath's Prologue, lines 243–45, 525–51 (Riverside). Shakespeare: Comedy of Errors 5.1; Midsummer Night's Dream 2.1; Romeo and Juliet 3.5; Titus Andronicus 4.2; Henry VIII 5.5. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755, s.v. "gossip." Etymonline and wordorigins.org for sense dates (c. 1300 friend; 1560s idle talker; 1620s verb; 1791–1811 the talk). Adrian Wilson, "The Ceremony of Childbirth and its Interpretation," in Valerie Fildes, ed., Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England, Routledge, 1990; The Making of Man-Midwifery, UCL/Harvard, 1995. Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet, Oxford, 2003; David Turner's review, H-Albion, January 2004. Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers, Oxford, 1996. Heinrich Kramer, Malleus Maleficarum, 1486, Part I, Questions 6 and 11 (Summers translation, 1928). Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families, 1548 (1809 ed., p. 590); Holinshed, Chronicles, 1587, vol. 3, p. 842. Second Book of Homilies, 1563, "Of the State of Matrimony." David Underdown, "The Taming of the Scold," in Fletcher and Stevenson, eds., Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, Cambridge, 1985, pp. 116–36. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, Autonomedia, 2004, chs. 2 and 4; Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women, PM Press, 2018, ch. 5. Lynda Boose, "Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds," Shakespeare Quarterly 42.2, 1991, pp. 179–213. Blackstone, Commentaries, Book IV, ch. 13, 1769. Ralph Gardiner, England's Grievance Discovered, 1655. Samuel Rowlands, 'Tis Merrie when Gossips meete, 1602; A Crew of kind Gossips, 1613. "Tittle-Tattle; Or, the several Branches of Gossipping," British Museum 1973,U.216. Hans Medick, "Village Spinning Bees," in Medick and Sabean, eds., Interest and Emotion, Cambridge, 1984. State v. Palendrano, 120 N.J. Super. 336 (Law Div. 1972). James v. Commonwealth, 12 Serg. & Rawle 220 (Pa. 1825). Verse comparisons across Wycliffe, Geneva 1599, KJV, Douay-Rheims, Darby 1890, YLT 1898, ASV 1901, Weymouth 1903/1913, RSV 1946/1952, NASB 1971/1995/2020, TLB 1971, NIV 1978/2011, ESV 2001, NRSVue 2021, via Bible Gateway. Lexicon: Strong's H7400 rakil, H5372 nirgan, G5588 psithyristēs, G5587 psithyrismos, G5397 phlyaros, G5396 phlyareō, G1228 diabolos. Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, Doubleday, 1997. Bart D. Ehrman, Forged, HarperOne, 2011. Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution, MIT Press, 1981; "What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like?", Signs 5.3, 1980; Redesigning the American Dream, Norton, 1984. Christine Frederick, The New Housekeeping, 1913; Household Engineering, 1919. FHA Underwriting Manual, 1938, pars. 937, 980. Eric Larrabee, "The Six Thousand Houses That Levitt Built," Harper's, September 1948. John Keats,

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In April a congresswoman pinned "Read the book of Enoch" to the top of her feed, and a cable host told America the government made a deal with demons for the bomb. They're pointing at a real book. First Enoch is older than every document in the New Testament, quoted as prophecy by the letter of Jude, and read as scripture by the people who wrote the Gospels. It's where the Christian ideas of demons, a hell of fire, the archangel Michael with his chain, the seven archangels, Lucifer's fall from pride, and the Nephilim actually come from, and almost none of that is in the Bible you were handed in Sunday school.

SOURCES — The Books of EnochPRIMARY TEXTS AND EDITIONSNickelsburg, George W. E. 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 1–36; 81–108. Hermeneia. Fortress Press, 2001.Nickelsburg, George W. E., and James C. VanderKam. 1 Enoch 2: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 37–82. Hermeneia. Fortress Press, 2012.Nickelsburg, George W. E., and James C. VanderKam. 1 Enoch: A New Translation. Fortress Press, 2004; 2nd ed. 2012.Charles, R. H. The Book of Enoch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893; 2nd ed. 1912. (Public domain; quotations in the script follow Charles.)Charles, R. H. The Ethiopic Version of the Book of Enoch. Oxford, 1906.Knibb, Michael A. The Ethiopic Book of Enoch. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.Milik, J. T. The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.Stuckenbruck, Loren T. The Book of Giants from Qumran. Mohr Siebeck, 1997.Stuckenbruck, Loren T. 1 Enoch 91–108. Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature. De Gruyter, 2007.Laurence, Richard. The Book of Enoch the Prophet. Oxford, 1821.Dillmann, August. Liber Henoch Aethiopice. Leipzig, 1851; Das Buch Henoch, 1853.Bouriant, Urbain. "Fragments du texte grec du livre d'Énoch." Mémoires de la Mission archéologique française au Caire 9.1 (1892). (Codex Panopolitanus / Akhmim codex.)Bonner, Campbell. The Last Chapters of Enoch in Greek. Studies and Documents 8. London, 1937. (Chester Beatty–Michigan papyrus.)Andersen, F. I. "2 (Slavonic Apocalypse of) Enoch." In Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1. Doubleday, 1983.Alexander, Philip. "3 (Hebrew Apocalypse of) Enoch." In Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1. Doubleday, 1983.Odeberg, Hugo. 3 Enoch, or The Hebrew Book of Enoch. Cambridge, 1928.Hagen, Joost L. "No Longer 'Slavonic' Only: 2 Enoch Attested in Coptic from Nubia." In Orlov and Boccaccini, eds., New Perspectives on 2 Enoch. Brill, 2012.VanderKam, James C. The Book of Jubilees. 2 vols. CSCO 510–511. Peeters, 1989.Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Genesis Apocryphon of Qumran Cave 1 (1Q20). 3rd ed. Biblical Institute Press, 2004.Wise, Michael, Martin Abegg, and Edward Cook. The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation. HarperOne, 1996; rev. 2005.Syncellus, George. The Chronography of George Synkellos. Trans. William Adler and Paul Tuffin. Oxford, 2002.Scaliger, Joseph. Thesaurus Temporum. Leiden, 1606.Fabricius, Johann Albert. Codex Pseudepigraphus Veteris Testamenti. Hamburg, 1713.Bruce, James. Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile. 5 vols. Edinburgh, 1790.VanderKam, James C. Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition. CBQ Monograph 16. Catholic Biblical Association, 1984.VanderKam, James C. Enoch: A Man for All Generations. University of South Carolina Press, 1995.Reed, Annette Yoshiko. Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity: The Reception of Enochic Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2005.Nickelsburg, George W. E. "Enoch, Levi, and Peter: Recipients of Revelation in Upper Galilee." Journal of Biblical Literature 100.4 (1981): 575–600.Suter, David. "Fallen Angel, Fallen Priest: The Problem of Family Purity in 1 Enoch 6–16." Hebrew Union College Annual 50 (1979): 115–135.Boccaccini, Gabriele, ed. Enoch and the Messiah Son of Man:

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For bonus content, early access and to support the show subscribe to patreon.com/montemader

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On This Day: PBS News — How the Tylenol murders changed the way we consume medication | Chicago History Museum — The Chicago Tylenol Murders

Bailey: CNN — One of Patel’s deputies resigns | CBS News — Bailey, once seen as Patel successor, resigns | ABC News — Bailey resigns | Washington Examiner — Same

Sanctuary surge: NewsNation — DHS announces nationwide surge | IBTimes — DHS denies pullback, announces surge | Daily Wire — Officers say they were told to stop arresting non-criminals

ICE at polls: Democracy Docket — Democrats mobilize against agents at polls | PolitiFact — What could stop Trump from sending ICE to polls | The Intercept — ICE watchers prep to defend midterms | Brennan Center — Preventing voter intimidation by federal agents | Yahoo — White House: “can’t guarantee an ICE agent won’t be around”

Paxton: New Republic — Paxton defends one-day plea | IBTimes — Records show 29 days | Texas Tribune — Inside the plea deal | PolitiFact — Paxton’s Uvalde remarks in context

Bo French: CNN KFile — History of calling for public executions | Houston Public Media — Top Texas Republicans knew, supported him anyway | New Republic — Long history of execution calls

Obama remarks: The Hill — Trump blasts Obama’s “ridiculous” take | HuffPost — Trump on women in leadership

Leavitt: Daily Beast — Leavitt shops book | Yahoo — Reportedly shopping book with White House details

Title IX: The Hill — Department formally rescinds protections | Education Week — Department kills Biden rule | The 74 — Same | Washington Blade — Same

Student loans: New Republic — Trump moves to cut off loans for degrees | WPR — Cutting loans for low-paying degrees | BestColleges — Professional degree definition narrowed | Mass.gov — Healey calls for reversal

Medicaid: The Hill — Lawsuit targets medically frail exemption | Fortune — Too frail to work, can’t afford a doctor to prove it | CBPP — Last-minute restrictions worsen impact | Common Dreams — Administration argues terminally ill not exempt

Hospital AI billing: Fierce Healthcare — AI coding cost BCBSA plans $942M | BCBSA — AI shaping hospital billing trends | HR Dive — Insurers vs. billing companies

Gates: Axios — Gates: AI powerful enough to cause a billion deaths | Business Standard — “Not a hoax” | Deadline — Gates urges safeguards | Axios — Companies probing tens of thousands of incidents | WORLD — Trump, Johnson host AI executives

National Rally: France 24 — RN forms Senate group for first time | Euronews — Same | Al Jazeera — Same

Argentina: Al Jazeera — Poverty rises to 32 percent under Milei | MercoPress — 32.3%, ending two years of decline | France 24 — Nearly one in three | CNBC — The U.S. bailout explained | NBC News — Support could hit $40 billion | Axios — Bessent’s second $20B facility | Epoch Times — Argentina repays swap drawdown | CFR — Will Trump’s $20 billion help Milei

El Niño: Governor’s office — Emergency proclamation | CNN — Newsom declares emergency ahead of super El Niño | Time — What to know

Cornell: CNN — Prosecutors reopen investigation | ABC News — DA reopens case | Cornell Daily Sun — DA reopens investigation | Cornell Daily Sun — Lawsuit filed

Good news: Positive News — What went right this week | Squirrel News — Kosovo concludes 27 years of clearance | HALO Trust — Kosovo

More of Jeff and Adams work on thedelta.men

We all see how the manosphere profits off the loneliness, rage and misogyny of young men. There are 100 coaches a day you can scroll past telling a man how he can be a true "alpha dude bro". ICK. Profiting off pain and rage with no intention of actually helping.

But there are men who are actually trying to help men heal, help them learn to build community and develop connection- what does that look like? What are those coaches seeing in men that needs to change? I brought in the coaches from the Delta to talk about exactly that. I have personal experience with them cause I've watched them transform my brothers life.

Everybody in our world is hurting, we live in such an unnatural disconnected society. Can men heal enough that women can feel safe? Can there be common ground But what about the men who haven't gone to the manosphere but don't know where to go? Who actually want to do better and realize that something is missing? The world doesn't change until we do.

Trying out posting yesterday's news here- if a morning recap helps you stay informed but also gives you a break from the social media cycle, here to help

Please like and subscribe to the show!!!!

I firmly believe that the United States will only be as progressive as the south is.

Tennessee is not as red as you think. The history of gerrymandering, the exploitation of the south, the control of super red majorities would have you believe that these "super red states" are a lost cause, they aren't.

In this episode we will cover some of the suprising history of Tennesee as a state of change, and the hope for a better future with the candidate for congress in Tennessee district 9- Justin Pearson.

Find out more about his campaign: https://www.votejustinj.com/

TW: Suicide

First ever true crossover episode! Flippers meet the Hellions, Hellions meet the Flippers. This case included so much of our mutual subject matter we decided to post it on both shows.

Mica Francis Miller, 30, died on April 27, 2024, at Lumber River State Park in North Carolina, roughly an hour from her home in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. She had bought a handgun that afternoon and called 911 minutes before shooting herself; the Robeson County Sheriff's Office and North Carolina medical examiners ruled her death a suicide. Days earlier she had filed for divorce from her husband, John-Paul Miller, pastor of Solid Rock Church in Market Common, and police records show she contacted law enforcement at least 14 times between February and mid-April 2024.Court filings and family statements alleged years of abuse, surveillance, financial control, and nonconsensual distribution of intimate images; a December 2024 filing added strangulation allegations. Miller denied wrongdoing.

On December 17, 2025, a federal grand jury in South Carolina indicted Miller on two counts, cyberstalking and making false statements to investigators, alleging he used tracking devices and unwanted communications to harass Mica from November 2022 until her death. Netflix's documentary series "Death of a Pastor's Wife" premiered August 27, 2026, renewing attention on the case and on South Carolina's protective-order law.

Sources: Full list on patreon

ABC News 4 (WCIV). (2026, January 12). JP Miller pleads not guilty to federal charges of cyberstalking, false statements. https://abcnews4.com/news/local/dozens-show-up-outside-florence-federal-courthouse-for-arraignment-of-jp-miller-mica-cyberstalking-lying-authorities-fbi-solid-rock-church-pastor

Burroughs Funeral Home & Cremation Services. (2024). Obituary for Mica Acacia Miller. https://www.burroughsfh.com/obituary/Mica-Miller

Christianity Today. (2022, September). What happens when you ask thousands of evangelical women about sex. https://www.christianitytoday.com/2022/09/sheila-gregoire-great-sex-rescue-survey-evangelical-women/

Condo-World. (n.d.). History of the Sea Captain's House Myrtle Beach. https://blog.condo-world.com/history-of-the-sea-captains-house/

Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. (1987). The Danvers Statement.

Creepy Catalog. (2026). Death of the Pastor's Wife: John-Paul Miller's first wife says Mica's account matched her own. https://creepycatalog.com/death-of-the-pastors-wife-john-paul-millers-first-wife-says-micas-account-matched-her-own/

Crime and Cask News Network. (2026, August). Father of former Solid Rock pastor John Paul Miller pleads guilty. https://crimeandcask.com/father-of-pastor-john-paul-miller-pleads-guilty/

FITSNews. (2024, December 20). Mica Miller saga: Police reports fill in blanks, raise more questions. https://www.fitsnews.com/2024/12/20/mica-miller-saga-police-reports-fill-in-blanks-raise-more-questions/

FITSNews. (2025, June 2). Embattled South Carolina pastor John-Paul Miller marries girlfriend. https://www.fitsnews.com/2025/06/02/embattled-south-carolina-pastor-john-paul-miller-marries-girlfriend/

Gregoire, S. W. (2023, September). 10 things to know about obligation sex. Bare Marriage. https://baremarriage.com/2023/09/10-things-obligation-sex/

Gregoire, S. W., Lindenbach, R. G., & Sawatsky, J. (2021). The great sex rescue: The lies you've been taught and how to recover what God intended. Baker Books.

Guidepost Solutions. (2022, May 15). Report of the independent investigation: The Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee's response to sexual abuse allegations and an audit of the procedures and actions of the Credentials Committee.

Jane Doe v. John-Paul Miller, Reginald Wayne Miller, et al. (2025). Complaint, Horry County Court of Common Pleas. https://www.wbtw.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2025/03/JP-lawsuit-2.pdf

Check out Christina Ray Stantons Book at https://christinaraystanton.com/product/out-of-the-shadow-of-9-11

A licensed New York City tour guide since 1995, Christina Stanton has led more than 50,000 visitors and is one of the city’s longest-serving guides. A 9/11 survivor who lived a few blocks from the World Trade Center, she now conducts weekly tours of the 9/11 Memorial and has written more than 40 articles about the attacks and their ongoing aftermath. She is the author of Out of the Shadow of 9/11, which received both the 2020 IPPY Award and the Benjamin Franklin Award.Stanton’s journalism spans the history and culture of New York City as well as stories of social justice and inspiring individuals around the world. She writes regularly for the NY Daily News, and her work has appeared in publications including The Daily Beast, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Time magazine.She is a member of the 9/11 Visionary Network, sponsored by the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, and The Newswomen’s Club of New York.

Stanton speaks frequently about 9/11 and has addressed live audiences worldwide from Tokyo to Mozambique. In 2016, she and her husband co-founded the nonprofit organization Loving All Nations, which supports vulnerable communities in countries such as Madagascar and South Africa. Christina and her husband Brian have lived for a quarter century in the same home in Manhattan's Financial District, where they love taking their rescue dog, Nala, on long walks through the historical streets.

I cried a lot of tears when we lost Dolly and also writing this script. WHAT A LEGACY!
This week on Flipping Tables, we celebrate the life, love, and legacy of Dolly Rebecca Parton. We will cover her childhood of growing up in poverty, her iconic music career, movies, books and most of all- her generosity. Dolly could have been a billionaire and chose to help people instead giving upwards of $600 million dollars throughout the course of her life. Dolly was an example of how to be superstar who was known most of all by her love.
Sources: Full source list on patreon.com/montemader

Anderson, E. J., et al. (2020, December 17). Safety and immunogenicity of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA-1273 vaccine in older adults. New England Journal of Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2028436

ABC News. (2026, March 13). Dolly Parton shares health update at 2026 Dollywood park opening. https://abcnews.com/GMA/Culture/dolly-parton-shares-health-update-2026-dollywood-park/story?id=131063621

ABC News. (2026, August 25). Dolly Parton's family shares her final message amid news of her death. https://abcnews.com/GMA/Family/dolly-partons-family-shares-final-message-amid-news/story?id=135948668

ABC News. (2026, August 26). Dolly Parton's legacy of giving: Inside her decades of philanthropy. https://abcnews.com/GMA/Culture/dolly-partons-legacy-giving-inside-decades-philanthropy/story?id=135947174

Afar. (2020). New Nashville mural highlights Dolly Parton's Black Lives Matter quote. https://www.afar.com/magazine/nashville-mural-highlights-dolly-partons-black-lives-matter-quote

American Eagle Foundation. (n.d.). Dollywood. https://eagles.org/dollywood/

American Songwriter. (n.d.). Behind the major financial risk Porter Wagoner took when RCA signed Dolly Parton. https://americansongwriter.com/behind-the-major-financial-risk-porter-wagoner-took-when-rca-signed-dolly-parton/

American Songwriter. (n.d.). The first song Dolly Parton wrote at age 5 with the help of her mother, "Little Tiny Tassel Top." https://americansongwriter.com/the-first-song-dolly-parton-wrote-at-age-5-wrote-with-the-help-of-her-mother-little-tiny-tassel-top/

American Songwriter. (n.d.). On this day in 1975, Dolly Parton released one of her most underrated (and controversial) career hits—banned by radio over one single lyric. https://americansongwriter.com/on-this-day-in-1975-dolly-parton-released-one-of-her-most-underrated-and-controversial-career-hits-banned-by-radio-over-one-single-lyric/

Appalachian Regional Commission. (n.d.). Education in Appalachia. https://www.arc.gov/about-the-appalachian-region/the-chartbook/education-in-appalachia/

Appalachian Regional Commission. (n.d.). High-poverty counties in Appalachia, 1960 and 2019–2023. https://arc.gov/map/high-poverty-counties-in-appalachia-1960-and-2019-2023/

Appalachian Regional Commission. (n.d.). Income and poverty in Appalachia. https://www.arc.gov/about-the-appalachian-region/the-chartbook/income-and-poverty-in-appalachia/

Appalachian Regional Development Act. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved August 29, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_Regional_Development_Act

Axios Nashville. (2026, August 27). Dolly Parton's philanthropy extended far beyond books. https://www.axios.com/local/nashville/2026/08/27/dolly-parton-philanthropy-donations

The Bargain Store (song). (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved August 29, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bargain_Store_(song)

Billboard. (n.d.). A timeline of Dolly Parton's good deeds. https://www.billboard.com/lists/dolly-parton-good-deeds-timeline/

Billboard. (2024, November 15). Dolly Parton's brother David Parton dies. https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/dolly-parton-brother-david-parton-dies-obituary-1235831296

Billboard. (2026, July 27). Dolly Parton's older brother Coy "Denver" Parton dies at 82. https://www.billboard.com/music/country/dolly-parton-brother-coy-denver-parton-dies-1236304122/

check out Tim on substack! https://substack.com/@timwhitakerspeaks/p-209161563

Tim and I share similar stories about leaving evangelicalism around a lot of the same reasons- but how do we get to the young men? Men, especially at a young age, are being pulled into the manosphere, extreme conservatism, and Christian fundamentalism. Today we talk about how the movement pulls them in, weaponizes their loneliness and anger, and keep them trapped.

