In 1964, when I was seven years old, my family took a day trip to the New Jersey State Fair. Displayed were the wonders produced by the agricultural lands in southern and western parts of the state. None stay much in my memory. What does stick with me is the booth for the Republican presidential candidate, where one could purchase a bottle filled with a clear liquid that was the color of marigolds. Gold water, see? If I recall correctly, the booth wasn’t getting a lot of action.

GOP Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona may not have been the most disastrous presidential candidate ever put forward by one of the major political parties (George McGovern and Walter Mondale would go on to even greater defeats), but at the time, Goldwater’s shellacking was humiliating. To the Republican Party establishment, Goldwater himself was a rough-hewn embarrassment who too often said the quiet part out loud: the rabid Cold Warrior part, and the anti-civil rights part. Yet from that 1964 presidential campaign sprang the sprawling architecture of today’s right wing, while vestiges of the Republican establishment of yore get harder and harder to come by with each passing year.

Essentially the creative project of young right-wingers who first came together to communicate and organize for their candidate, the Goldwater campaign was rife with the names of those who would become stars in Republican politics: National Review editor William F. Buckley, Heritage Foundation founder Paul Weyrich, direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie, and anti-feminist Cold Warrior Phyllis Schlafly, to name a few.

These are the people who built the institutions and organizations on which the right still relies today. (Think of “Project 2025,” the massive and draconian policy agenda for the new Administration, crafted by the Heritage Foundation.) Some beliefs may have been adjusted (we don’t hear a lot about nuking the Russians these days), but the basics are still there: the misogyny, the homophobia, the othering of migrants, and the racism, the racism, the racism. Think of the 1964 Goldwater campaign like a Lego starter set, but made with recombinant DNA. You don’t look at it for a few years and you find it’s grown exponentially, patterning new structures on those that preceded them. And that’s where we are right now.

The funders and institution-builders of the right have been working at their projects for decades, building movements and communities and political power, some outside the party structure, and some within. Funding for this model is dominated by a few old-school heavy hitters: the Koch brothers’ network of private capitalists, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Lindsey Foundation, and the fortune of Richard Mellon Scaife. But tech bros are hungrily eyeing the landscape; billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, with misplaced confidence in their own genius, are likely pondering ways to reshape the model to their own liking. After all, they’ve more or less bought themselves a President and a vice president, with Musk contributing heavily to pro-Trump efforts during the campaign, and J.D. Vance being a virtual creation of Thiel’s.

Meanwhile, the American left and center-left haven’t built much by way of institutions. Their separate interest groups do not intersect to the same extent as do those on the right. Rather than create their own institutions, the left and the center-left have stuck with the institutional party structure, which is designed to win elections, not build the kinds of training centers and think tanks that have been cranking out right-wing policy and activists over the course of generations.

For decades, a small population of journalists has chronicled the rise and expansion of the right in U.S. politics, its increasing power in limiting the rights of the people who live within the nation’s borders, and its lust for taxpayer dollars to support its antidemocratic agenda. Katherine Stewart is among those whose work shouts, “Hey, look over here!” But things look pretty frightening over there, what with all the threats and violent rhetoric and schemes to end public education, bodily autonomy, and queer people. So few take note.

In Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, Stewart lays out a truly terrifying story of how much the right has gained in its quest for a repressive, authoritarian government open to skimming by those with the connections. Not to mention how much power it stands to gain in the near future. We meet “spirit warriors” (who seek to drive out the “demons” of liberalism), gun nuts, anti-trans firebrands, gay-haters, anti-union stalwarts, government-wreckers, conspiracy-mongers, and plain old grifters.

Among the horrors Stewart takes us through is the assault on public schools, whose ultimate demise is a goal on which right-wing leaders have long set their hearts, and to which they are inching ever closer. As she reports, Peter Bohlinger, a member of the powerful Council for National Policy (CNP)—a secretive network of right-wing groups, many declaring a religious mission—was caught on tape several years ago saying: “Our goal is not to just throw stones. Our goal is to take down the education system as we know it today.” She describes the role of the Leadership Institute, founded in 1979 by Morton Blackwell, in training activists to take over local school boards. And what do you think Blackwell was up to before that? He claims he was Goldwater’s “youngest elected delegate” at the 1964 Republican National Convention. And early in the life of the CNP, Blackwell served as the umbrella group’s executive director.

