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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.

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