Learn more about our stories, how we got out and how to reach young men in the movement.

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

- Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born July 18th, 1918 in Mvezo, Transkei, into the Madiba clan of the Thembu royal house. His father, a chief, was stripped of office by a colonial magistrate for refusing to answer to colonial authority. Raised after his father's death as ward of the Thembu regent, he underwent Xhosa initiation at sixteen and took the name Dalibunga. He was expelled from Fort Hare in 1940 for a student boycott, fled an arranged marriage to Johannesburg, and qualified in law.

He joined the ANC in 1943 and co-founded its Youth League, pushing the organization from petitions toward mass action. He served as Volunteer-in-Chief of the 1952 Defiance Campaign and opened South Africa's first Black law firm with Oliver Tambo. After the 1960 Sharpeville massacre and the banning of the ANC foreclosed legal protest, he went underground and co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe, the movement's armed wing.

Arrested in 1962 and tried at Rivonia, he opened his defense from the dock in 1964, calling a free and democratic society an ideal he was prepared to die for. He received life imprisonment and served 27 years — most of it on Robben Island as prisoner 466/64, breaking limestone in a quarry that permanently damaged his eyes, denied leave to bury his mother and his eldest son. He refused conditional release in 1985, answering that a prisoner cannot negotiate.

Freed in 1990, he steered negotiations through near-civil war, shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with F.W. de Klerk, and became president in May 1994 after the first non-racial election. His single term produced the 1996 Constitution and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He stepped down in 1999, in a region where liberation leaders rarely did.

The unfinished business was economic: the Freedom Charter's redistributive commitments were traded away, land reform stalled, inequality endured. He admitted his government moved too slowly on HIV/AIDS, then spent his last years campaigning on it. He died 5 December 2013, aged 95.

References 

Boehmer, E. (2008). Nelson Mandela: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. Chikane, F. (1988). No life of my own: An autobiography. Skotaville. 

Frankel, P. (2001). An ordinary atrocity: Sharpeville and its massacre. Yale University Press. Gevisser, M. (2007). Thabo Mbeki: The dream deferred. Jonathan Ball. 

Gordimer, N. (1990). My son's story. Bloomsbury. 

Kathrada, A. (2004). Memoirs. Zebra Press. 

Lodge, T. (2006). Mandela: A critical life. Oxford University Press. 

Madikizela-Mandela, W. (1985). Part of my soul went with him(A. Benjamin & M. Benson, Eds.). W. W. Norton. 

Madikizela-Mandela, W. (2013). 491 days: Prisoner number 1323/69. Ohio University Press. 

Mandela, N. (1964). Statement from the dock at the opening of the defence case in the Rivonia Trial, Pretoria Supreme Court, 20 April 1964. 

Mandela, N. (1994). Long walk to freedom: The autobiography of Nelson Mandela.

Mandela, N. (2010). Conversations with myself. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Mandela, N. (2018). The prison letters of Nelson Mandela(S. Venter, Ed.). Liveright. Meredith, M. (2010). Mandela: A biography(rev. ed.). PublicAffairs. 

Sampson, A. (1999). Mandela: The authorised biography. HarperCollins. 

Steinberg, J. (2023). Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a marriage. Alfred A. Knopf. Suttner, R. (2008). The ANC underground in South Africa, 1950-1976. Jacana. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. (1998). Report(Vols. 1-5). Juta. 

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. (1997). Special hearing: Mandela United Football Club, Johannesburg, 24 November - 4 December 1997. 

Umkhonto we Sizwe. (1961). Manifesto, 16 December 1961. 

Trigger warning: extreme racial violence and discrimination

Thank you to patreon supporters for making this episode possible: patreon.com/montemader

The Dutch arrived at the Cape in 1652, dispossessing the Khoikhoi and San and building a slave economy racially ordered from the start. Britain took over in 1806; abolition in 1834 helped drive the Boer Great Trek inland. Diamonds (1867) and Witwatersrand gold (1886) demanded cheap Black labor, producing pass laws, migrant labor, and compounds — apartheid's machinery in embryo. The 1910 Union unified white rule and excluded Black voters; the 1913 Natives Land Act confined the African majority to 7% of the land. The ANC formed in 1912.

The National Party won in 1948 and codified segregation into a total system: race classification for every citizen, forced removals from Sophiatown and District Six, an education policy designed to train Black children for subordination, and Bantustans that stripped millions of citizenship.

Sharpeville (1960) ended nonviolent strategy; Mandela was imprisoned in 1964. Soweto (1976) and the 1980s township revolts made the country ungovernable. Sanctions forced De Klerk to unban the ANC in 1990. Apartheid law was repealed in 1991, and the first nonracial election came in April 1994.

Sources:

Beinart, W. (2001). Twentieth-century South Africa(2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. 

Bundy, C. (1979). The rise and fall of the South African peasantry. University of California Press. 

Callinicos, L. (1980). Gold and workers, 1886-1924. Ravan Press. 

Crais, C., & Scully, P. (2009). Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A ghost story and a biography. Princeton University Press. 

Davenport, T. R. H., & Saunders, C. (2000). South Africa: A modern history(5th ed.). Macmillan. 

De Gruchy, J. W., & De Gruchy, S. (2005). The church struggle in South Africa(3rd ed.). Fortress Press. 

Dubow, S. (2014). Apartheid, 1948-1994. Oxford University Press. 

Elphick, R., & Giliomee, H. (Eds.). (1989). The shaping of South African society, 1652-1840(2nd ed.). Wesleyan University Press. 

Giliomee, H. (2003). The Afrikaners: Biography of a people. University of Virginia Press. 

Hobhouse, E. (1901). Report of a visit to the camps of women and children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies.

Legassick, M., & Wolpe, H. (1976). The bantustans and capital accumulation in South Africa. Review of African Political Economy, 3(7), 87-107. 

Lodge, T. (1983). Black politics in South Africa since 1945. Ravan Press. 

Lodge, T. (2011). Sharpeville: An apartheid massacre and its consequences. Oxford University Press. 

Mager, A., & Mulaudzi, M. (2011). Popular responses to apartheid, 1948-c.1975. In R. Ross, A. Mager, & B. Nasson (Eds.), The Cambridge history of South Africa(Vol. 2). Cambridge University Press. 

Marks, S., & Rathbone, R. (Eds.). (1982). Industrialisation and social change in South Africa. Longman. 

Peires, J. B. (1989). The dead will arise: Nongqawuse and the great Xhosa cattle-killing movement of 1856-7. Ravan Press. 

Plaatje, S. T. (1916). Native life in South Africa. P. S. King & Son. 

Platzky, L., & Walker, C. (1985). The surplus people: Forced removals in South Africa. Ravan Press. 

Ross, R. (2008). A concise history of South Africa(2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

Sanders, J. (2006). Apartheid's friends: The rise and fall of South Africa's secret service.

South Africa. (1913). Natives Land Act, No. 27 of 1913. 

South Africa. (1950). Population Registration Act, No. 30 of 1950. 

South Africa. (1950). Suppression of Communism Act, No. 44 of 1950. 

South Africa. (1953). Bantu Education Act, No. 47 of 1953. 

South Africa. (1967). Terrorism Act, No. 83 of 1967. 

Thompson, L. (1985). The political mythology of apartheid. Yale University Press. Thompson, L. (2014). A history of South Africa(4th ed.). Yale University Press. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. (1998).

Wolpe, H. (1972). Economy and Society, 1(4), 425-456. 

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We've been hearing a LOT of red scare language lately, this time- directed at China. Tennessee gubernatorial hopeful Marsha Blackburn, released a campaign ad smashing fortune cookies so that we could know she would be tough on China (ok Marsha). So WHY does China have beef? It turns out, China has a very good reason to resent and distrust the UK and its rogue stepchild, the United States.

In the 19th century, Britain needed Chinese silk, porcelain, and tea and China needed nothing Britain made. The trade deficit was embarrassing. And while Britain kept spending money, China kept getting richer. So the British East India Company found a solution: flood China with opium grown in colonized India (using forced labor and leaving people in abject poverty of course). As China fell to addiction the silver that purchased the opium funneled through the East India Trading Company and into the British governments coffers.

By the 1830s, an estimated 12 million Chinese people were addicted. Silver was flowing out of China to pay for the drug, destabilizing the entire economy. When the Chinese government saw the population hollowing out in real time, they seized and destroyed 1,400 tons of British opium in 1839. Britain declared war under the guise of free trade, national honor and to protect it citizens and property. It was actually to protect its drug trade and poison China.

The military mismatch was obscene. British gunships dismantled Chinese coastal defenses built for a different era. China had no answer for industrial-age firepower. The 1842 Treaty of Nanking forced China to pay Britain the equivalent of billions in reparations (for the drugs Britain had illegally smuggled into their country), hand over Hong Kong, and open five ports to foreign control. Britain had gone to war for the right to keep selling heroin to a country that was begging it to stop.

A second war followed in 1856 had the same results but added granting legal immunity from Chinese law on Chinese soil. For breaking laws like, smuggling drugs.

The Chinese call this the beginning of the "Century of Humiliation." A sovereign civilization was militarily forced to accept mass addiction as a trade term. China was flooded with drugs intentionally, brutalized with war, robbed and told they were in the wrong. They have a DAMN good reason to distrust the west, and most of us, never hear this story.

Sources: (full list on patreon)

CDC/National Center for Health Statistics. (2026). Drug overdose death statisticshttps://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm

Dikotter, F., Laamann, L., & Zhou, X. (2004). Narcotic culture: A history of drugs in China. University of Chicago Press.

Fay, P. W. (1975). The Opium War, 1840-1842: Barbarians in the Celestial EmpireUniversity of North Carolina Press

Gladstone, W. E. (1840). The Gladstone diaries (M. R. D. Foot & H. C. G. Matthew, Eds., Vol. 3). Oxford University Press.

Gordon, C. G. (1860). Letters from China [Primary source correspondence]. In D. C. Boulger, The Life of Gordon (1896). T. Fisher Unwin.

Hanes, W. T., III, & Sanello, F. (2002). The Opium Wars: The addiction of one empire and the corruption of another. Sourcebooks.

Hansard. (1840, April 8). War with China: Adjourned debate. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., vol. 53, cc. 818-920.

Hansard. (1870, May 10). East India (opium revenue). Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., vol. 201, cc. 489-512.

Lin, Z. (1839). Letter to Queen Victoria [Primary source document]. In S. Y. Teng & J. K. Fairbank (Eds.),

Lovell, J. (2011). The Opium War: Drugs, dreams and the making of China. Picador.

Platt, S. R. (2018). Imperial twilight: The Opium War and the end of China's last golden age. Alfred A. Knopf.

Porter, J., & Jick, H. (1980). Addiction rare in patients treated with narcotics. New England Journal of Medicine, 302(2), 123. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM198001103020221

You can go to www.knittinglady.com to see Daniella's work and get her books "Uncultured" and "The Culting of America"

Have you ever wondered how people fall into cults? How do otherwise smart, caring, reasonable people end up finding a leader they would do ANYTHING for? Including offering up their children. What is a cult, and how do we get rid of them?

Daniella was born a third-generation member of the infamous Children of God religious cult, and grew up being trafficked around the world, before escaping that life and moving to America at age 15. She put herself through high school and graduated as college valedictorian before commissioning into the US Army as an intelligence officer. That’s where she really started to think about group behavior…and seeing it, well, everywhere.

Daniella deployed twice to Afghanistan (2011, 2014) and became a member of one of the Army’s first Female Engagement teams (an experiment that put women into deliberate ground combat for the first time in Army history, and eventually led to the repeal of the sexist combat ban and the gender desegregation of the entire US military).

She is a proud daughter of the 101st, (that's the unit in Band of Brothers), a recipient of the Presidential Volunteer Service Award (from Obama, y'all), and is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Organizational Psychology at the Harvard Extension School (she focuses her research on group behavior, social norms, culture, extremism, leadership demagoguery and cults).

Birth control has a long history in America. In colonial times, people relied on withdrawal, herbal remedies, and homemade barriers, though few spoke about it openly. During the 1800s, condoms became more practical after Charles Goodyear learned to vulcanize rubber in 1839, and diaphragms and douches came into use as well. This progress met resistance. In 1873, the Comstock Act made it a crime to send contraceptives or information about them through the mail, treating the subject as obscene and pushing it out of public view.

The movement took shape through Margaret Sanger. She opened the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916 and gave the practice its name. Her organization eventually became Planned Parenthood. The legal walls came down slowly. A 1936 court ruling weakened the Comstock restrictions and allowed doctors to prescribe contraceptives.

The turning point came in 1960, when the FDA approved the first birth control pill. The Pill gave women far more control over their own lives and became a defining part of the decade that followed. The courts soon caught up. In Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965, the Supreme Court ruled that married couples had a right to use contraception. In 1972, Eisenstadt v. Baird extended that right to unmarried people.

The years after brought more options: the IUD, hormonal implants, and emergency contraception such as Plan B, which later became available over the counter. In 2010, the Affordable Care Act required most insurance plans to cover contraception at no cost, a rule that drew legal challenges over religious objections.

Contraception is still a subject of political debate. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, questions returned about the privacy rulings that once secured the right to birth control, and its future remains uncertain.

References (full list on patreon)

Avery, B. Y. (1991). Empowerment through wellness. Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 4(1), 147–154.

Baker, J. H. (2011). Margaret Sanger: A life of passion. Hill and Wang.

Balmer, R. (2021). Bad faith: Race and the rise of the religious right. Eerdmans.

Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 573 U.S. 682 (2014).

Center for Constitutional Rights. (2021, February 1). Black liberation archives, week 1: Fannie Lou Hamer taught us. https://ccrjustice.org/home/blog/2021/02/01/black-liberation-archives-week-1-fannie-lou-hamer-taught-us

Christianity Knowledge Base. (2005). Contraception. https://christianity.fandom.com/wiki/Contraception

Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. (2017). Taking the unintended out of pregnancy: Colorado’s success with long-acting reversible contraception.

Commonwealth Fund. (2025, December 16). Overview of federally funded contraceptive programs. Issue Briefs. https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2025/dec/overview-federally-funded-contraceptive-programs

D’Emilio, J., & Freedman, E. B. (2012). Intimate matters: A history of sexuality in America (3rd ed.). University of Chicago Press.

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022).

Eisenberg, M. L., & Lipshultz, L. I. (2010). Estimating the number of vasectomies performed annually in the United States: Data from the National Survey of Family Growth. Journal of Urology, 184(5), 2068–2072. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.juro.2010.06.117

Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972).

Franks, A. (2020, July 28). Margaret Sanger’s extreme brand of eugenics. America Magazine. https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2020/07/28/margaret-sangers-extreme-brand-eugenics/

Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965).

Guttmacher Institute. (2023). Contraceptive use in the United States [Fact sheet]. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-use-united-states

Guttmacher Institute. (2025, September). The right is waging a quiet war on contraception.

Jones, R. K., & Dreweke, J. (2011). Countering conventional wisdom: New evidence on religion and contraceptive use.

Part 2 of my two part series about how women were written out of authority and a few rungs down the ladder of hierarchy in the church and in Christian Nationalism but also the history of how propaganda was weaponized against faith communities to build the power system we see happening. We have to know it and name it to fight back. And if you are a person of faith you have to be vocal about reclaiming it.

In this episode, we continue through the invention of virginity, the need to control reproduction to control wealth. The history of female leadership in the church, how it was intentionally translated out of the Bible in order to justify removing women from leadership and subjugating them. And the 20th century push of the weaponization of wedge issues against feminism, abortion, and gay rights to help people defend racism and school segregation. I hope that you enjoy! Full source list on patreon.com/montemader

Sources:

Primary Documents and Legal Records 

• Treaty of Tripoli (1797), Article 11. Ratified unanimously by the U.S. Senate, June 7, 1797. Full text, Avalon Project, Yale Law School.  

• Jefferson, Thomas. The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (the Jefferson Bible), c. 1820. Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Primary source.  

• Public Law 84-274, "Under God" added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Signed June 14, 1954.  • Public Law 84-851, "In God We Trust" established as national motto. Signed July 30, 1956.  • Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983). Supreme Court ruling.  

• Reagan, Ronald. "Evil Empire" speech, March 8, 1983, National Association of Evangelicals, Orlando, FL. Reagan Presidential Library.  

• Southern Baptist Convention resolutions on abortion, 1971, 1974, 1976. Available through SBC Historical Commission archives.  

Patristic and Early Church Sources 

• Socrates Scholasticus. Historia Ecclesiastica (Church History), Book VII, Chapter 15, c. 439 CE. English translation, NPNF (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers) Series.  

• Damascius. Life of Isidore (fragments), c. early 6th century CE. Names Cyril in connection with Hypatia's death.  

• John of Nikiu. Chronicle, Chapter 84, c. 690 CE. Pro-Cyril secondary source.  • Tertullian. De Cultu Feminarum (On the Apparel of Women), c. 204 CE.  

• Chrysostom, John. Homilies on Romans, Homily 31 (on Romans 16:1-4).  

• Augustine of Hippo. De Genesi ad Litteram (The Literal Meaning of Genesis), c. 401-415 CE.  • Council of Laodicea (363-364 CE), Canon 11.  

• Pope Gregory I. Homily 33 on the Gospels, 591 CE. The sermon conflating Mary Magdalene with the sinful woman of Luke 7.  