“The new American fascism is more a political pathology than a political program,” Stewart writes in her introduction. But I would argue that the “new American fascism” is hardly new at all: It’s the same old fascism that predates the Goldwater campaign, just with better tools, a lot more money, and a more robust infrastructure. What’s new is the total unbridling of hateful rhetoric, enabled by the ascendance to power of norm-breaker extraordinaire Donald Trump.

Yet even that phenomenon was coalescing long before Trump’s escalator ride, out of the mouths of such professional provocateurs as columnist Ann Coulter, the late radio personality Rush Limbaugh, and the phalanx of mini-me types they spawned. As much as Trump has enabled and encouraged threatening behavior among his supporters, it was the growing belligerence of right-wing actors over the course of decades that helped create Trump, the political creature. And the right’s long-growing architecture of intertwined funding sources, groups, and institutions helped build Trumpism, too.

It’s not for nothing that, not long before her death, the acerbic Phyllis Schlafly, who herself decried the public school system, endorsed Donald Trump for President.

In Money, Lies, and God, Stewart guides us through her reporting trips to, among others, a MAGA conference in Las Vegas; a Christian nationalist gathering in Washington, D.C.; a “family values” confab in Verona, Italy; and a church in the United Kingdom’s capital city built theologically on apocalyptic, homophobic, transphobic, and misogynist beliefs. The London church was “planted,” in religious-right terminology, by a Christian nationalist megachurch based in California.

The U.S. religious right has long exported its demonizing faith traditions around the globe. Stewart gives us a glimpse of the modern right’s worldwide evangelizing, whether on behalf of repressive religious ideologies or oppressive economics. She shows how right-wing legal shops founded in the United States, such as Alliance Defending Freedom or the American Center for Law and Justice, have offices throughout Europe, and she lays bare the connection between authoritarian forces abroad, such as the party of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and such U.S. movement leaders as Brian Brown, the anti-LGBT co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage.

Stewart digs into the part played by the Claremont Institute, an old-school right-wing incubator that harbors as fellows the likes of the insurrectionist attorney John Eastman and the anti-diversity, anti-gay activist provocateur Christopher Rufo, who claimed a feather in his cap last year with the resignation of then-Harvard president Claudine Gay, the university’s first Black president. Claremont shows its hifalutin side in the Claremont Review of Books, but also publishes The American Mind, an online magazine that celebrates, among other things, mythologies of European superiority. Describing Bronze Age Mindset, a book reviewed admiringly on the blog, Stewart drolly notes, “If a right-wing Yale PhD student woke up one morning after another dateless night on 4chan and thought he was the second coming of Nietzsche, this is the book he might write.”

Money, Lies, and God is rich in facts establishing the money flows and interrelationships between a plethora of right-wing entities. For example, you likely know the name Leonard Leo for his outsized role in crafting the reactionary Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade and granted unprecedented immunity to Trump in the federal case in which he was charged with numerous crimes for his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. But the Federalist Society, whose board he co-chairs, is hardly Leo’s only vessel. Stewart apprises us of his place in other movement-building power circles, including his chairmanship of CRC Advisors, “the go-to public relations firm and networking outfit for right-wing reactionaries,” according to Stewart.

She notes the sources of Leo’s funding—rich people, donor-advised funds, and the like—and his connections to Opus Dei, the quasi-ascetic Catholic group founded as a secret society. Yet, if one makes allowances for greater and lesser orders of power, Leo is but one of dozens of similarly positioned characters, which can make for a bit of a dizzying read. But it all adds up to the greater point that the right is highly developed and integrated via institutions that are nurtured through the largess of pro-business types. Some of those biz types have little interest in the ideology of the groups they’re funding, so long as they can count on those groups to support the pro-business deregulatory agenda.

Meanwhile, liberals and the left continue to lurch from election to election, while those tracking the right continue to cry, as they have for decades, “Hey, look over here!”