On Biblical Scholarship and the Pastoral Epistles 

• Ehrman, Bart D. Forged: Writing in the Name of God — Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We — 37 —

Flipping Tables — “Divine Protection… For Men” 

Think They Are. HarperOne, 2011.  

• Brown, Raymond E. An Introduction to the New Testament. Doubleday, 1997.  • Johnson, Luke Timothy. The First and Second Letters to Timothy. Anchor Yale Bible, 2001.  

• Fee, Gordon D. The First Epistle to the Corinthians. NICNT, Eerdmans, 1987. (Interpolation argument for 1 Corinthians 14:34-35.)  

• Epp, Eldon Jay. Junia: The First Woman Apostle. Fortress Press, 2005.  

On Women in the Early Church 

• Gupta, Nijay K. Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church. InterVarsity Press, 2023.  

In last week's episode, I had a LOT of questions around "How did we even get here?" "How did women get written into this system that way?" "Why are women buying into this movement?" "WHY WOULD WOMEN AGREE TO GIVE UP THEIR RIGHT TO VOTE?"

Quick note: take the repeal of the 19th Amendment seriously. It serves two purposes: 1. To normalize it so when they come for it, it doesn't sound as crazy as it used to. 2. By shifting the Overton window, when they propose other parts of their agenda, it sounds less crazy and sets off fewer alarm bells.

So I wanted to do a two-part series about how women were written out of authority and a few rungs down the ladder of hierarchy in the church and in Christian Nationalism but also the history of how propaganda was weaponized against faith communities to build the power system we see happening. We have to know it and name it to fight back. And if you are a person of faith you have to be vocal about reclaiming it.

In this episode, we go through the invention of virginity, the need to control reproduction to control wealth. The history of female leadership in the church, how it was intentionally translated out of the Bible in order to justify removing women from leadership and subjugating them. And the 20th century push of the weaponization of wedge issues against feminism, abortion, and gay rights to help people defend racism and school segregation. I hope that you enjoy! Full source list on patreon.com/montemader

Sources:

Primary Documents and Legal Records 

• Treaty of Tripoli (1797), Article 11. Ratified unanimously by the U.S. Senate, June 7, 1797. Full text, Avalon Project, Yale Law School.  

• Jefferson, Thomas. The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (the Jefferson Bible), c. 1820. Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Primary source.  

• Public Law 84-274, "Under God" added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Signed June 14, 1954.  • Public Law 84-851, "In God We Trust" established as national motto. Signed July 30, 1956.  • Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983). Supreme Court ruling.  

• Reagan, Ronald. "Evil Empire" speech, March 8, 1983, National Association of Evangelicals, Orlando, FL. Reagan Presidential Library.  

• Southern Baptist Convention resolutions on abortion, 1971, 1974, 1976. Available through SBC Historical Commission archives.  

Patristic and Early Church Sources 

• Socrates Scholasticus. Historia Ecclesiastica (Church History), Book VII, Chapter 15, c. 439 CE. English translation, NPNF (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers) Series.  

• Damascius. Life of Isidore (fragments), c. early 6th century CE. Names Cyril in connection with Hypatia's death.  

• John of Nikiu. Chronicle, Chapter 84, c. 690 CE. Pro-Cyril secondary source.  • Tertullian. De Cultu Feminarum (On the Apparel of Women), c. 204 CE.  

• Chrysostom, John. Homilies on Romans, Homily 31 (on Romans 16:1-4).  

• Augustine of Hippo. De Genesi ad Litteram (The Literal Meaning of Genesis), c. 401-415 CE.  • Council of Laodicea (363-364 CE), Canon 11.  

• Pope Gregory I. Homily 33 on the Gospels, 591 CE. The sermon conflating Mary Magdalene with the sinful woman of Luke 7.  

On Biblical Scholarship and the Pastoral Epistles 

• Ehrman, Bart D. Forged: Writing in the Name of God — Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We — 37 —

Flipping Tables — “Divine Protection… For Men” 

Think They Are. HarperOne, 2011.  

• Brown, Raymond E. An Introduction to the New Testament. Doubleday, 1997.  • Johnson, Luke Timothy. The First and Second Letters to Timothy. Anchor Yale Bible, 2001.  

• Fee, Gordon D. The First Epistle to the Corinthians. NICNT, Eerdmans, 1987. (Interpolation argument for 1 Corinthians 14:34-35.)  

• Epp, Eldon Jay. Junia: The First Woman Apostle. Fortress Press, 2005.  

On Women in the Early Church 

• Gupta, Nijay K. Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church. InterVarsity Press, 2023.  

Turning Point USA led a womens leadership conference in June which brought women of all ages together to tell them... not to lead.
They lied about things like the witch trials saying that it was the trials that were first wave feminism and they were killing those women because of abortions and that feminist historians recorded the accounts of the slaugher we know. NONE of that is true. For all their chatter about faith they have no issue lying.
We saw career women waiting to have children telling girls to have "more children than you can afford, before you're ready". White children specifically mind you.
I thought Dr. Barr would be the best resource to help me respond to these statements.

Beth Allison Barr is an American historian who is currently the James Vardaman Endowed Professor of History at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Her specialities include European women, Medieval & Early Modern England, and church history. She is also the author of "The Making of Biblical Womanhood" and "Becoming the Pastors Wife"

Thank you to the patrons who make this possible! patreon.com/montemader

When everything feels impossible (and lately at times it has) when power concentrates, institutions bend, and the news is a daily gut-punch, we're told that joy is irresponsible. That real resistance has to be grim all the time or you aren't doing it right. Thats not true.
Joy. Art. Music. Song. Are all integral components of resistances that change the course of history.

In this (almost) two-hour episode, lets traces ten stories across 2,000 years of human history where people under siege, during empire collapse, fascist occupation, genocide, and authoritarian rule, chose joy anyway. Not as escape but as the most radical act available to them.

From enslaved gladiators who built a free community on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, to early Christians throwing communal dinner parties in Roman catacombs, to Parisian workers running a utopian government for 72 days before being massacred, to Jewish fighters holding a Passover Seder the night before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began (and more): this episode is a historical time traveling journey in how joy functions as survival, identity, and resistance network. I hope it encourages me the way it encourages you.

It's only when we remember the joy of living that we find the courage to resist.

Recommended Books for further reading if these stories inspired you:

Spartacus Barry Strauss, The Spartacus War (Simon & Schuster, 2009) Aldo Schiavone, Spartacus (2013)

Early Christians & the Catacombs Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (Harper & Row, 1987) The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, trans. Maureen Tilley (Fortress Press)

Paris Commune John Merriman, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871 (Basic Books, 2014) Louise Michel, The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel, ed. Bullitt Lowry & Elizabeth Ellington Gunter (1981)

Harlem Renaissance David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (Knopf, 1981) Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (1940) Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925)

Danish Rescue of the Jews Bo Lidegaard, Countrymen (Knopf, 2013) Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Viking Press, 1963)

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? (Indiana University Press, 2007) Israel Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Houghton Mifflin, 1994) Emanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto (McGraw-Hill, 1958)

Víctor Jara & Nueva Canción Joan Jara, Victor: An Unfinished Song (Jonathan Cape, 1983) Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File (The New Press, 2003)

The Singing Revolution Mart Laar, The Power of Freedom (2010) The Singing Revolution, documentary (2006, dir. James & Maureen Castle Tusty)

The Velvet Revolution Michael Žantovský, Havel: A Life (Grove Press, 2014) Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern (Random House, 1990) Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless (1978)

Mothers of Plaza de Mayo Marguerite Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood (Scholarly Resources, 1994) Rita Arditti, Searching for Life (University of California Press, 1999) CONADEP, Nunca Más (Eudeba, 1984) Horacio Verbitsky, The Flight (The New Press, 1996)

Sources list available on Patreon: patreon.com/montemader

A couple years ago I learned that there is a reason that the 'L' comes first in LGBTQ+ and I want to share that with you.Through much of the 20th century, "gay" served as an umbrella term, and early activist groupings often led with gay men, producing orderings like "GLB." The shift to placing "L" first took hold in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the United States, and it was a deliberate gesture of respect.

The most cited reason is the AIDS crisis. As the epidemic devastated gay male communities in the 1980s, lesbians showed up in enormous numbers as caregivers, nurses, blood donors, fundraisers, and organizers. Lesbians like those in the Blood Sisters of San Diego organized blood drives when gay and bisexual men were barred from donating. This solidarity reshaped the movement, and foregrounding the "L" became a way of acknowledging that labor and centering women who had frequently been rendered invisible within both gay male spaces and the broader feminist movement.

Lesbians were central to progress long before the acronym existed. The Daughters of Bilitis, founded in San Francisco in 1955, was the first lesbian civil and political rights organization in the U.S. Figures such as Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon spent decades organizing. Lesbians were present at the 1969 Stonewall uprising and in the Gay Liberation Front that followed. Within 1970s feminism, lesbians pushed a frequently resistant women's movement to take their concerns seriously, even as Betty Friedan infamously dismissed them as the "lavender menace", a slur activists reclaimed in a celebrated protest.

Lesbians also did foundational work that benefited everyone: building community institutions, bookstores, health collectives, and mutual-aid networks; advancing lesbian feminist theory; and fighting for custody rights, anti-discrimination protections, and visibility at a time when being out could cost a woman her job and children.

References

Armstrong, E. A. (2002). Forging gay identities: Organizing sexuality in San Francisco, 1950–1994. University of Chicago Press.

Bernstein, M. (1997). Celebration and suppression: The strategic uses of identity by the lesbian and gay movement. American Journal of Sociology, 103(3), 531–565.

Brier, J. (2009). Infectious ideas: U.S. political responses to the AIDS crisis. University of North Carolina Press.

Cohen, C. J. (1997). Punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens: The radical potential of queer politics. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 3(4), 437–465.

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167.

Faderman, L. (1991). Odd girls and twilight lovers: A history of lesbian life in twentieth century America. Columbia University Press.

Faderman, L. (2015). The gay revolution: The story of the struggle. Simon & Schuster.

Gallo, M. M. (2006). Different daughters: A history of the Daughters of Bilitis. Carroll & Graf.

Gould, D. B. (2002). Life during wartime: Emotions and the development of ACT UP. Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 7(2), 177–200.

hooks, b. (1984). Feminist theory: From margin to center. South End Press.

Hutchinson, B. (2015). Lesbian blood drives as community building activism in the 1980s. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 19(1), 115–128. https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2015.959876

Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing Press.

Schulman, S. (2021). Let the record show: A political history of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Shilts, R. (1987). And the band played on: Politics, people, and the AIDS epidemic. St. Martin’s Press.

Vaid, U. (1995). Virtual equality: The mainstreaming of gay and lesbian liberation. Anchor Books.

Zimmerman, B. (1981). What has never been: An overview of lesbian feminist criticism. Feminist Studies, 7(3), 451–475.

In March 2026, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stood before a Pentagon worship service and prayed for "overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy", calling for the eternal damnation of America's enemies. Military commanders across every branch have been reported, in over 200 formal complaints, telling troops the Iran war is "God's plan" and that Trump was "anointed by Jesus" to trigger Armageddon. Benjamin Netanyahu has quoted 1 Samuel 15:3, the command to destroy the Amalekites, sparing "neither man nor woman, infant nor ox" to justify Israeli military operations.

This is what happens when political leaders weaponize faith to sanctify violence. And it has been happening for 1,700 years.

From Constantine's battlefield vision in 312 CE and the subsequent murder of philosopher Hypatia by a Christian mob, through Augustine's just war doctrine that gave state violence a Christian vocabulary, to Charlemagne's massacre of 4,500 Saxon prisoners at Verden for refusing baptism. We cover the First Crusade's Rhineland pogroms, where Jewish mothers drowned their children rather than see them forcibly baptized, and the Jerusalem massacre of 1099, where chroniclers described blood reaching horses' knees. We examine the Albigensian Crusade's destruction of Béziers, where the papal legate reportedly said "Kill them all, God will know his own," and the witch trials that followed, killing up to 60,000 people (80% of them women) using Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum as theological cover.

We also cover what this history did specifically to women, a thread that runs unbroken from Tertullian calling women "the devil's gateway" in 200 CE, through the rape of nuns during the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople, to the sexual violence documented in California's Spanish mission system, to the girls in Native American boarding schools whose hair was cut, languages stolen, and bodies abused under church-run federal contracts.

The only thing more dangerous than a tyrant, is one who believes God gave them permission.

SOURCES

Augustine, The City of God, c. 413–426 CE

Tertullian, De Cultu Feminarum, c. 200 CE

Socrates Scholasticus, Historia Ecclesiastica, c. 439 CE (murder of Hypatia)

Annales Regni Francorum (Charlemagne / Verden massacre)

Barbero, Alessandro — Charlemagne: Father of a Continent, UC Press, 2004

Chazan, Robert — European Jewry and the First Crusade, UC Press, 1987

Mainz Anonymous and Solomon bar Simson Chronicle (Rhineland massacres, 1096)

Raymond of Aguilers, Historia Francorum (Jerusalem, 1099)

Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, c. 1220 (Béziers)

Nicetas Choniates, Historia, c. 1206 (Fourth Crusade / Constantinople)

Brenon, Anne — Le vrai visage du catharisme, Loubatières, 1988

Kramer, Heinrich — Malleus Maleficarum, 1487 (ed. Mackay, Cambridge UP, 2006)

Levack, Brian — The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, Routledge, 4th ed., 2016

Cuneo, Michele de — Letter of October 28, 1495, trans. Samuel Eliot Morison

Díaz del Castillo, Bernal — True History of the Conquest of New Spain, c. 1568

Hassig, Ross — Mexico and the Spanish Conquest, U of Oklahoma Press, 2006

Pedro Pizarro — Relation of the Discovery and Conquest of Peru, c. 1571

Stannard, David — American Holocaust, Oxford UP, 1992

Kamen, Henry — The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, Yale UP, 1997

Jouanna, Arlette — La Saint-Barthélemy, Gallimard, 2007

Parker, Geoffrey — The Thirty Years' War, Routledge, 1997

Regan, Donald — For the Record, Harcourt Brace, 1988

Maurice, Jean-Claude — Si vous le répétez, je démentirai (Bush / Gog and Magog)

NPR — "Netanyahu's references to violent biblical passages raise alarm," Nov. 7, 2023

U.S. Dept. of the Interior — Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, 2022

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada — Final Report, 2015

Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. 543, U.S. Supreme Court, 1823

Vatican Statement repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery, March 30, 2023

My entire life I heard my Dad say "Freedom isn't free" and perhaps the best application of that is the Civil Rights Movement. It's easy from a place of comfort to not fully understand the risk and sacrifice required for... the right to vote. The right as a black person to have equal and fair access to elections, job protection, education. We are in our own Civil Rights moment now and we can learn a lot from what they didv

Sources:

U.S. Congressional Records, Joint Committee on Reconstruction, 1866 (Memphis Massacre testimony)

FBI Files on the murders of Medgar Evers, Emmett Till, and the Mississippi Burning case (MIBURN)

Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records — Mississippi Department of Archives and History (publicly available since 1998)

Department of Justice Civil Rights Division records and case files

NAACP Anti-Lynching Campaign Records — Library of Congress

Congressional Record, Senate filibuster of the Civil Rights Act, March–June 1964

Books — Scholarly and Narrative History:

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (1988). Simon & Schuster.

Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65 (1998). Simon & Schuster.

Branch, Taylor. At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (2006). Simon & Schuster.

Berman, Ari. Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (2015). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (2016). Bloomsbury.

Anderson, Carol. One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (2018). Bloomsbury.

Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935). Harcourt, Brace.

Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986). William Morrow.

Hamer, Fannie Lou. The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is (2011). University Press of Mississippi.

Lewis, John, with Michael D'Orso. Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (1998). Simon & Schuster.

Litwack, Leon F. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (1998). Knopf.

Marable, Manning. Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006 (2007). University Press of Mississippi.

McAdam, Doug. Freedom Summer (1988). Oxford University Press.

Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014). Spiegel & Grau.

Tyson, Timothy B. The Blood of Emmett Till (2017). Simon & Schuster.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892). New York Age Print.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895). Donohue & Henneberry.

Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010). Random House.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955). Oxford University Press.

Memphis-Specific Sources:

Honey, Michael K. Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign (2007). W.W. Norton.

Mlinar, Zeljko, et al. Memphis Sanitation Strike Archives — Memphis Public Library Special Collections

Tucker, David M. Memphis Since Crump: Bossism, Blacks, and Civic Reformers, 1948–1968 (1980). University of Tennessee Press.

Wright, Sharon D. Race, Power, and Political Emergence in Memphis (2000). Garland Publishing.

Legal Cases Referenced:

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)

Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944)

Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454 (1960)

Browder v. Gayle, 352 U.S. 903 (1956)

Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013)

United States v. Price et al. (Mississippi Burning prosecutions), 383 U.S. 787 (1966)

Apologies for the lateness of the post, our dashboard encountered a technical difficulty that showed my podcasts didn't exist and had to be fixed before an upload could happen. Thanks for your patience.

After being at Montgomery last weekend I wanted to do a deep dive into what I never learned as a kid. What led to the Civil Rights movement, its danger, its courage. Part one takes us through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and part two takes us beyond.

SOURCES

U.S. Congressional Records, Joint Committee on Reconstruction, 1866 (Memphis Massacre testimony)

FBI Files on the murders of Medgar Evers, Emmett Till, and the Mississippi Burning case (MIBURN) — available through FOIA requests and the University of Mississippi's Mississippi Digital Library

Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records — Mississippi Department of Archives and History (publicly available since 1998)

Department of Justice Civil Rights Division records and case files

NAACP Anti-Lynching Campaign Records — Library of Congress

Congressional Record, Senate filibuster of the Civil Rights Act, March–June 1964

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (1988). Simon & Schuster.

Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65 (1998). Simon & Schuster.

Branch, Taylor. At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (2006). Simon & Schuster.

Berman, Ari. Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (2015). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (2016). Bloomsbury.

Anderson, Carol. One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (2018). Bloomsbury.

Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935). Harcourt, Brace.

Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986). William Morrow.

Hamer, Fannie Lou. The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is (2011). University Press of Mississippi.

Lewis, John, with Michael D'Orso. Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (1998). Simon & Schuster.

Litwack, Leon F. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (1998). Knopf.

Marable, Manning. Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006 (2007). University Press of Mississippi.

McAdam, Doug. Freedom Summer (1988). Oxford University Press.

McWhorter, Diane. Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama — The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001). Simon & Schuster.

Payne, Charles M. I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (1995). University of California Press.

Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014). Spiegel & Grau.

Tyson, Timothy B. The Blood of Emmett Till (2017). Simon & Schuster.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892). New York Age Print.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895). Donohue & Henneberry.

Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010). Random House.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955). Oxford University Press.

Honey, Michael K. Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign (2007). W.W. Norton.

Mlinar, Zeljko, et al. Memphis Sanitation Strike Archives — Memphis Public Library Special Collections

Tucker, David M. Memphis Since Crump: Bossism, Blacks, and Civic Reformers, 1948–1968 (1980). University of Tennessee Press.

Wright, Sharon D. Race, Power, and Political Emergence in Memphis (2000). Garland

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)

Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944)

Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454 (1960)

Browder v. Gayle, 352 U.S. 903 (1956)

Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013)

United States v. Price et al. 383 U.S. 787 (1966)

We met the carefully curated Ronald Reagan in part 1. We saw the Hollywood grin, the borrowed cowboy myth, the astrologer in the basement, the informant and the corporate lackey. In Part 2, we follow the money. The sale of a new economic dream for Americans during a time of desperate stagflation, unemployment and uncertainty. And what it sold has cost this country more than any single presidency in modern American history.

Reaganomics was pitched to Americans as common sense. The government takes too much, thats the problem. Taxes on "job creators" choke the economy, corporations are going to run if you tax them you know. Cut taxes, slash regulation, trust the market — and a tide of prosperity will lift every boat. Cut off the welfare queen and free the small business owner. Trust the rich. Trust the men in suits who already had everything to know what was best for the woman scrubbing the floor at the hospital. He sold it the way only Reagan could, with a tear in his eye, a flag behind him, and a story about a Cadillac driving welfare cheat in Chicago who statistically did not exist.

In this episode, we trace what actually happened next.

The top income tax rate fell from 70 percent to 28 percent. The estate tax was gutted and capital gains were slashed. Corporate rates collapsed. All the ways the wealthiest among us make wealth were unleashed while the rest of us stayed tethered, shouldering more than our share of the burden. Union membership crashed from one in four American workers to roughly one in ten. Wages stopped tracking productivity. The federal minimum wage was frozen in time. Wall Street was deregulated, manufacturing was offshored, and the bottom half of the country watched its share of national wealth fall from 4 percent to barely 2.5, while the top 1 percent's share doubled. All while the national debt tripled. The mental health system was hollowed out, causing homelessness to explode. And every Republican economic platform since has been some version of do that again. Even Democratic leaders have allied themselves with this ideology in some way.

We also dismantle the lie at the heart of it all, that spending on people is waste. Because every credible economist who has actually run the numbers has found the opposite. Every dollar invested in SNAP generates up to $1.80 in economic activity. Every dollar spent on early childhood education returns $7 to $12. Public transit returns roughly $4 to $1. WIC saves $3 in future Medicaid costs for every dollar it spends. Universal preschool, paid family leave, Medicaid expansion, infrastructure, these aren't handouts. They are the highest-return investments any government can make. The math has been clear for forty years. We were just told not to look.

Reaganomics were one expensive lie for the American people. In this episode we talk about why we bought it, who profited, who's still paying — and what this country would actually look like if we ran the numbers instead of the mythology.

Three decades before the White House, Ronald Reagan was being assembled in plain sight. This episode traces the apprenticeship most highlight reels skip: the New Deal Democrat who became FBI informant "T-10," the B-list actor who turned a corporate speaking tour into a political movement, and the lapsed Midwestern kid who would one day broker the marriage of the Republican Party and white evangelical America.

In postwar Hollywood, where Reagan, as Screen Actors Guild president, simultaneously fed names to the FBI and lent SAG's institutional cover to the blacklist. His October 1947 HUAC testimony was polite; the private file was not. Careers ended on the strength of "fraternal" reports.

Then in 1954, General Electric Theater, and eight years on the GE plant circuit under Lemuel Boulware, the hardline VP who handed Reagan a reading list of Hayek and Hazlitt and turned his pep talks into a portable free market gospel. Corporations were buying preachers and performers to sell their "anti-union, low regulation" gospel. By 1962 GE had cut him loose, but "The Speech" was finished and in 1964 it launched Goldwater and, with him, Reagan himself.

Finally, the wedding of cross and capital. Reagan, never a churchgoing adult, became the indispensable broker between corporate donors and a politically homeless evangelical electorate. In Dallas, August 1980, he closed the deal with one line: "I know you can't endorse me, but I want you to know I endorse you." That coalition outlived him still runs our country. In Part 2 we talk about the longterm staggering impact of Reaganomics.

References

Balmer, R. (2021). Bad faith: Race and the rise of the religious right. Eerdmans.

Cannon, L. (2000). President Reagan: The role of a lifetime. PublicAffairs.

Crespino, J. (2007). The new right and the southern strategy. Journal of Southern History, 73(4), 895–924.

Critchlow, D. T. (2005). Phyllis Schlafly and grassroots conservatism: A woman’s crusade. Princeton University Press.

Dochuk, D. (2011). From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain‑folk religion, grassroots politics, and the rise of evangelical conservatism. W. W. Norton.

FitzGerald, F. (2017). The evangelicals: The struggle to shape America. Simon & Schuster.

Hancock, A. (2004). The politics of disgust: The public identity of the welfare queen. New York University Press.

Kohler‑Hausmann, J. (2017). Getting tough: Welfare and imprisonment in 1970s America. Princeton University Press.

Kruse, K. M. (2015). One nation under God: How corporate America invented Christian America. Basic Books.

Levin, J. (2019). The queen: The forgotten life behind an American myth. Little, Brown and Company.

Mittelstadt, J. (2005). From welfare to workfare: The unintended consequences of liberal reform, 1945–1965. University of North Carolina Press.

Nadasen, P. (2005). Welfare warriors: The welfare rights movement in the United States. Routledge.

Nickerson, M. M. (2012). The Reagan administration’s response to the gender gap. Journal of Policy History, 24(1), 115–140.

Perlstein, R. (2020). Reaganland: America’s right turn 1976–1980. Simon & Schuster.

Reagan, R. (1986, February 15). Radio address to the nation on welfare reform [Speech transcript]. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/radio-address-nation-welfare-reform

Rich, C. G. (2020). The “welfare queen” goes to the polls: Race‑based fractures in gender politics. Georgetown Law Journal, 108(4), 1–67.

Shilts, R. (1987). And the band played on: Politics, people, and the AIDS epidemic. St. Martin’s Press.

Sick, G. (1991). October surprise: America’s hostages in Iran and the election of Ronald Reagan. Times Books.

Troy, G. (2009). The great communicator: Media and the Reagan image. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 39(3), 458–470.

Unger, C. (2024). Den of spies: Reagan, Carter, and the secret history of the treason that stole the White House. Mariner Books.

Wilentz, S. (2008). The age of Reagan: A history, 1974–2008. HarperCollins.

In this deeply personal episode, Crystal Dawn opens up about the slow, often invisible process of religious deconstruction. Raised inside a tight-knit faith community where belief wasn't just a doctrine but the architecture of every relationship, Crystal walks us through the cracks that started as questions and widened into a chasm she could no longer pretend wasn't there.

Crystal Dawn is a writer and content creator shedding light on the patriarchal systems of harm within evangelical culture. Her experiences growing up a pastor’s daughter, as well as her own deconstruction journey, give her a unique lens… one she blends with research and history to give language to what many people experience in coming out of those spaces. She is currently at work on her first book, forthcoming in 2027.

Follow Crystal Here:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crystaldawnalchemy4/

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/CrystalDawnAlchemy

Website: www.crystaldawnalchemy.com

Resource packet mentioned in podcast: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JHWbiYVQ4sD5gX-o0yHC-5hXnY1KPf0kBvw2rZSJfiE/edit?tab=t.0

For ad free episodes, bonus content and "where did we get the Bible?" series sign up at patreon.com/montemader

We have all seen the photos and videos of Gaza the last two years. We have heard the stories. We have watched politicians deflect and people say "but October 7th!!". But there's a story that spans far beyond October 7th. There is a series of decisions that decimated a region and crushed the vulnerable under the thumb of the powerful. How did we get here? what is the history that led to this point? To help talk about his heartwrenching story, we welcome Dr. Daniel Bannoura. Daniel is a Palestinian theologian and podcaster. He is a professor at the University of Notre Dame, where he received his PhD degree in Qur'anic Studies. He’s also the Director of Public Engagement at the Bethlehem Institute of Peace and Justice, and host of “Across the Divide”, a podcast that provides a space for thoughtful conversations about Palestine-Israel through the lens of faith and peacemaking.

Recommended Reading: 100 Years War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi

This episode is brought to you by ground news. Get 40% off their Vantage plan by using groundnews.com/montemader

That feeling you get at 11pm on a Tuesday as you crawl into bed after another long day. You've been moving nonstop since you got up and theres a gnawing guilt you can't quite shake. That you haven't done enough, you should be doing more, working harder. That feeling has a 400 year history. Born on a ship off the coast of Massachusetts in 1630, preached from a Puritan pulpit, secularized by Benjamin Franklin, bolted to a factory wall, and then deliberately and expensively marketed to you by a public relations firm hired by General Motors.

The message wanders through the mill towns where clergy were quietly put on the company payroll to preach that strikes were sins against God; through the Gilded Age sermons of Henry Ward Beecher telling starving railroad workers that bread and water was enough; through the jaw-dropping story of Spiritual Mobilization, a corporate-funded operation that distributed pre-written anti-union sermons to seventy thousand American ministers during the New Deal era. The Protestant pulpit, for a generation, was a subcontractor of the American boardroom.

But it's also a story of the people who fought back and the saga ends with a powerful question "What if rest itself is the most radical act left available to us?"

References: full list at patreon.com/montemader

Bowler, K. (2013). Blessed: A history of prosperity gospel. Oxford University Press.

Carnegie, A. (1889). Wealth. The North American Review, 148(391), 653–664.

Carter, H. W. (2015). Union made: Working people and the rise of social Christianity in Chicago. Oxford University Press.

Cotton, J. (1641). The way of life. Printed by M. F. for L. Fawne and S. Gellibrand.

Dochuk, D. (2011). From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain folk religion, grassroots politics, rise of evangelical conservatism. W. W. Norton.

Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the witch: Women, the body, and primitive accumulation. Autonomedia.

Franklin, B. (1904). Advice to a young tradesman. In A. H. Smyth (Ed.), The writings of Benjamin Franklin (Vol. 2).

Franklin, B. (1909). The autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. P. F. Collier & Son.

Fraser, N. (2016). Contradictions of capital and care. New Left Review, 100, 99–117.

Gilman, C. P. (1898). Women and economics: A study of the economic relation between men and women as a factor in social evolution. Small, Maynard & Company.

Grant, H. J. (1936, October). Conference report. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints.

Han, B. C. (2015). The burnout society (E. Butler, Trans.). Stanford University Press.

Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press

Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto

Kruse, K. M. (2015). One nation under God: How corporate America invented Christian America.

Machen, J. G. (1933). The Christian view of man. William B. Eerdmans.

Osborn, I. (2008). Can Christianity cure obsessive OCD? A psychiatrist explores the role of faith in treatment. Brazos Press.

Petersen, A. H. (2020). Can’t even: How millennials became the burnout generation. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Phillips-Fein, K. (2009). Invisible hands: The businessmen’s crusade against the New Deal. W. W. Norton.

Price, D. (2021). Laziness does not exist. Atria Books.

Rodgers, D. T. (1978). The work ethic in industrial America, 1850–1920. University of Chicago Press.

Rose, J. (2001). The poverty of virtue: The ethical foundations of American welfare reform. Journal of Religious Ethics, 29(2), 247–272.

Sutton, M. A. (2014). American apocalypse: A history of modern evangelicalism. Harvard University Press.

Suzman, J. (2020). Work: A deep history, Stone Age to the age of robots. Penguin Press.

Tawney, R. H. (1926). Religion/rise of capitalism. John Murray.

Winthrop, J. (1838). Model of Christian charity. In Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (3rd series, Vol. 7, pp. 31–48). (Original work delivered 1630)

This Episode is brought to you by Ground News, subscribe for 4o% off their vantage plan at groundnews.com/monte

Why do institutions built on moral authority so often become safe harbors for predators?

Abuse scandals within religious institutions are recurring patterns with shared structural causes. This episode breaks down why churches, regardless of denomination, repeatedly find themselves at the center of abuse cover-up stories, and why victims so often find themselves silenced.

We walk through several prominent cases that have made headlines in recent years spanning Catholic dioceses, evangelical megachurches, and independent ministries examining the common threads: delayed reporting, internal investigations kept away from civil authorities, institutional loyalty placed above victim care, and the "forgiveness" framework weaponized to shut down accountability.

Then we go deeper into the structural question: hierarchy itself. When authority flows unidirectionally downward challenging a leader becomes spiritually dangerous for members. Whistleblowers risk not just reputation but community, belonging, and in some traditions, their eternal standing. This creates near perfect conditions for abuse to go fester and grow.

Sources

Baptist News Global. (2026, March 21). The Southern Baptist Convention did not get played. https://baptistnews.com/article/the-southern-baptist-convention-did-not-get-played/

Barr, B. A. (2021). The making of biblical womanhood

Chen, Y. (2024). Ecclesiastical abstention or judicial abdication? The First Amendment and clergy sexual abuse. Yale Law & Policy Review, 42(1), 1–58.

CrossPolitic Studios. (2026, March 17). How the SBC got played [Documentary film]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/XNQk2y8cUJY

Du Mez, K. K. (2020). Jesus and John Wayne

Freyd, J. J. (2022). Institutional betrayal and institutional courage. In L. S. Brown & E. Pantalone (Eds.),

Guidepost Solutions. (2022). Report of the independent investigation: The Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee’s response to sexual abuse allegations and an audit of the procedures and actions of the Credentials Committee. https://guidepostsolutions.com/sbc-ec-investigation/

Hess, R., & Hess, J. (1989). A full quiver: Family planning and the lordship of Christ. Wolgemuth & Hyatt.

Ingersoll, J. (2015). Building God’s kingdom: Inside the world of Christian Reconstructionism. Oxford University Press.

Joyce, K. (2009). Quiverfull: Inside the Christian patriarchy movement. Beacon Press.

Klein, L. K. (2018). Pure

Kvam, K. E., Schearing, L. S., & Ziegler, V. H. (Eds.). (1999). Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim readings on Genesis and gender. Indiana University Press.

MinistryWatch. (2022, February 15). Former plaintiffs in Bill Gothard abuse lawsuit hit back at Institute in Basic Life Principles’ statement to NBC News. https://ministrywatch.com/

MinistryWatch. (2025, August 1). TX Supreme Court rules against Bill Gothard and the Institute for Basic Life Principles. https://ministrywatch.com/

Netflix. (2022). Our father [Documentary film]. Blumhouse Productions.

North, G. (1996). Crossed fingers: How the liberals captured the Presbyterian Church

Portugal, T. (2023). Donor Deceived: Doctor donor fraud cases. https://donordeceived.org/

Pride, M. (1985). The way home: Beyond feminism, back to reality. Crossway Books.

Provan, C. D. (1989). The Bible and birth control. Zimmer Printing.

Recovering Grace. (2014). Firsthand accounts of sexual harassment and abuse at IBLP. https://www.recoveringgrace.org/

Right to Know. (2023). Fight fertility fraud now: State and federal legislation tracker. https://righttoknow.us/fertility-fraud-laws/

Silliman, D. (Director). (2023). Shiny happy people: Duggar family secrets [Documentary series]. Amazon Studios.

Stewart, K. (2020). The power worshippers

Type Investigations. (2016, January 8). New charges allege rape by prominent religious leader. https://www.typeinvestigations.org/

Worthen, M. (2013). Apostles of reason

I feel very confident in saying that this is quite possibly the most important, powerful, and for me, inspiring interview I've ever done. This one is on the longer side but it is worth every minute. I could have done a series with Deeyah.

Deeyah Khan is a BAFTA– and two-time Emmy Award–winning documentary filmmaker known for her deeply empathetic and unflinching storytelling. Her work explores some of the most urgent and polarising issues of our time, including extremism, violence against women, racism, inequality, and social exclusion.

Over the course of her career, she has spent years engaging directly with individuals involved in violence and extremist movements. Her documentaries feature jihadists, convicted anti-abortion terrorists, as well as current and former white supremacists and armed militia groups in the United States. Through these encounters, she seeks to understand the human stories behind radicalisation and division.

In addition to her filmmaking, Deeyah is the founder of Fuuse, an independent media and arts production company. In 2016, she was appointed UNESCO’s first Goodwill Ambassador for artistic freedom and creativity.

Born in Norway to Muslim immigrant parents, Deeyah’s experience of navigating multiple cultures informs her creative vision. This perspective brings a distinctive emotional honesty and humanity to her work, shaping films that not only challenge audiences, but also foster connection, deeper understanding and dialogue.
I encountered Deeyah's work in her documentary "White Right: Meeting the Enemy" and it is TRULY transformative. She sat in rooms with white supremacists I'd be nervous to sit in and she did it with fierceness, determination, courage and love. And some of those men left the movement due to her influence. She is a rockstar and I can't wait to share this story with you.

This episode is brought to you by Ground News. Get 40% off their vantage plan by subscribing at groundnews.com/monte

Like many of you, I watched a viral video of a gorgeous woman walking through her house, opening her Bible to Matthew 25 and reading the passage on "the least of these". This was in response to a TikTok comment of someone lashing out at Jen because she (the commenter) "was maga and loved Jesus". After calmly reading the Bible, Jen simply says "sounds pretty liberal to me" and ends the video.
That simple video caused MAGA to call Jen's job where she works as an OB Nurse to get her fired, reported her online and tried to call her licensing board to get her nursing license revoked! Because she read the Bible and they didn't like it. She even had to have private security when she spoke at a conference.
And that is how I met a kind, compassionate, funny, loving lady who shares my alma mater. We talk about our journey's through faith, Liberty, growth, change, and what it means to love your neighbor.

This episode is brought to you by Ground News. You can get 40% off their Vantage plan and stay up to date with all the news by going to groundnews.com/tables

My grandma Ena was a pilot and they were her favorite stories to tell. I am sure its no surprise that I grew up with Amelia Earhart as one of my heroes. The woman who flew so that my grandma could fly.

She vanished into the sky—and into one of the greatest mysteries of the modern age.

In this episode, we fly into the world of Amelia Earhart, a woman who refused to stay grounded, refused to stay compliant and traditional in a time when society expected her to. She became record-breaking aviator and one of the most famous women in the world. The first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. A symbol of independence, grit, and relentless ambition.

But Earhart wasn’t just chasing records—she was chasing the edge of possibility itself.

In 1937, she set out on a daring attempt to circumnavigate the globe, navigating thousands of miles over open ocean with only the tools and technology of her time. Somewhere over the vast Pacific, near a tiny speck called Howland Island… she disappeared.

No confirmed wreckage. No distress call that told the full story. Just silence.

In this episode, we’ll trace her rise from a curious, rebellious girl to one of the most famous pilots in history and then dive headfirst into the theories, investigations, and unanswered questions that have kept her story alive for nearly a century.