At the risk of giving short shrift to this well-researched walk through the thickets of paleo-Catholics, Protestant “prayer warriors,” conservative money men, and exporters of America’s right-wing culture, I am compelled to call attention to a succinct refrain that rings throughout Stewart’s tome: Liberals and the left have failed to counter the right-wing model of institution- and community-building sustained through hubs of grant-making entities and their grantees. This, I would argue, is the most important point made in this book—one I wish had been given greater exploration. From a chapter titled “The Room Where It Happens”:

“Donors on the right are much better at building values-based political movements and funding multi-issue organizations and networks that advance an overall narrative about what’s gone wrong with American life—and then tell us how to fix it,” David Callahan, founder and editor of Inside Philanthropy, a digital media site, told me. “Liberal funders in contrast tend to give to the DNC or to the politicians whose names they recognize, even though those politicians may be in safe seats or may not need the money. Also, the issues and organizations that they do support have tended to work in silos…”

 

Too many liberal-leaning donors, as Callahan notes, fail to understand or support the type of organizational infrastructure building and relationship building that’s required to forge a broad political movement. “Liberal donors can be a bit technocratic and think you make social change by coming up with solutions that are evidence-based. And that’s not really how politics works.”

In addition to understanding the need for institutions that can advance political goals over the long term, the right knows how to build community through the intersection of its projects, yielding emotionally invested participants. Describing the way this is evidenced in the Catholic right, Stewart quotes theologian Cathleen Kaveny as interviewed in 2020 by NPR’s Tom Gjelten. “Where conservative Catholics have the edge on more progressive Catholics is that they have set up networks and institutions that allow them to get together,” Kaveny said. It’s the same model used by the Koch brothers in building the Tea Party movement, or Morton Blackwell in creating the Leadership Institute and serving as movement-building leader of the Council for National Policy.

But just as important as the hubs where like-minded groups and funders cluster is the right’s creation of parallel structures as its modus operandi. What allowed the Koch network to take over the Republican Party were the structures it built outside the party that provided, with greater muscle, functions typically performed by the party. For instance, the Koch network funded the i360 voter data system, which was much better than the Republican Party’s counterpart system, and provided its donors’ favorite candidates with access to it. Then the data that flowed back to the system after the election could belong to the donor class, not the party. (Eventually, a data-sharing agreement was worked out in 2014 between i360 and the Republican National Committee.)

Looking at the rise of the political Catholic right, Stewart shows how the strategy of parallelism there allows the wealthy to craft their own theology and sell it to the laity via parallel structures. Examples of these structures include churches that celebrate the Mass in Latin and reject changes to liturgy wrought by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, and Catholic think tanks that spurn the social justice and economic teachings of the bishops and the popes. (Pope Francis is a frequent target of their ire.) They enjoy funding from many of the same sources as the secular and Protestant right.

These entities are distinct from such organizations as the Franciscan Action Network, an organization born of the long Catholic tradition of lay communities that demonstrate commitment to living out particular Vatican-sanctioned Catholic teachings—in this case, the peace teachings of St. Francis of Assisi. Stephen Schneck, then of the Franciscan Action Network, explains to Stewart how these structures allow the donors to build “a parallel establishment to the official church, an alternate magisterium, because their resources are so tremendous.”

In our post-truth society, such structures not only muddy the theological waters for those lured by them, but also exert significant pressure on church hierarchy from the outside, not least because of their access to wealth. Left-leaning Catholic communities and organizations, however in line with church teaching, lack the kind of financial investment and coordination enjoyed by the parallel structures financed by pizza magnate Thomas Monaghan or supermarket scion Timothy Busch. Despite their apostasies, these donors’ money is welcomed by legitimate Catholic institutions, such as the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., which received $15 million from the Busch Family Foundation, and $32 million from Busch’s fundraising networks.

Fascism now occupies the heart of American power, and it arrived largely due to the succor provided by right-wing organizations and entities constructed outside the institutions of party and legacy religious belief. While Money, Lies, and God is a copious recounting of the relationships and rhetoric nurtured by right-wing money, at its core, the book is a cry of the heart to left-leaning donors and organizers to create institutions built to last, outside of longstanding organizations and the party box. Running from pillar to post to put out the latest fire simply cannot save the republic.