And we will take a brief flyover to meet the Night Witches of the USSR's air service.

This episode is to celebrate Women's History month with women who paved a runway for those who would come later!

Rachel Hartigan, Lost: Unsolved Mysteries of Amelia Earhart and the Bermuda Triangle

Susan Butler, East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart

Doris L. Rich, Amelia Earhart: A Biography

Mary S. Lovell, The Sound of Wings: The Life of Amelia Earhart

Candace Fleming, Amelia Lost: The Life and Disappearance of Amelia Earhart

Ric Gillespie, Finding Amelia: The True Story of the Earhart Disappearance

Elgen M. Long and Marie K. Long, Amelia Earhart: The Mystery Solved

Mike Campbell, Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last

Fred Goerner, The Search for Amelia Earhart

Vincent V. Loomis, Amelia Earhart: The Final Story

Les Kinney, Amelia Earhart: Beyond the Grave

Theodore G. Tharpe, Crash and Sink: The Salvage of the Earhart Electra

National Geographic Society, “Amelia Earhart Biography and Disappearance”

Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, “Amelia Earhart”

Library of Congress, “Amelia Earhart Papers”

FBI Records: The Vault, “Amelia Earhart”

TIGHAR (The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery), “Amelia Earhart Project Research”

U.S. Navy Historical Center, “Earhart Search Operations 1937”

PBS American Experience, Amelia Earhart

History Channel, “Amelia Earhart Disappearance Theories”

This episode is brought to you by Ground News. Subscribe for 40% off their vantage plan at groundnews.com/tables. Project MKUltra was a secret research program run by the Central Intelligence Agency beginning in 1953 during the Cold War. Its goal was to explore methods of mind control, interrogation, and psychological manipulation, partly out of fear that rival nations like the Soviet Union were developing similar techniques.

The program funded dozens of experiments at universities, hospitals, and prisons. Researchers tested drugs such as LSD, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, electroshock, and other methods to see whether human behavior and memory could be controlled. Many subjects were not informed they were part of experiments, and some were exposed to powerful drugs without consent.

The program remained secret until the 1970s, when investigations by the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities revealed the experiments. Much of the documentation had already been destroyed on orders from CIA director Richard Helms.

MKUltra became one of the most controversial intelligence programs in U.S. history and led to new oversight of intelligence agencies and stricter ethical rules for human experimentation.

Sources available by request at info@montemader.com

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The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was a 40-year medical experiment conducted by the United States Public Health Service in Macon County, Alabama to observe the natural progression of untreated syphilis in Black men.

Beginning in 1932, researchers recruited about 600 poor African American sharecroppers—399 who had syphilis and 201 who did not. The men were told they were being treated for “bad blood,” a local term used to describe various illnesses. In reality, they were not given proper treatment, even after Penicillin became the widely accepted cure for syphilis in the 1940s. Instead, doctors deliberately withheld treatment so they could study how the disease damaged the body over time.

Participants were misled about the nature of the study and were subjected to painful procedures such as spinal taps while being told they were receiving medical care. Many men died from syphilis or related complications, infected their wives, and children were born with congenital syphilis.

The study continued until 1972, when a whistleblower, Peter Buxtun, exposed it to the press. Public outrage led to congressional hearings, a class-action lawsuit, and major reforms in medical research ethics, including stricter informed consent requirements and oversight by institutional review boards.

In 1997, Bill Clinton formally apologized on behalf of the U.S. government to the surviving participants and their families. The scandal remains one of the most infamous examples of unethical human experimentation in American history and contributed to long-lasting distrust of the medical system among many African Americans.

Sources available by request info@montemader.com

Another crossover episode from my true crime podcast Highway to Hell because of its relevance to whats going on today. If you are a true crime and travel fan please check us out wherever you listen to podcasts.

After his sweetheart deal in 2008, Epstein was able to reintegrate into life and maintain his trafficking ring without any loss in wealth, associations or connections.

This episode tracks his life and dealings from 2008 to his death in 2019, the aftermath of his cruelty, the arrest and trial of Ghislaine Maxwell and the recent release of the Epstein files.

As of now, no man involved with Epstein and his human trafficking has been arrested in the US

Sources

The source list is way too big for the show notes but is available upon request at info@montemader.com

Thank you to my patrons for your continued support of the show. Subscribe for ad free episodes at patreon.com/montemader.

A sticky sweltering Tennessee courtroom in 1925 would change the course of Christian conservative perception of "persecution" for the next 100 years. Tennessee's passage of the unconstitutional Butler Act in March of 1925 was fertile soil for a challenge by the ACLU who offered to represent any teacher prosecuted under the law. It was also prime opportunity for the ailing town of Dayton to draw in some much needed publicity to stimulate a strangled local economy.

John T Scopes, a substitute biology teacher would stand trial for teaching evolution from the state approved textbook. The prosecution was led by William Jennings Bryan, lawyer and presidential nominee and the defense was led by Clarence Darrow, the greatest defense attorney of his time. A Christian nationalist judge refused any testimony or experts for the defense and in a desperate move Darrow called prosecutor Bryan to the stand. The interrogation of literal interpretations of the Bible would not win the case, but it would cast Christian conservatives opposition to science into humiliation across the country. Journalist HL Mencken would exacerbate the embarrassment by mocking the "backwoods" people nationwide.

The humiliation didn't change them, it changed their strategy. They decided Christians in the US were being persecuted, formal education was the enemy and they withdrew from society and began to found their own institutions that would lead to Christian colleges, media platforms, conglomerates, PACS, and production agencies. The rhetoric of Christian persecution would fuel the rise of the radical right, the moral majority and the neo nazi platforms we see today.

Sources:

Armaly, M. T., & Enders, A. M. (2022). The sources and consequences of Christian nationalist victimization rhetoric. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 8, 1–15. 

Armaly, M. T., & Enders, A. M. (2023). Experimental evidence on persecution narratives and violence. Political Behavior, 45(2), 345–367.

Burke, K. J., & Hadley, H. (2025). Christian nationalism and educational policy in the United States. National Education Policy Center.

Darrow, C. (1904). The Resistible Rise of Democracy. Public lecture, later reprinted in Darrow's collected writings.

Du Mez, K. K. (2020). Jesus and John Wayne: How white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation.

Ginger, R. (1958). Six days or forever? Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes.

Halbrook, P. N. (2015). The Scopes Trial in educational perspective [Master's thesis, North Carolina State University]. NC State Libraries. 

Hart, R. P. (2016). H. L. Mencken and the mythology of American journalism. American Journalism, 33(4), 432–450.

Jones, P., & Cooter, A. (2024). White Christian nationalism after January 6. Middlebury Institute, CTEC Research Series.

Larson, E. J. (1997). Summer for the gods: The Scopes trial and America's continuing debate over science and religion.

Larson, E. J. (2005). Understanding the Scopes Trial 100 years later. Vanderbilt Law Review, 78(2), 571–590.

Marsden, G. M. (1980). Fundamentalism and American culture. Oxford University Press.

Mencken, H. L. (1925). Newspaper dispatches from the Scopes Trial. Reprinted in Pierce, J. K. (2000). The Scopes Trial. American History Magazine.

Moore, R. (2001). The lingering impact of the Scopes Trial on high school biology textbooks. BioScience, 51(9), 790–796. 

Perry, S. L. (2025). Secularism, sorting, and Americans' political knowledge. Social Forces, 103(2), 835–857.

Pierce, J. K. (2000). The Scopes Trial. American History Magazine.

State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, 154 Tenn. 105 (1927).

State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, Trial Transcript (1925). Reprinted in Famous Trials Project.

Whitehead, A. L., & Perry, S. L. (2020). Taking America back for God: Christian nationalism in the United States. Oxford University Press.

This episode is brought to you by Ground News. Subscribe for 40% off their vantage plan at groundnews.com/tables

Lets examine the birthplace and ideological architecture behind Project 2025 and the modern conservative movement driving it, tracing its roots through theology, institutional strategy, and political power . What is framed as a “Second American Revolution” is not merely transition planning but a coordinated effort to concentrate executive authority, weaken democratic safeguards, and embed a hierarchy-first moral framework into federal governance. We walk through the founding and evolution of The Heritage Foundation its key figures such as Paul Weyrich, Edwin Feulner, Kevin Roberts, Paul Dans, and Roger Severino, and analyzing how theological commitments to natural order and authority have been translated into policy blueprints.

Lets explore the projected human impact of Project 2025. We outlines how proposed changes would affect undocumented immigrants, people of color, the unhoused, women seeking reproductive care, people living in poverty, LGBTQ communities—especially trans individuals—and Indigenous nations. Across issue areas, it identifies a recurring pattern: civil rights reframed as bias, equality recast as disorder, and harm justified as restoration. Policies targeting health care access, environmental protections, voting rights, labor standards, and social safety nets are presented not as isolated reforms but as part of a coherent effort to shrink democracy until it no longer obstructs a predetermined moral hierarchy.

But people are pushing back morally, legally, and politically. Leaders such as Reverend William Barber II, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Women’s Law Center, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, LGBTQ advocates, and Indigenous organizers, and highlight counter-visions rooted in pluralism, shared power, and inherent rights. RESIST.

American Civil Liberties Union. (2023). Project 2025: Threats to constitutional governance and civil rights [Issue brief]. American Civil Liberties Union. https://www.aclu.org
Arendt, H. (1969). On violence. Harcourt, Brace & World.
Barber, W. J., II. (2018). The third reconstruction: How a moral movement is overcoming the politics of division and fear. Beacon Press.
Bendix, R. (1977). Nation building and citizenship: Studies of our changing social order. University of California Press.
Bonilla-Silva, E. (2018). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America (5th ed.). Rowman & Littlefield.
Brugge, D., deLemos, J. L., & Oldmixon, B. (2016). Exposure pathways and health effects associated with chemical and radiological toxicity in Indigenous communities. Environmental Health Perspectives, 124(8), 1232–1240. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP.1509889
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. (2019). Work requirements do not cut poverty, evidence shows. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. https://www.cbpp.org
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. (2021). How immigration enforcement harms children and families. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. https://www.cbpp.org
Critchlow, D. T. (2007). The conservative ascendancy: How the GOP Right made political history. Harvard University Press.
Davis, J. (2022). How the public administrative state became the enemy [Conservative legal and policy commentary on the “administrative state,” 2016–2022].
Feagin, J. R. (2013). Systemic racism: A theory of oppression. Routledge.
Feulner, E. J. (1986). The conservative vision. The Heritage Foundation.
George, R. P. (1999). In defense of natural law. Oxford University Press.
Gorski, P. S., & Perry, S. L. (2022). The flag and the cross: White Christian nationalism and the threat to American democracy. Oxford University Press.
Goss, R. E. (2009). Queering Christ: Beyond Jesus acted up. HarperOne.

This is not an error! Because of the recent release of the Epstein files I felt sharing my true crime show Highway to Hells 2 part series on Jeffrey Epstein would be valuable bonus for people.

If you are a true crime and travel fan please subscribe and listen to Highway to Hell wherever you get your podcasts. Part 2 comes out next Tuesday on Highway to Hell.

**Please forgive some slight quality changes as this had to be recorded remotely*

3 million more Epstein files were released and yet in the US there has been no further investigation, no arrests. Files that detail the rape, murder, cannibalism of children result in no arrests.

The release of the files almost extend Epsteins story- a man of deception, greed and who skated through his life with absolutely no accountability. The middle class Jewish boy, born into an average Brooklyn jewish family but who called himself "poor, smart, and desperate to be rich". Desperate for the elite and the luxury of New York, and then the world.

A man, who with no college degree who was hired to teach at the elite Dalton school anyway because of his proficiency at math. He was inappropriate with teenage girls but removed quietly- no accountability, no embarrassment for the school. But a parent who met him there brought him into Bear Sterns, with no degree, no qualifications, and when his deceit ran out, he was released quietly. Epstein then shaped himself as the financial advisor of the elite of the elite. He only needed one client, and he found it in Leslie Wexner who gave Epstein all of the keys to his kingdom. When Epstein misappropriated funds, basically gave himself a New York mansion, they settled quietly out of court- no accountability, no embarrassment.

If any single person had exposed Epstein for who he was, the files likely wouldn't exist. And when he finally did get caught for abusing minors, the district attorney and FBI cut him the sweetheart deal of a lifetime. 12 hours a day in jail for 13 months, getting to work in his private office, privacy and a non prosecutorial agreement for all his friends who participated in trafficking and raping minors. They went so far as to lie to his victims about it.

No accountability. No embarrassment. Boys will be boys after all.

FULL LIST OF SOURCES AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

info@montemader.com

Metro Surge in Minneapolis brought with it horror and conflict. Civilians and US citizens were killed, migrants were abducted without warrants, legal observers were tear gassed, people were held in extended detainment without help. Federal officers murdered without investigations, the DOJ and DHS broke federal law without any recourse and it left people wondering "what can I legally do?". It's also become progressively more important to understand how our immigration system works in the US, how its flawed and what all of our rights are.

Daphne Delvaux, is a former immigration attorney and now educator who helps people know their rights and understand how the system works. She is also an immigrant herself and shares her story of going through the system in the US, one that denied her the first time because she and her husband chose not to mix finances. Here she tells her story, teaches us about our rights and gives us some hope and gentle mothering towards the end. Something I desperately needed.

Today we explore the radicalization of young men. How do authoritarian movements especially capitalize on men and bend them to their will?
How does a kind, average boy grow up to be ordered to kill and say "I was just following orders"? Why do particularly conservative men buckle so quickly under perceived "more masculine" authority?
The reality is that there are a lot of reasons. And they are the same reasons that men are living in a system that makes them feel lonely, invisible, unable to access emotions, and kills them young.
Today we explore patriarchal systems, how the narrowing of masculinity rips humanity out of the hands of men. And how movements like the Nazis were able to weaponize disenfranchised, disappointed, and angry men and transform them into weapons of genocide.

Sources:

Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. HarperCollins, 1992.

Browning, Christopher R. Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp. W. W. Norton, 2010.

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

Welzer, Harald, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall. Myth of the German Comradeship: The Wehrmacht and the Politics of Memory. Cambridge University Press.

Welzer, Harald. Perpetrators: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Bloxham, Donald. Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory. Oxford University Press.

Koonz, Claudia. The Nazi Conscience. Harvard University Press, 2003.

Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics. St. Martin’s Press, 1987.

Neitzel, Sönke, and Harald Welzer. Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying. Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. (Based on secretly recorded conversations of German POWs)

Biddiscombe, Perry. The SS Hunter Battalions: The Hidden History of the Nazi Resistance Movement 1944–45. Tempus.

Biddiscombe, Perry. Werwolf!: The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement, 1944–1946. University of Toronto Press.

Lower, Wendy. Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.

Heinemann, Isabel. “Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut”: Das Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas. Wallstein Verlag.

Bartov, Omer. Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich. Oxford University Press, 1991.

Bartov, Omer. The Eastern Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare. Palgrave.

Fritz, Stephen G. Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II. University Press of Kentucky, 1995.

Manstein, Erich von. Lost Victories. Zenith Press.
(Primary source memoir; ideological but useful for studying mindset)

Himmler, Heinrich. Posen Speeches (1943). Primary documents; available in English translation via Holocaust Research Project / Nizkor / German Federal Archives.

Yad Vashem Archives. Testimonies of perpetrators and victims, Einsatzgruppen records, postwar interrogation files.

Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. Basic Books, 1986.

Staub, Ervin. The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence. Cambridge University Press.

Bandura, Albert. Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live With Themselves. Worth Publishers, 2015.
(Not Nazi-specific but foundational for understanding perpetrator psychology)

Kelman, Herbert. “Violence Without Moral Restraint.” Journal of Social Issues.

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin, 1963.

Rees, Laurence. The Nazis: A Warning from History. New Press, 1997.

Rees, Laurence. Auschwitz: A New History. PublicAffairs, 2005.

Haffner, Sebastian. Defying Hitler: A Memoir. Picador, 2003.

Snyder, Timothy. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. Crown, 2015.Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books, 2010.

This episode is brought to you by Ground News. Subscribe for 40% off their vantage plan at groundnews.com/tables

When I scheduled this talk with Odessa, one of Nashvilles staunchest activists, I had no idea what was about to unfold in Minneapolis with the shooting of Alex Pretti just 5 days after we recorded this session. I think this conversation could not have landed on a more relevant time if I had tried.

Odessa Kelly is a Nashville native, organizer, and political activist focused on racial, economic, and social justice. She was born and raised on the East Side of Nashville in a working-class community facing poverty, substance abuse, and gun violence. Kelly graduated from Tennessee State University with a degree in Business Administration and later earned a Master’s in Public Service from Cumberland University.

She spent nearly 14 years working as a civil servant for Metro Nashville’s Parks & Recreation Department, including leading the Napier Community Center, where she worked directly with youth and families. Witnessing systemic inequities and the impact of policy decisions on her community pushed her toward broader community organizing work.

In 2016, Kelly co-founded Stand Up Nashville, a grassroots advocacy organization dedicated to fighting for economic equity, affordable housing, workers’ rights, and community benefits from local development. Under her leadership, the group won Nashville’s first community benefits agreement with a major soccer stadium project, securing commitments on living wages, affordable housing, and childcare supports.

Kelly has been honored with several awards, including the National Eleanor Roosevelt Legacy Award, a National Courage Award, and Nashville Scenes Activist of the Year for her work advancing justice for working people and marginalized communities.

As a mother of two and a member of Mount Zion Baptist Church, she has also run for public office. In 2022, Kelly was the Democratic nominee for the U.S. House of Representatives in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District, campaigning on expanding economic opportunity, housing justice, and representation for working families.

Her activism and platform emphasize lived experience, community empowerment, and challenging systems that leave working-class people behind. And now she meets with us to tell us how to carry that legacy forward.

I apologize this is late everyone, as you know this has been a really busy and tough weekend in the reporting/political realm.

So excited for this conversation with a dear friend of mine, and one of my favorite voices in town. Kyndle Wylde is a Memphis born soul, blues and rock singer. You might recognize her as the winner of the 2024 CBS morning mixtape competition with a delicious soul version of "I Can See Clearly Now". She now performs and tours with Post Modern Jukebox and her cover of "Pour Some Sugar on Me" with them has over 1.6 million views. She also released her debut, self titled EP in 2025.

But what you might not know, is that she was born and raised in a small Tennessee town. She was part of the family worship band in her grandfathers church and she had a long road of self discovery to find that not only she could be an artist but she wanted to. She shares the moment the church told her "walk the Damascus Road" and when she didn't, found the support system pulled out from her.
But it turns out love, a dream, and slow unsteady steps to self discovery- can change your world.

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Viola Fauver Liuzzo was a 39-year-old white civil rights volunteer from Detroit who traveled to Alabama in March 1965 to support the Selma-to-Montgomery marches. On the night of March 25, while driving 19-year-old activist Leroy Moton back toward Selma, she was chased down U.S. Route 80 by a car of Ku Klux Klan members—Collie Leroy Wilkins Jr., William Orville Eaton, Eugene Thomas, and FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe. Wilkins fired a shotgun into Liuzzo’s car, killing her instantly; Moton survived by playing dead. The presence of Rowe, who had a history of participating in Klan violence while on the FBI payroll, sparked major controversy about what federal authorities knew and tolerated.

Alabama first tried Wilkins for murder, but his initial trial ended in a hung jury, and a second all-white jury acquitted him despite Rowe’s eyewitness testimony. After the state failed to secure a conviction, the Department of Justice charged Wilkins, Eaton, and Thomas under federal civil-rights law (18 U.S.C. § 241) for conspiring to deprive Liuzzo of her civil rights. All three were convicted and received ten-year sentences, marking one of the earliest successful federal civil-rights prosecutions against white supremacist violence. In the aftermath, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover orchestrated a smear campaign against Liuzzo—spreading false claims about her character to deflect criticism of the FBI’s role in managing informants. Her murder and the federal response helped galvanize support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and later fueled congressional scrutiny of FBI conduct during the Church Committee investigations.

Sources:

James P. Turner, Selma and the Liuzzo Murder Trials: The First Modern Civil Rights Convictions.
Mary Stanton, From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo.
Gary May, Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy.
Wayne Greenhaw, Fighting the Devil in Dixie: How Civil Rights Activists Took on the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama.
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963.
Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–1965
Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution
David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
J. Mills Thornton III, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma.
Peter B. Levy, The Great Uprising: Race Riots in Urban America during the 1960s.
U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee Reports).
FBI COINTELPRO Files (Declassified).
U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division Archives on the Liuzzo Case.
Federal Bureau of Investigation, The FBI and the Civil Rights Movement (archival materials).
NAACP Records and Papers on Selma and Voting Rights.
Civil Rights Documentation Project, Library of Congress.
Eyes on the Prize (PBS Documentary Series)
Home of the Brave (Documentary on Viola Liuzzo).
National Civil Rights Museum, Viola Liuzzo Exhibits.
Southern Poverty Law Center Archives on Ku Klux Klan Activity.
John Lewis, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement.
Lerone Bennett Jr., “Selma: The Road to Freedom,” Ebony Magazine Archives.
Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution.
Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr..
Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam (context on FBI surveillance).
Adam Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890–2000.
David Carter, The Music Has Gone Out of the Movement (on federal infiltration of civil rights groups).
United States v. Wilkins, Eaton, and Thomas (Federal §241 Trial Records).

Prepare to get angry.

I unfortunately fell back into the bad habit of doom scrolling. And it was so discouraging to watch what happens online. The increased amount of abuse towards women, calling for them to not be able to vote, taking away resources for single parents (because sure, lets punish the parent who stayed), and the double standard of women's sexuality has been gut wrenching for me.
Christmas Eve I read a book called "Witchcraft for Wayward Girls" by Grady Hendrix. I read it in one day. Now while its fiction, its factually based on what happened in homes for unwed mothers in the US- a grandchild of the Magdalene Laundries of Ireland. This double standard is so ingrained, so enmeshed in our culture and society and since the Dobbs decision, those homes - where so much abuse, fraud (gasp), coercion and trafficking happened, are now increasing in number.
Women will never be free and equal if we acquiesce, if we cave, if we allow it, if we carry shame that was never ours to begin with. We shatter those standards by first learning about them and what they have done to the women before us.

1803 Offences Against the Person Act (Lord Ellenborough’s Act)

1828 Offences Against the Person Act

1837 Offences Against the Person Act

1861 Offences Against the Person Act, Sections 58–59

Infant Life Preservation Act 1929

Abortion Act 1967 (UK)

Lane Committee Report, Report of the Committee on the Working of the Abortion Act (1974)

Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) historical ethics reports

Brookes, Barbara. Abortion in England, 1900–1967. Croom Helm.

Fisher, Kate. Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain 1918–1960. Oxford University Press.

McLaren, Angus. A History of Contraception: From Antiquity to the Present Day. Blackwell.

Williams, Glanville. The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law.

Irish Department of Justice. The Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee to establish the facts of State involvement with the Magdalen Laundries (McAleese Report), 2013.

O’Sullivan, M. The Irish Magdalene Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment. Manchester University Press.

Smith, James M. Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment. University of Notre Dame Press.

Finnegan, Frances. Do Penance or Perish: A Study of Magdalen Asylums in Ireland. Oxford University Press.

Luddy, Maria. Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800–1940. Cambridge University Press.

Raftery, Mary & O’Sullivan, Eoin. Suffer the Little Children: The Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools.

BBC Panorama investigative reporting on the Laundries

Irish Times archives (historical reporting on Magdalene institutions)

UN Committee on the Rights of the Child briefs on Irish institutional abuses

Joint Oireachtas Committee hearings on institutional abuse

Solinger, Rickie. Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade. Routledge.

Fessler, Ann. The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade. Penguin.

Kunzel, Regina. Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945. Yale University Press.

National Florence Crittenton Mission Archives

Women’s Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor, early 20th-century records on “unmarried mothers”

Maza, Sarah. Work on U.S. adoption coercion practices

Original court records from state maternity homes (various—primarily Minnesota, Tennessee, New York)

Liberty Godparent Home archives, Liberty University (reporting, survivor testimony, investigative journalism)

Liberty Lost podcast and transcripts (primary oral history from survivors)

Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute reports

New York Times investigative reports (1950s–1990s) on maternity homes and adoption coercion

Senate Subcommittee hearings on adoption abuses (1970s–1980s)

Social Security Bulletin archives on “Aid to Dependent Children” (ADC) and out-of-wedlock births

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What does real, REAL resistance look like?

Tad Stoermer is a public historian, teacher, and author of the forthcoming book A Resistance History of the United States releasing June of 2026.

His work dismantles the mythologies that pass for American history. He removes the curated nostalgia, moral evasions, and institutional silences that have long protected abusive power. That continue to protect that abusive power.

From his website:

"A Resistance History of the United Statesis a record of repeated fights against abusive authority, carried out by people who refused the lies used to justify it. Those battles have taken different forms: the women and men in Salem who would not confess to witchcraft, the Black Loyalists who seized their own freedom during the Revolution, and the Anti-Federalists who forced a Bill of Rights to limit nationalist power. It’s a tradition carried forward by people like Ona Judge and Henry David Thoreau, by the clandestine networks of the Underground Railroad, and by the violent resolve of John Brown and the Secret Six—resistance so disruptive it helped push the nation into civil war, and so ambitious it took the focus and will of the Radical Republicans to begin building a new republic from the ruins. A Resistance History of the United States uncovers these moments not as steps toward inevitable progress, but as a set of hard-earned lessons—a usable playbook for confronting the abuse of power in our own time.

ad is one of the most widely followed public historians in the world here today to help us face what is to come.

He is a currently a Visiting Scholar at the University of Southern Denmark’s Center for American Studies and a Lecturer in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He previously taught public history at Harvard, served as a public historian at Colonial Williamsburg, and was advisor for history content at C-SPAN.

Happy almost New Years Eve!!! Here on Flipping Tables we are going to end each year with an inspirational story. So here's one of my heroes.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor, theologian, and anti-Nazi dissident whose life continues to challenge how faith responds to power, violence, and injustice. Raised in an intellectually rigorous, non-religious household, Bonhoeffer came to believe that Christianity was not merely a system of beliefs, but a call to costly, lived obedience—especially when moral clarity comes at personal risk.

As Adolf Hitler rose to power, Bonhoeffer warned early that the church faced a defining test. When Christianity was fused with nationalism and racial ideology, he argued, the church had ceased to be the church. He became a key figure in the Confessing Church, opposing the Nazification of German Christianity and rejecting loyalty oaths to the Führer. His theological writings during this period—including reflections on “cheap grace” versus “costly grace”—confronted complacent faith that avoids sacrifice.

Eventually drawn into resistance circles connected to the German military intelligence service, Bonhoeffer wrestled deeply with ethical responsibility in a world where evil left no clean choices. Arrested in 1943, he continued writing from prison, leaving behind letters and reflections that would later shape modern Christian ethics and political theology. Executed by the Nazis in April 1945, just weeks before the war’s end, Bonhoeffer’s life stands as a haunting reminder: faith that refuses to act in the face of injustice is no faith at all.

Sources:

Bethge, Eberhard. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography. Fortress Press.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Act and Being. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 2. Fortress Press.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. Fortress Press.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Sanctorum Communio. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 1. Fortress Press.
Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives).
Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives) – Bonhoeffer family records.
Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Federal Agency for Civic Education), Germany.
Cambridge University Press. The Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. John W. de Gruchy, ed.
Chickering, Roger. Imperial Germany and the Great War. Cambridge University Press.
Christian History Institute. “Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Timeline & Biography.”
Clark, Christopher. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Harper.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (DBWE), English Edition, Vols. 1–3. Fortress Press.
Evans, Richard J. The Coming of the Third Reich. Penguin.
Evans, Richard J. The Third Reich at War. Penguin.
Fischer, Fritz. Germany’s Aims in the First World War. W. W. Norton.
Fulbrook, Mary. A History of Germany 1918–2014. Wiley-Blackwell.
German Reichstag Records, 1918–1923.
Green, Clifford J. Bonhoeffer: A Theology of Sociality. Eerdmans.
Herwig, Holger H. The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary. Arnold.
Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Empire: 1875–1914. Vintage.
Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Penguin.
Keegan, John. The First World War. Vintage.
Keynes, John Maynard. The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Harcourt.
MacMillan, Margaret. Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World. Random House.
Marks, Sally. The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe 1918–1933. Palgrave.
Marsh, Charles. Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Knopf.
Metaxas, Eric. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. Thomas Nelson.
National Archives (UK). World War I diplomatic records.
Overy, Richard. The Dictators. W. W. Norton.
PBS. Bonhoeffer Timeline.
Peukert, Detlev. The Weimar Republic. Hill and Wang.
Stevenson, David. Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy. Basic Books.
Strachan, Hew. The First World War. Oxford University Press.
Treaty of Versailles (1919), full text.
Union Theological Seminary Archives – Bonhoeffer Papers.

2025 has been a year of difficult conversations. It's been a year of angst, anger, and frustrating conversations. How do we continue to talk about the hard things, especially when we don't know how to get through to the other person?

You've seen Anna Connelly online with her cheeky conversations with her "conservative cousin" talking about history, immigration, politics, government. She uses these disarming conversations to help prep people to hear an opposing perspective and to arm people to have these conversations themselves. (If you're home now and trying to figure out how to talk to family, maybe open your phone and watch a few).

Anna shows us how to continue to show up with humanity, humor and humility. And she's brilliant at it.

These conversations are needed now more than ever and all of us have the power to have them.

This episode is brought to you by ground news. Subscribe for 40% off their vantage plan at groundnews.com/monte

Father Nathan Monk is a social justice advocate, author, and former Orthodox priest. He is the author of multiple non fiction books and novels including Russian Sleeper Cell and his 2015 hit Chasing the Mouse: A Memoir about Childhood Homelessness.

​Having experienced homelessness with his family during his teenage years, Nathan went on to become a priest in the orthodox church with a heart to serve the poor, the hungry and the outcast. Today we discuss his childhood, his call to ministry, why he eventually left and how he works and serves now.
He's now a comedian, a member of the LGBTQ community and an activist still advocating for "the least of these".

This episode is brought to you by Ground News. Subscribe at groundnews.com/tables for 40% off their vantage plan.

In this episode, we trace the extraordinary life of Malcolm X (1925–1965), born Malcolm Little in Omaha and shaped by racial terror, systemic oppression, and personal trauma. We explore his early years marked by the activism of his parents, the violent death of his father, and the institutional pressures that drove his mother into a mental hospital—forces that propelled him into a youth of hustling, street crime, and eventual imprisonment.

From there, we follow Malcolm’s dramatic transformation behind bars through his encounter with the teachings of the Nation of Islam, his rise as its most electrifying minister, and his break from the movement after disillusionment with its leadership. The episode covers his pilgrimage to Mecca, where he embraced Sunni Islam and broadened his philosophy on race and solidarity. We conclude with his increasing global activism, his deepening threat to U.S. authorities and the NOI, and the circumstances leading to his assassination in 1965.

This biographical journey highlights Malcolm X’s evolving worldview, his impact on the civil rights movement, and his enduring influence on Black liberation, human rights, and political thought in America.

“I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”
― Malcolm X

Sources

Malcolm X & Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

FBI Files on Malcolm X, declassified documents (FBI Records: The Vault)

Papers of Elijah Muhammad, speeches and writings (Nation of Islam archival materials)

Malcolm X Speeches: “Message to the Grassroots,” “The Ballot or the Bullet,” “Prospects for Freedom,” “Oxford Union Debate” (1964–1965)

Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (2011)

Louis A. DeCaro Jr., On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X (1997)

Michael Eric Dyson, Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X (1995)

James Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare (1991)

Peter Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X (2nd ed., 1979/2011)

Bruce Perry, Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America (1991)

George Breitman, The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary (1967)

Herbert Berg, Elijah Muhammad and Islam (2009)

Zachary K. Williams, Racial Realism and Malcolm X (Journal of Black Studies)

The Journal of African American History – articles on NOI, civil rights, and Malcolm’s political development

The Muslim World – studies on Malcolm X’s Islamic theology and Hajj transformation

The Journal of Social History – analyses of Black nationalism and mid-century urban conditions

Black Scholar – essays on Malcolm X’s ideological evolution

Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society – research on Black radicalism and Malcolm’s global politics

Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters (1988) — for civil rights movement context

Peniel Joseph, Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour (2006)

Karl Evanzz, The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X (1992)

Karl Evanzz, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad (1999)

Clayborne Carson, Malcolm X: The FBI File (1991)

C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America (1961; updated editions)

Claude Andrew Clegg III, An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (1997)

Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom Beyond America (2012)

Gadiel R. Del Orbe, “Malcolm X’s Global Human Rights Activism”

Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, podcast and archival work featured in Who Killed Malcolm X? (2019)

Les Payne & Tamara Payne, The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X (2020)

NYC District Attorney’s Office, 2021 exoneration documents of Aziz and Islam

COINTELPRO Records, U.S. Government declassified materials

When I was at the protests in DC a sweet girl came up to me and asked how to start talking when you're afraid and I worry I was too harsh. I said something along the lines of "you just have to start".
We are past the point of being complicit in silence- and that doesn't mean that these conversations especially with family aren't hard.

Starting can look like
"If you continue to use racist and dehumanizing language I'm going to leave" and walking out of the room when they continue. There's so much power in a walk out.
Starting can look like
"I believe in loving and supporting people of all faiths, genders, sexuality and races and I'm not going to compromise on this."

Starting can look like
"Didn't Jesus say that loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself were the most important commands? Since when has love been demonizing, name calling and belittling people?"

In this episode, which is by no means comprehensive, I talk about some of the big "trigger" issues we see with Christian nationalism and right wing movements. This will be one to save and re-listen to. It's a lot of information but on the first listen, just try to take one thing. This month will be a lot of calls, cards, family events. Take one thing at a time, one resistance at a time and one courageous push back at a time.
You won't always get it right and thats ok. When you know deep down what you truly believe it gets easier and as you practice, it will become safe and you will become a safe space.

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If you've seen the amazing ads on instagram from a soap company that is very openly ANTI fascist, yes the same ads I play the resistance fairy godmother, today you meet the owners. Trevor Silva and his wife Jennifer are the founders of My Cluck Hut, a no waste, inclusive, sustainable, "pay a freaking living wage" company. This is the story of how My Cluck Hut was born out of a desire to be the one who does better instead of waiting for everyone else to do it.
And the protest we mention here is the on that happened in DC last weekend - thank you so much to everyone who attended!

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This episode uncovers the hidden history and modern influence of The Family. A secretive religious–political network that has shaped American power since the 1930s. Founded by Abraham Vereide and built on the belief that God works through “key men,” The Family cultivated presidents, senators, foreign leaders, and global elites through private prayer circles, back-channel diplomacy, and the National Prayer Breakfast. We trace their role in anti-labor politics, Cold War foreign policy, international human-rights abuses, scandal cover-ups, and their deep connections to the Trump era, where “Jesus plus nothing” theology helped justify Christian nationalism and the erosion of church–state separation. Drawing from documented scholarship and investigative reporting, this episode reveals a movement that has remained influential precisely because it operates in the shadows.

As always ad free and thank you for your support.

Sources

Sharlet, Jeff. The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. HarperCollins, 2008.


Sharlet, Jeff. C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy. Little, Brown and Company, 2010.


Kruse, Kevin M. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. Basic Books, 2015.


Williams, Daniel K. God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right. Oxford University Press, 2010.


Dochuk, Darren. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. W.W. Norton, 2011.


Gage, Beverly. The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror. Oxford University Press, 2009.


Martin, William. With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America. Broadway Books, 1996.


Callahan, Richard J. Jr. “The Invention of Corporate America’s Invention of Christian America.” The Marginalia Review of Books, 2020.


Balmer, Randall. “The Religious Right and the Family Values Crusade.” Journal of Church and State, vol. 52, no. 3, 2010, pp. 370–394.

Butler, Anthea. “Race, Religion, and the American Presidency: The Faith Factor.” Journal of American History, vol. 99, no. 1, 2012.


Clark, Elizabeth A. “Invisible Hands and Divine Order: Theology and the Political Economy of American Fundamentalism.” Religion and American Culture, vol. 18, no. 2, 2008.


The Washington Post archives on the National Prayer Breakfast (1953-present).

The New York Times coverage of Doug Coe and Fellowship Foundation operations.

Religion Dispatches (University of Southern California Annenberg) – multiple investigations into The Family’s political network.

Guernica Magazine: “Christ Über Alles” interview with Jeff Sharlet.

The Humanist: “The Family: More Gilead than Godly.”

Encyclopaedia Britannica: “The Family (international religious movement).”

Library of Congress Congressional Records on the National Prayer Breakfast (1953-1970s).

Billy Graham Center Archives, Wheaton College – correspondence and records on Vereide and early ICL initiatives.

William Randolph Hearst was one of the most powerful and controversial figures in American media history — a man whose newspapers didn’t just report the news, but created it. Rising from the son of a wealthy mining family to the head of a sprawling media empire, Hearst revolutionized journalism through bold headlines, emotional storytelling, and sensationalism that came to define “yellow journalism.” His rivalry with Joseph Pulitzer ignited a circulation war that prioritized scandal over substance, blurring the line between truth and spectacle and forever changing how the public consumed information.

But Hearst’s influence extended far beyond print. His newspapers helped fan the flames of the Spanish-American War, demonstrated the political might of mass media, and paved the way for today’s era of opinion-driven journalism. Though his empire eventually declined — and his life inspired Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane — Hearst’s legacy endures in every media outlet that trades outrage for engagement. His story is both a warning and a blueprint for the modern information age.

Sources

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OrdIlOeSdw3i7lKSJNaBM-YcGUMS9qIUzfIMJloGKTA/edit?usp=sharing

Last summer here in Nashville, there were 8 neo-Nazi marches. What is social media’s role in fueling — or even enabling — political violence? How do algorithmic echo chambers, disinformation loops, encrypted organizing platforms, and the erosion of trust in institutions converge to create real-world harm? And what can be done to hold systems and actors accountable before the spiral becomes irreversible?

To guide that conversation, we’re honored to have Timothy J. Heaphy with us. His vantage is rare: He’s been on the front lines of investigating two of the most consequential episodes of recent American unrest — Charlottesville in 2017 and the January 6, 2021 Capitol siege — and in his new book Harbingers: What January 6 and Charlottesville Reveal About Rising Threats to American Democracy, he tells both the story of how these events unfolded and the deeper dynamics behind them.

Timothy Heaphy’s career spans decades of legal, prosecutorial, and public service work, giving him deep institutional insight and investigative experience. A graduate of the University of Virginia (B.A. and J.D., 1991), he spent over a decade as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C., and later in the Western District of Virginia, handling a range of federal prosecutions. After moving into private practice, he was nominated by President Barack Obama in 2009 to serve as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia, where he oversaw major investigations into corruption, fraud, civil rights, and national security.

Following his tenure, Heaphy returned to private practice and later became University Counsel at UVA. In 2017, he authored Charlottesville’s independent report on the “Unite the Right” rally, and in 2021, he was appointed chief investigative counsel for the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, directing its investigative and legal teams. He also founded The Fountain Fund, a nonprofit supporting reentry for formerly incarcerated individuals. Throughout his career, Heaphy has combined legal expertise, public service, and investigative leadership in some of the most consequential inquiries of recent years.

In his book, Harbingers, Heaphy brings that rich background to bear on two momentous acts of political violence: the 2017 Charlottesville rally and the January 6 Capitol attack. He doesn’t just rehash the facts — he shows how he built investigative teams, how he sifted through communications, how he probed decision-making failures in law enforcement and government, and how social media and digital networks played roles in planning, mobilization, and escalation.

In today’s episode, we’ll use Harbingers not just as narrative backbone, but as a portal into deeper inquiry:

How did social media architectures and incentives — content moderation policies, recommendation systems, coordinated groups — intersect with extremist organization and violence?

Where did institutions (local government, law enforcement, federal agencies) fail to anticipate or respond — and why?

What are the paths forward for accountability, reform, civic resilience, and prevention?

So let’s dive in, first by asking: when does online grievance cross the line toward violence — and what makes that line blur in 21st-century politics?

This episode is brought to you by Ground News. Susbscribe at groundnews.com/tables for 40% off their vantage plant.

Please support this show by subscribing to patreon.com/montemader. Please leave a rating and review!

Happy Halloween!!! In this episode, I am going to take you deep into one of the most bizarre and destructive moral panics in modern history — the Satanic Panic.

From daycare witch hunts to heavy metal hysteria, the 1980s saw ordinary Americans convinced that the Devil had moved into their suburbs. Police were trained to spot pentagrams and candles as signs of ritual murder, therapists “recovered” memories of occult abuse, and media outlets like Geraldo Rivera and Oprah fueled the flames. Innocent people were imprisoned, reputations destroyed, and entire communities torn apart — all in the name of protecting children from imaginary cults.

Lets explore how this hysteria culminated in the West Memphis Three case — three teenagers convicted largely for wearing black and listening to Metallica. Nearly two decades later, DNA evidence revealed what fear had obscured all along: there was no cult, no ritual, and no Satanic conspiracy — just a community so terrified of darkness that it created its own.

But the story doesn’t end there. The same architecture of fear — hidden elites, child-trafficking conspiracies, and divine warfare — has found new life online through Pizzagate and QAnon. Monte connects the dots between the witch hunts of the 1980s and the algorithmic hysteria of the digital age, revealing how the Satanic Panic never really died — it just went viral.

Through history, psychology, and media analysis, this episode asks a haunting question:

Why do we keep needing a devil to blame?

Sources & References:

Pazder, Lawrence & Michelle Smith. Michelle Remembers (1980)

Loftus, Elizabeth. “Creating False Memories.” Scientific American (1997)

Victor, Jeffrey. Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend (1993)

Lanning, Kenneth. “Investigator’s Guide to Allegations of ‘Ritual’ Child Abuse.” FBI Behavioral Science Unit (1992)

Nathan, Debbie & Snedeker, Michael. Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt (1995)

Richardson, James T., Joel Best, & David Bromley. The Satanism Scare (1991)

Barkun, Michael. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (2003)

Argentino, Marc-André. “The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making.” The Conversation (2020)

Zuckerman, Phil. “From Satanic Panic to QAnon.” Skeptical Inquirer (2021)

Swami, V., Malpass, F., Havard, D., et al. “Metalheads: The Influence of Personality and Individual Differences on Preference for Heavy Metal.”

“Extreme Metal Music and Anger Processing.” PubMed Central (PMC)

“The Psychology of Scapegoating.” Psychology Today

“The Cult Psychology of the Satanic Panic.” Get Therapy Birmingham

“Moral Panics…” Southern Connecticut LibGuide

“Lame Blame: Forgive the Scapegoat to Forgive Yourself.” Ernest Becker Institute

“The Oldest Trick in the Book: Panic-Driven Scapegoating in History and Recurring Patterns of Persecution*

Danny Collins once had everything lined up — talent, ambition, and a fast track toward the major leagues. Danny signed with the Atlanta Braves in 2002 but his life began to unravel. Addiction took hold, leading to 14 felony convictions and years behind bars. In prison, desperate for protection and belonging, Danny joined a white supremacist group — a decision that would define his beliefs, his future MAGA support, but also become a key insight into leaving MAGA and becoming an advocate for prison reform.

But inside those walls, something began to change. He started confronting his own pain, his past, and the hate he had inherited and embraced. Through education, introspection, and the influence of other inmates who faced the racial discrimination of the justice system, Danny began dismantling the ideology that had shaped him.

Today, he stands as an outspoken advocate for racial justice, prison reform, and personal transformation, using his story to expose how fear and indoctrination breed hate — and how courage and empathy can break the cycle.

In this powerful and deeply honest episode, Monte sits down with Danny Collins to talk about addiction, ideology, accountability, and the hard work of redemption.

This week on Flipping Tables, Monte sits down with Amy Duggar—the outspoken cousin who dared to step outside the Duggar machine and call it what it is. Known to millions from 19 Kids and Counting, Amy has spent years reclaiming her voice and redefining her faith after growing up in the shadow of one of America’s most controlling religious families.

In this raw and unapologetic conversation, Amy opens up about her upcoming book, Holy Disruptor, and the cost of breaking the silence. From toxic purity culture to spiritual manipulation, family loyalty, and the aftermath of scandal, she exposes the systems that weaponized religion—and shares how she found redemption in honesty, not obedience.

This isn’t just a story about the Duggars. It’s about the courage to burn down false altars and build something truer from the ashes.

Check out her book "Holy Disruptor" out now

I've been guilty in the past of talking about historical figures doing really awful things and making comments like "they were a reflection of their time" meanwhile, other men and women of their time- knew it was wrong and fought against it.
A great example of this is John Brown. John was a devout Christian, and a staunch abolitionist. In fact, he was an abolitionist who so firmly believed that slavery was a violent sin against humanity that he was willing to use any means necessary to end it. Even now, we live in an era where white washers of history want to act, and teach kids that slavery "wasn't that bad". That human trafficking, rape, kidnapping, beating, torture, forced labor, medical experimentation on an entire community because of their skin tone "wasn't that bad".

He famously said, "The crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood". And he was right.
How much do we believe in the things we say we do? Are we willing to let it cost us? Are we brave enough to stand for human rights no matter what?
I hope I am. John's story inspires me and calls me to account. How dare I be afraid or tempted to cower when others have sacrificed so much. Excited to share this story with you !

I know things over the last two weeks have been extremely heavy. I found myself more fatigued than I ever remember being. After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, getting doxxed and looking at the world burn it really brings up the question "Is there hope left?" Is there room to bridge the ever widening gap happening across America?
Caroline Stout, like me, was part of that faction once, including working at Turning Point USA. Today we discuss our journey's about how we left, because here's the thing- if two people that were as entrenched as we were can leave- anyone can leave. As we watch Christian Nationalism spin into a frenzy and we watch the America we thought we had fall into rubble...
People will wake up
People can wake up
People will leave
I hope this conversation gives you hope. Hope for change, hope for the future, hope for a better tomorrow. Because we can change. And at the end of the day we are being pushed into a rhetoric of right vs. left, christian vs. heathen, good vs. evil when that is NOT the battle.
The battle is and always will be top vs. bottom. The people pitting us against each other are picking our pockets, lining their mansions with money they don't need and could never spend.
My neighbor is not my enemy

This episode is brought to you buy Ground News. Get 40% off their Vantage Plan at groundnews.com/tables

One of my favorite people alive, and my favorite public scholar. I've been considering graduate school and this conversation has me deeply considering going back to school. There's so much to know.

Dr. Dan McClellan is a public scholar of the Bible and religion. He has a PhD in theology and religilon from the University of Exeter where he wrote his dissertation on the the conceptualization of deity and divine images in the Hebrew Bible through methodological lenses of cognitive linguistics and cognitive science of religion. Translation: REAL SMART and knows his shit.

Since 2021, he has been making scholarship more accessible and confronting misinformation on social media related to the study of the Bible and Religion. He also has an incredible podcast with Dan Beecher called Data over Dogma. He now even offers online classes like Biblical Hebrew.

In this conversation we really approach cultural issues and arguments being made about the Bible, especially about biblical history, and the ways in recent years its been used to ostracize and demonize groups of people and the burning question- is that what the Bible really teaches?? Check out his bestselling book "The Bible Says So!"

This was a dream conversation for me- hope you enjoy!

I am SO SORRY. In the wake of traveling and working in DC I completely forgot to post last weeks episode. I'm a human and I apologize sincerely. It means a lot to me to stay on top of this work and education the best I can.

That said, YOU GET TWO EPISODES THIS WEEK

The first is the most comprehensive conversation I've had to date. Dr. Randall Balmer is a prize winning historian and Emmy Award nominee and holds the John Phillips Chair in religion at Dartmouth which is the oldest endowed professorship at the school. He is an expert in Religion in North America and Evangelicalism in America and his recent book "America's Best Idea: The Separation of Church & Hate" is the best top to bottom explanation on why 1. Separation is so important and 2. NO we are not a "Christian Nation" but one founded on religious liberty.

For early and ad free releases please subscribe at patreon.com/montemader

September 11th was the day where I learned as a girl that America was not impervious. I'll never forget the people standing in the windows and the smoke. Little did I know I would grow up to live in New York City and it wasn't until then I understood the scale of the disaster. It's not until you realize just how big those buildings are, how close everything is, the people trapped in the subways, people walking home to NEW JERSEY because they didn't have cash for a cab and the ATMs were down. Meeting friends and clients who survived it...

It's incomprehensible

As a girl I remember fear, I remember everyone wanting to go to war, and to war we went. A war that wouldn't end until after I had graduated high school. The claims I remember were to defend democracy and to end Saddam's weapons of mass destruction program.

Weapons that were never there

Weapons that were searched for for months

And in our wake we started an onslaught on a country we had no business being in, and our recklessness paved the way for the domination of ISIS and the re-insurgence of the Taliban.
The first amendment is the single most important amendment we have. We HAVE to be able to question and condemn our government, we HAVE to be able to demand answers, we HAVE to be able to protest.

9/11 and the Iraqi War are a great example of real tragedy, real heroes, real courage, and the very real and all too common instance of the powerful using it to their advantage. I hope that we can use this conversation to honor the innocent and the brave and remember to ask questions to the powers behind the machine and demand accountability when they lie or cover things up.
The story and article of NYC resident Christina Stanton shared at her request and with her full permission**

See her article here: https://thedispatch.com/article/september-11-victims-memorial-health-trump-cuts/

Sources:

Lawrence Wright,The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006) – Pulitzer Prize winner, deeply researched account of al-Qaeda’s rise and the events leading to 9/11.

The 9/11 Commission Report (2004) – Official bipartisan investigation

Anthony Summers,The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden (2011) – Investigative account with interviews and newly declassified documents.

Steve Coll,Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004).

Mitchell Zuckoff,Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11 (2019)

Garrett M. Graff,The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 (2019) – Oral history drawn from transcripts, survivors, responders.

Bob Woodward,Plan of Attack (2004)

Thomas E. Ricks,Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006) – Military-focused critique of the war planning and execution.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran,Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (2006) – On occupation mismanagement.

Charles Duelfer,Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD (Duelfer Report) (2004) – Definitive assessment that Iraq did not have stockpiles of WMDs.

Michael R. Gordon & Bernard E. Trainor,Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (2006).

Andrew J. Bacevich,The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005) – Broader critique of U.S. war culture, with Iraq as case study.

Anthony H. Cordesman,The Iraq War: Strategy, Tactics, and Military Lessons (2003).

Francis Fukuyama,America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (2006) – Explains ideological currents behind Iraq War push.

Foreign Affairs and International Security articles on U.S. grand strategy post-9/11.

Middle East Journal and Journal of Military History articles on insurgency and U.S. occupation.

U.S. Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports on 9/11 and Iraq (2001–2010).

RAND Corporation studies: e.g., Operation IRAQI FREEDOM: Decisive War, Elusive Peace (2004).

TRIGGER WARNING: CHILD ABUSE AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

On August 21, 2025, Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family died. A behemoth and kingmaker in the evangelical world who supported vicious corporal punishment of children, the subjugation of women and the demonization of the LGBTQ community.
Today we discuss the life and career of James Dobson. We will open up about his teachings, books, and his evangelical power machine: Focus on the Family. We will discuss how his teachings overlapped with Bill Gothard. The same teachings that allowed Bill Gothard to groom and abuse of teen girls and young women.

Focus on the Family purported to be a wholesome counseling service but was the power arm of an evangelical force affecting policy around marriage, equality, and torture like conversion therapy. They even falsely claimed to be a church to evade taxes because... of course.

We break down destructive teaching by pulling it out of the darkness and into the light. So as we shine a light on these harmful organizations and doctrines, lets destroy them for good.

This episode is brought to you by Ground News. Subscribe for 40% off their Vantage plan ($5 a month) 

Death is the one experience we all share, yet it remains the conversation we avoid most. In this episode, I sit down with death doula Britna Savarese to explore what it truly means to accompany someone at the end of life. We talk about why our culture struggles to face grief, how silence around death isolates the dying and their loved ones, and how reclaiming these conversations can bring healing, connection, and even beauty.

Britna I was raised Southern Baptist in a small town best known for its rodeo. As a skateboarding punk, she pushed against the system and questioned the rigid religion I was handed. That same spirit of questioning and reimagining guides her work as a death doula today. Just as Flipping Tables dismantles harmful narratives, she dismantles fear and silence around death—offering space for authentic reflection and intentional closure.

Britna shares powerful stories of walking alongside families in their most vulnerable moments and offers insight into how death work isn’t just about endings—it’s about presence, love, and honoring the whole of a life. Together, we explore the hesitancy many of us feel when confronting mortality, the lessons death has to teach us about living, and the hope that can be found in embracing this natural transition. And these conversations can help us prepare for ourselves and our loved ones for our next great adventure. 

This is a tender, vulnerable, and deeply human conversation. If you’ve ever felt uncertain about how to grieve, how to support a loved one, or how to face your own mortality with more grace and peace, this episode is for you.

In this episode, we discuss:

The role of a death doula and what it means to provide compassionate presence at the end of life

Why our culture avoids talking about grief and how that avoidance impacts us

The sacredness and beauty found in the transition from life to death

How opening ourselves to conversations about death can actually deepen our appreciation for living

This episode is not about fear—it’s about finding courage, tenderness, and even hope in the face of the universal journey we all share.

Please consider supporting my work at patreon.com/montemader

“What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil?” — Heinrich Kramer (Malleus Maleficarum, 1487)Part I, Question VI

Today we travel to Europe's witch trials, the church and government leaders claimed it was to rid the world of women who had made pacts with Satan.

It was really just to remove women from positions of medical and religious power. and to it was to take their wealth and force their obedience. Priestesses, healers, midwives were targeted and the traditional role of women in medicine stripped and given to male doctors. Women who inherited land were targeted so their wealth could be given to powerful men. Women who refused marriage norms, appearance norms... also died in the flame.

The language and history that demonized the sexuality and prowess of women is the same language we hear today in purity and incel culture, with the same motive. The motive of stripping women of power, autonomy, wealth, equality and position,

The woman who refused to give up her power and knowledge, or chose to keep her own wealth, the woman that chose solitude... chose death

Sources

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. Feminist Press, 1973.

Roper, Lyndal. Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany. Yale University Press, 2004.

Karlsen, Carol. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. W.W. Norton, 1987.

Kramer, Heinrich and Sprenger, Jacob. Malleus Maleficarum. 1487. Trans. Montague Summers, 1928.

Tertullian. On the Apparel of Women, 2nd century CE.

Kieckhefer, Richard. Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Sharpe, James. Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in Early Modern England. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.

Kassell, Lauren. Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London. Clarendon Press, 2005.

Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons. Oxford University Press, 1999.

Rowlands, Alison. Witchcraft Narratives in Germany. Manchester University Press, 2003.

Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford, 1997.

Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology. Penguin, 1964.

Harpur, Tom. The Pagan Christ. Walker & Company, 2004.

MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. Viking, 2010.

Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne. Liveright, 2020.

Beard, Mary. Women & Power: A Manifesto. Liveright, 2017.

Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies. Zero Books, 2017.

Rogers, Nicholas. Witchcraft and the Western Imagination. Routledge, 2020.

Donovan, Joan. “How QAnon Uses Digital Witch Hunts.” Harvard Kennedy School, 2021.

Video for this episode available on patreon. Thank you to all my supporters www.patreon.com/montemader

The book "The Color of Compromise" is an heartbreaking historical journey through the history of America specifically around faith and the racial divide.

In this episode we sit with the author of "The Color of Compromise" and "The Spirit of Justice" Jemar Tisby. He is an author, historian, speaker and Christian who calls on his readers to faith history honestly, to step out of the bounds of complacency into real activism and real change.

Today we talk about head-shaking history, the development of "white is right" and the ideal that began to associate Christianity with European descent. We discuss "hereditary heathenism" and the key role the white church has played in injustice, both by her actions, and by her silence.

We get to choose in this moment how the story of our lives will be written. When it comes to our response to injustice, "What will it say?"

Sorry this came out late, for some reason it did not publish.

"History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes"- Mark Twain

It seems to be a common ideology that anyone who identifies as "left" or "liberal" or "progressive" or audible gasp "democratic socialist" is "a f*cking commie"!!!! And that of course is bad.... but why? Why is that rhetoric so ingrained in American vernacular?

In the wake of World War II, the tenuous "alliance" between the USSR and the USA disintegrated. With the entrance of nuclear arms, the ideological enemies and political superpowers fell immediately into the decades long Cold War. Fear of nuclear fallout, another devastating world war, was perfect political fodder for those who wanted to use fear to generate power, privilege and wealth for themselves.
Senator Joseph R McCarthy was a super power in his own right. From his speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, viciously clasping a piece of paper he claimed had over 200 names of employees in the state department who were communist spies. He levied unfounded accusations, ruined careers and lied his way into infamy. He, and his right hand man and future mafia and Trump lawyer Roy Cohn, made it a point to paint all their opposition as communist enemies of state. And it worked.. until it didn't.
We explore not just the life and movements of Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohn, the Red Scare, the Lavender Scare and the thread of manipulation that leads us all the way to now.

Sources:

Richard H. Rovere – Senator Joe McCarthy (Harcourt Brace, 1959)

Ellen Schrecker – Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton University Press, 1998)

David M. Oshinsky – A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (Oxford University Press, 1983)

Richard M. Fried – Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (Oxford University Press, 1990)

Howard Zinn – A People's History of the United States

John Lewis Gaddis – The Cold War: A New History (Penguin Press, 2005)

Arthur Herman – Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator

Government & Legal Documents

Army–McCarthy Hearings Transcript (1954)
Available through the U.S. Senate Historical Office and National Archives.
Excerpts are commonly found in collections like:
📁National Archives – Army-McCarthy Hearings

U.S. Senate Resolution 301 (1954) – Censure of Senator McCarthy.

Congressional Record

FBI Vault – Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Files

FBI Records: The Vault – Rosenberg Case

Venona Project Decrypts (NSA) – Declassified Soviet espionage cables.

NSA.gov Venona Files

Journalism & Documentary Archives

Edward R. Murrow – “See It Now” Broadcast on McCarthy (March 9, 1954)

CBS News Archives & YouTube

New York Times Archive – Coverage of McCarthy, the Rosenbergs, and the Army hearings.

Vanity Fair – “The Power and Poison of Roy Cohn” (2019)

Vanity Fair – Roy Cohn

The New Yorker – “Roy Cohn and the Making of a Winner-Take-All America”

New Yorker – Roy Cohn

The Guardian – “Trump's Roy Cohn Obsession” and Cohn’s legacy in GOP tactics.

The Guardian – Roy Cohn

Video & Archival Footage

Army–McCarthy Hearings (C-SPAN Archive)

C-SPAN: Army–McCarthy Hearings

“Have You No Sense of Decency?” – Joseph Welch Confronts McCarthy (June 9, 1954)

YouTube Clip

PBS American Experience: “McCarthy”

PBS – American Experience

“Where’s My Roy Cohn?” (2019 Documentary) – Directed by Matt Tyrnauer

Available on various streaming platforms (Amazon Prime, Hulu, YouTube).

This show is brought to you by ground news. For 40% off their vantage plan ($5 a month) subscribe at groundnews.com/tables

What would happen if representatives from every religion sat in a room and talked? How long would a conversation take before the atheist and the christian realized, they love the same hobbies, care about their kids having the best chance of success and LOVE Marvel movies? How long before the Muslim mother and the gay couple share their favorite recipes because cooking for their families brings them so much joy?

Today is just a conversation, with one of the orphans from Stuart Little, the winner of TV show wipeout, recovered addict, fiance to his gorgeous partner Jennaca and satanic atheist. Kyle and I couldn't have grown up further apart in life and what we were taught to believe. And Kyle and I talk about.....
How did we get here???
Talking about what its like to be a creator who feels like you HAVE to start using our voice to help??
How do we heal together and make something better for the future for EVERYONE, how do we create healing and hope and belonging for everyone??
How do we help pull young men back from the jaws of the manosphere??
This and more and I hope it intrigues and challenges you as much as it did me.
Thank you for your continued patience, I have limited wifi access where we are and I'm having to produce the entire shows and content solo for another week. But update: Lucy is doing better and almost ready for her second surgery

If you grew up in Church in the 90s and early 2000s you remember the CRAZE that was the book "I kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris. Purity culture was rampant in the church, preaching to young girls their worth was their virginity and that their bodies belonged to their fathers until they were given to their future husbands. YIKES.

Do you know that Joshua Harris has now denounced both the book and his stance?

Today Jubilee Dawns joins me on a deep dive about purity culture in the church, the damage it wreaked on ours and other women's lives and share our first "Youth Pastors Gone Wild" segment.

Purity culture emerged in American evangelical Christianity in the 1990s and early 2000s, emphasizing abstinence from sex before marriage as a moral and spiritual ideal, particularly for girls and women. It promoted the idea that a woman's worth was intrinsically tied to her sexual behavior, often using metaphors like "chewed gum" or "used tape" to describe those who had engaged in premarital sex. Movements like True Love Waits and purity balls encouraged young girls to make vows of chastity, often symbolized by rings and ceremonies involving their fathers.

This culture disproportionately harmed young women by instilling shame, fear, and a deep sense of guilt around their bodies and natural sexual development. Many were taught to suppress their desires, avoid close relationships with boys, and take responsibility for male lust by dressing modestly and remaining “pure.” As a result, countless women have reported long-term effects including sexual dysfunction, body shame, difficulty forming healthy relationships, and trauma from victim-blaming in cases of sexual abuse or assault. Rather than empowering young women, purity culture often silenced and controlled them, framing obedience and modesty as the only path to spiritual value.

This week on the podcast I scratched my original plan. The passage of the Big UGLY monstrous bill the day before July 4th and my recording being that day, it inspired me to change the topic.

I didn't celebrate July 4th the way that I have growing up. But I spent a lot of time thinking about what revolution means, especially at this moment in history. In this episode, I re-read the Declaration of independence and the crimes the crown committed that made the colonists revolt. Then I talk about the American Revolution but focus on the revolution it inspired... the French Revolution.
The French Revolution was inspired largely by wealth disparity. By the late 1780s, France was deeply in debt from wars, including the American Revolution. Food prices got so high that bread took up 80% of a poor family's income. Unemployment and starvation were widespread and while the people starved, the monarchy led by Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette spent like the countries coffers never ended. The top 1-2% controlled over 20% of the land and all the political power while 98% of the company could barely survive. The bottom 98% paid all the taxes, including tithes to the church, feudal dues and royal taxes.

Compare that to the US Today, 1% of Americans hold 34% of the nations wealth. The top 10% of the US hold almost 70% of the nations wealth. The bottom 50% of Americans? 2.5% of the wealth.
2.5% OF THE WEALTH.

Half the country has 2.5% of the wealth.

The current wealth gap in the US is the widest its been since the 1920s which led us to the Great Depression. And now we just passed a bill that is the largest upward transfer of wealth from the lowest 10% to the top 10%. And this wealth gap is always predictive of an incoming Revolution.
The world changes when people do. People like Dietrich Bonhoeffer who gave up everything to fight against in justice when he had everything to gain by staying quiet. But his work, his example and his writings would inspire Martin Luther King Jr. the US Civil Rights movement, Desmond Tutu and the fight against apartheid.
Empires always fall. Regimes do not last.
WE, the people, get the final say.
Fight on and Viva La Revolution!

54% of Gen Z individuals who disaffiliated from their childhood religion were women. For millennial women- 34%. For the first time in US History, men and young men are converting more to religion and filling the pews than women. Why? Women site gender inequality, systemic abuse, teaching limited roles for women, and lack of female church leadership as reasons for leaving.

My opinion is that women are realizing that organized religion run by men, led by men, collaborated on by men, interpreted by men, translated by men, taught by men... might be a system built to CONVENIENTLY benefit men. How convenient that the interpretations of scripture taught from the pulpit JUST SO HAPPEN to give men all the power, resources, decision making, a partner who can't say no and has to serve them as a house slave. Did God say that? Or did these men make God in their own image?

I think women are leaving because we see through the dogma right to the lies.

I am so deeply honored to call Irene a friend. I've been following her on social media for a couple years, when I discovered her rage-y music and that she had also deconstructed as well.
Irene and I left different branches of faith, evangelical fundamentalism for me, and mormonism for her.
This episode we talk about those journey's, how art was part of that healing process, how we found ourselves after growing up in a worldview that diminished us as women and told us that who we were was defective... sinful... and less than.
May this be your weekly reminder that YOU ARE WORTHY.

If you're familiar with the online deconstruction space, you've probably encountered Brian Recker or @brecker on Instagram. As a former evangelical pastor, he's been very vocal about his deconstruction and transformation.
In this episode, Brian and I talk about our growing up years, our faith and how thats evolved from narrow and rigid mindsets into who we became today.
I wasn't going to release this podcast for a few more weeks but I felt that some people needed reminded today that people can change. I was an open and passionate Christian Nationalist. Brian was raised in the IFB (think EXTRA fundamentalist). We were able to find our way and if people like us can change, anyone can.
Even on a dark day the sun is sitting behind the clouds.

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How can someone so intelligent end up with a cult like mindset? Someone who otherwise seems to have their life together? Seems to be so grounded?

Anyone can fall into a cult, and even those who are deeply indoctrinated can get back out.

Dr. Steven Hassan is a leading expert in cults, mind control, and undue influence, best known for transforming his own traumatic experience in a high-control group into a lifelong mission to help others recover from coercive persuasion. Born in Queens, New York, Hassan was raised in a Jewish family and, at age 19, was recruited into the Unification Church (commonly known as the “Moonies”). He quickly became a zealous member, working long hours and cutting ties with family and friends. After a serious car accident in 1976, his family organized a deprogramming intervention, which helped him leave the group and sparked his determination to understand how such manipulation occurs.

Hassan earned a Master’s in counseling psychology from Cambridge College and later completed a Ph.D. from Fielding Graduate University. Over the following decades, he dedicated himself to developing non-coercive methods of intervention, eventually creating what he calls the Strategic Interactive Approach. He also founded the Freedom of Mind Resource Center, which provides education, counseling, and expert support for individuals and families affected by cults, extremist groups, human trafficking, and political radicalization.

Hassan is widely recognized for his development of the BITE Model (Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional control), which helps identify the key mechanisms by which authoritarian groups manipulate people. He also created the Influence Continuum, a framework for understanding the difference between healthy and destructive influence. His published works—including Combating Cult Mind Control, Releasing the Bonds, Freedom of Mind, and The Cult of Trump—have become foundational texts for understanding psychological manipulation and authoritarian control, not just in religious cults but in political movements and abusive relationships as well.

He has helped thousands reclaim their autonomy and continues to shape the conversation on cult dynamics, political extremism, and mental freedom in the digital age. There's always hope that even someone who was raised in a cult or lost their way in one can find their way back out.

As RFK Jr. removes all members of the CDC panel advising on vaccines we are faced with the question, is all this making America healthy again?

Dr. Knurick has a PHD in Nutrition Science, is a registered dietitian and a mom of 2. And in this episode we break down the facts and fictions of the MAHA movement and what the real concerns for America's health are.

The "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) movement is merely a loosely connected health and wellness movement that gained traction specifically after covid. It merges anti-vaccine, anti-mask, and natural health rhetoric with far-right political ideologies and is deeply aligned with Christian nationalism. Despite its name, the movement often spreads misinformation under the guise of “freedom” and “bodily autonomy.”

Core Beliefs: Promotes “natural immunity,” distrusts vaccines and pharmaceutical science, and often embraces conspiracy theories about government control, the CDC, and the World Health Organization.

Pseudoscience: Opposes public health measures like vaccines, fluoride, mask mandates, and school-based health education. Spreads debunked claims about detoxes, supplements, and “Big Pharma.”

White Supremacist Roots: Echoes long-standing themes in white nationalist circles, including “purity of the body,” distrust of multicultural institutions, and framing public health as globalist overreach.

Overlap with Christian Nationalism and MAGA: Often intertwined with right-wing evangelical and MAGA politics, promoting the idea that “real” (white, Christian) Americans are under attack by progressive, science-driven agendas.

Undermines public health with disinformation.

Targets marginalized communities by resisting inclusive care (e.g., trans health, reproductive health).

Wraps racial and political extremism in the language of wellness, liberty, and holistic health.

The MAHA movement exploits the language of health and freedom to push anti-science, far-right ideology. Beneath its surface lies a deeper current of white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and resistance to modern medicine rooted in fear, control, and exclusion.

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Andrew Seidel is a constitutional lawyer, author of books "The Founding Myth" and "American Crusade", and works full time defending the 1st amendment and every Americans right to true religious liberty.
On Flipping Tables we have a discussion about the Christian Nationalist myth that America is a "Christian" nation and the dangers it poses to true individual freedom.

Across platforms the most common question I get is "What does the Bible say about homosexuality and trans people?" Christian nationalists main talking point is a direct opposition to gay rights. But does the Bible really say that?

Today we meet with pastor and theologian Brandan Robertson to talk about that, break down the "gotcha" passages of the Bible and see what it really says. It turns out, there's space at the table for everyone.

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Buy Brandans new book Queer and Christian!: https://read.macmillan.com/lp/queer-christian-9781250321343/

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In a world of cult like beliefs, propaganda, and manipulation its important to become experts on how these tactics work so that we can avoid them and so that we understand whats happening in the world around us.

A little true crime break from the norm but an important discussion we have to continue to return to.

HOW DO PEOPLE BELIEVE THIS? By using tactics we see everywhere.

The Children of God, founded in 1968 by David Berg, was a sex cult that disguised itself as a Christian missionary movement. Berg, who called himself “Moses David,” claimed divine authority and used it to manipulate and control his followers through apocalyptic teachings and a series of writings known as “Mo Letters.” Under his leadership, the group promoted sexual “freedom” that included disturbing practices like “flirty fishing,” where women were encouraged to use sex to recruit new members. Even more sinister, Berg endorsed and participated in the sexual abuse of children, normalizing pedophilia within the group’s teachings. He lived in hiding for much of his life to evade legal consequences, but continued to exert control over the group until his death in 1994. Berg’s legacy is one of extreme psychological, spiritual, and sexual abuse, with many former members coming forward to expose the deep and lasting trauma they endured under his cult leadership.

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THEY'RE TAKING THE CHRIST OUT OF CHRISTMAS!!!! Why do christians continuously feel like they are being persecuted? Why do they believe that anything other than special treatment is "persecution"?

Because fundamentalists don't believe in the separation of church and state, and many of them don't believe in religious liberty for anyone but them. They also don't believe in religious pluralism, or secular education. They also believe that Christians should rule every facet of society, even if by force.

These ideals come from Dominion Theology and the 7 Mountains Mandate. Two unbiblical but highly propagandized theologies that pose a direct threat to religious freedom in America. Lets meet its founders and it's teachings to learn more

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When I was sent a video of this guest... I judged a book by its cover and assumed I was going to get really upset. BOY was I wrong. Bryan Andrews is a country singer from the south who blew my mind with his vibrant and powerful personality... and opinions.

How are we so far apart? In the world of current politics it feels like we are light years apart. That decency and common sense and respect for humanity are so far out the window.

Yet, common ground can come in the form of a country singer from the south. A singer who never left his small southern town but also sees a way forward, and a glimmer of hope that maybe we aren't as far apart as we have been led to believe.

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TW: Sexual assault, child abuse.

I've gotten quite a few messages both here and on IG about my story and how I started to walk away and how I did eventually deconstruct.
Did I always have questions? Was there a defining moment or series of moments?
Little of both actually. This is a bit longer version (though not complete) of my story. I've never really laid it out before in this way. I'm not sure if I will release this episode publicly or not but I figured I would share it here.
I want to share my story in a book I'm writing as people ask but for now, this will do

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The trans population in the US has been a hotly debated topic the last few years. Fundamentalists believe that this group of people is a symptom of some kind of moral failing in the US, even though trans people have existed as long as we have had human history. The conservative movement acts as if about 1% of the population is somehow "the problem", with over 700 anti trans laws proposed or passed since 2021.

But so few people have even met a trans person to have these kind of opinions about. So why don't we ask what being trans is like?

Alyson Blake Dellinger is the lead vocalist, bassist and founding member of the band Flummox. She was raised deeply fundamentalist, in church, christian schools, and something was always just... off. Now, shes a musician, deconstructed fundamentalist, an LGBT ally and.. she's trans. And today we are going to discuss her life, her experience and what faith looks like in her shoes.

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Tia Levings is an author and advocate who writes and speaks about the realities of Christian fundamentalism, evangelical patriarchy, and religious trauma. Her memoir, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy, was released on August 6, 2024.

In her memoir, Levings recounts her journey into and out of the fundamentalist Quiverfull movement. Married at 19, she was indoctrinated into a belief system that emphasized strict discipline, isolation, and the submission of women as "keepers of the home." Her husband exerted extreme control over her life, dictating everything from her clothing to her daily activities, and subjected her to physical and sexual abuse—all sanctioned by their church. Levings details how she was taught to be more submissive and to accept abuse as part of her role. One night, when she realized she and her children wouldn't live, she fled.

Levings' story sheds light on the hidden abuses within certain fundamentalist Christian communities and serves as a testament to resilience and the pursuit of freedom. Her work continues to educate and empower others who have experienced similar forms of religious trauma

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We’re diving into one of the most infamous political scandals in American history—Watergate—and how it fundamentally altered the trust between the American people and their government.

Let’s rewind to the early 1970s. President Richard Nixon, riding a wave of political dominance after winning re-election in 1972, seemed untouchable. But behind the scenes, things were unraveling.

The scandal broke when five men were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., in June 1972. At first, it seemed like a routine burglary. But reporters from The Washington Post, most notably Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, started pulling on a thread that led to the very heart of the Nixon administration.

As investigations unfolded, it was revealed that the break-in was part of a broader campaign of political espionage and sabotage directed by members of Nixon's re-election committee. Even more shocking was the discovery of secret tapes Nixon had recorded in the Oval Office—tapes that captured efforts to cover up the administration’s involvement.

In 1974, facing near-certain impeachment, Nixon chose to resign—the first and only U.S. president to do so. His now-famous farewell was a moment of political theater and personal downfall.

🎧 The Aftermath and Impact:

Watergate didn’t just bring down a president—it brought down public trust. Americans saw firsthand how deep the corruption could go, and many began to question the integrity of the entire political system. Polls showed a sharp decline in confidence in government, a sentiment that has lingered for decades.

The scandal also sparked real reforms: campaign finance laws were tightened, ethics rules strengthened, and a more skeptical press emerged—watchdog journalism was born in earnest.

Watergate became more than a scandal—it became a symbol of betrayal, secrecy, and the loss of America's faith in government

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Jane Elliot has been an activist since the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Her landmark brown eye/ blue eye exercise was instrumental in my work deconstructing racism in my far right upbringing.

And she has great ghost stories!!! www.janeelliot.com

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